US Secretary of State Rubio tells Panama it must "reduce China's influence" over the canal. Also: Netanyahu and Trump to discuss the ceasefire, and why Bill Gates thinks he would be diagnosed as neurodiverse nowadays.
Hello everybody. I want to share an announcement concerning some of my recent work exploring the biblical texts that sit at the foundation of our culture. All of this initially exploded on the public front with the Genesis lectures I recorded in 2017.
That was followed some years later by the four-part documentary series I recorded with Daily Wire Plus on the foundations of the West, examining the contributions of Rome, Jerusalem, and Athens. That, in turn, expanded into our very successful seminar on Exodus, and then, most recently, on the Gospels.
All of those, 17 for the former, Exodus, and 10 for the latter, the Gospels, are now available exclusively on Daily Wire+. Joining me for the Gospel Seminar were many of the same stellar intellectual scientists, authors, and philosophers who journeyed through Exodus and the cities of the Foundations of the West series, along with some exceptionally insightful newcomers.
We wrestled through the stories told by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, examining their historical, existential, and literary significance, deriving from those texts as well a wealth of deep and immediately applicable practical knowledge. Today you're joining me for episode one of this new revolutionary but tradition-grounded series. The episode stands on its own.
It also serves as an introduction to the whole series of ten available at dailywire.com. Consider a subscription there. granting you access not only to the Gospel Seminar in its totality, but to Exodus, Foundations of the West, and to the many specials I've recorded for The Daily Wire Plus, addressing marriage, success, vision, masculinity, and mental health, among other topics.
so so
The Exodus story is arguably the central narrative in the Old Testament. Now, there are many profound narratives in the Old Testament, some which are equivalent depth, but there's none that have that combination of depth, narrative integrity, and detailed length. And so... And Moses is a great prophet who establishes the law. He's a central figure.
And Christ plays the same role in the New Testament. And his passion story has the same delineation of narrative detail combined with profound depth. And so it's very useful to understand the Exodus story and to understand the gospel story and to know both of them in relationship to one another.
So that's the purpose of the investigation, is to bring people to the story, including ourselves, and to further our understanding of the text upon which, for better or worse, the West is founded. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Gospel Seminars and welcome to all the panelists, all of you who were here before for the Exodus Seminar. and those of you who have newly joined us.
I'm very excited about this. It's the day after Easter Sunday. It's a good time to do it. There's a lot of buzz in the world at large about the state of Western civilization and the dependence or lack thereof of that civilization on the fundamental stories from which it emerged historically and conceptually and It's a wonderful time to be investigating that.
And so we've all come together to take all of you who are watching and listening through that and to learn as much as we possibly can simultaneously. And we're going to open this. I'll have everybody go around the table and introduce themselves, tell who they are, and also...
why they're here and why they think this is both interesting and necessary for themselves personally and then perhaps also at the broader cultural level. So, Bishop Barron, thank you very much for coming today. My great pleasure.
Jordan, thank you. I'm Robert Barron. I'm the bishop of the Winona Rochester Diocese, which is basically southern Minnesota. I'm also the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, which is an evangelical So I'm here as a believing Christian, as an evangelist, and I think there's saving power in these great texts.
But I'm also here as someone interested in the cultural impact right now of the scriptures. I think it's fascinating, you played a role in this, that there's been a revival of interest in the Bible. And a lot of my ministry is directed toward the nuns, the N-O-N-E-S, those who have no religion. But many of them are fascinated by the Bible. So I'm eager to hear everyone's perspective.
And I'm here partially to, you know, try to unlock some of the power of this text for those who have been alienated from religion for different reasons. But just delighted to be part of it.
Mr. Hurwitz. Well, I'm honored to be here. My name's Greg Hurwitz. I'm a novelist and screenwriter. In Exodus, I felt a lot like I was at a table with chess grandmasters, which was really cool to see everybody's engagement and finding these jewels that had different interpretations and everybody, you know, except for Pajot, who never says anything fascinating.
And I'd like to say that, you know, a shallow gaze might indicate that there's a lot of similarity among us. And one of the things that I thought was really compelling during Exodus was there's an enormous amount of differences, and that the text was really a welcome into the best of inquiry and hospitality. I thought it was incredibly productive.
Part of why I'm here is that I think that intellect alone can't grasp the speed and complexity of the change that is upon us now. And unconscious projection. And I think that we're seeing the world burn down in some ways to fundamentals. You know, is man smarter than machine with AI? We have wars breaking out at the birthplace of original sin.
We're trying to redefine what it means to be a man, male versus female. And I think when we have that level of definitional collapse, we need to go back to forms of thinking and forms of meaning that are different, whether that is sacred, symbolic, spiritual, mythological, or religious. And going back to the source means we started with Exodus.
You know, a lot of us have been going back to or come from Plato and understanding of Plato. And all sources, all stories are not necessarily equal. And the Bible, this text to me, is a story, and the Gospels in particular, they're like a story with maximal truth. pressure applied. It's like, you know, carbon turned to a diamond, where it is fractal and pure.
The amount of pressure generationally, historically, and spiritually on the story has condensed it into something that is impossible. And in some ways, the Gospels are, I think, well, in many ways, in many different ways, a perfect narrative. It's a hero story. It's structurally incredibly sound. It's shaped in extraordinary fashion, and it sets the conditions in a
thriving and freedom of differences of nearly any other story. And so why I'm here in some ways is I think what we, in the spirit that we're all here, is this is an invitation of sorts to what is a sacred text, to those who might be intellectually reluctant or even have intellectual shame about engaging with a story in a book like this.
And a lot of people might be familiar with this sort of light shown through Shakespeare or blasting in the Ode to Joy or in the words of MLK, these sort of safer reflections for the Enlightenment or secular mind. And this, of course, is the rock on which Western civilization is built.
And I think we're here not just to take it seriously, but to apply our serious attention, which means radical openness and also radical judgment in holding this up as a story against which other stories should be compared if we're borrowing back to what a foundational narrative should be.
Dr. Orr. James Orr, I'm an associate professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge. Wonderful to be with you all again and to be with new people too. Look, I think we're all agreed that there is something badly wrong at the heart of our culture.
I think if you said 15 years ago at the high noon of the new atheism that we'd be gathering around the table talking about these sacred texts, talking about Exodus, that it would have the impact that it has had, and what I think this series will have too, I'd have thought you were mad. But there is clearly a need for this. There's a yearning for it. There's an emerging coalition of atheists.
Intellectuals, public intellectuals, Jordan at the forefront, John too, who maybe are not card-carrying Christians, but who recognize the power of Christianity and are beginning to realize that we can't keep running on empty, that it may be the case that we're cutting off, Western culture is cutting off the branch that it's been sitting on, and we're starting to get worried about this.
And so I think what we're going to be looking at now, what we're going to be trying to do in a small way is to look for the taproot, to explore the taproot of Western culture, which is the gospel. It's not just the gospels, it's the gospel message. Paul says the gospel just is Christ crucified. It's a scandalous thought, Christ crucified.
Scandalous, he says to the Jews, and it's madness for the Greeks. And it was an offensive superstition for the Romans. And I think that is still true today very much in our culture. But Christianity, I think, has been tamed. It's been domesticated. We've become very used to it as something which is just part of the furniture. It's now expressed very often in the language of the therapeutic.
We've moved from sin to syndrome, as one theologian has put it. So I hope what we can do here is to reflect on the scandalous nature of the gospel message, to reflect on why it seems like folly, why it seems so offensive.
And with that, try and inject new life into Western culture and to learn from the pages of the Gospels, to learn from the figure of Jesus, his teaching, to wrestle with who he claimed to be. Looking forward to it.
Hi, I'm John Ravicki. I'm an associate professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. I'm a colleague of Jordan's. I'm here with sort of two hats. One is I'm here as a cognitive scientist.
I do a lot of work on the nature of meaning, meaning in life, and how that relates to transformative experience, how it relates to a sense of the sacred, about how it's often carried in non-propositional kinds of knowing. And of course, these are topics that overlap deeply with people's religious lives and the religious practice. And I'm interested in how we can
I'm going to use this word, realize this text as sacred again, because the second hat I'm wearing is I believe there's a meaning crisis. I've talked at length about that. And I believe that there's an advent of the sacred happening right now in response to the meaning crisis. I feel deeply vocationally called to be in service to this. And so I want to...
get into a relationship with this figure that recaptures how Jesus is strange, not in a pejorative sense, but the way I have found Socrates, another one of my heroes, to be profoundly strange in a way that has been deeply transformative for me. And so, I'm hoping that in this, that I can take a role I'm not a believer. I'm not a Christian. I'm not an atheist. I'm a non-theist.
I guess the closest name you could put to me is I'm sort of a Zen Neoplatonist. But nevertheless, I want to listen very deeply. I want to probe very deeply, and I'm very grateful to be here. Mr. Prager.
Thank you. It's wonderful to be here with all of you. I'm Dennis Prager, and it's a joy to be back with you. So, I have a slightly different background. I'm a religious Jew. I went to yeshiva until I was 18, 19 years of age, taught Jewish religion at City University of New York, written books on it. I have a five-volume commentary on the Torah, four volumes of which are completed.
I'm now working on Leviticus. Wish me luck. It's not the easiest of the five books, but I'm falling in love with it for other reasons. So I'm here for a number of reasons, one of which is to learn. And I've always found that I learn best from those who believe in the text that we're studying. I had a Buddhist teacher in England when I studied in England, and it was the best way to learn Buddhism.
I'm also here because though I'm not a Christian, the death of Christianity frightens me. It is my nightmare. And I ask people all the time, name me one ideology that has supplanted Christianity that has done good for humanity. And nobody can come up with an answer. There is a quote attributed to G.K. Chesterton, though it's not verifiable that he actually said it, but it's brilliant.
When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything. And as I point out on my radio show each day, I probably say this once a week, only secular people say men give birth. Not all secular people say that. but only secular people say that. We have entered a post-Christian or really post-Judeo-Christian world of the absurd. One final word.
I see Christianity as a divinely ordained vehicle to bring the world to the Torah. So I have a very pro-Christian Jewish-based view It hasn't always been done right. But Christians are human, and human nature is awful, or at least not particularly good. So people can screw up anything.
But when done properly, and I think America and Britain have been particularly good, it was Christians who abolished slavery. It's also Christians who made the Inquisition. I'm well aware. I wrote a book on anti-Semitism, and I pray that Christians come forth now and speak out against a raging anti-Semitism that I did not think I would see in my lifetime.
But nevertheless, this Jew, this Westerner is very frightened of a post-Christian society.
Dr. Headley. My name is Douglas Headley, and I teach the philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge. And I have a particular interest in Christian Platonism, and particularly what I might call the Neoplatonic version of that strand of thought.
And from this perspective of my work in the history of philosophy, I've always been struck by the extent of theology as a crucial, no pun intended, backdrop to Western thought. And yet philosophers are often either oblivious to this or consciously ignore it. Now, the gospel narrative is absolutely central to this Western intellectual tradition.
And yet this gospel tradition, this gospel narrative is, as a couple of people have already mentioned, both astonishing in its claims and very profoundly familiar, almost too familiar in a sense. You referred to the death of Christianity. I think that's putting it a bit too harshly.
But nevertheless, it is the case that Christianity has been through a fiery furnace in terms of the Enlightenment critique of its central claims. Now, I think from a philosophical point of view, from a theological point of view, we do have to take those criticisms seriously. and consider the questions of meaning and truth.
That having been said, there is, I think, a profound hunger for these philosophical and theological questions that we find expressed, I find personally, in an inexpressibly beautiful manner in the Gospels. And so, I'm very much looking forward to the forthcoming discussions.
Dr. Blackwood.
I'm Stephen Blackwood. I'm the founding president of Ralston College, a new university in Savannah, Georgia. I grew up in a Christian home reading the Bible, really in a daily basis. And so, these stories, you might say, were
maybe the most important frame through which I understood or came to understand, so far as I came to understand it, the world, especially my relations with my family, my younger siblings, nature, the community at large, beauty.
It was only later when I went to university that I learned that these stories and the stories of Judeo-Christian traditions both in their synthesis with the Greek intellectual tradition really produced Western civilization. That is fundamentally the synthesis that drives the whole unfolding of the West.
My deepest conviction is that human beings matter, that they are made in the image of what is most real and fundamental. And yet I think it's plainly the case that the dominant
ideological positions in our own time are woefully, painfully, desperately inadequate, whether that's reductivist materialism or certain kinds of existential immediacy or the hyper-politicization and activism of everything all the time, you know, the nihilism that there is nothing but power. These are psychologically, morally, theologically destructive in every sense.
And so it seems to me there's nothing more important than our rediscovering modes of understanding what the human being is, what we are, and how we can recover our relation to what is most fundamental and real, which we could call, let's say, God. So I'm hoping that this text in all of its power will come alive for us and we'll make some headway in that.
Mr. Pajot. So I'm Jonathan Pajot. I am a liturgical artist, a writer, but mostly I would say I'm someone who loves patterns and loves to show the beauty of the world, the beauty of art, the beauty of stories, the beauty of images. And the gospel is, for me, the key. It really is the place where these patterns come together.
And I often say that, but it's rare that I have the chance to sometimes show it, to be able to point it out so that people can see to what extent the story of Jesus brings all the stories together. And so, you know, it's a huge undertaking.
Because we're coming in the shadow of our Exodus seminar, that's the way that I'm going to approach all of this, which is what I'm hoping to do is to constantly help people see that the realities we perceived in Exodus, right, this fractal mountain of the world and how the world comes together,
some of the puzzles that were presented in Exodus and are presented in Genesis actually are brought together into this story. So that is my hope is to hopefully help people that are watching and everybody here see just how precious and beautiful this story is. And the fact that it has become
the cornerstone of Western civilization is not an accident of history, but it is through the very nature of the character of Christ, but also his story. So...
Whether the challenge in a way is pretty simple to state easily, it's that we're trying to cover all four Gospels in really just a few hours. We're talking about perhaps the most influential, the most powerful, the most difficult, the most radically unexpected words and stories of all time. You know, we're trying to cover it quickly.
And the temptation, if I can put it that way, will be to schematize so we can kind of make sense of it. And I think the challenge will be to sit with it in a way that what is most powerful and transformative in these unexpected words can speak to our own hearts and hopefully to the hearts of those who are listening.
So I think part of the reason that we're in a crucial moment is because the enlightenment doctrines that have savaged Christianity have also now turned upon themselves. And partly conceptually, but also scientifically, one of the things I've come to understand as a practicing research psychologist is that we see the world through a story. In fact, that's a technical description.
A description of the structure through which someone sees the world is a story. It's their story. And we have to see the world through a story because we have to direct our attention. And I think that's been revealed on the scientific side as incontrovertible. I've interviewed many top cognitive scientists pushing on this issue.
And the best of the best of them now understand that even our perceptions of objects are micro narratives. We see the world through a story. All right, so that's radical. That's a radical realization. We can't derive the world from a simple list of facts. That's become starkly evident. We don't even train our AI systems that way. It's just not the case. Okay, so then what's the story exactly?
That's the crucial issue. What's the story? Well, maybe there is no story, but if there's no story, there's no point and there's no aim and there's no way of organizing attention and action. And in that chaos, there's nothing but despair. And I think that's also evident, say, neuropsychologically, neurophysiologically. No aim, no hope, and despair. What are candidates for this story?
Well, the big candidates that have emerged since Nietzsche announced the death of God is the story of power and the story of sex. And those are good contenders for the throne. But power is the most dismal of stories, except for perhaps the story of hedonism. Right? Those two things compete. These two great stories, power and sex, they lead to catastrophic ends. They play with each other.
They rotate around each other. They drive us either towards a remarkably unproductive and bitter hedonism that cannot sustain itself psychologically or socially. And then on the power side, well, if everything's about power, then... That claim to me is no different than the claim that like the spirit of Lucifer rules the world. It's the same claim in a different guise. There's nothing but power.
All right, so there's no basis for marriage that isn't power. There's no basis for friendship that isn't power. There's no description of human society that isn't power. It's just all against all, right? And for what? And not only is that a stunningly hellish and dismal story, I think there's absolutely no evidence that it's true and plenty of evidence that it's not.
The religious question, the monotheistic question could be conceptualized as what could unite even power and sex and something higher and harmonious psychologically and societally. And I think that's what the biblical corpus is about. I think that's what the gospels focus on.
And I've come to realize, to understand, not just to believe, but also to understand that it has something to do with sacrifice. And so to mature is to sacrifice. To mature is to sacrifice the immediate delights of power in the present for the long term psychologically and the communal broadly. That's the definition of maturation.
And there's a spirit that underlies that movement towards integration and community. And that spirit is the spirit of progressive sacrifice. And the gospel story is the culmination of the sacrificial story. And so, I don't understand how it can be true
I don't understand how it can be right, but I now don't understand how it cannot be true because the converging evidence that something like the spirit of divine sacrifice animates the world, I think that's, I think we're there. I think that's the realization.
Now, what I hope to accomplish in this seminar is to further my understanding of that because the story upon which our culture is based, the gospel story, let's say, is deeply mysterious and dramatically peculiar and hallucinogenic. It's a trip, and it's not understandable from the purely rational perspective, yet it seems to be right, and I don't know what that means.
It's a terrifying thought, that's for sure. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. That's for sure. If you understand that... The gospels call to you to bear the weight of tragedy and malevolence on your shoulders along with the divine spirit that guides you. There is nothing more terrifying and no greater field of opportunity than that. And so we've got our work cut out for us, gentlemen.
This is one peculiar time and one peculiar text, and I sure hope we're up to the task.
Could I maybe suggest, in some ways, the climax of the New Testament revelation is the claim that God is love. I like the way you set that up. If power and hedonism are absolute values, then we're in serious trouble. Put love above both of them. Now power is directed by love. And what's love but to will the good of the other?
So the sacrificial narrative of the cross fits under that heading as well. But if the ultimate reality is love, then we can find a place for all these subordinate values. if we get rid of love as a supreme value, then we have the serious problem of power unleashed, or hedonism for its own sake. So I think that's the trajectory toward which the entire New Testament is going.
That God's name is being in the Old Testament. I am who I am. And Christian theology recognizes that as a supremely high name of God, but higher still is the claim that God is love. And in fact, the Trinity comes from that. You know, if God is love in his own most nature, there must be lover, beloved, and love shared.
So I might suggest that's where the New Testament is going, is love is the supreme value, the supreme reality.
Well, it's a hard thing to... what would you say, to come to terms with when that's the claim, but the arc of the narrative of Christ is the worst possible death for the least possibly deserving person and the full encounter with malevolence, right?
Out of love.
Right, right, right.
That's the great expression of love. Right.
So I thought I'd start, if you gentlemen are in accordance with John 1 to 4, and because it's one of the most peculiar paragraphs, let's say, in the Gospel account, we could talk about it for 10 hours, which we won't, but it'll set us up to start to investigate the metaphysical foundations of the text as well as the autobiographical foundations.
One other thing I'd like to point out to people, perhaps, before we get going from a conceptual perspective, is that Dr. Headley, for example, pointed to the philosophical as part of the understructure of the cultural and made the claim that perhaps underneath that is the theological. And I think that's a nice pattern. It's a nice description of the pattern of conceptualization itself.
It appears as though philosophy is nested inside drama. That's a good way of thinking about it. And a verbally portrayed drama is a story. And a story isn't philosophy. It's got a dreamlike quality to it. It's still something embodied and dramatized.
If philosophy emerges from the story, and then our other cultural concepts emerge from philosophy, you can see kind of an inverted pyramid with something at the foundation. And the foundation is the story itself. And at the base of that foundation is something like sacrifice in love. And that's the claim that's being made in the Christian context. Now, John opens up with...
an allusion to that whole set of claims because John does this extremely strange parallel by making the radical and improbable claim that Christ
the Christ of the Bible, who was born in a particular time and in a particular place, a no account place in the middle of nowhere, in an equally nondescript time in some ways, is equivalent to the spirit that gave rise to the cosmos at the beginning of time and has always existed. It's an unbelievably radical way of starting a book, and I'll read the words. In the beginning was the Word,
The word was with God and the word was God. The word existed in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and God created nothing except through him. In him was life. And this life brings light to all mankind. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of truth and kindness.
We have beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten Son of the Father. And from the abundance of Jesus' grace, we have all received blessing upon blessing. For the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God at any time, but the only Son who is closest to the Father's heart has made him known to us.
So I structured this seminar in relationship to a book called The Single Gospel, and he describes it as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John consolidated into a single narrative. That's not an approach without its pitfalls. He compresses and retranslates many of the verses. So I'm sure there'll be something in that to offend everyone who's listening. For me, it allowed me to enter the
single narrative of the gospels relatively rapidly and to make sure that we had the appropriate narrative through line jonathan maybe you could start with that terribly complicated piece of writing yeah well the first thing i think it's important to see is that it is definitely referring back to genesis 1. it's it's basically giving us a type of account of genesis 1 which is god spoke
the word the world into being it's joining it with the greek idea of logos which is huge obviously we'll talk about that um but what i'd like to just propose is that what we'll see when we look at the narrative of jesus is that what's described right there at the beginning which is that the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness that does not recognize it but just this idea of the light moving down into the darkness
is the whole structure of the life of Jesus. You'll see that happening all through his life, which is, it explains everything that he does, is that he moves from this mysterious meaning, this source of being, and then he moves out into death, into disease, into the margin, into all the things that don't fit. He basically fills the world with himself, but the world does not recognize him.
And so that's the first thing that I would say is that as we read the rest of all the other scripture, because people will tell us that that, you know, John is the weird gospel. It doesn't it's not the same as the synoptic gospels. But I think this pattern here is the actual pattern of the life of Jesus that you see all through all through the story.
And in some ways, the what the story of Jesus and how he does that story. nonstop and in every single way that you even haven't thought of is going to be the proof of this. That it's like, do you know what that looks like for the light to move down into the darkness? What does that look like?
And Christ will show that through His miracles, through His teaching, through His crucifixion, all through the story.
Can somebody explain to me, because I admit I've wrestled with this as long as I've studied Christianity, In the beginning was the Word. I've never fully understood that, especially if it harkens back to Genesis. I don't have an issue with it. Please understand, this is truly a question from ignorance. Is the Word, when God said, let there be light, is that the Word that's being referred to?
To some extent, yes.
So what word was at the beginning? The idea is to say, this is ultimately the Christian understanding, is to say that the God speaking is not created. When God speaks, it's not something else created. than Him. It is in some ways separate from Him, but also God. This is coming to love that Bishop Barron was going to talk about, that God speaking is His own being that is speaking into the world.
And you would understand this in the Genesis context, is that there's an insistence on something like the primacy of the process that extracts the order that's good out of potential and chaos. And that's the word. And the Christian insistence is that Christ embodies the pattern of loving sacrifice that characterizes that word. And so that idea is something like the foundation of God
existence itself is the spirit of loving sacrifice and that's equivalent it's the same thing as the word that extracts the order that's good out of potential at the beginning of time and one way of understanding that more prosaically i would say is that imagine the order that you establish in your family
if that little microcosm of the walled garden, your family, to the degree that you embody the spirit of loving sacrifice as a father, then you'll create, out of the potential that's your family relationships, the order that's good. And it's sacrifice because, well, that's what you do on behalf of your children, right? You put them first, not you. You certainly put them first before your whims,
You put what's best for them before their whims, too. And so there's an upward aim in that, and all that upward aim is sacrificial. And then, well, then we get to the issue of what constitutes the ultimate sacrifice, which is partly what's explored in the gospel accounts. It's obviously explored in Abraham, because Abraham is called upon to make an ultimate sacrifice.
But this is an extension in a different direction.
One thing I would say in response to your question is the logos being talked about here is the interior word of the Father. So the word of creation is more of a word that goes out. But within the Godhead itself, there's an interior word. The Father has an imago of himself that we call the Son. The Father and Son fall in love with each other. The mutual love is the Holy Spirit.
So we would see from the beginning, this very text, there's a Trinitarian overtone. But it's the Word that, in a way, precedes the Word of creation. It's interior to God Himself. So the Word was God, as it says.
May I just add to that, in terms of the text, there were two words here that are very difficult to translate into English. And one, of course, is logos, which can mean, obviously, word, proposition, meaning, story. The resonance of that word is very rich. But also the word that's translated as beginning, the ache, because in the Greek philosophical tradition, that word is used for God.
So, and there are reasons why this should be the case, but the is a term which has a very powerful theological meaning within the Greek philosophical tradition. It's the first principle. It's the source of all reality. So one way of looking at this is to say, well,
In the source, there was the word, i.e., to say the Trinitarian reading, although that sounds like an absurd Christian interjection of a much later period, you could see that as making perfect sense with just these initial words.
John. Yeah, I want to pick up on the fact that there's actually, I call them the four L's about God. There's love, agape. There's logos. There's light and life. And these are all the identity claims that are somehow circling. And I'd like to propose we slow down a little bit because the familiarity of those terms to us, I think, is masking something more profound going on here.
And if we think about all of these, they're pointing, well to me, they're pointing to something very radical here. They're asking us to get out of a normal way in which we think about reality in terms of stable, substantial, independently existing objects. All of these are inherently relational realities.
And think about how profound that is to say that ultimate reality is inherently ultimately relational. And that, therefore, our relationship to it has to be primordially a relational thing. And this is very, very hard for our way of thinking because we have got into the mode, and for all kinds of historical reasons we don't need, of thinking, you know, of that
What there really is are individual things. There's no relationality. This is, of course, normalism. All of that's in our head. And then that gives us a dualism because the mind has the patterns, the world. And there's something going on here in this language. And I want to slow down a little bit and get at, right, these terms are very familiar. And I think that's, I understand.
what they're there, but their familiarity is actually in some sense problematic because I think they're, it's easy, like these are all nouns and it's easy to think we're talking about four things. These are attempts to, disclose, and all four of them, I feel they're playing off against each other. The relation between them is as important as any one of them.
And all of them are playing off against each other and trying to call us into a new way of trying to relate to ultimate reality. And so, like when I try, because Jesus makes these claims, too. He talks about, I'm the light of the world, abundant life, like all of it. And this, to me,
If I could hear these words again, I could get to a place where I think the idea could have more real relevance to me. And so we live in metaphor. Metaphors aren't . Like we've just begun, but I hope this, you know, this discourse isn't too hard, but I hope we understand it. I hope you see my point. I hope you get what I'm saying. Like try and say anything. Metaphor is not an ornament.
It is part of the fundamental grammar of our cognition. And these are more than metaphors. These are metaphors that are trying to transcend themselves and they're trying to point. And I'd like to also, I mean, I'd like to try and make sure we're not only paying attention to the text, we're paying attention to what is the mental framing that we're bringing to this text.
I want this text to challenge me and I assume that's what everybody is doing here. And so what is our stance, our orientation towards it such that we can be appropriate to it, we can really listen to it very deeply?
It seems to me that John is establishing a radically, extending a radically non-materialist axiom. He's trying to identify what the core phenomenon of being is and it's in this story. It's not material. It's being itself. It's very fundamentally associated, I think, with what modern people would call consciousness, which is a complete opaque mystery in and of itself, right?
John is attempting to characterize the spirit of being itself. And he's making a claim. The claim is it's embodied in Christ. It's the same as the divine principle that generated order at the beginning of time. It's apprehensible. It's foundational. And
And it's also the fullest expression, this isn't directly in this text, but it emerges, it's the fullest expression of the tradition that's made manifest in the Old Testament. It emerges out of our primordial stories and announces itself as the principle of being itself. And it seems to me irrefutable that the principle of sacrifice is the basis of sophisticated thinking.
psychological integrity and community. I just can't see how that cannot be true. And that's being pointed to here as well. Sacrificial love, it's something like that.
But for sure the light, the life, and the word, they are things that make other things exist in the sense that light is that which makes things seen, life is that which makes things move, and word is meaning that makes things happen.
And so you can see that the analogies that John is putting together are there to say, like, if you don't understand what the word logos is, then light will bring you a little further. And if you don't know what light is, you know, then life will bring you a little further. And like you said, it's not that one of those is actually describing anything.
It's that all of them playing with each other are pointing you to the mystery of the notion that there are invisible things. movers that make things move or make things happen, make things exist.
I think that's helpful. But what I'm saying is, think about what we're saying here. Imagine going into a room of physicists and saying ultimate reality is love, light, logos, life, right? They're going to look at you and they'll either, well, that's very nice. It's a platitude and they don't really believe it. But they act it out in their life. But that's the point I want to make.
But these things are not out there metaphors. You can't do science without these principles of intelligibility. And so I'm trying to wake us back up to... John's not making a scientific claim. I'm not saying that. That's ridiculous. But he's not saying something that's irrelevant to the scientific world.
He's making a meta-scientific claim.
Yes. Thanks, James. Exactly. And also, this can be easily trivialized. That's my concern here. Oh, yes, that's very nice. Yeah, light of love. Oh, we like love. Right? And, you know, this, like, imagine, imagine proposing that relationality is that from which things emerge rather than things are that from which relations emerge.
Why did I jump in? I completely agree with what you're saying. And you're very close to Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI. He said, Trinitarian doctrine turned upside down the classical view. It said substance is primordial, relationship is accidental, just the opposite. Ultimate reality is a relationship, hence the importance of in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God.
And take the next step, Aquinas says this. that a creature is, he says, , it's a kind of relationship to the Creator. It has to be. If it's coming into being every moment from nothing, the creature is a relationship. Then I'd link it to Jesus' ethical teaching. Why do you love even your enemies?
Because it's not so much substance against substance, but all of us are, whether we like it or not, connected to each other through God. So I think that's really an absolutely right intuition. And it's the metaphysics of this opening line.
I think it dovetails too within space and time. It's very interesting, Douglas, you said that in the word for beginning is God, right? And so this goes into, John, you know, the discussion of, well, what is a cup, right? A cup is, it's designed for a certain purpose. It is also the purpose and the end of it is also what it's intended to be.
And so there's a circularity too in God was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. that temporally this is that same fractal thing that's also being expanded across time and space, that the meaning is embedded in the object as it exists, what its use is and what its end is are all simultaneous. I think that's a connection back to some of your thinking.
The other interesting aspect about that passage as well is that What we read as in the beginning is using another very important word in Greek philosophy, and that word is the ache, which means beginning, which means source, principle. And that usage is also very interesting. So in ancient Greek, in the philosophical tradition, the word God is not... So theos is not used for the first principle.
The word that is used is this word, achei. So the fact that we start off this prologue with these terms which resonate with profound metaphysical questions is, I think, of profound significance.
You made a comment about this, James, it was you, about this being a meta-scientific claim, and So I want to add a couple of things to that. So I watched Richard Dawkins yesterday talk about his existence as a cultural Christian. And he's also, he's not just a cultural Christian ethically.
He's a cultural Christian scientifically because the scientific program itself, which is a very particular sort of program and only emerged in the context of a Judeo-Christian society. And that wasn't accidental. It is predicated on a variety of meta-scientific claims. One is that the Logos characterizes the cosmos, which means it's intelligible.
Also that that intelligibility is good, because otherwise a scientist studying the intelligibility of the cosmos could be a terribly destructive force, which is of course something that we're afraid of, and is also true if the aim of the scientist isn't proper.
right and that and that there it is possible for us to exist in a relationship with the cosmos such that its intelligibility will reveal itself to us if we participate in that investigation both in the spirit of truth which is core to the scientific enterprise but also in relationship to our upward aim because scientists don't ever have to say we're conducting this research to further the good.
That's just axiomatic. But the reason it's axiomatic is because it's nested in this underlying ethos. I mean, you can easily imagine a science that serves totalitarian claims. I don't think it would last long as a science because it would eat itself. But we've certainly seen that enterprise perverted in directions that take it away from what it is and
and what it has to be nested in in order to be genuine science and to serve psyche and society.
The most incomprehensible fact of the universe is its comprehensibility. That's the Einsteinian thought.
The other thing you need is that the world is not God. So the world has to be intelligible for science to get off the ground, but also it can't be God. If it's God, you're going to worship it or you'll keep it at a distance. If it's not God, you know you can experiment, you're going to analyze and so on. And both those are contained here. It's radically intelligible and it's not God.
It's been made by God. I think those two things have got to be in place for the sciences to emerge.
Right, right. That's an interesting point, the idea that you can't be scientific if you worship nature. We're actually seeing that played out in the academy now because as the academy decolonizes, there are claims by the decolonizers that the scientific enterprise itself violates the sacred.
Right, right. Well, this is what's so interesting. From the 19th century onwards up until relatively recently, maybe 10 years ago, the standard discussion on campuses that you would see a Christian union put on would be religion and science. How are they compatible? How do you reconcile the two?
When it's quite clear that the paradigm now, it's really the hard-boiled secularist or the hyper-progressive who is struggling to reconcile the constructive view of reality to religion. the discovered intelligibility of the natural world. So we've seen a huge change here and I think it unsettles the old materialist paradigm.
I think it's, and I think even, I defer to John here, but if you talk to really cutting edge physicists, they'll be the first to say that matter is a lot more complicated and mysterious
than it used to be, and we're starting to see now that structure, that relationality, the mapping of relationality through structure, has a lot more heuristic power within the hard sciences than the old sticks and balls physics that you used to learn at school.
I just came from such a conference around Imelda Gurkir's work, and there was a physicist there, and what the science is, at the bottom, you're getting pure relationality, And at the top, with relativity, you have pre-relationality. And then the scientists are driven by this thing that they can't justify scientifically. But somehow the two theories have to be integrated. They have to be one.
And they've been struggling with this for like 50 years. I think part of the problem is they're still bound in a kind of substance metaphysics, even though they're wrestling with more of a neoplatonic theory. understanding of reality. Go ahead.
Well, we see also this unconscious porting over of nature worship that nature is elevated. It's the Rousseauian ideal where nature is elevated above man, right? So it gets out of place if you don't have that separation necessarily.
And it's almost this porting over of a notion of original sin that elevates it that we have in some way that makes us inferior to the thing to be worshipped if it's not differentiated from God, then we worship nature and hold it higher than us.
And this, I think, is like the first moving into this crazy proposition, which is that this fellow Jesus of Nazareth, that's where it all comes together. But at least at the outset, what we can perceive is that this union, the place where this comes together is in man. Right.
Even if we don't come to the person of Jesus yet, we can understand that if we, the capacity, the consciousness, human consciousness in the world that we know is the locus through which all these vectors join together.
Yeah, well, that's what I wanted to say. I mean, I'm not making any trespass on the doctrine of the incarnation. But what I was trying to say, look, these things are incarnated in us. They are not just things we're referring to out in the world. They're a body. We understand that we live... Like it's almost like what Paul says in Acts. In these we live and move and have our being.
We are participating in them.
But right here it says, right? Right in the text it says, But as many as received him, to them gave he the power to become sons of God. Right? And so, like, we'll see how this plays out in the story. But, you know, that this is already hinted at, right? That this is our role. That this is the role that humans play are to become sons of God. To become the place where this...
You know, the invisible, all of the invisible pattern, love, relationality, all that come together into this anchor.
So are you saying then that the microcosm, macrocosm structure is both significant anthropologically and in terms of the theology of the incarnation.
Of course. If you had to pick any kind of being in which these patterns of intelligibility could be united, just as a purely secular matter, what kind of being are you going to choose if not human beings?
Again, this is a cutting edge scientific idea. The idea that there's a deep continuity between how life works and how mind works and we can talk about whatever spirit is. This is what people are now talking about. They're taking it seriously. Right.
And they should, because we've hit this wall in our ontology in which science is making a picture of everything except the scientist, the living scientist who does science. That person doesn't fit in that ontology. That's a hole. Right. And we have to invert our epistemology and our ontology so that we can be proper places. We can find a proper home within that again. And I'm trying to
As a non-Christian, I'm trying to see how this text can be relevant to that challenge. I'm skeptical, not in the modern sense. I'm skeptical in the ancient sense. Skeptical means inquirer. I'm Socratic. I'm open. I want to learn and hear. There's an opportunity here because of the diversity of voices.
I have a sense of responsibility as a challenge to speak on behalf of the nones, the N-O-N-E-S's. Many people who are aware, because they come to my work, they're aware that there's something profoundly wrong, there's a meaning crisis going on, but they do not find an open sense of home.
Not that anybody's rejecting them, but they just don't see the established institutions of the legacy religions, the axial religions, as viable for them.
Okay, so I'm going to move us now to the first biographical detail, let's say, out of the realm of high metaphysics, and to the story of Zechariah. And so this is the announcement of the impending birth of John the Baptist, and this is really where Christ's story starts on the biographical side. It doesn't start with Christ himself in the Gospels, it starts with John the Baptist,
interesting and complicated figure, assimilated by Jesus himself to Elijah, who is the prophet of conscience, I would say, above all, and also, by the way, the figure in the Old Testament who brings the worship of nature to a halt. And so I'm going to read this. This is the Annunciation to Zechariah. One day, this is John the Baptist's father.
One day when Zechariah's group was on duty and he was serving as a priest before God, he was chosen.
What verse are you reading?
Luke, beginning of Luke. Luke 1, 5 to 25. I'm hoping that's where it is. I'm using the single gospels, by the way, in this journey forward.
So it's important to know that when Jordan is reading the gospel text, he's not actually reading from a gospel, but it's a kind of compilation of different gospels. So sometimes it starts in one gospel and then it cuts to another. And so for people that know the gospels really well, this might be a very frustrating experience. I know even for us at the table,
It is a little bit of a frustrating experience. I think most of the people that are Christian around the table would have liked us to either pick one gospel or, you know, follow one gospel and then supplement with another. But Jordan is really adamant on going to the single gospel. And so, you know, I mean, in the end, what's important is we do get through the story of Jesus.
And, you know, we get through the major events and the major teaching of Jesus. But even at the table, if... I don't know if the camera picks it up, but sometimes we're bewildered because we don't know. We're like flipping through the Bible and we don't know where we are, you know.
And so, yes, that's important to understand because even for the viewer, while you're watching it, you'll have a little bit of that experience yourself.
One day when Zechariah's group was on duty and he was serving as a priest before God, he was chosen by lot randomly, according to the custom among the priests, to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. At the time for this burning, all the assembled worshipers were praying outside. Then an angel of the Lord appeared to Zechariah standing on the right-hand side of the incense altar.
Zechariah was shaken when he saw the angel and fear fell upon him. But the angel said, Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. And you shall have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice that he was born, for he will be great in the eyes of the Lord. And he shall drink neither wine nor strong drink.
And he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb. And he will turn many of the children of Israel back to the Lord their God. He will go as a forerunner before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of fathers to the children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous and to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.
So Elijah calls the Israelites back to conscience. John the Baptist is the forerunner and the announcer of Christ. This is the announcement of his conception and birth. And so, what do we make of John the Baptist? Why is it necessary? Greg, maybe you can start us off here.
Why do you think it's necessary in the narrative flow of things for there to be an unroller of the red carpet, let's say, for someone to make the way ready?
It's almost like the association with conscience. The conscience is what has to lead the way first to prepare the people to receive Jesus. Because if he just arrives without there being... So first of all, in a dramatic sense, every introduction for dramatic effect, and I know that we're talking about this on different levels, but for the theatrical, the introduction of a character is always key.
I mean, you think about in... Casablanca, the number of times that Rick is mentioned before his back is turned in a chair and you see the cigarette smoke and he turns around. Dramatically, and I'm not implying this is merely dramatically, you want to set the stage for the arrival of a major character. And I think you have a culture in which the stage must be set before his arrival.
So you're making two points. One is that one's a psychological point or a theological point, which is that It might be that it's conscience that alerts us when our sacrifices are insufficient or something like that. It's conscience that alerts us to the necessity for a higher form of sacrifice than what we're currently performing. And so conscience is continually the forerunner of the sacred.
But then there's a dramatic level here too where you need to prepare the ground for the introduction of a major character.
Yeah, and we do this all the time dramatically. You have an opening act for a concert. You have somebody... An overture. Yeah, you have an overture. You have, if there's a late night show, they'll have somebody warm up the crowd as a comedian, right? You have to set the stage.
You have to show how bad the situation is, too, before the hero comes in. And that's one of the things that John the Baptist does. He says, you know, it's like the axe is at the root of the tree, folks. This is it. Things are dire. Everything, you know, you need to repent because the fire is coming, you know.
And so everything is in a very dire state, you know, before the main character comes into.
It's worth making the point that, I mean, Luke is seen as... A Greek physician, having a Greek mindset, he refers back to the Old Testament a little bit less often, say, certainly than Matthew. But it's worth saying that the reference to Elijah seems to be a fulfillment of the last two verses of our Old Testament, as it were, in Malachi, which... This is Malachi 4, 5.
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord, and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to the fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. So it's a clear... The sense is that he's fulfilling, that John is fulfilling something, that he's preparing the way for...
a sequence of events that is going to be a fulfillment of what is hinted at in Malachi and the Old Testament.
And the precursor to Elijah in certain regards is Enoch right before the flood. The other thing I was thinking is that there's these different sides that we're discussing of what Jesus is, and he also is a man, because if he's not a man, then the story doesn't make sense. And so it comes along to say, Why is Jesus baptized? That's a very unusual question.
But if there's not a human being who predates him with some moral authority who represents the voice of conscience, then he can't be baptized as a man. He just comes down with the full glory and righteousness and fear of God.
Well that touches on something, Peugeot, maybe you can speak to this. There's a very deep mystery there because the story of Christ doesn't really get going apart from some description of birth and youth, which we'll cover, until the baptism. And so that question immediately arises, well if Christ is the Son of God from birth, why the necessity of the baptism? What does the baptism represent?
Why is John a Baptist? What does it mean for him to be a Baptist, and what does baptism signify? Now, there's a lot of work on the anthropology of religion that's focused on this issue, and it's very frequently the case across cultures anthropologically distributed that men in particular must undergo an initiation ceremony, which generally bears some symbolic relationship to the modern church.
to the Judeo-Christian concept of baptism before they can adopt their full individuality. And it's often associated with something like a passage or re-immersion into the sacred waters or into the chaos. And it's a dissolution into chaos and then a restructuring, right? That would be the neurophysiological take on it.
Well, so Elijah, so in the Elijah, in St. John story, there are many things that are going on. I think the best way to understand is that he's there to kind of end the world. So you imagine there's Christ is the new beginning, is a new world, new creation. And then he's there to end that world. And then a new beginning will come.
And, you know, in the story of Elijah, it's the crossing of the Jordan. That's where that happens, right? Elijah crosses the Jordan. Then he's taken up. You know, and then Elisha receives the spirit of Elijah. And that is also the crossing of the Red Sea. It's the crossing of the Jordan when they enter into Jericho.
There's all these images of the crossing of the water that's going down, this undoing of the world. It's the flood itself. Enoch goes up before the flood. This undoing of the world before the new world is born. And so in St. John, you see that happening. You see it also in His Annunciation, which is that it's a recapitulation of all the women of the Old Testament, of the barren women.
So you have these old women that haven't had children, right? This kind of fallen world that God has to nonetheless give grace to, so to perpetuate it, even though it's fallen and it's broken. That's the end of the world. And the Annunciation to Elizabeth, to Zachariah and Elizabeth and the Annunciation to Mary are like the end of the beginning. Mary is the virgin waters.
And the Spirit of God descends on her, like in Genesis 1, where the Spirit is above the waters. So you can see that it's all of this relationship between the baptism, between the birth, the Annunciation to Mary, the Annunciation to Elizabeth are showing the end of a world and the beginning of a new world that is happening.
And it's layered, like it's layered in all these different ways. Can I just add something to that? Because that's, I think, the right framework. And I'd add the temple perspective, the very fact he's introduced as the son of a temple priest, his mother's from a priestly clan. So the question is, why isn't John the Baptist in the temple?
And part of what I think is there's a really pronouncing of judgment on the temple. He's proposing a kind of new temple out in the desert, a new washing. There are people seeking forgiveness of sins, not in the temple, but from him. And then his announcement in the Gospel of John when Jesus comes is, behold the Lamb of God.
So he's a radical, is he doing the same thing, do you think, with the temple that Moses is doing after the Israelites leave God with the golden calf and he sets up the tabernacle outside the center of the community? Is that associated with Jonathan's claim that John the Baptist is signifying the end of the old world?
Part of the Messianic expectation was the renewal of the temple, right? So he would gather the nations, he would reign as Lord, and he would renew the temple. So I think it's the beginning of a temple renewal program. And then when Jesus comes, he goes, well, here's the Lamb of God. Here's the one who's meant to be sacrificed in the true temple.
Then, of course, Jesus picks that up with, you know, I will tear this place down in three days, rebuild it, referring to the temple of his body. So I think that's the liminal thing, too. He's the end of the old temple, the beginning of the new, right?
If you look at John 1.14, it says, and the word became flesh and tabernacled amongst. Tabernacle. The word there is the verb from skene, which is the tabernacle, which is the word that the Greek translators of the Old Testament used of the tabernacle.
And the movement to the desert, to the River Jordan, is a movement from the strictures of law and architecture and ritual, right? It's all a movement out to take it out.
But he's also, I mean, John, like from a Christian interpretation, John is also telling people Jerusalem is going to be destroyed. Like he's saying, get ready. This is over. And so when Jesus, when Joshua crushes the Jordan this time, it's not Jericho that's going to be destroyed. It is Jerusalem that is going to be destroyed. Like the imagery is really prescient.
Moving away from ritual, I mean, John's engaging in a ritual, baptism. Like what do you mean?
Oh, I mean from the conventional ones in the temple. Why is he not in the temple? Why is he in the desert? Why is he committing baptism? His movement is out from the convention. Like you were asking, why isn't he in the temple given his background? So he's moving out into nature and into... Is it a radical archaism?
No, what I'm asking, I mean, I mean. The old ritual, perhaps I should say. Yeah, it's a new. It's a new ritual. There's a new ritual. That's an astonishing thing to me. Like if I wanted to, hey, you know what I've done? I've set up a new ritual. That's just a powerful thing.
But it's not a ritual. It's recapitulation of the Red Sea, of the cross from the Jordan, of Elisha's sending for healing in the Jordan. It's not like he's making it up with his own. No, no, I'm not saying that. He's basically taking all of this and recapitulating it.
That's where it's fractal. That's what Jesus does for, you know, Exodus, for Genesis. I mean, what we're seeing is everything is a relation and a fulfillment of the previous rituals.
But it is new and it's a baptism for the forgiveness of sins. That's right. Like I don't see that anywhere else. Can I ask this question? For Christians, what does that mean to you to have somebody proposing a ritual that's They're supposed to give their forgiveness of sins before Jesus has even appeared.
So what happens, the way I understand the baptismal event, let's say, if we can jump to that momentarily, is that it recapitulates the time at the beginning of time. You have the water, which is the tohu vabohu, right? I would say that's the deep pool of possibility. And you have the spirit descend that sets on the water, and that's a recapitulation of the initial state.
You can think about that as a neurophysiological transformation writ large, right? It's the dissolution of the old personality, the re-instantiation of the process that brings order out of chaos and the generation of a new order. And so, and it's new in the sense that you said, but it's very, very archaic. The baptismal idea is unbelievably old, right?
That initiatory idea, tens of thousands of years old. But that is the forgiveness of sins. Right, but... Right, because the, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I wasn't talking about the baptism by John of Jesus, I think, and even the ritual baptism. I appreciate what you're saying about its psycho-spiritual capacities for transformation. I'm trying to, like, this seems to be an... I'm not denying the continuity, but there's an innovation here. And then I'm asking a question looking sort of from the outside. This seems problematic.
How is this the forgiveness of sins?
The crossing of the Red Sea is already a forgiveness of sins because the Egyptians remain in the water. The image is already there. When the Israelites cross the Red Sea, the Egyptians remain in the water and the Israelites come out at the end.
It's a willingness to die. So it's the death of the old tyranny. Why was that forgiveness of sin? I didn't follow that.
So if you understand sin as transgression, as the thing that doesn't fit, as the thing that isn't towards the purpose. If we get away from just the simple moral, this is good, this is bad. If we understand that what sin is, is that which is not aimed towards the purpose. So you have things that step out of the purpose.
That is what the drowning of the Egyptian is because they are not moving towards Sinai. They're not forgiven. They're not moving towards Sinai. Right, they're not forgiven. No, they're not forgiven.
No, no, but the people who pass through are. Well, forgiven. So you have Egyptians inside. They're saved, but they're not forgiven. I never understood the Jews on the other side of the sea being forgiven for anything. because that's not what's said. They were just saved from the death of the Egyptian army.
Well, my sense is that they're comparatively forgiven because the Israelites and the Egyptians both have to face the chaos of the Red Sea. But the Egyptians are so tyrannical and so bent beyond redemption that that Flood of chaos destroys them. Now, that doesn't mean the Israelites are finally saved, but they at least managed to pass through the chaos alive. And so, there's an... And what?
They established themselves as a new people on the opposite shore, right? There is a new beginning there. And... That doesn't necessarily signify that they've been washed clean by the chaotic Red Sea, but it does mean that the tyranny that held them back has been demolished by the chaos. Well, they've been washed clean of the Egyptians. Right. And if you view them as one organism in a way,
And also to be saved is the same thing as to be forgiven from sin in a way. So they're saved.
Yeah, I mean, I can't find the verse that says that John intended by baptism the efficacious sort of salvation of people who are being baptized. And he says at various points, he says, he actually draws a distinction. So Matthew says, this is what 311 says. "'I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance.'" I mean, you're repenting, and there's an external mark of your having repented.
I take it to mean, I baptize you. But the Helot coming after me is mightier than I whose shoes I'm not worthy to untie. Then in John, this is in, let's have a look. This is the beginning of the opening chapter. He says, he's asked, why are you baptizing if you're not the Christ? And he says, well, I'm baptizing you with water but there's somebody standing among you who you don't know.
So it's a kind of proleptic.
This is the apocalyptic eschatological context and one might say mood, isn't it? So maybe this fits in with your setting the scene. Yeah. And this is a period when we know that there were these various groups emerging in this Jewish context. It's a symbolic prefiguring.
And it's insufficient.
It's not.
It's only partial. That's right. Well, we do, there are psychological investigations that show, for example, that if people take a bath or a shower, they feel, they declare themselves more morally pure.
That's what women do after they're raped. It's a very powerful imagery.
Right, and it's a removal of contamination, but it's not as profound a removal as could conceivably be imagined. So, okay, so now for the Christians again, why does Christ require a baptism?
Well, he does, he says he does it. Can I try to answer John's question about baptism? I think it draws a lot of the themes together. Our sins are forgiven in the cross of Jesus. They're forgiven in that great act. And when the soldier pierces a side, out comes blood and water. And the church fathers read that as the blood of the Eucharist, but the water of baptism.
And they further linked it to Ezekiel's great prophecy that, you know, the Shekinah of the Lord had left the temple and it'll come back someday. And when it does, that's when water flows forth from its side for the renewal of the world and of the human heart and all that. And I think that's how they read it, is from the side of the renewed temple.
So when John the Baptist, this priestly figure, says, behold, there's the Lamb of God, there's the one who will be sacrificed, and whose very body is the new temple, that's what the baptismal water symbolizes. It's the water coming from the redemptive act of Christ on the cross. I bring all those themes together.
So is the baptism... The baptism seems to precipitate two events. One is the sojourn in the desert, and one is the onset of the ministry. So what's your reading?
And Bishop Barron, I'd like to hear your... Well, in Matthew, it's amazing, because in Matthew, you really have this repetition of Exodus. You know, so, I mean, we'll get to it when we talk about it, but Christ is chased into Egypt, you know, to flee his brother, and then he comes back, when he comes back, he crosses the sea, he's baptized.
Then he goes to be tempted into the desert, and then he goes up the mountain to give the new law. That's where he does the Sermon of the Mount. And so that is really, the Christians really understand the baptism as this renewal. 40 days in the wilderness, 40 years in the wilderness. And so when you see Christ going in the water, it's a repetition of Genesis 1. It's so clear.
He goes down into the water, and then it says, when he comes up, the Spirit came down upon him as a dove. It's not just the Genesis 1, it's also the end of the flood. It's the Genesis 1, it's the end of the flood. It's Joshua, it's the Israelites going to the Sinai.
It's all of these images of water crossing that are in the Old Testament are recapitulated into this image of regeneration, which is the beginning of a new world. But you could say that that's ritually what it is for us that is that when we go into the water, we come out new. It is a new birth, a new beginning, like it's being born again, all of that imagery.
But Christ says that he's doing it for, he doesn't need it. He's doing it for us. He's doing it to show us what is real about himself.
When that's the scandal of it, so from the beginning, And even scholars today recognize that the fact that it's in the Gospels is scandalous. Why would Jesus, the Son of God, have to seek a baptism of repentance? So the fact that it's there means that, boy, this really happened. It's one of the stronger arguments.
But to Jonathan's point... How do you read that from the human side? I mean, is Christ as a man... Does Christ as a man... He obviously matures. He matures from infant onward. Does Christ as a man... reveal his relationship with God more and more deeply as he progresses even to himself?
He's the icon of the invisible God. Now, what's going on inside his own psychology, his own human psychology, is a famously, you know, controverted issue. He grows in wisdom and understanding. Right, it says that.
That's right.
So I think that's really fine to say that in his human nature, to use more technical language, sure, he grows.
Well, and he does...
go into the desert and encounter satan and begin his ministry as a concept well in its human nature and i think that's part of the baptism is the identification with the sinner so he stands shoulder to shoulder with sinners in the muddy waters of the jordan and anyone walking by would say oh there's another one of those sinners but that's anticipating the cross that's right becomes sin on the cross and that also explains the question of why do we need john the baptist because
we need a human being to stand in if Jesus is standing in for sinners that he doesn't need but to show us the path. You need another human being with enough authority to baptize him, right?
All the Christians at the table correctly are making clear the references to the Old Testament, specifically the Pentateuch, the Torah. So I have a question which is sort of outside of the province of the Bible study. But it's always puzzled me, and maybe you in particular, Maida, because you expressed the fact that you were an evangelist for the faith.
I never understood why so many Christian groups will only hand out the New Testament to would-be converts. Big mistake, yeah.
I agree. I mean, one of the earliest fights the church had was against Marcion. That's right. So the Marcionite heresy that tried to divide the New Testament from the Old. And the church, by a very deep and correct instinct, led by St. Irenaeus, said, no, you cannot understand Jesus apart from the Old Testament. So that's a very bad instinct to say, just read the gospel, you'll be fine.
You won't get the gospel apart from the Old Testament.
What's interesting is that Marcion not only repudiated the Old Testament, he cut the four gospels down to one. That many parts of the New, right. Which was the one he found most sympathetic and free of kind of Hebrew, the fingerprints of the Old Testament. But we still fight it today.
When people say, oh, the God of the Old Testament, cruel and violent and all that. I love the God of the New Testament. That's a neo-Marcionism. And the church has got to stand against that just as clearly today.
Huge problem. No, I'm glad this is on record. Yes, yes.
So another very strange occurrence happens. So after the annunciation to John's father and mother, we have the annunciation to Mary. And I'll read that because it's worth going into, I would say.
In the sixth month of Elizabeth's term, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, a nowhere town, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph of the lineage of David. This maiden's name was Mary. Gabriel came to her and said, Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with thee. Mary was greatly troubled at these words and wondered what this greeting might mean.
But the angel said to her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great. He will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will have no end.
Mary said to the angel, How can this be, since I have never known a man? And the angel replied, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be holy and he will be called the son of God. And Mary agrees to that. Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.
Okay, so I want to unpack a couple of things in that from a psychological perspective and then I'll let the people who are more biblically oriented take it from there. So the first thing I would, I've got two things to say on that front. The image of mother and child is an ancient image. It predates Christianity.
And the reason for that is that, well, any culture that doesn't hold the image of mother and infant sacred is done because that's the very image of love, maternal love, life, reproduction, continuity, sacrifice, all of that. And so, I think it's either Mary and the infant or the whore of Babylon. I think those are the directions for women fundamentally.
And so there's that from the psychological perspective is that the sacrificial relationship of mother to infant is core. It's fundamental. Then the next issue is possibly that The very definition of feminine, of female, biologically isn't chromosomal difference. Chromosomal difference is a reflection of a more fundamental difference.
What female means biologically is that sex which contributes more to the reproductive process. And so right from fractally, right from the level of sperm and egg upward, the bulk of the reproductive responsibility, especially in its initial phases, is clearly feminine. And so it is as if, at least as if, It's mother and God producing child with the father donating a trifle to the process.
Now, in Mary's case, that's obviously taken to the ultimate degree. But at minimum, it reflects this underlying biological reality. It's also the case that Mary... embodying as she does the spirit of motherhood, says yes to the fact of the child. Now, we don't know what Mary's informed of by the angel with regard to the destiny of her child, which is a very brutal and great destiny.
But that's the destiny of all children, right? And part of the reason we have a birth crisis in the modern world is because women now look at the world, A, they're unwilling to make the sacrifice, and B, they think, Who would dare to bring a child into a world such as this? And the answer is, well, we've always brought children into a world of death and malevolence.
And there isn't a deeper reflection of fundamental faith in the goodness of being and becoming than the decision a woman takes to throw herself wholeheartedly and without reservation into into the relationship with her infant. And that's all, as far as I can tell, that's all packed into this story and more. So that's what I have to say.
And we're going to get to the, when she meets Simeon in the temple, then we get the fullness of what you're saying, where Simeon tells her, you know, a sword will also pierce your heart. Like you are moving towards sacrifice of your own. It's not only your son that will be sacrificed, but you will also...
As she brings the presence of the God of Israel back into the temple, fulfilling Ezekiel.
In your read of this, this is typical when we read something and then all of a sudden, after so many times of reading it, something pops up. Yeah. So, I'm sure, I may be wrong, but the angel describing to Mary whom she will give birth to does not describe him as God, correct? No. as a divine being.
He will be great and he'll be called the descendant of David, he's the new... Right, but that's not a divine being. Yeah. So, is that not interesting or worthy of note that that Jesus, if indeed is God incarnate, that that would not be stated in the description of him by the angel to Mary?
Do you think that's, it seems to me arguably that that's implicit in two parts. Son of the Most High, say three parts, Son of the Most High, kingdom will have no end, and the intermediation of the Holy Spirit. So there's strong pointers in that direction.
But you need the whole trajectory of the gospel fully to see it. There are parallels too. I mean, there's that moment in 2 Samuel where David leaps back at the presence of the ark. And some scholars think there's a parallelism here with John the Baptist leaping in the womb. There's a sort of a presence here. Mary is the Ark.
Or it's David's dance in the presence of the Ark. She's being treated as the Ark of the Covenant in the story because it says that the presence of God will descend upon you. And so the image is that she is the waters, like the Holy Spirit comes down upon her as the waters of creation, but also the presence of God descends upon her as the Ark of the Covenant.
And then that will... Obviously, these are... The text is going to tease all of these things out, right? Because these are things that you always have to remember how crazy what we're saying is. It is crazy to say that this man is God. And so the story slowly teases out as we move towards the... So it was deliberate on the part of the angel to omit that. Yeah. Or to intimate it.
Yeah, to intimate it.
Because I think so much of this is, you know, there's so much of the gospel is around doubt. You know, it's like, you know, you go back to with Exodus where Moses says, hang on one minute, Aaron, I'm just going up the mountain and just keep things under control. And then immediately out of sight, it's like...
And so it's again and again with the Gospels, all the way through Peter denying Christ three times. I mean, it's all the way through is the doubt and the disbelief even in the face of what is.
And so I think that these intimations are also a way of, like they sort of naturally build suspense from a narrative perspective, but they also are trying to move along at a pace that human comprehension can possibly keep up with.
If I could just pick up for a second on something, Dr. Peterson, you were saying about motherhood. It's very interesting to hear the pattern that is emerging. An angel comes in both situations to prophesy the birth. And in one sense, pregnancy is... one of the great examples of fulfillment of nature, right? It's the actualization of the potentiality for motherhood.
And yet that fulfillment in both cases is a radical self-othering. Both of these sons will die brutal deaths. And so I think what's being indicated here already in a very fundamental sense is the inherently non-instrumental of love itself. And so that you are fulfilled precisely in the transcending of your own fulfillment.
And when Jesus says that my kingdom is not of this world, I mean, it seems to me what the scriptures are speaking to us of already here in the announcement of the angels about the pregnancy and birth of the children who will die deaths that are not for themselves is the radically, is the radical self-othering
that is the nature of self, you might say the realization of the self in the deepest sense.
And you see this in Christ at the very end, this is mirrored on the cross where he is going to say as his last act, as you might say, reconstituting that family between, in a sense, between Mary and John so that the ultimate act of self-othering is the principle that is able to bring together some harmony in us and in what is around us.
And I think we're also looking at this tragedy, especially in comparison to, let's say, Abraham and Isaac, where his hand is stayed and he gets to keep his son. But the actual end of the Gospels is that the same thing happens with God. He gives his, you know, like in a way... No one stays his hand. Yeah, it goes all the way through, but then he has his son, and Mary also is reunited with her son.
And by the way, just on Dennis' point, I think actually it's fairly... fairly clear that, you know, this is the power of the highest. And that's a literal, very literal translation. And also that this is hagion, it's the holy thing. And then the huios theou, it is the son of God. So I think actually the... You see it again. This is not any human being.
You see it more clearly in the Annunciation to Joseph, right, in Matthew 1.18. So let's refer to that again. I'll read through that and then we'll go to the birth of Christ. So this is the Annunciation. After Mary has been betrothed to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit.
And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to public disgrace... resolved to send her away quietly. But as he considered these things, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for the child within her is conceived of the Holy Spirit.
She will bear a son, you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken through the prophet. Behold, the virgin shall conceive, shall bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God is with us. That's a bit clearer.
Now, I'm going to speak about that biologically too, and I think the easiest explanation on the biological side is that of paternal uncertainty. And so, in any relationship between a man and a woman, there is always, until DNA testing became possible, but there's always an element of paternal uncertainty, and one of the
One of the things that a man has to contend with when his wife is pregnant is that paternal uncertainty. And his willingness to act in good faith is, of course, dependent on the integrity of the marriage. But it's that willingness to act in good faith that actually makes for the solidity of the family. That's a terrible place for doubt to emerge.
And so, at minimum, that's part of what's happening in that story. And so, I'll turn, unless anybody has a comment on that, I'll turn to the birth.
Well, I just wanted to pick up on what Dennis said though. I mean, I'm a little bit hesitant of going from the title of Son of God immediately because Son of God is used of other figures, even figures like the kings in the Old Testament. And secondly, if this story is so central, why is it absent from Mark and why does Paul never talk about it? That's problematic.
I mean, if it's such a central thing that you're claiming it is, Mark doesn't even consider it, and Paul never refers to it.
People write towards purposes. And so there are different reasons why you would include it and different reasons why you would exclude it. I mean, in the Gospels it says, I think it's in the Gospel of John where it says, you know, all the books of the world cannot contain the story of Jesus. And so if we ask why is this person saying this detail and why this other person is not saying this detail.
Do you mean divine sonship? The claim that Jesus is the Son of God is...
I think in a lot of ways, and we've discussed this a little bit, the uncertainty or the lack of consistency across the stories actually makes them more believable.
I agree with you.
And so if we were to reconstitute something from historical memory and every detail lines up, I mean, think about like a police investigation, right?
If everybody gets the exact same story.
Right, a bunch of guys in a heist and they have all the details in place, you're not going to believe them. And so part of this is it's a historical reconstitution and memory works in different ways, story works in different ways, people are writing to different aims. They had access to different sources maybe, yeah.
It's a good criticism, John, but one of the things that's interesting, because your criticism is if it's so central, why isn't it replicated? And people have addressed that, but interestingly, Despite the fact that it's not replicated, it's also become a really fundamental part of the culture of Christianity, right?
Because there's nothing in many ways that people know more about Christ's life than the birth, right? And so it does seem to speak to something that's very, very deep, despite the fact that those other Gospels also, they say very little about Christ at all until...
Well, until the ministries start, and so... I think it's also carried through though inherently in the other gospels because if Jesus is Jesus, it's not like he has another father, meaning by dint of how the characters move and progress in the other gospels, this is the only conclusion of how the birth could have happened, or else it would be misaligned.
I don't know if I agree with that. I mean, he has brothers and sisters, and there's no indication that they're considered half-brothers or half-sisters.
Well, no, I think the Greek is adelphos, adelpher. I mean, that could mean cousins, and is thought to mean cousins as well. And he's referred to as the son of Mary, which is very rare and odd that the patronymic shouldn't be used.
So I think there's quite a strong case for... Your point is that if Christ is God, then his patrimony is God. Right. And that's implicit in the other stories.
And if it's not, the other Gospels would have something to say about it. Or everything wouldn't proceed, and everybody around it wouldn't proceed as if that were the case.
I mean, we've got to remember that, okay, maybe the divine sonship theme isn't central in Mark, but I think in all the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke... At the moment, both the baptism and transfiguration, you have the divine voice saying, behold, this is my son. This is my beloved son.
I'd like to answer my own question, which is classic Jewish way of learning. So, it occurs to me, it's actually very real. He's speaking to a Jewish woman, and the whole context is Jewish. The Lord God shall give him unto the throne of his father David. He shall reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there shall be no end." It is all Jewish references.
If he'd have said, if the angel had said to Mary, I want you to know you're giving birth to God, she would have thought it was a hallucination or she had gone mad. This made perfect sense to her. And again, the Jewish context is so central. And that's why I raised my point about only giving out the New Testament.
So partly what you're saying.
referring to there, perhaps, it's an analog of what we pointed to before. It's like, well, how much can you spring on one person at once? Yes, yes. Right, okay.
Because you see that, I mean, in the entire rest of the gospel, you'll have Christ saying, okay, don't say this. Don't say this. Don't say this. Wait, this is not, like, nobody's ready for this yet. Wait, wait, wait. And then as things start to become clear, then the message gets out.
It's tied in some ways, too, with him refusing to perform carnival treks when asked. Thank you. Right. I'm not going to show proof whether it's to Satan, whether it's to others. I'm not going to perform for, like these things need to progress in their own time.
That's very important. To me what's so beautiful in that story, many things, but Mary's the new Eve. So another Old Testament reference where Eve grasps the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I'm going to grab this for myself and make it my own. Mary, the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to your word.
Right, right, right.
And that allows the divine to flow through her in this powerful way. So that's the way the church fathers read it. Sure. She's not putting herself at the center of creation. And the Latin writers, right, the Latin writers love doing the Ave of the angel, you know, Hail Mary, reverses the Eva of Eve. And it's just a beautiful motif of how the divine flows through. The lack of pride. Right.
The lack of presumption. Mary's pride. Right. Well, when women in the throes of pregnancy do have to throw themselves over to a process that's really outside of them, right? Right. in a way that men can't understand. I'm going to read the birth of Jesus and the angels' proclamation to the shepherds. Now, the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way.
In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. all went to be enrolled, each to his own city.
And Joseph went up from Galilee, out of the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was great with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered.
And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. Then Luke 2, 8 to 20. In the same region there were shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks.
By night, and lo, an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were very afraid. But the angel said to them, Be not afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior who is Christ the Lord. And this is how you shall know him.
You will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. All right. So there's a variety of things happening there. I'll unpack them briefly and then we can discuss them. So the first is that Christ is born under the dominion of the state. That's the point of the
census and the forced movement of people the state has a tyrannical element every person even the savior of the world is born into a situation where they have to contend with the background tyranny of the state and then the next part is that
And Augustus is the first god emperor. It's important to understand.
Right, right. So that's amplified, that fact, right? Because the Roman state is also degenerating towards a theocracy, right? Isn't he called Weos Tuteu?
Because he's the son of Julius Caesar.
Exactly. So he's the son of the god. Exactly right. So he would be on all the coins you'd have. Weos Tuteu. And in the Greek-speaking part of the world, where the Roman imperial cult, the cult of the emperor, was very, very strong. that's the language that would be used.
So we have the genuine God being born at a time when there's a false God who's emerged in the tyrannical state. Classic, that's a classic hero story. Okay, so who's the true God here? Well, it's a babe, right? So is that every human baby with the potential to be...
to participate in the redemption of the world, born in a very lowly place, well, that's a biological reality as well because all human infants are incredibly threatened, right? Our infants are extremely dependent, they're very, very vulnerable, we're born under the tyranny of the state, we're born in relationship to nature and even low nature and that's associated with the manger,
So it's the emergence of the highest and the lowest as a counter position to the false highest that's Augustus. And then that's reiterated to some degree with the proclamation to the shepherds. It's like, well, who gets wind of this? Well, it's not Augustus. the people of the court, it's the shepherds, right?
And the shepherds are an interesting choice too because, of course, shepherds, there's a kinship between the shepherd and the prophet all the way through the Old Testament and that imagery is replicated continually in the New Testament. And shepherds take care of the vulnerable. That's essentially what they do and they do that independently and responsibly.
And so even though they're lowly, they're not because they're types of something much greater and And even though they are low on the socioeconomic totem pole, The fact that Christ's birth is announced to them is an indication of the universally salvific nature of his birth and mission, right? So that's all happening in those little stories.
The shepherds are also counter to city because they're the opposite of civilization. They have these flocks, they move around, they don't stay in one place, they don't have agriculture, they don't have all the things, all the tropes of the city.
It's also an answer for the undeniable. In a way, it's the reversal of the cone, right? If a tree falls in a forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound? If the Son of God is born in a manger and there's only shepherds around, is he still the Son of God? The answer is yes.
Right, right.
Just two points. Great things from lowly beginning. Just about Augustus and whether fragile or endangered state of the child, Augustus is also... the emperor in this period of extraordinary stability for the Roman Empire. So it's also a good time for Jesus to be born because... Pax Romana. Exactly, exactly. So I think there's the tyrant element, the false deity, but also it's auspicious.
And the second point about his vulnerability, but again, the emphasis on David... This is the Davidic house, so it's in a manger. There's no room in the inn, but the emphasis again, this is the true successor of David.
And I don't think Augustus is just tyrannical. Augustus is the ending of a civilization-wide civil war. And I think there's an attempt to indicate something like a kairos happening here. That's interesting. Right? You've got... I'm not denying the tyranny of the Roman emperor, but... You know, Augustus, many historians consider him maybe the greatest emperor, right?
If God had to choose any period in history to leave his authenticating signature on the world in a way that would disseminate and distribute that message as quickly as possible, it's hard to pick a better time than...
And so it's like if you introduce it, it's almost like an enzyme. Like what's the state in which this action can be most fruitful? And so in a time when everything's filled with sin, he sends the flood. In a time when things have a level of stability and there needs to be foundations through which to... even to rise up to condemn him.
Because in utter chaos, you can't have so cleanly that the temple and the government, like every aspect of the culture fails him, so they have to be in place in order to render that judgment.
It's hard to imagine the Christian message spreading with the astonishing speed that it does from, say, the early 30s AD to the point where, well, by 64, there are enough Christians in Rome for Nero to be able to scapegoat the Christians as a distinct group from the Jews.
Yeah, so although, you know, the conditions are- But there is a desire to create a foil though, I think, you know, because even if we talk about the Pax Romana, we haven't gotten to the, right after that, when the angels announced, they say, glory to God in the highest peace on earth of men of goodwill, right? It's basically, it's trying to say,
I think it is creating a foil to the Roman rule, which is here's the great emperor, without maybe not necessarily criticizing, but here's the great emperor, here's this piece, but now here's the true emperor that's hidden at the bottom of the world in a cave, in a manger, and that this is through this that the true peace will be found.
It's the language of, that's the language of an imperial edict. And in fact, it's worth pointing out that the word, the Greek word for good news or gospel is evangelion, which is the word that emperors would send out. Often it was the emperor's birthday. You would send the evangelion to the towns and villages that worshipped him. And this was particularly in this part of the world.
And this was the good news, the good news of Caesar's birthday. There's clearly, I think, a semi-conscious aping and mimicking of the language of the imperial cult to assert that Jesus is Lord and therefore Caesar isn't.
I think it's a formula that in some ways sums up the whole Bible. You know, glory to God in the highest and peace among us. That's how it works. When you give glory to something other than God, then violence breaks out and division breaks out. But if you really give glory to the sumum bonum appropriately, then peace will obtain among us. So the angelic message is that's the whole Bible.
It's the whole Bible. That's for sure.
I totally agree. And some of that's associated with the glorification of the infant. as a center of attention, which is a proper center of attention.
But it also has to be, like for it to be the fullness, you also have to have these extremes where the angels appear above, these singing angels, the music of the spheres, and then the lowest aspect of reality being connected together so that you say, oh, this is the fullness of God's revelation, the fullness of God's presence in the world represented by these two extremes with the angels up above.
So Jacob's Ladder. But what is the Greek again for the, we say host or we say company of angels, but it's like something with army, like stratios.
The Hebrew is army. Pardon me? The Hebrew is army.
Yeah, and I find it so fascinating. So Caesar can dominate the world because he's got this big human army, but in fact the baby king has the real army. It's an angelic army of these fearsome supernatural realities. So who's going to win this battle? The baby king's going to win.
So Bishop, I have a question. which I know a lot of people watching this will have, but I have it too. I agree 100% if we all acknowledge the God of the Bible, it would be a much better world, even a peaceful world. So how do you explain, because it's a very real question for all of us, not just people who think
claimed to believe in God who did horrible things, but horrible things to other people who believed in God. The Christian wars in Europe probably precipitated the rejection of religion, ultimately. Yeah, I agree with that, yeah. So I'm just curious, and I really am curious, it's not a provocative question, it's in fact The first book I wrote is called The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism.
And one of the nine questions is, if religion, specifically Judaism, is supposed to make people good, how do you account for unethical religious Jews? It's one of the nine questions I asked in my first book. The question of people who believe in God who do bad, I mean, the God of the Bible, that's all I'm talking about, is a very real one.
Dennis, let's let that hang and get that back into that when we talk about the Pharisees.
Okay, I'm not sure they're the best example of bad guys.
Well, but I think the question is specifically addressed in some of the stories of Christ's conflict, let's say, with religious authorities per se. And I think we should address that.
It has to do with hypocrisy. Yeah. The idea of saying one thing and doing another. Like, that's the opposite of incarnation. It's like, it's this disjoining of heaven and earth where you have a word and a being that aren't connected. You say things, you think something, you say something, and then you do another thing. Where Christ is saying, no, heaven and earth have to be united.
That is what the incarnation is trying to show.
We'll spend a whole session on that question in some ways. Okay, so I'm going to go through... the lead up to the baptism here, and we'll conclude with that. So what happens in the next few stories, essentially, and I'll compress them, is that Mary and Joseph and the people around Christ are presented with evidence of various sorts that something particularly special is going on here.
So we have, we first of all have the the naming and events in the temple when Jesus is presented in the temple. And there's a prophetess there who describes his eventual destiny and a prophet there too, Simeon. And so he tells Mary that her son is destined to do spectacular things. And then after that, we have the gifts of the Magi. And these are magicians.
magi from the east who have seen who have analyzed the patterns of the stars in heaven because they're astrologers and have determined that an old age has ended and that would be the age of the ram and a new age pisces is about to begin and so there's there's signs in the stars so to speak that something new is about to be born and the magi come and find christ and
represent and regard him as the fulfillment of their prophetic intuition. And so that's another. And then we have the parallel. This is a Old Testament parallel with the flight into Egypt and massacre of the innocents. Do you want to speak about that?
Sure. I mean, the interesting thing about the flight into Egypt and the massacre of the innocents is, you know, the story of Jesus is always smashing the Old Testament references together, bringing them together in a way that is absolutely crazy. And so what happens is when Jesus goes to Egypt, he's doing the flight and return from Egypt at the same time.
That is, when Joseph goes to Egypt, he flees his brothers trying to kill him. When Moses leaves Egypt with the Israelites, he's fleeing the Pharaoh that tried to kill the children of Israel. And so in this version, the two come together in one story. And there's a third element too, which is also King David fleeing King Saul, who the true king fleeing the king that is there at this moment.
So you have this wild image where, you know, the... Christ goes into Egypt in order to flee the king in both ways, like fleeing his own brother, but then also fleeing the tyrant Pharaoh. It's hard even to say it because all the images kind of come together. But this is, we talked about this in Exodus. It's a difficult situation because in some ways it has to do with the problem of the one.
And it has to do with the problem of the concentration of a generation into one person. It's a little scandalous to talk about it, but I think that that is part of what is happening.
So the Magi tell Herod that a king will arise and Herod determines to kill all the
All the young, all the babies.
Right, all the babies. And so that's equivalent to what happens in Moses' time.
And it's another echoing of the idea that... And also Joseph, like Joseph leaving his brothers that want to kill him into Egypt, but then also Moses leaving Egypt into the Promised Land. Those two get smashed into one image.
There's also, I mean, there's extra biblical reference. They're magi. They're plausibly from, they're Zoroastrians. And so, and there's been an ongoing relationship between Israel and Persia. And Persia figures very, I mean, I believe I read somewhere that Cyrus was actually the first, one of the first people called Messiah in the Old Testament and King of Kings.
And so there's also that relationship to, and, you know, and Zoroastrianism is, you know, is the idea that, that the future has an openness to it and we are a moral battleground in which that openness can be decided. And I think by having the Magi there, there is a recognition of that.
There's also the intimation that's been presented right from the beginning and will be continually presented, which is that It is related to the story of Joseph, something like the stranger will recognize him first. Like this will move towards the strangers.
But it's the opposite also of the Old Testament because the Persians send the Jews, but now the Persians come. It's also an inversion, which is trying to say, I think there's something happening about the relationship to the Zoroastrian tradition that's being talked about here in an important way. And they are magi, and that's really, really important.
It's deeply Israelite that Israel is chosen, but not for their own sake, but chosen for the sake of the nations. To your earlier point, I mean, ultimately... the whole world's come to Torah. Well, you find it in the Psalms, you find it in Isaiah. From a Christian standpoint, here's the beginning of it. As Christ comes, the other nations get interested right away.
Shepherds and foreigners are the people who mark it. They want to come and see him. Then they don't go back the same way they came. I'm going to close, gentlemen, with this last story, I think, because this sets us up for the baptism and then the flight into the desert, which is where we can start our second session. So this is... the story of the culmination in some ways of Christ's youth.
And this is Luke 2, 40 to 50. The young Jesus confers with the teachers, Luke 2, 40 to 50. The child Jesus grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him. Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year for the feast of the Passover. When Jesus was 12 years old, they took him with them when they went up, according to the custom of the feast.
But after the celebration was over, and they were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know this, but supposing him to be in their traveling party, they went a day's journey, and then they looked for him among their kinsfolk and acquaintances. When they did not find him, They returned to Jerusalem to search for him.
After three days, they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his responses. When his parents saw him, they were astonished. And his mother said to him, son, why have you treated us this way? Your father and I have been anxiously looking for you.
And Jesus said to them, why did you need to search for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father's house? But they did not understand the significance of these words. So we see a variety of intimations there. We see the young Jesus first taking his place with the learned men in discussion. And that's a prodroma for much of what happens in the remainder of the Gospels.
We see the fact that he's exceptionally good at it, enough to hold his own even as a 12-year-old with the learned adults. And that he is also pointing out to his parents, who still don't understand this, that he's marked out for a very particular form of destiny. And so it's after that that that seriously starts to unfold, and that's where we'll pick up when we reconvene.
Thank you very much, everyone.
And for the Christians, too, it's important because the early church, there was a debate. There was actually an early Christian who proposed a single gospel. He said, you know, we have to take these unwieldy texts and merge them into one nice, clean, coherent text.
But the church resisted that because, you know, in some ways, they knew that the gospels were the closest accounts of the life of Jesus. They were handed down through the apostles, through the apostolic succession. They trusted these texts. And in some ways, the variety in the text, It is a witness to the kind of energy, you know, like the kind of frenetic desire to get this story down.
And even the idea that in some ways it represents different perspectives on the same story. So Christ is hidden in the four Gospels, right? He is somewhat more than the four Gospels. That's important to understand. His life is not simply... told in those gospels.
We have to understand that he's more than that, but that these gospels are the right testimony for his life, and they have a reason why each of them have their own thrust, their own narrative, their own emphasis, and that's very meaningful for the Christians.