Dan McClellan dismantles Ammon Hillman's claims that Jesus was a trafficker, clarifying that laistēs refers to insurrectionists punishable by crucifixion rather than drug dealers. The scholar refutes the idea that the Septuagint predates the Torah, explaining instead that Hebrew texts consolidated during the Hellenistic era while remaining a living language. He debunks linguistic theories regarding christos and Elohim, dismissing pagan influence myths like the dying-god motif as outdated anthropological errors. Ultimately, the discussion reveals biblical narratives evolved from Mesopotamian sources through scribal adaptation, challenging traditional views of divine univocality and historical origins. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Translating Ancient Hebrew Texts00:15:15
All right, Dan McClellan, thank you very much for coming down here and doing the podcast, man.
Thank you for having me.
I appreciate it.
As I was just talking to you off camera, this is.
I'm very, very new to this world of the classical world and Christianity and the history of religion.
And I've come to realize a lot of people have very different views and opinions of what was going on back in the day.
Yeah, yeah.
There's kind of a.
Standard deviation, and then you got some people reaching out a little further than that.
But yeah, there are a wide variety of views.
So, for people who aren't familiar with you, can you give me a background of your education and what you talk about on your YouTube channel and what you do?
So, my first degree was in Ancient Near Eastern Studies.
That was at Brigham Young University.
And I emphasized Biblical Hebrew, but I did a minor in Classical Greek.
Then, I went away to the University of Oxford, where I did a master's degree in Jewish studies.
And I wrote my a master's thesis there on textual criticism of the Septuagint.
Then I went and did another master's degree at a university up in Canada called Trinity Western University.
That was in biblical studies where I started working on cognitive linguistics and wrote my thesis there on the conceptualization of deity in the Hebrew Bible.
So when they talked and thought about gods anciently, what exactly were they thinking about?
And then I did my doctoral dissertation under the watchful eye of Professor Francesca Steverkapullo at the University of Exeter.
And that was on concepts of deity and divine agency.
So now I'm looking at what is a God, but also what is a divine image?
And how does like an idol, how does that work?
What was the logic they were using for how this could be both the deity and not the deity?
And then I looked at how we can better understand some features in the Bible related to divine presence associated with that.
And during the COVID lockdowns, I was at home with not a ton to do.
And I started seeing people posting TikTok videos on.
On Facebook and Instagram and elsewhere, where people were talking about religion and the Bible.
And I kind of was wondering who's in charge over there.
And so I got an account and went and checked out TikTok and saw that there wasn't really, there were not a lot of credentialed experts who were commenting, but there was a lot of discussion going on about religion and the Bible and stuff.
So I thought I might as well just kind of position myself as a bit of an umpire calling balls and strikes out there.
So my channel is all about trying to, my motto is data over dogma, the idea being that.
I'm going to try to center the data, what we can say about the Bible and religion based on actual research, and try to prioritize that over and against the dogmas, whatever they may be, from whichever side they come, whether they're related to identity politics or they're related to one's own personal interests or things like that.
And I was kind of expecting to not find a big audience for someone who kind of stands in the middle and tries not to play for either team, but.
To my surprise, there are a lot of folks who are interested in that.
And so it's been a fun ride.
But sometimes I also run into people who push back an awful lot.
And so I've made a lot of wonderful friends getting into this field.
I'm kind of learning, well, the academic world of the study of the Bible and religion, I knew a little better.
But getting into the social media world of the Bible and religion, I had to go through my own crash course.
Yeah, you seem like you're the guy that calls out the bullshit when it comes to religion.
I try to, yeah.
And you said you also had, what was your degree in classics?
So I did a minor in classical Greek.
A minor in classical Greek.
Okay, so that's interesting.
So you do have some knowledge of classics and you did study classics a bit.
A little bit, yeah.
Although I transitioned into Septuagint Greek, New Testament Greek, and that's kind of where I've spent most of my time.
Okay.
What is the difference between a classical scholar and a biblical scholar?
So, a person who studies classics is primarily engaging in the Greek and the Latin literature from the middle of the first millennium BCE down into the first few centuries CE.
And I use BCE and CE where people use BC and AD.
And so classics doesn't really have a ton of overlap with the Bible, but the people who wrote and transmitted and consumed the New Testament and as well as the Septuagint were also people who engaged with classical literature.
And there's a lot of influence from classics on the Bible.
But a lot of people who study the Bible will also study what's going on in the classical world because of the influence.
Yeah, you frequently see a lot of overlap.
Classicists going into biblical studies, biblical studies.
Sometimes going into classics.
So there are folks who try to straddle both of those fields, but that's a very difficult thing to do.
So classicists do entertain the Bible.
Oh, yeah.
Not all of them, but there are plenty who will work with early Christianity just because early Christianity was engaging with Greco Roman intelligentsia.
So there's relevance to what's going on there.
Okay.
So I discovered you obviously after you made those two videos from the response videos from Amon's podcast.
He said two things that.
You responded to the first one was about the word chrio.
Chrio is a Greek root word that he claimed was the meaning to apply a drug to the skin.
Yeah.
And he also mentioned that it was to be stung by the gadfly.
I think those are two separate meanings for chrio.
And then the other point was he believes that the Septuagint came before the Torah.
And he thinks that the, the, um, the Greek was translated into Hebrew.
Yeah.
So which one of those do you want to start on?
Which should we talk about first?
Whichever.
We can probably let's, why don't we start with the Septuagint?
I think that's a little easier.
Okay.
There are no specialists in the study of the Septuagint who would do anything other than laugh at that claim.
Can you, just to give people who might not be familiar with what we're talking about, can you give sort of a basis of the period of time we're talking about in history and give me an idea, like just lay out the argument?
Yeah.
So the development of the Hebrew Bible is pretty complex, but in short, there were a lot of traditions, a lot of poetry, some legal texts that began to be written down between around 800 BCE and down to around 400 or 300 BCE.
And as they're being written, they're being collected, they're being redacted and edited, and they're coming together into this corpus of texts.
Now, most scholars these days would probably say that it's not until around the middle the second century BCE, around the rise of the Hasmonean kingdom.
So, this is the Maccabees.
This is the story of the rededication of the temple that Hanukkah is based on.
But before that time, there were a lot of Jewish folks who weren't speaking Hebrew anymore.
They were speaking Greek because mainly they were the ones who were living in Alexandria in Egypt.
In the late fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great sweeps through all of this area.
Takes it over, and then as his successors are fighting for control of these regions, the land is Hellenized, meaning that Greek becomes kind of the lingua franca.
This is what if you want to engage in international business and sometimes even business between one city and another, usually a type of Greek is going to be the language of wider communication.
And so a lot of Jewish folks are living in Egypt and Alexandria.
They're living elsewhere where people are being raised speaking Greek as their native language, not Hebrew.
Now, Hebrew is still being spoken.
So it wasn't a dead language.
It wasn't a dead language.
I don't know where on earth that idea comes from because we have letters and inscriptions and things in Hebrew.
all the way down past the life of Christ.
Yeah, what does that even mean, a dead language?
How can a language be dead?
What does that mean?
So if people are growing up learning a language as their first language and then they're out there using it in public discourse, the language evolves.
So you get new words are brought in, old words change their meaning.
You get semantic drift, right?
That's one of the things that can happen.
There's a lot of stuff that can happen, but once a language is no longer being learned as a first language and it's not being used in Public discourse, when it's limited only to texts or rituals or things like that, then you don't have that continued change and evolution.
And at that point, they tend to refer to a language that doesn't, it's frozen, it's not changing at all.
They will usually refer to that as a dead language.
Okay, I get it.
So, like Latin, for instance, nobody learns Latin as their first language.
There are people who can speak it fairly fluently, but it's limited to usually liturgical things and rituals and things like that.
We're not building the Latin vocabulary.
The syntax is not changing.
You don't have old guys going, in my day, we use that Latin word to mean this, and the kids these days, you know, they're understood.
You don't have that kind of thing.
So there's they used to think that Hebrew was more or less a dead language by the time of Jesus and that most everybody spoke Aramaic, but there's a growing contingent.
I would say it's probably, if not about 50% of scholars, probably even more than that, think that Hebrew was still quite active.
Yeah.
Now, most people think Jesus probably spoke some degree of Greek.
I think it was probably some marketplace Greek, like the way that I can speak modern Greek.
I can't hold a conversation.
I can't argue with somebody in Greek, but I can find my way to the restaurant or I can buy or sell what I need.
So that was – and Sepphoris was right over the hill from Nazareth.
So if he was doing any work for people who were living in Sepphoris or something like that, growing up as a mason or whatever he was, then he probably would have picked up some Greek.
But there's debate about the degree to which Hebrew was a living language around the time of Jesus.
But I think most scholars would say it was probably still a living language, although Aramaic and Greek were the more common languages of wider communication.
Now, when the Septuagint was translated, Hebrew was very much still a living language.
That's probably around 250 to 100 BCE.
You have the process of translating the Septuagint.
There's an old tradition from a text that Scholars usually call pseudo Aristeus about the king in Egypt wanting translations of all the laws of the world.
And so he calls, sends some people to Jerusalem and they bring back 72 elders, six from all the 12 tribes of Israel, and they are locked up in towers and they each translate the entire Torah into Greek and they all come together at the end and miraculously all 72 translations match word for word.
And so that's the legend about the translation of the Septuagint.
The reality is that.
The books were translated by different people over the course of a few centuries, and there were some versions that were probably more popular than others.
By around the turn of the era, so the end of the first century BCE, beginning of the first century CE around the birth of Jesus, there was probably a set of more or less standard translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek.
One of the reasons that we know that this is a translation is because, for instance, the Torah, the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses.
Each of the books has a different translation profile.
Some of the books are more literal, some of the books are less literal.
Some have certain habits that they do in translating certain Hebrew things, others have other habits.
When you look at all five of them together, there's no way this is an original composition.
It has to be a translation.
You're talking about the Septuagint.
Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation.
When we look at the Hebrew, there is some some distinctiveness from book to book, but as we kind of drill down to the foundation of this distinctiveness, what we get is the different source texts, the different sources for these traditions.
So Genesis was probably composed separately from Exodus, Deuteronomy was composed separately.
We have what's called the priestly source, which is adding layers to several of the books of the Pentateuch.
The holiness code is an even later portion of the priestly.
Source that is responsible for things in Leviticus and things like that.
But there's a consistency that is related to the type of Hebrew that we see being used outside of the Bible.
So, in the inscriptions, in the letters, the Dead Sea Scrolls, there were a lot of biblical texts, but there were a lot of other texts that were discovered there as well that aren't part of the Bible, part of other apocryphal, pseudepigraphical books, but other things that were unique to that community that was living in Qumran.
There's nothing in there.
Well, so we have Hebrew, some Aramaic, and some Greek texts that were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
There's nothing in the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls that indicates it's being translated from Greek.
All of the data point in the other direction, that it's going from Hebrew to Greek.
In one of the videos, I pointed out that, for instance, you have these idioms that exist in Hebrew that don't exist in Greek, not classical Greek, not the Can you explain what an idiom is?
An idiom is something where, like, it doesn't.
The semantic content of a given set of words isn't the sum of the whole.
Like a butterfly?
Well, that's a single word.
But a common one you hear these days is in a thousand years, they won't know the difference between a butt dial and a booty call.
Because butt and booty are synonyms, dial call are kind of synonyms.
Exactly, work.
But those are things where you combine words in a way that has a specific kind of semantic impact that you might not be able to decipher just from looking at the words themselves.
Got it.
Okay.
And so in the thesis I wrote at Oxford, I was looking at Exodus 24 10.
And this is the story of Moses goes up Sinai with all of the elders.
Wild Linguistic Layers in Scripture00:09:54
And it says, and they saw the God of Israel.
And the text goes on to say there was like a sapphire.
Paving under his feet, and they sat down and they ate there.
In the Greek, it doesn't say that.
It says they saw the place where the God of Israel stood.
But it's So you're saying there's way more detail in the Hebrew?
Well, no.
Well, no, the point here is that there's a difference between what the Hebrew is saying and what the Greek is saying, but the Greek is not phrased how you would normally phrase that in Greek.
So it actually says they saw the place which God stood there.
And so the which and the there are an odd way that that's not natural Greek, but it exactly matches something called a resumptive pronoun that is used in Hebrew.
Where you would say, stood a share for which, a mod, he stood, sham, there.
And so what it shows is that the Greek translator is translating very literally, so much so that it doesn't make a ton of sense in Greek.
But if you know Hebrew, you could be like, oh, I see, it's doing this Hebrew thing.
Interesting.
And so there's, I'm trying to think of some English examples of like, Translationese, where something's, well, I guess just saying they saw the place which he stood there.
That doesn't make a lot of sense in English.
But a Hebrew speaker would be able to see, oh, I see what you're doing.
That's something that we do in Hebrew with this resumptive pronoun and adverb.
Yeah.
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The ancient Greek has like 1.5 million unique words, and the ancient Hebrew only has 8,000 unique words.
And he was explaining to us, he was showing us the differences.
And there was like for one word in Greek, when you translate it to Hebrew, there's like three or four words just to equal that one word in Greek.
So there's a couple of things there.
One, there's nowhere near that many Greek words.
There are ancient Greek, you've got, I think, 275,000 is the estimate, more or less, of how many ancient Greek words there are.
If you look at all Greek, ancient, medieval, and modern, you've got four to 500,000.
What's that lexicon website where we can actually look it up?
Thesaurus Linguae Graeca.
Yeah, okay.
TLG.
Can you find the TLG?
And is there a way you can just search for unique words in a certain language and it'll tell you?
You have to have an account, I think, to do the most robust kind of search with that.
Oh, do you?
But I think you should be able to do some pretty basic stuff.
Okay.
See what you can find, Stephen.
Okay.
And then you can keep going.
And then there are 79,945 words in Hebrew, in the Hebrew Bible alone.
79,000?
79,000, yeah.
So I think he may have heard 80,000 somewhere.
He said eight.
Yeah.
I think he may have mistook.
84 8, because the Hebrew Bible itself, which is not all of ancient Hebrew, like there was a lot of Hebrew writing and speaking outside the Hebrew Bible, but the Hebrew Bible itself has 80,000 different words in it.
But when it comes to translation, there are a lot of different ways that between one language and another, one word may need a whole phrase in another language.
Yes.
But at the same time, in that language, there may be another word that needs two or three words in the other language.
It's just wild.
Like it's bizarre that even, let's even just Let's just say what you're saying is true and it's 80,000 in Hebrew and it's only 250,000 in Greek.
The fact that you need four, like multiple Hebrew words to match one Greek word is like pretty wild.
I think more frequently you need more Greek words.
Greek uses articles a lot more frequently.
Like you don't just say Jesus in Greek, you say the Jesus.
So if you were just speaking in Hebrew or Aramaic, you would just say Yeshua.
Or something like that.
And you wouldn't have to use the article.
You have, and Greek is a much more systematic language than Hebrew.
Hebrew is a lot more vibes going on in Hebrew.
You kind of have to just get a sense for how things are being used.
But also in Hebrew, things get packed together into individual words.
So you can have your direct objects tacked onto the word.
You can have the definite article tacked onto the word.
And so if you're looking at a text, you may only be looking at one word, but it could be he did.
The thing it could be three different words in English, and so I actually tried to figure out what he was talking about with this going from more complex to less complex.
I honestly don't, yeah.
He did a debate with a guy named Kip Davis, Kip Davis, yeah.
He did a debate with him, I think it was on Neil's podcast where they were debating with what came first the Greek or the Hebrew.
And this is the example I was talking about, okay.
Um, I forget what the exact word was, Stephen.
Maybe you can find it on Neil's channel.
He's a scholar of Hebrew.
The Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Dead Sea Scrolls.
Okay.
In fact, he was on a team that helped demonstrate that a bunch of the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments that have been discovered and purchased in the last 20 years are all forgeries.
So he's a really good Dead Sea Scroll scholar.
They were forgeries?
Yeah.
So there were a bunch that were discovered with the initial excavations that went on in all the caves down in Qumran and elsewhere.
Right.
So since then, every now and then, A little piece of something that somebody calls a Dead Sea Scroll will pop up somewhere on the antiquities market, or a school will say, Oh, we just purchased this.
This was just discovered.
In fact, there were just some texts that were discovered just a few months ago in a cave that was adjacent to some of these others.
But there were about 80 of these fragments that have been purchased since 2002 by different institutions.
I think the Museum of the Bible.
Purchased a bunch, Azusa Pacific University, a handful of faith institutions purchased them.
And one of them that I really thought was fascinating was a fragment of Deuteronomy 27, which there's a variant reading where it says that they're supposed to be on Mount Gerizim.
And this is what the Samaritans have always said should be the reading over against the traditional Jewish reading.
This shocked a lot of people.
It's like this is very, very early evidence for the Samaritan reading.
They were given access to a number of these fragments to do analysis.
They did a bunch of different types of analysis and came back and said every single one that we've looked at is a forgery.
The features of these that we have used to diagnose them as forgeries are found in pretty much all of the 80 or so that have popped up since 2002.
And what sort of tests do they have to do to determine if they're forgeries?
They look at a handful of different things.
They do a lot of work under microscopes, for instance.
If you have like a tear in the manuscript, this happens an awful lot, particularly for fragmentary manuscripts.
You have multiple different layers to the page.
And if there's a tear, usually the layers will be separated from each other.
And they were able to show, for instance, that some of the ink goes off of the top layer and shows up on the bottom layer as well, which means that.
The ink was put there after the text was torn.
Balancing Bible Translation Spectrum00:15:54
Yeah.
Indicating this somebody, they may have found an actual authentic ancient torn piece of paper, but what they wrote on it came after.
Wasn't it on like animal skins?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mostly cow, but people are just trying to create fake Dead Sea Scrolls to make money to sell them?
Yeah.
Basically, yeah.
There are an awful lot of people out there who are getting very sophisticated when it comes to their forgeries.
So, Steve, you're going to have to drag your cursor.
Across that timeline right there, and you're going to find when they're going to have something pulled up on the screen that shows texts.
Oh, yeah, you'll see very clearly.
There you go.
Okay.
So go to the beginning of that, and we'll be able to play that.
There you go.
All right, here we go.
And here we go.
Translating into a dead liturgical language.
When you go to the synagogues, you see Greek.
Why don't you see any Hebrew?
You see Greek in the synagogues.
No, go ahead.
So Theosabea is what.
This guy Job has.
And I want you to see that this is that Saba, that Saba of Zeus or Theos.
Good.
Keep going, Neil.
Right?
Very now, how does this translate it right on the Masoretic side?
You just use an adjective for being afraid and you drop in Elohim.
Look, Theosabea is taken by the Hebrew back translator and done literally.
They have no internal concept of Theosabea or Saba.
All right, pause it there.
All right.
So, what is he saying there?
Do you understand what's.
Yeah, Theosabea is God fearing.
It was a title that was used.
You do see synagogue inscriptions where somebody, and God fearer was a title that was used in the Hellenistic Jewish world to refer to somebody who was a Greek or a Roman, was not Jewish, but supported the Jewish community.
So, it was like he's a friend of the Jews, he's a God fearer.
And so, you have like funerary inscriptions where on somebody's headstone it says, This is Dave, God fearer.
So that just meant he was a friend of the Jewish people.
Theosabes.
Yeah, or it might say this synagogue was built thanks to the help of so and so, Theosibis, a God fearer.
So that's a title that developed within Hellenistic Judaism as it's interacting with the Greco Roman world.
So it's not unusual that there would be a title that is unique to Greek because that title developed from the interaction of Jewish and Greco Roman individuals.
The notion that this Hebrew didn't pre exist that title, that this is a translation from That title is nonsensical.
So, and then he's also mentioning here that the synagogues, they had astrology or they had Greek astrology on the ceilings and stuff like that.
So they had mosaics that would have Greek astrological symbols.
Yeah, the zodiac signs.
Zodiac signs.
Yeah, so most of those are from the second century CE and later.
Dura Europis is the most famous one.
But yeah, there's, and this is again the interaction of Jewish communities with the Hellenized world.
They're living in a world where everybody around them is speaking Greek.
And so there are, you have a whole spectrum of people from the folks who ran off into the desert at Qumran, and these are the hippies that went out in the desert to live by themselves.
Okay.
We're sick of the man, we're going to go be by ourselves.
And then you had like the Maccabees and others who fought against.
The Seleucid tyrants like Antiochus IV Epiphanes.
These are the folks who want to defend their culture.
They're not about to go out into the desert, but they're also not going to adopt the Greco Roman worldview.
Then you have other folks, and this is primarily the elites, the people who are well off, who there's a lot of social capital associated with integrating with the broader Hellenistic world, who are fine with it.
What we find in what has been preserved in what we call the Jewish scriptures is mostly.
The production of the people on the more conservative end of that spectrum.
So, the folks who are very insular, running off into the desert to hide from the Romans, and the people who are fighting against the Romans.
Christianity is kind of the folks who are a little closer to the assimilationists, the people who are accommodating to the Hellenistic world, the Greco Roman world.
And so, this is why the New Testament.
To the Greco-Roman world?
world yeah um it's basically we're not your enemies we can you know we can be friends Our kids can play together.
We can speak the same language.
It stands opposed to the folks who are saying, no, the people across the street who speak Greek are not us.
They want to destroy our way of life.
need to stay separated from them okay um and so you've got this whole spectrum of of people and and the folks on the more conservative side are overwhelmingly going to speak uh hebrew or aramaic and they may know um some greek uh to get by But Greek is also kind of seen as the language of the enemy to some degree.
And so we have the remains of people living across this whole spectrum from the folks who were like, yeah, sure, do a giant mosaic of the zodiac calendar in our synagogue.
You guys are paying for it.
We're friends of yours.
We've got a bunch of Theosabi, God-fearers, who are visiting us, who come to the barbecue, so to speak.
And so we have those remains.
And then we also have the remains of the folks who are doing everything in Hebrew.
About 100 years after Jesus' death, you have what's called the Bar Kochba revolts, which is another attempt on the part of Jewish folks in and around Judea to try to throw off Roman rule.
And we have like coins that were minted that have Hebrew on them.
We have letters that are all written in Hebrew.
And these are another example of the folks on the very conservative side who we're going to fight against them.
We're going to go live on our own.
We don't want to be a part of that world.
We need to preserve our language.
We need to.
Make sure that we're not using their money, we're not using their language, we're not dressing like them.
So there's a whole spectrum of distinction versus accommodation going on with people who are consuming and using the scriptures, the Jewish scriptures, whether the Hebrew Bible or what would ultimately become the New Testament.
Okay.
So the point he's making here is Steve, can you just play the next 10 seconds of it and see if we get to the Greek?
Go ahead.
One who feared God.
You're saying it would be really hard to go the other way around to translate those two words into Theo Sabaeo.
Right.
It would be impossible, Neil, because you're adding.
So he's saying it would be impossible to translate Elohim and We Re into Theo Sabaeo.
Is that what he's saying?
That seems to be what he's saying, which is nonsensical because translation is not just a surgical, technical reproduction of the same words in another language.
It is just as much an art.
There's a whole range of ways to translate something, particularly when it comes to things that are considered authoritative or even inspired.
So you have a word like theosabea, which means one who fears God.
So that's one word in Greek, right?
Right.
And then so if I say.
It's a compound word, though, because it's theos and the verb for fear.
So it's two of them being put together in one word.
It's a compound word.
Okay.
So it's kind of like booty call.
Well, that would be two words or a hyphenated word.
Football.
Football.
There we go.
Okay, got it.
Thanks, Steve.
Okay, so this is like we're taking a word like football and we're translating it.
And basically, so you're saying they're separating it and they're taking each part, the person who's doing the fearing and the entity, God, and they're separating those into Hebrew.
And Amon's point is that it's impossible to do this.
I worked in scripture translation for 10 years.
That's laughable.
The notion that that would be impossible is just nonsensical.
That has absolutely no basis in any kind of valid translation theory that exists.
There is a presupposition in the translation of the Bible that anything that is said in a given language can be translated into another.
And I think there's a degree to which that's accurate.
But at the same time, there's so much nuance and so many layers of meaning.
That can be added by the non verbals, by emphasis, by context, by all this kind of stuff that you can't really communicate in writing.
So there are ways to say you could have a text and a translation, and you could say this is an accurate translation because these words mean this and these words mean this.
And then you could say this is an inaccurate translation because there's also this thing going on here, but you have to be on the inside, you have to get the joke, and the translation doesn't communicate that.
There's in Bible translation, you're trying to strike a balance because what you're doing is you're taking something that is a product of a specific time and place, and you're trying to render it understandable to a different time and place and language.
And there are a bunch of ways that you can, your translation is going to fall somewhere between those two.
And you can make it a lot closer to the original, like if you use the same word order or you ensure that the same number of words are being used or something like that.
And that makes it closer to the original.
But then the reader has to do a lot more work to understand it.
They have to get themselves closer to the original time and place in order to understand what's going on.
And so like an interlinear, people think they understand the Bible better if they look at an interlinear or something like that.
And that's not how language works.
It becomes harder to understand.
The other thing that you can do is you can accommodate the language to the target audience.
You can move the translation closer to the understanding, the conventions, the history of whoever's going to be reading it.
And that makes it easier to understand, but it also moves it away from the meaning that it had in that original context.
Yeah.
And so the example of butt dial and booty call again, in a thousand years, if for whatever reason they lost all knowledge of this, both of those are going to feel pretty similar because they're not close enough to the source culture to be able to understand what those words meant.
Yeah.
And here we are 2,000 years, more than 2,000 years away, trying to figure out what was going on back then.
That's the hardest part about this whole thing is trying to figure out the context of what the hell was going on back then.
Yeah.
That's where the meaning is found is in reproducing the history, the literary context, why somebody was writing.
An example I use a lot a lot of people like the King James Version of the Bible.
I think it's a great literary artifact, but it is an awful translation of the Bible.
It's an awful translation.
Why is it awful?
For a number of different reasons.
They were using inferior manuscripts because they were frequently being overly literal.
If they didn't have a clear understanding of what something meant in the source, they would frequently just render it literally, translate it as literal as they could, follow the same word order and everything like that.
Sometimes it's just nonsensical.
We have passages in the King James Version that are semantically meaningless because they just punted.
They were like, just render it literally.
But an example of why it's also outdated.
Nobody speaks the language.
In fact, when they published the King James Version, nobody spoke the language of the King James Version because it is a very conservative revision of the Bishop's Bible, which was a very conservative revision of earlier translations and earlier translations back to Tyndall's New Testament and his Pentateuch and then Coverdale's translation of the rest of the Old Testament from almost a century before.
And so the language is almost a century out of date.
On the day it was published.
And now it's more than 400 years further out of date.
But a good example is the Epistle of Jude in the New Testament, verse 22.
It says, Of some have compassion, making a difference.
And I've seen sermons preached on this where people say, Have compassion on people.
It makes a difference in their lives.
It has a positive impact.
It has a positive influence.
That's how we interpret making a difference.
It has absolutely nothing at all to do with what the King James translators were trying to say because.
In 1611, making a difference didn't mean have a positive impact or influence.
Positive impact or influence.
It meant to distinguish one thing from another.
So, what they were trying to say was, of some have compassion, but be discerning, but exercise discernment regarding whom.
And that phrase making a difference didn't start to mean having a positive influence or impact until around the year 1900.
So, our experience of the language of the King James Version is different from the experiences of the translators.
So, then there are a bunch of different ways that we misunderstand.
The King James Version.
But even that's an example of how we can be far enough away from the source culture that we don't even need a translation.
The same language that we are speaking, we're too far away from the source culture to understand it.
So when you're talking about a translation from one language to another, you know, it's isn't it so funny that we can be so far in the future and still be arguing about what the hell they're talking about?
It's kind of goofy.
Yeah, well, and it's unfortunate because, you know it still means life or death for some people, what the Bible says.
I know.
Or what people think it says.
Yeah.
And that's an interesting point you make.
It's perplexing to me how people can be a scholar of the Bible and dedicate their lives, I mean, to go to school and to get a master's degree in studying the Bible.
It's a science.
You're trying to figure out the truth about something.
And it seems to me so counterintuitive that you have.
All of these people who are Bible scholars, but they're also subscribing to the very belief of the thing that they're studying.
That is one of the things that causes me an awful lot of heartache the fact that there are folks who ostensibly want to understand this as it was understood anciently, but conveniently it always seems to line up with what they want it to mean today.
Right.
Cognitive Science of Religious Belief00:04:38
And I think that's to there's a degree to which that's inevitable because.
We don't have the authors here with us today.
We can't drill them for understanding.
We can't say, what did you mean by this?
Did you mean this or did you mean that?
We can only try to reconstruct their perspectives and what we think they meant.
And for a text that is authoritative, you know, this happens with the Constitution and other things as well.
For the texts that are authoritative or thought to be inspired or anything like that, just intuitively, not even on purpose, just the way the human mind Interprets language, we're going to be nudged in the direction of an interpretation that serves our interests or makes sense to us.
And for a text like the Bible, which there's so much power and authority and values wrapped up in it, I think it's just so incumbent on people who do make it their life's work to study the Bible to distinguish what I want the Bible to mean from what I think, what they originally wanted it to mean.
Because if it Just conveniently always happens to be the exact same thing, there's a problem in your math is wrong.
Yeah.
It's because they lived in an entirely different world anciently.
They don't magically hate all the same people and magically love all the same people and magically need all the same things.
Are you religious?
I am.
What sort of religion do you follow?
I'm an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.
So I'm a Mormon.
Okay.
But I've.
Some people discover that and they're like, You deceived me.
Well, I've had a pinned video on the top of all of my social media accounts that introduces myself and says that, but also says I make a very concerted effort to ensure that my religious beliefs, my dogmas, don't influence my academic positions.
And I'm very good at that.
And I get accused all the time.
People will post comments on videos saying, Ah, your Mormon is showing.
And it's always wrong because.
They're confusing something that looks similar on the surface if you squint at it, but don't really understand either in any detail.
My positions that I share on social media are all just strictly scholarly and are not aligned with my religious beliefs.
Where are your biases?
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Now back to the show.
My biases the, the biggest one I have, is something that I also state in my UH intro, UH videos, is that, all other things being equal, i'm going to give the benefit of the doubt to the less powerful group.
So if it's between uh, a privileged group and an underprivileged group and you know it's a wash, it's a toss-up, it's 50, 50 i'm going to side with the less powerful group.
I'm a specialist in the cognitive science of religion.
That was part of my doctoral dissertation.
I study why people believe what they believe, how they think about it, how they talk about it, why they talk about it the way they do.
A lot of my work also includes commentary about this is why this is going on.
Origins of Exodus in the 700s00:10:27
This is why people are interpreting the Bible the way they are.
These are kind of the intuitive nudges that they're getting that's leading them in the direction of interpreting it that way.
A lot of people accuse me of trying to read minds.
Read a lot of research about why people believe the way they do.
Yeah, I think it's important for people to be aware of their biases and to not completely deny the fact that there's any biases.
I think I would also say, like everybody, I have my own personal biases.
If I publish an argument, I want that argument to be right.
It'll be a little more difficult for me to think critically if somebody comes in later and says, aha, here's the flaw in your argument.
Eager to accept that argument.
And that's a bias that I'm always going to be struggling against, but I am aware of it in case anybody is doubtful.
Right.
Now, going back real quick to the Septuagint, is there any evidence that we can date the Torah?
Let's just say the Torah was first, the Septuagint came after.
Is there any evidence that places the creation of the Torah in the Hellenistic era?
There have been some theories about that, but it's not the composition of the Torah.
It is the consolidation of all these traditions and texts together and their arrangements.
Almost certainly took place in the Hellenistic era.
So, for instance, like the book of Genesis has some of the oldest poetry in all the Hebrew Bible, may go back to 1000 BCE, like Genesis 49.
It also has some traditions that are post exilic, that come from around maybe the late 6th or the 5th century BCE.
It probably did not take the shape that we know it now, more or less, until probably around 300 or 200 BCE.
So, these texts and these traditions all have very, very long lives.
But I think that the actual arrangement of the five books of the Pentateuch in the way we have it now probably did take place during the Hellenistic era.
However, the stories in them and many of them in the actual textual form in which we now have them probably existed for several years prior to that.
Yeah, I watched a video with the guy Gad Barnea.
Gad?
Gad Barnea, yeah.
Gad Bernayah, and he says that he insists that the Torah was at 300 BC or later.
Yeah, and usually these scholars are talking about when it all came together in the shape that we have it now.
Okay.
Which is close to the Septuagint?
Yes.
Yeah, very close.
Relatively close.
Yeah, within a century.
Within a century.
Yeah.
And at the same time, when we look at the Septuagint, the Septuagint translation of Jeremiah.
Is one sixth shorter than the Hebrew version.
And so, what a lot of scholars think happened there is that the version of Jeremiah as it existed when it was translated into Greek was much shorter and that it was expanded scribally in the centuries after.
So, there's probably a lot of stuff going on right between 300 and 100 BCE.
There's probably an awful lot of stuff going on.
And it's an incredibly complex thing to try to.
to unpack and parse apart.
But in general, in kind of broad strokes, we can talk about the main sources being the Deuteronomist source, the priestly source, and then the others we call non-P of the Pentateuch.
Probably the Deuteronomist probably started under King Josiah the end of the 7th century BCE.
That's when the earliest layers of Deuteronomy probably started getting written down.
And but Deuteronomy in the shape that we have it now probably is around 300 200 BCE, so there's over 300 to maybe 400 years of development of that text.
Here's another thing I don't understand, yeah.
Moses, so the first time the first time Moses is written about is Hectaeus of Abdera outside the Bible, um, yeah, that was talking about, yeah, yeah, Hecateus.
This was like 320 BC or something, 300 something BC, yeah, yeah, so how come?
We don't have any mention of Moses between when he supposedly existed 1200 B.C. up until 300 B.C.
So most scholars would say the Moses tradition probably started being written down in the 700s, maybe the late 800s B.C.
But probably in the 700s B.C.
And I. Up until we get to the Greco-Roman period, there's not a lot of interaction between these cultures.
The classical authors who are away in Greece, they're not really interacting with what's going on in Jerusalem.
They may know about it.
There are some travelogues, people who are traveling through and taking note of some general traditions.
But yeah, I don't think it's a huge surprise that we don't hear about Moses until the Hellenistic period.
So, Hectes of Abdera is 300.
You're saying there's someone else who wrote about it in 700?
Not somebody outside the Bible.
I'm saying the account in the book of Exodus probably comes from the 700s originally, not as we have it now.
The Moses tradition probably originates in the 700s.
So you're saying, okay, you're saying the accounts in the Bible refer to the 7th century BCE?
I think it's kind of like this.
If your grandfather had some kind of cool war story or something like that, and it doesn't get written down until 100 years after he dies, and then hundreds of years later, people are starting to publish it, yeah.
It's kind of like that, but the data don't support the historicity of Moses or the Exodus.
The data what?
The data don't support the historicity of Moses or the Exodus, at least how it is told in the Exodus.
In other words, there is not good evidence that there was a historical Moses, that Moses existed.
There's not good evidence that he existed.
Most likely, this is a tradition that got started up and over time accreted more and more details and got altered and got changed and got added to.
And there are a bunch of different theories about how this happened.
Some folks think that one theory is that there was a band of Levitical priests who were enslaved in Egypt and they escaped and made their way to the Northern Hill Country and that their story of escape grew to millions of people and we trudged along in the desert for 40 years.
Another theory is that it was just a small group of people who were already in the Northern Hill Country of Israel who escaped enslavement.
And told their story, and over the centuries, the fish got bigger and bigger and bigger, and we have what we have now in the story of the Exodus.
But the way the story is told, the language that is used, most scholars would say this seems to be something that developed between the eighth century and probably the fourth century.
But another important point is that when a lot of these stories were being written, they're being used as scribal exercises.
They're being used to train scribes to write.
So they're not, you know, not everybody has a copy of Exodus in their living room.
If you go to, if you get special training to be a scribe, you will have read this because it will be something that you had to write out.
They're also being used, the elites are using these texts to kind of structure power.
There's competition between the palace and the temple, and they're writing different kinds of texts to try to show that they're the ones who should be in charge.
And then, particularly after the exile.
There's a lot going on with groups who want to return to Israel and want the land to be pure.
Be pure.
And so we wouldn't expect to see people from speaking another language in another nation being aware of these texts because they didn't publish them.
There was no New York Times number one bestseller list that they looked at.
These were texts that were kind of internally circulating until we get into the Hellenistic period when they're probably more widely known.
And there's a book called The Origins of Judaism by Yonatan Adler that was recently published that argues that we don't see widespread knowledge within.
The people of Judea of the laws of the Torah and their enforcement until the middle of the second century BCE.
So, like, the 160s is when you start to see widespread avoidance of pork, when you start to see certain kinds of purity practices suddenly start being practiced.
And so, the argument there is that the texts that we now know as the Pentateuch, as the Torah, were not used by the whole nation.
They were just these scribal exercises, they were passed around the elite.
They were used to try to structure power.
And then, when we had this war, the Maccabees and the Seleucids, and we have the establishment of the Hasmonean dynasty.
So, for a brief time period after the Hellenistic period, there was actually an independent, quasi independent kingdom of Judea.
And it was at that time period that the people who were in charge of that kingdom probably said, All right, everybody needs to follow these rules now because we're.
We're a people again.
We're our own nation.
And this is how we're going to identify ourselves.
These are the identity markers that are going to distinguish us from the people we just fought off.
And so that's a theory about the rise of all the practices that we now associate with Judaism.
Christ Meaning Before Christianity00:07:47
Yes.
Okay.
That makes sense.
Okay.
Let's watch the second video you did.
Okay.
The second video you did was about the word Christ, right?
What's the root of the word again?
Creo.
There we go.
Yeah.
Cool.
Hold up.
We'll just watch it.
What is the Christ?
What is the Antichrist?
What is the Christ?
If you have to know the Antichrist, you have to know the Christ.
Right.
All right.
Let's see it.
It's a Greek word.
For?
For applying a drug to your eyes so that they may be open.
That's what the Christ means in Greek.
Yes.
The incredulity on the face of this podcast host is warranted because that is pure and utter nonsense.
From the verb chriot, to be stung by the gadfly.
So as with many words in many languages, the verbal root chriot in ancient Greek can mean more than one thing.
Overwhelmingly, it refers to rubbing with some kind of sticky fluid of some kind, either after bathing or for some kind of ritual purpose or something like that.
So to anoint, be anointed, anointing, something like that is going to take up the majority of The real estate for the occurrences of this verbal root.
However, it can refer to the sting of a gadfly, but that is overwhelmingly in the minority of occurrences of this verb, and it's limited to classical and later Greek lyrical poetry, none of which has anything whatsoever to do with early Jewish or early Christian literature, not the Septuagint, not the New Testament, not the early Greek literature.
Okay.
And he did correct me on something there.
I said it was limited to classical and early Greek lyrical poetry, but it's also in classical and early Greek medical texts.
And he pointed that out.
Oh, he did?
Yeah.
Now, that has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the claim that that's what it means in the New Testament.
But.
Okay.
But it is in medical texts.
Okay.
So he, so is it true that the word hrio means to apply drugs to the eyes or the skin?
So it can, if the context indicates that that's how it's being used.
Okay.
So the way Ahmed described it to me, he said what classicists do is they take the meanings of words and they figure out what part on the human timeline, where in history the context fits, where they fit into the, where.
They come from and what was going on at that time in history to figure out what it meant then to figure out because there's like the semantic drift over time.
So, we're going to go ahead and we're going to go back in the time machine to 100 BC.
And during that time, he's saying the word chriel meant overwhelmingly to apply drugs to the skin.
Yeah, that's not that's just not true.
Like, there are you can isolate certain texts where they're using it in that context to indicate that.
Okay.
But if you just gather all the occurrences of the word for a given time period, the majority are just going to be more generic about rubbing with something.
Either you just got out of the bath and you rubbed some oil on you so you smelled good, or somebody just won a contest and so they get a little smudge of something, or Simba is born and you go on his forehead.
All of those things could be called this anointing.
But you have to look at each individual occurrence in its context because the context is what determines the sense.
Yes.
And so, what, and Amon did a whole two and something hour live stream responding to me, arguing that I was wrong about all this.
But all he ever did was show the non Christian and non Jewish texts.
So you can't say, look at all these texts over here.
They are using this word to mean this.
But I don't think he's saying.
When he said in the podcast, he didn't say it was in the Bible.
He just said it was a Greek word.
Well, he's trying to define what the Christ is.
And his theory is that.
He's saying that the term Christ means this.
Right.
Well, you asked about it.
He said, What is the Christ?
You said, What is the Antichrist?
And he said, If you.
Christ and Antichrist, as we use those words today, are biblical terms.
They're biblical terms, right.
But what his point is in the sources, in the original sources, when the people around that world were talking about and were writing about this kind of stuff, He's what he's saying is outside of the biblical context, Christ meant drugs and antichrist meant um antidotes to drugs like venom and and and anti venoms, they could be used that way, sure.
Um, what is this?
Is this what uh would this help?
This is uh, so yeah, so that's Christos, yeah, that's that's the word, yeah, this, yeah, that's that's a Greek word, so Christ right here, and the definition, so this is a Christos, and then okay, it gives you a definition.
That's where is it?
Is that the proper is that the so are you saying this is.
Is that the word we're talking about?
Christos, right there.
Yeah.
Christos is a title.
This is the actual Greek letter up here, and this is the English translation.
Okay.
So it says to be rubbed on, used as ointment.
Yeah.
Now, you occasionally have occurrences of this form of the word in classical Greek, but this was not a salient title.
Like, if you were just in a.
If you just had some random Greek text and they just referred to the Ho Christos, the Christ, no one would know what on earth you were talking about unless something in the context were to indicate.
As a title, Christ and Antichrist are overwhelmingly for us today and in the ancient world are going to evoke Christianity and the New Testament, where the words are used very differently.
They're never used to refer to.
And this was something that I pointed out that But this was before Christianity.
Yeah, this was before Christianity.
Right.
So it's but it is.
There's a.
The way it was used in the centuries prior to the development of the New Testament don't necessarily govern how they're allowed to use it in the New Testament.
My whole point was that if you're talking about Jesus in the New Testament, if you're talking about the translation of this word in the Septuagint, because this occurs in the Septuagint, like Cyrus the Great is called my Christ in the Greek translation of Isaiah 45 1.
And that is a translation of the Hebrew word Mashiach, which is a pre exist that also long predates Christianity that is used to refer to people who are anointed for certain purposes.
They're consecrated whether they are prophets, priests, or kings.
So, you know, Samuel anoints Saul and David to be king.
So, in that sense, they're anointed because they're given special authority, or prophets could be anointed.
And Jesus is the anointed one because this.
This tradition developed that primarily in the Greco Roman period, that there was going to be some special figure who had special authority, who was going to be kind of a mediator between God and humanity, who was going to be known in some circles as the Anointed One.
Drugs, Bandages, and Anointing00:15:38
Now, there were a bunch of other titles as well.
And when the Jesus tradition starts to arise, he kind of consolidates all these different titles.
But the one that takes over, at least in the New Testament, is Christ.
So, how come when we type in this word here, it only Pulls up this to be rubbed on and used as ointment.
Because this is the generic sense, but then in different contexts, it can have more specific reference.
So, yeah, like you could use the word anoint today.
You know, if somebody, if you hit somebody with something that was wet and, you know, knocked them out and they got all their face wet, you could say you anointed them just to be funny.
Like, So, the word has this kind of generic sense, but in that context, there's all that additional semantic content that's associated with the generic sense.
And this gets into some complexities of how language works.
But now, in his book, The Chemical Muse, he makes the case that during this time, that during this classical period, this classical era, that life was absolutely brutal and terrible.
People were not dying from heart disease, people were not dying from old age.
People were dying from hand to hand combat, plague, and famine.
And he was making the case that medicine and drugs, which weren't distinguished, there wasn't really a difference, were ubiquitous everywhere.
People needed them just to heal from wounds, from battle, from everything, to get through the day, basically.
And he was saying it wasn't drugs as we look at drugs today, right?
We have the war on drugs, we have this schedule system of scheduling drugs depending on.
How bad they are, or what the crime is going to be, or how much jail time you're going to get.
That did not exist.
It was just, they were viewed as medicines and ways for these people to get through life and to make life more bearable.
So he's saying that because he's, I think he's connecting the dots here.
I think he's kind of using that.
That was what his dissertation was about.
And he's taking the meanings, like you look up the word for Christ and it means to apply anomaly.
He's connecting the dots there with drugs.
And he also showed a passage from, what was it?
Was it Euphrates?
I saved it and I emailed you, but there's a passage he showed me.
Is this it?
Why do famous Greek authors like, Okay, okay, yeah, this was an example, right?
So this was from what?
This was from line 516 of Euripides of Hippolytus.
Hippolytus.
The Greek is very simple.
So that's a sentence in Greek, and he's saying translated, it means what kind of drug is it?
Is it a Christ or a potable?
Potable means to drink it.
Yeah.
So is it topical?
Or is it something you consume?
Right.
So this is, anyways, my point, like this is his point of view.
You can see where he's coming from.
Yeah.
And I don't disagree with the fact that they were using whatever they could find to get by.
You know, doTERRA is around today because people want to use whatever they can find to try to cure what ails them.
But to use that as an interpretive lens to try to entirely renegotiate what Christianity was, what Jesus was within early Christianity, is like at least be able to use evidence from those texts because Euripides has no bearing whatsoever on how the author of the Gospel of Mark or how Paul were using the term Christ.
If you go look in their text, they're not using it in a way that is amenable to these other medical texts.
Like just the genre of text is different.
It's not a medical text.
You have kind of Greco Roman bios as part of what the Gospels are doing, and you've got a bunch of epistolary stuff.
A lot of paranetic stuff.
The context, the genre, the way the words are being used, I don't see any support in there for taking that understanding of the ancient world, which I agree is a valid one, and he knows a lot more than I do about medical texts in classical and early Greek literature.
But the notion that that just overrules everything in the New Testament, my understanding is that is part of the argument that he's making, that Jesus was.
There was some kind of purple stuff that Jesus was rubbing on everybody and everything.
Yeah, that actually was part of the Greek magical papyri.
There was one of the first words that was translated from there the word purple.
Yeah, I think from one of the Herculaneum papyri.
Yeah, the Herculaneum papyri.
They were charred that they used the new technology to read.
Yeah.
Right.
I think his whole point was that the Bible completely misrepresents what the terms were or changes what the terms actually originally meant, which paints a false narrative of what was actually going on.
And that's where I would want to see evidence from the Bible because it's not like the, when you talk about the original sources, the original texts, they're not original to the Bible.
They're earlier than the Bible.
But the Bible would have to be coming, would have to be literarily or conceptually or in some way based on them for them to be the original texts when we're talking about the Bible.
The biblical texts are, they're using their own traditions.
They're using their own, they're using the language in their own way.
And the idea of, Christ as the anointed one, this one who is to be anointed by God for this special purpose.
That predates Christianity.
That's in the Septuagint.
That's in Greco Roman period literature.
So, when we're talking about the original sources for what we see in the New Testament, that's going to be Greco Roman period Jewish literature.
And the usage that is in classical medical literature, that kind of usage, that's not in the Greco Roman period Jewish literature.
And that's, I even, I think I responded to Amon's live stream saying, show me a text from early Judaism, early Christianity, that uses the word in this way.
Because just because it, Is used that way in other texts, in the older texts.
Right.
In the classical Greek literature.
And there's literature in Greek that is being used contemporary with the New Testament that can use it in these ways as well.
Well, I guess his point is that if you are trying to start a religion and you are trying to develop a way of life and to somehow evolve your society with a religion, this goes back to Plato's Noble Lie.
You don't want to have it being based on drugs.
You want to have some sort of a positive outlook.
You want it to be positive.
You don't want it to focus on things like this.
Maybe they wanted to, later when Christianity came about, maybe they wanted to change it to make it fit a different sort of narrative.
Maybe.
And I'm sure there were folks who thought of drug use as something positive.
And so there's certainly, I think there certainly would have been an audience for that kind of thing.
But there's just no evidence within.
The literature, the other material remains the history of early Christianity that supports that.
Some of the earliest references we have to what the Christians were doing are just reports that they gather, they sing hymns, and this is a religion for women and slaves, and they don't do anything wrong, but they're just a bunch of superstitious weirdos.
Was there a religion for women and slaves?
Christianity.
Oh.
That was Pliny the Younger.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Huh.
I think that's part of it.
Well, he has one of our earliest accounts of Christian meetings.
There was a rule that he was supposed to be enforcing that people weren't supposed to be gathering together, and he arrested some Christians for doing that.
And he was like, we tortured some of the slave girls, and all we could get out of them is that they meet together in the morning and they sing hymns to Jesus as to a God, and they're just a bunch of superstitious weirdos.
So I said, if you'll denounce Jesus, you're free to go, otherwise you die.
And he wrote to the emperor and said, You know, I'm doing okay, boss.
And he said, You're doing great, kid.
So, yeah, there's just no evidence that Christianity was oriented toward anything like this in any of the literature.
The only reference we have to any kind of drugs in the New Testament is there's a reference to pharmakia, which is a Greek word that could be used to refer to like potions and poisons and curses and things like that, but also to elixirs and.
And things that you might rub on your forehead or might ingest.
But there's a negative reference to people who engage in pharmakia.
And these days, you hear just asinine conspiracy theories about how, because that's the source of the word pharmacy.
And so a lot of people think the pharmaceutical industry is therefore the Antichrist or something like that.
That's amazing.
It's all interconnected.
Yeah.
What is Christianity, like when Christianity was developed, what was.
What did they say about the Eleusinian mysteries?
I don't know that we have much at all about that.
I mean, not really.
The closest you have, I think, is there are some folks who think there may have been some overlap between Christianity and Mithraism, just because they were kind of both seen as mystery cults.
And then there are some who think there's kind of a Bacchic background to Christianity.
There may be some influence from the Bacchae on, like, the Gospel of Mark, for instance.
Some of the ways that Jesus is represented in some of the Gospels kind of mirror.
What is Bacchic?
The Bacchae is a story associated with Dionysus and mysteries and people who dance and frolic and get drunk on wine and stuff like that.
And the Bacchae is this famous piece of literature.
And there have been scholars who suggest some of the imagery and some of the gospel accounts is riffing on what's going on in the Bacchic literature.
And some people see, particularly in the The Johannine representation of Jesus.
So, Jesus in the Gospel of John, particularly his relationship with wine, kind of hints at Dionysus a little bit.
So, there are some ways some of the writers of the New Testament literature are pulling in some imagery from the Greco Roman world and from the mythology to try to represent Jesus as kind of the true one who has all this power and is sovereign over all these different aspects of the world.
Including the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, maybe riffing on something called the Priene inscription, which celebrates the good news, the gospel of the coming into the world of the god Augustus, because it uses a lot of the same terminology.
What do you make, speaking of Mark, what do you think of Amon's interpretation of the scene in the public park where Jesus was arrested at 4 a.m. with the kid?
Yeah, that's.
I think that's wildly over interpreting things.
There's just a kid with like a cloak on or some kind of piece of fabric.
He says he claims it was a medical bandage.
He claims the Greek word means medical bandage.
Like if you have a text where he says, so the doctor applied a blank to his wound, you could interpret it as medical bandage.
But if you just see the word on its own, it does not mean.
Oh, really?
No.
Okay.
So it's the idea there is that there was a kid who just had something wrapped.
Around him to keep warm, and they were like, Come here, kid!
and they grabbed it, and he ran off, and they were left with the piece of fabric in his hand.
Yeah, so you just see him scurrying away nude.
So, the notion that there was anything sexualized about that, or that it had anything to do with drugs or antidote to drugs, isn't supported by anything at all.
And is it true that Jesus said, I'm not a lay stase?
I don't know which part he's talking about.
When the people came to arrest him, the cops, When they got there and they had other weapons, and he was like in a state of mania, he says.
Jesus was like, he was overwhelmed and he was in this state of mania, and he said, I am not a lay stase.
That's something that can be interpreted a variety of ways as well.
It's not indicative of any kind of enhanced or alternate state or anything like that.
Doesn't mean he's.
Because they use a lot of words to refer to Jesus being kind of overcome with sorrow and grief and things like that.
And sometimes they're overinterpreted when.
I think some of the translations should probably relax a little bit.
It's more like he said it in this kind of voice, not necessarily.
Necessarily.
No, so what, what, what Amon was saying?
What, what passage is it?
Cause I can look up the passage and we can find it.
I have no idea.
It's like, he said, I think, I believe he said it was in Mark.
Oh, God.
I'm like 14 or 15, I want to say.
He said, um, anyways, he said that, um, he says that the word laestes means human trafficker.
And he says that human traffickers were also everywhere in that, in that time.
Yeah.
He says there was pirates, there was traffickers.
I mean, even he said Julius Caesar was captured by human traffickers or chilled.
Traffickers and uh, when Julius Caesar, like he says, that in Julius Caesar's account, he actually calls these guys lacedace or lacedi or something like that, and then he goes and crucifies these guys that that captured him when he when he gets ransomed and catches them.
Yeah, I know there's there was a lot of human trafficking going on because you had um, you know, the the society was even more stratified than that it is now, so you had a lot of people who were enslaved, and then you had different types of enslaved people, and so um, yeah, I'm sure there was a lot of that going on, particularly in the in the more um.
Densely populated areas.
So, yeah, so his point about that was, you know, why is this guy saying, I'm not a lay stase, which means I'm not a human trafficker, when this boy is with him and the boy runs away?
And then he goes and he says the next day he's crucified in between two other lay stase.
He says the guys that were crucified next to him were human traffickers.
So, the I know that the terms when it's talking about the so human trafficking wasn't a from what I know from first century Rome, human trafficking wasn't one of the crimes that was punishable by crucifixion.
Lucian's Human Trafficker Context00:15:30
It was the word that they used to describe the criminals.
I think in the later text it calls them thieves, but they're brigands.
Because it was shoot.
Steve, maybe you can find that Greek word and we can punch it in that thing again.
Yeah, there's a I'm trying to think of the English word.
Oh, oh, oh.
It was basically oh, it's sedition that was punishable by crucifixion.
What does that mean?
So that's trying to revolt against the state.
Okay.
Okay.
But the, so they would have been people who were probably revolutionaries or people who were attacking the Roman rulers or things like that.
I know thieves is not right.
Go back, Steve, to that long list.
Yeah.
Go down.
It says on the right kind of like what they all mean.
Yeah.
Plundering, booty, spoil, taken as booty, captive, a robber.
There you go.
It wasn't a lay stay.
To carry off as booty.
Keep going.
It was like a pirate.
I think this is it.
One of them said buccaneer, didn't it?
Yeah.
I think buccaroo is the right translation there.
It's hard to.
Every way I can spell it.
In the English language, it doesn't.
But you'll notice with these glosses as well, because lexicons just use glosses, which are basically here are equivalent words.
It's not necessarily saying this means when this happens in this context and this color and all this other stuff.
It's not a full definition, but it's pretty generic.
Like a robber can be a lot of different things.
And you might find if you tell a story about a robber in a specific circumstance, then again, there's all this additional semantic freight that goes along with the way the word is used.
But that doesn't mean that that is evoked with every single use of the word.
But yeah, I don't think I know of any New Testament scholars who would agree that the other two people.
Crucified alongside Jesus were human traffickers.
I think it could have been included in the broader notion of someone who committed sedition or someone who was a brigand or something like that, but it certainly doesn't specifically refer to human trafficking.
And he says that the word he uses, that laistase word, is the same word that Julius Caesar used for the guys that captured and kidnapped him and that he crucified.
There it is.
That's the word right there.
This is the Greek actual spelling.
It's funny.
It says predator.
Yeah.
Whoa.
Laystays.
That's the letter in English.
But let's plug it in.
Maybe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's plug it in.
And then we should find the actual passage in, I think it's Mark.
I've been looking at it.
Oh.
Or maybe it's Matthew.
I don't know.
Anyways.
So stick that in there.
Pump that in there.
There you go.
Okay.
Here you go.
To be carried off his booty, to be won by force, a pirate or a robber.
Yeah.
So that can refer to an incredibly wide variety of things.
So I think that second sense, revolutionary insurrectionist, that's the kind of sense that could merit crucifixion.
Oh, that's not even here.
You said, yeah, where did you find the revolutionary?
So I'm looking in what scholars affectionately know as BDAG, which is a Greek English lexicon of the New Testament and other early Christian literature.
So it isolates the usage of these words within early Christian literature to show how they're being used in those contexts.
Yeah, but wouldn't that kind of be a biased translation?
If Jesus is saying he's not a laistase, they wouldn't want Jesus to be saying he's not a.
A predator.
They would want him to be saying he's not a revolutionary.
Well, they look at all the different places it's used to see how it's being used.
And I'd be interested to see the chart, the usage of this word to see in what genre of literature, in what types of context it is used to refer specifically to human traffickers.
Because robber, highwayman, bandit, that's pretty much anybody who's waiting along the side of the road.
The guys that captured Julius Caesar.
Mm hmm.
Wouldn't that be in the same context because he was what?
The context would indicate it.
I mean the same period in time, I'm sorry.
Oh, it would be, yeah, near the same period of time.
It wouldn't be the same literary corpora.
It's not the same literature.
And also, one of the big differences between what's going on in the literature written by Greek elites and the literature written by early Christians is the Christians are using the Koine Greek, common Greek.
This is street Greek.
It's the Greek that you use as a second language.
It's not, these are not people who were raised reading Plato and Aristophanes and all these other people.
And so this is, they're more closely related to classical Greek over and against the New Testament Greek, which is generally referred to as Koine Greek, which means vulgar or common.
Okay.
And so they use words in different ways.
And this is one of the main points is that all the literature that Amon is pointing to is exclusively.
Classical literature or literature from elite Greeks who are literarily trained and all that kind of stuff.
What is.
Stuff.
I did see.
Are you familiar?
Sorry to interrupt you.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Well, I was just going to say I have yet to see a single piece of evidence actually from Christian literature to indicate that it's ever being used and anything approximating the way he's describing it.
There is an.
Oh, you found the verse.
Mark 14 51.
Yeah.
New International Version.
A young man wearing nothing but a linen garment was following Jesus when they seized him.
But where does it say?
When does he say his response to the cops?
Oh gosh, where did it go?
What was I going to say?
Oh, are you familiar with Lucian?
Not very familiar now.
It's been a while.
So he wrote, Lucian was another example of a writer.
I think this was like 150.
I could be wrong here.
Steve, you have to fact check me on this.
I think it was like 150 BC.
Lucian was a Poet, and he wrote a story about a guy named Alexander the False Prophet who was a laystase.
And he's using the context to how Alexander, the context that Lucian uses to describe this guy, Alexander the False Prophet, as this terrible, tyrannical laystase who's trafficking people and using them as like putting them into like prostitution rings and all kinds of stuff.
I think he's using that for the main historical context for that passage in Mark where Jesus says, I'm not a laystase.
So that wouldn't be relevant to what was going on on the ground in that part of the world.
No.
Because we're talking 200 years later, 200 plus years later, and a different part of the world and a different type of literature altogether.
Can you Google Lucian so we can actually get the real story about what his deal was, when he was?
Sorry.
But yeah, you need to be able to show that this usage is actually going on in the text you're looking at.
You're asserting where it's occurring.
I don't think there's anything in the New Testament that can plausibly.
Scroll down about.
Yeah.
They all show Wikipedia.
Okay.
So one.
Oh, that is CE.
What is CE?
What does that mean?
So that's AD.
That's AD, right.
So this is a lot of.
A satirist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So this is saying he was 125 to 180 AD.
Right.
Okay.
So roughly about 100 and something, 100 years and change after.
Well, less than.
That for the actual composition of the Gospels.
So they're.
The Gospels are 70 CE to maybe 125 CE.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Yeah.
So that's.
So around the same time.
Yeah, it's much similar.
But.
That's also interesting.
The Gospels are written then.
And they're talking about this story of Jesus being in a park, being arrested at 4 a.m. 100 years later.
And Mark, the Gospel it's in, Mark wasn't even there.
Right.
A bunch of it.
Who were there?
It was Paul, Peter.
Peter, James, and John.
Peter, James, and John, yeah.
So why is it in Mark if he wasn't even there?
I don't know.
I don't understand this.
Well, none of the Gospels were written by people who were there.
None of them are eyewitness accounts.
They're all later people who are basically just committing the tradition to text.
And probably because they're getting far enough away from the actual life of Jesus that nobody really has a plausible case to have actually heard the words of Jesus directly from him.
And so now it's time to actually. commit these words to text.
These words to text.
Because there was an idea initially that Jesus' words had more authority than the scriptures, because scripture means written things.
So words on a page don't have as much authority as spoken living words.
So the whole, you know, you have read that Moses said this, well, I say this, is a way of suggesting that Jesus' words trump scripture.
But once you get far enough away that nobody can say, I sat on my grandmother's knee and heard the words of Jesus.
Now it's, you kind of need the written words to ensure that they they actually get preserved, but you still have the continuation of this tradition of what they called the agrafa, the unwritten things.
So there were, there were traditions about Jesus that weren't written down but would continue to be communicated orally, that were considered to be of special authority because they remained unwritten.
So do you think this gives it more merit, the fact that this was written?
Lucian was around the same time those Gospels were written.
I don't think so, because Because there's a context That is giving that word a more specific sense.
In the absence of a context that indicates what it means, you've got to look at what it means most generically and then try to reason from there why it's being used the way it is being used.
Because if I am on a street in San Antonio and I say the word boot, Pop up into people's heads.
It's a generic term, but they're going to come up with a very specific image.
It's going to be something like a cowboy boot.
If I'm in London and I say boot, they're going to think either of an army boot or the trunk of a car because it's a different context.
Same word, but the context is what determines the semantic content that gets evoked for the hearer or the reader of the text.
And there's just nothing in the New Testament that points in this direction.
So, where did Lucian come from?
Was he not in the same area?
He's close to the same area.
Can you scroll down?
I don't know where he was living when he was writing, but I know he's.
Does it show you where he lives?
Roman Syria.
Roman Syria?
He was born in Roman Syria, died in Egypt.
So it was near the same area.
But yeah.
Same area, same time.
Yeah.
But the context is what's most important there.
And I got to come up with some more off the cuff examples of.
Contextual differences and contextual uses of words.
And it seems like every, in his definition, every single definition had something to do with thievery or piracy or robbing.
But what was the one that you looked up again?
What was the, you said you found a different definition.
What was the website you used?
That was a lexicon, BDAG.
BDAG?
Yeah, that's just an acronym, a Greek English lexicon of the New Testament and other early Christian literature.
Okay.
And yeah, there are a bunch of different lexicons for early Christian literature.
So that basically just references.
The Bible, the scriptures, and figures out what the words meant specifically in those scriptures?
Well, it's the New Testament and the other Christian literature is usually the writings of the first couple of centuries after the New Testament was written.
Okay.
But yeah, that's generally considered kind of a not a totally isolated, but its own kind of linguistic corpus, the early Christian literature.
Because they're all talking to each other and they're sharing a lot of.
A lot of background, a lot of understanding, and they're talking about the same themes.
And so that's considered its own kind of corpus for analysis.
When it comes to the crucifixion of Jesus, what is the conventional understanding of why he died so soon?
Because it's the, isn't that the consensus that he died soon, like quicker than he was supposed to?
When people get crucified, it takes a long time.
They have to come back and break their legs so they drop more and they suffocate.
But for him, he died like way earlier than he was supposed to.
Yeah, that's what it says in one of the texts that they went to break his legs, but he was already dead.
Yeah.
And I don't know that there's anything historical about that.
However, that.
That text is used to show that he was the perfect sacrifice because, according to Jewish custom, this specific type of sacrifice, you were not supposed to break any of the bones of the animal.
And so it was basically a way of telling the story in a way that makes Jesus the fulfillment of prophecy.
And I don't think, I don't know that we could demonstrate one way or another that it actually happened that way.
Right.
Hold that thought.
I got to take a leak real quick.
We'll come back in five minutes.
Oh, thank you.
So, this guy, he says he's a big fan of Dan.
He's got a couple questions.
The first one up here.
Oh, this is a good one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I appreciate his expertise in citing the sources and his responses to people.
Danny Jones, can you please ask Dan McClellan about his views on the people like Billy Carson, whom he has made very critical response videos on YouTube about, and the rise of the simplification of the Sumerian creation stories and the Anunnaki?
Does it feel like Billy Carson teaches?
Billy Carson's teachings are dangerous.
And why are people confusing Protestant teachings with Catholic teachings and blaming primary Catholics and not Judaism or Islam for the misunderstandings they have of the creation stories?
Sumerian Myths vs Biblical Flood00:08:09
Does Dan know where the Vatican have their secret archives?
I don't know where the Vatican archives are.
I've had friends who've gone and done archival research at the Vatican, but I was never a part of that.
But the Anunnaki, the favorite of.
Everyone loves talking about the Anunnaki.
Yeah.
That's primarily the result of it, it's primarily coming from Zechariah Sitchin's fanciful translations of the Sumerian literature, and then also trying to kind of harmonize what's going on in Sumerian and Akkadian literature with what's going on in the Bible.
There are resonances between the two, but it's kind of trying to weave them together to make it the same historical story.
And so you get this idea about aliens coming to Earth.
Looking for resources and stuff like that.
You've made videos responding to Billy Carson's videos?
Yeah, Billy Carson's made a lot of videos making ridiculous claims.
When he talks about Hebrew, particularly the word Elohim, that's where I get the most annoyed.
What does he say about Elohim?
That it means gods.
And so Genesis really is talking about the gods creating the earth, which is like something you would be disabused of in the first semester of learning biblical Hebrew.
It is grammatically plural, but it's overwhelmingly used to refer to singular subjects.
And there's a lot of information on why that is.
But all you have to do is look at the verbs and the pronouns.
And if they're plural, then Elohim is being used to mean gods.
If they're singular, then Elohim is being used to mean God.
But there are a lot of folks who get a hold of, like, a Strong's Concordance or something like that, or learn some little nugget and don't really understand anything else about the languages.
And so.
Just go off on all kinds of ludicrous tangents.
Didn't he also say Yahweh meant something specific?
I think he said it meant hail.
Did he say it meant hail juice?
Yeah.
No, it says Jesus means hail juice.
Jesus means Hail Zeus.
Yeah, yeah, no.
And that's Hail Zeus would be Chaira Zeu.
And Jesus has absolutely no relationship etymologically whatsoever to Hail Zeus.
That's another thing where somebody was just like, hey, that reminds me of this other word that I know in English.
And so maybe they're the same.
And then unfortunately, they go from saying, oh, that reminds me of them to going on public and saying, this is what it originally meant.
And they have no training whatsoever in that.
And there are.
A lot of claims about like, yeah, there are a lot of things.
It's interesting too, the similarity between the Epic of Gilgamesh and Noah.
Is that just a coincidence?
Well, it would be Utnapish team and the, well, actually, yeah, that's in Gilgamesh as well.
The flood story pops up in a couple of places.
It's not a coincidence.
They probably are borrowing the idea of the flood from the version that was in circulation in Babylon around the middle of the first millennium BCE.
So the flood story first is inserted into one of the Sumerian king lists very, very early, but it gets shared in a lot of different versions, first in Sumerian, then in Akkadian.
When the Judeans are in exile in Babylon, they're now surrounded by all of this.
And a lot of what's in the Bible is being written by the elite members of that community.
when they're back in the land of Israel and they're kind of riffing on what was going on in Babylon.
So they are, you know, the idea that these patriarchs are living for eight, nine hundred years, that's based on a version of the Sumerian king list that was in circulation in Babylon in the middle of the first millennium BCE.
The flood story is probably based to some degree on that.
Even Genesis 1 is kind of, it's heavily, heavily altering it.
But it's kind of related to the Enuma Elish creation story.
In fact, the idea of a seven day week is probably borrowed from what they were experiencing in Babylon.
Were they able to translate those tablets back then?
Sumerian tablets?
Oh, when they were writing Genesis?
Yeah.
No, no.
So they were translated from Sumerian into Akkadian.
So Akkadian is the language of Assyria and Babylon, Sumerian is the language of Sumer.
Now, it survived for Quite a bit longer, but it was primarily Akkadian that the Neo Assyrians and the Neo Babylonians were dealing with.
And so when the Judeans were in exile, it would have been the Akkadian literature.
And they would have learned, you know, they were there for many decades.
So they would have learned to engage with that language, with that literature.
And so when they're kind of telling these charter myths and these origin stories, it's being influenced by the way the Babylonians are representing the world.
It's the Judean spin on it.
And so, whereas in Enuma Elish, you have Marduk doing battle with Tiamat and splits her in half, and one half becomes the waters above, and the other half becomes the waters beneath.
It's kind of de-deified to some degree, but you have God just by divine fiat just commanding things to be.
But Tehom is the Hebrew for deep, which represents the waters of creation that also get split to the waters above and the waters beneath.
So there are little resonances here and there, but at least when it comes to the creation story, they altered it pretty significantly.
Yeah, Tanunaki story is so bizarre, man.
There's like the idea that they created humans.
They created a slave race of humans from sacrificing one of the demigods or one of the other gods and mixing them with these other beings and then creating these like subhuman or humans that would be the slave race to terraform the earth for them.
And they were called the Ajiji.
And then it was Enlil who decided to want to save them.
And I think it was Enki.
Enki.
Okay.
Enki.
Yeah.
And yeah, but they, and one of the interesting things about the Akkadian literature, a lot of people think that there's one consistent story, but there are dozens of different stories.
Like you've got multiple different creation accounts.
Sometimes they have some of the same characters.
Sometimes they're different characters.
You know, these are some of the earliest ones are separated from the later ones by more than a thousand years.
And so people want to try to harmonize it into one narrative.
And that just does damage to all of it.
That's interesting.
Who do you think is the, did you study any of the Sumerian stuff when you were in school?
A little bit in translation.
I didn't ever study Sumerian.
Do you know who the most authoritative scholar would be on this stuff?
I knew some.
There are a handful of folks when I was at Oxford who are some of the leading figures in Mesopotamian, but they're retired now.
Right.
Yeah, I know there are folks who could say at the drop of a hat, but all the people I'm thinking about are people I either knew or read when I was in graduate school.
There's a wonderful book by a guy named Lambert called the, I think it's called the Babylonian Creation Myth, which is a translation of the main Akkadian creation myth.
So if somebody wanted a decent translation that was academically sound, that would be the place to go for that.
But yeah, I don't know who it is these days.
Okay.
Dying God Motif Controversy00:05:44
Another thing I wanted to talk to you about was it seems to be a controversial.
That there are any pagan influences in Christianity.
Is this the case?
Yeah.
It depends on the degree to which people argue for pagan influence.
But yeah, it's controversial.
How much pagan influence do you believe is in Christianity?
I think there was probably a little.
A lot of people who came into Christianity are coming from other traditions where they're going to keep doing some of the things that they're doing.
And even today, you can visit different parts of the world and Christianity is practiced in different ways because of frequently the preservation of indigenous. traditions and conventions that they just carried on.
And so Christianity is not a monolith.
There are a lot of different ways around the world and throughout time to be a Christian.
And in the earliest generations of Christianity, I think there was definitely influence from the Greco-Roman world.
A lot of Greek philosophy gets into Christianity.
I think there's probably more influence from Greek philosophy than Greek mythology or paganism.
But yeah, it depends on what you're looking at, whether you're looking at ideas about divine mediation, what the gods are like, where humans come from, morality, all that kind of stuff.
So, first of all, I don't understand why that is controversial in the first place.
So, is the idea that Christianity was just this new thing that developed in its own bubble that was completely in a vacuum from everything else?
And why is that so.
defended?
Because most people who identify as Christian believe that this way of life, this whole package is something that was delivered by God.
And so they want to minimize the degree to which social circumstances are influencing it.
Most people, most thoughtful people will recognize there's some degree of influence from the world around them.
But there are usually a handful of non-negotiable features of their belief that they don't want to, that they want to have.
Dropped ex nihilo from the heavens, that this is pure revelation, this is pure inspiration, there is no borrowing or influence from paganism.
So people tend to be pretty sensitive about that.
What about the idea of gods that die and resurrect?
Like Persephone, Osiris, there's a ton of them.
So the idea that this is like a discrete category of deity, the dying and rising god, comes from Fraser, from The 19th century.
It is an outdated anthropological model that is used to try to, like, if this is a discrete category, if you can define it by these features and then Jesus fits the definition, then you can just say, well, Jesus is just one of these other deities, just like these other deities.
It's kind of an archetype, it's just the way people create deities.
And that also That Christianity is just kind of a product of the natural interaction of human cognition and the environment around them, which also kind of desacralizes things.
So, for people who are Christians, they tend to be pretty sensitive about that as well.
But scholars these days don't really think of the dying and rising God motif as something that has much analytical value.
No analytical value?
Not a lot of analytical value.
You can point to some parallels, but When it comes to analyzing the rise of Christianity, I think most scholars who study that kind of thing would say the Jesus tradition doesn't seem to have been based on any dying and rising God motif.
More likely, the idea of Jesus dying and rising is just a relic of the fact that their Messiah died, was executed, and the only way for this tradition to carry on was for his followers to.
Develop this tradition of his return to life.
And so the fact that Jesus dies and rises is more incidentally related to the dying and rising God motif than it is inspired by it.
So it's more of a coincidence, you think?
I think it's more likely that the whole resurrection motif is an outgrowth of Jesus' followers trying to cope than it is with.
Because usually when people are suggesting Jesus is part of the dying and rising God tradition, this is a part of a mythicist.
Approach the idea that there was no historical Jesus, that it was all made up and that it was patterned after the dying and rising God motif.
That's usually where that argument is going, that it's there to support mythicism.
I think most scholars agree that there was a historical person named Jesus who was an itinerant apocalyptic preacher who was executed by the Roman state.
And then shortly afterwards, stories about him having come back to life began to circulate.
To circulate.
So, and there are the ways the tradition doesn't fit the dying and rising God motif, but I think most scholars would say it's more likely incidental.
Pagan Roots of Christmas Dates00:09:27
Right, right.
Now, the word pagan actually means to be what is the word pagan?
What is the actual definition?
It's kind of like, it's almost like hillbilly.
Like a hillbilly, right.
Yeah.
Initially, it was, there were two different ways that it was used.
It could be used to refer to somebody who wasn't from the city, who was from out in the country, or it was also a term that people used to refer to civilians as opposed to soldiers.
But yeah, it was kind of a pejorative term to refer to the other guys over there.
Now, when Neil was on the show a couple weeks ago, he blew my mind with this thing, this festival, this ancient festival called the Hilaria Festival.
And it was essentially like Easter before Christianity.
Do you remember this, Steve?
We could pull up the Wikipedia and we could read about it.
But do you remember what we were talking about?
He was showing there's the Hilaria.
Day of merriment and rejoicement.
I can try to find some pictures.
Yeah.
So, what does this say?
This says the Sibylle, Addis cult, and in the Isis, Osiris cult, March 25th to November 3rd, respectively.
It was one of the several days in the festival of Sibylle that honored Addis, her son and lover.
March 15th, his findings by Sibylle among the reeds on the bank of the river Gallus, March 22nd.
His self-mutilation, March 24th, fasting and mourning at his death, March 25th, the Hilaria, rejoicing at the resurrection.
Some of the activities on the Hilaria resemble those associated with April Fool's Day, November 3rd, and Hilaria of the Isis-Osiris cult, marked by the resurrection of Osiris, the husband of Osiris.
Yeah, I don't know.
He was showing, we were on some other page where he was explaining to us the dates of this festival and how it has to do with resurrection.
And there was like a Christmas tree.
Remember that?
Yeah, they would bury a tree.
Oh, yeah, they would bury a pine tree.
And then what would happen?
I think it was just, it was like a.
Have you ever heard of this?
Oh, I'm aware of the festival.
Some of these details are a little fuzzy, though.
The idea is this was like a pagan festival that came before Christianity, and it's very, very similar to Easter.
How it's depicted.
Yeah.
Well, the date of March 25th that is associated with when Christians determined when they believe one, when they believe Jesus was conceived, and then the traditional date of the resurrection associated as it was with the Passover.
conceived on march 25th so there was an idea uh in the ancient world uh in some ancient biographies if they didn't know when someone was born they would associate the date of their death if it was some kind of spectacular death they would link that with the date of their And with Jesus, he died.
The traditional date of his death was March 25th, which was when the Passover was more or less.
These are movable things, but March 25th became the traditional date.
And instead of saying that was, instead of associating that with Jesus' birth, they associated it with his conception.
Conception.
And this is where we get the date of December 25th for Christmas because that would be nine months later.
And you see that in around 210 CE, I think is when you have the first calculation of when December 25th was determined to be his birthday.
But March 25th, that's much earlier.
I found a hilarious, funny enough, Wikipedia has more information.
Oh, wow.
So, way down in here, they talk about.
Got okay.
The full is this.
This is the thing we were looking at before the full festival that can be tentatively reconstructed as follows.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You can they talk about felling a tree at one point.
A pine tree is felled.
There it is.
Uh, tree is set up at the temple of Sibylle, its trunk wrapped with wool and its branches decked with wreaths and violets.
Then a day of mourning the next day, then a day later, the day of blood, frenzied rites, including scourging and whipping.
Castration rituals would take place on this day.
Well, they certainly didn't follow that.
That didn't make its way into the Bible.
Nuts.
The tree is symbolically buried.
And then March 25th is the day of joy, celebrating the resurrection of Attis.
This was the hilaria proper, as opposed to the mournful tone of the previous days.
Then 26th was a day of rest.
And the next day was the washing, added by Marcus Aurelius.
Interesting.
Possible ceremony at the Vatican sanctuary appears in the calendar of.
Philocalus.
Is that how you say that?
Philocalus.
Philocalus.
That's where we get the first reference to the celebration of Christmas.
Yeah.
This is supposed to date.
Now, when was this festival happening, Steve?
This happened.
Gosh.
This says Celestius, writing in the fourth century AD, described the basic multi day structure of the festival.
But that was the writing.
I remember it was a little late.
So the writing was that late?
No.
The writing about it was, but the actual event was way earlier.
I don't remember.
It's got to be in there.
I remember we saw it.
Maybe I typed in BC.
BC.
No, it doesn't show up.
I don't know.
Well, then how do we even know this was before Christianity?
Sounds like it was.
I think he had a source.
Okay.
I don't remember.
Interesting.
Well, it's very similar.
It's very similar, right?
The resurrection.
I'd be interested to see what sources predate.
Because Easter is one of the first Christian celebrations that existed.
And we have pretty early evidence for that.
And I've never seen someone produce evidence that the celebration of Easter, either the date or whatever features of the celebration were associated with it, were drawn from pagan sources.
Normally it is stuff that's coming from centuries later.
And then the Christmas tree thing is interesting because we know how the Christmas tree developed.
That developed in the 1400s along a Specific part of the Rhine from within Christianity.
Like, there was, if they did the pine tree thing, that's unassociated, that has no relationship to Christmas because Christmas trees don't even start being used by Christians for over a thousand years after that.
1400s.
Yeah.
So I don't know that there's any relationship that can be asserted between the pine tree and that festival and the Christmas tree.
Right.
In Germany in the 1400s.
When they first developed the idea of a Christmas tree.
In Germany?
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
To you, in your experience, what do you think the biggest popular misconceptions are about Christianity?
There are a lot of them.
I think one of them is the mythicist idea that there was no historical Jesus, that it was just stolen from pre existing pagan stuff or from the existing astrology or things like that.
That's something I confront frequently on social media.
But I think that's. limited to kind of a specific demographic.
Most people aren't.
It's usually folks who have some kind of ideological opposition to Christianity that are quicker to adopt a mythicist position.
Within Christianity, the one thing about the Bible that I'm always harping against is this presupposition of univocality, the idea that the Bible all speaks with one voice, that it can't disagree with each other.
That's one of the most frustrating things I run into talking to people about.
About the whole Bible, but particularly the New Testament.
So you'll see people when they're talking about the Bible, they'll say, Oh, you know, you got this verse in Genesis and this one in Mark and this other one in Daniel and this other one in the Psalms, and they all mean the same thing.
It's like, Well, no, these are passages written in three different languages over the course of almost a thousand years by people living in different parts of the world for writing for different reasons with very different perspectives.
But the idea of the inspiration of the Bible means that.
All the Bible has the same source.
It's all coming from God, which also means that it's representing a single perspective.
Contradictions in Sacred Texts00:02:38
And so they can't disagree.
So there are no contradictions in the Bible, is how it usually kind of bubbles to the surface.
And the Bible's full of contradictions.
It contradicts itself all over the place.
Between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, within the New Testament, within the Hebrew Bible, individual books of the Bible contradict themselves.
That is one of the things that some folks just refuse to consider.
But there are absolutely no data anywhere that support the notion that all of the Bible is speaking with a single voice.
But that's how it is most commonly used by Christians today.
Dude, I can't thank you enough for coming and doing this show.
I really appreciate it.
Well, thank you very much.
It's been really interesting.
Tell people that are watching or listening where they can watch your videos, your YouTube channel.
I'm sure you have a Twitter and website and all this stuff.
Yeah.
So I go by, my username is McClellan, M A K L E L A N.
It's a.
Phonetic spelling of my last name that I used when I lived in South America.
And so I'm on TikTok, I'm on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube as well.
Forgot about that one.
And then I also have a podcast called the Data Over Dogma podcast.
My co host Dan Beecher and I put out episodes every week talking about our goal is to increase access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and then combat the spread of misinformation about the same.
You lived in South America?
Yeah, shortly after I joined the LDS Church, I went on a two-year proselytizing mission.
So I went to Uruguay.
So I lived in Uruguay for two years and learned to speak Castellano.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, it was a fascinating, life-changing experience.
Two years, huh?
Yeah.
And you learned to speak the language.
Oh, yeah.
That's quick.
Well, yeah, I used to be fluent.
I'm not as fluent as I used to be.
Every now and then I'll do a video for tikTok in Spanish and it confuses people.
That's amazing.
But there's a whole world of Spanish-speaking social media out there about the Bible and religion that I need to focus, dedicate more time to because there's tons of misinformation being spread in Spanish as well and lots of other languages.
Cool, man.
Thanks again.
I really appreciate it.
I'm going to link all your social media stuff below so people can go down there and follow.
I appreciate it.
And then we are going to keep going and we're going to do a Patreon Q&A with people on Patreon that wanted you to answer their questions.