Danny Jones Podcast - #303 - Ancient Religion Expert on Secret Gospel Coverup & Jesus True Origins | Bart Ehrman
Aired: 2025-05-15
Duration: 02:02:02


=== Ancient Hebrew Grammar Challenges (14:54) ===

[00:00:07]  What's up, Dr. Ehrman?
[00:00:08]  Thanks for coming, man.
[00:00:08]  Okay, thanks for having me.
[00:00:09]  Pleasure to meet you.
[00:00:10]  Nice meeting you.
[00:00:11]  What's your background?
[00:00:12]  My background.
[00:00:13]  How long do you have?
[00:00:16]  At least three hours.
[00:00:17]  Yeah, okay.
[00:00:18]  Well, right.
[00:00:19]  So I'm a scholar of the New Testament early Christianity.
[00:00:25]  I have a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary in New Testament studies.
[00:00:29]  My background.
[00:00:31]  I got into biblical studies because I was a Christian as a teenager, a born again evangelical Christian.
[00:00:37]  And I went off to a fundamentalist Bible college after high school and then went off to an evangelical liberal arts college.
[00:00:43]  And I got really interested in studying Greek, the ancient language, Greek is an ancient language, and decided to do graduate work analyzing Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.
[00:00:55]  And so I went to Princeton Theological Seminary, where the world's expert in the analysis of Greek manuscripts worked.
[00:01:01]  And I spent years there working on that and did a master's degree and a PhD.
[00:01:07]  End up teaching at Rutgers University for a few years, and I've been at North Carolina Chapel Hill now for, well, since 1988.
[00:01:15]  Oh, wow.
[00:01:15]  Teaching both undergraduate students and PhD students in early Christianity, New Testament, those kinds of things.
[00:01:22]  And you mentioned that when you were younger, you had a belief and you were a practicing Christian.
[00:01:27]  That's right.
[00:01:28]  And what happened to you?
[00:01:30]  What was your evolution through your belief in Christianity?
[00:01:33]  Well, when I was raised in the church, I was raised in the Episcopal Church.
[00:01:37]  But then when I was a teenager, late teenager, mid-teenager, I had a born-again experience and became a very conservative evangelical.
[00:01:45]  And a lot of my faith at that point was built on the idea that the Bible has no mistakes in it, completely inerrant.
[00:01:53]  That was the view taught at the Moody Bible Institute I went to, and also at Wheaton College where I finished my undergraduate degree.
[00:02:01]  That view started shifting when I went into graduate school.
[00:02:04]  As I started, I learned Hebrew, and so I was reading the New Testament in Greek and the Old Testament in Hebrew.
[00:02:10]  And I learned French and German so I could read what modern scholars are saying in these countries and learned other ancient languages.
[00:02:17]  And the more I studied, the more I realized, in fact, the Bible does have mistakes in it.
[00:02:21]  There are contradictions, there are discrepancies, there are geographical errors, there are problems with the Bible.
[00:02:26]  For a number of years, I became more of a kind of mainline Protestant type who had a fairly liberal view of the Bible, a pretty liberal view of social issues and politics and things.
[00:02:40]  But I've still identified with the church.
[00:02:43]  I ended up leaving Christianity maybe about 30 years ago or so, and it wasn't directly related to my scholarship.
[00:02:50]  It was trying to wrestle with the problem of why there's suffering in the world, why there's so much pain and misery if there's a God who's in control.
[00:03:00]  And so I'd spent, you know, I actually taught on it.
[00:03:02]  I've written a book on it.
[00:03:04]  I'd read a lot of philosophers and theologians and biblical scholars and what regular old people say about why they're suffering.
[00:03:10]  And I just got to a point where I didn't believe it anymore, that there's actually some kind of divine being who's in charge.
[00:03:15]  Of the world.
[00:03:18]  What is the, in your view, the difference between biblical scholars and classical scholars?
[00:03:25]  They're very closely related, and it depends which kind of biblical scholar you're talking to.
[00:03:30]  Most biblical scholars work in a theological context, in divinity schools, in seminaries, and they would be more closely related to theologians than they'd be related to classicists.
[00:03:45]  My training was mainly in that kind of world.
[00:03:48]  Where I was.
[00:03:49]  The theological world.
[00:03:51]  Because even my master's degree and my PhD were at Princeton Theological Seminary, which trains Presbyterian ministers.
[00:03:59]  But they were also very interested in serious scholarship.
[00:04:03]  And so it kind of was more kind of crossing the lines.
[00:04:07]  My professor, my main professor, Bruce Metzger, was actually his graduate degrees were in classics.
[00:04:14]  And so I had a bit of that.
[00:04:16]  But once I started teaching, I really shifted more kind of away from anything having to do theology and interpreting the Bible for the church kind of thing and far more into kind of the classics.
[00:04:29]  And so I have a secondary appointment at UNC, Chapel Hill, in the classics department.
[00:04:33]  And those are the people I really resonate with, or the classicists.
[00:04:38]  And in your opinion, which one of the ancient languages is the best ancient language?
[00:04:43]  The best?
[00:04:44]  Yeah.
[00:04:44]  For what?
[00:04:45]  For anything.
[00:04:45]  Brownie recipes?
[00:04:46]  Well, yeah.
[00:04:50]  So, well, they're very different from the rest of the world.
[00:04:51]  Okay.
[00:04:51]  Can you explain the difference?
[00:04:53]  What's the difference between ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek?
[00:04:56]  Well, they're unrelated.
[00:04:57]  And so, Greek is an Indo European language, like English.
[00:05:02]  And so, the grammar of Greek can be taught.
[00:05:07]  If somebody knows English grammar, which nobody does anymore, but if they did know English grammar, the grammar of the Greek makes sense in many ways.
[00:05:15]  It doesn't in many other ways because it's an ancient language.
[00:05:17]  Hebrew is a Semitic language, and so it's different in every way.
[00:05:22]  It has a different alphabet.
[00:05:23]  Instead of going from left to right, it goes from right to left.
[00:05:26]  It doesn't have the same ways of doing grammar.
[00:05:29]  And so, and there aren't as many texts in ancient Hebrew as there are in ancient Greek.
[00:05:34]  For Greek, we have thousands and thousands of texts.
[00:05:37]  To Homer and Hesiod and on up.
[00:05:40]  And it just goes forever.
[00:05:41]  For the Bible, for the Hebrew, like biblical Hebrew, the Bible is the only Hebrew Bible, the only sources from its time period that we have.
[00:05:50]  Right.
[00:05:51]  And so it's in some ways harder to analyze Hebrew texts when it comes to things like just words.
[00:05:56]  Like if there's a word that occurs one time in the Hebrew Bible, well, that's the only time the word occurs anywhere in that time period.
[00:06:03]  And so how do you know what it means?
[00:06:05]  Right.
[00:06:05]  Exactly.
[00:06:06]  And so there are places where you can't really even tell.
[00:06:08]  You know, it's some kind of Probably a four legged animal of some kind, but you don't know what.
[00:06:13]  And so, with Greek, it's not that way because, I mean, there are Greek words that we aren't really quite sure what they mean, even in the New Testament.
[00:06:22]  But most of the time, the words are used so many times in so many pieces of Greek literature that you can analyze how they're being used in the context.
[00:06:31]  Exactly.
[00:06:31]  And you can use the context in order to establish the basic meaning of the word and how it's used variously.
[00:06:37]  And so, that's a luxury that you get with Greek, and you also get that with Latin.
[00:06:41]  Right.
[00:06:41]  But you don't get it so much with Hebrew or Coptic, which is another language that people in my field study or Syriac.
[00:06:49]  But Greek and Latin, which is what the classicists do, we're really, we're really well set with those in comparison.
[00:06:56]  Yeah.
[00:06:56]  This has been a highly contested topic on this podcast recently when it comes to exactly what you were just talking about with Greek being everywhere in antiquity and there being no Hebrew outside of like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
[00:07:09]  Like all the ancient texts were, all the ancient Hebrew texts were religious texts.
[00:07:16]  However, Greek, you have legal shit, you have medical stuff, you have all kinds of stuff in Greek, poetry, comedy, everything.
[00:07:27]  But then you have the Dead Sea Scrolls come about and we just have the Dead Sea Scroll religious texts, right?
[00:07:32]  And there's no other Hebrew you can find.
[00:07:33]  There's no libraries with any Hebrew in them or anything like that.
[00:07:37]  That's basically true, but it's not completely true.
[00:07:40]  There are inscriptions, for example, in Greek.
[00:07:42]  So inscription would be things written out on stone that are not religious.
[00:07:46]  In Hebrew?
[00:07:47]  Yes.
[00:07:47]  Okay.
[00:07:48]  But some of the there have been other discoveries of texts that are in Hebrew from there aren't very many of them, but like they'll find a cache of letters, for example, written in Hebrew.
[00:07:59]  And so there are some things, but not for the Hebrew Bible period itself.
[00:08:04]  The Dead Sea Scrolls are much later than the I mean, the Hebrew Bible period dates basically from it's debated when the first texts were written, 10th century maybe BCE up to maybe the 2nd century BCE.
[00:08:17]  But the Dead Sea Scrolls are more around the time of Jesus.
[00:08:20]  And so it's a different period.
[00:08:22]  Right.
[00:08:22]  And so the scholarly consensus, and this is another thing I don't understand that I've heard so much from Bible scholars, is they always say most scholars would agree.
[00:08:34]  Why is consensus so important when it comes to this stuff?
[00:08:37]  Why doesn't it, for me, maybe I don't understand this because I didn't come from a university or anything.
[00:08:42]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:08:42]  Well, it's not important as evidence.
[00:08:45]  So that's the first thing to say.
[00:08:47]  And no really good scholar ever uses it as evidence.
[00:08:50]  In other words, The fact that everybody says so doesn't make it so.
[00:08:54]  Right, right, right.
[00:08:54]  So, I guess the reason people say that, and I say it as well, is because if you have a counter opinion, then it needs to be examined and you need to look at it.
[00:09:04]  But you need to realize that there's a reason that everybody thinks the other.
[00:09:07]  Right.
[00:09:07]  And these are, you know, when it comes to biblical scholarship, for example, you know, biblical scholarship's been around for 300 years and lots and lots and lots of things get changed, have been changed, do get changed.
[00:09:19]  But if somebody says that virtually all scholars agree that the gospel, That whoever wrote Matthew was using the Gospel of Mark, and you say, like, virtually everybody agrees with that.
[00:09:29]  You say virtually because there will be some exceptions.
[00:09:32]  But the reason that you say that is because these are most of these people are ones who have actually looked at it seriously and thought about it really hard and seen all of the evidence.
[00:09:43]  And on the basis of all this evidence, they say, you know, it's probably this.
[00:09:47]  And so it's like, you know, it's like that in every field.
[00:09:50]  Yeah.
[00:09:50]  To me, it just feels like a cop out.
[00:09:53]  Like it's like a cop out if you're using it as an argument.
[00:09:55]  Yes, exactly.
[00:09:55]  Correct.
[00:09:55]  But nobody uses it.
[00:09:57]  People.
[00:09:57]  People object when someone says that.
[00:10:00]  They say, well, that's not an argument.
[00:10:02]  But no one's using it.
[00:10:03]  They shouldn't be using it as an argument.
[00:10:05]  If they are using it as an argument, that's stupid.
[00:10:07]  Yes.
[00:10:07]  I mean, you know, so the fact that everybody agrees the world is round doesn't mean it's round.
[00:10:14]  Exactly.
[00:10:15]  But, you know, if you don't think it's round, you really have a burden of proof.
[00:10:20]  Correct.
[00:10:20]  So by saying it's a consensus, you just say, yeah, okay, well, if you think otherwise, let me see your stuff.
[00:10:26]  Right.
[00:10:26]  So one of the folks I had on here recently believes that the Septuagint.
[00:10:32]  It was originally written in Greek and that it was translated into Hebrew.
[00:10:37]  And the reason he said that is because, and I'll try to elucidate this argument the best I possibly can, and you can basically deconstruct it and give me what you think.
[00:10:47]  Is that ancient Greek is a language that had over a million unique words.
[00:10:51]  Ancient Hebrew is a language that had maybe 7,000 at best unique words.
[00:10:55]  And he made the argument that you cannot translate from something less technical, Hebrew, to something.
[00:11:05]  Way more technical ancient Greek.
[00:11:08]  He says you translate down, you don't translate up, right?
[00:11:11]  So you don't, you don't like if I was to, the analogy I think of that I try to explain when I talk about this is like you find a flying saucer in the desert and you want to like reverse engineer it and make your own flying saucer.
[00:11:25]  When you try to reverse engineer that flying saucer, you're not going to make something better than that flying saucer.
[00:11:30]  It's going to be something not as good, right?
[00:11:32]  So that was his main argument with the translation of the Septuagint, meaning like that's why he thought it was an original Greek.
[00:11:39]  And then it was translated into Hebrew after.
[00:11:42]  Translated into Hebrew after.
[00:11:43]  But the argument of this is that the Greek that we read in the New Testament or the Old Testament is like Koine Greek.
[00:11:49]  Greek it's like a it's like a very unsophisticated Greek compared to like Homer and some of the ancient stuff yeah well it's not very good I don't know who this is, but I mean, it's a very bad argument.
[00:12:00]  You frequently have translations go both ways translated up, translated down.
[00:12:05]  It's just an empirical fact.
[00:12:06]  English is a much more complicated language than many works that are translated into English.
[00:12:12]  And the Bible gets translated into many languages that are much more simple than Greek.
[00:12:17]  So it goes both ways, and it always goes both ways.
[00:12:21]  Moreover, how does he know there are 7,000 unique words in Hebrew?
[00:12:24]  He's basing that on the fact that we've got these texts that have 7,000 unique words.
[00:12:30]  Okay?
[00:12:31]  These are the only texts we have.
[00:12:33]  People spoke Hebrew.
[00:12:34]  We have no idea what their vocabulary was.
[00:12:37]  For him to say that it had to be only these 7,000 words is a little bit crazy.
[00:12:42]  That's like saying if you get a copy of Time magazine, or something, or what may it's not even printed anymore, but you get Time magazine and you say, This is the extent of the English vocabulary.
[00:12:52]  Like in 3,000 years, somebody finds a Time magazine and they categorize all the words, say, Okay, those are the only words in English.
[00:13:01]  And so it could not have been translated into a language that has more words because it doesn't work that way.
[00:13:07]  Sure, but just going off evidence, right?
[00:13:10]  We have evidence.
[00:13:10]  What's his evidence?
[00:13:11]  Sorry?
[00:13:11]  What's his evidence?
[00:13:12]  I'm saying just going off evidence of word counts, unique word counts for those languages today.
[00:13:16]  We only have 7,000 unique words for ancient Greek.
[00:13:18]  We have over a million.
[00:13:19]  I mean, I'm sorry.
[00:13:20]  We only have 7,000 for ancient Hebrew and we have a million for ancient Greek.
[00:13:23]  That's right.
[00:13:24]  Maybe those are estimates, right?
[00:13:25]  Those are samples, maybe they are.
[00:13:26]  No, no, they're not estimates.
[00:13:27]  He's basing this on an account of what the Hebrew words we have.
[00:13:30]  But when people translated the Hebrew into the Greek, they didn't have just those 7,000 words.
[00:13:35]  This was 2,000 years ago.
[00:13:39]  Okay.
[00:13:40]  But do you think the scale was similar, though?
[00:13:43]  It doesn't matter how similar it is because it's not always that you take something more complicated and make it more simple or that you take something more simple and make it more complicated.
[00:13:52]  Absolutely, just show time after time after time where that is and how it happens.
[00:13:57]  There are also very good reasons for thinking it did not go from Greek to Hebrew.
[00:14:00]  Okay, what would be a good example of something that went from a translation that went from a language that was less complicated to something far more complex?
[00:14:08]  That went from something less complicated to more complex.
[00:14:18]  For example, Hebrew to Greek.
[00:14:19]  Coptic is a very simple language in many ways.
[00:14:22]  You have Coptic, we have ancient Coptic texts.
[00:14:29]  The grammar isn't as difficult.
[00:14:31]  It gets translated into English all the time.
[00:14:34]  English is a far more complicated language.
[00:14:36]  Okay.
[00:14:37]  Interesting.
[00:14:38]  So, my understanding of the Septuagint is, and correct me if I'm wrong, the Septuagint was allegedly written around between 300 and 400 BC?
[00:14:51]  No.
[00:14:52]  No.
[00:14:53]  Okay, when was it?
[00:14:53]  We don't know.
[00:14:54]  For one thing, it's not that early.
[00:14:57]  But what we do know is that.

=== Translating From Original Hebrew (05:21) ===

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[00:16:35]  There wasn't a Septuagint.
[00:16:38]  So when people talk about the Septuagint, they're using – when scholars say the Septuagint, they're using a shorthand.
[00:16:47]  There were numerous translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek that were floating around.
[00:16:53]  And it'd be kind of like today if you go to some developing country and you have missionaries there who are trying to put parts of the New Testament into that language.
[00:17:06]  So like you have these translators, these – Conservative missionaries who try Wycliffe translators, they'll take the Bible and put it into some language in Africa that hasn't ever been put into English before.
[00:17:16]  So you do that so that the people in that language can read it.
[00:17:20]  Okay.
[00:17:21]  In the ancient world, after Alexander the Great, so after the fourth century, Jews are spread throughout what was then, at one point, was kind of a Greek empire, but then became the empires around the Mediterranean.
[00:17:37]  The educated people read Greek, they didn't read Hebrew.
[00:17:41]  They would read Hebrew in Israel, but not in other places.
[00:17:44]  So, in different places, the Bible is being translated into Greek.
[00:17:51]  Eventually, there was one form of that Greek that came together, and that is what they're calling the Septuagint.
[00:17:58]  But it's a mistake to think it was a one-time event.
[00:18:02]  Oh, interesting.
[00:18:03]  And people say that because there's a letter called the Letter of Aristeas, which is a Jewish writing that's trying to explain how it happened.
[00:18:11]  And the way it explains it can't possibly be right.
[00:18:13]  I mean, it describes it to this miracle.
[00:18:16]  It says you had these 70 Jewish scholars who were brought together.
[00:18:20]  They were all put in separate rooms.
[00:18:21]  They were all given the assignment to translate it.
[00:18:23]  They all translated it literally word for word the same.
[00:18:25]  Right.
[00:18:26]  Which is like, of course, that's crazy.
[00:18:28]  But it does show that they were aware of the fact that it came out of the Hebrew into the Greek.
[00:18:33]  And again, this is not, I know you don't like people saying there's not a disputed topic, but there's a reason this is not a disputed topic.
[00:18:41]  I mean, because for one thing, I'll give you one piece of evidence.
[00:18:45]  I mean, a linguist would just tear that apart, that whole idea apart.
[00:18:49]  One reason it would be torn apart I mean, like a serious linguist who knows both the Semitic languages and the Indo European languages would tear it apart.
[00:18:57]  And one of the reasons is because there are many instances where the Greek embodies what are called Semiticisms.
[00:19:09]  A Semiticism, the Greek of the Septuagint, and the Greek of the New Testament.
[00:19:13]  A Semiticism.
[00:19:14]  Is when you're taking a grammatical construction that doesn't work in the language that you're translating it into, or is not normally used in the language you're translating it into, but you keep the grammatical construction of the original language for the sake of authenticity or because you don't know quite how to.
[00:19:34]  And so, just as an example, in Hebrew, if you want to say the Holy Spirit, there's no way to say Holy Spirit in Hebrew.
[00:19:44]  The phrase in Hebrew is the spirit of holiness.
[00:19:48]  The way you make an adjectival attribution in Hebrew is not by using an adjective, but by putting together two nouns and saying of.
[00:19:56]  So the spirit of holiness means the Holy Spirit, or the way of righteousness means the right way.
[00:20:02]  Okay.
[00:20:03]  So Greek speakers don't do that, they use adjectives.
[00:20:08]  But when you get in biblical Greek, Septuagint, and the New Testament, you have these Semiticisms.
[00:20:14]  That shows these are not original Greek compositions.
[00:20:17]  Okay.
[00:20:17]  Okay.
[00:20:18]  They're being translated from Hebrew with using Semitic forms.

=== Spirit Of Holiness Explained (14:14) ===

[00:20:23]  Okay, interesting.
[00:20:24]  But so the original Hebrew we don't have other than the Dead Sea Scrolls, is that correct?
[00:20:32]  Well, I don't know what you mean by the original.
[00:20:35]  Like the original Hebrew.
[00:20:37]  So it was translated into Greek from Hebrew, but that original Hebrew.
[00:20:41]  We have Hebrew manuscripts, yes.
[00:20:43]  We have the manuscripts.
[00:20:44]  But we don't have the original manuscripts.
[00:20:46]  We don't have the originals, but they're basically what I'm trying to say is like.
[00:20:50]  Scholarship tries to date them to a certain spot, but we don't know actually when they are because we don't have them.
[00:20:57]  I'm not sure what the them is that you're referring to.
[00:20:59]  The manuscripts.
[00:21:01]  We don't have the original manuscripts for any writing from the ancient world.
[00:21:08]  We don't have the original writings for Euripides or for Plato or for Cicero or for Seneca or for the book of Isaiah or for the Gospel of Matthew.
[00:21:15]  We don't have the originals for any of those.
[00:21:18]  The original manuscript.
[00:21:19]  If you mean by that, that the author sits down and writes.
[00:21:22]  You know, I'm Mark and I'm writing my thing and I write my thing.
[00:21:25]  We don't have that thing he wrote.
[00:21:27]  Everything that we have is a copy or a rewrite.
[00:21:30]  Unless it's a personal letter, a correspondence.
[00:21:32]  But in terms of literary texts, they're copies.
[00:21:37]  Wow.
[00:21:38]  Yeah.
[00:21:38]  Oh, wow.
[00:21:39]  It's a big problem for a lot of people.
[00:21:41]  Yeah, no, I can imagine.
[00:21:42]  It's a huge problem.
[00:21:43]  Yeah.
[00:21:43]  That was what my PhD was.
[00:21:45]  The reason I was interested in analyzing Greek manuscripts is because with the New Testament, we have thousands of Greek manuscripts, but they all disagree with each other because they're all copies and the scribes made mistakes.
[00:21:57]  Right.
[00:21:57]  Or they change things on purpose.
[00:21:59]  So you got to figure out, well, what did the author say then?
[00:22:03]  You know, if you've got, suppose you've got 10 copies of Plato's Republic or something.
[00:22:08]  Okay.
[00:22:08]  And the 10 have like, they word certain lines differently.
[00:22:12]  Like, certain sentences are worded differently among these 10 manuscripts.
[00:22:16]  Well, okay.
[00:22:17]  So you got that, but you want to figure out, well, what did Plato write?
[00:22:20]  You got to figure it out.
[00:22:21]  And there's a whole science to doing that.
[00:22:24]  Oh, wow.
[00:22:24]  That's so interesting.
[00:22:26]  Um, Switching gears a little bit, you do you think that Jesus was you think that Jesus was a real historical person, right?
[00:22:37]  Yes.
[00:22:38]  And there are people you've debated that think that he's not.
[00:22:40]  Yes.
[00:22:41]  What is the argument to him not being a real historical figure?
[00:22:45]  Good question.
[00:22:48]  What good argument?
[00:22:49]  Yeah, what's the best argument you've heard?
[00:22:53]  Well, if I were arguing that case, I would argue, I would say, I guess, I mean, You're saying it's the best argument is kind of like it's a very low bar.
[00:23:02]  Yeah, best.
[00:23:03]  Yeah, okay.
[00:23:03]  You know, like, you know, what's my best round of golf?
[00:23:07]  I mean, it's like, well, okay.
[00:23:08]  You know, it's like.
[00:23:12]  So, I think what gives some people pause, not so much, yeah, okay.
[00:23:21]  What would give people pause is that we don't have any eyewitness accounts of Jesus.
[00:23:26]  We have records that are from probably 40 to 60 years later.
[00:23:32]  Our first author who mentions Jesus is the Apostle Paul, and he's writing in the 50s.
[00:23:39]  Jesus died around the year 30.
[00:23:41]  So, the first time we have Jesus mentioned in any source is.
[00:23:44]  About 20 years after his death.
[00:23:47]  Do we know when that drawing was done with the donkey head on the cross, the guy with the head of an ass on the cross?
[00:23:56]  Yeah, that's later.
[00:23:58]  That's in the second or third century.
[00:23:59]  Oh, it's later.
[00:24:01]  Oh, yeah.
[00:24:01]  Yeah.
[00:24:02]  Yeah.
[00:24:03]  Oh, wow.
[00:24:04]  Yeah.
[00:24:04]  No, and it's a much debated thing.
[00:24:07]  People say they know what it is, but in fact, it's debated among experts what it actually represents.
[00:24:13]  It's clearly Jesus on the cross with a donkey's head.
[00:24:16]  Yeah.
[00:24:19]  And And a graffiti next to it.
[00:24:21]  But no, it's much later.
[00:24:23]  So the first reference to Jesus at all, our first Christian writing is the book of 1 Thessalonians.
[00:24:28]  And it's usually dated to the year 49 or 50.
[00:24:31]  Jesus died around the year 30.
[00:24:33]  So it's about 20 years later.
[00:24:34]  So the argument would be that we don't have any eyewitness reports or we don't have any things that are really close to the Gospels.
[00:24:41]  The first Gospel is written around the year 70.
[00:24:43]  So that's 40 years later.
[00:24:45]  So why should we think he really lived?
[00:24:47]  That's.
[00:24:48]  Kind of the argument.
[00:24:50]  It's not a good argument, but it's an argument.
[00:24:53]  Right.
[00:24:54]  And it is crazy, too.
[00:24:55]  I mean, that goes with a lot of historical figures.
[00:24:57]  Like, I think Moses is one.
[00:24:58]  Moses wasn't written about until, what, like a thousand years after he supposedly died?
[00:25:02]  Yeah.
[00:25:03]  Well, 30 years is very different from a thousand years.
[00:25:04]  Yes.
[00:25:05]  Very different.
[00:25:06]  So when Paul's writing, there are people alive who knew Jesus.
[00:25:09]  Right.
[00:25:09]  And Paul knows some of them.
[00:25:10]  So it's a much better case for Jesus than Moses.
[00:25:12]  I mean, Paul knows his brother.
[00:25:16]  Paul personally knew Jesus' brother.
[00:25:18]  So, I mean, You know, if Jesus didn't exist, you'd think his brother would know it.
[00:25:24]  That's a joke.
[00:25:27]  So, yeah, Moses is a whole different thing.
[00:25:29]  I mean, so if Moses lived, Moses would have probably lived in the 13th century BCE.
[00:25:35]  And it's not clear if we have any sources that mention him for centuries.
[00:25:39]  Right.
[00:25:40]  So that's a different thing from somebody talking about him who knows his brother.
[00:25:46]  Yes.
[00:25:47]  Yeah, totally.
[00:25:48]  I mean, then the claims when it gets into him being divine and Well, that's a different story.
[00:25:52]  And doing all these things and being able to, you know, that's the whole thing, which I read recently this fascinating book that really gave me a really good understanding of everything, which was Thomas Paine.
[00:26:09]  I forget the name of his book.
[00:26:10]  I think it was The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine.
[00:26:13]  Yeah, no, it's a classic.
[00:26:14]  Oh, my God.
[00:26:14]  It was such a good book.
[00:26:15]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:17]  No, these English deists were really something.
[00:26:19]  They really knew a lot, but they didn't know what scholars know today about things like the Bible.
[00:26:25]  Yeah.
[00:26:26]  And.
[00:26:26]  You know, he explains how like the first Christian preachers, how they were, you know, selling Christianity.
[00:26:35]  And then there was a second generation of Christian preachers, then the third generation of Christian preachers.
[00:26:41]  And, you know, how the ideas and the motivations and everything, everything gets lost in each generation.
[00:26:50]  And then eventually down the road, it's kind of like the starting point.
[00:26:54]  We don't even remember where this started, but we do know that the preachers are making a living off of this stuff.
[00:26:59]  Right?
[00:27:00]  So, you know, someone like Thomas Paine is a very important figure for the history of biblical scholarship.
[00:27:06]  He wasn't a biblical scholar himself.
[00:27:09]  But these 18th century English deists mainly led to the development of biblical scholarship and the scholarship in early Christianity, especially in Germany, as it turns out, but then also in England and France and eventually in America.
[00:27:25]  If you want to know what was really going on in Christianity, you don't want to rely on what they have to say because they're at the very beginning.
[00:27:34]  It'd be like, you know, if you're going to be studying what evolutionary biologists think today, you definitely have to start with Darwin.
[00:27:43]  But you can't base your views of evolutionary biology on Darwin.
[00:27:47]  You've got to see what we found since then, because even though Darwin was a genius, there are other geniuses who are standing on his shoulders.
[00:27:55]  And so he opened the way for people to learn more and more and more.
[00:27:58]  But it'd be silly to assume that everybody now agrees with what he was saying then, because they don't.
[00:28:05]  And it's the same with any field.
[00:28:07]  If you look at the giants, because they're just absolutely amazing and they make these breakthroughs, but if you want to see what people, What we know now, both on the basis of new discoveries and new ways of analysis and deeper analysis by experts, then you have to go to the modern experts.
[00:28:23]  Yeah, I think one of the most profound things that I took away from that book was that it is the gift of reason that gives man the ability to discover God in the first place because it's impossible.
[00:28:38]  We didn't come from nothing, right?
[00:28:40]  We go backwards in time.
[00:28:41]  I came from my parents.
[00:28:42]  My parents came from their parents.
[00:28:45]  Things don't just appear out of thin air.
[00:28:46]  So it is just by us being as intelligent as we are, we have to understand that we can't appear out of thin air.
[00:28:52]  There has to be some sort of higher power, right?
[00:28:55]  Without that gift of reason, you know, we don't have that.
[00:29:00]  Well, that's what these.
[00:29:01]  So it's like the human brain, there's something ancient in the human brain through evolution or whatever it is that makes it wired to be dependent on believing in a higher power.
[00:29:14]  Yeah, maybe.
[00:29:15]  I mean, it's much debated about why people believe in higher power.
[00:29:19]  And there are lots.
[00:29:20]  A lot going on.
[00:29:22]  But the whole thing, project that the people of the Enlightenment were doing, that Payne and the other people of the Enlightenment were doing, whether historians or philosophers or theologians or biblical scholars, whatever, what they were doing is they're trying to break with the tradition of the church that had been established for hundreds and hundreds of years, where your knowledge came from revelation from God.
[00:29:43]  That's how you know things because God reveals it to you.
[00:29:47]  And the people of the Enlightenment realized, well, actually, we can figure things out ourselves.
[00:29:51]  And that's when the sciences develop.
[00:29:53]  And it's You know, it's only when someone like Isaac Newton comes along and realizes, even though he's a devout Christian, he says, you know, you can't trust revelation for anything.
[00:30:03]  You've got to do the experiment.
[00:30:05]  And if the experiment comes out to be differently from what you expect it to be because of your beliefs, so much the worse for your beliefs.
[00:30:11]  Once you say that, you start science and it changes everything.
[00:30:15]  But Payne is all part of that, even though he's not a scientist.
[00:30:18]  Right, right.
[00:30:18]  And much of a lot of those guys around Payne, like the founding fathers, they were Masons, right?
[00:30:26]  I suppose so.
[00:30:27]  I'm not sure how that affected their.
[00:30:29]  Yeah.
[00:30:30]  Freemasonry was a big thing with the founding fathers.
[00:30:35]  Yeah.
[00:30:35]  Well, okay.
[00:30:40]  Yeah, no, it's just interesting.
[00:30:41]  You know, it's just an interesting thing.
[00:30:45]  But the thing about all of these, Payne or anyone else, whatever their other associations, whatever their other religious commitments or non commitments, whatever their philosophical stance, when they say something, it needs to be evaluated.
[00:31:00]  That's true of all everything.
[00:31:04]  For me, I mean, I'm basically a historian.
[00:31:06]  And so when I want to know whether somebody said is true or not, I have to do the analysis.
[00:31:14]  So if he's a Mason, you know, if he's a, I mean, you know, whatever.
[00:31:17]  I mean, today, if somebody is whatever, I mean, is a, you know, a Satan worshiper, is a Mormon, is a Roman Catholic priest, whoever, whatever it is, if she or he says something, I look at it and evaluate it.
[00:31:33]  It's not based on what they happen to be.
[00:31:36]  Right.
[00:31:37]  We were talking before we started about the ancient Greek, and I was telling you that I had a classical philologist in here who studied ancient drugs.
[00:31:46]  He said that the word Christ was originally a word for drugs, meaning to apply drugs to the skin or apply drugs to the eyes.
[00:31:54]  And he is basically his basic theory is that you know Christianity was founded by these pagan drug cults, right?
[00:32:04]  These like ancient drug and sex cults, and Christianity is borrowing.
[00:32:09]  From everything that they're doing.
[00:32:10]  And most of the things that they were doing were drugs.
[00:32:15]  And not only drugs, but there was in the ancient world, it was constant plague, famine, hand to hand combat, human and child trafficking was going on everywhere.
[00:32:25]  There were pirates everywhere.
[00:32:28]  And he thinks that a lot of this stuff was borrowed, these pagan cults, a lot of the traditions that they were doing were borrowed by Christianity.
[00:32:39]  And he thinks that.
[00:32:40]  You know a lot of the words.
[00:32:43]  Basically like, the best way I can describe it is and this is my understanding of what classics is is that there's all this ancient literature that exists out there from Antiquity.
[00:32:57]  Right, you have the medical stuff, the comedy the, you know, whatever you name it, and then you have the biblical stuff right the, the Canon and all the Gospels, but then like, if you veer out of that lane, there's all this other stuff that, like you said earlier, gives you context to what the words are.
[00:33:16]  And Amen was saying that in all of these texts, in like Euripides, Galen um Sophocles, the word Christ is being used as a drug term.
[00:33:35]  And he said, everywhere.
[00:33:36]  He said it's not just some, you know, i'm not just like cherry picking little things here and there, because he said you can find it literally everywhere.
[00:33:43]  From when Jesus died And from like 100 years before and 100 years after he was dead, the word Christ is being used as a term to apply drugs.
[00:33:52]  And he even gave me some specific examples, which we can pull up.
[00:33:57]  I don't know if you've heard of them or not, but one of them was he said that in the book of Revelation 3 18, God says, You must Christ your eyes so you may see.
[00:34:11]  And then there's another one where he says that in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says you can lift up snakes and drink death poisons that won't hurt you.
[00:34:25]  What do you think about this?
[00:34:27]  Well, I'm sure he probably wanted to sell some books.
[00:34:30]  No, he didn't.
[00:34:32]  He didn't sell books?
[00:34:34]  He doesn't sell books anymore.
[00:34:35]  He wrote a book, but now he tells everyone to pirate his books.

=== Misleading Biblical Claims Debunked (02:33) ===

[00:34:38]  Yeah, well, that's fine.
[00:34:40]  He wants his views out there then.
[00:34:41]  No, I'd say it's just categorically false what he's saying.
[00:34:45]  Yeah.
[00:34:45]  It's not true.
[00:34:47]  And so, you know, to somebody.
[00:34:51]  It's difficult to kind of explain to somebody who's not a scholar or an ancient linguist about how it works, but that isn't how it works.
[00:34:59]  The term Christ is not always used as drugs.
[00:35:02]  It's rarely used as drugs.
[00:35:03]  It's used, the word, it comes from a word creo, which means to anoint.
[00:35:08]  And so, of course, some medications in the ancient world were used for ointments, but it's not everywhere at all.
[00:35:16]  The term Christ doesn't occur very much, actually.
[00:35:19]  The Christos, the term Christos doesn't occur very much.
[00:35:22]  In fact, it's kind of a weird word.
[00:35:24]  It's in Greek, it's just the translation of the Hebrew word, Mashiach, which means anointed one.
[00:35:29]  And it's used in the Old Testament for when somebody becomes a king, they have a coronation ceremony.
[00:35:34]  Like, you know, today when we have a President being sworn in, there's a ceremony you go through.
[00:35:39]  He puts his hand on the Bible and swears the oath of office.
[00:35:42]  And in ancient Israel, going back to the earliest kings, Saul and David and Solomon, they had.
[00:35:46]  Did you hear that?
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=== Eye Drops And Lukewarm Faith (03:13) ===

[00:37:11]  It is linked below.
[00:37:12]  Now back to the show.
[00:37:14]  Right.
[00:37:14]  Where do we start back?
[00:37:15]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:16]  We just got erupted by a vacuum.
[00:37:19]  So I was trying to explain that Creo comes from Mashiach.
[00:37:22]  Pull up the book of Revelation 3 18.
[00:37:26]  Well, here, you could do this.
[00:37:27]  You don't need that.
[00:37:28]  Look for interlinear Revelation 3 18, interlinear online.
[00:37:35]  There it is.
[00:37:36]  And the second to last word is the one to anoint.
[00:37:42]  What is that word?
[00:37:42]  That's not even Creo, is it?
[00:37:44]  Well, it is.
[00:37:45]  So the first two letters mean.
[00:37:47]  In uh, so it's to anoint on.
[00:37:50]  So, cryo is the if you move the cursor, you can see it better.
[00:37:54]  Yeah, so you see that it looks like a crease eye.
[00:37:58]  Okay, so uh, so it's just saying that you anoint the eye salve on your eyes.
[00:38:05]  So, an eye salve is it's like taking eye drops.
[00:38:09]  So, what is it?
[00:38:09]  What are they talking about there?
[00:38:10]  What's going on there?
[00:38:12]  Um, he's saying you're you've got blurry eye, he's saying you're naked and you've got blurry eye.
[00:38:17]  Go to the pit before it so we can talk about the whole thing, yeah.
[00:38:21]  Um Oh, I see.
[00:38:23]  You know what?
[00:38:23]  It helps if I just actually look at the passage in my text because this is one of the.
[00:38:30]  In Revelation 3, it is a passage where Christ is writing to one of the seven churches of Asia Minor.
[00:38:39]  And he's writing to the church in.
[00:38:43]  Let's see, this is 318.
[00:38:46]  So he's writing to the church in Laodicea.
[00:38:52]  And.
[00:38:53]  He's ticked off at the Christians in Laodicea because they are not fervent enough in their faith.
[00:38:58]  This is Christ.
[00:38:59]  Christ is dictating a letter to the prophet John, who's writing the letter to this church in Laodicea, which is in what's modern Turkey.
[00:39:07]  And he's ticked off because he says, You're not hot or cold.
[00:39:10]  I wish you were either hot or cold.
[00:39:11]  Since you're lukewarm, I'll spit you out of my mouth, he says.
[00:39:15]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:39:17]  It's Revelation 3 16.
[00:39:18]  Yeah, so Jesus, Christ is being portrayed as being ticked off because people aren't either for him or against him.
[00:39:23]  They're kind of lukewarm Christians.
[00:39:25]  Since you're lukewarm, I'll spit you out of my mouth.
[00:39:27]  So he's threatening to take away their salvation.
[00:39:30]  Okay.
[00:39:32]  And so then he says that he counsels you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich.
[00:39:39]  In other words, trust in me instead of trust on your earthly riches.
[00:39:44]  You should try and get white garments to clothe you with instead of those dirty rags of untruth that you're following.
[00:39:50]  And you should keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen because people realize that you've got nothing you know, you're an emperor with no clothes.
[00:39:57]  And you should get salve to have anoint your eye so you can see because you're blinded here.
[00:40:02]  You've blinded yourselves.
[00:40:04]  And so you need some eye drops.
[00:40:07]  So they didn't have eye drops in the ancient world.
[00:40:10]  If you wanted to heal an eye problem, if you had like an irritated eye, they would use salve, S A L V E.
[00:40:16]  And you just spread it on the eye.
[00:40:18]  And so it's like an eye drops.
[00:40:18]  And what is salve?
[00:40:19]  Do you know what it's like made of?
[00:40:21]  It's anything.
[00:40:21]  It's just any kind of oily substance that you put on a wound.
[00:40:24]  Okay.

=== Euripides Context For Christ Term (03:34) ===

[00:40:25]  Yeah.
[00:40:26]  So there's no relationship to the word Christ.
[00:40:29]  Well, no, it's just the verb.
[00:40:31]  The word Christ comes from the word anointed.
[00:40:33]  The word Christ is not a common word in Greek.
[00:40:36]  It's rare.
[00:40:37]  Yeah, probably if the Apostle Paul went into some city and said, I wanted to preach you about Christ, they'd have no idea what he's talking about.
[00:40:47]  It wasn't a name, and it wasn't a word you would describe anybody.
[00:40:50]  It just meant somebody's been anointed.
[00:40:52]  And they think it's kind of like somebody just had a workout in the gym, and so they rub olive oil over them afterwards.
[00:40:58]  It's like typical in the ancient world in gymnasiums.
[00:41:02]  You'd have a massage, and they would rub oil on your skin, and that makes you the anointed one.
[00:41:08]  That makes you the Christ.
[00:41:09]  Really?
[00:41:09]  Yeah.
[00:41:10]  They rubbed olive oil on their skin?
[00:41:11]  Oh, yeah.
[00:41:12]  Yeah, because they didn't use soap and things.
[00:41:14]  And they would work up a sweat.
[00:41:17]  And then they had these instruments to kind of take the metal instruments to kind of take off the sweat.
[00:41:23]  And then they'd have oil rubbed on them.
[00:41:25]  And it could be anointed, it could be perfumed oil.
[00:41:31]  And yeah.
[00:41:34]  So you get a workout.
[00:41:35]  So if somebody's a Christoff, they're anointed one, that just means they've had like oil spread on them.
[00:41:40]  So, it's got nothing to do with drugs.
[00:41:42]  I mean, of course, drugs also could be, you could have some drugs that are anointed, but this is just a word.
[00:41:49]  It just means being anointed.
[00:41:52]  Nobody thinks drugs.
[00:41:55]  Right.
[00:41:55]  And so, when this fellow says it's all over the place, well, the word actually is not that common.
[00:42:00]  And the word Christos is definitely not common.
[00:42:03]  And they call him Christos just because in the Hebrew Bible, the king is called the Mashiach, he's the anointed one.
[00:42:12]  And so when you read that in the Greek Bible, he's the Christos.
[00:42:15]  He's the anointed one.
[00:42:16]  It's got nothing to do with him taking drugs or something.
[00:42:19]  Are you familiar with Euripides?
[00:42:21]  Yes.
[00:42:21]  I read Euripides this morning for an hour.
[00:42:23]  Wow.
[00:42:24]  Yeah, no, I loved Euripides.
[00:42:27]  So are you familiar with Euripides when he talks about Theodora?
[00:42:32]  Yes.
[00:42:33]  What is going on there?
[00:42:34]  Wait, the Phaedra?
[00:42:35]  You said Phaedra?
[00:42:36]  Theodora.
[00:42:37]  I thought it was pronounced Theodora.
[00:42:40]  I'm not sure which one you're talking about, actually.
[00:42:43]  So, I thought that one of the passages or one of the stories in Euripides about Theedra had talked all about this Christing, and he said that it gave really good context to why it is a drug term.
[00:42:59]  I wouldn't be able to, I'd have to look at it.
[00:43:01]  Steve, let's look at it.
[00:43:02]  Can you pull it up for us?
[00:43:03]  We'll just cruise the internet.
[00:43:04]  My latest passion is more the Medea and the Alcestis.
[00:43:07]  Oh, really?
[00:43:08]  Yeah.
[00:43:10]  The Lady Babylon.
[00:43:11]  Euripides.
[00:43:14]  Euripides.
[00:43:15]  So you just casually warm up your mind in the morning by reading it.
[00:43:17]  Every morning I get up for a night.
[00:43:19]  My first thing I do in the morning is always to read Greek.
[00:43:22]  And I've been reading Euripides lately.
[00:43:23]  Yeah.
[00:43:24]  Yeah.
[00:43:24]  Fantastic.
[00:43:25]  And you read it in the Greek.
[00:43:26]  Yeah.
[00:43:27]  Oh, Phaedra.
[00:43:27]  Okay.
[00:43:28]  Phaedra.
[00:43:28]  There you go.
[00:43:29]  Well, that story.
[00:43:29]  Yeah.
[00:43:29]  So that's kind of an unusual story.
[00:43:32]  Yeah.
[00:43:32]  Try that one.
[00:43:33]  Okay.
[00:43:33]  Which one are we looking at?
[00:43:34]  Is that the right one?
[00:43:35]  Well, this is one of the plays.
[00:43:38]  It's.
[00:43:40]  Okay.
[00:43:40]  Phaedra's in love with her.
[00:43:42]  Oh, that's it.
[00:43:42]  That is it.
[00:43:43]  Yeah.
[00:43:44]  That's it.
[00:43:44]  That's the one I was thinking of.
[00:43:45]  So what is this?
[00:43:46]  Story for people who don't know?
[00:43:49]  Well, so it's this kind of weird story where she's in love with her stepson and wants her stepson to sleep with her.

=== Reading Greek Every Morning (15:21) ===

[00:43:59]  And he refuses to do it.
[00:44:05]  And it gets all messed up because his father finds out.
[00:44:10]  And it's one of these things where people are killing themselves and getting killed over this love thing.
[00:44:17]  With Hippolytus.
[00:44:18]  Okay, so there's no drugs used in this story?
[00:44:20]  Oh, well, there might be.
[00:44:22]  I haven't read the story for a while, so I don't think that there's.
[00:44:26]  Steve, what can you find?
[00:44:27]  Are you talking about his reference?
[00:44:29]  If you just go to.
[00:44:30]  He's saying that Christ is used in the context here.
[00:44:34]  Wow.
[00:44:35]  He must mean Creo.
[00:44:37]  He must mean Creo.
[00:44:38]  Anointing is.
[00:44:39]  Right, okay.
[00:44:41]  How do you spell that?
[00:44:43]  No, just say anointing.
[00:44:44]  Anoint.
[00:44:45]  Yeah, anointing, something like that, or ointment maybe.
[00:44:50]  So.
[00:44:51]  And then doesn't he say something about lifting snakes and drinking death poisons?
[00:44:57]  That's in the Gospel of Mark.
[00:44:59]  Exactly.
[00:44:59]  Yeah, but that's bogus because it's at the end, right?
[00:45:03]  It's the end that actually was not originally in Mark.
[00:45:05]  Oh, really?
[00:45:06]  Yeah.
[00:45:06]  So he's just making stuff up here.
[00:45:09]  Who put that in there?
[00:45:10]  Later, scribes.
[00:45:11]  As I was telling you, we don't have the original of Mark.
[00:45:13]  And one of the big things they did with Mark is they added 12 verses after Jesus' resurrection, the scribes did, in order to show that Jesus really appeared to his disciples.
[00:45:24]  Because in Mark's gospel in particular, Jesus is raised from the dead and his tomb is empty.
[00:45:29]  The women are told to go tell the disciples that he's been raised, but they don't tell anybody.
[00:45:36]  And it ends there.
[00:45:37]  They don't tell anybody.
[00:45:38]  So scribes thought that was a bit abrupt.
[00:45:40]  And so they added 12 verses where they do go tell the disciples, and Jesus tells them this thing about handling snakes and drinking poison.
[00:45:50]  I wonder why they added that.
[00:45:51]  Well, they added it because it sounds pretty spectacular and because.
[00:45:54]  There are traditions in early Christianity already in the book of Acts of people being bitten by poisonous snakes and not hurting them.
[00:46:00]  Paul is.
[00:46:02]  And people speaking in other languages.
[00:46:04]  That happens in the book of Acts.
[00:46:06]  And so these Christians were adding this on that Jesus would indicate that that would happen.
[00:46:10]  And there are traditions in early Christianity of people being able to drink poison without it hurting them.
[00:46:14]  What?
[00:46:15]  So was it specifically snake venoms and snake poisons?
[00:46:19]  No, not necessarily.
[00:46:20]  It's two different things.
[00:46:21]  You can handle snakes and you can drink poison and it won't hurt you.
[00:46:25]  Says Jesus, in those additional verses.
[00:46:27]  Oh, wow.
[00:46:28]  That's interesting.
[00:46:28]  Those are the verses that the Appalachian snake handlers use to justify their practices.
[00:46:33]  I don't know if you know about the Appalachian snake handlers.
[00:46:35]  No.
[00:46:36]  Oh, there are these groups of Christians, these Christian denominations, where during their worship services, they pull out the rattlesnakes or whatever, the deadly snakes, and handle them in the church service to show that they really can do this because that's what Jesus said.
[00:46:53]  But they don't realize that Jesus didn't really say that and it was added by scribes.
[00:46:58]  Oh, no.
[00:46:59]  And sometimes they do get bitten and they go to the hospital.
[00:47:03]  That's crazy.
[00:47:04]  So this guy shouldn't be using stuff like that.
[00:47:06]  Well, it's interesting that they say that.
[00:47:07]  That in the gospels, it says they could be bit by snakes and it wouldn't affect them or wouldn't hurt them.
[00:47:13]  It doesn't say that except for in these verses.
[00:47:15]  In these verses that were added.
[00:47:16]  That were added later by scribes.
[00:47:17]  Because Galen talks about, or Galen created the theriac for Marcus Aurelius that had snake venoms and snake viper flesh and all this stuff in there that was like a panacea that was supposed to be able to.
[00:47:27]  Yeah, sure.
[00:47:28]  And because like one of the main reasons people were getting killed was the viper, all this deadly snakes that were in that part of the world.
[00:47:34]  There were people who were dying from snake bites and stuff like that.
[00:47:37]  So maybe.
[00:47:38]  There was certainly medicine in the ancient world.
[00:47:40]  Right.
[00:47:41]  Maybe there was some sort of anti venom or antidote to snake bites that was real.
[00:47:46]  I don't know of any, but maybe there was.
[00:47:48]  I don't know.
[00:47:48]  I mean, I wouldn't be surprised.
[00:47:50]  I mean, yeah.
[00:47:53]  But it doesn't mean that that's what the name Christ means.
[00:47:57]  It's kind of the fact that you've got a verb that means to anoint.
[00:48:02]  You anoint, anytime you kind of spread some kind of liquid substance on your body, you're anointing it.
[00:48:07]  But usually it's not to get a high.
[00:48:09]  It's so crazy to me because.
[00:48:11]  Like, I've been kind of like diving down the rabbit hole of this drug stuff, and I haven't been able to get any scholars to debate this guy.
[00:48:21]  Like, there's so many of them, and we've had a couple of them that would be like, Oh, yeah, we'd love to come do the podcast, right?
[00:48:26]  Like, we want to be on the podcast.
[00:48:27]  And I'm like, Okay, would you mind debating this man?
[00:48:31]  Oh, no, sorry, I can't do that.
[00:48:32]  I wouldn't be comfortable doing that.
[00:48:33]  It wouldn't be productive.
[00:48:34]  You know, well, it probably wouldn't be productive.
[00:48:36]  I mean, it sounds like he likes ridiculing people.
[00:48:38]  Yeah, well, it would be.
[00:48:39]  I mean, I never debate people who want to ridicule, who think ridicule is a form of intellectual discourse.
[00:48:44]  I mean, it's, but you know, From that clip you showed, I mean, he's just kind of mocking this person who's just actually giving factual information.
[00:48:50]  And so I'm not interested in debating somebody who thinks mockery is a way to engage in intellectual discussion.
[00:48:57]  Yeah, I don't know.
[00:48:59]  I think that if somebody was confident enough in the classical stuff and they understood where he was wrong and where the holes were in his arguments, that they would be more than happy to come.
[00:49:10]  Any classicist would be able to do it.
[00:49:12]  It's just whether they want to deal with somebody like that in a public context.
[00:49:17]  So it's not that they're.
[00:49:20]  I think it'd be a mistake to think that he's come up with something that nobody can refute.
[00:49:25]  I think that is so far from the truth.
[00:49:28]  So, I mean, at my university, we have a very strong classics department.
[00:49:31]  These are people who have got international reputations in classics, and any one of them could take him apart.
[00:49:38]  Yeah, but just like one of the top classical scholars, Karl Ruck, the guy who wrote to Eleusis, he confirms everything this guy says.
[00:49:48]  And no other classicist that.
[00:49:50]  Where does he teach?
[00:49:52]  He teached at Harvard.
[00:49:53]  I think he's retired now.
[00:49:54]  What do you mean he confirms everything?
[00:49:55]  Let's pull up his bio.
[00:49:57]  What do you mean he's confirmed everything this guy said?
[00:49:58]  Like he says that this guy, all the stuff about drugs is real.
[00:50:03]  That they had drugs?
[00:50:04]  Yeah.
[00:50:04]  Of course they had drugs.
[00:50:05]  Or no, that Christ was a drug.
[00:50:08]  This guy says that?
[00:50:09]  Where does he say that?
[00:50:11]  There's podcasts where he says it, but this is just his bio right here.
[00:50:14]  This isn't like, go up.
[00:50:17]  Where's his PhD from?
[00:50:19]  He thinks that Jesus Christ, that Christ, he got a PhD from Harvard University, classical philology.
[00:50:24]  Yeah, no, this is a serious guy.
[00:50:26]  Yeah.
[00:50:26]  But I mean, he actually says that the name Jesus Christ means Jesus' drugs.
[00:50:31]  No, he corroborates a lot of the things that Amon says.
[00:50:38]  And Amon is the one who says that Christ is a drug term.
[00:50:43]  Creo, okay, fine, fine.
[00:50:47]  I mean, so.
[00:50:49]  Yeah, so that's why you understand my.
[00:50:51]  I'll tell you what you do.
[00:50:52]  I'm so perplexed.
[00:50:53]  That's why I'm just saying this.
[00:50:54]  Well, okay, I'll tell you what you do.
[00:50:55]  Just get the.
[00:50:57]  There are a couple of.
[00:51:00]  Comprehensive Greek lexicons in existence.
[00:51:04]  The big one is called the Liddell and Scott.
[00:51:06]  It is a massive volume that gives definitions for every Greek word and shows how the Greek word is used in every context.
[00:51:14]  Right.
[00:51:15]  Okay.
[00:51:15]  What's it called again?
[00:51:17]  Liddell and Scott.
[00:51:18]  So those are two 19th century British scholars L I D E L L, Liddell and Scott, S C O T T.
[00:51:26]  Okay.
[00:51:27]  Or you could get the Cambridge, there it is.
[00:51:30]  You want the long one, the big one.
[00:51:32]  Oh, the LSJ.
[00:51:33]  Okay.
[00:51:34]  There are three versions of it.
[00:51:36]  You want the big one.
[00:51:37]  But there's also a new Cambridge lexicon of Greek that is also comprehensive.
[00:51:45]  And just look up the word Christos and see what it says.
[00:51:51]  It's not hard.
[00:51:52]  I mean, so anybody could do it.
[00:51:54]  So, yeah.
[00:51:56]  In fact, I wonder, it might be online.
[00:51:57]  In fact, you can get this online.
[00:51:58]  You can get their definition online.
[00:52:00]  Let me see.
[00:52:01]  How would you.
[00:52:03]  So if you will search for.
[00:52:06]  I think it's like lsj.com or something simple like that.
[00:52:09]  LSJ.
[00:52:10]  We've been on this website before, I believe, Steve.
[00:52:12]  I don't remember this.
[00:52:14]  This is it.
[00:52:14]  Oh, yeah, we've been on this.
[00:52:16]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:52:17]  Ancient Greek.
[00:52:21]  I should give you like the actual.
[00:52:23]  There we go.
[00:52:24]  There it is.
[00:52:24]  Yeah, just stop.
[00:52:28]  Oh, my gosh.
[00:52:30]  There.
[00:52:31]  Boom.
[00:52:34]  There we go.
[00:52:34]  Okay, so we're going to come back up here.
[00:52:36]  Yep.
[00:52:37]  Pasteicles.
[00:52:38]  Boom.
[00:52:40]  All right.
[00:52:40]  What do we got?
[00:52:42]  Search all the text.
[00:52:43]  Why not?
[00:52:43]  See what you got.
[00:52:45]  Paste.
[00:52:48]  Paste.
[00:52:48]  It's finding.
[00:52:49]  It says, please be patient, Steve.
[00:52:51]  I am impatient by nature.
[00:52:53]  What is this?
[00:52:54]  This isn't even the word.
[00:52:55]  Cristo.
[00:52:58]  Keep going.
[00:52:59]  I'm not sure why they're doing this.
[00:53:00]  This website's a little bit slow.
[00:53:04]  Maybe their traffic is so minimal.
[00:53:05]  They bought the cheapest hosting provider.
[00:53:10]  Sure.
[00:53:11]  There you go.
[00:53:14]  Dogma.gr, Perseus Tufts.
[00:53:16]  Perseus Tufts, that's what it was.
[00:53:18]  Really?
[00:53:19]  Yeah, that's what we've been using.
[00:53:20]  Okay.
[00:53:22]  Okay.
[00:53:23]  All right, here we go.
[00:53:26]  We're making some progress here, folks.
[00:53:27]  Progress.
[00:53:28]  All right, so it means to be rubbed on, used as ointment, or salve.
[00:53:36]  Anointed.
[00:53:40]  Messiah.
[00:53:42]  Euripides.
[00:53:42]  Oh, wow.
[00:53:43]  Look at that.
[00:53:43]  Euripides is right there.
[00:53:44]  So click on Euripides.
[00:53:47]  Okay.
[00:53:47]  Euripides.
[00:53:48]  Oh, there's Christos.
[00:53:50]  Whether.
[00:53:52]  Ah.
[00:53:52]  Oh, no, that's the case.
[00:53:53]  Phaedra.
[00:53:54]  Yeah.
[00:53:54]  There it is.
[00:53:55]  Phaedra.
[00:53:55]  Yeah.
[00:53:55]  Where it says whether it is the anointment or the drug drink.
[00:54:04]  Drug drink.
[00:54:06]  Yeah.
[00:54:06]  Whether anointment or drug drink.
[00:54:09]  In other words, the poisonous drink or the anointment.
[00:54:15]  So, is it used as a drug term here?
[00:54:17]  No.
[00:54:17]  Can we give it credit for being here?
[00:54:19]  No, because it says the.
[00:54:21]  Or a drug term.
[00:54:21]  I'd have to read the context, but it looks like it's contrasting the thing that it'd be anointed on or the thing being drunk.
[00:54:29]  Oh, unless the pharmacon.
[00:54:31]  I don't know.
[00:54:32]  I'd have to look at the whole context.
[00:54:34]  Oh, that's why it said 516.
[00:54:36]  This is the one place.
[00:54:40]  It looks like it's saying this is the one place in the Phaedra that it's used and the one place in Euripides that it's used.
[00:54:49]  Whoa, that would be interesting.
[00:54:51]  You know, I don't think that the word Christos actually probably.
[00:54:55]  It'd be worth looking up.
[00:54:57]  I mean, if I had my resources here, I could look it up.
[00:55:01]  I'd be surprised if the word Christos, like what became the name Christ, occurs before the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, before it gets translated into the Hebrew Bible.
[00:55:11]  You'd be surprised if that happened.
[00:55:12]  Yeah, I'd be surprised if anybody uses the actual word Christos before the Septuagint.
[00:55:18]  So I don't think Euripides was long before the Septuagint.
[00:55:23]  He was, how much earlier than the Septuagint was he?
[00:55:27]  Well, he's 5th century BCE.
[00:55:29]  And so he's about three.
[00:55:31]  It depends when.
[00:55:32]  If the Septuagint was done around the year 200 BCE or one, yeah, then it'd be about 300 years at least before.
[00:55:39]  Okay.
[00:55:39]  Doesn't this say that he uses the word Christ?
[00:55:41]  No, it's using the word Creo, the verb.
[00:55:44]  The verb.
[00:55:47]  I think.
[00:55:47]  At least the passage we saw in the Phaedra, that's the verb.
[00:55:51]  It's not the noun.
[00:55:53]  Look, I'll just tell you the short of it is that I think if you get, you know, if you get.
[00:55:59]  Any dictionary, if you ask anybody who does classics for a living and you just ask them, does Creo, not does it sometimes refer to drugs, but does it necessarily refer to drugs or does it usually refer to drugs?
[00:56:16]  Okay.
[00:56:16]  They will all tell you the same thing.
[00:56:18]  No, I know.
[00:56:18]  I talk to all of them.
[00:56:19]  There's only one that tells me that it's drugs and that's Amon.
[00:56:22]  Yeah.
[00:56:22]  But then his argument is he says that the only other person that corroborates him who's been dead for a long time is a guy by the name of Julius Africanus.
[00:56:31]  Well, he's been dead for a long time.
[00:56:33]  Yes, I'd say he's been dead for a long time.
[00:56:34]  He's been dead since the second century.
[00:56:38]  A little while, huh?
[00:56:39]  And we actually only have, we don't have much of his stuff.
[00:56:44]  And so I'd be suspicious.
[00:56:49]  What did he say that Julius Africanus said?
[00:56:50]  Sorry, he said Julius, actually, he said what Julius Africanus said was that the Septuagint was an original Greek, or at least parts of it was an original Greek.
[00:56:58]  How would Julius Africanus know that?
[00:57:00]  Apparently, he was a linguist or he was a classicist.
[00:57:02]  He was living 400 years later.
[00:57:05]  He doesn't know.
[00:57:06]  How would he know?
[00:57:06]  Maybe he read Greek.
[00:57:07]  I don't know.
[00:57:08]  No, he did read Greek.
[00:57:09]  Right.
[00:57:09]  But so what?
[00:57:11]  Look, if somebody today, for the first time, says that the Declaration of Independence was written originally in French, and this is the first time anybody said it, living hundreds of years later, would then, like in 2000 years, oh, yeah, but that person said it.
[00:57:31]  Yeah, I see what you're saying.
[00:57:32]  It's hundreds of years later by somebody who had no idea.
[00:57:35]  Right.
[00:57:35]  I see what you're saying.
[00:57:37]  So, look.
[00:57:38]  All right.
[00:57:39]  I've already explained why the Septuagint is.
[00:57:41]  No, we're already past that.
[00:57:44]  It applies to the Creo thing.
[00:57:46]  Right.
[00:57:46]  It's the same thing.
[00:57:47]  The word can be used, of course, for medical applications.
[00:57:51]  Right.
[00:57:51]  Okay.
[00:57:54]  And then when Jesus was arrested in the park at 4 a.m. in the park with the boy.
[00:58:00]  We're not told what time it was.
[00:58:02]  We're not.
[00:58:03]  Okay.
[00:58:03]  So was it at night?
[00:58:04]  Or do we know if it was a night or a day?
[00:58:06]  Do we know when the SWAT team came?
[00:58:12]  So.
[00:58:14]  It's in the evening.
[00:58:14]  He's arrested in the evening.
[00:58:15]  He's had his last supper.
[00:58:18]  He goes out and prays.
[00:58:19]  The figure of the boy in the park is in Mark 14.
[00:58:23]  Yep.
[00:58:24]  And it's only in Mark.
[00:58:26]  And it's a strange passage.
[00:58:28]  Very strange.
[00:58:28]  Yeah.
[00:58:29]  So it'd be, yeah, it'd be nighttime.
[00:58:34]  And then the next day, about eight hours later, roughly around eight hours, he dies.
[00:58:38]  He's crucified.
[00:58:39]  He dies.
[00:58:40]  And he dies early.
[00:58:42]  Well, it depends which gospel you read.
[00:58:44]  In Mark, he dies.
[00:58:45]  At Mark, he gets crucified at nine in the morning.
[00:58:48]  In John, he doesn't get crucified until in the afternoon.
[00:58:51]  Right.
[00:58:52]  And he's crucified.
[00:58:53]  Who were the guys that were crucified on each side of him?
[00:58:56]  What were their charges?
[00:58:58]  We're not told in the New Testament.
[00:59:00]  There are later legends that deal with them.
[00:59:02]  Okay.
[00:59:02]  Where they're actually, yeah.
[00:59:04]  So we have no idea what they were crucified for?
[00:59:07]  What's the consensus, scholarly consensus?
[00:59:10]  Well, there's not.
[00:59:11]  So people were crucified for a variety of reasons.
[00:59:16]  And I guess I haven't really looked around to see what the consensus would be.

=== Virgin Birth Versus Conception (07:41) ===

[00:59:21]  But my suspicion is that they also were accused of some kind of insurrection.
[00:59:27]  Things.
[00:59:28]  Because normally the people who would be crucified tended to be the complete people, the very lowest level of the social scale.
[00:59:36]  So, slaves.
[00:59:37]  If slaves did something nasty, they'd get crucified.
[00:59:42]  But the Romans are basically crucifying people that they see as a threat.
[00:59:45]  And so, probably Jesus is crucified for calling himself the king of the Jews in all the Gospels.
[00:59:52]  It's like the unanimous thing in the Gospels.
[00:59:54]  And so, the problem is that the Romans are ruling.
[00:59:57]  Israel.
[00:59:58]  And so if he calls himself the king, he's saying that he's the ruler of Israel.
[01:00:02]  And so they don't like that.
[01:00:04]  They crucify people like that.
[01:00:06]  So it may be that they were also, they're called, the problem is in the Gospels, they're called a word that's often translated robbers.
[01:00:15]  The Greek word is laistase.
[01:00:17]  A laistase, though, in Josephus, the Jewish historian Josephus uses the term laistase to refer to guerrilla warriors, people who engage in guerrilla warfare.
[01:00:29]  And so, if that's what it means.
[01:00:31]  When was he?
[01:00:33]  First century.
[01:00:33]  First.
[01:00:34]  Yeah.
[01:00:34]  So he talks about people.
[01:00:36]  Yeah.
[01:00:37]  He's our main source for information about first century Judaism.
[01:00:43]  And by the way, he doesn't say much about drugs.
[01:00:46]  Okay.
[01:00:46]  So, going back to some of the stuff about Christianity and some of the early sects of Christianity, one of the things that you've written about a lot is the idea of the virgin birth story, the Immaculate Conception.
[01:01:01]  Those are different things.
[01:01:04]  The virgin birth refers to Jesus' mother who conceived as a virgin.
[01:01:11]  The Immaculate Conception has to do with how his mother was born.
[01:01:16]  She was born, God did a miracle.
[01:01:18]  Her mother was not a virgin, but the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is that when Mary was conceived, unlike every other human being, she was conceived without a sin nature.
[01:01:32]  Oh, okay.
[01:01:32]  So her mother did not pass on the sin nature to Mary.
[01:01:35]  That became a later doctrine.
[01:01:37]  To show why Jesus did not inherit a sin nature from his mother.
[01:01:43]  Okay.
[01:01:44]  So the Immaculate Conception isn't about the birth of Jesus.
[01:01:46]  It's about the birth of his mother.
[01:01:48]  About the birth of his mother.
[01:01:49]  Yes.
[01:01:49]  Okay.
[01:01:49]  And where does this idea originate from?
[01:01:51]  Like, where are they getting this?
[01:01:54]  Well, yeah, well, you know, where does any theologian come up with their ideas?
[01:01:57]  And so the earliest accounts of Jesus' mother are in a book called The Infancy.
[01:02:06]  I'm sorry, it's called The Proto Gospel of James.
[01:02:09]  And it is an early second century book.
[01:02:13]  And it actually doesn't even mention the Immaculate Conception yet.
[01:02:18]  In this account, it is an account of Mary's birth.
[01:02:21]  And it's a miracle because God gets her pregnant, even though she can't get pregnant from her husband.
[01:02:26]  But the strange thing about this story is that it's actually a virgin birth rather than a virginal conception.
[01:02:33]  So a virginal conception is in the New Testament.
[01:02:36]  That's when in Luke and Matthew, she conceives without having sex.
[01:02:42]  But that's different from a virgin birth.
[01:02:45]  A virgin birth is if she gives birth and her hymen hasn't broken in the process of giving birth.
[01:02:52]  The hymen breaks because the baby comes through the birth canal.
[01:02:56]  Right.
[01:02:56]  And in the proto gospel of James, a midwife gives her an internal exam.
[01:03:02]  Mary, this is a legend, gives her an internal exam to see whether her hymen is broken, and it has not.
[01:03:09]  And so now it's not just a virginal conception, it's a virginal birth.
[01:03:14]  And as theologians started thinking more about it, they realized she must not have only conceived as a virgin and given birth as a virgin.
[01:03:20]  She must have been a perpetual virgin.
[01:03:23]  And so then you later get the idea of the perpetual virginity, or she never had sex.
[01:03:27]  And then after that, you come up with the idea she never even had a sin nature.
[01:03:31]  And so the idea of the immaculate conception becomes, especially becomes a doctrine in the fourth and fifth centuries.
[01:03:37]  That's so bizarre.
[01:03:39]  I didn't know that.
[01:03:40]  Why?
[01:03:40]  So they're saying that he, how was he born if he didn't come through the birth canal?
[01:03:44]  It's a miracle.
[01:03:45]  It's a miracle.
[01:03:47]  How do you get born?
[01:03:47]  How do you get born from a virgin?
[01:03:50]  Did they do C sections back then?
[01:03:52]  Ah, well, they're called C sections because so they're Caesarian sections.
[01:03:59]  They're Caesarians named after Julius Caesar.
[01:04:03]  Oh.
[01:04:03]  Because his mother was having trouble giving birth, and so they took him out of her womb.
[01:04:08]  Did she survive?
[01:04:10]  I don't think so.
[01:04:10]  They usually didn't.
[01:04:11]  In the ancient world, they usually would take the baby instead of the mother.
[01:04:15]  Wow.
[01:04:15]  Wow, I had no idea it's named after Julius Caesar.
[01:04:18]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:04:19]  That's wild.
[01:04:20]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:04:20]  See, that's why I'm here.
[01:04:22]  Yes, that is why you're here.
[01:04:23]  Wow, that's fascinating.
[01:04:26]  That is fascinating.
[01:04:28]  Right.
[01:04:28]  But you were going to ask me about the virgin birth.
[01:04:29]  Yes, yeah.
[01:04:30]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:04:31]  I was originally asking you about the virgin birth.
[01:04:34]  So that didn't borrow from any other ideas or any other myths.
[01:04:40]  You know, I just did a class on this yesterday at Chapel Hill.
[01:04:43]  I had my students read a bunch of Greek and Roman myths about people being miraculously born.
[01:04:50]  Because there are a lot, we have them, we have accounts of a god getting a woman pregnant throughout Greek and Roman mythology.
[01:05:02]  In every case though, the god, the woman is not actually a virgin in the Greek and Roman versions.
[01:05:12]  Most of the time she's just a woman who's had sex a lot and never had kids, or she's had, the god gets her pregnant, but the god gets her pregnant.
[01:05:20]  But the god always has sex with her.
[01:05:24]  And so there are these fantastic stories.
[01:05:26]  My students thought this was really bizarre because you have these stories about how Alexander the Great was born.
[01:05:32]  And it turns out that Alexander the Great was born, he was the son of Zeus.
[01:05:38]  And Zeus came down in the form of a snake and lay with his mother.
[01:05:44]  And his father, Philip, Alexander's father, Philip, was watching through the door and seeing this snake cohabiting with his wife.
[01:05:52]  And then she got pregnant by the snake, who was Zeus.
[01:05:54]  And Alexander the Great was the son of Zeus.
[01:05:57]  Because the snake got her pregnant.
[01:05:59]  Oh my God.
[01:06:00]  With the snake.
[01:06:01]  Yeah, it's very.
[01:06:01]  Incestual.
[01:06:02]  And Freudian to boot.
[01:06:04]  And so, the snake figure.
[01:06:07]  And Freudian, yeah.
[01:06:08]  Yeah.
[01:06:08]  So, but in any event, so you have these stories of God's getting women pregnant.
[01:06:13]  Right.
[01:06:13]  What doesn't happen is God's getting that she remains a virgin.
[01:06:18]  So that's different in, they're all different.
[01:06:21]  Like all the stories are different from each other, right?
[01:06:23]  Getting pregnant from a snake is different being pregnant by a swan, you know, or something.
[01:06:29]  Right, right, right, right.
[01:06:30]  But so there are accounts of divine men.
[01:06:35]  They're almost always men, with only one or two exceptions, whose father is a God.
[01:06:41]  But the difference is in the New Testament, the father who's a god, the woman is still a virgin.
[01:06:47]  Okay.
[01:06:50]  Interesting.
[01:06:51]  In other words, there's been no penetration.
[01:06:53]  Whereas in the Greek and Roman myths, there's penetration.
[01:06:56]  Yeah.
[01:06:56]  It seems like the Greeks and these ancient cultures were obsessed with this stuff.
[01:07:00]  They were just obsessed with this like nasty.

=== Ancient Myths Obsessed With Sex (08:29) ===

[01:07:02]  What?
[01:07:02]  Sex?
[01:07:02]  Yeah.
[01:07:03]  They were obsessed with sex.
[01:07:03]  Unlike the American culture?
[01:07:05]  Yeah.
[01:07:05]  Yeah.
[01:07:06]  Come on.
[01:07:07]  Yeah.
[01:07:08]  Every culture is obsessed with sex.
[01:07:09]  No, I mean, it seemed way more than us.
[01:07:11]  I mean, it seemed way, it didn't seem like, let me put it this way.
[01:07:14]  They're nowhere near as this mess.
[01:07:16]  Maybe not more obsessed, but it didn't seem like there was the cultural sanctions around this kind of stuff that there is now.
[01:07:22]  It depends where you lived.
[01:07:26]  Oh, okay.
[01:07:26]  Well, I mean, you know, today, you know, if you sleep with somebody else's spouse, you know, your spouse might leave you.
[01:07:35]  In Israel, if you slept with your, if the woman slept with her neighbor's husband, they'd kill her.
[01:07:43]  Which takes it more seriously.
[01:07:46]  But in those cultures, a lot of the time, the sanctions for inappropriate sex were connected with property rights.
[01:07:57]  Already in the Old Testament, the problem with a woman committing adultery is that – so a married woman has sex with another man.
[01:08:10]  The problem is this other man has taken the husband's property rights.
[01:08:14]  Oh, okay.
[01:08:14]  I see.
[01:08:15]  And so that's why in the Ten Commandments it says, you shall not covet your neighbor's house, his wife, his donkey, his axe, his ox.
[01:08:24]  So the wife is right up there with the donkey as one of the guy's properties.
[01:08:28]  And so it's a property issue, but it still takes it far more seriously than we do.
[01:08:36]  Which brings me to my question about Jesus and Mary and the greater questions of Mary.
[01:08:41]  What was going on?
[01:08:44]  What was going on?
[01:08:45]  On the mountain with Jesus and Mary.
[01:08:47]  What was Jesus doing up there?
[01:08:51]  Do our listeners know what the greater questions of Mary is?
[01:08:55]  They're about to find out.
[01:08:57]  I saw you write about this in your blog, which got me interested in it.
[01:09:00]  We've actually done it.
[01:09:02]  Actually, during our recent podcast, we brought up your blog and we were showing it to people.
[01:09:07]  Oh, good.
[01:09:07]  Yeah.
[01:09:07]  Well, people should know about my, you know, the kind of stuff we're talking about is stuff I talk about on my blog all the time.
[01:09:12]  Yeah.
[01:09:12]  Like I post five times a week on dealing with this kind of stuff.
[01:09:15]  Big fan of your blog.
[01:09:16]  We'll link that below.
[01:09:16]  Okay.
[01:09:17]  So, Right.
[01:09:19]  The greater questions of Mary.
[01:09:21]  Let me see if I remember this accurately because I haven't looked at this thing in many years.
[01:09:26]  Jesus, does he pull a woman out of his own side and has sex with her?
[01:09:32]  I think that's what it is.
[01:09:33]  Something like that.
[01:09:34]  From what I understood, that was that he brought Mary to the mountain and he said something like, You have to eat my semen or something like that.
[01:09:41]  Eat my seed.
[01:09:42]  Yeah, that's part of it.
[01:09:43]  But she's up there.
[01:09:45]  So Mary Magdalene is up there and he pulls a woman out of his side and he has sex with her and then.
[01:09:51]  Uh, yeah, I think they consume his semen, yeah, and he says something about do this and you will live.
[01:09:57]  And so, Bart's blog, Steve, so we can uh show the people, yeah, yeah, pull it so I can see what.
[01:10:02]  There we go.
[01:10:03]  There we go.
[01:10:03]  Look at that.
[01:10:04]  Rated R, rated X. Punch in on it.
[01:10:08]  There we go.
[01:10:09]  Okay.
[01:10:10]  Keep going.
[01:10:10]  The greater questions of Mary.
[01:10:12]  Epiphanius claims to have read this.
[01:10:15]  Yeah.
[01:10:16]  Yeah.
[01:10:16]  Take care of the man.
[01:10:17]  He prayed, extracted a woman from his side, had sexual intercourse.
[01:10:20]  I got it right.
[01:10:21]  He gathered a semen in his hand, explained this was what we must do to live.
[01:10:24]  Why was Jesus doing this kind of thing?
[01:10:27]  You know, well, because he could.
[01:10:30]  I don't know.
[01:10:32]  And she was disturbed.
[01:10:33]  And yeah.
[01:10:34]  So this is so look, okay.
[01:10:36]  The reality is that this is quoted in a church father named Epiphanius, who wrote a multi volume work called the English word for it is the medicine chest.
[01:10:51]  Oh, yeah.
[01:10:52]  Your guy might have liked this book, The Medicine Chest.
[01:10:55]  So it's called the Greek word is panarion.
[01:11:00]  And it's called The Medicine Chest because.
[01:11:03]  It provides the antidotes for the venom of snakes.
[01:11:09]  Ooh.
[01:11:10]  And the venom of snakes are the heretics.
[01:11:13]  The heretics will poison you.
[01:11:16]  No, they might call them antichrists, but these are like Christian teachers who are teaching false doctrine.
[01:11:21]  Okay.
[01:11:22]  So they're teaching false doctrine, and it's like being stung by a snake, it'll kill you.
[01:11:26]  The heresy will kill you.
[01:11:27]  And so he provides the antidotes for this by telling you the truth.
[01:11:31]  The truth will save you from the poison bites of the heretics.
[01:11:34]  That's the idea of this long work.
[01:11:37]  Okay.
[01:11:38]  And so one of the groups that he attacks is a group called the Phibianites that he accuses of engaging in wild nocturnal orgies as part of their Christian ritual, like literal orgies at night.
[01:11:55]  Phibianites?
[01:11:56]  Phibianites, P H I, Phibianites.
[01:11:59]  I don't know why they're called that.
[01:12:01]  But it is a group of Gnostic Christians.
[01:12:04]  And he claims that this is one of their documents.
[01:12:08]  The greater questions of Mary.
[01:12:09]  Okay.
[01:12:10]  That they have a book that they use to justify their crazy ritual practices, which include having random sex.
[01:12:23]  The man, this is during the worship service, they meet at night, they turn out all the lights, which are on lampstands, torches.
[01:12:32]  They extinguish all the torches, they randomly mix men and women.
[01:12:38]  Have sex together.
[01:12:39]  The man pulls out before he orgasms, orgasms in his hands.
[01:12:44]  They eat the semen together and then they drink the woman's menstrual blood.
[01:12:49]  Good Lord.
[01:12:49]  And this is the body and blood of Christ.
[01:12:52]  And so Epiphanius claims this is happening.
[01:12:58]  When was this guy writing this?
[01:12:59]  So he's writing in the end of the fourth Christian century.
[01:13:02]  Okay.
[01:13:03]  And he's saying that these groups are doing this stuff.
[01:13:06]  So basically, what he's doing is he's trashing people by making stuff up.
[01:13:12]  So he's making this all up so he can have an excuse to participate in this sick shit himself.
[01:13:16]  No, no, he doesn't participate in it.
[01:13:17]  He's a strict moralist.
[01:13:19]  Okay, I see.
[01:13:20]  But he's saying that if you start hanging out with these Gnostic people, these Gnostic Christians, this is the kind of stuff you're going to get into and it's going to send you straight to hell.
[01:13:29]  And so it's like overly voyeuristic for somebody who's a Puritan.
[01:13:35]  But he's one of these people who's like, he just enjoys telling these kinds of things.
[01:13:40]  He doesn't tell a lot of these kinds of things, but he tells some of these things to.
[01:13:44]  Scare his audiences away from this form of Christianity.
[01:13:48]  There are a lot of scholars, probably the majority of scholars, think that there's some kind of historical root to what he's claiming these people were doing.
[01:13:57]  And I don't think so.
[01:13:59]  I think he's just making this stuff up.
[01:14:02]  So it's not likely that Jesus actually did that.
[01:14:05]  Oh, no, there's no way Jesus did this.
[01:14:07]  I'm saying there's no way that these Gnostics actually thought he did it.
[01:14:11]  There's no way that Gnostics actually thought he did it.
[01:14:13]  Okay.
[01:14:13]  There's no way he did it.
[01:14:14]  And I think there's no way they actually thought he did.
[01:14:16]  Epiphanius is making up slanders against his enemies in order to show how horrible they are.
[01:14:22]  Oh, wow.
[01:14:22]  So he's making the thing up.
[01:14:23]  I think he's making the thing up.
[01:14:25]  That's interesting.
[01:14:26]  And that's another hard part of this whole field of study and studying these ancient.
[01:14:30]  Text is because you're like reading all this stuff, all this historical stuff.
[01:14:34]  And like, just think about the world we live in today with like the news.
[01:14:38]  Like, imagine in 5,000 years from now, they're going back and reading the news today.
[01:14:42]  Well, like, it's like the news is how do you, I watch, I read a headline and 90%, 90% of the time, there's about 1% of truth in that headline.
[01:14:51]  Oh, absolutely.
[01:14:52]  No, absolutely.
[01:14:52]  And if in 2,000 years they find, you know, this, that, or the other conspiracy theory is the thing, they'll think, well, that's what everybody thought.
[01:15:00]  Right.
[01:15:01]  Exactly.
[01:15:01]  And then on top of that, people have axes to grind against other people.
[01:15:07]  Yeah.
[01:15:07]  Yeah.
[01:15:09]  Right.
[01:15:09]  So that's another thing that just, to me, makes this whole thing so confusing.
[01:15:14]  And in today's day and age with the internet, you have people with different views on the ancient world.
[01:15:24]  And they want to dedicate their whole life and build a career off arguing with people about what happened thousands of years ago or what people were talking about thousands of years ago.

=== Sumerian Roots In Hebrew Words (05:36) ===

[01:15:32]  Okay.
[01:15:32]  But see, this is, again, it's why expertise matters.
[01:15:36]  Yes.
[01:15:37]  Because experts read these documents in their original languages.
[01:15:41]  They read them in the Greek and the Latin, the Coptic, the Syriac, the Hebrew, whatever.
[01:15:45]  They know what these words mean.
[01:15:47]  They understand how it works.
[01:15:48]  They know the history of the period.
[01:15:50]  They know the political history of the period, the economic history of the period, the social history of the period, the cultural history of the period.
[01:15:55]  And they study these things.
[01:15:56]  So if somebody comes along and reads Epiphanius, like just a regular old person comes along and reads Epiphanius, they'll just think, well, that's what was happening.
[01:16:03]  Right.
[01:16:04]  And Experts will be able to explain.
[01:16:08]  It'll take a while to explain.
[01:16:11]  It'll take a while for an expert to explain.
[01:16:14]  But if you listen to them and hear the explanation, you'll understand, oh, yeah, that's right.
[01:16:21]  And if you have different experts saying different things, then you can kind of evaluate them.
[01:16:24]  But without the expertise, you just say anything.
[01:16:28]  And there's so much stuff on the internet.
[01:16:30]  It's just people just saying stuff and getting people to believe them because they said it.
[01:16:35]  And yes.
[01:16:35]  Okay, fine.
[01:16:36]  But I mean, you know, there are ways to analyze.
[01:16:40]  Ancients.
[01:16:40]  So I know it sounds confusing, but if you study this stuff for 30 years, you know how to analyze this stuff.
[01:16:45]  Right, right.
[01:16:47]  Is there any, I don't know if you know how much you know about Sumerian, but is there any links from Hebrew to Sumerian?
[01:16:53]  Are they any of the roots similar?
[01:16:55]  No, I think Sumerian is a different language.
[01:16:57]  It's completely separated, right?
[01:16:59]  Yeah.
[01:16:59]  Ugaritic is a language that's comparable to Hebrew.
[01:17:02]  So there were cognate Hebrew languages.
[01:17:05]  So when I said earlier that the Hebrew Bible, you only have the Hebrew Bible.
[01:17:09]  Right.
[01:17:09]  One thing that helps translators.
[01:17:12]  is to know the cognate languages from antiquity.
[01:17:16]  So a cognate language is like, suppose you've got Spanish and Portuguese.
[01:17:22]  So if you know Spanish, Portuguese is pretty close, pretty close.
[01:17:27]  And, you know, if you've got a word in Portuguese, you don't know what this means, but you know the Spanish word that looks just like it, then you can probably guess, yeah, that's probably what it means.
[01:17:37]  Right.
[01:17:37]  You can do that with the Hebrew Bible.
[01:17:40]  And so Hebrew Bible translators, when they know, when they see this word, they don't, This word doesn't occur anywhere else in Hebrew, but you have a similar word that occurs in this language and that language and that language that are cognates, like Ugaritic, then that probably suggests what it is.
[01:17:55]  Okay.
[01:17:56]  And you can do that with Sumerian and Hebrew.
[01:17:58]  There is some sort of a link there.
[01:18:00]  No, I think Sumerian is a different language.
[01:18:01]  Right, right.
[01:18:02]  Different language group.
[01:18:02]  It's got to be a Semitic language.
[01:18:04]  Right, yeah.
[01:18:05]  That's what I thought because there is a guy who's come up on this podcast, he's dead now, but he's come up on this podcast many times who wrote a book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
[01:18:14]  And the premise of his book was about taking the roots of ancient Sumerian into Hebrew.
[01:18:21]  And I don't think you can do that.
[01:18:23]  I think that basically tears apart his whole hypothesis.
[01:18:26]  Well, I'm not an ancient, I don't work in ancient Near Eastern linguistics.
[01:18:30]  And so I'm not right.
[01:18:31]  Yeah.
[01:18:32]  Right.
[01:18:34]  But yeah, no, his theory was that the idea of immaculate conception was the same thing as a mushroom because a mushroom you don't pollinate.
[01:18:43]  A mushroom comes from mycelium, basically, like it's rain comes down on the earth and the mushroom is born out of the earth.
[01:18:49]  What's that got to do with Sumerian?
[01:18:51]  For some reason, he was taking Sumerian roots and applying them to Hebrew words.
[01:18:59]  And he was studying the Dead Sea Scrolls for like years.
[01:19:03]  I think he studied the Dead Sea Scrolls for like 50 years.
[01:19:06]  It's not John Allegro.
[01:19:07]  John Allegro, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:19:12]  Okay.
[01:19:12]  Okay, look, the roots of a word, the etymological roots of a word are not indicative of what the word means.
[01:19:20]  Right.
[01:19:21]  So we have lots of words in English that don't mean what the roots mean.
[01:19:29]  You can see where they got it, but I mean, for example, if you say lion's teeth, Okay, the teeth of lions.
[01:19:38]  You're not referring to the thing that you go out and dig in your garden, the weed that has a yellow thing coming up, the dandelion.
[01:19:47]  Right.
[01:19:48]  Dandelion, Dr. Leon, the lion's teeth.
[01:19:53]  And so the fact that it's called lion's teeth doesn't tell you what the.
[01:19:57]  When your dad tells you go out and dig the dandelions, you don't go around looking for lion's teeth.
[01:20:02]  So the root of a word is not how you'd establish what the word means.
[01:20:07]  Right.
[01:20:07]  So it doesn't matter what the Sumerian root was for this, that, or the other thing.
[01:20:11]  Right.
[01:20:12]  It's irrelevant.
[01:20:13]  Right.
[01:20:13]  Yeah.
[01:20:14]  That combined with the fact that one's a Semitic language and one is from, you know, Near Eastern, I think that kind of like blows that out of the water.
[01:20:22]  But it wouldn't matter.
[01:20:24]  I mean, what does it, what, I mean, for one thing, what does a mushroom in Jesus have to do with either one?
[01:20:30]  He's claiming, he's claiming that how a mushroom appear, a mushroom come, basically, a mushroom doesn't have to be pollinated like any other plant.
[01:20:39]  On earth, right?
[01:20:39]  It doesn't have to be, it's not pollinated.
[01:20:43]  So it's like being born of a virgin.
[01:20:46]  That was his connection that he made.
[01:20:47]  It had nothing to do with Sumerian or Hebrew.
[01:20:49]  No, that idea, right?
[01:20:50]  It's biology.
[01:20:51]  Right, yeah, that's biology.
[01:20:52]  That's just one of his arguments to support how Jesus Christ was a mushroom.
[01:20:58]  A psychedelic mushroom, may I add.
[01:21:00]  I know, I know.
[01:21:01]  No, you know, the thing was, he was, he started out as a fine scholar and he was an expert in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

=== Jesus As A Psychedelic Mushroom (15:40) ===

[01:21:08]  But every now and then you get somebody who's like, You know, very erudite who takes this weird turn and wow, okay.
[01:21:17]  So, uh, yeah, that gets a lot of people into this stuff too.
[01:21:21]  You know, it's kind of cool because it's like maybe they're crazy, maybe it's outlandish, but it gets a lot of people who would know who would otherwise not be interested in religion.
[01:21:28]  Maybe they're like, ooh, this man, maybe he's onto something, and they go, they fall down the rabbit hole.
[01:21:33]  Well, the problem is that people who are experts in religion don't do a very good job of showing why it's interesting on its own without crazy ideas, right.
[01:21:43]  And so you don't need crazy ideas.
[01:21:45]  I mean, the Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, got a lot of people interested in Mary Magdalene or in the Council of Nicaea or how we got the canon of the New Testament or how Jesus became the Son of God.
[01:21:58]  And everything Dan Brown said in the Da Vinci Code about those things was wrong.
[01:22:04]  Right.
[01:22:05]  I mean, I wrote a book on it.
[01:22:06]  I wrote a book on the Da Vinci Code going through point by point.
[01:22:09]  And so, yeah, I got people into it, but it got them thinking wrong things.
[01:22:12]  So, how good is that?
[01:22:15]  I think it is good because then they can find your book and they realize, oh my God, that shit's wrong like me.
[01:22:19]  Like, I got into this stuff from a guy who told me that Christ was a child trafficker who was giving people drugs, and he's a drug cult leader.
[01:22:27]  Yeah, okay.
[01:22:28]  And that got me interested in this stuff.
[01:22:29]  Yeah, fair enough.
[01:22:30]  Now I'm here in front of you, and I'm figuring out, you know, maybe there's more to this.
[01:22:33]  Maybe not.
[01:22:34]  Yeah, maybe that isn't how it worked.
[01:22:35]  Yeah.
[01:22:37]  I don't know.
[01:22:37]  Yeah, well, sometimes truth is a lot more boring than.
[01:22:40]  That's very true.
[01:22:41]  But sometimes truth is really interesting.
[01:22:43]  And I think scholars generally do not do a good job of showing what's interesting about what they do across the fields.
[01:22:51]  That.
[01:22:52]  People become scholars because they're really deeply interested in something, and they're interested in it because there's something that is interesting in it.
[01:22:58]  But they have the hardest time to explain to somebody what's interesting about this.
[01:23:01]  Right.
[01:23:02]  And so, you know, I think what scholars need to do is figure out how to communicate better because otherwise you just have these people who come up with these crazy ideas.
[01:23:11]  And there's another thing about scholarship, too, is when you're a part of an institution like that, it's also frowned upon to come up with a theory that doesn't fit in with consensus.
[01:23:21]  People are afraid of it.
[01:23:24]  It's frowned upon if you don't have support for it.
[01:23:27]  If you just spout off some crazy theory, then yeah, you get fired.
[01:23:31]  Well, I mean, in general, would you say in general, though, that people in scholarship, they typically walk on eggshells when it comes to discussing new ideas or talking outside the lines or anything like that?
[01:23:44]  No, I never felt that way.
[01:23:45]  I mean, I've been in academia since 19.
[01:23:48]  I've been a professor since 1984, and I've never felt that I. Bound to say one thing or another, except if I say something that doesn't have any support for it as a historian.
[01:24:00]  So I just can't claim crazy things.
[01:24:03]  And I can't claim that Constantine, the Emperor Constantine, is the one who formulated the Hail Marys and that he, I don't know, you just say something and it's just demonstrably wrong.
[01:24:24]  Well, you can't do that.
[01:24:26]  If you're a historian or if you're a scientist or whatever you are, if you make a statement, you've got to be able to back it up with facts.
[01:24:36]  Otherwise, yes, you should walk in eggshells.
[01:24:40]  But I mean, you know, and probably, you know, if you say that every time the word Christ is used, it's referring to a drug, that's like you can't back it up.
[01:24:50]  And you can laugh at people who say you can't back it up, but you can't back it up.
[01:24:55]  And it can be just shown by anybody who can read a dictionary that you can't back it up.
[01:25:00]  Right.
[01:25:02]  Yeah.
[01:25:03]  Yeah, there's a lot to it for sure.
[01:25:05]  I think it's complicated and it's really hard to parse out.
[01:25:08]  I don't think it's complicated.
[01:25:09]  You look it up in a dictionary.
[01:25:12]  And you don't trust the dictionary.
[01:25:13]  You know, dictionaries can't be trusted either.
[01:25:15]  Exactly.
[01:25:15]  Well, that's one thing.
[01:25:16]  I had a scholar on here who was telling me we were discussing the word lacedace and we were looking it up on the website we were just on here.
[01:25:25]  Yeah, the Perseus.
[01:25:26]  And it said Perseus Tusk, exactly.
[01:25:29]  And it gave us a.
[01:25:31]  Couple definitions.
[01:25:32]  I think one of them was robber.
[01:25:34]  One of it, I think robber was like the main one.
[01:25:37]  Pirate.
[01:25:37]  Pirate and robber.
[01:25:38]  And then this guy goes, oh no, that's the wrong dictionary.
[01:25:41]  He goes, you got to look at this dictionary.
[01:25:43]  It says he's a revolutionary.
[01:25:45]  Yeah.
[01:25:45]  See, well, so that's problematic.
[01:25:48]  He's problematic if he's saying that because it means both things in different contexts.
[01:25:54]  All three things pirate, robber, and revolutionary.
[01:25:57]  Yeah.
[01:25:58]  But the one dictionary didn't say pirate or robber, it only said revolutionary.
[01:26:02]  Well, it probably wasn't an exhaustive dictionary.
[01:26:04]  That's why you get it.
[01:26:05]  It was a biblical dictionary.
[01:26:07]  Of course it was.
[01:26:08]  That's the problem.
[01:26:10]  That's the main problem with it, right?
[01:26:11]  Yeah, well, of course.
[01:26:12]  I mean, because.
[01:26:14]  Right.
[01:26:15]  So that is a main problem because you can't trust a.
[01:26:18]  Like a biblical dictionary or a dictionary of biblical Greek.
[01:26:22]  You can't trust a dictionary of biblical Greek to understand Greek more broadly.
[01:26:26]  Because a dictionary of biblical Greek is kind of like a dictionary of New York Times, today's edition English.
[01:26:35]  So it tells you what it means within that.
[01:26:38]  But if you get within that corpus, but if you move outside the corpus of the New Testament into broader Greek, then you want to know what laistase means.
[01:26:46]  Because that might affect what it actually means in the New Testament.
[01:26:49]  And it actually does.
[01:26:51]  So, it means all of those things.
[01:26:55]  But when I say it's not complicated, it's because what you do is you look it up in a comprehensive dictionary and you can't trust that, but it gives you references.
[01:27:03]  Euripides, Phaedra, you look that up and you look up all the references and you say, yeah, that's right.
[01:27:10]  It is what it means here.
[01:27:11]  It's got to mean that here.
[01:27:12]  It can't mean something else here.
[01:27:14]  And so, if you see a passage that says that the ship of the lace die was sunk, Pirates.
[01:27:25]  Yeah, it's pirates.
[01:27:26]  Yeah.
[01:27:26]  If you say the laystase was caught with a loaf of bread, you know, red handed with a loaf of bread.
[01:27:31]  Right.
[01:27:31]  Robber.
[01:27:32]  Or if in Julius Caesar's case, he says the laystase captured me and held me ransom.
[01:27:36]  So it's the context.
[01:27:38]  Yeah.
[01:27:38]  And so it isn't, so that's the problem with saying that the etymology is what tells you the meaning.
[01:27:44]  Right.
[01:27:44]  It doesn't.
[01:27:44]  So Jesus was in the park with a kid at 4 a.m. or whatever it was in the middle of the night and the SWAT team pulls up on him and he goes, Why are you pulling up on me like I'm some laystase?
[01:27:53]  Like, what is he, what is he probably saying here?
[01:27:55]  Yeah, well, he doesn't, but he doesn't say that in Mark.
[01:27:58]  He says that in John.
[01:27:59]  And so, uh, so the kid is one story.
[01:28:03]  The laystase is in a different story.
[01:28:08]  So you're saying he doesn't say, Why are you guys on, pulling up on me like I'm a laystase when the kid's there?
[01:28:12]  That's a, that's, that's in two different versions.
[01:28:14]  Yeah.
[01:28:14]  I think it's in two different versions.
[01:28:15]  I don't think it's in, I don't think that's in Mark.
[01:28:17]  Hold on.
[01:28:17]  Let me check.
[01:28:18]  Let's find it.
[01:28:18]  Let's find it.
[01:28:19]  Cause I don't think it was in Mark.
[01:28:21]  Uh, maybe it is.
[01:28:22]  Maybe it is.
[01:28:22]  Steve is good.
[01:28:23]  Yep.
[01:28:23]  Gotcha.
[01:28:24]  I've got, I've got Mark.
[01:28:25]  I've got, uh, John in my mind right now because the laystase, hmm.
[01:28:29]  Laystase has a, um, uh, A kind of different, a double meaning in the Gospel of John.
[01:28:37]  Okay.
[01:28:37]  And so that's why.
[01:28:39]  Let me see.
[01:28:41]  Laced, just give me a second.
[01:28:44]  I just.
[01:28:45]  You don't even need.
[01:28:46]  I will look at it right here.
[01:28:47]  He's got it.
[01:28:48]  We got two versions.
[01:28:49]  Oh, yeah.
[01:28:50]  Yeah.
[01:28:50]  It does use Laced in Mark.
[01:28:53]  Mark 15, 27.
[01:28:55]  No, it's in 14, 48.
[01:28:58]  I hate this freaking.
[01:29:00]  Yeah.
[01:29:01]  Laced.
[01:29:01]  Yeah.
[01:29:01]  You're right.
[01:29:02]  It does occur there.
[01:29:02]  But what's it got to do with the kid?
[01:29:03]  So what is it?
[01:29:04]  So what does it occur?
[01:29:05]  What does the passage say?
[01:29:06]  Mark 14, 48.
[01:29:08]  Jesus answered and said to him, Have you come upon me as a laystase with swords in order to arrest me?
[01:29:18]  Right.
[01:29:18]  So, like, out of all the definitions we have, obviously he's not saying, Why are you pulling up on me like I'm a pirate?
[01:29:22]  Like, why would you be a pirate if one AM would be a robber?
[01:29:25]  It's talking about being an insurrectionist.
[01:29:27]  An insurrectionist.
[01:29:28]  Yeah.
[01:29:31]  Why else would soldiers come after him?
[01:29:34]  It's not for you don't send a band of soldiers after somebody's stolen a load of bread.
[01:29:37]  Exactly.
[01:29:38]  Right?
[01:29:38]  Why are you coming up on me like I'm a laystase?
[01:29:40]  Yeah, that's it.
[01:29:41]  What am I stealing here?
[01:29:42]  You know, it is weird that he's with the kid, though.
[01:29:44]  It's not stealing.
[01:29:46]  It's here.
[01:29:47]  It's not that he's stealing something.
[01:29:49]  It's that they're arresting him for being an insurrectionist.
[01:29:52]  Right.
[01:29:54]  And the way you know that is because they arrest him, they put him on trial for being an insurrectionist.
[01:30:00]  Right.
[01:30:00]  So that's why they're arresting him.
[01:30:01]  Right, right, right.
[01:30:02]  Not for being a robber and not for being a pirate.
[01:30:05]  So, yeah, but I'm not sure what the kid has to do with that.
[01:30:07]  Yeah, me neither.
[01:30:09]  So the kid is only in Mark, but it's a strange story because it's this they try and grab the guy and.
[01:30:15]  He's not pulling his towel off.
[01:30:16]  This young man is not, no, he's wearing a linen cloth.
[01:30:18]  He's wearing like a robe or something, a linen robe.
[01:30:21]  And they grab him, and it says he's wearing a linen robe over his nakedness.
[01:30:26]  They grab for him.
[01:30:27]  They only get a word for it again.
[01:30:29]  Um, Sindon.
[01:30:32]  Yeah.
[01:30:32]  Okay.
[01:30:32]  Good enough.
[01:30:33]  Uh, and so they grab it, and he runs away buck naked.
[01:30:39]  And that's it.
[01:30:39]  It's Mark 14 62.
[01:30:41]  And so the question is, what in the world is that all about?
[01:30:43]  Right.
[01:30:44]  And people have different theories.
[01:30:46]  Yeah.
[01:30:47]  Ahmed has a theory.
[01:30:48]  Oh, God.
[01:30:51]  So does Morton Smith.
[01:30:52]  Do you know about Morton?
[01:30:53]  No.
[01:30:54]  Oh, my God.
[01:30:55]  Well, you should be interested in Morton Smith.
[01:30:58]  So, Morton, have you ever heard of the secret gospel of Mark?
[01:31:02]  The secret gospel.
[01:31:02]  I have heard of the secret gospel of Mark.
[01:31:04]  Oh, my God.
[01:31:04]  You need to do some episodes on that.
[01:31:05]  Oh, yeah, please.
[01:31:06]  Yeah, Morton Smith, man.
[01:31:07]  I'm telling you, well, he's written a whole book.
[01:31:09]  Oh, God.
[01:31:10]  No, it would take three hours to describe the secret gospel of Mark.
[01:31:13]  But what he argues in the secret gospel of Mark.
[01:31:15]  Now, this guy is a serious guy, Morton Smith.
[01:31:18]  He was like, Oh my God.
[01:31:20]  He was so much smarter than anybody else and he knew it.
[01:31:23]  And he, oh God, this guy was brilliant, but he had this kind of outer theory.
[01:31:31]  He taught at Columbia University and wrote his first dissertation in Hebrew, modern Hebrew.
[01:31:37]  And he was a New Testament scholar and scholar of early Christianity, scholar of early Judaism, and knew, like, he was absolutely flipping brilliant.
[01:31:48]  But he claimed to discover a new gospel, a gospel that was a secret.
[01:31:53]  version of Mark that had been published by Mark later than the Mark that we have that had additions to it.
[01:32:01]  And he wrote two big books on this thing.
[01:32:04]  And the reason it caused a big uproar is because he argued that this passage in Mark 14, 62 about the young man running away with just a linen cloth over his nakedness is actually referred to in this secret gospel.
[01:32:21]  And that it suggests that this is a young man that Jesus had baptized.
[01:32:28]  In the nude, baptized people in the nude, and then had spent the night with him teaching him the mysteries of the kingdom of God.
[01:32:38]  Jesus.
[01:32:42]  Come on, Jesus.
[01:32:43]  We can do better.
[01:32:45]  Oh, no.
[01:32:45]  He thought he was doing pretty well, according to this version.
[01:32:49]  And so, but he has these two books.
[01:32:53]  One is called The Secret Gospel of Mark, which was written for lay people, but he wrote a scholarly edition of this whole thing because he claimed to have discovered this.
[01:33:02]  This manuscript in a monastery in Israel.
[01:33:08]  And it's not clear whether it was a forgery or not.
[01:33:14]  And it's not clear whether he may have forged it.
[01:33:15]  Interesting.
[01:33:18]  Yeah, there it is.
[01:33:19]  Yeah.
[01:33:20]  I love this part right here.
[01:33:21]  Some scholars suggest that the letter implies that Jesus was involved in homosexual activity.
[01:33:27]  Yeah, well, Morton Smith does.
[01:33:29]  Yeah.
[01:33:29]  And some people agree with him.
[01:33:32]  And some people think that he's just.
[01:33:36]  Some people think that he's just actually doing this to make waves and to forge something that other scholars accept as authentic.
[01:33:44]  Sure.
[01:33:45]  Well, I mean, it is.
[01:33:47]  I mean, I can imagine how that's frowned upon by most people.
[01:33:50]  Yeah, most people didn't like that.
[01:33:51]  Especially if they're theological scholars.
[01:33:54]  But the thing is, you could accept the secret gospel and not accept his interpretation of it.
[01:34:01]  Because the gospel itself doesn't say that Jesus was engaged in homosexual activities.
[01:34:05]  Right, exactly.
[01:34:06]  And so it's the interpretation that people objected to.
[01:34:09]  But.
[01:34:10]  Now, there's big questions about whether it's an authentic writing or not, if it is, when it was written, and so forth.
[01:34:19]  So, my introduction into this, Amon's, you're probably going to laugh me out of the room after I tell you this.
[01:34:30]  His theory, the drug theory of what's happening in the park, is that Jesus was participating in the mystery in the upper room prior to when he was in the Garden of Gethsemane.
[01:34:40]  Mm hmm.
[01:34:42]  And he was drinking viper venom, the death inducer.
[01:34:45]  So his idea of how people participated in the mystery was they would ingest the viper venom, come up to the edge of death to where they're about to die, and then they would take the antidote.
[01:34:57]  And according to Galen, the way they came up with the antidotes to things like viper venoms was sort of like antibody therapy, like ancient antibody therapy.
[01:35:06]  So they would take young people who had way better, more robust immune systems.
[01:35:11]  They would slowly give them an introduction to viper venom with a small cut in the skin where they'd wrap the bandage with venom, wrap the cut in the skin so they would do a slow introduction of the venom so it wasn't enough to kill them, but their body would fight it off and create antibodies.
[01:35:30]  So then they would use the young person's bodily fluids as an antidote for the older people who got high on the viper venom.
[01:35:36]  So you get high in the venom and then you take the body fluid so you don't die, right?
[01:35:40]  So it would save you.
[01:35:41]  It'd be the antidote.
[01:35:42]  And what Amon says was the Antichrist because the drug was the Christ.
[01:35:46]  Ha!
[01:35:46]  The drug was the Christ.
[01:35:47]  The antidote was the Antichrist.
[01:35:49]  All right.
[01:35:49]  Okay.
[01:35:50]  So the kid had the bandage on him because he was the antidote because Jesus was tripping on viper venom in the park, right?
[01:35:57]  The kid was there because Jesus needed that kid's bodily fluid so he wouldn't die from the viper venom.
[01:36:02]  It was his antidote so he would survive that psychedelic trip that he was on.
[01:36:06]  The kid ran away.
[01:36:08]  Jesus was crucified.
[01:36:09]  When he's on the cross, he's screaming out, He's thirsty.
[01:36:12]  I'm thirsty.
[01:36:13]  They tried to give him the sponge.
[01:36:15]  His followers tried to give him the sponge.
[01:36:17]  Which had the antidote on it, the antidoton for the deep sauce, according to Nonus, the antidote to the horned North African viper.
[01:36:27]  And Jesus said, no, he refused to take it.
[01:36:30]  And he died early because he refused to take the antidote.
[01:36:34]  And that's the explanation to why Jesus died early and why he was screaming and why he was so thirsty on the cross is because when he was arrested in that park, the boy was his antidote and the boy ran away so he didn't get his antidote.
[01:36:45]  That's a fun one, isn't it?

=== Job And The Antidote Refusal (10:29) ===

[01:36:49]  Yes, I suppose it is fun.
[01:36:52]  So, yeah, well, you know, I think that, you know, every theory needs to be considered seriously.
[01:36:58]  Yes, I guess.
[01:36:59]  And one needs to evaluate probabilities.
[01:37:02]  Sure.
[01:37:03]  And just, I mean, for openers, in the text, it's clearly a Passover meal.
[01:37:13]  In all of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it's the Passover meal.
[01:37:19]  And it doesn't say anything about Jesus.
[01:37:21]  drinking venom, obviously.
[01:37:24]  What he does is he takes the, so at the Passover meal, we know what foods were eaten at a Passover meal, included unleavened bread and several cups of wine.
[01:37:32]  And he takes the bread and breaks it and says, this is my body.
[01:37:36]  And he takes the cup of wine and says, this is the new covenant in my blood.
[01:37:41]  So normally at Passover, they weren't drinking venom.
[01:37:47]  We have no record of anybody drinking venom at Passover.
[01:37:52]  We have many, many, many references to people drinking wine.
[01:37:59]  And it's portrayed as wine.
[01:38:01]  It's likened to his blood.
[01:38:03]  Normally it's thought that's because it's red wine that looks like his blood.
[01:38:07]  I don't think venom normally looks like blood.
[01:38:11]  So, right.
[01:38:13]  As to the young boy, it doesn't say anything about that.
[01:38:18]  And so it's just, you know, you can make things up and it sounds interesting.
[01:38:26]  And people will say, oh, that sounds interesting.
[01:38:28]  But what's the evidence of it?
[01:38:31]  Right.
[01:38:33]  And what is what's the evidence that he's drinking venom?
[01:38:38]  Yeah.
[01:38:39]  And what is it?
[01:38:39]  This is, like I said, this is like, it's fascinating.
[01:38:42]  And it would be great if I could get him in the room with a scholar that has the capacity of the Greek who could combat him.
[01:38:50]  Because most Bible scholars, they don't understand the Greek to the level of a classical philologist.
[01:38:56]  Oh, they understand it well enough to refute that one.
[01:38:58]  I mean, how hard is it?
[01:39:00]  I mean, blood is hyma.
[01:39:04]  Is that used for venom?
[01:39:07]  So, I think you don't need a.
[01:39:10]  I mean, look, there are a lot of biblical scholars who are very fine linguists.
[01:39:16]  I mean, superb.
[01:39:17]  Aren't most biblical scholars, though?
[01:39:19]  Like, this is the contradiction of a Bible scholar, is that most of them, and correct me if I'm wrong, they subscribe to Christianity.
[01:39:28]  So they're a scholar of their own belief.
[01:39:30]  Yeah, but Christianity doesn't mean fundamentalist.
[01:39:36]  When I went to Princeton Theological Seminary, I was very conservative at the time.
[01:39:40]  But when I went there, I was, I mean, all of my professors believed there are contradictions in the Bible, there are historical mistakes, there are discrepancies all over the map.
[01:39:50]  There are things we don't, that Jesus said he didn't really say.
[01:39:53]  I mean, just like they all agreed to that.
[01:39:56]  And so it isn't like they're a bunch of fundamentalists just going around trying to pounding the Bible.
[01:40:01]  These were very serious scholars who are, you know, and so, I think it's unfair to say that they can't be trusted because they have some religious beliefs.
[01:40:17]  You have to look at the scholarship for the scholarship.
[01:40:19]  Plus, there's plenty of us who aren't religious at all, who study this stuff, who think that that sort of thing just, it's like, sorry.
[01:40:27]  But I mean, no.
[01:40:29]  No.
[01:40:30]  Okay.
[01:40:30]  I mean, if I come up with some account of Joe Biden being taken out of this world by a By a Martian spaceship, and that's why we don't see him anymore.
[01:40:44]  I can certainly say that, and there'll be people who believe me, but you know, there'd be ways to kind of check to see if it's right.
[01:40:52]  And the problem in the world right now is people don't check to see if anything's right, they don't, they can't.
[01:40:56]  People want to, if they hear something, they assume it's a fact.
[01:41:00]  And of course, politically, that's a big problem, yeah, because on both sides, people just assume things are facts without bothering to look into them, right?
[01:41:07]  It's tribalism, yeah.
[01:41:08]  But it, but in my field, I mean, you know, there are ways to check out facts.
[01:41:12]  So you should do that.
[01:41:14]  Yeah, no, it's interesting because most people, you know, most religious, godly people, they don't look that deep into this stuff because it gets messy when you really get deep into it.
[01:41:25]  You know what I mean?
[01:41:25]  It's the general idea of it.
[01:41:27]  Like we were mentioning, talking about Thomas Paine earlier, like the general idea of believing a higher power and the idea of Jesus, it's like a good moral framework for society, right?
[01:41:40]  But when you really like, that's the whole point of what your history is and the stuff that you've looked into is like when you start to excavate all these texts of ancient history and the Gospels and all that thing, you'll find out that it's really messy and it's not that simple.
[01:41:54]  But that's like, you can't discount, you know, The moral value and the structural framework that religion provides for success.
[01:42:03]  Well, a lot of people do.
[01:42:04]  And, you know, my view of it is that religion can be used for good or bad.
[01:42:09]  And there are horrible things that get done in the name of religion, obviously, but there are also good things that get done in the name of religion.
[01:42:15]  Sure.
[01:42:15]  And so that's another complication.
[01:42:17]  So I don't think that you can, you know, I just don't think like the way people think today, it's so binary.
[01:42:22]  It's like this or that, you know, and it just, it's few things really are just this or that.
[01:42:27]  Yeah.
[01:42:27]  And just, you know, I'm an atheist, but I'm a New Testament scholar.
[01:42:33]  And when I say something positive about Christianity, I have some atheists who just come down my throat.
[01:42:39]  How can you possibly say anything good about Christianity?
[01:42:42]  Well, why not?
[01:42:43]  It has done good.
[01:42:46]  And if I say anything negative, then the fundamentalists get down my throat.
[01:42:50]  Right.
[01:42:50]  Yeah.
[01:42:52]  That's an unfortunate part of human nature.
[01:42:56]  What's going on with the book of Job?
[01:43:03]  Not to come out of left field, but what's up with Job?
[01:43:08]  Job is another book that people almost always misunderstand.
[01:43:13]  So it depends what you mean by it.
[01:43:17]  So I learned about the book of Job reading about Thomas Paine, and he basically explains that it's completely disconnected from anything else in the Bible.
[01:43:23]  Well, it depends what you mean.
[01:43:26]  It's written in Hebrew, so it's connected with other things.
[01:43:29]  Job, in Job, It's in the Hebrew Bible, but Job is not an Israelite.
[01:43:37]  So, the book of Job, I'll tell you the reason the book of Job is complicated, and it's for a reason that Thomas Paine would not have known.
[01:43:43]  Isn't it the first book that mentions Satan?
[01:43:46]  Kind of, but that's not the complication.
[01:43:48]  Okay.
[01:43:48]  It does.
[01:43:49]  So, there is a figure in there called Hasatan, which in Hebrew means the adversary.
[01:43:57]  But he's not the devil.
[01:43:59]  He's not like this evil force that's out.
[01:44:02]  Trying that we think of today like the head of the demons.
[01:44:05]  He's not that.
[01:44:05]  He's actually one of God's council members.
[01:44:08]  God has like a group of like angelic beings around him that he asks advice for in a number of passages in the Old Testament.
[01:44:17]  So scholars just call it the divine council.
[01:44:20]  And the Satan, the adversary, is one of those figures.
[01:44:24]  And so later on, hundreds of years later, Jews started developing the idea that this adversary was actually an enemy of God, the devil.
[01:44:38]  That's why.
[01:44:39]  That starts up about 200 years before Jesus.
[01:44:42]  But it's long after the book of Job was written.
[01:44:44]  And Job, he's one of the, he's, yeah, well, he plays devil's advocate.
[01:44:48]  He tries to, he brings up the opposite side of what God says just as a kind of challenge him, and then God responds kind of thing.
[01:44:56]  The problem with Job is that people have, the reason they don't understand it is because it begins, Two chapters that are kind of a short story about this guy, Job, who's very righteous, and that Satan convinces God to take everything away from him to see if he'll still be righteous.
[01:45:13]  Because, like, the guy's filthy rich, richest guy on the planet, fantastic family, big family, you know, tons of cattle and sheep and every camel and things.
[01:45:21]  He's like filthy rich, but he's very pious.
[01:45:24]  And the Satan figure says, He's only pious because all the stuff you're giving him here.
[01:45:28]  Take away the stuff, and then he'll curse you to your face.
[01:45:32]  And so that's what happens.
[01:45:33]  And so God says, No, he won't.
[01:45:34]  Satan says, Yes, he will.
[01:45:35]  So God said, Okay, do it.
[01:45:37]  And so Satan does it.
[01:45:39]  And then, so it goes like that.
[01:45:41]  But then, so that's the first two chapters.
[01:45:44]  But then the book is like 40 chapters long.
[01:45:48]  And almost all of it is not about that.
[01:45:51]  Almost all of it is about Job having a conversation with his three disciples.
[01:45:55]  So called friends who say that the reason he's suffering so much is because God's punishing him.
[01:46:01]  And Job keeps saying, I haven't done anything wrong.
[01:46:04]  He's nope, God's punishing you.
[01:46:05]  And it goes on like this for like 37 chapters.
[01:46:09]  And then it gets back to the short story.
[01:46:13]  So the back and forth of friends is all in poetry.
[01:46:16]  And the beginning and end is a pro short story.
[01:46:19]  And scholars, long after Pain, came to realize these are actually two different stories that have been put together.
[01:46:26]  The beginning, the end is about the patient Job who suffers even though he's righteous and God rewards at the end.
[01:46:33]  And in the middle, Job is not patient.
[01:46:35]  God doesn't want anything to do with him.
[01:46:38]  The friends are not friends, they're enemies.
[01:46:41]  And so they're two different things that have been spliced together.
[01:46:44]  So the whole thing as a whole doesn't make sense because you got these two accounts put together.
[01:46:49]  Okay.
[01:46:50]  And then Job also mentions a lot of things like that, like about astronomy and all kinds of astrological things that the Jews didn't know about necessarily.
[01:47:00]  That's at least how Thomas Paine explained it.
[01:47:02]  A lot of scientific stuff.
[01:47:03]  It's not true.
[01:47:04]  No, it's not true.
[01:47:05]  No.
[01:47:05]  At the end, God, at the end of the poetry where Job's saying he's completely innocent and the friend's saying you're guilty, Job says, Look, if God will just show up, I'll be able to make my case.

=== Spliced Accounts In Book Of Job (09:53) ===

[01:47:18]  And God shows up and just dries him into the ground, just squishes him under his thumb and just blasts away because basically God is the Almighty and you're a peon.
[01:47:28]  What are you talking about me for?
[01:47:31]  And so.
[01:47:31]  But in that, God says, where were you when I created the foundations of the earth?
[01:47:36]  Where were you?
[01:47:37]  And he starts talking about the stars and all the stuff that he's created.
[01:47:42]  And even in the other things in the book, occasionally there will be astronomical references.
[01:47:47]  But they aren't things that were unknown to ancient Israelites at all.
[01:47:52]  Okay.
[01:47:53]  Ancient Israelites were just as interested in astronomy as anyone else.
[01:47:56]  Yeah, I heard that there's actual zodiacs and the temples in Talmud Gitto.
[01:48:02]  Oh, yeah, but that's centuries later.
[01:48:04]  Okay.
[01:48:05]  That's many, many centuries later.
[01:48:07]  Yeah.
[01:48:08]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:48:08]  No, you do have zodiacs in some, not in temples, but in synagogues.
[01:48:12]  Right.
[01:48:12]  Yeah.
[01:48:12]  Oh, that's what I meant to say.
[01:48:13]  Yeah.
[01:48:13]  Yeah.
[01:48:14]  In the synagogues, which is interesting.
[01:48:15]  Yeah.
[01:48:15]  There's all sorts of stuff that archaeology has told us that for centuries people didn't realize because it was always said that Jews could not have pictorial art, for example, that you couldn't have pictures of humans because that's like an idol or something and you can't have that.
[01:48:29]  Right.
[01:48:29]  And that's just not true.
[01:48:30]  Now they've dug up synagogues that have pictorial art in them.
[01:48:33]  Oh, wow.
[01:48:34]  Yeah.
[01:48:34]  Yeah.
[01:48:35]  Got it.
[01:48:36]  Dug up a synagogue that appears to have a picture of a mosaic of Alexander the Great in the synagogue.
[01:48:42]  Wow.
[01:48:43]  Did you see there?
[01:48:47]  There was a recent discovery that was made, and actually, the University of Tampa, which is close to here, they found a mug from the god Bess, Bess, it was an Egyptian god mug that had, they somehow did a study on it and they found out, like, they figured out the cocktail that they were using in this mug.
[01:49:09]  And it, like, can you pull it up, Steve?
[01:49:11]  Oh, no, I don't know about this.
[01:49:13]  Oh, yeah.
[01:49:14]  There it is.
[01:49:14]  There you go.
[01:49:16]  Psychotropic drugs.
[01:49:17]  I'm telling you, man, it's everywhere.
[01:49:19]  Look at this.
[01:49:20]  Ritual drug war.
[01:49:22]  When did they date this to?
[01:49:24]  Oh, Jesus.
[01:49:25]  See here.
[01:49:27]  Ancient Egyptian mug from the god Bess ingested mixed psychoactive drugs, human blood, and other bodily fluids in mysterious ceremonies, according to a new paper.
[01:49:34]  15 authors of the paper reported in the research square prior to the academic peer review come from institutions, including the University of South Florida.
[01:49:41]  When did they say this was?
[01:49:43]  Okay.
[01:49:43]  Here we go.
[01:49:44]  16th century.
[01:49:44]  Oh, wow.
[01:49:45]  BCC.
[01:49:46]  Yeah.
[01:49:47]  Well, okay.
[01:49:48]  Vessels of this shape are from the 16th to the 5th century.
[01:49:53]  This particular one dates to the 3rd century.
[01:49:56]  Interesting.
[01:49:57]  Oh, somewhere between the third century BCE and the third century.
[01:49:59]  Great.
[01:49:59]  Yeah, interesting.
[01:50:01]  So, what did it say?
[01:50:01]  Scholars have speculated that they may have been used to hold perfume or holy water, wine, or beer.
[01:50:09]  Ha!
[01:50:09]  God.
[01:50:10]  The cult members may have drunk from them.
[01:50:12]  Oh, my God.
[01:50:14]  But the residue of their contents has rarely been studied.
[01:50:18]  Oh, I see.
[01:50:18]  They're saying generally that's the case.
[01:50:20]  Have you studied this one?
[01:50:22]  There was semen found in this one.
[01:50:23]  I'm quite sure.
[01:50:24]  There was nothing.
[01:50:26]  The Phibianites.
[01:50:28]  I swear it was.
[01:50:29]  No, I swear.
[01:50:30]  No, Steve.
[01:50:31]  I want to say it.
[01:50:33]  A lot of stuff made up around here.
[01:50:36]  Keep throwing these things out.
[01:50:37]  Body fluids, man.
[01:50:38]  Go back down.
[01:50:39]  See what it says.
[01:50:40]  Type in bodily fluids.
[01:50:41]  See what it says.
[01:50:41]  What bodily fluids it was.
[01:50:43]  Probably blood.
[01:50:45]  Fluids.
[01:50:48]  Okay.
[01:50:48]  Keep going.
[01:50:49]  Go to the next one.
[01:50:52]  Such as oral, vaginal mucus and breast milk.
[01:50:55]  Yeah.
[01:50:56]  And human blood.
[01:50:56]  Wait.
[01:50:57]  Okay.
[01:50:57]  By analyzing.
[01:51:00]  Wait.
[01:51:00]  The authors found.
[01:51:01]  Okay.
[01:51:02]  Take a second.
[01:51:02]  These include.
[01:51:04]  And plant, they also found human blood.
[01:51:07]  A lot of that's fantastic.
[01:51:09]  Oh my God.
[01:51:10]  Oral or vaginal mucus and breast milk and the blue water lily.
[01:51:14]  Holy crap.
[01:51:16]  That they mixed with sesame seeds.
[01:51:17]  You know, that's the best way to consume vaginal mucus, and it's with sesame seeds.
[01:51:23]  They probably have a recipe.
[01:51:24]  Probably on the bottom of this cup, you'll find a recipe for.
[01:51:27]  That's great.
[01:51:28]  God, that's crazy, man.
[01:51:29]  Yeah, no, that's amazing stuff.
[01:51:31]  Wow.
[01:51:31]  And Bess was who was Bess?
[01:51:33]  He was a guardian figure until he became a Roman era divine being.
[01:51:38]  Oh, shit.
[01:51:39]  Bess, deity Bess.
[01:51:40]  Mm hmm.
[01:51:43]  Roman era divine being that provided protection from danger and averted harm.
[01:51:48]  Yeah.
[01:51:51]  Yeah.
[01:51:51]  Okay, cool.
[01:51:52]  Antiquity was a fun place to be.
[01:51:53]  Yeah, I tell you.
[01:51:54]  And, you know, they still find stuff and it's amazing.
[01:51:57]  It's really quite amazing.
[01:51:58]  Yeah.
[01:51:58]  Yeah, it's insane.
[01:52:00]  We had a guy in here who brought in a collector of.
[01:52:05]  He buys stuff on the antiquities markets and he buys these.
[01:52:10]  these granite vases, vases.
[01:52:13]  And they were, I guess they were found in like the Bent Pyramid or something, one of the pyramids in Egypt.
[01:52:20]  And they were like all just down to the bottom of them.
[01:52:23]  And he paid like hundreds of thousands each per, he says like a few dozen of these vases he's purchased.
[01:52:29]  And I guess Egyptology dates them to being around the time of like 2000, maybe 2500 BC roughly when they were created.
[01:52:43]  And the way that the consensus of how they were shaping these things were just based on hieroglyphs and depictions that are written or like drawn on cave art or whatever is that they like were hammering and chiseling these things with like pounding stones and copper chisels.
[01:52:58]  That's the tools that they had.
[01:53:00]  But then he took one of his vases to an aerospace company, like a big aerospace company in like the Midwest.
[01:53:09]  And they put it under a light scanner and they found out that this granite vase, which is one of like the hardest stones.
[01:53:15]  That we have is perfectly symmetrical from top to bottom within the deviation of a human hair.
[01:53:23]  Interesting.
[01:53:24]  Like it was almost spun on, like even more symmetrical than you find like a piece of clay that's spun on a wheel.
[01:53:29]  Interesting.
[01:53:29]  Yeah.
[01:53:30]  And it was made 2,000 years ago.
[01:53:32]  And it's like, so basically, if you wanted to recreate, if we, if our culture wanted to recreate it today, you would have to do it on like a CNC machine or something like that, like make it on a computer.
[01:53:40]  No, I know some of the technology, you know, they don't know a lot about how the technology worked.
[01:53:45]  I mean, there are classicists, you know, who work on ancient technology.
[01:53:48]  Like, this is what they do.
[01:53:49]  Oh, really?
[01:53:50]  Yeah.
[01:53:50]  Like, how do you build a temple?
[01:53:52]  Like, how do you put it?
[01:53:54]  How do you have this column that goes up 40 feet and each of the drums of the column weighs?
[01:54:00]  What kind of, you know, how do you do that?
[01:54:02]  And so they, yeah, they're people who do that kind of thing.
[01:54:05]  But, you know, there's also a lot of prehistoric stuff, right?
[01:54:07]  That, I mean, like the rock circles, like the Stonehenge things.
[01:54:13]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:54:14]  You know, they're just, there's some amazing finds.
[01:54:19]  That, um, where you'll have like one of the, you'll have two stone circles like that, uh, on different, uh, continents that are exactly the same size to the millimeter.
[01:54:34]  What?
[01:54:36]  How?
[01:54:37]  That's so wild.
[01:54:38]  Yeah.
[01:54:38]  I mean, it's stuff.
[01:54:39]  And it's like, you know, you know, the ancient world is amazing.
[01:54:42]  And it's like, yeah.
[01:54:44]  Yeah.
[01:54:44]  It's so mysterious how the, how some of this stuff was, was, was able to be, Create you like root beer?
[01:54:51]  We'll see.
[01:54:51]  That's root beer flavor.
[01:54:52]  It's great, delicious stuff.
[01:54:53]  White rabbit, shout out.
[01:54:55]  Um, it's just so mysterious and it's so interesting.
[01:54:58]  And it gets people, you know, and it's a it's a it does that that phenomenon where people like to fill in the gaps with their minds of what it was like, was it God or was it aliens?
[01:55:07]  You know what I mean?
[01:55:08]  Like, the mysterious choices, yeah, okay, yeah, those are our choices these days, yeah, or miracle, or maybe we had human beings had technology that was more sophisticated than we have today, right?
[01:55:19]  In some ways, they did, but.
[01:55:21]  And the problem is that so much of it is lost.
[01:55:24]  But they certainly did in some ways, but they didn't have electricity.
[01:55:29]  And they didn't have ways of creating engines the way we do.
[01:55:32]  And so they didn't have – so they didn't know anything about internal combustion or anything like that.
[01:55:37]  But what they did was absolutely spectacular.
[01:55:41]  But they also had a lot of people power.
[01:55:43]  Yes.
[01:55:45]  Have you heard of the Younger Dryas hypothesis?
[01:55:49]  I don't know that I have.
[01:55:51]  Basically, it's the idea that around – I want to say it was 16,500 years ago, roughly around then, during the end of the Pleistocene, that there was some sort of either a cosmic comet impact or like a solar flare ejection that happened that melted, that ended the ice age, right?
[01:56:13]  Like if comets hit around the Earth, like we went through some sort of like asteroid belt or something like that, or com or meteor stream, that comets hit the Earth, melted all the ice, flooded the Earth, and basically wiped out like.
[01:56:27]  75% of civilization and it kind of like reset us, right?
[01:56:30]  So like there's people that like to connect that idea with the fact that maybe human beings had some sort of advanced ancient technology that was erased from the face of the earth when one of these cataclysms happened.
[01:56:40]  Because there is archaeological evidence that like with the black mat layer and other things that there was some sort of a cosmic event that happened on earth that ended the ice age and would have wiped out a lot of people and potentially some sort of technology that we had and that civilization was reset.
[01:57:00]  And maybe this could be an explanation for some of the flood myths as well.
[01:57:04]  Yeah.
[01:57:04]  Because the flood myths are everywhere, right?
[01:57:06]  Well, they are, but they're also always around places where there's major water supplies.

=== Biblical Studies Academy For Charity (04:50) ===

[01:57:11]  Right.
[01:57:12]  Certainly not.
[01:57:13]  They're not.
[01:57:13]  They all flood.
[01:57:15]  So, yeah, I don't know.
[01:57:16]  I mean, if I wanted to know about that, I'd probably talk to a high level university geologist.
[01:57:23]  Probably wouldn't go online to find out.
[01:57:28]  So that's the problem.
[01:57:29]  You wouldn't go on TikTok?
[01:57:31]  Well, not anymore, apparently.
[01:57:33]  Oh, yeah.
[01:57:34]  Yeah.
[01:57:35]  Oh, yeah.
[01:57:36]  We're getting rid of it.
[01:57:37]  As of yesterday, apparently, yeah.
[01:57:40]  Yeah.
[01:57:40]  What happened?
[01:57:40]  Someone bought it.
[01:57:41]  Did Elon Musk buy it or something?
[01:57:43]  Or he's trying to buy it?
[01:57:43]  Well, the Supreme Court.
[01:57:45]  Yeah.
[01:57:45]  I forget.
[01:57:45]  Anyway, who cares?
[01:57:46]  Yeah.
[01:57:46]  Yeah.
[01:57:48]  Anyways, Bart, thank you so much for coming, man.
[01:57:50]  This has been a really fun conversation.
[01:57:51]  My pleasure.
[01:57:52]  Tell people where they can find your work, where they can find your blog, all that fun stuff.
[01:57:56]  So there are a couple of things.
[01:57:57]  One is my blog.
[01:57:58]  So my blog is this unusual thing because it's, I mean, you know, thousands of people have blogs.
[01:58:03]  But my blog, it's on New Testament, early Christianity, everything cognate to it, ancient Christianity.
[01:58:08]  The ancient Roman world, the ancient Judaism, early Christianity, up through Constantine and beyond.
[01:58:15]  I post five times a day, five times a week, five times a week.
[01:58:20]  You are doing it.
[01:58:20]  1,200 to 1,400 words.
[01:58:22]  I've done it for almost 13 years now.
[01:58:25]  And so it's like every day.
[01:58:27]  And I answer questions.
[01:58:29]  Every question I get, I answer.
[01:58:31]  So the reason I do this is not for my jollies.
[01:58:35]  It's both to spread knowledge about my field, but it's also to raise money for charity.
[01:58:40]  So there's a small membership fee that people pay.
[01:58:43]  It's not big.
[01:58:44]  It comes out to like the cheapest level is like a dime a week kind of thing.
[01:58:47]  It's like $24.95 for a year.
[01:58:50]  But there are higher levels where there are more perks.
[01:58:52]  But I give all of the money to charity.
[01:58:55]  And so I don't keep a dime myself.
[01:58:58]  And I do separate fundraising to pay for our expenses so that every penny goes into the charities, which are all dealing with hunger and homelessness issues.
[01:59:08]  Last year, 2024, we raised $575,000.
[01:59:14]  What?
[01:59:15]  Yeah.
[01:59:15]  Holy smokes.
[01:59:16]  So people just by joining and getting all these perks, like, you know, my posts, and at higher levels, there's audio versions of they can get, and I do live QAs, and I do, at the higher levels, I do webinars, periodic webinars with people in the higher groups.
[01:59:35]  So people should just look up.
[01:59:38]  So it's urbanblog.org.
[01:59:39]  Okay.
[01:59:40]  And they can look it up.
[01:59:41]  The other thing, about three years ago, we started a company.
[01:59:45]  That produces online courses on all topics.
[01:59:49]  We start out doing mainly biblical studies, which is what we still mainly do.
[01:59:53]  And I start out doing the courses myself on, you know, I'll do something on the Gospel of Mark, like eight lectures on the Gospel of Mark on a weekend.
[02:00:01]  Or we'll have short, like one off lectures.
[02:00:03]  Like I did a thing on the dark side of Christmas, where I did two lectures talking about like the really parts that don't look good about what's happening in the Christmas story.
[02:00:12]  Like, why does Herod have to kill all the babies so that Jesus can be born, that kind of thing.
[02:00:16]  And so, So we have these courses.
[02:00:19]  They can find that on barturman.com.
[02:00:22]  I've got a thing on courses.
[02:00:23]  But we've also started this thing connected with it where we do semester long courses taught by high level university professors.
[02:00:32]  We have one going on now on an introduction to the New Testament by a very fine New Testament scholar who's a terrific teacher.
[02:00:40]  And it meets twice a week, like a university course, 50 minute lectures followed by QA each time with suggested readings people could do, quizzes if they wanted to take quizzes.
[02:00:50]  And so it's like getting a.
[02:00:53]  Our first course was by Duke University professor Mark Goodacre.
[02:00:56]  You get a Duke University course online for this thing.
[02:00:59]  So, this one is not for charity.
[02:01:02]  It's a business we have going, but that's called the Biblical Studies Academy.
[02:01:06]  Okay.
[02:01:07]  So, if people just look up Biblical Studies Academy, it's like a streaming service.
[02:01:12]  They pay a monthly fee, and if they pay the monthly fee, they get all the courses that are already available.
[02:01:18]  They can go to these university level courses.
[02:01:20]  They have chat groups, they have discussion groups, they have book reading groups, movie watching groups.
[02:01:25]  It's like it's this community.
[02:01:27]  For people who are not, you know, a lot of people are interested in the Bible, but they don't have anybody to talk to about it, like academically interested.
[02:01:34]  Right.
[02:01:34]  You know, as opposed to being like in the church interested sense.
[02:01:37]  And they just want to talk about stuff that they're interested in.
[02:01:39]  They don't have anybody.
[02:01:40]  This is a forum for them to do it.
[02:01:42]  So we just started a Biblical Studies Academy and they could look it up.
[02:01:46]  Beautiful.
[02:01:47]  That's really cool.
[02:01:48]  Making this stuff accessible to just anyone online who wants to learn about it.
[02:01:52]  Serious scholarship made accessible and interesting to people who aren't scholars.
[02:01:56]  That's amazing.
[02:01:56]  Yeah.
[02:01:57]  Cool, man.
[02:01:57]  Well, we'll link it all below so people can check it out.
[02:01:59]  It's great.
[02:01:59]  And thanks again.
[02:02:00]  I appreciate it.
[02:02:01]  Okay.
[02:02:01]  Thanks.
[02:02:01]  Thanks for having me.
[02:02:02]  Yeah.
[02:02:02]  Bye, everybody.