Alex Thomson is an independent journalist and regular contributor to UK Column, where he presents under the "Eastern Approaches" platform. Educated at Rugby School and Cambridge, he began his career with a Christian mission in the former Soviet Union before serving as an officer at GCHQ during his twenties. James visited Alex at home with his father, also named Alex, to discuss biblical studies, language, and reality itself.https://www.ukcolumn.org/writer/alex-thomson-eastern-approaches↓ Monetary Metals is providing a true alternative to saving and earning in dollars by making it possible to save AND EARN in gold and silver.
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I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but it's special guests this week, and we've got a double bill of Alex Thompson's.
There are two of them.
There's Alex Thompson Senior and Alex Thompson Junior.
Now, you've met Alex Thompson Junior before.
And I'm excited to meet his dad, who knows possibly even more than Alex does about all sorts of esoteric things.
But we're going to talk mainly today, aren't we, about scripture and Christianity and which I don't want to put off the atheists out there.
No, no.
I think this is going to be really...
It's going to be a really interesting chat and we're going to skitter around.
In all sorts of directions.
Before we go on, Alex Senior, can I ask you, you said something really interesting, which I didn't know, about how in the old days, and I'm not sure when this ended, there was a tradition in Scotland, but also in England, where the three most important people in the area would talent spot clever boys and sometimes girls and educate them.
In Scotland, as in England, the parish system was the important political, geographical entity for most people.
And you had three worthies.
You had the lord, the laird in Scotland, the former law, the minister, the minister of the church, and the domine, the schoolmaster.
And that was a pecking order.
And these three kept...
The morals of the parish, and of course there was a parish constable to police the place.
He didn't bother about policemen outside the parish, he was a parish guy who kept the peace at the behest of the three.
And so, and they regarded it as their duty, not simply their privilege, but their duty to make sure that poor lads, and sometimes poor lassies, who had a bit up top, the lads of perts parts, and the lads of perts, the lads of parts.
We're properly educated.
So they, rather like the medieval monks, used to go around from the monastery, around the villages, and spot a lad and go and say, Mr and Mrs, we can take the lad off your hands.
You won't have to feed him.
We'll feed him and educate him.
Give him to the monastery and he'll have a good career.
And he would be educated and write out scripture and other documents and so forth.
And that...
Obtained, really, also.
They weren't taken necessarily away from home.
Although sometimes they were taken into the minister's house, or the nominee's house, or the Lord's house.
It did happen.
Anyway, they got an education, and that's why even in England, especially from the Reformation on, the High Renaissance Stroke Reformation on, you've got people going up to Oxford and Cambridge from poor backgrounds, if you read some of the 17th century.
Biographies of poor lads up in Cambridge, Shining or Oxford.
And the same in Scotland.
Remember, four ancient universities in Scotland.
Scenarios, for example, to where I went was founded in 1411. They were fairly old universities without a tradition.
And the students were poor.
They would go home, for example, they would bring a sack of meal with them to university and that would last them a term or whatever.
Then they would go home and get another sack for the next term.
They were poor, you know, but they were educated.
And that was the system.
So that Scotland always had a high proportion of educated people.
And from the Reformation on, this was really emphasised.
For example, John Knox, who might not have been a very personable fellow individually, was not just a religious Christian genius, but a political genius.
An educational genius.
He made sure there were schools in Scotland and he made sure, for example, when the Geneva Bible came out, before the authorised version, from 1557 onwards, he made sure that every household that could afford one had to have one by law so that people could read a Bible.
What, Dad?
What is this heresy you're telling us?
Surely we all know that the King James Bible was invented by a couple of deep state goons, and before that nobody had any Bibles in Scotland or England.
It is true that deep state was evolved.
So you had from Wycliffe onwards, Wycliffe translated from the Latin, but then when the realisation came in that the New Testament was actually written in Greek, which Wycliffe knew himself, Remember that the Latin Vulgate was the Bible of the West.
And it had been cleansed by Jerome and then got gradually depraved again in some of its parts.
So when the Reformation came, the Renaissance, remember, I say the Renaissance stroke Reformation because I regard it as a unity.
The Christian humanists of the Renaissance.
And I won't give that term humanists to atheists.
It's Christian humanists.
That's what they were called.
And Latin in St Andrews is still what was called the Department of Humanity.
That was the usage.
And so that impetus was there.
And, of course, Greeks came in from when Constantinople, Istanbul, further than 1453 to the Turks, really.
And that drove manuscripts and men, Greek-speaking scholars, westwards.
In quite big numbers, really.
And so the universities picked this up in a big way and started learning really did start.
And with a slight delay after that, of course, Hebrew, not just manuscripts, but the first printed editions of Hebrew came from the Jews of Venice further west as well.
And in fact, the most famous Jewish Bible, the Bornberg of 1543, I think it was, was actually done by a Christian man under the aegis of a Jew.
So there was a lot of, and many of the Puritans in England, quite a few Puritans learned their Hebrew from Jewish rabbis when we admitted them back in.
Remember, to the shame of Cromwell haters, it was Oliver Cromwell who invited the Jews back into England.
It was the Puritans who had Latter-day glory men and Millennialists and all that sort of thing.
Anyway, so that went a bit better for the Bible.
We've got the great Tyndale.
That's really the rock.
So 1534, Tyndale's mordered on the continent.
He's produced his first New Testament, translation of the Greek New Testament, the second edition he wants to, and it's smuggled into England.
But the Bishop of London is ready.
Because of spies.
Sieges.
He actually pays for it.
And destroys them.
But Tindall says, thank God for him.
Because now I can do my second edition and improve the first one.
Yeah, so God was in it.
Yeah, see?
So he did his second edition.
He went to the...
He was murdered in...
Judiciary murdered on the continent.
A precursor of the European arrest warrant, because Charles V agents did it on behalf of Henry VIII. They strangled him?
As a courtesy to a scholar, they garrotted him on the gallows before his body was burnt.
It was not uncommon, apparently, even if a common person was being burned, if a soldier took a liking to you.
He would knock your brains out rather than see you suffer.
Nice!
Yeah, a quick death rather than the agonising, slow...
Because remember, it's not the flames that kill you, it's just the smoke.
Asphyxiation.
Asphyxiation.
It's a nasty way to go.
So why did they want to kill him?
They did not want the New Testament in a language understanded of the people.
Quite simply.
Oh, OK. Because...
Officially, they'll tell you now, officially, Rome will tell you now, that we weren't against the reading of the scriptures in the vernacular, but they were in fact, because what they didn't want was people doing their own interpretation.
That's inevitable, of course, when people are educated, they will do that.
You used the wording, understand it of the people, because of the language used in the 39 articles of the Church of England.
That's right, the language, yes, understand it of the people, yes.
And so Tyndale translated from the Septuagint.
No, from the Greek, first of all, the Greek New Testament.
Right.
The Greek New Testament that Erasmus of Rotterdam had produced.
So, Harmonson, Erasmus, yeah?
No, that's Arminius.
Erasmus and others, they produced, from the manuscripts that were in Europe, they produced in 15, 15 or 16, I think it was, I've got to remember my date.
The first actual The first actual printed New Testament was under Cardinal Ximenes at Alcala Complutensius, which is more than Alcala in Spain.
And he employed a man called Zunica.
And they actually produced the first printed New Testament.
It had to go to Rome to be sanctioned.
And unfortunately there were delays, whether intentional or accidental, we won't go into that.
And it wasn't until about 1522 or something or later that it was sanctioned.
In the meantime, Erasmus had been working on the Greek New Testament under his publisher, Froben.
And Froben said, get your skates on because we're going to be beaten.
You know, and sales are going to go to the competentians.
And for the neophytes, this is competition between two wings of reformist Roman Catholics.
Roman Catholics.
Now, this is interesting because there are men, we've got to be fair to honour to whom honour, that these men were on, if you want, the left wing of the Roman.
And Erasmus, of course, had a lot of criticism for a lot of the nastiness that was going on amongst priests.
But so did...
Ximenaes.
Ximenaes had spent a young and younger part of his time in prison.
And if you...
Why wasn't there a Reformation in Spain?
Because people like Teresa of Avila cleansed Spain to some extent.
Because there was a moral movement in Spain, if you want, that seemed to hive off the Reformation.
Spain, what's now Benelux, there was a very high demand to know what the Bible said.
So that's the...
Growing middle classes could read it in their own languages.
And those who had the time and inclination could also find out what the original Greek said.
And this was all happening at the final pre-Reformation stage of the Roman Catholic Church.
There's no plot in a single country or church going on.
And it's important that when these Bibles were produced by...
Sorry, Erasmus published that.
And then it's important also that continually after that...
Erasmus produced quite a number of editions, improving his own product.
Another man came in and, yeah, so you got between 1516 and Beza in 1598, you got quite a lot of editions being produced.
So, you know, honing, you know, not significantly different, but honing the sort of New Testament.
And James asked, of course, about what was the You've just answered for the Greek New Testament.
Septuagint, the Greek of the Old Testament, wasn't used.
Tyndall was the first Englishman in a small number of scholars, mostly German at that stage, who had recovered the knowledge of Hebrew.
Erasmus, a Dutch Roman Catholic humanist, learned his Hebrew in Cambridge by going to the rabbis there.
So Tyndall was the first generation scholar for English and Luther at the same time for German.
Who translated directly from the Hebrew.
And unlike the Greek New Testament, there is virtually no debate over the text within the original language.
For Greek, there's a lot of variations.
Luther also used Erasmus' second edition to do history, his groundbreaking German edition, when he was taking refuge at Wittenberg.
It's important that we've gone into this for nearly a quarter of an hour, because a lot of people are slinging a lot of nonsense around.
I'm sure James will ask a question about that in a moment, suggesting...
That the Bible could just be cooked up, or reimagined, and that nobody would be any the wiser.
No, no.
And of course you've got in Byzantium, the original Byzantium, Constantinople, and then Istanbul.
Istanbul, by the way, is East Tampolin, to the city, at the city.
It's a corruption of the Greek words.
At the city, the main city, metropolis.
And, of course, you're in a Greek-speaking part of the world where the Greek New Testament was continually, and continuously, rather, the Greek New Testament.
It wasn't translated for them.
They used, from the apostolic time onwards, the Greek New Testament.
You've elegantly answered, I think, what would the next objection have been?
Which is, oh, all these variations in the Greek New Testament.
Fair enough, they say that the Jews never had any variations in the Old Testament because they were careful copyists.
But they say all these differences in the New Testament.
And you've given the bedrock of the answer, which is the Greek-speaking church knew what was significant.
But the ancient world lived with variations in manuscripts from classical men onwards.
Because it's inevitable when you're copying by hand, even the most careful scholar copying can make a mistake.
He's tired.
His eye slips.
He went to the city, and he went to the treasury, and he went to the palace.
With all these and, you can miss maybe the middle term, but he went to the city and to the palace, and you miss out, and the treasury.
Or, another one will miss the final one.
He went to the city and to the treasury, but omits out to the palace.
So you get copies, you're thinking, well, it's obvious.
You think, when you put the copies together, some have got three terms, some have got two, and some have got another two.
And so you can say, well, it's pretty obvious.
Even the most supposedly shocking and large-scale examples, such as the woman caught in adultery in Vilnate not being in many texts, easily understood, if you have any idea about human nature and the use of the manuscripts.
Because a Greek-speaking church would have a Gospel of John, and an elder would have put in a mark saying, skip this when reading out to women and children.
And the later copyists would think, ah, I'm directed by these marks to leave this out of the copy.
And in some Greek manuscripts, you've got two words, archi telos.
It's not the beginning and end of the diopter.
It means the beginning and end of the reading for the day.
So what you're doing is you've got manuscripts that copy the whole of a document, a New Testament book, and you've got manuscripts, many of them, that are lectionaries that copy simply what is fit to be had in church.
Now, the woman in adultery is not fit to be had in church.
Why?
Because it might encourage adultery.
So it's reckoned It's still scripture, but they're a bit squeamish about it, so they take it out for the common good.
They go a bit Romish with it, you know.
A bit inconsistent for Protestants, but they do it.
And we know why they did it, yeah?
Yeah.
And the so-called ending of Mark is omitted in two of our earliest manuscripts.
But there's a reason for that.
And you can actually, if you look at the manuscripts, there are gaps, unique gaps there.
You can see that a scribe has said, there should be something there, but I've had to admit it.
And if you fit the missing bit in, it does actually match.
People have done it with the same script and so forth.
And that's because Jerome, for example, one of the church's fathers, Jerome actually says a woman in adultery is found in non nullis, in non-son manuscripts, because it might encourage people.
It's thought it might encourage you.
The other one is because the ending of Mark doesn't quite seem to fit the pattern of the other Gospels.
And that's only because, not that they use commas, but Jesus having risen early on the first day of the week, or Jesus having risen early, on the first day of the week.
Jesus said, I say unto you to the thief on the cross, Lord, So the thief, remember me when you come in your kingdom.
And Jesus said, I say unto you today, comma, no, I say unto you, comma, today thou shalt be with me in paradise.
That's a comment.
That suggests that the thief and Jesus would be in paradise today.
They weren't, because paradise is not yet.
But Jesus said, it's a New Testament declaration, I say unto you today, comma, you'll be with me in paradise.
What Jesus is saying, you have no need to wait, my good man, for an answer.
I'll give it to you now.
Oh, I see.
I'll tell you today.
An emphatic Hebraic way of saying, I'll tell you now, today, I charge you this day.
If you look at the Old Testament, I say unto you this day, you will be with me in paradise.
Can I ask you a basic question, which is, which is the oldest, most reliable version of The New and Old Testament, because as I understand it, you've got the Septuagint, is it?
Yes.
Some people use a hard word.
Septuagint, or you've got the Masoretic text, which I thought originally, my ignorance being in Hebrew, oh, well, they must be the original, they must be really old, but apparently they date from the 9th or 10th centuries.
Yeah, yeah, but this is a big problem, and you face it in classical scholarship.
If you have a tense, if you have a, A 14th century copy of Plato, right?
And maybe a 10th century copy of Plato.
You mustn't assume that the 10th century is better than the 14th.
You can't do that.
Because you can have an extant, early copy of a poorer manuscript, which has survived.
And you can have a later, better copy of an earlier manuscript.
In fact, there are positive reasons why that might come about, such as people trashing.
A copy that's no good, and ergo it remains suspiciously good quality.
Manuscripts after the 9th, 10th centuries are no longer written in capital uncials, written in cursive script, we would say just ordinary writing.
And that doesn't mean, oh, they're later, therefore they're no good.
No, no, no, no.
They were taken from earlier uncials, recopied in the new script, and then some of the uncials were destroyed or let go.
To waste, because you had a better script that people used.
That was the fashion.
And so you tended to disregard these earlier manuscripts.
So rather like, if you gave me your biography, your autobiography, in written form, now that's interesting as a historical document for us.
But if he, Alex here, then types it up and publishes it, what am I going to keep?
Probably the bone book.
It's actually better to read, isn't it, than your scribbled writing, as it were.
Yeah.
But do go on and give perhaps other reasons why the Hebrew Masoretic is later in.
It was written in Hebrew and some in Aramaic, right?
Now, early, it is true that the Septuagint is a bit of a myth.
Now, Septuagint studies have come round to this, and there are a number of books on this.
And basically, the Septuagint, it means 70. It's actually 72. The myth, the story goes that when, remember, our last part of the, when Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem in 586, yeah?
BC. BC, of course, yeah.
And not 606, it's the JWC, it's 586. Some of the Jews, quite a large number, actually went into Egypt, fled to Egypt in that sense.
Now, they then formed quite a large population in the north, in Alexandria.
The large part of the city, about one-third, was Jewish at one time.
Large city, large Jewish population.
And if you read the end of the book of Jeremiah, you see God saying in terms, I'm finished with you.
He actually says to Jeremiah, you get into Egypt.
So he encourages that.
So at some point were taken into East, of course, into Mesopotamia.
And some migrated there.
But some into Egypt.
And so therefore, Ptolemy, one of the Ptolemies, after Alexander's death, remember, these dynasties were not Egyptian, they were Greek-speaking descendants, if you want, and Alexander's generals, who carved up his empire after his death.
And one of the Ptolemies said, it's about time we, I want to understand, and it's probably a right reason, it sounds right, I want to understand my Jewish subject.
And so suddenly they've got a set of laws.
Yeah, do we have a copy?
Well, yes, but nobody's translated it, Your Majesty.
Well, we'd better do something about that.
So the myth is, the rabbi said that six translators from each of the twelve tribes of Israel were invited to come and sumptuously banqueted.
Kept in separate places, and they all produced perfect, the same translation, the 72, whittled down to 70. Now, I think what generally is agreeing, seems to me to be right, is that the first five books, the Torah proper, the Chumash, the first five books of the Bible, the first five books of Moses, were translated.
As an official act by Ptolemy's government.
Because the letter of Aristius, the earliest source, says that it was the Jewish law that Ptolemy was interested in.
And that is, and it's been embellished.
And thereafter, you then started to get the rest of the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament, mostly Hebrew, translated into Greek by various people.
And not just one, several people might have a go.
So you might have several copies of a book, and maybe none of this book, and then somebody would translate that book, and then somebody might correct it, that sort of thing.
But basically, by the time the New Testament came along, it does appear that the whole of the Hebrew text had been translated into at least one form of Greek.
And the earlier rabbis appeared to have taken the view, did take the view, that basically these books were holy.
They defiled the hand.
That means if you touch them in the wrong way.
Books are holy.
They defiled the hand.
And so they're there to be regarded.
And they were encouraged because the Jews of Alexandria didn't speak Hebrew anymore.
They'd forgotten it.
And so they spoke Greek.
So that was fine.
And that's what they did.
Sometimes in the synagogues, especially in Palestine and other places, the Hebrew would be read out and then there would be a targum, a translation given by somebody.
He would read the Hebrew out and I would stand by his side and translate it into the Aramaic or Palestinian Syriac or the Egyptian Demotic or whatever tongue was spoken.
But people were encouraged to, their own language, study.
If Greek was what they understood, they were encouraged to study the Greek.
What would Jesus have read?
By the time Jesus came, we have an interesting situation because we undoubtedly have, if you look in the book of the Acts, we have several synagogues described.
The synagogue of the freedmen.
Roman freedmen, you know, who maintained that sort of status between full citizen and slave, as it were.
Libertines in the King James.
And then the synagogue of the Hellenists.
Of the Hellenists.
That means that they were Greek-speaking people in Palestine.
So they didn't use Hebrew.
They used Greek.
Because by that time, the world, after the death of Alexander, the conquest of Alexander, Hellenised the non-world.
And Greek became the lingua franca.
Of the West, certainly.
Of the East tended still to be Aramaic, although Greek was widely understood.
And so, in a place like Palestine, even in Rome, the Christians, many of the slaves, for example, would speak Greek rather than Latin.
So, you know, you've got that sort of world.
And of course, many of the intelligentsia of Rome learned Greek because they regarded Greek civilization as greater than their literature, as greater than their own in many ways.
So you've got that mishmash.
And you can almost prove that Jesus spoke Greek.
He would speak Hebrew as a sacred tongue.
He would recognise Hebrew anyway.
Read it, certainly read it, if not speak it.
Of course, Aramaic, in forms of Aramaic, because that would be his daily tongue.
You can see that from the Gospels.
And he would speak Greek.
And I think he can prove that, because when it's Caesarea Philippi, he takes them outside of the land of Israel.
And Caesarea Philippi is a gentile city outside.
And he takes them and there it's called, in ancient, it was called Panias.
Modern Panias.
Panias because it was dedicated to the god Pan.
It was a Roman, a Hellenistic Roman city.
And with grottos and caves and statues of Pan.
And the Grotus, the mouth of Hades.
And Jesus said, and he takes them to this city at a point of crisis, and he says, who do men say that I am?
Some say you're John the Baptist, some say, and who do you say I am?
Thou art the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed, the Son of God.
Not God, but the Son of God.
And blessed are thou, yeah?
Simon Bar-Jonas, Peter, who articulates.
And he says, he said, you'll no longer be called Kephas, which is Aramaic for rock, but Petros.
Now, you can't make that pun in Aramaic.
Because you'll not only be called Kephas, but Kephas.
Well, I thought, so Petros is rock in Greece.
Petra is a rock.
Petros is a pebble.
A bit of...
Oh, okay.
What was the other word?
Kepha.
Is it?
Kepha.
Kepha in Aramaic.
And the S puts the ending on to make a nominative case, a subject case.
So you're no longer Kepha, but Kepha.
Sorry?
Ah, you're no longer Kepha or Kephas, but Petros.
You can make the distinction now.
Why?
Because, and upon this Petra, This feminine form, I will build my church.
In other words, the Petra is either Christ himself or the confession of faith in him.
So you, upon this Petra, it's probably best to look at it as a double idea, upon this Petra, that is me as being confessed as the Lord, you, Petros, the first to tell me to recognise that, you'll be called Petros, you'll be called Rockman.
I'm the rock and you'll be called rock man.
Is it?
Rocky.
Yeah?
The wee Rocky.
Something like that.
Yeah?
And so you can prove from things like that that he spoke Greek.
Yeah?
Right.
And that's not unusual because if you take Matthew at the receipt of customs at Galilee, you think, well, what would Matthew be doing speaking Greek in Galilee?
Quite simply.
Because the Romans brought fish from the Galilee.
There was a big fish trade.
What you regard as a poor wee fisherman in the Gospels is quite inaccurate.
These were middle-class tradesmen.
Right.
Businessmen.
With advanced shorthand techniques, for example.
I mean, we have given up everything for you.
We haven't given up property for you, Jesus.
We've given up wealth for you.
We've given up a comfortable way of life.
Right.
And Jesus said, don't worry about that.
You'll be rewarded.
Yes, so Matthew is sitting there recording the captives because there's a Roman tax.
As always, the Romans like to tax everything just as much as any chancellor here does.
And so he's writing down and he has to use shorthand to do it.
And he has to speak Greek and Aramaic and Latin and various other languages.
And I mean, for example, the Emperor Trajan I used to have a competition with the stenographer, the shorthand writer, because Trajan knew, yeah, and see who could write it down the fastest.
So it was quite common, and you could use wax tablets.
You could do it on papyrus, or you could use wax tablets, and then you can...
So you might be bringing a batch in, and I'm sitting there recording the amount you brought in, and when I've done that, I might transfer that to a parchment as total, and then I could wipe the wax clean.
And use it for something else.
It's worth your while having gone into this, because so many people are still slinging around the notion that anyone could have made up anything that Jesus said and did.
Yes, yes.
So you get that sort of background, really.
So it is a cosmopolitan place.
We should recommend the Slender book by Carsten Teter.
T-H-I-E-D, yeah.
The Cosmopolitan World of Jesus, and the author's surname is T-H-I-E-D-E. Yeah, tragically killed in a crash, but it was good.
I haven't really familiarised myself with the arguments about people who say Jesus didn't exist.
Where does this come from?
What's the nub of that?
The child is father of the wish.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, we should establish your credentials.
You were the favourite student of the leading Professor of Greek in the English-speaking world in his days.
Professor Kenneth Dover at St Andrews.
And you are well familiar with this from the 60s, already being claimed that Jesus was made up.
So what's new?
It's not new.
It goes back a long way, this sort of thing.
But if you take that sort of attitude, you end up in silence.
Because, fine, did Alexander the Great exist?
Did Napoleon exist?
No, that's an interesting one.
People say that he didn't.
No, you are.
Well, on what grounds?
Did anybody in the past exist?
Did anybody in the past exist?
No, why shouldn't I say that Kaiser Wilhelm didn't exist?
I guess he's on film.
Oh, really?
Seeing is no believing?
You can now present me with a digital document that I cannot tell.
That between an AI-generated or even a pre-AI-doctored film and a real one.
So, yeah, all right, let's go back and say, well, let's give you the benefit of the doubt.
Wilhelm's on film.
Does really?
Does really exist?
Does Queen Victoria exist?
She's pictured somewhere.
Right, okay.
Where do we draw the margin?
What, 1837 when she came to the throne?
Shall we say before 1837 we're not sure that anybody existed?
A revisionist scholar would say that there was proto-Victoria and deutero-Victoria, separate people.
Exactly, yes.
And I like the answer of the professor who said, well, professor, how do you know that I exist?
And the professor said, and who's asking the question?
Descartes.
Je pense dont je suis.
I think that I am.
So the philosopher says, oh, well, you cannot deduce that because there's thinking.
So who's doing the thinking then?
When I say I am, I'm immediately conscious that I am.
I am.
Not you are.
I deduce that you are because I know that I am.
So I see you by analogy.
Yeah?
Yeah.
And I see, so I immediately make a connection that you are.
And you can say within yourself, I am.
And you can say to me, you are.
Yeah.
And in the same, for me as a Christian, even before I was a Christian, if you want, I deduced that God is for the same reason.
I'm with Descartes on this.
Yeah.
And to call him a rationalist is just a piece of nonsense because it's intuition.
You cannot prove these things.
You can prove if one and one equals two and two and two equals four, then you can prove by axiom because you've defined it.
1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 4. So that's a mathematical proof, which is probably intuitive.
But to prove intuitive things is quite difficult as well, although we all intuit them to be true.
And we can see that the rules of mathematics are logical.
It's not a million miles away from what Dad was saying earlier, actually, because Dad was saying you actually have to use your mind about...
The circumstances in which Jesus is talking to his apostles.
Use your mind about the ways in which manuscripts were stored and used in churches.
And use your mind about where the pause in breath goes that becomes a comma after biblical times.
And people jump up and down and say, why isn't God clear in his communication?
And not just the Dutch types, but even in otherwise educated minds, people say, I want God to speak clearly in a single text.
They refuse.
To use their own mind and deduction as a source of knowledge.
So, if I say to you, James, behind that wardrobe there, behind that dresser, there are two green men from Mars.
Now, you would say, Alex, don't be absurd.
There are no green men.
And I say, wait a minute, James, how do you know that?
How do you know there are not little green men on Mars?
Because space is fake and gay.
Yeah.
Aha, there you are.
I know that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, there.
Right.
Now let's say that, how do you know there's not a policeman lurking on the other side of that fence waiting to raid the house?
I think he'd have showed himself by now.
But it's not logically absurd.
It's not, it is logically a possibility.
It's practically, yeah?
Now, I can say this example because one of the best lecturers in Dr Hunter, when I did logic and metaphysics at St Andrews.
He reduced the idea on the curtains, heavy curtains in the small lecture theatre.
He said, how do I not know there's not two Martians behind the curtains?
And we said, of course, don't we?
And he said, but it's not a logical impossibility, is it?
No, it isn't.
If green men from Mars, if Mars exists and there are green men on Mars and they can travel here, it's theoretically possible they're hiding behind the curtain.
It's not practically possible.
So you have to make some sort of distinction.
I'm glad you've given me the background because you've always knocked down counterfactuals and hypotheticals by saying if the moon were made of green cheese, the space mice would have eaten it.
And now I know from Dr. Hunter's lecture where you got the idea.
The moon is not made of green cheese and there are no space mice.
At least we haven't seen them.
But even that is...
So you get that.
So what we call possible and impossible, it's logical possibility.
The circle cannot be a square.
That's why God cannot do the impossible.
You cannot ask God, who is the author of logic, to do something illogical.
Even God cannot square the circle.
There's concentric rings here.
Anyone who thinks seriously about God, even a deist, any kind of monotheist or henotheist will say God cannot contradict himself, right?
Anyone who's a biblical Christian...
Or indeed a serious biblical Jew or Quranic Muslim will go further and say God cannot lie, which is in Titus, Absustos, he's unlying.
And then Protestant and Reformed theology goes further than that and says that God cannot undo his promises and he cannot, as some have maintained that God decides to stop being a righteous God in order to save people mercifully in Christ.
And so the more you think about it and the more consistently you take God seriously.
People, seriously.
You actually delineate God's scope of action more, don't you?
If you cannot say anything about anything, if you get into this solipsistic nonsense of my own universe, you can't even talk about my own universe because you're begging the question of me and universe and laws of logic, right?
Right.
For those who don't know what begging the question really means, Dad uses it in the correct sense there, which means assuming the conclusion is taken for granted.
Because it's quite simple.
In a chaotic system, if you imagine, like some of the Stoics used to believe that the world was just a collocation of atoms, you know, randomly falling, as it were.
In a chaotic system, the concept of chaos, you cannot have cosmos.
In chaos, the yawning, the gap, you cannot have any order.
So you cannot mentally have any concept of disorder.
Because you don't have any concept of disorder or order.
You just have disorder.
And you can't think in disorder.
But when I'm in cosmos, when I'm in order, I can think of its opposite, okay?
Another of your lifetime occupations has been how to understand the first chapters of Genesis.
And that's the bare bones of your mature understanding, isn't it?
More distinctively than other ancient Near Eastern mythologies.
Genesis is saying there was chaos and God made cosmos, order out of it.
But the chaos that God made in Genesis was a different type of chaos.
If you look at the Babylonian myths, you get chaos.
Because even in the Babylonian myths and the Teutonic myths, they're all reflections of the same.
There's original chaos, disorder, lack of cosmos.
And out of that comes...
Some sort of order, including the gods.
But the gods themselves are born out of chaos in a way that we're not told how that happens.
Yeah?
And that's impossible in my view.
Did God make chaos as well?
No.
Because in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
If you look at the Enuma Elish of the Babylonians, when on high there was nothing, yeah?
There was no order.
There was no nothing.
Then, if you look it up, You'll see it's chaos.
And out of the chaos is born the gods come out of that.
And then the gods sort of vie and do things.
And there are gods and gods, as it were.
And so you get all that sort of thing.
But Genesis is nothing like that.
People say, oh, it's just a copy of.
It isn't a copy of.
It's written against the background of ancient mythologies, but to correct them, because the first two words in Genesis, in beginning, there's no article, but that's not unusual with prepositional phrases, But you can say in what is regarded as the beginning, it doesn't matter.
God created, using a special verb, that only God, yeah?
Usually God is the subject of that verb.
The heavens and the earth.
So in other words, there's an initial act of creation.
Now, even with the Big Bang, you can say that's still consistent, because if there was a universe before that that contracted, for example, and the Big Bang was born out of that, you can say that's still the beginning of God bringing a universe into existence.
And then, and the earth was void and without form.
It's after the act of creation that...
There is limited chaos.
It's an ordered chaos.
Chaos is our own word.
It's a void.
The earth is unformed and unfilled.
That is, it hasn't reached its full form yet, and it hasn't been filled with life yet.
And then Genesis then goes on to say, and God talks about let the waters be gathered, let the dry land appear, let the waters be gathered into one place, let the dry land appear.
That's the forming of the earth.
The full forming.
And then let light be light.
That is the swirling away of the clouds.
And so the earth becomes visible.
Because remember, the initial earth is enveloped in clouds, even in scientific understanding.
And then you get the beginnings of life.
And it's the green, really, representing this sort of lower...
The algae and then you get the progressive forming and filling.
So that the three days, the first three days are really the forming of the earth, right?
And the next three days are the filling of the earth.
So the earth is no longer unformed and unfilled.
And I like that translation because it keeps the alliteration in the...
because the Hebrew is tohu and bohu.
So if you keep...
Something like unformedness.
It's an abstract noun.
And unfilledness.
We would just say unformed and unfilled.
And you keep the idea going.
Three days of forming and three days of filling in a two-by-three table.
Two-by-three table.
And when was the bit where the rebel angels get thrown down to earth?
Yes.
Jesus said.
The clues are what Jesus said.
When they, he sends the disciples out, in Matthew 10 is it, and other parallels, and he sends them out to a mission to Israel, or go only to the lost house of Israel, the house of Israel.
He says, time's not yet come to go to the Gentiles.
Just go, confine it to the land of Israel.
And they go out, and they come back and report to him.
Lord, he said, we went here, and The devils were subject to us.
The demons were subject to us.
We healed the sick and we cast out demons.
And Jesus said, I beheld Satan fall from heaven.
In other words, when the disciples were going round, the vision that Jesus had was that Satan was falling from heaven.
Now, it's not to be regarded as a one-off, I think.
It's a reality that we've got to understand that Biblically, you have the earth and the heavenlies.
And you have heaven.
Or the third heaven, is it sometimes called?
Yes, it's sometimes called heaven.
Now, sometimes heaven or heavens is used as the absolute dwelling place of God.
The machome, the place of God.
Sometimes it's used as the place of spiritual powers.
Yeah.
Right?
And the spiritual powers are a mixture of good and evil.
For we wrestle not, we wrestle our wrestling, we wrestle, comma, not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers.
Now, there can't be principalities and powers of the earth, because Paul's just said, our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but the principalities of this earth, no matter how highly exalted, are flesh and blood.
He's not saying that in Galatians chapter 6, verse 16. He's saying...
So, in other words, the Christian is not called to wrestle against the men of the New World Order?
No, only so far as they represent powers that are against God.
So, if you get, say, the Book of Job, in the first two chapters, when the sons of God are in convocation, a holy convocation, unlike another one that's taking place at the moment elsewhere in the Church of England, That's the divine counsel idea.
That's an Eastern idea.
And so the gods, that's the angels, the good angels, the gods, because these words are used generically.
The word God in the scripture and is in English.
Your belly is your God.
Satan's a God.
His wife is a goddess to him.
That sort of thing.
What's his wife called?
No, no, no, no.
I'm saying...
Somebody can say that man's wife is a goddess.
Oh, I see.
Sorry, sorry.
But with a capital G, it's deity.
They're deity.
Yeah.
And Hebrew's got the same.
The word Elohim, the so-called plural.
It can be a singular entity.
So it can be a singular?
Yeah, because what people call plurals are extensions.
Mostly they are plurals.
It's like book, books, table, tables.
But when you're talking about God and certain other words, creator and certain other words, it can be an external, extensive plural, that we would call a plural, or an internal, intensive.
So that means it's still a singular subject, but intensified.
Oh, I see.
For example, 2 Kings, as you know, when Elijah is taken up to heaven in the fiery chariot, and Elisha has one wish to be granted, genie-like, but it is in Scripture.
And he says, if it please you, Lord, may I have, in Hebrew, he says, two portions, or it's in the dual number, a double portion of the spirit that was on Elijah, may it rest on me.
Now he's saying, may I have a lot, plenty of the spirit that was in Elijah.
Right.
So, and this is relevant because I know, James, you are concerned about people saying, I see this ex-Vatican translator saying, I have discovered that Elohim, it means a bunch of angels.
It can mean that.
It can mean.
So, what is Samé?
What is man that thou art mindful of him?
Or the son of man that thou should visit him?
Well, not of the modern mistranslations of, you know, What is humanity or some sort of thing like that?
Because the Son of Man is both generic and particular of Christ.
That's what the real meaning is, as shown in the book of Hebrews.
Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels.
Elohim.
Some translations than God.
Some gods.
Spiritual beings would probably be a better, yeah?
So in other words, It's not saying you've made them less than God.
I mean, that's pretty obvious to a human being.
But you've made them less than the spiritual powers, if you want.
Yeah, all of whom God created.
All of whom God created.
Now, some of them turned against him.
We know that.
Yes?
So, you go back to Genesis, chapter 3. At the end of chapter 2, the man and the woman were naked.
There's a pun on what's coming.
And they were not ashamed.
They didn't know any shame.
Because they didn't know they were arumim, were naked.
Right?
Now, the serpent, the nachash, it's a better word than snake, the nachash, was more arum.
Now, it's a different word, but it's a homonym.
Two words that sound the same, but different meanings.
Genesis 3.1.
Then all the creatures, yeah, from.
It's literally from all the creatures of the Sade, the field.
Now, when you look at that, people say, the question is, Adam and Eve were in Eden, Gan Eden, the enclosure of Delight, the Idunu, the steppe, probably up between Lake Orme and Lake Van, in the Armenian highlands, the Antonian highlands.
That's probably where Eden was located.
What was this creature of the field?
Now the field lies outside Eden, because Adam and Eve are given the command to replenish the earth, i.e.
fill it up, not re, in our sense, it's in all the sense of re, meaning intensifying the verb, to plenish it, to fill it up, and to subdue it.
Hebrew kabash, bash it down, bash it down lad, bash it down.
Kabash is used of conquering your enemies.
What they're saying is, outside of Eden, there is a battle to be done.
And it's put in terms of, in here, you've got pleasant work to do, but you now have a task.
Because the task is to go out from Eden, right before the fall.
That was the original idea.
And from this base, this holy base of Eden, which is a temple and a safe...
And they have to guard it against anything intruding in it.
To dress and keep it has a double meaning in the Hebrew.
Not just be a nice gardener, it means to be a priest.
Because the priests of the ancient temples guarded the temple against foreigners.
And set it up for work.
To protect the god that lived at the top of the ziggurat, the tower.
So that idea is a distortion of the biblical idea.
So basically you have to go out and do that.
Now, what is out there is to be conquered.
There's something there.
That's lurking.
The ground itself.
What is to be found there?
It's to be conquered.
Brought to heal, brought to subjection.
This is not a very popular idea, but that's what the Bible tells you.
Now, what is the beast of the field doing in Eden?
Answer, he's there unlawfully.
He snuck in.
Guys, sneak it, wee laddie.
Big laddie.
And he appears to Eve, not as a wee snake.
But as an achash, a shining serpent, a mesmerising, probably, figure.
Yeah?
And multicoloured, I don't know.
Like the one in South American mythology?
Yes, that's sort of...
With an iridescent flared hood and all that stuff.
I mean, you honestly think Eve would be bothered, but a wee bit of a stick on the ground that was speaking to her.
You probably should go away, you silly creature.
That's an impressive snake.
It's something about it that's mesmerising.
And he's, you know, the cunning, the cunning.
Because we're told that it was through cunning that he was deceived.
But Adam was not deceived.
Adam had not yet.
But he fell because he loved his wife rather than the command of God.
Now, so this snake plants the idea.
So this...
This is one of the Elohim.
This is one of the spiritual beings.
Okay.
And he comes here to say, well, he's not yet called Satan.
If you read the Bibles in Revelation, he should expressly identify that ancient serpent, that archaic serpent.
He was there at the beginning.
Is Satan Lucifer?
Yes.
No, we call him Lucifer.
But Lucifer is in Isaiah.
The morning star, Lucifer, the light bringer.
And it's unfortunate in a way that what was meant originally just as a neutral or a good term for the morning star, the bringer of light, is transferred to Lucifer because Paul says that even the messengers of Satan can transform themselves into angels of light, messengers of light.
So that's the idea that Satan can present himself as a messenger of light.
And deceive people.
Christ does reassert for himself the title Morning Star at the end of Revelation.
At the end of Revelation, yes.
So this accuser, if you want, appears in the book of Job in the first two chapters when the Divine Council of the Elohim presided over by the great God, Yahweh, the great, the supreme God.
And it says, Satan presented, this Satan, Satan.
Not just Satan, an adversary, it means adversary in Hebrew.
The adversary, that is one we know about.
The one par excellence, the supreme adversary.
Not just anything, yeah?
So it's already a name, if you want, as well as a description, and it's a well-known one.
We know who he is.
Now, Job doesn't know because he doesn't see what's going on in the council.
We know.
The reader knows.
The listener knows.
And he presents himself either as a member of the council or as one who has a right to attend meetings of the council.
And he's not chucked out.
What are you doing here?
Where have you come from?
I come from walking up to and fro upon the earth.
That is my sphere.
That is a sphere that's been either allotted to me or I have usurped.
And you've acquiesced in it, God.
And he doesn't acquiesce forever, because you'll remember, James, that at least in Western and Jewish numbering, Psalms 50 and Psalm 82, one number lower in Septuagint and Eastern Orthodox numbering, 50 and 82 are the two Psalms that expressly treat of the Divine Council, where God addresses...
It's a fallen Elohim, led by Satan, and says, I've had enough of you misleading the nations.
Yes.
I'm chucking you out.
You're all the children of the Most High.
You shut me as Adam.
You die.
There's an end to you.
Immortal beings you might have been created as.
Yeah.
Your immortality is derived from me.
And I will bring it to an end one day.
But...
In the Scots Psalter, from me your beings are.
You're me, your beings are.
The problem is, there were so many potential...
Digressions here.
I'm not sure which one to pick on.
But very briefly, if we can be brief on this one, in the modern servants of the rulers of the darkness of this world, the people who actually run the bloodline families and stuff, there seems to be a division within the evil ones on Earth between those who are Dedicatedly satanic in their activities.
And those who follow Lucifer, and they see him as a separate thing.
So the Satanists are into kind of adrenochrome and paedophilia and killing children.
Trump, for example, is a Luciferian.
He's an intelligent, intellectual sort of devil worshipper.
So how do you explain this?
Because if Satan can transform himself or his angels into messengers of light, they're capable of pandering, if that's the word, and presenting themselves in any way to human intellect or emotion.
They can turn any politician or professor into an Eve, simpering at his loveliness.
So they might go to a Democrat and then to a Republican, and the Democrat might Proposed policy A and the Democrat policy B, and they seem to be at loggerheads, but they're both satanic.
That is, they both suit the ultimate power.
Sometimes it's a Mr. Nice and Mr. Nasty act, isn't it?
Again, just briefly, was Milton right?
Is the Moloch really all...
Has he got his junior...
Well, yes, I mean, he was an Aryan because he believed that Jesus pre-existed and was created as a second god, which is a lesser god, which is an Aryan, one of you.
And we know that because his Christian doctrine, which is worth reading, was secreted away by him because he knew he'd be in trouble if he published it.
And it wasn't discovered until the 19th century in the library, hidden behind something.
Crikey!
Yeah, so, you know, it wasn't, because if you published in those days, remember the Heresy Act was brought in in 1689, I think it was, after the Toleration Act of 1680 Act of Settlement, and it wasn't repealed until 1830 or so.
And as late as, oh, fairly late, there was a lad in Scotland who was hanged for denying the Trinity.
Very early 18th century.
So Milton wasn't a Trinitarian, he was a Binitarian, if you want to use it, yeah?
He believes in two gods, but one lesser.
So, yes, he took the idea that there's pandemonium, all devilness, all demon place, and this one man called Satan, or one man, one entity called Satan, rules it, and there are these lesser but very powerful spiritual beings under them, Moloch and Baal and all the rest of it.
Yes.
So I wouldn't say that It's wrong.
I wouldn't necessarily go along with everything he said, but in concept, yes.
We have to think that there are spiritual powers.
Yeah, and they do have, by God's permission, they do have an effect, don't they?
They can achieve things for you.
It's clear, for example, one of the intriguing passages in Jude 2 Peter, 2 Peter Epistles, is about Angels that kept not their own estate.
And what happened to them was they were immediately Tartarised.
That is sent to Tartars.
And it uses a Greek concept.
Now, Tartars, in Greek mythology, is the lowest part of Hades.
And it's reserved for punishment.
Yes.
The other parts are just where spirits, just and unjust, wander about in shades.
And it's not the scriptures endorsing the geography, but it's getting home to its readership in the Hellenistic world, that these spiritual beings were not just rapt and said, naughty, naughty.
They were immediately taken out of circulation because what they had done was so heinous in terms of human affairs.
These would be the ones who'd fiddled with our DNA. I think it's in Genesis 6 when the sons of...
So, yeah, actually, where are you in this one?
This is one of my favourites, I have to say.
I think that what is being played out now is the battle between the seed of the serpent and the son of man.
Yes.
And this sort of miscegenation between the fallen angels and humans.
This is why the Old Testament God can be quite severe when he says, I want you to destroy everything.
Because he understands.
Is that right?
That's right, because when Jesus...
Heal the gathering man, the madman.
And remember, when he cast out more than one evil demon from the man, the spirit, they begged him, Jesus, not to send them to hell, but to let them enter the swine.
Why?
Because they crave...
In a corporeal existence.
They lack a corporeal existence.
Now we don't know too much about this, and I don't want to be speculating, but it's clear that they prefer to be in a body, because they can do things in the body that they cannot do out of the body.
They're malevolent, but a body gives them the power, more power to do something.
So either they enter the body themselves, or they manipulate another body.
So obviously it's easier if they can enter a body and control that body.
So even if it's the pigs, let us go into the pigs.
So it is obviously in their prime interest to induce man to make chemical, neurological, electronic, genetic discoveries and applications of those discoveries that will invite them in.
I tell you what, it's completely changed my view on the works of David Bowie.
I mean, he's all over this stuff.
He's talking about this stuff.
Yes.
So many of them are, aren't they?
The saviour machine and so on.
So, I've always thought, when you look at Genesis 6, the alternative is that it's when the sons of men saw the...
Sons of God.
Sons of God.
When the sons of men saw the daughters...
When the sons of God beheld the daughters of men that they were fair.
So that's the godly and ungodly then, but that doesn't really fit for me.
It's difficult.
But it always seemed very clear, and when I read the Duke passage, that always seemed very clear, the answer to it.
But somehow, what they did at that point in Genesis 6 was to have some sort of experiment with DNA, sexual DNA, sexual chromosomes or genes, trying to do something to alter and manipulate human beings.
Now, that was clearly from what happened to them.
Yeah, that was clearly, God had said, that's an absolute no-no, you must not be doing that.
And he immediately tartarised them.
Yes.
Right out of circulation.
They were the fallen angels, Nephilim, which means the fallen ones.
But the next generation of the hybrids that they produce are giants.
And that verse, Genesis 6-4, says that those giants were in the land then.
And after this.
And they appear in numbers and in other places.
And they were the men of Shem.
They were the men of name, of renown.
And that just fit into mythologies.
People can say, oh, it's mythology.
But why did the human race, the Teutonics and the Greeks and the Indo-Europeans, the Aryans, whatever you want to call them, why do they retain a memory or a mythology with a memory of supermen?
Because there were supermen.
There were some around.
Why did the Smithsonian Institute hide all the bodies of the giants?
Of the giants?
In Malta, for example.
In the caves.
I mean, who lived in these places?
And the tomb of Gilgamesh.
Yes, yes.
Yes, yes.
Because it needed a special man to...
So does that mean that none of the giants could be goodies?
Because they're all...
Who knows about an individual?
I don't know.
Right.
As a classic and then.
Now, we've mentioned Mauro Billieri, who is trading cynically upon his reputation.
Of course, if he's any kind of big-name translator, above all for the Vatican, which so many people are intrigued about, he can get big sales for his book.
I can forgive a more amateurish dabbler in the biblical languages making the same claim about Elohim were a bunch of...
Angels or demons that God turned the other way while they fiddled with mankind.
I can understand, for example, somebody like Kevin Annett, the former minister of the gospel from Canada, who became a champion against child abuse, if you remember, among the Canadian Aboriginals.
He says that when he got his smattering of Hebrew, he tried to do a fresh translation of Genesis 1 and says, Actually, I've discovered that there's a bunch of people called Elohim.
It's nothing to do with God because Jehovah doesn't come until chapter 2. I can understand him missing that the verb is singular.
Meaning that whatever the nuance of the plural, it is a single entity doing the action.
But it's less easy to forgive or overlook somebody like Pilieri making the same claim.
The third one, because we were talking about Genesis 6-4, with the angels, according to many traditions, Porting themselves down to some Levantine hill and saying, right, now we've established Earth base, now we're going to fiddle with the human women, the daughters of man, and so on.
One of the big claimers of this was a gentleman called Maximilien de Lafayette.
You might have come across the name, or he might predate your dabbles in this corner of things.
He was a big internet alternative media interviewee.
10, 15 years ago or more, claiming to be a Frenchman appearing on American shows like Coast to Coast Radio with this sort of darksome European voice saying, actually, it's very mysterious.
There are all kinds of texts.
And this chap who went by the pseudonym Maximilien de Lafayette, he had half-decent Lebanese Arabic, like a lot of French explorers out there.
Don't ask who they were rubbing shoulders with.
And he said, oh, there were these wonderful...
Giants of great intellect who reconditioned mankind and the Babylonists false, you know?
But they showed themselves up in all kinds of ways.
De Lafayette, when he was getting too much attention, actually took himself out of the scene halfway through an interview by saying, I'm sorry, they're coming for me.
I have to end the interview now.
You know, it's very, very convenient.
And in a previous...
One of his many overpriced books and his claims in interviews was that the US State Department had hired him to check.
This would have been shortly after 2003 in his bogus claim.
They had hired him to check the veracity of the Arabic translation of the new constitution, the post-Saddam Iraq, which the US had written.
But you would never ever hire a non-native speaker, let alone one who wasn't a trained lawyer.
To check the text of a constitution, you would have to have a native Arabic-speaking qualified lawyer.
That's just a universal rule of any serious translation.
So for me as a translator, that's just another way in for me to see that some of these people are talking out of their rear end.
It's so easy for them to hoodwink people, especially in the English-speaking world and above all in the States.
Whenever you talk about translation issue, people think, oh, well, that's so vague, and who could ever have any certainty about such things, so I'll believe this claim.
Yeah, well, I think people who want to latch on, people who are of a conspiratorial mindset anyway, they want to latch on to, as long as it's got a bit of apparent scholarship in it.
So it's, yes, everyone confidently asserts Elohim means plural.
And then you go from there to one of my favourite podcasters, Guilty Pleasures, Cliff High.
Who says that, well, of course, the L, the L are these aliens.
That's what they are.
They're space aliens.
And then you get onto theories like Enki and Enlil, who apparently created us as slaves to mine the gold on...
Well, basically, that's the Anakini Gigi of the Enema Elish.
That's basically one set of the god's complaints.
So, yeah.
And so it has a lesser set of gods, and they complain, and so you have humans.
And humans were created, in the Mesopotamian version, effectively to be slaves to the gods.
So that's where it's coming from.
And you don't get that at all.
If you get complete, in Genesis, man is created.
You have to serve God, but not as a slave, as a free individual.
It's coming back with a vengeance because any group of men who think they've got spiritual power behind them who say, we have patented this group of mankind.
We have genetically or somehow altered them so that they no longer fall under Jehovah.
They're ours to use and abuse and condemn to eternal torture.
Well, I can see why it would make sense for the ruling elites to believe in a religious tradition where we were created as slaves because that's where they want us anyway, isn't it?
Yeah.
Top of a minute.
Yeah.
That'll be the police.
It could be.
You never know.
I sent them earlier.
They weren't hiding behind the shed.
No.
They were, in fact, coming through the front door.
I was just almost right.
Yeah.
Coming through the front door, yes.
Yeah.
I can just leave that out easily, you know.
Right.
Let me hold it again before I resume.
It's very heavy.
Okay, so what about the...
Chronology.
There are those who say, of course, there are many, many texts, like the Sumerians, which predate the Bible.
So the Bible just sort of picks little bits of older...
Yeah, yeah.
But it's back to the...
The Bible never claims to be the oldest book.
It's not...
it's a mozies it's 2,000, 3,000 years after the start of civil life You take the last glacial movement, the LGM, and you take then the hunter-gatherers, then becoming agrarian, you know, becoming farmers.
And you can date that pretty well.
And you're coming down from 12,000 to 11,000.
You get the magical 10,800, 10,600 of the Incas when the alignment of Giza and Anchor Watts all seem to point to the Orion belt, you know, astronomically.
So there must be something there in human memory.
The younger Dryas.
10,000 BC. Yes, so 12,000 years before present.
And this is also the age of Gobekli Tepe and some of the other places around.
And then you come down 9,000.
So you're coming down.
And so when, for example, say, oh, the Bible says that it all began in 4004 BC. Ha ha!
No, that's not wrong.
Because 4004 BC, 6,000 years ago, That is about the time when, if you want, you can envisage that that's when the Adam of Eden began.
And it says that God took the man whom he had created and put him into Eden.
Bear in mind that just as Satan is HaSatan with the definite article in Hebrew, the leading member of his category, Adam...
He's Ha'adam in many passages.
So you mean he's not the first man?
No, he might be what we anthropologically call not the first man.
He's the first biblical man.
That is, the Bible uses the word Adaman, or it uses the Hebrew word, meaning he is regarded as the first biblical man.
That is, that God took the man whom he had created.
So you can...
It's quite...
I'm not trying to be...
Definitely scientific or definitely theological or dogmatic, but it's quite feasible because theories do change over time.
Even the Big Bang's now modified and challenged in some places.
Because it's maybe the big crunch and then followed by the Big Bang.
So we get challenged to all these things.
But basically, there's no reason why there shouldn't be...
I mean, in evolutionary theory, you get hominids.
So homonyms is it, and then hominids.
Yeah, and then, is that the other way?
I can never remember.
Then homo.
Hominins, then hominids.
Hominids, and then homo sapiens, and then you get homo sapiens sapiens, which is us.
And even that, you get several branches as well.
But I don't believe in evolution.
No, well, I do, but I mean, it doesn't matter.
But I'm saying it's quite possible that you get branches, whatever you want to call them, and you get pre-Adamic men.
Can we put it that way?
Or non-Adamic men.
If you want that.
So, are we or are we not made in God's image?
Yes, but it does not mean what most people think it means.
Okay.
Basically, the Adam of the Bible is, in my view, when the evolutionary process, and you'll disagree with this, has reached such a stage that God then takes that man, a representative of that man, And places them into a very favoured environment.
Of course, you mustn't think of an English country garden.
Gan is a place, Ganan to enclose.
Gan Eden is a pun on the word Eden, because in Hebrew it means delight, pleasure or delight.
But also it's a Babylonian word, Edino, which is the steps, or the flap, yeah?
And you can place that, if you look at David Rowell's work, and even before him, I encountered it many years before David Rowell, the idea that Lake Ormia, Lake Van and Lake Ormia, up in the Anatolian highlands.
It's where Eden was.
You can see the conditions there.
And then men come down from it into Babylonia.
You can see the migration.
And so you can get, so at that point, that's the Adam of the Bible.
Now that, somewhere between, depends how you look at the genealogies and how you count.
And what spaces you allow for in the genealogies.
You're talking about 6,000 to 10,000 years.
6,000 to 10,000 BC. Which is quite a bang in the scientific period that the archaeologists and the anthropologists want.
You followed this debate for so long you will know that it wasn't until 1920s that...
The idea of fundamentalist Protestantism developed in the sense of demanding six-day creationism and heaven and earth coming into being in 4004 BC. The series of books called The Fundamentals, where the work came from, published 1912 to 1917, at least two of the contributors were evolutionists.
Great theistic evolutionists.
Nobody batted annihilated at that point.
Nobody batted annihilated.
No, it doesn't really agree or disagree.
The point is that culturally, in evangelicalism...
Nobody batted an eyelid.
It wasn't until, and get this, it wasn't until a Seventh-day Adventist called George Crete Price, is that right, folded the idea of young earth creation.
Modern evangelicalism, anti-evolutionary and young earth creationism, does not take its roots from traditional biblical scholarship.
It takes itself...
From a Seventh-day Adventist.
Very much the same era, you see the triumph of Futurism.
Don't worry about Revelation, it's all in the future.
And that takes itself, yeah, from Evernight and Pentecostalism.
And of course from our old friend Schofield.
This is really hard because I do keep saying on my podcast that Christianity is the ultimate rabbit hole.
And if nothing else, this conversation has confirmed that this is so.
I'm trying to find out, like a lot of Christians, I'm trying to find out what the right and true way is, what God wants for me.
You know, will he give me some more days out fox hunting?
And what can I do to make him happy?
And to be a good Christian and to research all this stuff.
And here I am talking to a scholar and you're telling me stuff, some of which is...
Completely new to me.
And I believe you.
Some of which I think you couldn't be more wrong.
Some of it...
But I have no...
I've got no backup.
Because I can't go to my local Catholic priest and get chapter first.
I can't go to the Protestant pastor or anywhere.
Nor your academic professor these days.
Because they don't know the history.
Thompson's motto.
Out historicum, out hystericum.
If it ain't historical, it's got to be hysterical.
Actually, Dad would attest that he got the last generation where you could just about get honest and reasoned answers about the Bible from atheist classical professors.
Not from churchmen anymore.
Now you can't even get that from professors.
Do you know, my professor Dover, Kenneth Dover, when he was fairly young, he went to Oxford after graduation, I think.
He had looked into Christianity and rejected it.
But he was the most honest man in translation I've ever known in Greek.
And I used to, to the day of his death, I used to constantly talk with him.
And some of the translations that moderns are putting out, like, for example, we mentioned John 1.18, about, yeah, the translation.
Now, the traditional reading is, no man has seen as to God.
No article.
Qualitatively.
Nobody has ever seen God at any time.
It's as to what God is, the concept of God or the quality of God.
Nobody has ever seen it with the mind.
It's the mind.
Because the Indo-European root for seeing and understanding are the same word, with.
And the verb that's used there is used as the perfect tense of it.
So nobody's really understood the quality of God, the understanding of God, the notion of God.
The only, the monogamous, the only kind, the unique.
And it's proved by the fact it's not the only begotten, because you've got shades of Arianism and eternal generation and all that sort of nonsense.
But the Latin translation is unicus, the unique.
And that was the earliest translation in the West.
The so-called old Latin.
And that's preserved in the Creed as well.
It's the same word.
We've omitted the crucial word.
The crucial word is sun, which comes afterwards.
Quios.
Right?
He has exegated or he has declared him.
But him's in italics in the A because there's no pronoun in the A. So it's not the only...
Nobody has seen God at any given time ever.
The only begotten Son who dwells in the Boots of the Father, he has declared him.
It's a truer translation.
I'm not saying that's a bad translation.
The truer is as to what God is.
It's brought up to the beginning of the sentence to emphasise it without the article.
Qualitative as to what God is.
Nobody's really seen it with the mind.
But the only begotten Son, the unique Son, right?
Jesus is a unique Son, born of the Virgin.
Unique Son, who dwells in the bosom of the Father.
And that's the reclining image at a banquet.
You recline, and one of you has to face the host.
And that's the most intimate place in a banquet.
The favoured guest gets that place.
And that's intimate.
Because you're towards the breast of the host.
Because you're lying side by side.
He has explained it.
He has beaten out the idea of what God is.
Now, ho monoganes quios.
Quite clear reading.
Subsidiary reading.
Minority reading.
Early, so-called early manuscripts.
And they want to read Pheos instead of Pheos.
They want to read God.
So you get the idea of the only God.
But of course, if nobody's seen God, but the only God's seen him, you get two gods, don't you?
If the only Son is revealing God, there's no problem with that, because God is Father and the Son is the Son.
But if you have nobody's seen God, The absolute God at any time.
The true God.
But the only begotten God.
The unique God.
Well, that's another God then.
That's Arianism.
But in fact, it's worse than that because there are actually three readings.
It's not simply the unique son.
It is And it's not, then, the last reading is monogonist etos, which they translate as the only begotten God or the only God.
There's an intermediary reading, and that gives again the way, oh, monogonist etos.
So you get from the only begotten Son to the only begotten God to only begotten God.
Right?
And only begotten God cannot be translated in Greek as the Only Begotten God.
You know what?
There's no definite article there.
You'd have to say, ah, an Only Begotten God, or a Unique God.
Now, these scholars jolly well know what Greek is.
They should know, but they consistently mistranslate it in the modern versions.
Even their own reading, even if a true reading, which it isn't, they cannot and dare not translate it properly.
Which means?
They're dishonest with the public.
Right.
They're trying to update, upgrade the divinity, so-called, or the deity of Jesus.
So this is why you're not a...
That's one of the reasons.
The texts simply do not support.
John 17, 3, it's a different topic.
What does Jesus say in the most intimate prayer in the New Testament, in the garden?
The so-called high priestly prayer of John 17. And the disciples are listening, and it's quite deliberate, because he's interceding, so therefore men should hear what he's interceding for.
So his choice disciples are there listening, if not falling asleep, right?
And Jesus is saying, he's speaking to the Father, and he says, Father, then he says, this is eternal life, that they should know, The, so he's speaking to the Father, right?
This is what eternal life is.
They should know the, the only true God, the only real God, the only genuine God, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom I have sent.
There is no God but God, and Jesus is his messenger.
See?
That's where Islam gets it from.
Right?
He's the Rasul Allahi.
Rasul Allahi.
He is the Rasul, the messenger, the sent one of God.
Yeah.
So God, Allah, the true God is the Father, and the true Rasul is Jesus.
So that's where the Islamic heresy comes in.
It's a twisting.
So Jesus is saying quite clearly that God is the only true God.
And I am his messenger.
I am his apostle.
Apostolos.
He has sent me.
Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.
Right.
I'm the apostle of God.
I'm not God.
I may be son of God, but the son of God is not God.
He's son of God.
Yeah?
It's a term.
And so, but I'm not the only true God.
Now, but, oh yes, Jesus is the only true God and the Holy Spirit is the only true God.
How many only true gods can there be?
There are the only true God.
How many of the only true gods can there be?
Only one.
If I come to a town, and I say to you, and I'm hungry, and I say to you, are there any bakers in this town?
And you say, oh yeah, there are several bakers.
And I say, are there any good bakers?
He said, well, yeah, some are better than those.
Yeah, there's just three or four good bakers.
And he comes and says, you know, really, Fred is the real baker in town.
You say, oh yeah, you're right, Fred.
So you agree that Fred is the only true baker in town.
Therefore, logically, it's an identity statement.
If it's Fred, it's the only true baker in town.
If it's the only baker in town, it's Fred.
If it's not Fred, it's not the only true baker in town.
If it's not the only true baker in town, it's not Fred.
It's an identity statement.
Right?
It's no longer just a qualitative statement about bread.
It's an identity statement.
If X is the only true Y, then X is identified as Y and as equivalent.
If the Father is the only true God, Jesus cannot be the only true God.
The Holy Spirit cannot be the only true God.
You might say, well, Jesus is a true God.
A true God?
Even if you accept that.
He's not the.
Only true God.
See the difference?
Yes.
And that verse demolishes all Trinitarism forever.
Right.
And there's another verse in 1 Timothy 2.5.
There is one God and one mediator, middle man, between God and men.
No article between what we call God and what we call men.
Man, qualitatively, not the man, man.
Jesus Christ.
Right.
That's clear, isn't it?
There's a middleman between God and men.
And who is the middleman?
He's man.
He's not God.
He's not angel.
He's not God-man.
He's not incarnate God.
He's man.
It's man who is a mediator between God and men.
These verses demolish all the nonsense of Trinity and Jesus is a man.
A unique man, but he's a man.
Well, you're going to have lots and lots of listeners spitting at you.
I don't know what to say.
Let them verbalise passionately, but orderly, without calling me a whatever.
Try and get the expletives out of the way.
They can call me that, but in a nice way.
And we can answer them.
And show me.
If, dear listener, if, dear listener, if peradventure thou art still Trinitarian in thy ways, think on this.
If thou shalt say unto me, Be thou Trinitarian, thou shalt have to enunciate clearly what thy doctrine of the Trinity is.
For I tell thee that amongst modern men there are several doctrines of the Trinity.
There are several doctrines of Trinity, a Trinity, But nobody can tell me what the doctrine of the Trinity.
Notice the two articles is.
You put out clearly in plain English what is your doctrine of the Trinity.
And then answer me the second question.
You show to me that even if your doctrine of the Trinity is right, where in Scripture can I find it?
And where in Scripture can I find that I must believe it as a matter of salvation or I shall be damned?
So you must answer the second as well.
It's not a question of whether the doctrine is right, but it is a question.
The second question is, is it required for salvation?
Until you can prove that, you cannot say to any man, heretic or damned.
Interesting.
So you're not going to burn in hell then?
No, no.
I'm happy to hear that, Alex, because it's been lovely talking to you.
Do you think we should have a...
Scottish sausages thing.
Scottish sausage.
But just very briefly, try and keep this short.
Scottish sausage stuff.
Are we saying that you think that the Masoretic texts are better than this?
No, that's a good point.
So basically, by the time of Jesus, you get this so-called Septuagint.
Now, the early church, The last part of it is non-Hebrew speaking, as time goes on, even more so.
So it's understandable that Christians tend, in Greek-speaking areas, to cling to a Greek form of the Old Testament, which is used of God, there's no question about it.
Even the Trinitarian Bible Society, which holds the primacy of the Masoretic, still has a pamphlet about how God honoured the Septuagint, and it's undeniable.
Where there's a clash, they tend to go to the Masoretic.
But there are errors in the Masoretic.
Not many.
There are some errors in the Masoretic.
But if you look at producers of the Masoretic text, nobody's ever denied that.
Nobody's ever denied that there are variant readings here and there in the Masoretic text.
And you'll find that in modern, and not so modern, Editions of it, you'll find a footnote, you know, some manuscript.
The Eastern manuscripts read X, the Western manuscripts read Y. So you'll find that they are aware of them.
And so you just make up your own mind, yeah?
And sometimes if there's a mistake, they'll draw attention to it in the mass or in the margin and say, this is written as that, but it should be pronounced as that.
You know, there's grammatical points and there's sort of variant readings.
No, there's not many.
Nobody's ever tried to hide any of this.
And they don't make earth-shattering revelations either.
You know, yeah.
It doesn't matter.
No, nothing of that sort.
No, I mean, you know, it can alter an understanding of a text, yes.
I mean, I'll give you an example in a minute.
So, basically, and sometimes they set to an older Greek version, Preserve the correct Hebrew reading in its translation.
So you can see that.
So for example, if we go back to the Genesis text where when God rejected Cain's offering, accepted Abel's and rejected Cain, and then they went out, and Cain sort of spoke to his His brother.
And then the next thing is the action.
Now, the Masoretic doesn't have that.
Some of the manuscripts have a gap there.
But the Syriac and the Greek and others have, say, and spoke to his brother and said, let us go out to the field.
Which makes sense.
So there's quite possibly an omission.
Something's dropped out of the Masoretic text that just completes the sense.
It's not radical.
But it makes a bit more sense, yeah?
So what about a thing I read somewhere, that the Masoretic texts were sort of doctored by post-Jesus Jews, who didn't want him to be the Messiah, and therefore removed...
It is true that after the fall of Jerusalem, AD 70, Jamnia, There was a gathering and there were some discussions about a couple of the books.
The question is whether they should be included.
That is because, for example, no man under 40 or something should read the Song of Songs.
It's a bit too risky to read the Song of Songs sort of thing.
Or nobody should discourse on this until they're 85 and a half sort of thing.
You know, you get that sort of Peripheral discussion.
But by and large, the canon was settled.
And because of the rift between Christians and Jews, largely because the Christians, remember, had fled to the hills, so Jesus warned them, and had got out of Jerusalem.
A remarkable thing is that when the Roman army, Jesus said, when you see the armies coming in, yeah?
Get to the hills.
So that's where the Christians went, if you're in the city, don't go into the city.
But those in the city were surrounded by the Roman army, by Cestius and his army.
Inexplicably, I think Josephus recalls this as well.
Cestius withdrew his army for a period and allowed the Christians to escape.
It's not recorded that a single Christian was killed in the siege of Jerusalem.
And then there were factions, of course, fighting amongst Jews in the city.
They wouldn't go.
And it prevented Jewish people from going.
And then Sestis came back and surrounded it.
We don't know why.
We would say Providence, you know.
And so after that sort of thing, and of course the enmity and the bitterness of what had happened, the Romans were forbidding Jews to enter the city and all the rest of it.
You can understand that the rabbis began to turn against the Greek translation and insisted on the Hebrew.
And that's when you get the start of the Masora, the tradition, the Masoretes.
You're preserving faith of the Hebrew text, including the errors, the known errors in the Hebrew text.
They don't correct.
So if it was 400, if they wrote 40 instead of 400, or 400 instead of 40, With numbers, for example, you can imagine.
Somebody made two zeros instead of one.
They wouldn't then, in the next copy, put 40. They would put 400, because that's what they had inherited.
And with a marginal note, it should be 40. That sort of thing.
So they kept to that extent.
But as to large-scale things, no.
You argue in Isaiah 7, You know, the virgin.
That argument as to whether it should be a virgin or just a young woman.
The truth is that the so-called Septuagint, which predates the Christian translations of the New Testament, it used the Greek word for virgin, parthenos.
It wasn't a Gentile who translated it, it was a Jew who translated that.
And he understood the text to be a virgin.
Because the Hebrew word is capable of that.
Like a lot of these words, it's got overlapping Venn diagram meanings.
Every virgin may be a young woman, but not every young woman's a virgin, sort of thing.
That sort of thing.
And in English, there was a big argument when the RSV, the Revised Standard Version came out, which could have been solved quite simply, because there's a good English word, maid or maiden, which covers both.
And it could have been solved just if there had been any goodwill, which there wasn't.
But that sort of thing, but that's an argument that's manufactured later.
It's an artificial argument, in my view.
But there is, when you get to Isaiah 9.6, the wonderful words of Hanlon, his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
And all the Septuagint is, he shall be called the messenger or angel of the mighty covenant.
Anglos megalis bullis, yeah?
Now, that obviously is, you would say, deliberate.
Right?
Maybe because, at that point, some Jewish scribes thought, I'm not putting the Christian in because they'll give maybe ammunition to the Christians.
But that's, and I don't think there are very many of these.
Right.
But they're easily identified from other manuscripts.
I mean, if they want to wipe these things, they've done a very poor job.
You'd have to wipe out all sorts of things.
So just one final one about important readings that the Jews are honest about.
In Zechariah 12.10, and they shall look unto me whom they have pierced.
Right?
Look unto me.
And Trinitarians will say, oh, that brute of Jesus is Yahweh, Jehovah.
But if you look at the Hebrew, if you look at the The apparatus criticus, the critical apparatus of the Hebrew Bibles, including the Trinitarian Bible Society's one, you'll find that there is an alternative reading.
Not Eli, Elaw, to him, whom they have pierced.
Because the first letters are the same in Hebrew.
The E, the word for a Yod and a Wav, one is short and one is long.
It can be confused in writing.
And if you look at the New Testament, they shall look unto him.
Yeah?
So the undoubted, in my view, true Masoretic reading is they shall look unto him whom they are fierce.
Which is consonant with the New Testament.
You see?
And there, there is a variant reading.
But any Jew can look at it and say, Hang on, there is a variant reading here.
But a Trinitarian doesn't want to know that.
Now it's a Trinitarian who's distorting things.
He doesn't want to know that because that would upset his theory.
But a Biblical Unitarian says, well done.
That's exactly what the New Testament says.
Well, if nothing else, it's going to be we put a Thank you, Alex, for poking your stick into the worst.
Always entertaining.
Always entertaining.
Thank you, Alex Jr., for holding the heavy mic and for putting in the odd, erotite question.
So thank you very much.
Just don't publish my address.
No!
I don't believe in...
I'm interested in it.
I'm trying to work out.
It's been a massive, very steep learning curve in the last four or five years.
And I'm trying to find out what's what.
I'm open to explanations.
I'm not going to say this is...
They'll tell you that they're praying for you, James.
They'll tell you they're praying.
I have working hypotheses.
I think you're wrong.
I think you're completely wrong on Big Bang, for example.
I don't believe.
It's absolutely fine.
Fair enough, fair enough.
I don't believe in evolution.
But...
What's in a name, eh?
Yeah, exactly.
There we are.
Good.
Good luck.
Thank you.
Now for the Scottish sausages.
Scottish sausages, yeah.
Right.
Thank you.
Well, it's going to be...
Some people...
Some might unsubscribe now.
There was an airshipman where I spilt my tea on the floor.
I know I did all of these things.
We'll let you all through that, don't we?
I suddenly realised that I was craning round in a really uncomfortable way and I couldn't sustain it any longer.
There is no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition to my 2012 classic book.
Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in 2011, actually.
The first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when...
The people behind the climate change scan got caught red-handed, tinkering with the data, torturing till it screamed in a scandal that I helped christen Climategate.
So I give you the background to the skullduggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us, we've got to act now.
I rumbled their scan.
I then asked the question, OK, if it is a scan...
Who's doing this and why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands up.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk And I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring round all those people who are still persuaded that, oh, it's a disaster, we must amend our ways and appease the gods, appease Mother God.
