Wesley Huff, a meticulous scholar of ancient languages and manuscripts, critiques Billy Carson’s superficial claims about Christianity and Sumerian while defending his own decades-long research—including Dead Sea Scrolls analysis, which reveals oral transmission preserved with striking accuracy. He debunks Zacharias Sitchin’s theories, highlights the Voynich manuscript’s linguistic puzzles, and contrasts the Gospels’ historical consistency (e.g., 1st-century names) with later forgeries like the Gospel of Judas. Huff argues Jesus’ resurrection isn’t a literal recovery but fits ancient Jewish timekeeping, while rejecting Peterson’s moralistic portrayal, insisting divine standards transcend human effort. His work, blending textual criticism and skepticism toward dogma, aims to ground faith in rigorous historical study, challenging both cults and modern reinterpretations. [Automatically generated summary]
So, I, like many people, was introduced to you because of the debate that you had with Billy Carson.
You know, it's one of those things where it's very unfortunate when people get caught with their pants down.
I'm not an expert in many things, but the things that I am an expert on, you could wake me up at 4 o'clock in the morning and ask me about those things, and I'd go, oh yeah, no, this is what it is.
I know, you know, like martial arts or comedy, I could tell you, I could give you an expert version of reality.
It seems like he does not have that.
And he is a wonderful talker, and it's a lot of fun.
I like watching his videos.
I love all that ancient history stuff, and even the most ridiculous tinfoil hat aspects of ancient...
When he was on with you, it was quite apparent that you are an actual expert in the Bible and in many religious texts and that he didn't necessarily have the facts straight.
Well, it's interesting you say the expert thing because I literally was asked to do it 24 hours beforehand.
So I had like the least amount of preparation going into it and I was okay with that.
Because I'd listen to Billy Carson.
Well, and I'd listen to the stuff he'd said.
So I knew enough about the ways that he'd articulated things about the ancient Near East and the Bible and Christianity to know enough that his level is pretty surface.
But the fallout was that not only did he not want us to release the conversation, but then he started throwing out cease and desist letters.
And then he started, you know...
Trying to sue people.
So, I mean, I was never worried because I'm a Canadian.
And anybody who's tried to sue internationally knows that...
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Well, the irony of this situation is if he just kind of left it, it probably wouldn't have made...
Anywhere close to the splash that it's made.
And we told him that.
We said, like, hey, Barbra Streisand effect is going to happen.
Like, you're a big enough personality that if I make a video and say, like, hey, I had this conversation, didn't go well for Billy, and Billy doesn't want it released, that's going to start to gain traction sooner or later.
I hoped to have, in our initial conversation, kind of pressed him a little bit more on the more overt things he'd said about, like, Greek and Hebrew and Sumerian.
because I've studied a number of ancient languages.
And when you study the languages, you realize the complexities of these things.
And so when someone hasn't, and they're making statements that are obviously indicative of someone who hasn't studied them, it's super apparent.
And so I think it's one thing to be making claims about, say like, Christian history or the Bible.
But when you start to get into, like, linguistics and philology, it gets messy.
And if you don't know what you're talking about, it gets really apparent really fast.
So it's actually become really—it's become— Pretty rough for him.
So he released a video yesterday, which I think people should go and check out, where he kind of gives his perspective.
He's been friends with Billy for years.
He was at Billy's wedding.
Billy had 15 people at his wedding.
Mark was one of them.
And they live in this community in Florida.
Their sons are friends.
Their wives would hang out.
And Mark told me, he's like, I've been hearing Billy say, You know, he wants to debate.
Nobody will debate him for years.
And so as far as I think Mark was concerned, he was giving Billy the opportunity that Billy had told a lot of people he wanted.
And so he, you know, this was set up in that Mark and Billy have been talking.
They've been on each other's podcasts in the past, and they've been friends, but more like business colleagues.
Like Mark has come out and said, I hadn't really gone into.
The stuff he'd said about Christianity or ancient religions or whatever that much.
Mark is a Christian.
He has like a public profession of faith.
And him and Billy had talked about the fact that they wanted to talk about like faith stuff and some of their differences.
And that Mark was kind of prepping for this and his media manager Anton had sent him some of my stuff and said like, Wes has done some stuff on some things that Billy has talked about.
You know, maybe you should look up some of the stuff, you know, read into it.
And Mark, very last minute, was like, well, I feel inadequate.
Do you think I could just ask Wes?
And so he DM'd me on Instagram and just kind of laid this out like, hey, I'm going to have Billy in my studio in 24 hours.
Like, he knew we were going to go over some of his stuff that he'd said about Christianity, that I was going to come in, who I was, what my name was, some of my background, and that...
Part of the conversation was going to be me kind of asking him some clarifying questions and rebutting some of the things that he said.
So you didn't watch the three-hour live stream that he did, did you?
And he also was claiming that it wasn't a debate, that he had been involved in debates before, and that he would prepare for debates, but this is something he didn't prepare.
But again, it's like, if you ask me about things that I know about, you can wake me up.
And I think, you know, that always, although my parents were never overt with this kind of stuff, they always had the perspective that, you know, we're Christians.
We believe that this worldly perspective is true.
But, hey, this stuff isn't scary.
This stuff isn't, you know, off limits.
You know, we can investigate these things.
And they never said that outright, but I always felt this kind of attitude of that kind of perspective.
And, you know, having been exposed in majority Muslim contexts and seeing that kind of stuff, and my mom having like a pretty...
Good knowledge growing up in India of things like Hinduism and Sikhism and that.
And I don't know how much of the kind of testimony stuff you watched of mine, but just before my 12th birthday, I actually was diagnosed with a neurological condition that left me paralyzed from the waist down.
So that's a condition that's called acute transverse myelitis, which I often say is a word you can forget as soon as you hear it.
It's a complicated one.
But what happened was that I had the flu and my body's immune system attacked the nerve endings at the base of my spinal cord and caused swelling and cut off the communication between my brain and my legs.
I was camping out in the bathroom floor for flu reasons.
And when I woke up, about 30 minutes later, I couldn't feel my legs.
And so, yeah, that's the acute part of the acute transverse.
Myelitis was that it was basically instantaneous.
And that's what made the diagnosis as severe as it was.
Like, they said there's a 30% chance.
It was like a small percentage of probability that I would recover, but a much higher percentage that there would be a lot of either complete paralysis for the rest of my life or some kind of issues.
With walking.
It's related to diseases like multiple sclerosis in that it's neurological and it affects that kind of thing.
And one month from the day that I woke up and couldn't feel my legs, I woke up on a Saturday morning, got out of bed, walked over to my wheelchair and sat down.
No, in fact, when I was in the hospital, I'd wake up and there'd be pinpricks in my legs because they'd be testing where the reactions were and they'd have used a syringe.
And so I'd wake up and there'd be these tiny little pinpricks in my legs because they'd been testing while I was asleep to see what the kind of, you know, whether it was registering neurologically with anything.
But I couldn't feel anything.
I was fully a paraplegic.
Yeah, but going back to that, like, so I've...
I experienced this, what I consider to be a true supernatural experience in that I walked into the hospital to the doctors that had overseen me and they were the first ones that used the word miracle.
They said, we really don't have any type of medical explanation.
And mainly because there was no atrophy.
Because of the cutoff of the communication, my muscles in those 30 days were fine.
And just a short amount of time.
But they said there should be something, and we're picking up nothing.
And so taking that pretty seriously and competing competitively well into university, because even though I wasn't the most naturally talented individual on the team, I felt like a motivation to be able to, okay, I don't want to waste this. okay, I don't want to waste this.
And then later on, in terms of your original question, the difference in that was that I realized, okay, there's something out there.
Something happened that I can't totally explain on naturalistic terms.
But how do we go from that to saying, okay, well, then this worldview is correct.
And so despite, you know, being raised in a Christian home, I felt like my parents telling me what was true is not the worst reason to believe it, but it's also not the best.
And so as a teenager, I did a lot of kind of soul searching.
And like I said, you know, I was able to do that.
To a certain level of degree because of the openness within my household, where I did.
I pulled the Koran off the shelf and I read it, you know, front to back, just trying to figure out, okay, what's going on here?
What's all this about?
And it was through that period of, like, searching and it wasn't a crisis of faith.
And that was about a period of about a year and a half.
And at the end of that, I did truly feel that, okay, well, I think in the ways that I, in my limited ability as a teenager to investigate these things, I think that Christianity is true.
But it wasn't until I went to university where...
I was engaging with people of other faith perspectives in Toronto at York University where I was talking to Muslims and Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and atheists, you know, from the gamut.
And I was having these conversations and I was expressing kind of my perspective on what I believed.
And they would say things like, well, that sounds great, Wes, but, you know, that's all the Bible.
Well, no, they did in the sense that the Book of Mormon trumps the Bible.
So they would believe, I think it's the 10th article of the Mormon Church, is that they believe the Bible insofar as it is translated.
And so they have this perspective that...
There's been things that have been affected.
I mean, Joseph Smith made his own translation of the Bible, and it's rough.
And when he was 14. Well, I think it was later on that he made the Joseph Smith translation, but I don't even know if the official LDS Church ascribes to the Joseph Smith translation, because I think they even see, like, ugh, this is...
We know what the Greek and the Hebrew looks like, and this is not even...
People have such a deep search for meaning and truth that if you are confident, which is what a con man is, a confidence man, if you are really good at expressing yourself and really show confidence in your convictions, you can persuade a lot of people.
Well, I mean, I think that's why, you know, experts themselves feel a lot of inadequacy is because they study a subject and realize, like, I'm never going to get to the bottom of this hole.
And part of the whole, like, what I was trying to get Billy in that conversation that I had with him to get to the bottom of partly was a question of methodology.
Like, I think he got frustrated at me at one point because I kept asking, you know, what are the criteria that you're using when you're looking at...
one source versus another source and coming up with a conclusion.
Because in historiography, it's the inference to the best explanation.
And so there are different ways that you go about that, different methodologies.
And historians very rarely disagree on the data and evidence.
It's the conclusions that you draw from that.
But then there are some things that are just out and out false.
And I don't think Billy totally knew what I was talking about.
But it's those criteria that we look at when we look at something that does come from like an oral tradition and eventually gets written down and becomes a literary text.
And I think actually part of that also led in, like, I'm a big believer in athletic discipline needs to go hand-in-hand.
I mean, I know you are too.
It needs to go hand-in-hand with any other type of, like, whether it's an intellectual endeavor or, like, because...
It trains you to be able to go into places that are uncomfortable.
And that uncomfortability allows you to then become stronger.
You know, realize where your inadequacies are.
And especially when you're with people who are better than you.
I mean, when I was running at York University, there were two guys on our team who...
Because I was okay individually, but I ran for the relay team.
I was a sprinter.
And one of the guys was part of the, they medaled, when Canada medaled at Worlds, he was part of that relay team.
And then my other training partner, Busy, who, he ended up competing in Tokyo for Canada.
And when you're beside someone who is like just a genetic freak, you're like, oh, okay.
Like, that's different, right?
And it both pushes you, but it also reveals your limitations.
Where that doesn't inhibit you, like, you shouldn't, that shouldn't discourage you to go up to that line of being able to push yourself.
But at the exact same time, it creates a realism.
That, like, I'm never gonna, I can train as much as I want to, I'm not gonna run like that, right?
And so, yeah, but going back to what you were asking, like, I think there was part of that in wanting to go into the police force.
But then realizing, like around my third year of university, that my passions and motivations were very, very different.
And that I didn't know how to go about that or where the proper place to do that was.
But I knew that I needed to lean into that to some degree.
Particularly with the Bible.
Because I was claiming that this Bible...
Talks about this guy, Jesus, and I'm a Christian.
So I have a friend, Andy Bannister, he's out in the UK, and he says, if you take Christ out of Christian, all you're left with is Ian.
And Ian's a great guy, who's not going to save you from your sins.
And so, like, if I'm wrong about the Bible, those people who push back on me, right, those skeptics of various worldviews, if the things they were saying about the Bible were true, then it did actually legitimately undermine.
What I believed.
And so I needed to take that seriously.
I had an obligation to actually investigate those things as far as I could.
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The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest of the Old Testament.
So when they were discovered, I mean, so they were discovered in 1946 to 1957. And at that point during their discovery, they pushed back a lot of our previous oldest manuscripts a thousand years, which was a big deal.
They're anywhere between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century BC. So it's kind of tricky because the Dead Sea Scrolls are, they're like a library that we refer to.
So it's approximately 970 documents, but it's distributed out between 10,000 and 11,000 fragments.
So there's a lot going on there, right?
And some of these, I mean, are so fragmentary that you look at them and it's like confetti.
Because they're, I mean, 3,000 years old, but not quite that.
Actually, this relates because I know you're a Marco Allegro guy.
The first...
Time I was introduced to Marco Allegro was not his Sacred Mushroom on the Cross stuff, but he published a book on what's called the Copper Scroll, because part of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments is this inscribed document on copper, which is an ancient treasure map.
So, like, the largest grouping of papyri literature in the world is the Oxyrhynchus Collection, which we get a good portion of our oldest manuscripts of the New Testament from.
But if you go to Oxford and you look at the Oxyrhynchus Collection, and you pull out that drawer, it's like a jigsaw puzzle.
Like, most of it is untranslated, untranscribed, because the amount of man-hours that it would just take to even put it together, never mind, then go to the effort of transcribing and translating it, most people are not willing to do that.
So, part of my area of specialty in research is in regards to that.
So I study paratextual features.
We're really going to get nerdy today.
Let's get nerdy.
So you look at the features of the manuscripts, not necessarily the words, but things like the spaces between the words, the development of punctuation, indentation or outdentation.
And I look at the margins, and I try to, based on the average size of manuscripts in and around that time, and also the average spacing of words and...
The margins on top, bottom, and the side recreate what the manuscript could have possibly looked like.
We literally pushed back our understanding of Isaiah a thousand years.
And the thing that really shocked scholars, like I said, this isn't true for all the Dead Sea Scrolls, but one of the things that shocked them about Isaiah was that it was word for word identical to the Masoretic text.
Like, same thing with— Yeah, arguably we don't know how any of this was pronounced.
I mean, modern Greek speakers get really mad at me when I say that because they're like, of course we know how it's pronounced.
It's pronounced like we pronounce it, right?
And on all my videos where I'm like sight translating Greek manuscripts, there's so many comments of modern Greek speakers getting mad at how I'm pronouncing things.
But realistically, yeah, we don't really know how most of the things...
And so, that's in and around the same time that languages like Sumerian.
So, there's this...
Very interesting kind of, if we're talking about a story in the Bible like the Tower of Babel, where it says that God confused their languages and everybody started speaking different languages, you have these languages that just pop up and out of nowhere and have no relation to one another.
So Akkadian starts to adopt certain words in Sumerian, but they're still Sumerian words.
It's like pizza.
Is Italian, right?
Or like kayak is Inuit.
But when you're looking at the words that carry over, it's not because there's a relationship between Akkadian and Sumerian.
It's because you have these cultures that live side by side.
And eventually, Akkadian starts to adopt these things.
But Sumerian is...
So that's why when I see people like Billy Carson talk about being able to read Sumerian...
I'm like, dude, I read ancient languages and I can't...
I've tried and I can't make heads or tails of Sumerian.
Well, even if you look at the, I mean, language systems develop.
Paleo-Hebrew turns into...
Mm-hmm.
there's like a development within the language and then modern Hebrew adopts the Hebrew in the Dead Sea Scrolls but modern Hebrew has it has vowels where that were developed in the Middle Ages mmm to to figure out how to pronounce it because basically ancient Hebrew doesn't have a vowel system in its writing that's overly comprehensive
And so in the Middle Ages, when you have these groups of Jews who are copying these Hebrew scriptures, who aren't speaking it as much as they're reading it, you got to figure out how to pronounce it.
Because vowels make a difference.
But if you took all the vowels out of English, if you were a natural English reader, you could probably figure out.
What was what, if you're looking at the page.
And so in the Middle Ages, the Masoretic scribes come up with these vowel pointing systems.
And that's what you see when you look at a Hebrew Bible today, is you see these vowels.
And sometimes the introduction or removal of the vowel is significant in the changing of the words.
The whole thing is wild that people figured out how to associate sounds with little symbols and then they did completely different shit in Korea, completely different shit in Russia.
And then you have to have these experts who can translate these things, and you're dependent upon them forever, which that was what Lutheranism was all about, right?
Like Martin Luther wanted to have phonetic translations of the Bible, and there was a lot of resistance to that, because the people that knew how to read Latin were like, hey, hey, slow down.
Yeah, well, Tyndale's line was that he wanted, I believe it was Tyndale.
It was either Wycliffe or Tyndale.
My friends who are specialists in this are going to get mad at me for this.
But one of those two guys...
Said that they wanted the plowboy to be able to read the Bible and know it as well as the priests.
And so that was their motivation, is that their public education for literacy in these areas was largely because they just wanted people to read the Bible.
But that was a big motivation behind Luther, was he's like, I'm going to translate this thing to German.
Because part of his kicking off of what we call the Protestant Reformation was that he read the Bible in Greek.
Because there was a guy named Desiderius Erasmus who was a, they called them humanists, but it means something different than now.
Humanists were like scholars who were trying to figure out the entirety of human knowledge up until that point.
And even Erasmus was, so he dedicates his first few additions to the Pope because he knows that the Pope is going to get wind that he's producing Greek New Testaments and the Church is using the Latin and he's risking his life.
So if he dedicates it to the Pope, maybe the Pope will take it easy on him.
Well, that's part of the problem, right, is that you're dealing with these priests.
You're dealing with human beings.
And when human beings are the sole purveyors of truth, that becomes a problem.
It's power.
It's too much power.
Most people suck at power.
It just makes them drunk with it, and they abuse it.
And you see that in many, many religions.
You see that in...
Cults, you know, for instance, is the best example of it.
Because, you know, like when you know the person who created this thing and you know this person is fucking insane and you have a bunch of people that follow them.
One of the ways my wife and I bond, we have very different tastes in movies, but there's enough crossover that our guilty pleasure is cult documentaries.
Documentary is so fascinating because you can see this guy who is a gay porn star and a hypnotist take a bunch of really lost people and send them down this crazy road and then eventually it all falls apart.
You know what's interesting about that is I have less of a problem with the objective truth claims and more of a problem with them saying, but don't look into it.
Like, don't test it.
Like, what I say goes, and you're not allowed to explore it.
Like, talking about the Mormon church, they recently did this thing where they're like, you don't need to go on the internet, and you don't need to...
It's because in what Joseph Smith wrote, there's an idea that...
Everybody's soul pre-exists.
And you were born as a spirit child in a previous life.
And the reason you need to have children is you need to bring those people's souls into existence.
And so there's like, because you have a heavenly father and a heavenly mother and you're all children of God in the actual like physical sense and that the pursuit is exaltation.
Exaltation where you will be a God on your own planet if you've done everything right.
I mean, it's only really been recently that we have the levels of literacy that we have today.
I mean, this is part of the reason why you have these long spans of time between, like, when people live and then the ancient biographies that start to pop up about them.
But imagine how crazy that is, that something in a time where there's no printed press and something that had been passed on for so long as an oral tradition is exact word for word.
The Christians were less discerning in their proliferation of written documents.
So the Jews had this whole system where you had to be a trained scribe, and they were very, very careful with the procedures that you went through.
Whereas the Christians were like, we want to get this thing out as fast as we can, as often as we can.
Which had a lot of benefits in that their goal was proselytization.
And evangelism, and that worked.
But the downside of it was that you get really messy copies, where you have copies all over the place, but human error gets involved with spelling differences and additions, deletions, mostly for completely understandable reasons.
But we actually have manuscripts where we know the person copied it, and they didn't know how to read it, because they make mistakes that you wouldn't make if you...
We knew how to copy.
There's this really great example of a guy who copies, I believe it's the genealogy of Matthew.
And he's looking at a manuscript that has two columns.
And he's copying it from left to right, and he's copying it like this, whereas it's like the column you go down and then the next column.
So in the genealogy of Jesus, he's got all the wrong people begetting all the wrong people.
And you're like, you wouldn't do this if you knew how to read, because God is in the middle of the genealogy.
With the Christian manuscripts, because we have so many, it's actually because of the mistakes that we're able to trace the text back with a high degree of confidence.
Because if you have copies that are floating around North Africa and places like Egypt, and then you have copies in Syria, and you have copies out into Asia and into Europe and the British Isles, when mistakes pop up, they're geographically located.
And because you have so many, you can compare and contrast them and figure out, okay, well, this obviously happened here at this time, and you can pinpoint those things.
So this is a field called textual criticism.
And we do this with all ancient documents.
Like, the Bible is a more kind of fleshed-out field of textual criticism because we have so many manuscripts.
You know, Marcus Aurelius.
We even do it with Shakespeare, with the different copies.
Because if you only have one copy, you have to trust that the person who copied that got it right.
Well, there's an interesting, so in Germany, at the Center for the Study of New Testament Research in Münster, there actually, it's called CBGM, the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method.
And it's tracing, not manuscripts, but readings within manuscripts, and finding the relationships between the different ones by, like, computer models.
And so they are actually getting...
This is actually the way that like modern era textual criticism is being done is with these language models that operate on tracing readings and how certain readings are related to one another, which has allowed us to do things like look at 4th century manuscripts and actually see that their readings come hundreds of years earlier in other manuscripts that we have in collections.
So one of the...
The clearest examples of this is there's a manuscript in the 4th century called Codex Vaticanus, because it happens to be in the Vatican right now.
And there is a manuscript from the 2nd century which has the exact same scribal conventions that Codex Vaticanus does in particular readings.
And so we know for a fact that the scribes who created Vaticanus did not have, I think it's P75, which is a papyrus 75, but they had some sort of collection of manuscripts that were similar.
And so we can have confidence that the readings, although they're fourth century in particular areas of Codex Vaticanus, are actually second century in their origination.
And a large part of this is because of these like models that the computers got involved in.
In some ways, it's very close, and in other ways, it's not.
So that's the story of Upnupishtim, which is kind of a side story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh realizes his mortality, and he's trying to find eternal life.
And there's this guy, Upnupishtim, who he runs into, who tells him this story of the gods gifted him with eternal life because he saved all the animals on a boat.
And so there are actually parallels between that and, say, the Genesis 6 Noah Ark story.
In, like, making a big boat, putting all the animals on it, and then they get off and they make a sacrifice to, in his case, the gods and the Bible God.
And I think what you're looking at there is probably a cultural remembrance of something that did take place.
And so you have these adjacent cultures who, they're existing within this framework of the ancient Near East, and you're seeing these kind of parallel echoes of things that actually did happen.
So there are definite parallels, but I think...
Sometimes people look at those and they overplay that.
So one of the examples I often give is Advil and arsenic both come in pill form and have an A on the bottle.
But it's not the similarities that matter in that case, it's the differences.
And so if you look at the differences, there are significant differences in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Upanupishtim story and the Genesis 6 story.
If for no other reason than...
The Noah Ark story is a very small part of the Book of Genesis.
And the story of Up-Napishnum in the Epic of Gilgamesh is a little bit more stretched out.
It has more to do with the theme of what Gilgamesh is doing in his epic.
But there are obviously parallels between that because these are both ancient Near Eastern stories and they're products of their day.
In the same way that I think you see parallels between some of the New Testament gospels and other ancient Greco-Roman biography in that these are products of ancient history.
And so they're going to look like other ancient historical writings that kind of parallel around that.
And when you're talking about, particularly if you're talking about the Old Testament, The series of writings, like, these are long stories that someone had to remember and pass on to generations.
So the thing with me was always like, well, what was the origin of all this?
Like, what was the first version of it?
And where the hell did it come from?
And what was it?
What was going on?
Where these people felt like in this time of incredibly difficult survival, right?
You're essentially...
You're hunter-gatherers, right?
We're talking about thousands of years ago.
And these people took great time and made great effort to preserve these stories.
And then there's always human error, right?
There's human error, as you were saying, with transcription and trying to decipher things and writing things down where you don't really speak the language.
You've got to wonder, like, how much did we lose?
In this oral tradition, like what was the original story and what were they trying to convey?
And I think that there's an aspect of like a message that's trying to be communicated.
I mean, we are modern people of the Enlightenment.
So we almost have a perspective where we want something to be very like exhaustive that.
Ancient writers didn't have those same sort of conventions.
So they're going to capitalize on certain ideas and concepts for the purpose of when someone tells you a story, you don't memorize everything.
You go to university, you write notes, right?
The people who are writing everything the professor is saying word for word, probably not the people who are going to remember what the professor says as well as the people who write down the main things.
And when you write down the main things, the main points, without all of the other stuff that kind of is just icing, then you get the main idea more.
Ancient writers talk about this.
So there's a guy named Quintilian who exists in the first century BC. And there's this series of writings that we call Progymnasmata, which are basically like, how do you do good writing?
He's training people, maybe even individuals like Plutarch, who is one of the best known ancient biographers, and saying, like, it's just as important what you don't say as to what you do say.
Because you don't want to, A, writing in the ancient world is expensive, really expensive, and B, you want to make sure that your audience is actually getting...
The message that you want to convey.
And so this is something that when you read like German scholars, biblical scholars of the 19th and 20th century, or even prior to that, like 18th, 19th century, they look at the Gospels and they're like, this isn't biography.
It's not capitalizing on Jesus' childhood.
And we all know that good biographies tell about your childhood and psychologize and these sorts of things.
Whereas if you look at some of these ancient writers who are talking about how you should write biography, they say, if there's nothing in their childhood that's that significant, don't write it.
It's going to distract from...
Like if there is something, say like Jesus' birth, or Luke tells a story when he's...
12 of Jesus when he goes with Mary and Joseph and, you know, Mary and Joseph lose the son of God and they start going home without him and they're like, where's Jesus?
And they got to go back to Jerusalem.
That's a significant story.
And so it appears that Luke includes it because there's a significant reason to include that.
But they wouldn't have had any problem with leaving out large...
I think what's also what's important is we have to try, as difficult as it might be, to put our minds in the context of people who lived in a time where most people were illiterate.
And you're telling these parables, you're telling these stories as an oral tradition.
And that they have a different mindset in terms of the distribution of information.
These are documents, well, in terms of the Bible, like as someone who identifies as a Christian, I would say that these are, the Bible is written for you, but it wasn't written to you.
It had a completely different original audience.
But you should do your best at figuring out who it was written to and how that made a difference to them.
Because then the application is going to come out even clearer for you.
And that should be ultimately, you know, the goal of everyone who's looking at ancient documents.
Who was the original audience?
How would they have understood it?
Because you can read all sorts of things because of your modern conventions into what someone is talking about in the ancient world and completely bypass what they're actually trying to convey in their intention.
Yeah, and again, it's almost impossible to put your mind completely into the context of these people that were living then.
It's almost impossible to imagine the way they viewed the world and the way they communicated.
And when you're dealing with really old stuff like the Sumerian text, and then people have translations of it, which can be fantastical, like the Zacharias Hitchin stuff.
It's like you have to be a scholar in ancient Sumerian and understand the origins of language.
And then still, there's massive debate.
There's a whole website called SitchinIsWrong.com.
God, it's just like when you're just there in the presence of these things and just trying to put your brain back thousands of years and imagine what society was like back then.
Of the percentage of what we know that happened in Egyptian history, 1% has been excavated in terms of what we can actually pull out of the ground and look at artifacts.
So there's whole eras of pharaohs that we don't know where they're buried.
Even when Tutankhamun was discovered, he was kind of a footnote in the pharaohs that we knew about at that time.
And we didn't know he...
He was, you know, as extravagant, as rich, as, you know, until we discovered his actual tomb.
A lot of people at that time didn't even think it was, he was worth looking into because we have these lists of pharaohs and the thing with the pharaohs is that they're always trying to, the next pharaoh is always trying to prove that he's the better one.
And this is why you go to Egypt and you find statues of Ramses everywhere.
And part of it was because Ramses, I think it was Ramses II, Was he commissioned so many statues of himself because he's like, oh, I'm the best.
I'm the greatest.
And what they actually, they couldn't keep up with the commissioning and they started actually rubbing off the names of previous pharaohs on statues and just putting Ramses on it.
So when you go there and you're in the presence of these things and you try to put yourself back into that time period, have you ever tried to think, what was the motivation to make something as great as the Pyramid of Giza, the Great Pyramid?
I mean, if you think you're a god and you have this whole kind of worldview perspective and theology that you need to make something and bear yourself with all this crap because that's going to make a difference in your afterlife, then you're going to go big rather than going home, right?
The perceptions of people in the ancient world are just so different.
Like longevity, health, food is just on a completely different scale.
And so the conventions of needing to make sure that, especially if you're like the richest guy around, that you tick off all the boxes.
Because you know you're going to die, and you're probably going to die sooner than you want to, sooner rather than later.
And you have this whole perception of, well, you know, if I bury myself with all this stuff and maybe even some of the people, we're just going to kill them and include them too, because they're going to help me out.
Yeah, I think even just looking at the Sphinx, you can tell that no matter what your perspective is, you should entertain the idea at minimum that the head was built later.
If you do take that timeline, the Robert Shock timeline, and you say, okay, so you're talking about thousands of years of rainfall, you have to go back to when there was rainfall in the Nile Valley, so now you're back like 9,000 years.
One of the more interesting things about hieroglyphs and the interpretations of it is that the ancient hieroglyphs, well, the ancient versions of pharaohs, rather, like when they go back...
You know, past the established dates of 2500 BC and before that, you get to like 30,000 years ago.
And then they say that these are myth.
These are not, this is not representative of an actual history.
I mean, you have that and you have the Sumerian king lists, which have...
People living hundreds and thousands of years, too.
And, I mean, there are some interesting academic articles on, like, the probability of the numbers that come up in those.
Because we have a base 10 counting system because we count our fingers.
Ancient Near Eastern cultures like the Babylonians, the Akkadians, the Assyrians, they had a base 12 counting system because they would count each hinge.
Or what do you call these?
Like spaces?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. There's different joints of the finger.
Yeah, the joints.
That's the word I was looking for.
And so that's why we have 360 degrees in a circle, 365 days in a year.
Like this comes from the Mesopotamian counting conventions.
And you look at some of these lists and they're operational and all divisible by like 12 and 60. And you're like, what's going on here?
So not all of them, but enough of them where it's statistically impossible.
And I don't totally know what to make of those things because you do have the genealogies, I believe it's Genesis chapter 4 and Genesis chapter 11, where they're all divisible by these types of numbers that were very common in the ancient Near East.
They're not random.
Whereas if we look at the genealogies later in like Chronicles and Kings of the ages of the Israelite kings, they're random.
And so it's just like, what do we do with that?
Because numbers are also far more representational, which is why we see numbers like 12 and 40 and 7 come up in the Bible, but also other ancient Near Eastern literature.
Like there are certain numbers in Egyptian society that also were seen as like perfect numbers or like numbers that you wanted to incorporate.
And there are different timekeeping conventions, depending on society.
Like, ancient Jews had a different timekeeping convention than ancient Romans.
So that's why you see, like, in Genesis chapter 1, it talks about there being evening and there being morning.
It's because, well, Jews today, right?
You start the Sabbath on sundown the day before, right?
So that's why.
It's because there's different cycles.
And so we go on a 24-hour time system.
But ancient Jews had a different convention of that.
Ancient Romans had a different convention of that.
Ancient Mesopotamian cultures had...
Their own kind of conventions about these things.
And calendars were all over the place.
You know, when you get to the Julian calendar and they're like, we gotta standardize this thing because everybody's operating on a different, you know, the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar.
Ancient timekeeping is very inexact and very messy.
And so you kind of got to take certain things with a grain of salt in terms of that.
Yeah, ancient calendars.
I don't even know.
I know that actually, talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the group in Qumran, they were a sectarian group of Jews who believed that the Jews in Jerusalem had basically capitulated and were not holy enough.
And part of their reasoning is that they believe they have a perfect calendar.
And so they use a different calendar that doesn't have to do things like incorporate an extra month every certain number of years because their thing is not perfect.
And part of their reasoning as to why they're like the chosen is that they have a timekeeping system that they say is perfect.
So it was at least representative of the fact that we know when the days start getting shorter, it starts getting colder, and then it warms up again, the days start getting longer.
Which is one of the things that's so fascinating about some of the constructions of the pyramid, where on the summer solstice, these pillars line up so perfectly that the light shines straight down these hallways and illuminates everything.
It's just so weird that people were so vastly more intelligent, at least in terms of their ability to build things, than anyone else anywhere around there.
That's what's so weird about Egypt to me.
It's like there's amazing pieces of ...
Even ancient Greece is incredible, but I can kind of believe you did it.
When you deal with 2,300,000 stones in the Great Pyramid, and some of them ...
Where people have visited places and brought their cooties and killed off a giant swath of the population.
And one of the things that they're discovering now in the Amazon, which is so fascinating, is through use of LIDAR. You know, they're discovering, like, oh my god, this is, like, all populated.
The literary comparison of ancient Near Eastern origin stories is like a really interesting thing to do.
Because when you look at something like the Enuma Elish, which was the Babylonian creation story, and then you look at something like Genesis chapter 1, there are obvious crossovers with, like I said before, these ancient Near Eastern conventions.
But then you can see that the author of Genesis is making these points that are actually rebutting something like the origin stories of the surrounding cultures that largely believe that Matter is like eternal and the gods come out of the created world and that there's this narrative of the battle that takes place where some gods fight against other gods and the world around us that we see and like human beings are the end result of this battle.
And so they would read this on every Babylonian New Year and one of the main themes was basically that like it's all chance.
It's all a random mistake.
You were created without purpose and intention because Tiamat gets destroyed.
And she's the god that, you know, you come from.
And then you read Genesis chapter 1 and it says, in the beginning God creates the heavens and the earth.
And he makes it good.
And there's this idea that, like, that's counter-cultural in the idea that the Babylonians did not think that the world was good.
Like at every, at the end of every refrain, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good, and then it's very good at the end.
And that humanity in particular is created in the image of God.
Like that's a very, not just like kings, which a lot of ancient Near Eastern cultures believed that kings were created in the image of God, but that humanity in general is created in the image of God.
And this idea of the Imago Dei, that you're, that's why you're different.
Like why are you different from all the animals?
Because you're given something.
That exemplifies a unique quality.
And then the ancient Near Eastern cultures that believe that, you know, the planets are gods and that the sea is a god.
Genesis chapter 1 looks at that and it kind of subverts the expectations of the day in getting to this ultimate question of why are we here?
What are we supposed to do while we're here?
And how do we get out of here?
And it says that, no, there's purpose, there's meaning, there's intention.
And actually, a lot of the things that you worship, it's pretty stupid because God created them.
There are a number of different, like, variations.
The problem is that we're largely relying on, like, our complete copies are coming in languages like Akkadian, where the ones in Sumerian are very fragmentary.
So, like, even the Epic of Gilgamesh, the copy that we have that kind of is the final.
If you go and you read a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's going to be the one in Akkadian from the Library of Ashurbanipal.
But the earlier versions in Sumerian don't even have the flood story in them.
And they're more pieced together.
And we actually do have another flood story in the Atrasis, which appears to have been influenced, the Epic of Gilgamesh story is influenced by the Atrasis.
In terms of, like, written language, I guess it's the Enuma Elish.
I wouldn't actually know what, like, the oldest, oldest one is.
But you get a lot of these origin stories, and they have these themes.
We see it in the Bible, too.
The ancient Near Eastern cultures were very preoccupied with chaos and order.
And so it's all about kind of...
Creating order out of the chaos of the world.
And that's where I think you do see the parallels.
And establishing chaos and certain things being representational of chaos within the created order, like the Bible included, but a lot of other ancient cultures saw things like the ocean.
As the embodiment of unpredictability and chaos.
And so that's why you have...
Sea monsters are this very common depiction.
The Leviathan in Job, which is this sea monster.
And it's representational in a way of – because it appears actually in Babylonian literature too, the Leviathan.
And the point of God bringing it up to Job in the book of Job is like, God has the ability to tame this thing.
And even in the book of Revelation, at the end of the Bible, it says that in the new heavens and new earth, there will be no sea.
And it's not because, you know...
I had a friend who is Australian, and we were kind of working through translating sections of Revelation, and he's like, hold on, there will be no sea.
He's like, I'm Australian, I love the sea.
But the point of that, though, is not necessarily that the body of water is not going to exist.
It's that the ocean, the sea, is so unpredictable.
You go out there and storms can come out of nowhere, and you die.
And so there are these motifs that are representational in the ancient world, and we see a lot of those in these creation stories.
So the sea kind of working as an analogy of that which is unpredictable.
And actually, there's a lot of concepts of the realm of the dead being in the sea that we see throughout this literature.
If you read the book of Jonah, There's this kind of stylistic, which you miss when you read it in the English, but it's very apparent in the Hebrew, where Noah keeps going down.
He goes down from his town to the dock, and then he goes down into the boat, and then he goes down into the inside of the boat, and then the storm happens, and then they throw him overboard down into the sea and down into the fish, and eventually the fish takes him down into the depths of the sea, and when...
Jonah prays, he says, I cry out from the depths of Sheol, which is the realm of the dead.
So there is actually a form of Jewish interpretation where it argues that Jonah actually died and was resurrected when he was spit up by the fish.
And it could be, because in the Gospels, Jesus says, the people are following him and they keep asking him for miracles.
Because they're like, we saw you do miracles, do more miracles for us.
Come on, do a trick.
Do a trick, Jesus.
And Jesus says, the only miracle you're going to get is the sign of Jonah.
That just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, I will be in the belly of the earth three days and three nights.
You know, prediction of his own death and resurrection.
But there is an argument within rabbinical literature that when Jonah says that he's crying out from the depths of Sheol, it's because he's actually dead.
And that's one interpretation.
But another interpretation could just be that he saw and understood as a person of his day the depths of the ocean as where the dead people ended up anyways.
Like your soul goes down into the chaos and the disorder of Sheol, which is the realm of the dead.
Hominid that's not human and one of the things that they were so fascinated about was that they buried their dead and that they did so in a cave.
Do you remember that Jamie?
Do you remember who was discussing that with us?
It was they did not think that this version of ancient primate was capable of these things and then they seem to have confirmation Through these very extensive cave systems, there was at least one area where they would put their dead.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not a scientist, so I gotta stay in my lane.
I ultimately would be an advocate for intelligent design, where I would say that God purposefully created humanity in a way You had Stephen Meyer on, right?
So, I mean, he's one of those guys who talks about kind of the issues that he sees with evolution.
And I think I have some of those issues, too.
My friend Jonathan McClatchy is a biologist, and he does some really great presentations on the ways that he sees kind of the intricacies of Neo-Doranian evolution is not quite explaining some of what's going on with things like the fossil record and some of the gaps that we have in there.
When you talk about early hominids, I mean, ultimately, I think that there are aspects of the fact that there are ancient cultures, which, I mean, humanity obviously looks very different today than it did, you know, if we're going tens of thousands of years ago.
And so I think that there's a different kind of convention and understanding.
But ultimately, I would ascribe to there being an original Adam and Eve, and that those are our like, if you want to call them like our first parents kind of thing.
But there are other Christians who I would disagree with, but I think have interesting articulations of that in terms of theistic evolution.
I disagree with them, but it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility to find explanations.
I don't think the Bible is trying to explain how people came into existence in the same way that maybe we want it to.
And a lot of people read the origin stories in Genesis as a scientific textbook.
And I think ultimately that misses the point of what Genesis is trying to say.
This goes back to what we were talking about with like, how did the original audience understood this?
When they read Genesis chapter 1, are they looking at that as an exact prescription of what God did?
I mean, in some ways, maybe.
But in other ways, they could see that as this counter-apologetic to the other ancient Near Eastern stories, like I explained.
So I just think we need to be careful when we're looking at, or even counting up the genealogies and coming up with how old the earth is.
I think that might be missing the forest for the trees in what we're actually looking at when we look at ancient documents and how we're trying to interpret them.
Well, the question of evolution is a fascinating one, right?
Because there's obviously something happening, particularly with us, if we really are related to homo ledaldi, naliti, or there's something clearly is happening.
This is like process of change.
And if we don't completely understand all the factors in that process of change, we might miss out.
The equation might be incomplete.
I mean, we know a lot now about evolution that we did not know before, but like all sciences, new data comes in and you have to recalibrate things.
Have you been paying attention to this new discussion about dark matter and dark energy?
And I mean, I think we get that in history, too, whereas we have these kind of what we think are established conventions and all of a sudden we discover something and it completely overthrows the ideas that we have.
So you were talking about, like, what is our oldest...
So this guy is P52, John Ryland's 457. So that's a genuine Egyptian papyri that I made.
I cut it out for you.
And then I transcribed the text on that manuscript.
So when we're talking about what is potentially our oldest evidence for the New Testament, this manuscript that most likely comes from Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, is the one that usually is...
Universally accepted as our oldest one.
And that contains John 18, where Jesus is on trial before Pilate.
And yeah, so that's the one.
It's in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England.
And where Jesus is on trial before Pilate, and Jesus says, everyone who is following the truth follows me.
And on the back has the words of Pilate saying, what is truth?
But so part of my research—so the reason I bring this up is because before this was discovered by C.H. Roberts in the 1940s, the convention was, because of a guy named C.H. Bauer, that the Gospel of John was second century.
And so he had this—he was a student of Hegel.
Have you ever heard of Hegelian dialectic?
So you have like a thesis, synthesis, and antithesis?
So Hegel— He had this philosophical theory, and his student, Bauer, takes that and he incorporates this into history, and he says, you know, the earliest gospel, Mark, has this very Jewish Jesus, and then the later gospels have a very, like, the last of what are called the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Luke has a very kind of more divine Jesus.
And so he says, based on this, John is the last, last written one.
And it combines these two where you get a very human and a very divine Jesus together.
And so based on this, he says that John has to be second century.
Well, we discover this guy.
C.H. Roberts is, you know, literally going through these piles of manuscripts in these drawers that are being like stashed away.
And he finds this guy and he sees that it's written on both sides, which is almost exclusively a Christian convention.
Because in the ancient world, they used scrolls.
And the Christians, for reasons we're not entirely clear on, they start to make codices, books.
And so they write on both sides.
And so he says, okay, this is written on both sides.
It's probably a Christian manuscript.
So he sends it off to the leading paleographers, or guys who date manuscripts.
And they all say, this is the beginning of the second century.
And so there's still debate about the dating of this, but the unanimous consensus is that it's comfortably second century, potentially the beginning of the second century, which means that this is found in Egypt.
John is probably writing his gospel in Ephesus.
So it has to be written by John, spread around, find his way to Egypt, be copied, and then end up in this manuscript, which means that at minimum, you've already pushed the gospel of John back into the first century comfortably, and potentially even like most likely into the lifetime of the eyewitnesses of these and potentially even like most likely into the lifetime of the And so all of the literature up until that point from the scholarly consensus about the dating of the gospel of John gets totally rewritten.
And because of my academic work where I was telling you like in paratextual features, you When we look at these tiny manuscripts and you figure out, okay, well, what does that look like on the page?
I also made you.
So this is, I use two different variations of papyri.
So you have there where P52 would have been on the page and based on the, it's called codicological conventions, the spacings of the words.
And the way that the size of the margin that we can see, where it would have been on the page and how big the page would have actually been.
So this is like a reconstruction, and then I filled in the rest of the text in the same sort of style, stylistic hand of the scribes at that time, what that page would have looked like.
So this would have come from what would have been essentially like a pocket copy of the Gospel of John.
I was at the, two summers ago, I was at the University of Pennsylvania.
And I was looking at a manuscript called P1 or P-Oxy-2, 1.2.
And it's a beginning of the third century copy of...
The first page of Matthew's Gospel.
And when I requested access to it, they told me that the last person to request it was when Pope John Paul II came and visited the States, and they pulled it out for him.
So on the, like, you know the library when you used to, like, have to punch your name, write your name on the cards?
Actually, you know what, Jamie, if you go up to the search bar and put CSNTM, those letters, CSNTM.org.
So this is the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.
So if you click Digital Manuscript Collection.
So they go around the world, and they try to digitize all the existing New Testament manuscripts to preserve them.
And so you can actually, you see there on the side, you can click, well, I want to look at a papyri, and you can go the different conventions of, you know, the date or the time.
Yeah, so ideally you always want to go look at the original, but because of organizations like CSNTM, which is actually in Dallas, people like me don't have to go to Europe where a lot of these manuscripts are housed.
We can look at them and because these are such high grade that you can figure these things out.
So actually, a guy I know, Elijah Hickson, he used that and he actually figured out that there was a prominent manuscript, P50, which is a forgery.
And so he used that based on like looking at the digital.
Yeah, he filled in the gaps within the rips and saw that the words didn't match up when you fill in the gaps.
And so when he's transcribing the text, he's like, wait a minute, I don't think that word fits in there.
And based on that, he's like, yeah, that's a forgery because someone has written the text in after that piece of papyri, which is...
These forgeries are almost always a genuine piece of ancient papyri.
Someone gets it from like the black market antiquities.
There's such a giant problem today in that if you just post some fantastical claim in a headline, like the theory of dark matter has been debunked, and then you get clicks.
And so you can kind of get away with doing that now.
Well, it's just so insane because we're so separate from it because of light pollution that the most majestic thing that you could ever see, we gave up so that we could drive at night.
It's really weird.
It's really weird because when you go to a place, you know, I've talked about it a bunch of times, but I'll say it again.
I went to the Keck Observatory many years ago, and we got there on a perfect time where the moon was not out at all, and the sky was insane.
It was like you were in the cockpit of a spaceship, and, you know, it was just like you were in a giant glass cockpit, which is essentially...
We are kind of in an organic spaceship hurling through the universe, so it should look like that.
But it just doesn't because of the fact that we're constantly inundated by light pollution.
And I think the ancient societies and ancient cultures didn't have that.
And because they didn't have that, I think they had a much more humble view of our place in the universe.
Because you're just presented with something that's absolutely impossible.
It's like a rethinking article I found that gets into explaining what dark energy is and then there's probably a paragraph at the bottom that's just what you're looking for.
So the timescape model rejects the idea that dark energy is the driving force of universe expansion.
Improved analysis of type LA, LA supernovae, has suggested that the acceleration based on light curves seen in 1998 was a case of misidentification.
The timescape model amends this by considering differences of time in void and matter-dense areas.
The model suggests that time moves much slower in matter-dense areas, like the Milky Way galaxies, than in voids.
With more time passing in voids, increased expansion takes place, making it seem like expansion is accelerating as the voids increasingly spread through the universe.
Dark energy, therefore, is not needed to explain the expansion of the universe, according to the researchers.
Who fucking knows?
It's too much.
It's too much like, what are you even saying?
How crazy is this?
You know, like, one of the more controversial aspects of the James Webb Telescope was this theory that perhaps the universe was quite a bit older than 13 point whatever billion years.
And they were trying to push it back to 22 based on the existence of galaxies.
And people are pushing back against that, and there's a lot of debate about that, but the bottom line is all of it is too many numbers for your brain to even register.
Yeah.
However many billions of years ago, there was nothing.
And then all of a sudden there was something.
And Terence McKenna had a great line that said that science requires one miracle.
It really is nothing compared to the birth of the universe, but we're convinced at the creation of the universe, and we're very skeptical at other miracles.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's an inconsistency there, and you do see when the Big Bang is first hypothesized that there are individuals who are uncomfortable with that sounding like in the beginning.
Because before that, the idea was that the universe was eternal.
And if you propose a point in time where everything starts to exist, well, that for – and you see some of these people are pushing back on it.
They say things like, well, that sounds too religious.
That sounds like a beginning point in time.
And at that point, if there's a big bang, you have to figure out, okay, well, what's the big banger?
And I mean, that's ultimately, it's a metaphysical religious question.
I mean, not even just, and we're the doughiest, like weakest, softest.
But also the smartest.
Like, we gave up that.
That was the trade-off.
And somehow or another, by evolving into this particular form, we figured out a way to uniquely change the environment in ways that no other creature has even come close to.
It's interesting to me that...
There are certain things that we think of in terms of unexplained phenomena that we'll accept because we have some sort of a scientific definition of what this unexplained phenomena is.
Like the Big Bang.
And you can say that there's theories.
It's not completely unexplained.
You kind of get it, but you kind of don't.
Something that's smaller than the head of a pin that becomes the entire universe that we say is...
You know, and just to say that that just happened and you don't, you don't really, I know you don't want to say you don't know, but you really don't know.
There's no way you can know.
It's not really possible to know.
There's no, like, working theory where you can convince me.
That the whole universe gets compressed into something smaller than the head of a pen and then instantaneously becomes everything that you see.
If you just imagine the sheer number of illiterate people, the sheer number of...
Days that have to go by where people are telling the story exactly the same and that it's entrusted in the hands of these very few people that are so dedicated to it that they get the exact words right a thousand years later.
Well, I mean, that is kind of the crazy thing about Christianity where you have this Jewish itinerant guy who's walking around for a century Roman-occupied Judea.
He's making some...
Pretty audacious claims.
Claims to be God himself.
And then he predicts his own death and resurrection.
And then his disciples, they think it's over.
They're like, he's dead.
We're done.
And then they go from 11 scared men, because Judas commits suicide, scared men in an upper room to completely overhauling the Roman world in only a couple hundred years because of this claim that they say They saw Jesus resurrected.
Like, there's something different that goes on there.
So, but it's hard when you're dealing with illiterate populations, you're dealing with thousands of years of time, you're dealing with an oral tradition.
And then you have us sitting here talking about it in 2024, trying to figure it at the end of 2024, trying to figure this out, literally the end.
It's very difficult for anybody who thinks of themselves as an intelligent person who's secular to even entertain the possibility that someone died and come back to life.
Yeah, 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says that Jesus appeared to the disciples, and then he appeared to 400 people all at once.
I mean, if we read the Gospel of Luke and Acts, so same author wrote these both documents, he says that Jesus was walking around teaching them for 40 days after he was resurrected from the dead.
And so...
These are written within a time period when you have people who would have seen Jesus' ministry, who were there, say, at something like the feeding of the 5,000, who could have been able to verify or debunk some of these things that are being said.
And you go from a bunch of scared guys who, because Jesus wasn't the only messianic figure who arose and claimed to be the Messiah.
And so, in fact, if you look at, say, very skeptical biblical scholars, like non-believing...
Atheist, agnostic, Christian scholars, they will say if we can know anything about Jesus, like they'll cast a doubt on a lot of the things that we read about in the Gospels in terms of the actual historical Jesus of Nazareth, they'll say one thing we can be sure of is that he died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.
Because we have not just multiple detested documents that we refer to as the New Testament, but Roman and Greek and Jewish writers refer to that claim afterwards and talk about the fact that You have this guy.
And it's mocked within earliest Christianity.
So one of our earliest, in fact, not one of, the earliest depiction of Jesus on the cross is called the Alexa Menos Grafito.
And it's probably from the end of the first century.
And it depicts an individual with their arms raised in an act of worship, worshiping a man with a donkey's head who's being crucified.
And right beside it, it says, Alexa Menos worships his god in Greek.
And it's mocking, right?
Because crucifixion was for the lowest of the low.
It was for, like, slaves.
In fact, if you were a Roman citizen, you were banned from being crucified.
Well, so the story is that they say, we're going to crucify you, and he says, it's, like, too big of an honor to die like my Lord, and they say, well, we can fix that.
We know a lot about crucifixion, but crucifixion was seen as so disgusting.
I believe it was Cicero who said that, like, the word crucifixion shouldn't even be on a Roman man's lips.
I mean, the word excruciating, ex is off of in Latin, and cruce, off the cross.
So that's where we get that word, is because this was designed to humiliate, and it was designed to be as painful as possible.
There was actually a really good article done by JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, which was done by a number of, I think it was in the 70s, early 80s.
It was done by a group of biblical scholars and then medical professionals.
And so they looked at the conventions of what we do know about Roman crucifixion, and then they looked at the descriptions in the gospel to try to figure out, okay, if we could diagnose how Jesus died, how would he have died?
And so they basically came up with this idea that he probably asphyxiated to death.
You kind of drown in your own blood.
But the chances of Jesus surviving the crucifixion, I think, are narrow to none.
And the chance of him appearing three days later, completely fine.
I mean, you don't...
If the first thing you do, if you survive a crucifixion and then you go and you find your disciples, the first thing you say is not, you know, peace be with you.
So this is an interesting question because of the differences between when the Gospel of John says Jesus died compared to the synoptics, because John appears to be using the Roman convention of counting time, and the other Gospels, when they describe the timing, appear and the other Gospels, when they describe the timing, appear to be using the Jewish ones.
And actually, if you correlate between the two, they match up pretty well.
So, the thing is, with Jews, any part of a day was considered a day.
So three days and three nights becomes almost an idiom for any part of that day is the day.
So if Jesus, and because they count evening and morning, evening to morning is the day, it's very possible that it wasn't like how we would think of three 24-hour days, especially if he dies on Friday and wakes up on Sunday.
And how many different people have some sort of a recollection or a writing or something that's a tribute to them of being witness to his resurrection?
Peter, Paul, Jude, James, and Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
The thing with Matthew, Mark, and Luke is that Matthew and Luke, or Matthew and John, are attributed to direct disciples of Jesus.
Luke and Mark are not.
So they are not eyewitnesses within the Jesus community.
In fact, Luke prefaces his gospel by saying that.
He's right up front about this.
He's like, hey, I'm not an eyewitness.
Don't confuse me with an eyewitness.
But he actually uses conventional writing.
What's the term I'm looking for?
He uses writing conventions of the day that would fit within regular biography that was written within the Roman world.
So you have a guy named Quintilian who is basically...
I mentioned him before.
He's teaching people how to write.
And he says that if you're going to write biography...
You need to be interviewing eyewitnesses and you can't be too far away from the event to be able to write these things.
And Josephus, who are all these very prominent ancient biographers and writers of history, have a lot of crossover in the way they describe how you should write history with the words that Luke uses at the beginning of his Gospel, where he says, I'm interviewing eyewitnesses and I'm writing up an orderly account.
And so he's saying, you know, I'm going to use these methods that are expected as good history of my day.
I'm not an eyewitness, so I'm going to try to find the people who are eyewitnesses, and I'm going to try to encapsulate this within a document that communicates what is being written.
No, the only ones from the ancient world that deny his resurrection are groups that come on afterwards that sometimes are described as Gnostics.
And they're not necessarily just denying it for the reasons we might think they were.
They're denying it because they have incorporated ideas of pagan philosophy, where they believe that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad.
So if Jesus was crucified, he—so let me back up.
If Jesus is God, he cannot have a physical body.
So they deny that he actually had a physicality to him.
This is sometimes called docetism because docene in Greek means to seem.
So these groups that we describe as the docetics, they are denying that Jesus had a physical body.
He only seemed to have a physical body.
And they wrote documents later on.
So the Gospel of Peter, which comes around in, you know, second, third, fourth centuries, is being written and it has Jesus kind of chilling on the cross because he's not really physical because he's divine and physical entities.
We don't actually get like a concrete denial of his resurrection in that way until you get things like the Gospel of Barnabas in the Middle Ages, which is actually the document that Billy brought up to me in the conversation we had, is the evidence that Jesus was never crucified, the Gospel of Barnabas.
Well, the Gospel of Barnabas is 15th century.
It paraphrases Dante's Inferno.
It's not an ancient document.
Nobody really had that big of a problem with these kind of supernatural claims.
The more of the kind of skepticism was why you would worship a crucified individual to begin with.
In fact, the ancient world didn't really have a problem with supernatural events.
There is an ancient writer who mocks Christianity, and he particularly mocks Christianity in saying that, of course, Jesus did miracles, because Jesus had a childhood in Egypt.
And he goes, all those Egyptians are magicians anyways.
So he just learned the magic when he was a child.
So he actually confirms, incidentally, two things.
That the narrative in the Gospels where it says that the Holy Family fled to Egypt during the reign of Herod.
He corroborates that he actually thinks that happened and that Jesus did miracles.
He just attributes the miracles to Jesus being a traveling magician anyways.
That is what's really fascinating, that the mindset of the people that lived back then was that whatever was going on in Egypt was so crazy that they had to be magicians.
Well, that's also why it's so interesting trying to put your mind into the context of people that live back then when you try to interpret what these stories were all about because they did believe in things that weren't real.
So when they talk about this thing that we're supposed to believe is real, when you have all this evidence that they believe things that aren't true, it's interesting, right?
Because like...
You're now saying, yeah, but this one really was true.
So when we do history, it's an inference to the best explanation.
And so there are probabilities of things that have happened in history where we can say, okay, there's a higher probability of event A happening and a lower probability of event B happening.
So the example I often give is like Jonah being swallowed by the fish.
That's low probabilistically.
Not that it didn't happen, but that, like, as a historian, we gotta, like, say, well, there's no independent cross-reference sources.
You don't have multiple attestation for this particular event.
The interesting thing about Jesus is that we have more evidence from different writings in the ancient world than we probably should have for someone of his stature.
We have Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John, these four biographies.
There's really only one other person in and around that time that can claim to have that much kind of independent testimony of their life, and it's the Roman Emperor Tiberius.
So he also has four biographers.
He has Cassio Dio, Suetonius Tacitus, and Vilius Paterculus.
And so the Roman Emperor, who's the most...
Famous, most powerful person at the time has a similar amount of historiographical evidence biographically for the events of his lifetime that Jesus does.
Yeah, I mean, you have individuals like Josephus mentions him, end of the first century, beginning of the second century.
He was a Jewish Roman writer.
Tacitus mentions him, who also wrote about the emperor.
And, you know, you have a number of these individuals, Cassius or Suetonius.
But what they're doing mostly is describing what the followers of Christianity are saying about him.
So you do have to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt in that they're not saying things that they believe happened.
They're talking about things that Christians believe happened.
And Christians are this very unusual group because they're monotheistic in a world that does not believe in monotheism.
And Jews are monotheistic in that time as well.
But there was this idea that your religion could be tied to your ethnicity, and that was okay.
Like the Jews believe in one God and that's weird, but they're Jews.
Whereas the Christians start to convert people who are of all different ethnic backgrounds.
And so they're like, well, what the heck is going on here?
Because why are you saying...
So the earliest criticisms of Christianity were actually that it was atheistic.
Ah being the negative participle and theos meaning God, right?
Because the ancient world was polytheistic.
But more than that, it was what's sometimes referred to as henotheism in that it's not that they believe in many gods.
It's that they believe in many gods and your gods could be my gods, right?
Jupiter could be Zeus.
Just the same god by a different name.
And your cities could have gods, right?
Osiris and Ra can live in Egypt.
And Zeus and Athena can live here.
And that doesn't compromise anything.
But then the Christians are coming around and they're saying, actually, no, none of those gods exist.
If they exist, then they're demons.
But they don't actually exist.
And this was a big point of persecution within early Christianity.
Is that...
A lot of physical events were tied to supernatural events.
So there's an ancient historian who has this line where he says, if the Nile River is too high in Egypt or the Tiber River is too low in Rome, the cry will ring out the Christians to the lions.
Because if you have, say, a famine in Athens and they're going, okay, what's the reason for the famine?
Well, Athena's mad because there's a bunch of...
People running around saying she doesn't exist.
Okay, well, let's deal with them.
Let's get rid of them, and that'll solve our issue.
Well, that's part of, I think, the argument of, well, how do you explain that?
How do you explain it going...
From 11 scared disciples in an upper room to being willing to go out and die for the proclamation that you believe that Jesus rose from the dead and you saw him and you touched him and you ate with him.
Right before Constantine, you had a guy named Diocletian, who was the emperor, who basically had the goal of wiping out Christianity entirely.
And so the worst point of persecution was under the Diocletian rule.
He actually made it so that if you had to go into the equivalent of your town hall, and you had to take a pinch of incense and offer it onto the altar of Caesar, him, Right?
The king.
And say, Caesar is Lord.
And part of this was that they knew that Christians say, Jesus is Lord.
And Christians wouldn't do that.
So here's how you outed them.
And if you didn't do this, so if you did do it, you were given this piece of paper.
It's called a libelus.
And a libelus allowed you to buy and sell.
If you didn't do it, you didn't get a libelus, which meant that you were not allowed to buy and sell.
And so you have this incredible era of persecution where Christians are being like killed and Christian literature in particular is being destroyed because they're hunting it out.
So Constantine comes after this and he knows that this is bad for Roman society.
And so him and Licinius get together.
They're both ruling the Roman Empire at the time.
And in 313, they...
Put out this edict of tolerance, which includes Christianity.
So it's called the Edict of Milan, and it decriminalizes Christianity.
I think they just felt like in order to establish peace within the empire, you need to make sure that people aren't fearing you constantly to that degree.
And so...
It wasn't just Christianity that benefited from the Edict of Milan.
A number of religious minority groups were benefited from this particular event.
But this happens.
Between 313 and 325, Constantine converts.
And so he becomes friendly to Christians.
He also commissions.
Books of the Bible to be written.
And so this is where we first get our understanding.
Like when we think of a Bible, we think of it as like in a single bound volume.
Like because we have the 66 books of the Bible and, you know, has a nice cover on the page or on the front.
But in the ancient world, those existed independently.
So like P52, like that would be a separate copy of the Gospel of John.
And that's what it would...
Well, Constantine, as like a peace offering, commissions all of these documents to be brought together and published in one book.
And so we actually have what we think are some of these documents.
So when I was talking with Billy Carson, he brought up the Sinai Bible, Codex Sinaiticus.
Codex Sinaiticus is probably one of these Documents that Constantine commissioned.
Because it's one of our earliest examples of a cover-to-cover Genesis to Revelation copy of the Bible.
And it comes from the 4th century.
And based on both its dating and based on the fact that this would have been incredibly expensive to make.
Like it took 360 sheep just to put together.
Which would have been the equivalent of like, I don't know, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars today.
The reason why we're pretty sure that documents like Codex Anaticus, Codex Vaticanus, potentially even Codex Alexandrinus or Codex Washingtonianus are documents that could have been part of this commissioning is just because they're such giant projects.
Very few people would have had the ability to produce something like this other than an emperor.
And so we actually have some of these documents that survive today.
So very early on when you have Christians having these conversations, The four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, there's unanimous agreement about those.
Particularly, and that's not to say that there aren't other Gospels that pop up.
It's that you have this chain of custody that goes back to the earliest Jesus community.
Jesus has disciples, and there's a group of individuals who we call the apostolic fathers who are the disciples of Jesus' disciples.
And so they comment on the books that the disciples of Jesus or that people within the community of the disciples of Jesus wrote.
And so we actually have a very close connection to the time.
And we see early on that you have guys like...
Ignatius of Antioch, arguing that there are only four Gospels in the second century, and there couldn't be any more than four.
Or Theophilus of Antioch makes the similar argument, and they name Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Now, Ignatius of Antioch also talks about other Gospels, but he specifically highlights the fact that the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Truth, Gospel of the Hebrews, Gospel of these ones that we kind of hear about, Mary, Judas, that the reason we know that they're not associated with The names that are attached to them is because they're being written in times when those people were dead.
And they have these rings of pagan philosophy that are incorporated into them, which is completely foreign to first century Judaism.
So Jesus would not have.
So in the Gospel of James, Jesus is worshipping a goddess named Sophia.
It's like, okay, well, no first century Jew is going to do that.
That's obviously paganism.
And so we have these early conversations.
But when Christians are thinking about, well, what is and isn't Scripture, the earliest Christians are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah.
And the Jews had this idea that the promises of God are followed up by the writings, the documents that establish those.
So the word that's often used is covenant.
Right?
God makes a covenant with people, and that's always followed up by written text.
So this is why sometimes, well, in the case of Moses, it's literally inscribed on a tablet, right?
And in the prophets, sometimes you get this command, write this on a scroll, inscribe this on a tablet.
And that the Jewish scriptures in Jesus' day were seen as a story in search of a conclusion.
Because they were looking for this figure, this Mashiach, the Messiah, who would come and fulfill things like the reign of David.
So they're talking about these things.
They're actually expecting them to happen.
And so the story in search of a conclusion in the Christian understanding is that Jesus is that individual.
He comes and he does things like he says at the Last Supper, right before his crucifixion, that he's establishing a new covenant in his blood.
And so the earliest Christians, mostly who are Jews, who believe in Jesus as the Messiah, they see, okay, there's a new covenant, which is actually promised in Jeremiah 31, 31, when God says that he's going to make a new covenant and inscribe the law on people's hearts.
That covenant has come.
Okay, the promises have come.
So the earliest Christians very organically say, okay, where's the writing?
Because we expect this to happen.
Promises are followed up by writings.
And so they start to have these conversations of what are the writings and where can we find them?
And so very early on, because the New Testament has 27 books in it, very early on, 24 of the 27 are unanimously accepted.
So by the time you get to the middle of the second century, we have lists in documents like there's a document called the Meritorium Fragment.
Which there's debate on its dating, but it's probably like mid to late second century.
And it includes 24 of the 27. And it gives reasoning why.
Now, the other books that are in our New Testament that aren't in that 24 are ones that were discussed because the earliest Christians were trying to figure out, okay, can we tie this to either an apostle or someone who knew an apostle?
Because we have a lot of books.
Flying around with the names of John and Peter on them.
So you have the Acts of Peter, and you have the Revelation of Peter, and you have the Gospels of Peter, and you have...
So how do we do our due diligence to try to tie this back?
So there's two letters of Peter, 1 and 2 Peter, in the New Testament.
And the early Christians are like, we've got to make sure we can tie these to Peter.
Or the book of Jude and the book of James, which are ascribed to the brothers of Jesus.
They were like, can we really say that those are written by those people?
And so there are some books that the dust kind of takes time to settle on within the whole 27 canon because these groups are debating and discussing, you know, well, why do we have these ones and not other ones?
And so there are various canon lists.
That come up throughout the ancient world where some people are hypothesizing, well, maybe, you know, this book is part of it or maybe this book is part of it.
But it's this ongoing conversation of people.
And by basically the end of the second century, we have more or less unanimous agreement of the 27 books being those that encapsulate scripture that can be tied to either someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus.
Well, so part of the problem with some of these other books is they appear to be almost completely reliant on the other books.
So you do have, and some of them have an agenda to them.
So like the Docetic Gospel of Peter seems to be uncomfortable with the fact that the biblical gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, have women being the first witnesses to the empty tomb.
Because in the ancient world, women were not seen as good eyewitnesses.
So you almost have this apologetic trying to solve that problem by having all the right people be witness to the resurrection.
So you have all the Roman and Jewish officials camping out in front of the tomb, which also gives away the fact that no Jewish priest on the eve of Passover is going to be camping out in front of a dead body.
Like they didn't do that.
So it betrays that the author of the Gospel of Peter has no understanding of purity ritual rites within first century Second Temple Judaism, but is also clearly trying to remedy this embarrassing fact.
Most interesting ways that we figure out, okay, how can we tie, say, the Gospel of Matthew to the first century in Judea, is studies that have been done on name frequency.
So this is called onomastic congruence, where we look at the most popular names within a particular geographical area, and we compare it to how names are differentiated.
So the name Joe...
It's pretty common.
So when you have a room and there's more than one Joe, you differentiate.
Okay?
That's Joe Rogan.
Or, you know, that's MMA Joe.
You know, we figure out a way to do it.
And that's called a disambiguator.
And we see this in the New Testament.
I mean, you have lots of Peters.
Right?
You have Simon Peter.
You have Peter the Canaanite.
You have, you know, or...
Or James, the son of Zebedee.
Or you have lots of Marys.
So you have these disambiguities.
You even have lots of Jesuses, which is why Jesus is often described as the Lord Jesus or Jesus of Nazareth, because Yehoshua is a common Jewish name.
And so we can look at the popularity of names written in documents and actually pinpoint some of these documents to particular times and particular places.
In fact, Jamie, are you able to, if you go on Apologetics Canada, Our YouTube page.
So the first episode of the Can I Trust the Bible series we did, we made an animation about this where we looked at the data and then we actually compared it to one of these other Gospels, the Gospel of Judas.
And so in the first episode of Can I Trust the Bible in the right books, partway through, it's near the end, the last animation, if you can find it, we had a guy put this together for us where we...
Looked at the studies, and there have been some really recent ones by a guy named Luke Vanderway, who published this in, I believe it was at Cambridge.
No, no, no.
Birmingham University, he did his PhD on it, and he narrowed the gap within all of these literary bodies that talk about names, and were able to pinpoint and actually show.
Yeah, so if you go to...
Yeah, right here.
A series of scholarly studies has shown that, though Jews were located in many places across the Roman Empire, people's names often tended to be geographically located.
By observing literary and archaeological artifacts, a list of common names can be clearly identified.
By narrowing down the most popular names in places that Jesus lived, traveled, and ministered, and by comparing these to the list from the studies, An interesting correlation can be seen.
Just as we see today with popular names, a qualifier or nickname is often used.
For example, notice that when Matthew lists the disciples in his gospel, certain names have a qualifier or nickname and others do not.
Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector, James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus.
As we would expect, the most popular names are those that have an added description.
When we compare the most popular names in Judea and Galilee during the first century with names we see listed in key places in the biblical gospels, we find that all the names with qualifiers match with what we'd assume if they were actually written in the time and place they claim to be narrating.
In contrast...
The Gospel of Judas only has two names that would fit, Jesus and Judas, but contains a host of other characters whose names match not with 1st century Judea or Galilee, like the biblical gospels, but with names that were popular in Egypt during the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
Consider how difficult it would be for someone living outside of the locations and times that these events took place to get the right names with the right qualifiers.
We have four biblical gospels, with four different authors, and yet each gets this test of naming frequency and attribution right every time.
A test and standard that the non-biblical gospels simply do not pass.
Yeah, so it's the levels of methodology that we can use to find internal accuracy.
If we really want to figure out, okay, where was this written?
And is it coming from early eyewitness testimony?
We look at something like the biblical gospels, and they fit the bill for something that's written in first century Judea.
But if we look at something like the other gospels, they're doing things like the Gospel of Judas does, where...
Other characters are coming up with names that are almost either non-existent or very unpopular in places like Judea and Galilee, but are popular in 3rd and 4th century Egypt.
So what can we then conclude from that?
Well, this is being written in 3rd or 4th century Egypt.
And lots of this stuff, like the onomastic congruence is something that has really only been studied to the level that it has within the last like 50 years.
So we're constantly discovering ways that we can use different types of methodological analysis to figure out the historical validity of something.
So this is, we call it verisimilitude, which is historians are looking for What can show us the appearance, likelihood, and probability of something being true?
And so sometimes documents out themselves as being unreliable and not true because they inadvertently include these clues.
So the Gospel of Barnabas, which I mentioned before, which Billy Carson has brought up as an evidence that he sees as denying the crucifixion, it talks about Jesus getting in a boat and traveling to Nazareth.
But Nazareth is landlocked.
So, that person clearly did not know anything about the geography of, like, first century Israel, because you're not getting in a boat to go to Nazareth, right?
So, but if you're writing, you know, I mean, in the case of the Gospel of Barnabas, you're talking about, like, a thousand plus years later.
But if you've never been there, and you don't understand, it's like, have you ever seen middle-aged paintings of lions?
So, and a lot of these writings kind of out themselves as that, literarily, within the things that they...
Choose to include.
Names are a small example, but geography or distances between places.
The biblical gospel is described going up to Jerusalem.
And we can kind of read that and not think anything about it.
But Jerusalem, on the elevation of sea level, you do go up to it.
And so it's like these small clues that we as historians are looking for, or on the parable of the Good Samaritan, it's going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.
And you literally, you go down like an elevation in sea level to go to Jericho.
Or the story of Zacchaeus, who's the guy who climbs a tree to see Jesus.
He's a wee little man.
He's short.
And he can't see over the crowd, and he hears this miracle worker, Jesus is coming, so he climbs a sycamore tree.
And the Gospels specifically say he climbs a sycamore tree.
Well, this can be like a detail we can pass over, but we know, based on kind of the acidity of the soils, that sycamore trees only grow in those areas in that, you know, time frame.
So we can look and see, okay, well, Luke, whoever Luke is getting this from, He's adding this detail.
Maybe he's not even aware of the significance of it.
But whoever he's getting this from has been there because they actually know what tree would have been growing there and tell him that Zacchaeus climbs a sycamore tree.
And so it's like fauna and flora and distance between locations, things that actually other ancient writers get wrong sometimes.
Especially when you're talking about something that's as bizarre as death.
And especially when you have people that have near-death experiences that are radically similar.
Those are really weird.
They're really weird how many similarities people have in these near-death experiences from accidents and all sorts of things that people come back from where their heart stops beating.
They see themselves above their body.
There's a lot of weirdness to it.
That makes you...
I just think it's a little silly.
Because how could you know what you don't know?
You cannot know what you don't know.
And the problem is that there's a cachet, that there's a social credit amongst academics in particular that's ascribed to a person who is atheist.
A person who is...
He's brilliant.
He's not silly.
He doesn't believe in myths.
He doesn't...
I get it.
I get why there's social pressure in that regard.
I get it.
But to not look at the universe itself, just this creation engine of planets and stellar nurseries.
Well, it certainly seems like there's a lot of people that believe that there was this very exceptional human being that existed.
So the question is, what does that mean?
Does it mean he was the son of God?
Does it mean he was just some...
Completely unique human being that had this vision of humanity and this way of educating people and spreading this ideology that would ultimately change the way human beings interact with each other forever.
So is He the Son of God?
Well, are we all?
That's another question.
Do we all have that inside of us?
Do we all have that ability to change everything around us, inside of us?
Do we all have that unique connection to the divine?
And is He a representation of the best version of that?
Or was He an actual person that was the Son of God?
And is it important?
I don't know.
I mean, what does it mean?
Just the fact that it's a question to ponder is a miracle in itself, in a way.
Just the fact that there's this concept of this person that died for our sins as the Son of God, but you have to believe in a bunch of stuff to go that way.
Just the concept of that is interesting to people, because what it can do to people is offer them...
A very unique way to change the way they feel about the world itself.
And if you do follow that, I know a lot of Christians, or hardcore Christians, or some of the nicest people you'll ever meet in your life.
So it does work.
Right?
Like, if you do live like a Christian, and you do follow the principles of Christ, you will have a richer, more love-filled life.
So it is true.
Right?
But you have to submit to this concept that this guy was the child of God who came down to earth, let himself be crucified, came back from the dead, explained a bunch of stuff for people, and then said, all right, see you when I come back.
And if he came back, here's the thing, if he came back, who the fuck would believe him today?
With all the fake news and all the CGI and AI, like, imagine, that would be the...
Most bizarre thing of all time.
If we get to a point where artificial reality is indiscernible from regular reality and Jesus chooses to come back at that moment, boy, that's the ultimate test of faith.
Right?
When it's impossible to discern.
If we really reach a point where virtual reality is indistinguishable from regular reality, which we're probably a hundred years away from that or something.
I really appreciate- I mean, guys that you're friends with, right?
Like the Jordan Petersons and the Douglas Murrays of the world, or the Tom Hollands, not the Spider-Man actor, the historian, who talk about this stuff.
I think I really like the way that Jordan Peterson articulates it, but I think he misses the forest for the trees.
In that he sees Jesus as an archetype, and I don't think actually even Jesus gives you the opportunity to see him as the archetype.
Because I have this love-hate relationship with all of Peterson's stuff, because he seems to get so much right where he walks up to the line, but he doesn't want to cross over.
I wonder, and I'd love to talk to him about this, like, how do you remedy this issue that—because he seems to think that the concept of Jesus, as an example— Is more important than the actual flesh and blood, first century itinerant Jewish preacher who was crucified and rose from the dead physically, which is the claim of the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament.
That that's an example for us to look on and live by.
But I actually think that Jesus condemns moralism.
And ultimately what I see Peterson doing is looking at Jesus as a moral example.
And if Jesus is nothing but a moral example, then you can save yourself and you don't actually need a savior.
And so I think actually Jesus would have critiqued that because Jesus was very against moralism.
Well, Jesus looks at the religiosity of his day with particular groups like the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who are these other, like...
These other groups of Jews during his day.
So we talked about the Essenes, who actually aren't mentioned in the Bible, but there are other groups like the Pharisees, who are like lay scholars, and the Sadducees, who are professional priest scholars.
And he's constantly critiquing the fact that they have this hypocritical religiosity to them, where they're doing things like tithing their mint leaves, like to make sure that they get all of...
This is where we get the idea of the letter of the law versus the intention of the law.
Like, Jesus critiques them for that because he says, you're trying to do everything right and you're missing the point.
So, one of the things he says is, like, if your donkey falls in a ravine on the Sabbath, do you pull it out?
Or does that work?
Like, what's the point of the Sabbath?
Is it to not do any work?
Like, is it to make sure that you're not working too hard because you might be breaking the Sabbath?
Or like, what is the point?
He says, like, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
And that there's this intention.
This is the whole Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter 5, is he keeps saying, you have heard it said, but I say, and he refers to the Mosaic law.
And it looks like he's critiquing the Mosaic law, but he's not actually.
He's getting back to the intention of the law.
So when he says, you know, you have heard it said, do not commit murder.
But I say to you, anybody who harbors a hate for their brother in their heart has already committed murder.
And what he's getting to is like, what's the intention?
What's the meaning of the law that God gives to you?
Because the law is like a mirror.
It shows you how dirty you are.
But his critique is he's like, you guys are trying to clean yourself with a mirror.
That's stupid.
If anything, it's going to make you more messy.
Like, get in the shower.
The law is not what cleans you.
The law is what reveals that you're dirty.
And so in that sense, I think, you know, if Jesus is a moral example, it actually misses what I think Jesus actually said about what his purpose was, in that you can't do enough to actually live up to the standard that God holds you to.
And so if you keep striving, you're actually going to wear yourself out and be exhausted.
We want people to know what they believe and why they believe it.
And so we produce materials like we played that clip from Can I Trust the Bible?
That's a series that's ongoing.
You know, I'm going to be traveling in 2025 to produce more of that content to try to, you know, get this stuff that's all up here out into people so that they can be able to access it.