Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] I'd like to welcome you to this May 2024 edition of the Gold Q and A. And I want to begin by apologizing for recording this at the end of June.
[00:00:14] It's not good. I know it's not what you paid for.
[00:00:18] Paid for this to come out every month, and I meant for it to come out in June, but life and personal situations got in the way. And so I'm recording this now at the end of June, and I'm going to be recording June probably tomorrow. And so try to get us back. Almost back on track.
[00:00:39] I do appreciate your patience, and I want to thank everybody who sent in a question. I got some very good questions this time. As always, I will try to get through as many of these as I can, but there's no way on God's green earth it's going to happen that I get through all of them. So. All right, let's start. First question.
[00:01:00] Isn't Jesus a little bit hypocritical in his teaching about loving one's enemy by calling his own enemies sinners against the spirit?
[00:01:09] Because he's forgiving of all sorts of sinners and enemies. But when it comes to the ones who are the enemy in his particular situation, namely the Pharisees and Sadducees, he creates an exception for the command to love one's enemy. I don't see how you can reconcile calling someone unforgivable and saying, there's no hope left for that person with loving that person. So Jesus is not loving his enemies. What do I have to say about that? Yeah, well, it's a really good question.
[00:01:40] First thing I'll say is that when Jesus talks about loving your enemies, he means by love what he means in most places that he talks about, which is not having a good feeling towards somebody, not necessarily liking somebody.
[00:01:58] It's not an emotion. It's a kind of action. Love is action that works on behalf of the well being of someone else.
[00:02:07] Jesus loved his enemies, did he? Well, it kind of depends on how you define things.
[00:02:16] By telling them that they were. They were in danger of committing the unforgivable sin. One could easily argue that, in fact, Jesus was doing the best thing for them because he was trying to get them to repent, and the best thing for them would be to repent because otherwise they will not enter into the coming kingdom. It's important to understand what Jesus. The context within which Jesus said that he never actually tells anybody, you can never be forgiven. What he says is that there is an unforgivable sin that unforgivable sin for Jesus is not what has been historically said over the centuries. Everything from committing adultery to committing suicide to masturbation, to pick your sin. People have said, that's the unpardonable sin. And you just kind of wish that people would read this passage in context. You'll find it in all three of the synoptic gospels. It's in response to the leaders of the Jews, the jewish Pharisees, who are and the scribes were saying that Jesus is possessed by an unclean spirit.
[00:03:26] The unforgivable sin for Jesus is not a typical sin against God, not a violation of the jewish Torah.
[00:03:34] The unforgivable sin is the one that rejects Jesus, because Jesus is the one who can bring salvation.
[00:03:43] A question could arise whether this kind of saying, you've got to accept me or you won't be forgiven. If, if you say that I've got an unclean spirit rather than the spirit of God, you've completely missed the point and you can't be forgiven. It's a good question whether that goes back to the historical Jesus or not.
[00:04:03] My, um, my tendency is to think that the answer is no. Uh, it did not that this is a saying that later christians put on his lips in order to show the importance of accepting who Jesus really is, the one sent from God to bring salvation. If you don't accept the salvation of Jesus, then you can't have salvation. This sounds to me more like a christian message.
[00:04:25] It could. I could conceive of it coming from Jesus lips, though, because Jesus did believe that his message was all important. It's not that people in Jesus lifetime, it's not that people had to believe in his death and resurrection. He hadn't died yet, and so that isn't what he preached. He preached that the kingdom of God was soon to arrive and people needed to return back to God to repent of whatever sins they were committing, turn back to God so that they could be forgiven and enter into this kingdom. And if anybody says that's a demonic message, then they're lost, you know? And so I'm a little bit more forgiving of Jesus in this situation because I don't think he's telling anybody they've done something that they'll never be forgiven for. And he's probably doing it because he thinks that this will be, this could lead to their salvation. I'm not saying I agree with him that this would lead to his salvation. But if that's what he thought, then as I suppose it did, then I don't think that he's being unloving toward them.
[00:05:32] Just my view of it. Number two, completely different. On a tour of a monastery in Corfu, Greece, says this person, which made my ears stick up because I've just been on a cross greek islands recently, did not go to Corfu, although it's a great place. On a tour of a monastery in Corfu, says this person, I noticed they displayed a bible they called the most famous tetrane gospel of the 12th century in parchment.
[00:06:00] Are you familiar with this Bible? Are most parchments held in churches or museums?
[00:06:07] I'm actually not sure if I'm familiar with this Bible, because when scholars talk about biblical manuscripts, they give them their official design designations. And so I don't. And so I don't. I don't know which of the 12th century manuscripts that I'm familiar with actually are ones that happen to be in Corfu. I just. So I don't know. I suspect I probably don't know this manuscript, but I don't know the question about whether the old parchments are mainly held in churches or museums. I'd say a lot of them are.
[00:06:39] I'd say most, most really ancient manuscripts today are held. Most are held either in museums or libraries. There are libraries even in America that have manuscripts, original, you know, originally the real thing. Twelve century manuscripts, 8th century manuscripts, et cetera, as do museums and libraries throughout Europe. Some are also kept, still kept in monasteries. And those would be the three major locations for most of our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament.
[00:07:14] Next question. Does the greek prose and manner of storytelling of the Gospels indicate in any way that the authors were writers of other works?
[00:07:27] In other words, is there any reason to believe that they writers say before their conversion and decided to use their talents to tell the story of Jesus?
[00:07:39] Conversely, is there reason to believe they were inexperienced writers doing their best to tell the story of Jesus?
[00:07:47] And this person goes on to say that the reason he's asking is because scholars often say that these gospels are very sophisticated in their plot lines and their stories and the kind of cleverness of how they recount their narratives. But on the other hand, it's often said the Greek isn't all that good. So that seems to be a discrepancy. He's wondering.
[00:08:11] He's wondering about that. He concludes by asking, would an inexperienced writer do what Matthew does or what Mark does, much less craft the complexity and historical narrative of Luke? Okay. Yeah. Okay. These are really good questions. It would take a long time to answer them. I'll give you what I think is the brief answer. We don't know as I think, as this question knows, we don't know the authors of these books, and so we don't really know who they are.
[00:08:38] And anything we know about them has to be intuited or inferred from what they've given us, which are these gospels themselves.
[00:08:47] Did they write other things? Well, we don't know. We don't have anything else that we suspect was written by any of these particular authors.
[00:08:57] But the vast majority of ancient literature has been lost. Well over 99% of writing from that period is no longer with us anymore, if you count everything that was written at the time.
[00:09:10] What we do know is that to learn writing, to learn how to compose a book, it took a lot of training.
[00:09:20] Most people were not educated at all at this time. In the Roman Empire, probably about 85%, maybe 90% of the population could not read.
[00:09:33] And more people could read than could write. Unlike in modern day America, for example, or England or Europe, unlike today, in the ancient world, in the greek enrollment worlds, people were taught the children who could go to schools. This would be the rich, elite folk or people who had social connections. Some way, they could send their kids to school. The kids who went to school almost entirely boys were first learned, first taught how to read, and they were not taught writing at the same time like we were. We were taught how to, how to write letters the same time we were taught how to read them, pretty much. And so we learned reading and writing as kind of a combined skill. And in the ancient world, the reading curriculum happened before the writing curriculum. And so people could read before they knew how to compose the, how to make the letters. They had to be trained in how to actually make the letters. Then they were trained on how to copy somebody else's document. Then they were taught, eventually they were taught how authors wrote, and later on in the curriculum, they were taught how to compose themselves, how to compose sentences, and even after that, then they learned how to compose narratives. And so somebody who was taught to write a letter, for example, did not necessarily know how to write a narrative. That's not unusual. I mean, I write a lot, and there's no way in the world I could write a novel.
[00:11:00] I wish I could.
[00:11:02] Boy, do I wish I could, because I would love, I can't. I just don't have that skill, and I don't have any training in it.
[00:11:09] Most, most educated people in the ancient world would not have been able to compose Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. And so these are relatively highly educated christians living sometime at the end of the second century, probably some 40, 50, 60 years after Jesus.
[00:11:29] The fact that they are able to compose narratives and can do that coherently suggests that they did write other things. Whether they wrote other narrative accounts of any kind or any fiction or any, you know, any essays or.
[00:11:45] We simply don't know, but they certainly were trained to do so.
[00:11:52] I would also say that the fact that the Greek is not at the highest level of quality does not mean they could not compose a good narrative. There are a lot of people who are really smart and are really good storytellers and cannot write worth beings. These authors do write worth beans. I mean, they completely coherent.
[00:12:17] They make very few actual mistakes.
[00:12:20] Offhand, I can't really think of too many mistakes. In Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. You get mistakes in the book of Revelation, but it wasn't written by the same person who wrote the Gospel of John. And so they're grammatically fine. It's just they're not very sophisticated.
[00:12:33] It's pretty simple greek, and it's kind of basic Greek in many ways. It doesn't have the complexities that real literary superstars like to show off in their writings. It's possible that Luke could have written that way.
[00:12:49] It's possible that he could, in fact, have written Luke, especially because Luke begins his gospel with a four kind of a. It's now a four verse introduction that shows he's got. He's got the goods.
[00:13:04] It is sophisticated degree, but he only does it for four lines, and then he goes on and starts his narration.
[00:13:12] So I do think that. I think they probably did write other things, but I don't know what. And if they did, man, we wish we had them, but we don't. Okay, next question. Okay, this is completely different.
[00:13:26] Does evangelical Christianity have the same political impact, have the same impact politically now as it did eight years ago?
[00:13:36] Why or why not?
[00:13:40] I'm not an expert on the modern political situation or on american history or even on or on modern evangelicalism. I will say that my impression is that evangelical Christianity is getting stronger and stronger politically and that the social agendas of the conservative evangelicals are becoming more part of our social agendas of the government.
[00:14:14] For example, second amendment rights and abortion and views on immigration. There's actually no reason why these things should be evangelical causes.
[00:14:28] There's nothing really. I mean, you might think it something like abortion or rights to own guns might be. I mean, they might be tied to religion and they get tied to religion, but there's no reason they have to be. There really is no reason because the Bible doesn't speak about any of these things. And if your religion is based on the Bible, then you would think that you would support social causes that are related to the Bible. But I would say that most of conservative evangelical agenda today is not.
[00:14:59] And so it seems to me to be getting stronger. It started getting stronger. Well, it's been strong for some decades now.
[00:15:08] It includes, for example, support for the nation of Israel, which is a very strong evangelical agenda. And that could well be argued on biblical grounds. Of course, I'm not speaking out for or against an evangelical agenda on any of these topics. I'm simply saying that they become prominent because of evangelical support.
[00:15:30] And I think that support is getting stronger, even though in the younger generations the more kind of liberal social agendas are stronger. But for now, anyway, that's the way the pendulum has swung. And so I think the evangelical community is stronger politically now than they were eight years ago, and they were much stronger eight years ago than there were 18 years ago, and so on. Okay. For good or ill, depending on what your personal positions are, which we all have, by the way. Okay, next question. Back to the Bible. What sources do we have for the historicity of John the Baptist?
[00:16:12] How would Josephus have viewed John the Baptist?
[00:16:17] And then the person goes on to say, could the quotation from Josephus's antiquities about John the Baptist be partially a forgery similar to the reference on Jesus?
[00:16:29] So I'm not going to quote that reference to John the Baptist from Josephus. I'll directly answer the question, what are our sources of information for this person, John the Baptist, our direct sources of information are a reference in the writings of Josephus, who gives a description of John the Baptist at greater length than he gives a description of Jesus, with some differences from what you find in the gospels. And the gospels are our other sources. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all mentioned John the Baptist. So those are our five sources. Josephus, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
[00:17:12] As is true for just about everything in ancient sources, there are differences among these sources. There are differences between the gospel of John and the Gospel of Mark about John the Baptist. There are also differences with Josephus. Together, we look at all of these pieces of evidence, recognizing, for example, that Luke and Matthew at least used Mark as one of their sources. So they're not completely independent. But both of them say things about John the Baptist that Mark does not say. And so for that information, they are independent. And so you look at what's independent among them, you look what each one says. You kind of try and characterize it. The best book on John the Baptist in recent years, probably ever, is by my friend Joel Marcus. And if you just look up his name on Amazon and look for his book on John the Baptist, I think it's the best book available. And you can get a sense for what we can know about John. I personally, Joel and I, we're friends. We've been friends for 35 here 40 years or so. 40 years, I guess. And we disagree on a number of things. But he's a very, very fine scholar. And one thing I disagree with him on about John the Baptist is he thinks that John at one point belonged to the Essene community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls.
[00:18:30] I don't think so. And we have disagreements about this and we have great discussions about it over beer, but it still is the best book. And so you can read about that. And by the way, while I'm saying that, I should point out that earlier question about the strength of evangelicals politically, there's a really good book some of you may know about that you may want to know about if you don't by Christian Dumay, who teaches at Calvin College, I think still, which is a christian school, but it's called Jesus and John Wayne.
[00:19:05] And it may sound weird, but it is a really interesting analysis of how evangelical Christians changed from being a group that emphasized doctrinal issues, as they did when I was an evangelical as a young man, to emphasizing social agendas and pushing their social agendas and their political agendas and to become more like John Wayne, the tough guy.
[00:19:31] And so anyway, if you're interested, you should check out that book, Jesus and John Wayne. Okay.
[00:19:37] Right. Next question.
[00:19:41] The English Bible. No, the english translation of the apostles Creed says that after his burial, Jesus descended into hell.
[00:19:52] What's the biblical basis for this claim? Is Ephesians 4910, perhaps. And why, by the way, do most translations enclose Ephesians four, chapter four, verses nine through ten in parentheses?
[00:20:11] Right. So that's a good question.
[00:20:14] So let me explain what's going on with these, with this idea of Christ going to hell.
[00:20:21] So this is the traditional understanding. The traditional doctrine of this is called the harrowing of hell.
[00:20:31] The issue involved is what happened to Jesus between the time of his death and his resurrection.
[00:20:39] So if he died on a Friday afternoon and he arose on a Sunday morning, then people talk about him being dead for three days. But I guess more in our reckoning it'd be more like 36 hours. And what was he doing during that time, was he just dead and non existent in his grave?
[00:20:57] Did he go up to heaven for, for the time?
[00:21:02] Or was he just kind of, what was it? And so ancient christians, starting clearly in the second century, but possibly already in New Testament times, thought that jesus was a human being. And humans, when they die, they go to the place of the dead. And to be fully human, it would mean jesus also must have gone to the place of the dead. But what did he do there? Did he.
[00:21:27] Well, what did you do there? And so there are two major options that emerged in early Christianity. One is that Jesus went down there to preach to those who were in Hades, in hell. They weren't being tormented. Yet in some, in a lot of these traditions, they aren't being. Maybe they are, but they're down there in the realm of the dead, and Jesus goes there and preaches to them so that because his salvation was not available until he died. And so what about people down in Hades? They didn't have a chance yet. So jesus goes down to give them a chance, just as he gave people on earth a chance. He goes down, and in this view, he preaches. The question is, to whom does he preach and how successful is he?
[00:22:12] And so there are two options. Well, no, there are lots of options. Did he preach? Did he preach, for example, to the jewish patriarchs of the Old Testament, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph? What about Noah? What about Moses? I mean, these people could not be saved because Jesus hadn't died yet. Did jesus go down there to tell them, okay, it's happened, come with me. Now they all go up to heaven? Or did he preach to all the righteous jews, even the ones not mentioned in the Old Testament? Is it possible they do preach to both jews and gentiles? Is he preached who were righteous, the righteous people? Is it possible that he preached to everybody to give everybody a chance? And if he preached to everybody, is it just that some accepted him to go to heaven or did they all accept him? I mean, it seems like you'd be kind of stupid not to accept him if your choice is just to stay in hell or to go to heaven. I mean, it's not like you're wondering if he's right there he is.
[00:23:05] So there are debates about that.
[00:23:08] There are also debates about whether instead of preaching, maybe he went down to manifest the power of God.
[00:23:15] God's more powerful than the devil and he's more powerful than hell. He's more powerful than everything. And surely God wants everybody to be saved. And if God's all powerful by golly, he can make it happen. And it may be so. There's the question. Did Jesus go to assert power if he went to assert power rather than preach? In other words, his salvation was powerful and had an effect. If that was the case, did his power bring the saints out of Hades, the jewish saints or saints, the righteous people, both jewish and Gentile? Or did he bring everybody out? So there are large debates about this, and just recently I did a podcast on it, on my misquoting Jesus podcast. If you don't listen to that, check it out, because I do an entire episode talking about this, and one of the very big questions is, where did the idea first come from? It starts coming to the fore in the second sentence. It doesn't develop for some centuries. And in one of my books, I talk about it. My book journeys to heaven and hell. There, rather than just a 50 minutes podcast, I devote an entire chapter where I get into the weeds, if you really want to know a lot about it. But the question here is, is there any biblical basis for it? And the person points out, maybe Ephesians 4911, which says that when Christ descended, he's just quoted scripture. He just quoted the scripture that says, when he ascended on high, he made a captivity itself captive. He gave gifts to his people. And then the author starts commenting on this, on this quotation of scripture, which is from psalm, chapter 68, verse 18. And the author of Ephesians then says, when it says he ascended, what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth. He who descended is the same who ascended far above all the heavens so that he might fill all things.
[00:25:20] Well, that kind of sounds like he descended to Hades, although you could take this to mean that he descended from heaven to earth and then ascended again to heaven without anything about Hades.
[00:25:32] It was certainly later interpreted to refer to Jesus descent to Hades, but it's not clear at all that that's what the author meant. Why is that statement in parentheses in many translations of Ephesians?
[00:25:47] It's not because it's lacking for manuscripts. It's because the translators are trying to tell you that the author has quoted something, and now he's giving a kind of interpretation on the side so you can figure out what the quotation was meant to that author.
[00:26:05] There's another passage that actually was more important for the formation of this idea of Christ going down to Hades, the realm of the dead.
[00:26:14] It's found in one Peter. It's a very convoluted passage for many people. Bible scholars have argued about it for a very long time. And, in fact, there are books written just on these couple verses. And it's a passage in one Peter where the author says that Christ. This is one Peter, chapter three, verses 18. And following Christ was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison who in the former times did not obey. When God patiently waited in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons were saved through water, what? In his spirit? He died in the flesh, but then he became alive in the spirit. And in the spirit he went and preached to these spirits who had been alive at the time of Noah, who got wiped out in the flood, so did he go down to Hades. And then in the next chapter, in one Peter, chapter four, verse six, the author says that this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead, so that though they had been judged in the flesh, as everyone else is judged, they might live in the spirit as God does.
[00:27:49] The gospel was preached to those who are dead. Does this mean the people who had died and were in Hades? Well, it came to be taken that way. Interpreters have, you know, they have difficulty figuring out what this author is trying to say.
[00:28:01] But these verses ended up being used to explain what happened to Jesus. The fullest exposition of this account from antiquity is in a book called the Gospel of Nicodemus, a terrific gospel, really interesting that for a long, long time was not available to an english reading public.
[00:28:24] I translated it in my book. In this book I did with my colleague Zlakoplatia, called the other gospels. The other gospels and the other gospels. That book is a translation of all the earliest gospels outside the New Testament for the first, say, 600 years of Christianity. The gospels that were written in Greek or Latin or coptic, we translated them and gave them introductions and had notes to explain what was going on in them. But if you're interested in this, check out the Gospel of Nicodemus, and you'll see part of the last part of it deals with this and explains what happened. It's a fascinating story. Let me tell you. It's really interesting how it happens in that gospel. Okay, so next question. Unrelated. What is the likelihood that Paul's letter to the Romans was written in part in response to conflicts in Rome between the returning Jews who had been exiled by Claudius, who was the roman emperor in the years 41 to 53 CE?
[00:29:31] Conflicts between these retaining Jews and the pagan Christians who had kept the church going even taking control of it in the Jews absence. Okay, so here's the deal.
[00:29:42] We have a couple of indications that there were there. That there was a problem among the jewish community in the large jewish community in Rome in the days of Claudius. There's a suggestion of this in the book of acts, and there's a suggestion of it in the writings of Suetonius, the Jewish.
[00:30:05] I'm sorry, the biographer, the roman biographer who wrote lives of the biographies of lives of some of the emperors, including Claudius, and indicates that Claudius expelled Jews from Rome because of some kind of riot that was happening. And is it possible that they were expelled under Claudius? They came back into Rome after things had calmed down and could return. And this person is saying, is it possible that the letter to the Romans that Paul wrote was written in part in response to that historical situation?
[00:30:41] The jewish Christians, with all the other Jews, had been kicked out of Rome, and now they've returned. But the church in Rome, which had been probably led by jewish Christians, it was. But in tradition it was started by jewish Christians. I don't know if it was or not, but it was. We don't really know. But. But is it possible the Jews were in control?
[00:31:02] They got kicked out. They returned a few years later, and now gentile Christians were in charge. And that Paul's writing his letter to the Romans in order to help resolve some of the problems.
[00:31:13] Part of the logic behind that question is that Romans, the letter of Romans by Paul, it is heavily about the relationship of Jews and Gentiles in the church.
[00:31:27] And there are passages that may suggest that there's conflict between Jews and Gentiles in Rome that Paul's heard about, especially in a discussion in chapter 14 about what kind of foods are appropriate to eat.
[00:31:42] That, of course, is a big issue for jewish Christians who, if they want to keep kosher, they can't eat some of the things gentiles eat and maybe can't even share meals with gentiles because gentiles aren't preparing their food in a kosher way. And so is Paul's attempt to explain the relationship of Jews and Gentiles based on this historical incident that we have attested in a couple of sources under Claudius? The answer is, yeah, we don't know, but some have suspected it.
[00:32:16] Some scholars have suspected that, in fact, this is what lies behind what's going on in the letter to the Romans.
[00:32:24] I have never been completely convinced by that myself, but I think it still seems to me to be a plausible explanation. Paul's reason for writing the letter, though, seems to be more immediately connected with his own ministry.
[00:32:39] He indicates some of the reasons he's writing this letter. The main one is that he himself is going to go visit Rome. He's never been to this church. He didn't start the church. He's never been there. But he wants to take his gospel message to the far west. He wants to go to Spain. And it sounds like he wants to use the roman church as a base of operation and to have their support for his mission. Maybe financial support, certainly moral support. He wants them on his side. But it appears from the letter that he knows that these roman Christians have suspicions about him.
[00:33:19] Especially. They suspect that he is claiming that God now has rejected the jewish people and that God is purely on the side of Gentiles, because he's the apostle to the Gentiles. And he's saying gentiles don't have to keep the law. And the law that God gave, the law of circumcision is supposed to be an eternal covenant for Jews. It's not. The people of God are supposed to be circumcised. And Paul's now saying, yeah, no, you don't need to if you're a gentile. So is Paul saying that God has rejected his Jews? Has he rejected his people, the Jews? Is he saying God's gone back on his word? Is he saying that God's a liar? He said this was eternal, and then, you know, and he's saying, is Paul saying that the law doesn't matter for salvation so you can live a lawless life? Is this what he's saying? These are the kinds of questions that Paul addresses in this book. And my suspicion is that his main concern really is roman Christians understanding what he's really proclaiming instead of what the rumors are saying about him, so that they'll support his mission.
[00:34:22] But this other thing is really tantalizing because it's right.
[00:34:26] Paul probably wrote this letter about ten years after Claudius had left the throne, not voluntarily. And so it's possible that there's still problems in Rome. It's possible. Okay, next question.
[00:34:47] I've been reading your book how Jesus became God, and a question that keeps raising its head when dealing with Paul. Is this his question, in your opinion? Did Paul believe that Jesus knew he was a pre existent divine being while he was a human, or did he, in his human form, share the ignorance of his existence that all humans have? That's a good question.
[00:35:15] So the question is predicated on the idea that Paul, in the book of Philippians, chapter two, says, that before he became a human, Jesus was in the form of God, and that he did not regard equality with God, something that he wanted to grasp after. But instead, he gave up his, who he was. He gave up what he was, and he became human. He emptied himself and took on human flesh and came down to humans as a slave who died for others. And then after he died, God exalted him even more highly and gave him a name that's above every name so that everyone will worship Jesus. Well, the name above every name is the name Yahweh. The Lord. God gave Jesus the name the Lord. It's not that he became Yahweh. I mean, Yahweh was Yahweh, but he became equal with God. And so he had God's name in the same way that, like a messenger from the king comes and makes demands in the name of the king. Well, he's got. He can use the name of the king because he's the messenger. And Jesus now has the name of the king.
[00:36:28] So the point is, though, that before Jesus became human, he said to be in the form of God. And the question is, did Paul think that Jesus knew that?
[00:36:39] Did Paul think that Jesus knew he was God while he was on earth?
[00:36:44] And the answer once more is, we don't know.
[00:36:48] Paul says very little about the historical Jesus.
[00:36:55] He hardly quotes any of his sayings.
[00:37:00] He quotes three sayings of Jesus. Basically, what he said at the last Supper is saying that you should not get divorced and is saying that you should pay your preacher.
[00:37:10] He doesn't report anything Jesus said about himself. He doesn't report most everything in the gospels about what jesus did during his life. So what does Paul know about Jesus? We don't know. Did Paul think that Jesus knew who he was? I don't know.
[00:37:28] You might think, well, Paul thought he was God, so he probably did think he knew what he was. But Paul also says that Jesus emptied himself.
[00:37:38] This phrase, he emptied himself, it comes from a greek word, kanao, to empty. To empty something. So when you empty a pitcher of water, you empty it. They use this word, kanaho. And some of you may have heard of something that's called a kenosis theology. K e n o S I S. A kenosis theology.
[00:37:58] The kenosis theology is that Christ is a divine being who empties himself of all of his divine prerogatives. And so he doesn't have omniscience. And he's not all powerful when he's here on earth. He really does become a human being. But then he returns to his heavenly state.
[00:38:14] So, did he empty himself of the knowledge of who he was? I don't know. I mean, I don't. I'm not saying I don't know whether Jesus really did. I'm saying I don't know whether Paul thought that that's what happened.
[00:38:25] Um, I wish I did. Which we did. Okay, next, could you please explain what canonical criticism is or canon criticism, and what your thoughts are about this approach? Okay, yeah. Right. When I was in graduate graduate school, canonical thesis criticism was a big thing. I'm not sure it is anymore. Maybe it is. I'm not in seminary anymore. I don't know if they still practice this thing or not in seminary, but it was a big thing. And it's a very interesting way of approaching interpretation of the Bible.
[00:39:03] Canonical criticism is especially associated with a Yale professor of Hebrew Bible named Brevard childs, who was a brilliant scholar of the Hebrew Bible. Brilliant linguistically, he knew everything about the Hebrew Bible. Just about. I mean, he was really quite remarkable. And as a historian, I mean, he was deeply rooted in historical understanding of the Bible, but he also had a theological view that the Bible was a canon of christian scripture.
[00:39:38] So he did not think that his historical analysis of the Bible, I mean, he knew everything that critical biblical scholars say about the Hebrew Bible and also about the New Testament, but he still was a believer, and he thought that the canon was important for interpreting the Bible. The way canonical criticism works is that you go ahead and do your historical analysis. You understand that Genesis one comes from a different source from Genesis two. They were both written hundreds of years after the event. They contradict each other. Neither one of them is right in terms of, like, how the world really came into being.
[00:40:19] And, you know, one comes from the J source, one comes from the e source, and they're dated here and they're dated there, and these are the discrepancies. And you do all of that for the whole Bible. You read Amos, and you realize that that bit at the end of the Book of Amos, where all is God's going to make everything right, was added by a later editor. It wasn't the original part of Amos. You do the kinds of things historians do with the Bible, but there's also an important theological aspect of studying scripture, which is that you understand that the Bible is a canon, and the entire canon has to be involved in your deep interpretation of any particular part of the canon. And so you can't just read Genesis one and two apart from reading the Gospels or apart from reading Deuteronomy or apart from reading Isaiah, you read all of these things as having some kind of canonical unity.
[00:41:15] These books were put together into a book, and one aspect of interpretation is interpreting them in light of their canonical context.
[00:41:26] So that rather than just looking at discrepancies and saying, well, that's different, that's different. You also see how these different books can interpret each other, so you can come away with a broader canonical interpretation of the entire Bible.
[00:41:40] I would say, what's my view of this? I would say that it is a sophisticated theological interpretation of scripture as somebody who is not himself persuaded that the canon is in any way divinely inspired, or that the people who assembled the canon were being led to do so.
[00:42:03] I believe that the books of the Bible that got put into the Bible were put there for a very wide range of reasons, a lot of historical reasons, cultural reasons, theological reasons. A lot of it was accident and chance, a lot of it. There are a lot of historical contingencies. I don't think the fact that John and Matthew are in the same Bible should be an interpretive method for interpreting either method, either Mark or John, Matthew or John, or any of the gospels. The fact they're all there is not, for me, of interpretive importance, but for somebody who's doing canonical criticism, it is. And I would say that if I were that kind of christian believer, then of course I probably would be attracted to that. But frankly, even when I was a Christian, I didn't find it attractive because I was more impressed with the differences among these books and the view that you have to understand each author for what he has to say, rather than assuming there's some kind of big overall message that none of them says, okay, next question.
[00:43:19] The concept of God and the concept of divinity were very different in the time of Jesus from what they are today.
[00:43:28] A man could be considered divine without considering him to be God the creator.
[00:43:34] Was Jesus considered by God to be divine in this way? When did he begin to be considered equal to God the creator? Do we understand the evolution of these beliefs?
[00:43:45] I touched on Paul's views in an earlier answer just a few minutes ago. Paul does think that Jesus was a pre existent divine being, but that he was separate from God and he was not equal with God.
[00:43:58] Paul says that Christ did not think equality with God was something to be grasped after. And I think that's the meaning of the passage in Philippians, chapter two, verses six through eight. I think he's saying that Jesus was not equal with God, but he was a divine being. And God eventually made him, exalted him to a level of equality with himself. That would be the beginning of the idea, then, that Jesus is equal with God, which is at the root of the eventual doctrine of the Trinity.
[00:44:31] It is absolutely true that in the ancient world, people thought that human beings could be divine beings. Sometimes divine beings could become human beings. Sometimes human beings were exalted to the level of divinity.
[00:44:46] Sometimes human beings were born to the union of a divine being and a mortal. You find these views in greek stories, greek thought, roman thought, in jewish thought, interestingly. And they get applied to Jesus, the equality of Jesus with God. It was a much debated issue in early Christianity. Paul seems to affirm it, but there were debates about how to interpret Philippians. Chapter two. The arian controversy in the fourth century was initially resolved at the famous council of Nicaea in the year 325, a council of bishops from around the world that was called and headed by the emperor Constantine. They were debating at this council whether Jesus is fully equal with God in every way. Did he exist forever with God? Is he equal with God? Is he of the same essence, the same substance as God?
[00:45:46] Is God the father, superior to God the son? Did God the Son come into existence at some point? If he's the son, he must have been begotten or born at some point. Is he lesser than God the father or is he equal? And so that was the debate. And it came out that the bishops at the meeting decided overwhelmingly that Christ was fully equal with God.
[00:46:09] That view that came out of the council of Nicaea, there continued to be debates afterwards. Afterwards, most people went to, many people went to the other side and so on. But. But eventually that became the standard view. If you want to read more about that, this is the, this is the main topic of my book, how Jesus became God.
[00:46:31] Next question.
[00:46:33] How did we end up with four similar but differing gospels?
[00:46:38] Why did the early believers and followers not just copy one of them and use it and maintain consistency? Yeah, that's a great question.
[00:46:46] I think the reason they didn't just accept one of them is because nobody thought of any of these as gospel, as scripture, as gospels of scripture, yet they were just accounts of Jesus life. And just as you might read multiple accounts of Thomas Jefferson or might read multiple accounts of Julius Caesar, or you might read multiple scholarly accounts of Jesus, you usually don't just read one.
[00:47:11] You read well, you might. Some of us do. You just want to know something about Abraham Lincoln. You read a biography, right? But if you're really interested, you read multiple ones because they disagree with each other.
[00:47:23] And when they disagree with each other, if you're reading multiple accounts of Abraham Lincoln, I've read several book length studies of Abraham Lincoln. They disagree with each other on things. But I don't go away trying to. I don't make a big list of all their differences. I come away with kind of an amalgamated view.
[00:47:39] It's in my head that I have a basic view of Abraham Lincoln based on all these sources. And I think the earliest christians who did that with these gospels, they were included in the New Testament because they were the ones who was widely seen as authoritative and acceptable theologically. And so that's why they were all included. And only later, you know, only in modern times, really, did they, people realized that the differences were hugely, hugely significant.
[00:48:10] Another question, this person, I'm going to summarize this question because I'm running out of time, but it points out that in April 2024, there was an article in the Scientific American by Thomas Weber. I assume he's English. So it's Weber called the race to decode an ancient manuscript. And it talks about how some of you have seen this in the news, how there was this volcanic eruption in the year 79 that wiped out Pompeii and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy, and it also wiped out another city called Herculaneum. And archaeologists found a library in Herculaneum that was a fairly intact library that was buried under all the pumice, but all of the scrolls, which were the ancient book form, all the scrolls in the library had been burnt to a crisp. They hadn't been destroyed, they'd been carbonized. And so they were all rolled up still as they had been when the eruption hit and the lava came in. And when they found this library, they had a pretty good idea of what it was. It's the library of a philosopher who's was a known epicurean philosopher, who had all these writings that presumably were philosophical writings from Epicurus. They wouldn't have had any christian writings in it. This was in the year 79, and they wouldn't, but they had these. And so scholars tried to figure out what was in them. And the way they normally would do this is they would take a carbonized scroll and they would slice it very carefully and then gradually unroll it to be able to read it. But this was so carbonized that they did that. It just turned to ashes.
[00:50:00] So just recently, they've come up with a way to read these things involving AI and also, I guess, probably multispectral imaging that AI can read that we can't without unrolling the scrolls.
[00:50:16] And so they haven't been able to read a whole scroll yet, but they've started to, they've started identifying words and, whoa, that'll be good. And so, yeah, that's what this is all about.
[00:50:28] So this person wants to know, are there other manuscripts like that thought to be biblical that this can help with?
[00:50:36] There aren't manuscripts like that. There are manuscripts called palimpsests.
[00:50:42] The word palimpsest means scraped again.
[00:50:47] Ancient manuscripts, parchment manuscripts were prepared by, when you're taking the animal skin and you cut it into shape and you smooth it off. You scrape off the hairy side. Scrape both sides, probably, and you make it smooth, and then you treat it, and then it's a writing material that can last roughly forever unless it gets carbonized or burnt or whatever he's asked.
[00:51:10] So a palimpsest is when somebody's written a manuscript out on something, like they've written one of Julius Caesar's works or they've written one of Euripides plays or something on a manuscript, and someone else wants to use the, the parchment, because, like, you know, there's not much parchment around. And they, so what they do is they scrape off the writing and they write their account. So they'll write a gospel on it. Who needs Euripides? Who needs this play by Euripides? Give me the, you know, give me the gospel. Or they'll take a gospel manuscript and wipe it out and put something else over on the top of, put a sermon of a church father on it. So, so scholars have known about these palimpsests, and in the 19th century, they had a way of reading them. Them, they would treat them with chemical reagents that would make the underwriting reappear, but that would really hurt the manuscript. Then they started doing it with special forms of lighting, multispectral imaging lately, and he's asking, will we be able to do this with some of these other manuscripts? And, yes, we, I'm almost certain we'll be able to read palimpsests better. I'm not sure how much that will change things, but we do have some. And some, in some places, we aren't quite sure what this particular letter was or, and we may be able to read some that we haven't been able to read before.
[00:52:29] Okay, I'm out of time now. I've really enjoyed doing this, as I always do, and thank you again for your patience. This is the May Q and A.
[00:52:39] We will be getting the June Q and A out early in July, and hopefully we'll get the July Q and a out in July so you can get your money's worth. Thank you for being a gold member. There's something that we can do to improve other than getting back on schedule.
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