Gold Q&A - April, 2024

[00:00:01] I'd like to welcome you to this April 2024 Gold Q and a for gold members and platinum members of the blog. I enjoy doing this every month. I always get a new set of questions. I can never get through all the questions I get, but I do my best. If you're listening to this and are planning on doing a question, the best questions are ones that are direct and to the point and do not go on for three pages. [00:00:33] As a general rule, some of these are more than a sentence or two, but I'll try and get through them as many as I can. So this person, I'm going to summarize the first part of this person's question because this person indicates that he was listening to the great courses, lectures on the Old Testament by Amy Jill Levine, whos a New Testament scholar but also does Hebrew Bible studies as well. And she was talking about this really interesting passage about David and Bathsheba in two Samuel chapter eleven, where David is trying to get her husband Uriah to have sex with her so it wouldnt look like David is the one who got her pregnant. Its kind of a steamy story. [00:01:24] Want Uriah to go home and sleep with his wife Bathsheba because David's already slept with her and Uriah has come home from the war and he says to Uriah to go home and wash your feet. [00:01:37] And Amy Jill in her lecture pointed out that feet in the Hebrew Bible is often a euphemism for genitals. [00:01:53] And so he's telling Uriah, go home and kind of wash up and make yourself pleasant and go to bed with your wife. [00:02:00] But, so the question is this. It's kind of an interesting question. I don't think I've ever thought about it, he says, recognizing it's hundreds of years later and speaking a different language. Is it possible that this Dublin tond is still there when New Testament characters are discussing the washing of feet? [00:02:20] And so the main episode is in, is actually the western doesn't say, this is in John chapter 13 where Jesus washes the disciples feet. And I think, yeah, this guy's wondering, you know, what's going on there. [00:02:35] So that's a good question. [00:02:38] But I think, I think the best way to answer that is that, you know, sometimes the cigar is just a cigar. [00:02:45] So, you know, sometimes feet are just feet. And it's quite clear in the christian tradition that foot washing was a, was an occasional practice and still is today. [00:03:00] If you happen to watch the Super bowl this year, you saw an advertisement or, or the, this, he gets us I think that's what it's called. Campaign that's trying to introduce people to Jesus. And there was a foot washing episode there, and I can attest, I watched the commercial, and it actually was feet. It was not genitals. So it's a good question, but feet doesn't always mean genitals. It does in a number of places in the Hebrew Bible, including, most famously, when Ruth seduces Boaz. [00:03:38] In the Book of Ruth, they've had a drinking party to celebrate the harvest. She's in need of a husband. He's a relative who would be close in line to marry her. And he gets drunk, and she lies down to him at night and uncovers his feet. [00:03:57] And when he wakes up in the next morning, he realizes that, oh, my God, what did I do? [00:04:04] And then he, uh, goes ahead and marries her. In that case, uh, it's pretty clear she was not uncovering, you know, the appendages at the end of his legs. He was. It was, uh, he was uncovering his genitals. So, uh, but it doesn't always mean that feet also means feet in the Hebrew Bible, as well as, I think, probably every place in the New Testament that I can think of. Okay, next question. [00:04:27] This one is about the lord's prayer. Uh, the Lord's prayer. To summarize part of this, you can find the Lord's prayer in both the gospel of Matthew, where it's in the sermon on the mount in chapter six, and in the gospel of Luke, where there is no sermon on the mount. But there are a number of the passages found in the sermon on the mount in Matthew, chapters five, six, and seven. A number of those passages in the sermon on the mount in Matthew are replicated in Luke, but in various places throughout his gospel. They're inserted here, there at the other place. And there's a version of the Lord's prayer in chapter ten of Luke. And in both prayers, there's this line, may your name be holy, or I think, holy be your name. So may your name be holy. And this question points out that also in John, chapter twelve, verse 28, Jesus in John says, father, glorify your name. [00:05:33] And so the question is, what's the meaning of God's name? [00:05:37] And the question is this referring to God's actual personal name, Yahweh? Or is the name a synonym for his character? [00:05:46] How would a first century jewish Christian interpret this? [00:05:51] Okay, so, yeah, another good question. I don't think in the New Testament the authors are quite as cognizant of the hebrew name Yahweh as being a personal name, as modern readers might be, those who've studied the Bible at all will know that Yahweh is used as God's personal name in the Hebrew Bible. And when he's just referred to as God, they refer to him as Elohim, which hebrew word means God or gods? [00:06:30] The name Yahweh is made up of four letters. In Hebrew, these four letters are so sacred when put together as Yahweh, that in traditional JudaiSm, the name is not to be pronounced holy. Holy in this context means set apart from everything else. [00:06:52] Something is holy if it's completely set apart from everything else. And the name Yahweh was so holy that it could not be pronounced. It is sometimes simply called the TetragrAMmaton. So if you hear the term TEtragRammatoN, that's referring to the four letters. Tetra, four grammaton letters. The four letters is the name for Yahweh. [00:07:14] When Jews in antiquity would be reading the Hebrew Bible, they would not say the name when it occurred in the text. They would instead substitute the name for the word for lord, Adonai. [00:07:32] Adonai means my lord. And so when they're reading the text, if they find the word adonai, they just say the word adonai. But if they find the name Yahweh, they also say Adonai. So when the translators of the Bible from Hebrew into Greek translated the Bible, they didn't replicate Yahweh. [00:07:56] When the name Yahweh occurred, they used the lord in the Bible that You read today, most Bible translations use lord for Adonai and lord for or Yahweh, the personal name. But the way you can tell the difference, in case you've never noticed this, is that if all four letters are capitals, so it's capital l o r d, all the way through. That is Yahweh. [00:08:25] If it's the first letter capitalized lord, that's Adonai. The translators are telling you that it's Yahweh tHere. [00:08:34] And so I don't think the greek authors of the New Testament understood this thing about Yahweh because their version of the Old Testament probably just had Adonai there. [00:08:45] So then the question is, what does it mean? May your name be holy? [00:08:50] I think what I think the way to think about the name of God in this context is to think about it kind of like when somebody, like, if you read a story and the. [00:09:02] You've got a messenger from the king coming to the village and making a pronouncement, this messenger will say, in the name of the king, I come to you. You know, something like that. And it means that in the. That the king, the king's representative, is a representative of his person. [00:09:23] The name of the king provides the power and is, in a sense, kind of representative. And so when it says, may your name be holy, then it's something like it's just reverencing God and say, may your name always be held in the highest esteem. In other words, may your person always be revered as something completely holy and different from the rest of us. And so it's basically, even though it's a petition to God, it's actually a hope for humans. The humans will revere God the way that he deserves. I think that's what it means. Okay, next question. Here's a quick one liner, the kind I like. What is the scholarly consensus on when Paul had his vision on the road to Damascus? [00:10:15] All right, good. So a couple things to say. [00:10:19] The idea that Paul had a vision on the road to Damascus principally comes to us in the book of acts, acts as an account of the spread of Christianity from right after Jesus resurrection and ascension over the next 30 years. Paul first appears in the book of acts as somebody who's participating in a persecution of christians. But in chapter nine, Paul is on the way to Damascus with an authorization from the high priest in Jerusalem to persecute Jews who are saying that Jesus is the messiah. And on the road, Christ appears to him and wows him with his presence and asks, and Paul can't figure out what's going on. And Jesus says that I'm Jesus whom you're persecuting. Why are you doing that? Don't do that. [00:11:20] Paul then has this vision on the way to Damascus, and in the book of acts, then he's blinded and he's taken into Damascus, and he speaks with a christian there named Ananias, who heals him of his blindness. [00:11:32] And Paul then becomes a great missionary. Now, Paul himself. [00:11:37] So that account in acts, chapter nine, let me say this is replicated two other times in the book of acts, in acts, chapter 22, and acts, chapter 26, where Paul relates himself not as a narrative about Paul, but in the narrative, Paul himself describes his vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus. There are interesting contradictions between these three accounts in acts, interesting contradictions. If you look at them side by side, they're differences that are kind of strange because there's really no reason for them. They just are there. [00:12:15] Paul also talks about the vision that he had of Christ. But Paul himself actually doesn't say that it was on the road to Damascus. [00:12:24] But he does say that there was a moment at which God revealed his son to him that convinced him that Christ was raised from the dead. And he talks about that in Galatians chapter one, and he elsewhere says in one corinthians 15 that he saw the resurrected Jesus. And he says in two corinthians that he saw Jesus after his resurrection. And so these are all almost certainly talking about the same thing. Paul had this some kind of visionary experience that made him believe that Jesus was really raised from the dead, and it changed his understanding of things because he had been persecuting christians, and then he became a leader of the Christians. And so all of that's background to this very simple question, when did it happen? [00:13:12] And so the best way to establish chronology of Paul's life is by looking for hints in his own letters, especially in Galatians, where he refers to the vision. And then he says things like, three years later, I did this. [00:13:33] And so 14 laters I did that. And so he gives us some kind of chronological indications about when this thing happened and that thing happened. You can line a lot of those things up with what we find in the book of acts to provide more chronological guidance. And it's very messy. It's complicated. I know scholars who have literally spent their lives trying to figure out Paul's chronology. [00:13:59] This is not something I'm all that interested in to do. I'm not interested in spending a few years trying to figure out where Paul was in April of the year 58 is not something. That's not the sort of thing I'm interested in. But I do know people who are really enthralled with it. [00:14:16] The general consensus is that Paul must have converted to the faith three or four years after Jesus death. [00:14:25] And so part of the issue is, when do you think Jesus died? [00:14:30] People have suggested dates between 29 and 33 of the common era. And so most people just settle on 30 or, you know, some people say 31, some will say 30. People say different things, but just assume it's 30. That would mean that Paul probably converted around the year 33 or so. But in any event, it appears to have been three or four years after Jesus death. [00:14:54] Okay, next question. [00:14:56] To what extent do you me think ecstatic practices were popular among Jesus disciples? By ecstatic practices, I mean glossy lake trances, faith healing, etcetera, but particularly glossolalia. Where do you think the early christians learned it and how widespread was it? [00:15:20] Okay, so glossolalia is the technical term for speaking in tongues. [00:15:28] Glossa, tongue, and lelia, from the verb laleo, meaning to speak. So speaking in tongues is when somebody speaks in a foreign language or some other language, as inspired by the spirit of God, usually in a worship service or in personal prayer. [00:15:48] There are two sources of information for this phenomenon in the New Testament. There is the book of acts in chapter two, where after Jesus has told the disciples to go spread the word throughout the world, but first to wait in Jerusalem so that the Holy Spirit will come upon them. Jesus does that in chapter one of acts. Then in chapter two, on the day of Pentecost, that's 50 days after Passover, and that's why it's called Penta. Cost five. Penta, 50 days after Passover is a jewish festival. The disciples are in Jerusalem for the jewish festival. The Holy Spirit comes upon them from on high, and they start speaking in foreign languages. [00:16:36] There are a large number of jews who have gathered in Jerusalem at the time for the festival, and the apostles are outside, and they're speaking these foreign languages. And the people, these other jews standing around are amazed that they're speaking, preaching the gospel in their native languages, languages these apostles can't possibly know. And this is the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. [00:17:03] In this case, the disciples are speaking known languages, and the spirit inspires them to do that. [00:17:12] The other source we have is the apostle Paul, who speaks about the Glossolaelia in one corinthians, chapters twelve and 14. [00:17:21] He deals with the issue there because the people in Corinth, in his opinion, are abusing this gift that comes from the spirit. [00:17:31] It was Paul's view that when a person was baptized in Christ, they received some kind of gift from the Holy Spirit that was to allow the community to function harmoniously together. Some people had the gift of prophesying from God, speaking God's word. Some people could heal. [00:17:53] Some people could give, knew how to give alms better than others. Okay. Some had faith, probably to heal or something. Some people could speak in foreign languages they didn't know. Some people could interpret tongues. And so it's one of these things, one of these gifts, where tongues were apparently meant to be a kind of way for God to reveal his truth through what appears in Paul not to be a known human language, but to be some kind of angelic language that people wouldn't know, but that some people had the gift of interpreting through the spirit, even though they didn't. They themselves didn't understand the language. The spirit told them what it meant. [00:18:33] These would have been in prayer, in prayer services, in worship services, where it happened because Paul is upset, because these corinthians think that, man, if you can have any gift, that one's a good one to get, that is really spiritual. Oh, boy. Like to be able to do that one. That's pretty cool. And so people are acquiring this ability to speak in tongues, and all chaos is breaking out in their worship services because these people appear to be trying to outdo each other in speaking tongues, and Paul has to tell them to put a cap on it. [00:19:04] Only two or three in a worship service, and only if an interpreter is present. Otherwise everybody's going to think you're crazy. And so that's what one corinthians 1214 are about. Paul does indicate that he himself does not condemn tongues per se. He prays in tongues more than anybody. And I think that probably means privately. [00:19:25] And so it could be used in a worship service or could be privately. And so the question is, did Jesus disciples practice that, or did they have other ecstatic practices, such as going into trances, faith healing, and so forth? [00:19:42] In the book of Acts, the answer is yes. [00:19:47] Peter goes into kind of a trance like vision in chapter ten. [00:19:53] And Peter and the especially Peter can heal people later. Paul can heal people doing faith healings. [00:20:01] And so that does happen in the book of Acts. [00:20:04] If the question is, did this actually happen among the disciples of Jesus? I think the answer is no. [00:20:11] I don't think Jesus own disciples practiced glossololia or. [00:20:18] Or anything like that. They may have done. If they did, we don't have. Apart from the book, we don't have, like Paul saying so or anything else indicating this other than the Book of Acts. And I generally am hesitant to accept the book of acts at face value on miraculous events, because one of the major points of the book of acts is that the reason Christianity spread throughout the world was because of the power of the spirit, and nothing could stop the christian movement. [00:20:51] When the author of Acts applies that to the Apostle Paul, he narrates events that Paul seems to contradict some in his own writings. And so I'm kind of suspicious of all that. So my view is that this was not probably practiced by Jesus Aramaic speaking, lower class disciples in Israel, but it did become a phenomenon outside of Israel, in part because glossolalia is a cross cultural phenomenon. It's not unique to Christianity. There are other religious groups today that still claim glossolalia, as there were in the ancient pagan world. Sometimes holy people would go into a trance and begin to speak some language that seemed like gibberish to everybody else, but it was a sign of being possessed by the divine. [00:21:41] And so I think probably this came into Christianity after the initial disciples were doing their thing. [00:21:49] Okay, next question. What do you and other New Testament scholars believe about the duration of Jesus ministry and how many times he went to Jerusalem? [00:21:59] In the synoptics, this person points out, Jesus ministry lasted only about a year, and he went to Jerusalem only once. [00:22:09] In John's gospel, his ministry lasted two to three years, and he went to Jerusalem three times. [00:22:15] And so this person's saying, what's the scholarly consensus on this? I don't think there's a scholarly consensus, but I think there is a majority opinion. I might even be wrong about that. [00:22:28] But it is generally thought that the synoptic gospels are more reliable about events of Jesus life than the gospel of John. And I think this is a case in point. [00:22:41] It does indeed seem that in the Gospel of Mark, at least, the ministry of Jesus is thought to have lasted over a period of months, not years. [00:22:53] The reason for thinking that is because early in the gospel, in chapter two, Jesus comments that the fields are ready for harvesting. [00:23:03] So that would suggest the autumn. [00:23:06] And in the Gospel of Mark, our earliest gospel after Jesus says that we have a sequence of events that happen. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And one of the striking things about Mark is that one of his most common words is the greek word which means immediately. Paragraph after paragraph begins with the word immediately, immediately. Jesus did this immediately. Jesus did that immediately. The disciples went there immediately, this, that, and the other thing. And so it's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So it starts in the fall and is boom, boom, boom, boom, boom until you get to the final thing, which is Jesus. Last week in Mark, chapter eleven, he goes to Jerusalem for the Passover feast. [00:23:50] The Passover feast is a spring festival, and so it sure looks like his ministry starts in the fall and ends in the spring. [00:24:00] People get uncomfortable with that because everybody's just used to thinking that Jesus was 30 when he started and it lasted three years. So he died when he's 33. So where does that come from? Well, the idea that he was 30 is not found in Mark or in Matthew or in John. It's only in the gospel of Luke. Luke says that Jesus was baptized by John when he was about 30 years old. He makes that off the cuff remark. I have no way of knowing whether that's right. [00:24:33] I doubt if Luke had any way of knowing it was right. It's just something he heard or something that he said that he was about 30 years old. [00:24:41] Jesus could have been 20. He could have been 48. I don't know how old he was, but so, but, you know, for convenience sake, because we don't have any other ideas, we stick with 30. The three years thing does come from John's gospel, and it's precisely for the reason the questioner points out. In John's gospel, Jesus attends three different Passover feasts on separate years. Since the Passover was an annual festival, that meant there had to be at least a two year ministry. If Passover is like at the very beginning and the one in the middle, the one at the end would be two years. But people usually are more generous than that thing. Well, he started before the first Passover, and, well, he didn't last much after the last. He didn't last after, but, but still, it's, you know, maybe two and a half years or something like that. So what is the scholarly consensus? Who's right? John or the synoptic? Most scholars would go with the synoptics on this one and think that Jesus probably only went to Jerusalem one time and that his ministry, who knows how long his ministry lasted. I don't think any of them had had a way of knowing, living decades later without having to talk with any of the eyewitnesses, any of the disciples. And so they're taking a stab at it, would be my guess. [00:25:58] There are, I will say that one scholar, a very fine scholar, who supports the idea that John is right, as I'm sure others do, too. But one who's been kind of more public about it is Paula Fredrickson in her book on Jesus, where she argues that John is far more reliable than most scholars have given it credit for. [00:26:20] Okay, next question. In John chapter 20, this is when Jesus is raised from the dead. Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene at the tomb. [00:26:34] She thinks he's a gardener, and he says, don't touch me because I have not yet ascended to the father. That's after she realizes he's not the gardener. She wasn't into touching gardeners, so she, she realized it's actually Jesus. And then he tries to. I don't think she was. I don't know, but, but. So then she tries to touch Jesus, tried to revere him, and, and he says, don't touch me. I haven't risen to my, I have not been raised to my father. And the question is, what, what would John's readers have thought he meant? [00:27:09] And why would Mary think she saw a gardener and whats the significance of people not recognizing Jesus after the resurrection, etcetera? Well okay, its a complicated story with a lot of questions that can come out of it. [00:27:21] So in terms of like why would Mary think its a gardener? Well she doesnt think its Jesus because she thinks Jesus has been dead and buried and so shes in a garden tomb and theres a man there. So she just, it's kind of a natural assumption. Oh this must be the guy taking care of the garden. So that's, that's why uh, that's why that um, uh, it is very interesting in the gospels that when people see Jesus they don't recognize him. [00:27:51] Um, it kind of goes along with the I with the same, with the similar idea that whenever anybody finds an empty tomb they don't get it. There's this empty tomb and it confuses them and they see somebody, they don't know it's Jesus. And sometimes they try to make jesus prove it's Jesus, which has always seemed a little weird to me. I mean Jesus shows up in front of the eleven disciples and he starts talking to them and they don't believe it's him. Well what's to believe? There he is, he's talking to them. And so in Luke and John they think, I don't, they think it's some kind of ghost or something and they ask him to eat some fish. He eats some fish. So it's really there it is, it's Jesus digestive system and all right there and he's right in front of your eyes and so, so what? But why do you get this thing with um, you know, not recognizing him? And why do you get this thing wherever the empty tomb shows up? Contrary to what the christian apologists today say, the christian apologists always say the empty tomb is proof of the resurrection. In the New Testament it's never proof of the resurrection, it's what creates doubt. [00:28:58] It doesn't prove anything to the disciples. They can't figure, they can't figure it out. It creates doubts rather than faith. So why is all that? [00:29:08] We don't know for sure. [00:29:11] I have an opinion about it. My opinion about it is that this idea of people not believing it's really Jesus, or people not understanding how the tomb could be empty, is reflecting a historical reality that some of Jesus followers actually did not believe. He got raised from the dead, that not everybody was convinced. And the fact that people weren't all convinced, maybe some of the eleven, I don't know that all eleven came to be believers, but if some of them continued to doubt about it. It would make sense that you would have stories generated where they doubt, but Jesus removes their doubts. [00:29:54] It'd be much easier if everybody just believed it immediately. Then it'd be easier to tell glorified stories where there's no doubt there is. Everybody accepts and believes it right off the bat. So the vatic don't and then suggest to me that maybe some of the people didn't, didn't actually believe it. Okay, so what that he got raised? That would be interesting. Boy, I wish we could find out about that one. [00:30:15] But the, the other question then the main question is why does Jesus say don't touch me because I've not ascended to my father. Now I haven't dealt with this question yet because it's the one I can't answer. [00:30:27] So I don't know. So I'll say a couple of things about one is the irony that is usually noted. This is in John chapter 20, in verses in the early part, middle part, eleven through 18. After this, Jesus shows up to his disciples and there we have one of the doubting stories. Doubting Thomas. Thomas is there and doesn't believe it's him. [00:30:52] There he is, he doesn't believe it's him. And Jesus says to Thomas, it's really it is. I put your hand in my wounds and in my side, you know, touch my hands in my side and you will see that it's me. He still has his wound, the wounds from being crucified three days earlier. And so Thomas does it and he believes and, you know, and he says, my lord and my God. It's one of the few places, is it the only place where anybody in the New Testament actually calls Jesus God like a figure and then actually call and because he believes now. But the thing is, why would he say to Mary, don't touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my father? And then in the episode at the end of, middle of the chapter, then at the end of the chapter he says, touch me. [00:31:41] People have had various explanations of this. [00:31:44] One explanation that I don't find very convincing is that Jesus only allows those who are in his inner circle to touch him. [00:31:55] But that doesn't make sense because he says the reason he gives Mary is not don't touch me because you're not one of the inner circle. He said, don't touch me because I haven't ascended to my father yet. So presumably after he ascends to his father, he can be touched. [00:32:10] And so another interpretation is that between the time Mary saw him. He ascended to heaven quickly, maybe changed clothes, and came back and appeared to his disciples, and then they could touch him. [00:32:23] It's one theory better than the other. I think it's problematic. I mean, it sounds like he's like doing the elevator thing, going up and down, and for what reason, I don't know, but a lot of people think. I don't know if a lot of people think this, but a lot of people ought to think this. That the reason you have this discrepancy between the two stories is because they come from two different sources available to John, that one set of stories about Jesus resurrection have him telling Mary, don't touch me, for I haven't descended yet, and the others about how Jesus proves himself by being touched in John's gospel. Throughout John's gospel, we get stuff like that where you have two stories that just don't. They don't reconcile with each other in their conceptualities of what's going on. So that happens a lot in John. So maybe that's another instance of that. Still, you'd have to ask, why not touch me because I haven't ascended to my father. My guess is that what John is trying to say in this point is you should not cling on to earthly things. [00:33:31] The message of the earthly Jesus is not what you want to cling on to. You want to cling on to his death and his resurrection and his ascension to heaven. That's what matters. Kind of like what Paul says. When Paul says in two corinthians that he doesn't think about Jesus in a human way anymore, it doesn't think about Jesus according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. Maybe this is a narrative version that's trying to say something kind of like that. [00:34:02] That'd be. That'd be my. My best guess. [00:34:06] Okay. Um, next question in Mark's gospel includes the title Lord chapter one, verse three, and Lord chapter two, verse 28. And it's not clear what's going on here, because the idea is that the Lord in chapter one and in chapter two, one of them is Jesus and one of them is God. And so is there a way to differentiate between capital l, lord, and kind of, you know, and. I don't know, lord. Lord. [00:34:43] And so let me just say something about the word lord in. I've already said something. The. The word adonai in Hebrew is translated Lord, and so is the name of God. Lord. In the New Testament, of course, they're writing in Greek, and the name, the word kurios is the word in in Greek, kurios is the word for lord. It's used of both yahweh and adonai in the Old Testament. Translation into Greek. [00:35:11] In Greek, broadly, the word kurios has a wide range of meanings. [00:35:18] It always refers to somebody, a male, who is your superior and somehow more in control or. [00:35:28] Yeah, more in control. And so the word Lord can be used of all, in all sorts of situations. Women used it of their husbands, we'd call him Lord. I've tried getting my wife to do that, but it just doesn't work. [00:35:41] Slaves did it with masters. They would call them Lord. [00:35:46] And somebody who owns a property could be called the Lord of the property. [00:35:51] Lord is used of Jesus. Lord is used of God. [00:35:56] And so in every context, you have to figure out from the context what it means. [00:36:03] It's worth pointing out because people often say, well, if you use the word Lord for Jesus and it's the name of God, in the Old Testament, that means that Jesus is Yahweh. [00:36:14] And that's ridiculous. You might as well say that Jesus, you know, is like a master of a slave or he's somebody's husband, because, well, that's how it gets used. Yeah, well, it gets used that way, but it doesn't mean it's being used that way in this context. And so you wish language were easier, but it's not. You can't know the meaning of a word unless you see how it's being used in its context. And that takes some rigorous analysis sometimes. Okay, next question. How does the practice of human sacrifice appear in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament? If it's in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament both, is there a direct carryover from the earlier to the later, or just separate instances? [00:37:00] Yeah. So this is an interesting question. [00:37:03] Human sacrifice does appear in the Old Testament, and it is put forward as not a good thing. [00:37:12] Luckily, the main place it shows up is in some passages referring to a canaanite deity named Maalech, who is said in passages in kings and elsewhere to have performed human sacrifice, child sacrifice in the valley of Gehenna, the valley that belongs to the sons of Hinnom. This is a valley that is outside Jerusalem, to the south of Jerusalem. And according to these narratives, in two kings, there was a practice of child sacrifice to this foreign deity there that desecrated the place. [00:38:03] That's why Gehenna became seen as a desecrated place that was completely void of anything, any presence of God at all because of this hideous pagan practice. [00:38:19] When Jesus in the New Testament says that you need to fear that you will be tossed into Gehenna. That's what he's referring to. He's referring to this godforsaken place that your corpse will be defiled by, thrown in there. It does not mean Jesus, does not mean your soul is going to go to hell. It means your body will be defiled by being tossed into this valley. I have a lengthy discussion, fairly lengthy discussion of that in my book, heaven and hell, if you're interested in that, that's the main place where child sacrifice is forbidden in the Hebrew Bible. And this is the place where it's an exception. But there's another very interesting passage, a very important passage in the Hebrew Bible, where Abraham is asked by God to slay his son Isaac. [00:39:12] Abraham, if you remember in chapter twelve of Genesis, is promised by God that he will be. He'll make him a father of a great nation and have many descendants. But then he has trouble. He and his wife Sarah can't get pregnant. And it takes years and years and years until they're decrepit old people before they have a child, Isaac. [00:39:35] And God then, having fulfilled his promise by giving him an heir so that now he can have many descendants. [00:39:42] As Isaac gets a little older, he's about a teenager. God tells Abraham to go and take Isaac and sacrifice him, literally to kill him as the sacrifice to Yahweh. [00:39:54] And so Abraham takes Isaac and decides to obey God and takes firewood, and they take a mule, they take some slaves and they go. And then they get to the place, Mount Moriah, where he's supposed to do this. And he takes Isaac up onto the mountain. Isaac's looking around saying, so, dad, I see the firewood and I see the knife. But, like, where's the sacrificial victim? And Abraham says, don't worry, God will provide it. And so he takes him up and he binds him, his son, his promised son. And he prepares to sacrifice him, takes out the knife, and he's ready to plunge it. And the angel of the Lord comes and stops him and says, now I know that you will be faithful to God no matter what. [00:40:43] So this passage is called the binding of Isaac because he is bound and about to be sacrificed. The angel then tells Abraham that instead, there's this Ram caught in a bush over here. Go get it. And sacrifice the Ram instead of your son. [00:41:01] And so the idea is that the Ram is an animal sacrifice to replace human sacrifice. [00:41:11] And many people have argued over the last couple centuries at least, that this, in fact, is a tale to explain why animal sacrifice was accepted within Judaism and that it could atone for the sins of humans because it was a substitution for human sacrifice. And the story about Abraham and Isaac was told to tell that. [00:41:36] It's a horrifying story. [00:41:38] I mean, it's one of these stories that if you're a believer and you think God is perfect and this is great, oh, isn't it wonderful that Abraham passed the test? You know, I get that. I used to think that, but man, God telling a man to murder his own son with a knife. [00:42:00] So, yeah, it's not a pleasant story, and there's a lot written on it. It became very important in jewish traditions, important in christian traditions, and important into modern philosophy. [00:42:14] Soren Kierkegaard has an entire book called fear and trembling, which is his kind of interpretation. Trying to understand this from a philosophical level, where he uses one of the great phrases, I think, which is the eschatological suspension of the ethical. [00:42:33] It's a phrase I like. So the eschatological suspension of the ethical is when the demand, the kind of the ulta demands of God to spend what we normally would think is ethically proper. [00:42:47] Okay, so does human sacrifice occur in the New Testament? Well, in many ways, the New Testament is about human sacrifice. The whole point of the most of the New Testament is Jesus died as a sacrifice for sins. [00:43:04] In some christian traditions, this is linked to the binding of Isaac. That that's a kind of a foreshadowing where God is going to kill his son, but temporarily substitutes animal sacrifice. [00:43:21] But finally, God does kill his son to suspend animal sacrifice. So there need be no more animal sacrifice. And so the binding of Isaac, which is called the Akidah, a k e d a h. I guess in the Jewish traditiOn, the akidah is sometimes used by Christian theologians to eXplain the sacrifice of Jesus. [00:43:48] Okay, right. Next question. [00:43:51] I have a question about the history of translations of the jewish scriptures. When did Christians begin to transition from using the greek translations of the Old Testament back to the original language, Hebrew? And what sparked this movement? [00:44:10] Okay, when did christians stop using the greek Old Testament and start using the Hebrew? [00:44:16] In early Christianity, it happened, like, really quickly because most christians could not read Hebrew. [00:44:25] And so as Christianity spread outside of Israel, people who were using the Jewish Bible almost always used it in Greek. And as time went on, fewer and fewer christians were able to read Greek. [00:44:42] In the early fifth century, Jerome, the Church father Jerome was one of the real learned scholars of early Christianity who did learn Hebrew precisely so he could translate the Hebrew Old Testament. Hebrew Bible into Latin. [00:45:02] Jerome was commissioned by the pope to produce a latin translation of the Bible, because at this time, Christianity was spread throughout the roman world. And half the roman world, the eastern part of the roman world, continued to speak Greek, but the western part of the roman world, including Rome, spoke Latin. And so there were latin translations of the Bible floating around in Jerome's day. But the problem that the pope and many others had was that these translations were very different from one another, and there wasn't a standard translation. [00:45:45] And so the pope wanted a standard translation, and so he commissioned one of the great intellectuals of the day to make it. And Jerome could do that because he knew both Greek and Latin, I mean, both Greek and Hebrew, even though his native language was Latin. And so he engaged on a translation project. It's not clear that he translated the entire Bible. In fact, he probably did not in the New Testament. He probably translated just the gospels, and that some others in his wake translated the other books into Latin. [00:46:18] Latin became the standard Bible throughout the Roman Catholic Church for centuries, because the Roman Catholic Church was the form of Christianity in the western world, which, of course, included Europe, where it was particularly influential, and then into the new world, the eastern part of the empire, remained Greek. And so you had the Greek. What emerges as Greek Orthodox Christianity that continued to use the Greek Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. [00:46:53] When did modern people start using the Hebrew? [00:46:58] So this is part of the debate that happened at the Reformation. [00:47:03] In the Reformation, Martin Luther insisted that the Bible is the only authority. And Protestants, those who protested the Catholic Church, protestant theologians, began to think that we needed translations into modern languages that are made from the original, not from Latin, and for the Old Testament, not from Greek. [00:47:28] And so people started learning Greek. Scholars of Christianity began learning Greek back in the 16th century, and that began. Began to be the language that was preferred because it was understood that it's the original language. [00:47:44] The reformers, the protestant reformers, did not like using the Latin Bible or using the Greek Old Testament. One major reason for that was because the Greek Old Testament had books included in it that are not found in the Hebrew Bible. [00:48:04] And some of the doctrines of the Catholic Church, according to these protestant theologians, were principally based on the Greek Old Testament, from books that are not found in the Hebrew Bible. And so they insisted the original language is what matters. And these other books are not to be considered authoritative on the level as the other books. Those books are the books of the Apocrypha. [00:48:30] When you hear somebody talk about the apocrypha, those are the books they're talking about the books in the Greek Bible that are not in the Hebrew Bible. And so it's during the Reformation that people move toward being more interested in the Hebrew Bible than the Greek Old Testament. [00:48:44] Okay, next question. What do we know about the sons of God? [00:48:50] When and why does Jesus become the one and only son? [00:48:56] And so this person points out that you have people called the sons of God in the book of Genesis. This is a reference to one of those very peculiar passages in the Bible, Genesis, chapter six before the flood, where the sons of God look down upon the daughters of men and see that they are beautiful. And so they come down and have sex with them and create babies. And these babies. In the end, you have these giants on the earth and, oh, my God, what is going on here? Well, you have these kind of like this kind of mixed thing between these sons of God, these divine beings, and these human women. And that's in one strand of the tradition. That's why God brings the flood. Get rid of those guys. It's like they're enormous. And so there begun. There began jewish traditions about these offspring of these angels, these sons of God. The angels are these sons of God. And the book of first ENOCH, which many of you may have heard of if you read it, it's about these sons of God. There are 200 of them, and they're named in the first EnOCh, and it describes how God punishes them. And it's like the book is about these stories about these people who are in this book are called the Watchers. So, all right, so sons of God. There are angelic beings. They look like they're angels of some kind who are not good angels. [00:50:28] The term sons of God appears in the book of Job where God is in heaven bragging on this righteous person. JOb and the sons of God come up to him as his kind of advisory council. [00:50:40] And one of them, HASataN the SATan, says, well, job is only righteous because, you know, you're giving him everything. Take away everything he's got. He's not going to be. He's going to be worshiping you then, I can tell you. And so that leads to Job's sufferings. But the Satan figure is one of the sons of God. He's not the devil with a pitchfork down in hell. He's one of God's advisors up in heaven, one of God's divine counsel. So there are the sons of God, or divine counsel, the sons of God. Son of God gets used for a number of, a number of figures in the Hebrew Bible. [00:51:14] Angelic beings are called the sons of God. [00:51:18] The nation of Israel is called the son of God. Hosea chapter eleven one out of Egypt have I called my son. [00:51:26] The king of Israel is called the son of God. [00:51:31] Psalm two seven, you are my son today I have begotten you, says God to the king. [00:51:41] And so in the New Testament, the term son of God is used almost exclusively of Jesus. Although Paul talks about christians being sons of God, Jesus says other people are sons of God in John chapter seven, quoting scripture. But Jesus becomes the son of God. He's the son of God because of course he's the special son of God. He's unique from everyone else. [00:52:10] Even for those authors who don't think of Jesus as a pre existent divine being, he's the son of God because, for example, Mark, I don't think Mark or Matthew or Luke understand that Jesus existed before his birth. [00:52:32] But they all think of Jesus as the son of God because he is the one who either becomes divine or is already divine in a way unlike everyone else. [00:52:44] And so. [00:52:47] Right, so that's what happens in the New Testament then. And those who are members of Christ's body are also then children of God as well. [00:52:58] Okay, I was going to say something else about that, but I forget what it is. [00:53:02] So just as well because I need to speed through a couple more questions next. Around what time around when does the idea that baptism makes the soul eligible to go to heaven spread in early Christianity? [00:53:22] Baptism is an interesting phenomenon. In the modern world. Different christian denominations have different understandings of what baptism is all about. [00:53:34] I think every denomination probably practices baptism. Jesus in the New Testament, chapter 28 of Matthew tells his disciples to make disciples of all the nations and baptize them. And in the Book of Acts, people convert, have to be baptized. And so baptism happens throughout. [00:53:51] In modern denominations, there's a range of views. In the roman catholic tradition, baptism is the washing away of original sin. [00:54:03] Everybody is born with a sin nature residing in them because everybody is born of people who were born of people who were born from Adam and Eve, who brought sin into the world. And once sin came into the world in the catholic tradition, it affect, it infected everyone. And then in fact, it's passed along in the sex act. [00:54:26] The man passes along the sin nature to the woman in the act of having sex so that the child inherits the sin nature more or less as part of its DNA. [00:54:38] In the catholic tradition, baptism removes original sin so that a person can later have be restored into a right standing before God. [00:54:51] But the baptism doesn't do that because the person sins afterwards. But you've got to get rid of the original sin and you don't want to die with original sin because you're condemned. So you baptize a baby so that they don't have their original sin with them anymore. That's the baptist church. [00:55:08] In the presbyterian church as an example. Baptism doesn't function that way at all. Baptism is a way of replacing circumcision as a sign of the covenant. [00:55:21] In Judaism, a person had to be circumcised in order to belong to the people of God. To be a jew, you had to be circumcised. [00:55:32] In this view of things, in this christian view of things, baptism replaces circumcision. So you don't have to circumcise people. You can if you want, you don't have to. And you certainly don't want to be circumcising girls. And so this is for girls and boys both. It's a way of entering into the people of God, entering into the covenantal community in the presbyterian church, in the baptist church, it's none of the above. In the baptist church it's adults who are to be baptized. There are various kinds of baptists, of course, but adults are baptized. And baptism is not some kind of like mystical thing that happens with your original sin disappearing or what, or you know, or joining the covenantal community. It's actually symbolic act, not one that actually, where something actually happens, it's a symbolic act. It's an outward sign of an inward reality that has already transpired. When you committed your life to Christ, you're born again, you are washed clean of your sins when you have faith, and then you demonstrate your faith by being baptized as an outward sign of what happened on the inside already. [00:56:42] So this person is saying, when does the idea that baptism makes the soul eligible to go to heaven spread in early Christianity? So that sounds like the kind of doctrine that develops in the Roman Catholic Church eventually that you are made able to go to heaven once you're baptized because the original sin disappears. That doctrine of original sin did not get formulated in its now traditional sense until Saint Augustine in the late fourth, early fifth century. [00:57:12] And so when that's where that particular idea comes about. But the idea that everybody has to be baptized and the assumption that salvation is connected with baptism goes way back in Christianity. In the New Testament, it is simply assumed that if you become a follower of Jesus, you will be baptized. You find that in Paul already. You find it in acts, etcetera. So the theology developed, but the practice was there from the very beginning. You have to do this. [00:57:44] Okay. Finally, the final question I have time for, which I actually don't have time for, but I'm going to answer anyway. [00:57:50] Please discuss the possibility that the virginal conception tradition in early Christianity has its origin in pagan mythology. [00:57:59] I actually have a course on this. [00:58:02] It might be a free course. I can't remember if it's free or not. If it's not, it's worth every penny. You can find the course on my website, barterman.com, and I think I called it the other virgin births in antiquity. [00:58:17] What I argued in the course is there aren't any. [00:58:22] What there are, though, are very similar stories in which a God gets a mortal woman pregnant. [00:58:31] In almost every case that involves some kind of physical act. [00:58:38] Often, for example, one of the gods say, Zeus will come down and disguise himself as a very attractive male, sometimes an attractive male who's already married to the woman that Zeus has fallen in love with and have sex with her. And the baby that results is part divine, part human. [00:58:59] Usually these miraculously born people are human rather than divine, but they have a divine element in them. That's true of Hercules, for example. His father's Jupiter, his mother Zachmeni. [00:59:16] And it's true Alexander the Great, some people thought, was born of a union of Zeus and his mother. Or Plato or, you know, there are different people who are said to be divine that way. And some rare occasions, like the God Dionysus, his mother was immortal. Father was Zeus, but he was actually born Zeus. He gestated in Zeus. So Semele, the mother who's been having sex with Zeus, wants to see him in his full glory, and he reluctantly shows him his glory, and it fries her. She's, like, instantaneously, like, consumed in fire, because you can't, you can't look on God and just survive it. And so, like, she's gone. But before she perishes, Zeus takes the, the embryo out of the womb or the fetus out of the womb and puts it in his thigh, and the baby gestates in Zeus's thigh, and so is born from Zeus. That's the God Dionysus, the God of wine and frolicking and kind of wild behavior. And he's a God, not immortal, because technically he was born out, born from a God unlike these other divine men. In no case that I know of is the woman who gives birth to this divine human being. In no case do I know if she's a virgin, except in the New Testament. [01:00:39] But the idea of a God getting a human pregnant is found throughout greek and roman mythology. Okay, I've gone longer than I wanted to. I didn't answer all the questions I wanted to. And so it goes. You can't always get what you want, as we know from the Rolling Stones. So thank you all. Thank you all for listening in on this. I hope you've enjoyed this. This month's gold Q and a. We're going to do it again next month. It's one of the perks for being a gold member of the blog, and so I hope you enjoy that. There are some other perks, as you know. If you can think of other ways for us to improve what we do for the blog generally, or for you gold members, just let us know. And I will be talking to you again next time.