Gold Q&A - June 2024

[00:00:01] Welcome you to this June 2024. Gold members Q and A. [00:00:07] I enjoy doing this every month, and apologies again for this one being a little bit behind schedule, but we are definitely catching up. I've got a large number of questions here. I won't be able to get through them all, but I will do my best. We begin with a question about the Bible. There's a surprise question. There seems to be a range of definitions for biblical inerrancy. Can you delineate them? [00:00:37] Right. Well, the word inerrancy means without error. And traditionally it has meant that the Bible has no errors of any kind. There are no contradictions that cannot be resolved. There are no geographical mistakes, no scientific mistakes, no historical mistakes, no mistakes of any kind. [00:01:03] To the extent that if it says that the world was created in six days that began with an evening and a morning, as Genesis one says, then the Bible literally says, is created in 624 hours days. And it really was created in 24 hours days. 624 hours days. And so it is inerrant when about 40 years ago or so, 50 years ago, some people started to differentiate between inerrancy and infallibility. [00:01:41] The idea of infallibility is that there could be some technical errors about this, that or the other thing. But I. The basic teachings of the Bible, the things that is trying to communicate about God, about Christ, about salvation, the major things it's trying to teach people in its own historical context, were absolutely infallible. You could trust what the Bible has to say about theological issues and about the big issues of life, even if it makes a mistake here or there. And some people who held to infallibility would say that, you know, the Bible is not trying to teach that it happened in 24 hours. The creation is 624 hours days. It's not. It's not meant to be a science book. It's meant to be a book about God. And so what it says about God is infallible. And what it says about other things is simply the authors expressing things in their own, in their own words at their own time. [00:02:41] I'd say that recently, some people, people who are conservative evangelical Christians, have tried to redefine what inerrancy means. This became clear to me several years ago when I was doing a debate. It wasn't a debate, actually. There are four presenters, four of us, presenting talks to an apologetics conference in Chicago. Apologetics conferences are conferences for evangelical christians primarily, or could be catholic Christians or people who want to. Any Christian who wants to make arguments in favor of the faith, this happened to be a protestant evangelical group. And the three other speakers all believed that the Bible had no significant contradictions in it, including the gospels. And I think it does. I think there are problems and there are contradictions. [00:03:38] They invited me to have another voice. And so it was a very pleasant conference. And really it was actually quite, quite great in terms of interpersonal interactions. But at one point. So the issue of inerrancy, of course, was central to the conference. The conference was about, does the Bible, do the biblical gospels, the New Testament gospels, have contradictions in them or not? So the interesting thing is that two of the speakers, who are both scholars, said that, in fact, there might be things that look like contradictions, but they aren't really contradictions. And you can explain them away this, this way or that way. One of the speakers, Mike Lacona, my friend who's an apologist, argued that there are places where Matthew and Mark are at odds with each other, where Mark will report something that Jesus said and Matthew will change it to say the opposite. [00:04:40] And so for most of us, that would be a contradiction. And most of us would say, well, if Mark reports Jesus saying this and Matthew reports saying that, and they are at odds, then they both can't be right. [00:04:58] The issue was, there's a tiny little issue, whether Jesus and his instructions to the twelve disciples, when he sent them out on a mission in order to preach the gospel and to heal the sick and to cast out demons, whether he told them, don't take anything with you, don't take a backpack, don't take extra sandals, don't take any money, and don't take, and don't take any of that. But Mark says, but do take a staff. A staff to walk with a walking staff. [00:05:27] Matthew reports the same story, same discussion, same context. And in Matthew's version, Matthew says, as Jesus say, don't take a backpack, don't take extra sandals, don't take any money, and don't take a staff. [00:05:42] And so it's, you know, does Jesus say take a staff or don't take a staff? [00:05:47] Simple thing. And if he said, you know, if one says one, one says the other, it's kind of hard to see how that's not a contradiction. So it is a contradiction. Mike insisted, though, that even though it's a contradiction, Matthew is inerrant, even though it contradicts Mark and he thinks Mark is what Jesus said and Matthew is not what Jesus said, but he says, still, Matthew is inerrant. And if I understand his argument correctly, it's because Matthew knew full well what he was doing when he said that Matthew was taking a marking story and he was trying to emphasize something that he thought was very important, that the apostles actually couldn't have anything with them. They had to rely completely on God, couldn't even take a staff. [00:06:33] And so Matthew's emphasizing that. And since Matthew knows he's emphasizing that, and since he knows he's changing mark, therefore it's not an error. So the Bible is still inerrant. [00:06:45] I think that's an unusual definition of inerrancy because it is locating whether there's an error or not in somebody's intention. [00:06:55] I find that problematic myself. If somebody gives me directions in order to get to the public library and says, you know, when you get to Michigan Avenue, turn right and I go there, I go to Michigan Avenue, I turn right and the library is no place to be found, because in fact the correct thing to say was when you come to Michigan Avenue, turn left. [00:07:21] I would not say that that was an inerrant instruction. It was an error to tell me to turn right when I should have turned left. Mike would say, though apparently, that if the person saying that meant for you to get lost and knew that he was giving you the incorrect instruction, that even though it's incorrect, it's not an error because he knew he was doing it for me. Errors are not contingent on whether somebody's lying or not, or directly changing something or not, or falsifying something or correcting something in the opposite direction. If they contradict each other, they both can't be right. And one of them has to be an error if you claim to be representing the truth in this case, what jesus said anyway. So there probably are other definitions of inerrancy. My sense is that modern evangelicals are joining the modern world in many ways and recognizing there are problems and are simply redefining the term so they can hold on to the term inerrancy without believing in the traditional view of inerrancy, which is it's something without error. [00:08:31] Okay, next question. [00:08:34] Why did Jesus preach in smaller towns in Galilee and not in the bigger towns and cities? [00:08:41] It's a really good question. [00:08:43] When you read through our earliest gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. Jesus does spend his time in the rural, in rural Galilee. There were two large cities in Galilee at the time and there's nothing to indicate that Jesus went to either one of them. The two big cities are Sepphoris, near Nazareth, and Tiberius, Tiberius, which is on the sea of Galilee. Jesus didn't go to either one in the gospels he didn't go to large places with large population centers. He only went into small towns and villages and just out in the countryside to preach. The first time Jesus is recorded as going to a large city in our earliest gospels is when he makes his fatal trip to Jerusalem at the end of his life. It's pretty clear when they show up, he and his disciples show up in Jerusalem that it seemed pretty clear they haven't been there before. [00:09:53] Jesus does go there several times before this in John, but not in our earliest gospels. The disciples, when they go into town, they look around at these tall buildings and they, whoa, look at that. I've never seen anything like that. That is amazing. And so it's like, you know, when I was a good Kansas boy and showed up for the first time in New York City, that's exactly what I was doing. Wow, look at that. Never seen anything like it, because I hadn't seen anything like it. [00:10:20] The question this person is asking is, why is that? Why didn't Jesus go to the bigger places? We don't really know. [00:10:26] He's from Nazareth, he's from a small place. He's probably more comfortable in a small place. Most people from small towns are more comfortable in small towns. [00:10:37] He starts his preaching ministry in Galilee and he spends his ministry there. However long it is, the only time he goes to the city is Jerusalem at the end. And probably he's going to Jerusalem then precisely because he wants to spread his message to larger number of jews in a major city. And that's the place to go. Jerusalem during Passover is the place where you're going to get the highest concentration of Jews, probably anywhere. And so that's why he goes there. Why did he not do that earlier? [00:11:08] I don't know. I mean, maybe it didn't occur to him. [00:11:13] Maybe he. You think, well, it should have. Well, maybe, maybe, I don't know why, but he did go at the end, and that's what led to his demise because he offended the authorities in Jerusalem. [00:11:28] Okay, next question. It always seemed odd to me that faith was necessary for salvation. How did the early church fathers understand this? [00:11:37] Sometimes Paul seems to understand this as a mechanism for salvation rather than necessarily attaching value to faith itself. That's an interesting question. [00:11:48] So I think one problem is that many people think of faith as something you do and that it's a mechanism, it's a way to find salvation. Have faith and you can have salvation. You have to believe. [00:12:09] And so believing is something that you do, that you have to do for salvation. I think a lot of people understand it that way. A lot of christians do. And I'm not sure that's quite the way Paul understood it. [00:12:23] It is true that Paul did think that without faith, one would not be saved. But faith, for Paul is less something you do than it is someone that you trust. [00:12:39] When you trust your parents or you trust your spouse or you trust your teacher or you trust somebody, you're not actually doing something. You're not asserting some kind of effort to accomplish something. You're accepting something. You're accepting their trustworthiness. [00:13:03] And that isn't quite the same as doing something. And I think for Paul, faith meant that you understood what Christ had done for you, and you readily accepted it. [00:13:20] You realize what he had done and you were grateful for it, and you accepted it as something that he had done for you. And so it's kind of like if somebody loans you, if somebody wants to give you $100 and they hand you $100, you can take it. I mean, in a sense, you're doing something because you're taking it. But basically you're just receiving a gift from someone else. It's not that you're doing anything for the gift, you're just accepting it. And Paul saw salvation that way. You're accepting the gift. If you reject the $100, if you say no, then you're doing something, you're rejecting it. And if you reject it, you don't get it. If you don't accept the salvation God's provided, you don't get it. It's not that you haven't done something, you just haven't accepted it. And so I think it's more like that. It's a little bit hard to kind of conceptualize that, but I think it's more like that. I don't think it's something that you do, but I think it did develop into that in Christianity. It was something you had to do, and I think maybe that isn't actually what Paul had in mind. [00:14:26] All right, next, did early church fathers think God was happy to consign non believers to eternal torment? And how did they reconcile this with a loving and forgiving God? [00:14:38] I'm not sure that the early church fathers would use the term happy for this. [00:14:44] I think they would say that God had offered salvation to everybody, and if people rejected it, then they've rejected goddesse. And so it's not God's fault. [00:14:58] God has saved you from torment, and you refuse it. So, well, okay, that might be idiocy, but it's not God's fault. I think they probably put it something like that. But in terms of happy to consign non believers to eternal torment in the sense if this question means was God willing to do that, well, yes, the church fathers would say, yes, he is that. In fact, he is consigning non believers to eternal torment precisely because they've rejected him. [00:15:28] So he's not willy nilly just picking people out, ascend to hell. [00:15:32] He's made an offer of salvation and people reject it. [00:15:36] How does one reconcile this with a loving and forgiving God? [00:15:40] Forgiveness is an interesting phenomenon in early Christianity because forgiveness was not something that God does automatically. [00:15:54] It's something that God does. When somebody realizes that there's something to be forgiven for, they realize a person realizes they've done something wrong, they violated God's moral law and that, and they're sorry they did that, they wish they hadn't done that, and they repent of their sins. They apologize to God for what they've done. They ask God to forgive them and he will forgive them. But you can't really forgive. Somebody doesn't ask to be forgiven. [00:16:26] You may think you can, because today we have this concept of unconditional forgiveness. [00:16:32] That's when somebody does something really nasty to you and you don't hold it against them. [00:16:38] That's really good for your blood pressure and stress when you just, you let it go. [00:16:44] That's great. But it's not the same thing as forgiveness in the christian tradition, and it's not the same thing as forgiveness as many philosophers today are understanding it. Philosophers, non christian philosophers as well as christian philosophers, but non Christians as well. Forgiveness is a way of working out a reconciliation between two people when there's been a breach caused by one of them. [00:17:08] So the breaches happen when somebody's done something, something bad that has hurt another person. And when the person who's offend the offender recognizes that and they realize they've done something wrong and they, and they feel regret about it, they feel remorse for hurting the other person and they ask the person to forgive them. The reconciliation comes when the offended party agrees not to hold it against them, not to hold back any, not to hold any anger, not to require penalty, not to require punishment, not to humiliate them, not to whatever, not to punish them in any way, but simply to let it go. That is not unconditional forgiveness. [00:17:50] That's forgiveness conditioned on repentance, on recognition that you've done wrong and repenting of it. And that's what brings the reconciliation, because now the two are on the same page again. [00:18:05] They are restored to one another with what we call unconditional forgiveness. There's no restoration because the offending party hasn't admitted they've done anything wrong. But that admission is necessary for true forgiveness. So I would argue that unconditional forgiveness is not the kind of forgiveness you find in early Christianity. [00:18:29] It is hard to understand, though, just to continue with this question. It is very hard to understand the concept of eternal torment for violating God's moral law. Eternal torment does not seem like the act of a loving God to me. [00:18:46] You die when you're 30 years old. You've kind of been conscious of what you're doing for the last 20 years. You've messed up a few times, maybe a lot of times. And for those 20 years of really not living the way you should have, God has you tormented for 20 trillion years and with no end ever. Like, really 20 trillion years for exchange for 20 years. And actually the 20 trillion can be multiplied 20 trillion times and it goes off forever and ever because you messed up for 20 years. That doesn't sound loving to me. It's not like he's trying to restore you to a right relationship or he's trying to reform you. He's just like, you know, torturing you forever. Yeah. So that's not really. It's not really showing a loving God. But the early christians would, of course, include insist God was a loving God and he was forgiving. [00:19:34] But in their view, God is eternal and he is just. [00:19:41] He's not just loving and forgiving, he's also just, which means he has to execute justice. And so if you've violated the eternal moral will of the eternal moral God, there has to be an eternal moral punishment. [00:19:58] Not just moral punishment, physical punishment, torment. Well, I personally do not subscribe to that view. I think it's a very hurtful view, harmful view, and I can't see how it could possibly be right. And so. But the early christians didn't have as much a problem with that. [00:20:16] All right, we have a range of locations tagged to various members of the twelve disciples after the resurrection question continues. It seems that various regions and their bishops might have simply adopted one of the twelve to be their token patron apostolic source. [00:20:38] And the questioner is saying, so, okay, so you got these different places that say, yeah, Alexandria, that's where Mark went, or India, that's where Thomas went. And everybody has the place where they say, we were founded by this apostle, or that apostle Peter in Rome, for example, John in Ephesus, etcetera. And so the question is, outside of the more familiar and conflicting stories related to the travels, later travels of Peter and John, has there been any convincing historical or physical evidence uncovered tying any other apostle to teaching within a specific geographic location? Well, I'd say there's actually not very good evidence for Peter or John either. [00:21:21] I'm not completely convinced that Peter went to Rome. [00:21:25] He may have done. [00:21:27] He doesn't appear to have been there when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans in the sixties, probably around the year 60 or 62, something like that. The last letter of Paul, he greets over two dozen people in the congregation of Rome whom he knows, and he doesn't mention Peter as either being there or having been there. [00:21:49] John. I think that the evidence linking him to Ephesus is very, very loose indeed. [00:21:55] And the other apostles, I don't think we have much information about them either. [00:22:00] I don't think anything really puts Mark in Alexandria and to the surprise and upset of many, many people in the world, I don't think there's anything that really ties Thomas to India. [00:22:11] We start getting these kinds of ideas later in legendary texts of the second and third centuries. They're highly legendary. Anybody who reads them almost, you know, except for, like, firm believers that everything ever written down about Christianity has to be true. Except for people like that. You know, you read these things, it's pretty clear that there's. This stuff is filled with legends, and we don't have early legends. We don't have early accounts of any of this. The earliest accounts of the apostles is basically, they stayed in Israel. They stayed in Jerusalem as long as they could and then hung out in Israel, maybe went back to Galilee or something. But I don't think all of them are traveling. There is some evidence that Peter was traveling because Paul mentions Peter's presence in Antioch and in Corinth, but not in Rome. [00:23:03] So I guess the answer is no. [00:23:05] We don't really have solid evidence for any of that. [00:23:09] Next question. I'm familiar with the emergence of the New Testament canon based on the letter of Athanasius. [00:23:19] Okay. But when was the first time a particular collection was presented as a single entity under the title the New Testament? Okay, yeah, good question. The Athanasius letter. So the deal is that the New Testament had. There are lots of books written in early Christianity, not billions, but there are more than we have in the New Testament. We have 27 books in the New Testament, but we have other gospels. Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of so and so. [00:23:54] We have other apocalypses in the New Testament, you have the apocalypse of John, but you also have the apocalypse of Peter, and you have the shepherd of Hermas, which were both apocalypses that some people thought were scriptural. You have other letters. You got letters of Paul in the New Testament, letters of Peter, allegedly, and James and so forth. We have other letters outside the New Testament. So there are other. There are other books that could have gone into the New Testament that did not. Athanasius was the bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, who in the year 367, wrote a letter to the churches under his jurisdiction. [00:24:28] He wrote a letter like this every year that he was bishop. This is his 39th letter. 39th year. He did this in the year 367. And in these letters, he would give pastoral advice and about various things. [00:24:46] This particular letter was a letter in which, among other things, he described which books belong to the New Testament. And he listed our 27 books. [00:24:56] And this is the first time ever that we know of that anybody listed our 27 books and said, these are the 27 books and not more of them. Not fewer of them. These 27. It became our New Testament eventually. Not immediately, but eventually that became whatever. Almost everybody, not everybody even still, but most people agree is the New Testament. So the question this person is saying, this person is saying, look, I know all that, but what he wants to know is, when do we have the first time that anybody talked about the New Testament, gave the title to the New Testament so well? Nobody did it with respect to these 27 books until Athanasius. But there were earlier people who used the term New Testament. The word testament is the same word as covenant. [00:25:50] You may recall that in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew Bible, God makes a covenant with his people, Israel. He agrees that he will be their God if they will be his people, and that will require them to follow his prescriptions about how to worship him and how to live together. [00:26:11] And so the covenant is made with the israelite people. [00:26:16] Jeremiah predicts that in the future there will be a new covenant, a New Testament. And the early Christians claimed that Jesus inaugurated the new covenant. And since this new covenant is authoritatively described in this, in a set of christian books, it came to be called the New Covenant or the New Testament. And that's the point at which christians started talking about an Old Testament. So you have an Old Testament and a New Testament, and the question is, when did that designation first occur? [00:26:50] It is usually said to have first occurred, the designation itself in the writing, in the writings of Melito of Sardis, somebody you may not have heard of, he's a late second century around the year 200, bishop of Sardis, he is most famous for a sermon that he preached in around the year 200, which was an Easter sermon, which was highly, highly anti Jewish. [00:27:23] It's the first. It's a very powerful sermon, very poetic, rhetorically forceful, and in it, he accuses the Jews of deicide. Jews have killed God. [00:27:38] The logic is Jesus is God. Jews are responsible for Jesus death. Therefore Jesus Jews killed their messiah, but he also killed their God. Melito uses this as an attack against Jews for killing the God who created them. Melito elsewhere apparently called the christian writings the New Testament. That, though, is, I don't believe it's in a writing we have of Melito per se. It's according to the church, Father Eusebius writing about 100 years later, around the year 300, in his church history, the book called Church History, the ten volume book that we still have that you can get in english translation. It's a history of Christianity down to Eusebius time. [00:28:28] He mentions that Melito of Sardis used the term New Testament. That does not mean that Melito of Sardis had our 27 books as his New Testament. He had a collection of books he called the New Testament. [00:28:41] Okay, so around the year, too. All right, next question. Did Jerome and the King James Version use the masoretic text? [00:28:52] Okay, well, that's a span of some centuries. So the masoretic text refers to the version of the Hebrew Bible that was copied by a group of jewish scholars, scribes, scholarly scribes called the Masoretes, who, in the very early part of the Middle Ages, started to standardize the text of the Hebrew Bible. [00:29:23] There were lots of different variations among Hebrew Bible manuscripts, and the Masarits wanted to make sure that everybody had the same text, and they inaugurated textual copying practices that would guarantee that when scribes copied a page of a book, you know, copy a page of Isaiah, a page of Genesis, that they did not make any changes. They had checks and balances to make sure that no changes were made in any of the copies. [00:29:55] And so the question is, is this the text that Jerome used and the King James Version used? [00:30:00] It's certainly true for the King James Version. The King James version is based on the masoretic text, as is every other modern translation, because the masoretic text is the only text available. For the most part, that's changed somewhat with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. [00:30:22] And modern translators will also look at other kinds of textual witnesses for the Hebrew Bible. [00:30:28] They'll look, for example, at what the greek translation of the Hebrew Bible is the Septuagint. [00:30:36] The Septuagint is called the Septuagint because it's a translation into greek that allegedly was made by 70. [00:30:45] 70 jewish scholars. [00:30:48] And so it's called the Septuagint septa seven because 70 scholars allegedly did it. That's a legend. But there were greek translations that were floating around the Mediterranean in the time of Jesus, in the time of Jerome, and so on. And these greek translations in some places appear to be. The ancient greek translators appear in places to be translating a different form of the hebrew text from the one we have today. Masoretic text. [00:31:26] The differences are not always enormous. [00:31:31] Sometimes they're big, sometimes they're not. [00:31:34] But the king James used the masoretic text because today, if you're going to translate the Hebrew, basically, you've got a text. [00:31:42] Okay, so you've got a text. The masoretic text. What about Jerome? Jerome would have used a text very similar to the masoretic text, saying the masoretic text is a little bit complicated because the Masorets worked on, they developed their practices over a long period of time. But Jerome certainly used something very close to the masoretic text when he was translating the Hebrew Bible. And by the Middle Ages, after Jerome, century two, after Jerome, just about everybody's using the masoretic text. Okay, next, what do you consider to be the most significant issues and controversies in New Testament scholarship today? [00:32:24] I would say things have changed radically since I was a graduate student in the seventies and eighties. [00:32:30] The kinds of things that people used to argue about where there was, like, two positions on something, this. That, you know, and people would argue this, people would argue that are not really big issues anymore, because the field itself, like so many fields of knowledge, has fragmented so much that most people. [00:32:51] There are not a lot of people all talking about the same thing anymore. [00:32:56] There are people who are concerned with this thing or with that thing or this other thing. And sometimes these break down in theoretical interests. And so many people will take an interest in doing a feminist interpretation of the New Testament, for example, or a postcolonial interpretation of the New Testament, or a queer studies understanding the New Testament. Or you have all sorts of queer theory and feminist theory, postcolonial theory, very serious, that are very, very helpful for understanding the text from a variety of perspectives, bringing a modern theoretical interest to. To shed light on the text, and vice versa. So you have that kind of thing going on a lot. You. Another phenomenon you've had for 2030 years, most significant for a long time, but most significantly is how the, how the New Testament is read in various various cultures and countries. You know, so you might get an east asian reading of the Book of John or a, you know, or a latin american reading of Exodus or, you know, and so, like, how people are reading these texts in different places for different purposes. And that's, that's a completely new, that's a completely different field of study that's also very, very interesting and important. [00:34:20] I have a feeling this person is not asking about any of that. The person's asking about the kinds of historical critical analyses that I do on the blog and in my courses, in my books. What are the big, big debates now for this kind of historical approach to the New Testament? Trying to understand it in his own historical context? Principally, there are disputes about that. [00:34:44] It is interesting to me that some of the hottest disputes represent simple pendulum swings in opinion of scholarship. This is always informed opinion. It's not like you just got to grab an opinion out of the air and run with it. Your opinion is based on serious years of analysis, usually. But it is interesting that, as in other fields of the humanities, you'll have a view of something that is pretty well established, that pretty much everybody agrees and new scholars come along and they think, you know, actually everybody accepts that it's true, but it's problematic. In fact, it's this other thing. It's the opposite of what they're saying. And so you get that just. I'll just stick with the gospels for a second. [00:35:29] There are significant issues and controversies for lots of things, but just with the gospels. For example, it used to be complete orthodoxy that Matthew and Luke used Mark, and they had a separate source called Q, which Q stands for the german word quelle. The german word cavalla means source, and this was understood to be the source for the sayings that Matthew and Luke both have. [00:35:59] But they don't. They didn't get them from Mark. Mark doesn't have these sayings, but Matthew and Luke do. The Lord's prayer, the beatitudes, parables, some of the one liners. These are sayings attributed to Jesus in Matthew and Luke. Sometimes their word for word, the same. [00:36:16] So there has to be some copying going on, and for lots of reasons. Since the 19th century, it was argued that they, they didn't copy each other, for there are good reasons for thinking that they didn't copy each other. And if they didn't copy each other but somebody's copying somebody, then it seems more likely they're both copying another source that doesn't exist. Anymore. And you call that source? Q. [00:36:39] I still think that's the most plausible explanation for these sayings in Matthew and Luke. And that continues so far as I can tell. It continues to be the majority view of scholars today, but it's being called into question. [00:36:55] And my friend Mark Goodacre, who has provided guest posts on the blog and has been, he was in my conference last year, the new insights into the New Testament on my website, and really intelligent, smart guy who knows everything about the gospels, teaches at Duke crosstown rival. [00:37:18] He, he has spent a good deal of his career trying to argue that Q did not exist and that the way it worked is Matthew copied Mark, and Luke copied Matthew and Mark both. And that's why you have these agreements. So that's his view. It's catching on. [00:37:38] His students basically accept this view, many of whom are now teaching in universities, and so they're spreading, spreading this view. [00:37:46] I don't think it's right, but it's fine. It's fine. Another thing now that's happening, just sticking with the gospels, is that another kind of really mainstay view that was the majority view that virtually everybody had for decades and decades, was that Matthew, Mark and Luke are closely related and they're sharing of sources and somebody's copying somebody. But the John is completely different, that John did not rely on the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, or on their sources, that John was an independent source. And that, too, now is coming under question. Again. Thank you, Mark Goodacre. Mark has spent his career trying to figure out who used whom, and he generally thinks that whatever gospels we've got that exist still today are the ones that used other gospels that we still have that exist today. [00:38:47] One reason I don't agree with that is because I think there were lots of things written back in the ancient world, and we're just lucky to have the few we have. But the fact that these happen to survive doesn't mean they happen to be the sources for the other ones that survived. Like you can find the smoking gun somewhere, everywhere. It exists someplace, and I don't think it always exists. Anyway. Mark now and many others now are arguing that, in fact, I, John used Matthew, Mark and Luke not the same way that Matthew used Mark, but that they knew these gospels and were influenced by them. And again, I don't agree with that. I'll mention one other controversy not related to the gospels. [00:39:26] I recently wrote this book, Armageddon, which is trying to provide an interpretation of the book of Revelation from a historical point of view. Rather than a theological point of view or some other point of view. And I was trying to explain in this book how you put the book of Revelation in its historical context and how you understand what this author was saying to his original audience. And it was not about what's going to happen in the 21st century. It just was not. [00:39:55] But in the course of this, of course, I had to do a ton of research. I've taught the book of Revelation for over 40 years, and so it's not like I hadn't thought about it or done any research on it. But there are things I wanted to read more deeply in the. And one of the things that continues to surprise me, and I had forgotten just how strongly some people argue this is. Some very fine scholars will argue that the book of Revelation is not a violent book. [00:40:26] What? [00:40:29] And that God is not portrayed violently in revelation, that Christ is not portrayed violently in revelation. And I'm wondering, which book of revelation are they reading exactly? [00:40:39] So I. You know, I. So I have an extended discussion of this in my book, Armageddon, but so that's. I guess that's a controversy. It's revelation violent. [00:40:50] When. When God kills just about everybody on the planet, including lots of christians, violently. It has people tortured for five months without even allowing them to kill themselves to get out of the pain. Is that violent or nothing, really? Okay. Anyway, I developed the argument in my book to explain why I don't think that's a very acceptable way of reading revelation. Okay. All right, next question. [00:41:19] It seems odd that the book of acts does not address the trial and execution of Paul, or of Peter, for that matter. [00:41:28] One would think that the author would have been aware of the circumstances and details of these rather significant events. Why do you think they were not included? Yeah, great question. [00:41:39] Conservative evangelicals and other conservative scholars over the years have argued that this is an argument that Luke and acts were written before the death of Peter and Paul, because if they were, if these book. If the book of Acts was written after the death of Peter and Paul, since Peter and Paul are the main characters of the Book of Acts, the author would have mentioned it. The fact he doesn't mention it, they say, shows that it hadn't happened yet. [00:42:12] Since Peter and Paul were thought to have been executed during the reign of the emperor Nero in the year 64, that would mean that acts had to be written before the year 64, which means that the Book of Luke had to be written before that, which means that these are not gospels. From the end of the first century, the book Luke and act are not books from the end of the first century, but in fact they go back to the fifties or around 60. They were fair, they were early. [00:42:41] So, you know, this is an argument that people frequently make and I have never ever found it convincing. [00:42:49] So here's why. The Book of Acts is the second volume of a two volume work. The Gospel of Luke was written about Jesus birth, his life, his miracles, his teachings, his death and his resurrection. The Book of Acts then takes the story after Jesus resurrection and traces the history of Christianity through its 1st 30 years, up to the time when Paul is in prison in Rome. And it ends with Paul in prison in Rome prior to any trial or execution. [00:43:25] Okay, so what are the major themes of the Book of Acts? Well, there are a lot of major themes in acts. Very interesting book, very important book. [00:43:35] One theme is that the gospel of Christ applies not just to Jews, but also to Gentiles. It's a major theme. Gentiles also need to hear the word. [00:43:48] Another theme of acts is that the word is spread by the power of the Holy Spirit. [00:43:56] What happens to the apostles in the Book of Acts is very similar to what happens to Jesus in the New Testament. [00:44:03] Jesus is baptized and the apostles practice baptism. Jesus has the spirit come upon him in baptism. Spirit comes upon the apostles. Jesus starts doing miracles after he receives the spirit. The apostles start doing miracles after they receive the spirit. Jesus delivers great teachings after the spirit. The apostles received delivered great teachings after the spirits. Jesus is rejected by the Jews, by the jewish leaders in Jerusalem. The apostles are rejected by the jewish leaders in Jerusalem, etcetera, etcetera. It goes on like this, the parallels. So another theme of act is that the mission of the apostles has been inspired by God and is driven by the spirit of God. [00:44:48] Okay? And so it's all spirit that is not human act. Nobody could possibly pull this off if they're just human. It needs to be the spirit of God. But another theme is that since it's being driven by the spirit of God, God's will is that the gospels get spread throughout the earth. The spirit makes it possible by working through the apostles. And there's nothing that can stop the movement. [00:45:11] Major thing, nothing can stop the movement because the spirit's behind it. People try to stop Paul in acts and nobody can stop him. [00:45:22] They persecute him, they beat him, they drive him out of town, they try to stone him to death, they. But you know, whatever happens to him, he just keeps going. You stone him to death. And after they leave, he gets up and goes into the next town and preaches again. You can't stop Paul. [00:45:44] So why would the book of acts not narrate the death of Paul? [00:45:50] That's the theater, because it runs precisely against one of its major themes. You can't stop him. [00:45:59] Paul is spreading the gospel to the ends of the earth, and nobody can stop him. And so you can't very well narrate that. In fact, he got arrested and killed. [00:46:10] So they got him arrested, but he's not killed in acts. And so that's why, you know, often when people write about a history, they stop someplace before bringing it up to the current day. You know, you could, you know, if somebody's writing an account of the 20th century, for example, they don't have to go beyond the 20th century. They've got a period that they want to talk about. The period that acts wants to talk about is how the gospel went from the capital city of the Jews to the capital city of the empire, goes from Jerusalem to Rome. And that's the, that's what the author wants to show, that the message went to the very center of the empire with Paul, and so he ends it there. [00:46:56] Okay, next question. Do the writings of female authors, do the writings of female authors survive from the Roman Empire in the first century CE to support the position that the author of Luke act could have been a woman boy? We have very few authors from the, from the roman world who are women. [00:47:21] Very few women authors. Most of the people who were educated were boys. [00:47:28] Girls were rarely educated. The education of a child took years and years. Reading itself took years and years. And they taught writing after they taught reading. [00:47:41] And so it would have been a very long and drawn out process for somebody to be educated. And women who, by and large, were not involved with public affairs had no need to read and write. [00:47:54] You might think that a rich woman would have, need to read and write, right? Because I have a lot of interactions with other rich women and other rich families and things. But rich women had slaves who could write. They did have, sometimes women slaves who could be trained to write. But by and large, there are very, very few women authors in the world, let alone in the first century. [00:48:18] We know of one woman historian, I believe, pamphlet of Epidaurus, who is a historian of the first century. It's rare that we have women. And so was the author of Luke acts a woman? Yes. Could have been. Why not? It could have. Well, why not? It theoretically could have been. Is it likely? I don't see any likelihood at all that any of the authors of the New Testament was a woman? [00:48:45] It's not likely at all. Very few Christians could write. Very few christians were upper class and upper class women who could write. I don't know. I mean, they may have existed, but we don't. I'm afraid we really don't know about them. So I think the issue with something like that is we know there were lots of books written by men in the ancient world. And so anytime you think that a book that's anonymous was not written by a woman and it was not written by a man, was not written by a man, then I think you need to find, you know, reasons for thinking so. And most of us are really open to the possibility. Let me tell you. We are really open to the possibility. But as a historian, I ask, you know, what's the likelihood the first Christian writing by a woman that is reputed to have been produced is a part of the martyrdom of Perpetua. [00:49:38] Around. It was in the year 203. It was written as written in Latin. [00:49:43] Part of it is a diary. [00:49:46] Perpetua. This is a fantastic text, the martyrdom of Perpetua. She was a woman in North Africa, a well placed woman, a rich woman who was arrested for being a Christian and refused to recant. And we have an account of her execution. [00:50:11] Part of this text, the martyrdom of Perpetua, is the diary that she allegedly kept in prison. [00:50:20] And for many years, I assumed, as did many other people, that it actually was her diary, so that it was, like, the first account by a woman. But a number of scholars, both feminist scholars and non feminist scholars, your scholars trying to study this, have argued that, in fact, it wasn't really written by her. It was written by a man putting it on her lips. And there are reasons for thinking that, in any event, it was the year 203. So it's long after the New Testament period. At any point, you have to ask, well, what would make you think so? That would be, you know, what's compelling as opposed to what you would like to think. Okay, another question, I'm assuming, says this person, that Jesus never answered to the name Jesus while he was alive. He would answer to something like Yeshua. [00:51:12] I've never heard anyone say in the name of Yeshua. [00:51:16] Mark even quoted Jesus native language. So why change his name? [00:51:21] Maybe Paul used the name Jesus, and the author of Mark followed suit. But why would Paul Saul do that? [00:51:26] Okay, well, there's actually pretty easy to answer this, and I think I get this question a lot. So I guess it's the kind of question people are asking these days. Why do you call him. [00:51:38] Why don't people call him Yeshua? [00:51:42] Well, people don't call him Yeshua because they're not speaking Aramaic. [00:51:47] Whenever you take an ancient text and you put it into another language, you translate all the words. [00:51:58] And the words, you know, names are words as well. Names are proper nouns, and they are changed. And so the author of Mark was not called Mark. [00:52:11] Paul was not called Paul. [00:52:14] In Greek, Mark would be. I mean, Mark would be Marcus, and Paul would be Paulus, and Jesus would be Yeshua, and John would be. In Greek would be Ioannes. [00:52:28] He'd be Jacobus, I guess, or James would be Jacobus. And so it just. When you translate a text into another language, when you translate verbally into another language, orally, you translate it. And so it's not that the name of Jesus, Yeshua, which would have been his aramaic name, we presume. It's not that that name had magical powers that you had to say, that version of the name Yeshua itself is the aramaic form of Yahshua, which comes in English as Joshua. [00:53:05] So why. You know, why don't you call Jesus Joshua? Well, because it got translated into Aramaic, from Aramaic into Greek, which is Yesus, and then from Greek into English, Jesus. And so, in the New Testament, the name yeshua doesn't occur because it's in Greek. And in the english bibles, it doesn't occur because it's in English. And so the same thing is true of all the. All the words, including God. The name for God isn't found in the hebrew name, isn't found in the English Old Testament. The, uh. The greek name word for God isn't found in the greek New Testament because you translate the name. Um. Okay, uh, final question. This person. I think I'll paraphrase this question. This person says that, uh, after trying. After deconstructing their christian faith and coming to doubt christian faith, um, this person said, I still believe in a higher power, but I don't know really what I think about that. She says, every time I think, it's okay, every time I try to think, okay, I believe in a high power. I don't know what it's like. [00:54:12] I just keep trying to be a good person, etcetera. This person says, they. You know, Cs Lewis's argument always comes in their head that there must be a good God, because where do you get your idea of morality from? [00:54:26] Why would you believe in morality if you weren't created immoral? To be created moral, you've got to have the moral being create you. [00:54:36] So there has to be a higher power because we have morality. [00:54:42] Well, and that leads this person, this person to say, well, so maybe Christianity is right. I would say several things about this. For one thing, if there's a higher power that's giving you morality, that does not mean Christianity is right. [00:54:56] You could argue makes Islam right, makes Judaism right. So that in itself doesn't make Christianity right. It would make, it could be that, you know, maybe there are 30 gods and one of them gave you your morality. You know, I mean, so it would argue that there's some other being or beings in the universe that have constituted us the way we are. I would say that much. But I think the thing is, I'm actually going to talk about this in the book I'm writing now on the evolution of christian ethics, where I'm going to argue that this argument that Cs Lewis and others make, that you couldn't have an idea of morality unless somebody gave you the idea. I think that's just flat out wrong. I don't think it's true. And if you want to know where morality came and why we all have morality, the way to find out is to study evolutionary biology. [00:55:48] There are very good evolutionary reasons for explaining why we are the way we are and why we think what is moral is what we think is moral. [00:55:59] We would not survive as a species if we didn't have right and wrong behaviors, behaviors that succeeded in allowing us to survive. That when we became more thoughtful about it, we defined as good, right. [00:56:17] These things that we define as good and right almost always have some kind of survival element to them, something that is good about the survival of the species in them. [00:56:28] And so it's quite easy to understand where love comes from, why caring for others matters, why helping others matter, why, you know, a whole range of morality, apart from a hypothesis that it has to come from some superior divine being, it could just as well actually come from evolution. And in fact, it's been shown to, just as animals have, behavior that allows them to survive. [00:56:58] We might call that a good behavior, but there is not necessarily any moral judgment about it. [00:57:05] It's a kind of behavior that works to protect the species. And to that level, we as part of the species think it's a good idea to behave that way. [00:57:14] Okay, I could talk more about that, but I'm not going to. I am going to cover it a bit in my book, and I recommend somebody's interested in that simply to read some books. You can just read popular books on how evolutionary psychology has led to our moral state. And our moral sense of right and wrong. Okay, I'm going to end there. I want to thank you again very much for being a gold member of the blog. [00:57:41] I hope the blog is proving satisfactory to you. If you have suggestions for how we can improve it, please let us know. But thank you so much for what you do, and I look forward to doing this again next month.