Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Oh, it is recording. Okay, it's recording.
[00:00:03] Okay, great. Well, thank you all. Thank you all for, for coming and participating in this.
[00:00:11] I'm, I'm debating about just today it occurred to me whether it'd be more interesting to do this as a live ama, asking anything than a. Taking questions in advance. I don't know if that's right or not. We may, we may be polling all of you to see, see what you think about it.
[00:00:29] In the meantime, we have collected a number of questions for tonight. Way more than I can answer.
[00:00:37] Some questions would require the entire 50 minutes, however long hour that we're going to be together. So I'll try and get through these judiciously and answer the ones that I think I can answer and let me get my other screen up so I can do that. There we go.
[00:00:56] Okay, so I'm just going to go through these Syriac.
[00:01:02] So question number one.
[00:01:05] In the Gospels, Jesus appears to anticipate his own death as part of his mission.
[00:01:10] Given that, how do you understand his cry on the cross? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
[00:01:17] What does this line reveal about the historical Jesus or about the Gospel writers portrayal of him? Okay, it's a very good question and there are a lot of things to be said about it.
[00:01:27] That, that cry, the last cry, the last thing Jesus says is found only in Matthew and Mark.
[00:01:35] So Matthew got it from Mark.
[00:01:38] There's nothing like that in John, nothing like it in Luke.
[00:01:42] Luke, Luke's interesting in particular because he used Mark as Matthew did, but he got rid of that.
[00:01:50] He doesn't, he does not portray, Luke does not portray a Jesus who feels forsaken at the end.
[00:01:56] Instead he is calm and in control. And at the end, instead of asking God why he's forsaken him, he says, father, into your hands I commit my spirit.
[00:02:07] And so it's a very different portrayal in Luke. But the questioner is absolutely right that Jesus, it's not that he appears to anticipate his death as part of his mission. In Matthew, Mark and Luke and in John, it's in fact a central part of his proclamation.
[00:02:23] In Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus says very little about himself.
[00:02:28] He talks about God and the God's coming kingdom and about how in God's coming kingdom how people need to behave in order to get into that kingdom. But he says very little about his identity. He doesn't say anything about his identity or who he is or he teaches, teaches ethics and he teaches about the coming kingdom.
[00:02:50] In Mark, the one thing that he does Talk about about himself is that he has to go to Jerusalem and be executed, and then he'll be raised from the dead. So on three separate occasions in Mark, there's an explicit prediction, starting in chapter eight. There's one in chapter eight, one, Chapter nine, one, chapter ten, and chapter eleven. He goes to Jerusalem. So this. It's a major part of the Gospel narratives. It's hinted at earlier in Mark a number of times. Clearly hinted at once you know what the verse is saying. And frequently in Matthew. Three times in Matthew as well. Same in Luke. Luke actually has four. So he definitely knows he has to go and be crucified. He goes to the garden of Gethsemane. He knows he's going to be crucified, and he says your will be done to God. But then hanging on the cross, he cries out in Mark, and then in Matthew, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? How do we make sense of that?
[00:03:43] The leading explanation is one that I don't subscribe to. The leading explanation is based on the reality that this cry actually is a quotation from the book of psalms, from Psalm 22. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
[00:04:00] It's how the psalm begins.
[00:04:03] And the end of that psalm.
[00:04:08] The same person thanks God for being on his side.
[00:04:11] And so he feels forsaken. But then he realizes God's on his side. And so what a lot of people say is that what Jesus really means is that he's thankful that it's all going to work out okay.
[00:04:25] That's not how I read it.
[00:04:28] The way I read it is that Mark wants to portray throughout his Gospel that nobody really understands that Jesus has to die at the end. Even Jesus has his doubts.
[00:04:42] Why does this have to happen?
[00:04:44] It corresponds with what happens in Gethsemane. Take this cup away from me.
[00:04:49] It's showing how rot Jesus is by this whole thing.
[00:04:54] The reason Mark is doing this here, I think, is because he wants the reader to understand that even though Jesus could not understand why he had to do this, the reader can understand because immediately when Jesus cries out this cry of dereliction, he dies.
[00:05:16] And the curtain in the temple is ripped in half.
[00:05:20] This is the curtain that separates God, located in the holy of Holies, from the rest of the temple, from the rest of the people.
[00:05:28] Only the high priest can go into the holy of holies once a year to perform a sacrifice on the day of atonement, Yom Kippur, for his own sins and for the sins of the people so that they'll have atonement for their sins.
[00:05:42] Jesus death now brings atonement so that the inner curtain, the curtain is no longer needed.
[00:05:47] The sacrificial system is no longer needed. He has died, and now people have access to God. So Jesus may not understand why it has to happen, but the reader does.
[00:06:00] And the reason that's significant is because Mark may well be writing for a community that is being persecuted.
[00:06:06] The persecution doesn't make any sense. Why? If we're on God, if we're doing God's business, why is he letting this happen to us?
[00:06:13] And Mark is showing that God is working behind the scenes. Even if it doesn't make sense to you, even if you feel like God's not on your side, he is. And it's going to work out in the end.
[00:06:23] So that's why I think it's there.
[00:06:26] Next question. You have stressed that Nazareth was a hamlet in a rural and illiterate part of Galilee.
[00:06:33] Some scholars point out that the town of Sephorus was a few miles away from Nazareth and that Sephora, at the time of Jesus was a rather cosmopolitan city.
[00:06:42] Do you think Jesus may have been influenced by Jewish scholars and maybe even Gentile scholars at Sephorus?
[00:06:49] It's a very good question again, and a very important question in the history of modern scholarship on the historical Jesus, because a number of scholars, especially in the. Starting in the 1980s, became convinced that Jesus spent a lot of time in Sephorus, that he attended the theater there, that he received culture there, he learned Greek there, and he. That's where he. He became sophisticated by going to Sephorus just some miles away from Nazareth.
[00:07:16] That was especially a view held by the members of the Jesus Seminar, especially those who wanted to say that Jesus was very similar to Greek philosophers in some ways and that he learned about Greek philosophers and Sephora.
[00:07:31] So it's an important argument, and you have to try and figure out whether it's right or not.
[00:07:40] I have never thought it's right for several reasons.
[00:07:46] For one thing, Jesus certainly didn't go to the theater there.
[00:07:50] There are books written claiming that Jesus actually, as a carpenter, helped construct the theater and then started going to see Euripides and things there, Greek drama. And that's not right because it was constructed after Jesus day, as archaeologists have figured out. One of the principal archaeologists of Israel, ancient Israel, is Eric Myers, who was my colleague at Duke University. He and his wife Carol ran major archaeological digs in.
[00:08:20] In Israel for years and years and years.
[00:08:23] Eric was. He's one of the internationally Known scholars of it, archaeologists of Israel. And he was convinced that Jesus never went to Sephorus and that there's no evidence of him going there. And then in fact there's little likelihood of it. He was joined in that by his later colleague E.P. sanders. E.D. sanders was one of the great New Testament scholars of the late 20th century who said who he argued that it's unlikely that somebody who was a lower class day laborer in Nazareth would trek to Sephiroth either to find work or to get culture.
[00:09:00] Based on what we know about the social and economic situation of Galilee, Jews, to survive basically had Jews living there, had to, had to work. Every day you work six days a week, the seventh day Sabbath and you can't travel.
[00:09:17] And so Jesus, most people are living a hand to mouth existence and you just can't take days or weeks or months off if you want to survive. So that was Sanders argument and I think he's probably right.
[00:09:31] I don't see any evidence that Jes went there. And you might. You know the thing, it's just so hard for us to imagine because we travel so much and it's not a big deal to go a few miles to the local city.
[00:09:43] But it's interesting that in the Gospels, even when Jesus starts to travel, he never goes to the cities.
[00:09:51] Sephorus is never mentioned in the New Testament, which would be odd if he had spent a lot of time there.
[00:09:57] But either is Tiberius, the other large city up in Galilee. Those are the two main cities. Jesus doesn't go to either one. He stayed away from cities. The only record we have of him going to a city was Jerusalem at the end of his life.
[00:10:11] So I, I just don't think so. And you know, it's fine to think so, but I, but there, I mean literally there's no evidence of it. So. But there it is. Okay, next. Please mute yourselves.
[00:10:22] Next. What documentation do we have on where the apostle Peter traveled and where he died? Did he ever get to Rome?
[00:10:32] We are poorly informed about the travels of Peter. We have two major sources.
[00:10:38] One is the book of Acts in the New Testament, written by the same author who wrote Luke, who describes some of Peter's travels.
[00:10:47] Not very many of them.
[00:10:49] He basically is in Jerusalem in the book of Acts.
[00:10:54] The Apostle Paul does say a couple of things about Peter that suggest that Peter was traveling. Peter describes the confrontation that he had with Peter. Paul describes the confrontation that he had with Peter in Antioch.
[00:11:07] This is in the letter to the Galatians, their famous argument.
[00:11:13] So he was in Antioch. He was spending time with the Jewish followers of Jesus there.
[00:11:20] Paul suggests that Peter may have been in Corinth.
[00:11:26] He mentions him as one of the people who the Christians in Corinth revere as a Christian leader.
[00:11:35] He mentions also in First Corinthians that Peter and the brothers of the Lord travel with their spouses, which shows Peter was buried, as is true in the Gospels as well.
[00:11:49] So that's kind of it.
[00:11:52] Did he get to Rome? Well, several things to say about that.
[00:11:58] The first reference to Peter's death is in the book of First Clement.
[00:12:03] This is not in the New Testament, obviously, even though there were Church fathers who thought it should be in the New Testament early on.
[00:12:10] Clement was probably written around the year 95. We call it Clement because. Because it was attributed later to one of the early bishops of Rome named Clement.
[00:12:22] And in the tradition, Peter himself appointed Clement to be the bishop.
[00:12:28] Peter had a successor, Linus, who was succeeded by Clement. But Peter appointed Clement, or Peter and Paul both appointed Clement, depending on which legend you're following.
[00:12:39] The book of First Clement does not claim to be written by this person Clement, and in fact, it claims to be written by the Church. Wrong.
[00:12:47] Clearly somebody put pen to paper, though, and maybe that person's name was Clement.
[00:12:52] We don't really know.
[00:12:53] But my point here is that First Clement is our first reference to Peter being executed, and the first record of Paul being executed. He indicates they were both martyrs.
[00:13:06] He's writing in the year 95.
[00:13:09] He's writing from Rome.
[00:13:11] And so some people say, well, if you knew that Peter and Paul were martyred, he must have known that they got martyred in Rome. That's obviously not necessarily the case at all. He's writing about 30 years after their deaths, and he may just have done that. Peter and Paul were martyred, so that doesn't put him in Rome. That doesn't put Peter in Rome earlier. Our first evidence of the Church in Rome is also the author who provides us our first evidence for the existence of Peter, and that's Paul in his letter to the Romans.
[00:13:43] Paul writes a letter to the Romans, even though he's never been there. This is the one letter he writes to people that he has. He's not visited the Church. He didn't start the Church. He says he wished. He's long wanted to go there. He hasn't been able to get there yet. He's going to come eventually to Rome.
[00:13:59] And at the end of his letter, he greets over 25 people by name that he knows there in Rome. So the people that he knows by name. He greets them and wishes them well. And he does not name Peter.
[00:14:12] This letter would have been written probably around 60 of the Common Era, maybe 62. 60 to 62, the Common Era.
[00:14:20] Paul has not yet been to Rome.
[00:14:22] The later legend is that he went to Rome and got martyred there.
[00:14:26] And later legends say Peter went there and got martyred there. But he does not appear to have been there when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans because he is greeting the people that he knows there.
[00:14:38] So the idea that Peter went to Rome or that he found. He certainly did not found the church in Rome.
[00:14:45] Our first reference to it is in Paul. He says nothing about Peter founding it. There's no later. Later legends indicate that Peter went to Rome and.
[00:14:54] And that he was crucified. That he was crucified upside down there.
[00:14:58] This is the Acts of Peter from the end of the second century.
[00:15:02] Very interesting book which has very little historical information in it, as you will realize when you read it. And read the passages about the talking dog and the tuna fish that is brought back to life to convince the crowd that Jesus is Lord. And great miracles, great story. But even in this book, by the way, if this book celebrating Peter does not show Peter as the founder of the church in Rome, this book claims that Paul was the founder of the church in Rome. Paul was there before Peter. Well, may not have been the founder, but he was there before Peter, and the church was there before Peter, even in the Acts of Peter. Okay, next number four.
[00:15:43] Are there or should there be guardrails for public facing scholarships such as podcasts, blogs, et cetera, that are comparable to peer review?
[00:15:53] How should consumers assess if public facing scholarship is trustworthy? Oh boy, is that a problem? No, there are no guardrails. No, there never will be any guardrails. There are not going to be guardrails. How are you going to have guardrails? Except if you have something like Wikipedia started out not being so great, but now they really vet things and they have people checking things. And so that's not bad.
[00:16:17] It's often pretty good. These days you can't control what somebody says on a blog and it's creating real havoc in every field.
[00:16:25] In my field, it means people who know shockingly little about just factual information about the Bible, let alone what scholarships say are able to have podcasts and have large audiences, people who don't know any better.
[00:16:45] I've had numerous podcast interviews with interviewers who could not ask an intelligent question because they just. They had ideas without any information. And so what do you do? Well, if you're a consumer, you have to take everything with a pound of salt.
[00:17:03] And so I myself, I don't listen Bible podcasts. I'd probably find it crazily frustrating if I did. But I do listen to other kinds of podcasts on sometimes, you know, on history, for example.
[00:17:17] And when I do, I listen to podcasts or on politics. I listen to podcasts that. By people that I know are experts.
[00:17:26] I'm not saying that experts are the only ones who know anything, but, you know, most of the time, there are people who've studied this stuff intently for year after year after year, not somebody who just, you know, read a book once and has some ideas.
[00:17:37] And so I don't think there. No, there, There. There won't be. And the best thing to do is to vet your sources.
[00:17:43] To vet your sources.
[00:17:45] Next question. Can the lack of mention in the New Testament's four gospels of the destruction of temple in 70 CE be used as an argument that they were written prior to that date?
[00:17:58] If not, why not?
[00:18:00] So this is an argument that I hear frequently where people say, look, since the destruction of the temple is not mentioned in the Gospels, they must have been written before the destruction of the Gospels.
[00:18:14] I mean, for the destruction of the temple, because otherwise they would have mentioned it.
[00:18:19] I have never seen the force of that argument.
[00:18:23] The reason I haven't ever seen the force of the argument is because the Gospels are about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
[00:18:32] Two of the gospels start with him as an adult.
[00:18:36] Mark and John.
[00:18:37] Two of them start with his birth, Matthew and Luke.
[00:18:41] They all end with his death and resurrection.
[00:18:47] Three of them have resurrection appearances of Jesus, and they're at the end of their story.
[00:18:53] The temple doesn't get destroyed for another 40 years.
[00:18:57] It's not about the temple. It's about Jesus. So why would they mention the destruction of the temple?
[00:19:04] No, so that's not a strong argument. But this next question deals with something similar, which. Which I have to get a little bit more into the weeds on. So I'm saying this is a really good question because I asked. I get asked it a lot, and it kind of, you know, on the surface it makes sense, but it doesn't really make sense, you know, so, you know, if I. If I talk about the life of my grandfather who died in, like, 1964, I wouldn't mention the. What happened on September 11th. You know, I mean, I just wouldn't. Wouldn't come up because I'm not talking about that period right but this next one is asked, kind of asks a similar question but in a different nuanced way. I saw an interview did earlier this week, this person says, where the interviewer mentioned that he thinks ACTS is written earlier than I think because it doesn't mention the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D.
[00:19:59] i don't think you got the chance to give the counter argument of why you think it's dated later. And I'd love to hear that now.
[00:20:05] I did an interview, I guess I did the interview last.
[00:20:10] I don't know when it was. What is today? I have no idea what today is.
[00:20:15] So who knows? I guess I did it last Friday. I was in New York. I did an interview with, with Ross Douthit at the New York Times and he is a columnist for the New York Times. He, he leans toward the kind of conservative, conservative trajectory of politics.
[00:20:34] And he's a Catholic Christian, but he's very bright, he's a very good interviewer, smart, knows a lot. And we had a, we had a long interview. We had a two hour interview. They cut about a half an hour of it just to kind of make it fit into an hour and a half. And as he kept saying, we could have gone for seven hours. So it was a lot of fun. But one of the things he wanted to challenge is my dating the golf balls because he thinks that, he thinks there's a good reason for thinking they're written earlier. And this probably is the best reason if you want to think they're written earlier. This might be the, I don't know, it's the best read.
[00:21:08] So what his argument was, look, the book of Acts was written by the same authors, the Gospel of Luke.
[00:21:15] The book of Acts is about the spread of Christianity over its first 30 years and about first Peter and then Paul.
[00:21:24] Take the message and converting people.
[00:21:27] And the book of Acts ends with Paul in prison in Rome.
[00:21:34] The tradition is that Paul was martyred in the year 64.
[00:21:39] And Ross said the most sensible reading of this seems to be that Luke ended it because that's, that's when he was, that's when he was writing.
[00:21:47] Because right after that, you know, say around 62 or so, right after that you have the persecution of Nero in Rome and you have the destruction of the temple and you have martyrdoms. And surely Luke would have continued the story if there's more of the story to continue.
[00:22:06] And if that, if Acts is written before 70, then it's likely that then Luke would have been written 470, because Luke is the first volume. And that suggests the Gospels were written earlier.
[00:22:18] Part of the motivation for saying that is, and Ross was pretty clear about this, this would show that the Gospels are more likely to be historically accurate than if they were much later.
[00:22:30] So I get all that. I mean, I used to have that. I used to use that argument too.
[00:22:35] So there's several things and I didn't have time really to respond. Part of the problem, part of the difficulty with an interview like that is I think for a lot of that interview, we were getting into kind of biblical scholarship a little bit more than most of his readers would have been that comfortable with. But we couldn't get deep enough actually to get to the issues.
[00:22:52] So you got to really kind of dig a little bit. And so I didn't. I wasn't able to give an answer to that. So let me just say several things here. Quick. I'm going to say this quickly.
[00:23:01] One thing is everybody, I think just about everybody agrees that Luke was written after Mark.
[00:23:08] Luke used Mark as one of his sources. There are good reasons for thinking that Mark was written around the year 70.
[00:23:16] He speaks especially because. Could you all mute yourselves, please?
[00:23:23] Mark speaks of the destruction of the Temple and the destruction of Jerusalem at some length in chapter 13 in a way that makes it look like he knows that it happened. These are not just Jesus predicting, oh, the temple is going to be destroyed. No, like that's it. No, they're. They're detailed descriptions. And so almost, almost all critical scholars that I know.
[00:23:45] Well, no, almost all critical scholars. Right. Date mark around 70. And so Luke would have been written after that.
[00:23:51] Next third point is that Luke does seem to know about the death of Paul.
[00:23:56] There are hints of it, for example, by Paul himself in chapter 20 and by a prophet who tells Paul not to go to Jerusalem in chapter 21.
[00:24:12] So Acts doesn't narrate Paul, but he.
[00:24:16] But the death of Paul. But he seems to know about even more than Mark seems to know about the destruction of the Temple. When you read Luke's description of the destruction of the temple in chapter 17, it is, it is detailed to an extent that does not look like, like a prophecy. It looks like he's looking back at what has happened and projecting would be possible that Jesus predicted the temple, the destruction of the Temple before it happened. This is something Ross was kind of interested in talking about too, because I do think Jesus did predict the destruction of the temple, but I don't think he gave kind of, kind of the nitty gritty details that you would know only afterward.
[00:25:00] I think that he knew the destruction of the temple for a. There's kind of a reason that Mark Goodacre explained one time in a podcast that I listened to that I thought was really pretty interesting, which is that what Mark argued was that when somebody is writing about somebody who makes predictions, like, they're writing about this person after the fact.
[00:25:27] When they're writing about it after the fact and they want to talk about his predictions, which predictions do they mention?
[00:25:37] Mark. Mark Goodacre's point is that in the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly talks about the destruction of the temple. It's the prediction that all the Gospels keep reporting. And he asked, if you're going to keep reporting something, which one do you. Do you just, like, pick out anything, whether it came true or not? Or do you. Or if you're going to report a prediction you predict, you know, do you write down the one that you know came true?
[00:26:00] Because that provides you with the evidence you want. And. Yeah, that's. I think that's what's going on here. And so Mark. Mark is saying that's evidence that in fact, Jesus.
[00:26:08] Jesus did predict the destruction of the temple, but it doesn't show that he's living after the fact. I mean, that Mark. After the fact.
[00:26:16] Okay, some of you are not completely muted. And I just checked. I'm not able to mute you. Would you all mute yourselves?
[00:26:25] Thank you.
[00:26:27] Okay, next question. What do you think about books written by reputable biblical scholars that take some basic historical facts and then extrapolate lengthy narratives that have no direct historical basis and are, at best, conjectures?
[00:26:44] Okay, well, I'm not going to name any names here, but I will say it drives me crazy.
[00:26:53] I don't like it.
[00:26:56] And there are.
[00:27:00] I personally know. Right, yeah. So I know. I know people have done this. And my view is. Look, I've got. It's kind of a complicated question, really, because we have so little information about the past that the only way to make sense of the past is to fill in the gaps.
[00:27:18] And sometimes that involves creative thinking. History is not like a raw science like chemistry or something, where you can do experiments and demonstrate to the satisfaction of virtually every thinking person that that is what happens when you do this experiment.
[00:27:37] History is more complicated than that, and you have to fill in the gaps. And often it takes creative imagination, but there are degrees of creative imagination.
[00:27:47] My. My view is that if you're writing about, say, the historical Jesus or you're writing about some event in early Christianity or some phenomenon in early Christianity, if you are a historian, you Try to find out, say you're writing about a person. You try to find out what someone said and did based on the surviving record, and you report what you have weeded out and what you think the person said and did, along with what you know about what was happening at the time in the person's context. All of that's perfectly legitimate.
[00:28:21] I think it's more difficult when scholars want to describe what it is the person was thinking, what their opinions were, what their motivations, action were, what their desires were, what their backgrounds were, when we have no evidence.
[00:28:39] My view is that if a historian wants to do that and wants to write a book like that, that they should point out that this is a speculation rather than stating it when they state it. It just drives me nuts. And there have been a couple of times where I've picked up a serious scholar's work, started reading it, and thought it was a novel.
[00:29:03] I mean, I seriously thought it was a novel. This, this is a novel. I didn't know this was going to be historical fiction.
[00:29:11] Then you read it further and you realize, no, they're serious. This is what they're saying. Oh my God, don't do that. In my opinion. Okay, next question. Another Peter question part. Can you explain the meaning of the names Cephas and Peter? Is it possible that Paul was using Cephas as a derogatory or less respectful way of referring to Simon? Like calling someone with the nickname Rocky Pebbles instead?
[00:29:37] Okay, okay. So I've talked about this on the blog.
[00:29:42] You can look up Cephas and you'll see my posts on it.
[00:29:47] I one time, when I was young and foolish and daring and bold and interesting in speculation, but not afraid to show things, say that, you know, this is. This is not historical fact, but I think this is where the evidence leads. One time I wrote an article arguing there were two different people, that Cephas and Peter were two different people. Cephas comes from the Aramaic word khos, which means rock.
[00:30:09] Peter comes from the Greek word that means rock.
[00:30:13] That was. Neither one of them was a name before this follower of Jesus was given it as a nickname.
[00:30:25] In the Gospel of John, in chapter one, verse 42, they are identified as the same person where Jesus says Cephas, and the author tells you, which means Peter.
[00:30:34] And so they're explicitly identified as the same person. What I argue in my article is that the only author from antiquity that we have who was personally acquainted with Peter and with Cephas seems to argue that, seems to think they're two different people.
[00:30:55] And that's Paul.
[00:30:57] Paul talks about Cephas and he talks about Peter, and it doesn't look like he's talking about the same person. That was the, that was the claim in my article. The article is actually divided in two parts. The first part, the first part nobody had any objections to because the first part traced the ancient tradition that there are two people, one named Peter, one named Cephas.
[00:31:20] One of them was Jesus, one of Jesus 12 disciples.
[00:31:23] And the other was one of the 70 sent out by Jesus, one of his followers sent out to do his mission.
[00:31:30] So we have lists of the 12, lists of the 70 where both are named, one is Peter, one is Cephas.
[00:31:39] So I track down every reference that I could find back before we could do all this by computer, by the way of the name Cephas, and found all found these places. And there's a history of Christians thinking they're two different people.
[00:31:59] My article was, was.
[00:32:03] It's actually pretty funny because for several years after I wrote that article, I'd go to, I'd go to a professional meeting, you know, biblical scholars, and I'd always have some up if someone would come up to me and kind of squint their eyes like, were you serious?
[00:32:19] Is that what you think?
[00:32:21] Yeah, yeah, that's what I think.
[00:32:23] And so my point was, if you read Galatians, it looks like he's talking about two different people. But it's been opposed that part of the article where I actually tried to make the argument that the reason you have this history of tradition of two different people is because there may well have been two different people and that, and that what Paul says about Peter does not apply to what he says about Cephas and vice versa and stuff. So what do I, what do I think? I don't know what I think. I, I flip a coin because I think my argument that they're two different people is good, but the counter argument is really good. The counter argument is these were not names.
[00:32:56] The idea, two of Jesus followers being given the same nickname, one in Aramaic, one in Greek, really, it's more likely that he was given this name in Aramaic, then later was called that when people were speaking, called the other when he's speaking Greek. And yes, I can see that would be more likely on the face of it.
[00:33:19] But Paul seems to be talking about two different people.
[00:33:22] You could argue that Jesus had a disciple who was given Simon. Simon's son of Jonas was given this nickname and that later another follower of Jesus who had become a leader was given the same nickname. The name does mean rocky.
[00:33:37] Rocky. Yeah, it means rocky. In English, you'd be rocky.
[00:33:41] Peter, the word Petros, Petros in Greek is a.
[00:33:50] It's a big stone. It's like a. It's like the big stone on a cliff face. Like a huge solid rock.
[00:33:58] And so it does not mean pebbly either, does Cephas. Kephos just means bibrock. I have wondered, though, whether Jesus.
[00:34:08] Not that he was being derogatory, but if. If Jesus was being humorous because he sure seems more like shifting sand than.
[00:34:17] Than a solid rock in the Gospels. And maybe Jesus would be ironic, I don't know. Or maybe he called him. Maybe called him Peter or Cephas.
[00:34:27] Okay. I have a. You know, I have this book, Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene, where I talk about those three figures at some length. If you're interested in seeing what I think we know about them and what the legends are that sprung up after them. Okay, next question. The first 11 verses of Matthew, chapter four tell the story of Jesus being led by the spirit into the wilderness to be repeatedly tempted by the devil.
[00:34:50] Do you and most scholars believe this is pure fiction?
[00:34:55] Okay. And the person adds, I believe it is, but what I believe is irrelevant.
[00:34:59] Well, it's irrelevant to what scholars say, but it's not irrelevant to what you think. You think what you think.
[00:35:05] Well, yeah, no, I think it's fiction.
[00:35:07] Who is recording this story? Exactly.
[00:35:10] It's Jesus and the devil by themselves going up onto a tall mountain, going to the pinnacle of the temples. No, I don't. No, there's nobody recording this.
[00:35:20] So if, you know, if it happened, it would have been told by Jesus. I don't think it happened. I don't believe in. I'm not a. I'm an atheist. I don't believe in the devil. So, no, no. But there are other reasons for thinking that this is really meant to be more of a.
[00:35:33] I'm not sure that they. I. I don't think we can say whether the authors thought it really happened or not. I don't think we can say.
[00:35:40] I think there's plenty of symbolism in the story that suggests that its main importance is symbolic rather than the literal event. Symbolic in ways that many people haven't thought of Jesus.
[00:35:54] Jesus has been baptized, and then he goes into the wilderness for 40 days and he comes out and he starts to preach his understanding of God.
[00:36:09] That is a clear reflection of the story of Moses where Moses brings the children of Israel through the water of the Red Sea baptism.
[00:36:22] They're tempted in the wilderness for 40 days.
[00:36:26] For 40 years. For 40 years. And then they enter the promised land. So in Matthew especially, you can. I'm not going to go into this. If you see how Matthew sets this whole thing up. It is just Moses, Moses, Moses, Moses, from the birth of Jesus up to the time he gives the sermon on the mount.
[00:36:42] So the 40 days in the wilderness that Jesus spends being tempted corresponds to the 40 years of Israel being tempted in the wilderness.
[00:36:50] When the children of Israel are being tempted in the wilderness, they don't do well. This is a theme of the Book of Numbers. In the Book of Numbers, they spend their 40 years in the wilderness and they continue to succumb to temptation. They complain about not having enough food, for example.
[00:37:11] Well, Jesus is tempted to turn the stones into bread.
[00:37:17] They are tempted to worship another God. They worship the golden calf, for example, Jesus is tempted to worship Satan, etc. So this is trying to show that whereas the nation of Israel failed in the wilderness, now Jesus, the Messiah has come and he survives the temptations. It is striking and not often enough noted, that the quotations of Jesus when he's talking to the devil are quotations from the book of Deuteronomy involving the temp, involving the years in the wilderness turn the stones into bread.
[00:37:54] A person does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
[00:37:59] According to the book of Deuteronomy, the devil tempts, tempts Jesus to jump off the temple, takes him to the highest point of the temple, 10 stories high. Jump off. The angels will come and catch you thereby, and so you won't bruise yourself. Go ahead and jump.
[00:38:18] Jesus says, you should not put the Lord your God to the test.
[00:38:22] So God will send the angels, but I'm not going to test to find out.
[00:38:27] The devil shows him the kingdoms of the earth and says, bow down, worship me. I'll give you all this. Jesus refuses and says, you shall worship the Lord your God and serve him only. All three of those quotations of Jesus come from Deuteronomy.
[00:38:40] And so this is an attempt to show the success of Jesus versus the success of the people of Israel. Jesus now is the Messiah, the one who can lead Israel to the ways of righteousness.
[00:38:52] I think it has that symbolic significance. And we could talk a lot more about the temptations, but that should answer the question. Next question, are the documents that contain alternative versions of Matthew and Luke, or is what we read today in an American English translation of the original Greek manuscripts?
[00:39:11] So this person's asking, do we have other manuscripts that have really alternative versions. The answer is no.
[00:39:18] The manuscripts we have of Matthew and Luke are what we get in English translation.
[00:39:23] I'm not saying these manuscripts all coincide with each other.
[00:39:28] There are lots of differences among the manuscripts, differences that make a big difference for how you might interpret Matthew or Luke. And the scholars who are making the translations have to decide which form of this Greek verse is the original form that Matthew or Luke originally wrote.
[00:39:48] And there are places where there are disputes, serious disputes, that actually change the meaning and the theology of Matthew and Luke. But with that said, every translator is basing the translation on Greek manuscripts. And all the Greek manuscripts have basically the same thing. So you don't have.
[00:40:04] You don't have copies of Matthew that, like, add a chapter here or two, or take out a chapter here too, or anything like that. Basically, you could trust that these translators are giving you what's in the oldest, the oldest and best Greek manuscripts.
[00:40:18] Speaking of Greek, next question. This person says, I find Paul's grammar to be awful, especially in Ephesians 1 chapter, chapter 1, verses 3 through 14.
[00:40:31] Although this person says, I understand, scholars conclude this is not genuinely poli the book of Ephesians.
[00:40:37] This passage is complex structure with relative classes, positives and prepositional flavors. Phrases galore. This makes it a nightmare to parse and understand.
[00:40:48] And so the question this person wants to ask is based on that. Is the grammar simpler in Koine Greek than in English and more typical of Koine Greek writing style, or is it just as awful in the original and the second part of this question? Is the structure in Ephesians different from what's typical in genuine Pauline letters, therefore leading scholars to conclude that a difficult personal wrote it. Really good question.
[00:41:14] And I think I can explain the answer to this without requiring knowledge of Greek.
[00:41:21] If you read Ephesians 1, 3, 14, it is a kind of long sequence of thoughts, I think in Greek. I think in English, though, they usually separate it into periods, like into sentences.
[00:41:35] When you read it in Greek, it is more convoluted.
[00:41:39] These 11 verses are one sentence in Greek with subordinate clauses of subordinate clauses and interweavings. And it goes on for a long time.
[00:41:56] So it's even more complex in Greek, which can make it hard to parse and understand.
[00:42:03] You have to understand how the grammar works to understand what the author is saying.
[00:42:09] And so when the person asks, is the grammar, Is the grammar simpler in the Greek than English? No, it's more complicated.
[00:42:16] Is it more typical of Koine Greek writing style? That's A little more harder to say it's actually better Greek than you get in most of the New Testament. In many ways, when Greek intellectuals became alerted to the writings of the New Testament, they typically, during the first 300 years or so, more or less mocked the simplistic writing style of the authors.
[00:42:45] If you read a book like the Gospel of Mark, it is for somebody who's well trained in Greek. It is very simple Greek, and so simple that occultured elites in the Greek world would think it's really pretty low level because you try to show off your artistic skills. Especially if there's a, an elite class that is literate and is trying to impress everybody else in the elite literate class. It can get complicated.
[00:43:13] This is true not just of the Koine, it's true of Attic Greek.
[00:43:19] I try to read Plato most mornings and I, I, you know, my, I, I'm not a classicist. I'm not a classicist, but I really enjoy reading Plato. But, man, does Socrates have some long sentences. Oh my God, longer than Ephesians. One goes on and on, and it's sometimes really hard to piece it together. You're like, oh, you get to the end of the. Just look for a period someplace, please. It's got to end sometime.
[00:43:48] So I think it's fine. As far as Greek goes, it's higher quality Greek. But the second question is the important one, is this style different from what is in the genuine Pauline letters? And there the answer is absolutely yes.
[00:44:02] Paul does not write this way.
[00:44:05] Could he have written this way?
[00:44:08] I don't know.
[00:44:10] Maybe this is one of the reasons. It cannot be a definitive reason, but it's one of the reasons for scholars thinking Paul did not write Ephesians. The writing style is very different. And it's not just this one long sentence.
[00:44:27] There are grammatical form, grammatical, stylistic things.
[00:44:33] How do I say this in, in Ephesians that are not found in Paul.
[00:44:39] So it doesn't mean he couldn't write in a different style. It really looks like a different author. The way I, I tell it to my students is that, look, if you read a page of James Joyce and then you read a page of J.K. rowling.
[00:44:52] Rowling, then you know you're not reading the same author.
[00:44:56] It's not that one is smart and the other is dumb, is they write differently.
[00:45:00] And most people when they write a letter are not consciously thinking about developing a different style. If you see what I mean. You're writing a letter.
[00:45:09] And so anyway, so it's a very good question and all right, Next question.
[00:45:19] I was wondering why John, the Gospel of John did not include the Last Supper.
[00:45:25] Google sources explain this omission by John's distinct theological agenda, which focuses on the New Covenant rather than on old Jewish stuff.
[00:45:37] Well, there's Google sources for you. Wow. Okay.
[00:45:41] Could it be that John omitted the Last Supper because in his narrative Jesus is killed before the Passover meal. Therefore, Jesus could not participate in Last Supper, which is the Passover meal. Your thoughts? My thoughts is that this person's suggestion is far better than what he or she got from Google.
[00:46:04] All of the Gospels think that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Jewish promises and the plan of God and that he is fully.
[00:46:16] That he's. That he's Jewish and that he is. That he's Jewish.
[00:46:22] So him having a Passover meal is not a problem in the Gospel of John. In fact, Jesus goes to celebrate Passover three times in Matthew, Mark and Luke. It's only once.
[00:46:35] This author has no trouble with Jesus being associated with the Passover, with the Passover per se.
[00:46:46] So why doesn't he make the last meal the Last Supper? By Last Supper, usually that means that's referring to the meal where Jesus is with his disciples and he breaks the bread and he drinks the wine. At the Passover meal, there are certain sets. There are certain set foods that were eaten as part of the celebration of the Passover. The Passover celebrates the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt.
[00:47:21] Moses leads them out of Egypt, leads them through the Red Sea.
[00:47:27] They have escaped because God has done a number of miracles against the Egyptians, including the final miracle which made the Pharaoh finally kick them out, which was that they are to.
[00:47:41] The last miracle is God's going to kill the angel of God. The angel, the angel of death is going to kill the firstborn of every non Israelite in Egypt and the people of Israel. On the night that's going to happen, they're supposed to slay a lamb, put the blood on their doorpost and their lintel so that the angel of death sees this blood on the doorpost and lintel and passes over those houses to go to the houses that doesn't have that and kills every firstborn. That happens.
[00:48:08] And after that when they escape, then because Pharaoh kicks them out, then he has second thoughts. He starts chasing them in the chariots with the entire army. And Moses crosses the Red Sea or the Sea of Reeds and it comes back and it drowns them all. And the enemy's all destroyed. And Moses and the people of Israel are saved. And God tells them to commemorate this event with a meal where they have a lamb and they have other symbolic foods.
[00:48:35] For example, unleavened bread.
[00:48:38] The bread is unleavened because they're going to get kicked out and they're not going to have time to let the yeast work. They're going to have to get out in a hurry. So they're going to have to eat their bread unleavened.
[00:48:48] And so there are these symbolic foods. And so possibly the cups of wine sometimes are taken as representative of the blood of the the lamb spread on the doorpost. Jesus takes these foods, the bread and the wine, and he instills new significance in them.
[00:49:05] Now they're commemorating not just the Exodus event and salvation of Israel from Egypt, they're commemorating the coming death of the Messiah.
[00:49:14] This is my body that is to be broken. He says as he breaks the bread. This is my cup which is given for all of you. Drink it.
[00:49:23] He used to shed his red blood like the red wine. He used to have his body broken.
[00:49:28] That last supper is recorded in Matthew, Mark and Luke. It is also discussed in Paul, 1st Corinthians 11.
[00:49:36] It is not in John.
[00:49:39] John does have a last meal with his disciples.
[00:49:44] In John's account though it is not the Passover meal.
[00:49:49] In Mark we're told that it's Passover.
[00:49:53] The disciples in Mark are told to prepare the Passover meal. They do prepare the meal. That evening they eat the meal. Jesus instills significance in these foods. In John, the disciples are not told to prepare the Passover meal.
[00:50:09] They do have a meal, but there's nothing about the meal or the food in it, or the bread and the wine instead. At John's account in John 13, before they eat, Jesus takes a basin of water and he begins to wash the disciples feet.
[00:50:26] He washes the disciples feet.
[00:50:28] And they are watching him do this in some surprise because this is what a slave does and he's their master.
[00:50:36] He comes to Peter and Peter says, you're not washing my feet.
[00:50:40] And Jesus says, I have to wash your feet.
[00:50:42] And he explains that if he doesn't wash his feet, he's not going to have anything to do with him.
[00:50:48] Okay, don't wash my feet, wash my whole body. No, no, once you're washed, clean the feet is enough. And so Jesus washes his feet. Then he tells them that they're to replicate his example, that he is their master. But he treats them as if he were their slave.
[00:51:06] They are to serve one another.
[00:51:09] You are to love one another and give of yourself to one another and to serve one another, not try to dominate one another.
[00:51:17] That's the point John is making rather than the death of Jesus will be the body and blood.
[00:51:25] The reason he does that is because Jesus is arrested after this meal and he spends the night in jail.
[00:51:34] And the next day he's on trial before Pontius Pilate. And In John chapter 19, verse 14, Pilate condemns him to death.
[00:51:43] And we're told that this happened on the day of preparation for the Passover.
[00:51:49] This is the day that they're getting ready for the Passover meal.
[00:51:54] In Mark's Gospel, they passed through that day and eaten the meal and Jesus got killed the next day. In John, Jesus gets killed on the Passover day when they're preparing the Passover.
[00:52:03] That's the day in Jerusalem where they are in the temple. The priests are killing the lambs for the dinner that night.
[00:52:11] And John's is the only gospel that identifies Jesus as the Lamb of God, that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
[00:52:22] John says it in chapter one, verse 29, then again five verses later, Jesus is the Lamb of God, so he dies when the lambs are being killed. This is a symbolic statement by John.
[00:52:33] So the reason there's no institution of the Lord's Supper in John is because John wants to emphasize that Jesus was the Lamb of God. So he can't have them eating the lamb.
[00:52:46] When Matthew, Mark and Luke do, Jesus has to die a day earlier in John for him to be the sacrificial lamb. So it's the wrong day.
[00:52:55] It's not because the new covenant and stifled Jewish stuff.
[00:53:01] All right, next question is on the same passage, so I can do this one quickly. Do you think the foot washing event from the Gospel of John is historical even though it does not appear in the Synoptics? Or is it totally symbolic to fit in with John's particular message?
[00:53:15] Well, I don't think it's symbolic. I mean, I don't think it's historical. No, I mean we don't know. Look, we don't know. We don't know what happened at Jesus last message meal. The reality is we don't know if there was a foot washing like this. I would expect to find reference to it in some other sources.
[00:53:34] I think that Jesus probably was, did have a last meal with his disciples. That was on the the day of the Passover. They're eating the Passover meal.
[00:53:44] John's Gospel interestingly has very little ethical discourse in.
[00:53:51] I don't think I really noticed how Little ethics you can find on Jesus lips in John.
[00:53:57] Until I wrote this most recent book.
[00:54:00] You think I've been reading John since I was 17 years old. Seriously.
[00:54:05] My first New Testament class in undergrad, my first semester, my undergraduate class, 17 was on the Gospel of John. So I mean, like, I've been studying this thing ever since and it never has really occurred to me. I. I must have noticed. But it's like it never hit me full force. There's not much ethical teaching in here.
[00:54:20] Jesus spends his entire time talking about himself and who he is. And he came from heaven, he's sent from God. If you believe in him, you'll have salvation, you know, and he's in God, God's in him. People could be in him. He can. And so it's all about salvation by believing in that Christ is the one sent from above.
[00:54:39] The only ethical teachings in in John are that his disciples have to love one another.
[00:54:49] This passage is a clear indication that that's what Jesus was teaching. So it's a way of symbolically affirming Jesus own message. He lived as a servant for others. They should do likewise. This is the message in the Gospel of John. It's intramural love, love for followers of Jesus, which is what you get in first John as well.
[00:55:14] Okay, two more questions.
[00:55:19] Given the documented and scholarly accepted instance of Roman general Vespasian taking a special interest in a Jewish rebel leader, Josephus and granting him personal audience, is it not possible that Pontius Pilate could have had a special interest in another Jewish leader, Jesus granting him a personal audience as documented and written account from that time period as to why Pilate may have had an interest in Jesus. Gospel texts present clues. Okay, so this is. Somebody wants to say that Pilate may have been personally interested and wanted a personal audience with Jesus because he knew how important he was or he had heard rumors of the things that he was doing and wanted to interrogate him?
[00:56:01] Is that possible? Yes, it's possible.
[00:56:04] Every hypothesis, every theory has to be taken seriously and investigated.
[00:56:11] We have no record in the Gospels that Pilate took any special interest in Jesus. No record in the Gospels that he thought he was a Jewish leader, no record that he had any knowledge of his miracles or of his teachings.
[00:56:26] The only thing that Pilate seems to know about him is that he called himself the King of the Jews.
[00:56:33] I do not see this as similar really to what happened with Vespasian and Josephus. Josephus.
[00:56:42] The reason Vespasian had an interest in Josephus is not because he's a Rebel or a rebel leader is because he was an upper class elite. He wasn't just a rebel leader. He was the leader of the armies who turned himself in.
[00:56:57] And so. And he was an elite hot. He was, he was as elite Jew as you can get.
[00:57:03] He was not a lower class day laborer from a rural part of the land. He was, he was as elite as they come.
[00:57:14] And the reason Vespasian had an audience with him is because he was the opposing general.
[00:57:22] And the reason he took a special interest in him is because when Josephus appeared before him, he had the good sense to utter a prophecy where he told Vespasian that he had a revelation from God that Vespasian would become Emperor of Rome.
[00:57:38] Not long after that, it happened.
[00:57:42] He became Emperor of Rome.
[00:57:44] Oh boy, did he like Josephus then.
[00:57:47] I don't think this is commensurate with what we get about Jesus. I frankly, I don't know how much Pilate knew about Jesus. I mean, in the Gospels, all he knows is he calls himself the King of the Jews. And I think that probably one of Jesus disciples told him that, or the Jewish leaders told him that. And he probably, I don't even know they had much of a conversation, if any at all in that kind of case. Typically, I think a governor like that would see somebody who was a lower class, uneducated peasant who was calling himself a rebel, who was saying that he's going to rule instead of Rome and he sort of crucified, Take him off and crucify him.
[00:58:26] Okay, last one I'll have to do. Quickly, what is the most widespread myth about early Christianity that you most wish would die? Well, there are a lot of myths that, you know, it'd be nice if they died, but I don't really care. I mean, you know, the idea that Christians are hiding in the catacombs and that they were completely illegal, declared illegal, and that the Romans route to murder them whenever they could, and that they had to go into hiding and they drew the sign of the fish in order to keep from being known. And they're writing books with symbolism like the book Revelation, so nobody know what they're talking about. All of that's a myth.
[00:59:03] You know, I don't, you know, it's just, it's wrong.
[00:59:06] I would say the two biggest myths that I, that I find more troubling is that is the myth that that earliest Christianity was a lot like modern Christianity and that the earliest followers of Jesus believed, or Christians today believe theologically in terms of like, what their doctrine is their ethics, their moral codes, that early Christians were not Jewish, for example, the earliest Christian not Jewish somehow. Or that the early onslaught is a different religion. I think all those are wrong and those might be more dangerous. The other thing is that the. The idea that just widespread. That early Christianity was a monolith.
[00:59:47] Like, there was one thing. Oh, my God, as soon as you start getting sources, Paul. Paul has more enemies than friends who are Christians who proclaim very different things from what he proclaims. So much so that he declares anathema on them sometimes. And so early Christianity was very diverse. And there was no form of earliest Christianity that is like modern Christianity. We don't live in that world and they didn't live in ours. So I think it would be most useful to understand early Christianity, to understand its diversity both internally and with respect to us.
[01:00:20] Okay, I am done.
[01:00:22] Thank you for coming to this. Thank you for your very good questions. I'm sorry I couldn't get to about 10 of them.
