Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] So I got a lot of questions here. I won't be able to answer all of them, but I will try to devote sufficient time to each one, each one that I, I do. So, okay, I'm going to go, I'm going to get in reverse order of what I got them at, see how that goes. A little entertainment for me since you don't know. All right, question number one.
[00:00:26] Like most modern folk, Christian or not, I grew up thinking of early Christians as being constantly persecuted with loads of martyrs, people hiding in the catacombs for safety, et cetera, et cetera. The questioner goes on and says that he or she had read some of my stuff that said, yeah, it really wasn't quite that way. And then she read, or he read Canada Moss's book on the myth of persecution that tried to explode that whole idea that Christians are always being persecuted.
[00:00:53] So the person's question is that after watching Hugo Mendez's lecture on the Book of Revelation, it seems that Revelation takes a contrary view that portrays a world where there are many, perhaps millions of Christian martyrs. And so this person wants to know what my take is on that.
[00:01:12] Hugo, if you don't know, did a semester long course, Introduction to the New Testament for the Biblical Studies Academy.
[00:01:20] And that you can, you can still get if you go to my, my website bartiman.com but so I guess he probably ended with Revelation. And yeah, the book of Revelation sure sounds like there, there are thousands and thousands of, not millions, but of martyrs. And so what's that all about?
[00:01:37] So one thing about literature that is trying to make a point or writings, they're trying to make a point, social, political, religious, is that if it's involved in any kind of conflict with other groups, other peoples, there, there can be a lot of exaggeration that goes on.
[00:01:59] I mean, for example, you think of politics like you get the politician who says, yes, you know, at my rally yesterday, there were thousands and thousands, you know, there are 12,000 people there and you get a photograph from above, you know, there's like 600 or something. You know, it's that kind of thing. So both whether, you know, and, and if you're being, if you're being attacked, oh, everybody's against me, you know, the whole world is against me. But then you, you know, you say, yeah, you know, there are 8,000 people who wrote a letter again, you know, you do that. Well, that's what Revelation is doing. Revelation doesn't actually give numbers.
[00:02:31] It does indicate that there are a lot of martyrs in heaven, but it doesn't it doesn't give a number. And the, the prophet actually speaks to these martyrs. These martyrs are under a, a, an, under an altar in heaven, and the prophet speaks to them. And the book is largely about persecution against Christians.
[00:02:52] But people who feel persecuted often exaggerate the actual numbers involved.
[00:02:58] And you see that still today. I mean, my students at Chapel Hill, my good conservative Christian, evangelical students, feel like they're being persecuted. And I've always wondered how they actually do the math on that one. I mean, it's like, are you kidding me?
[00:03:12] You guys are calling the shots here. So in any event, I don't think revelation can be trusted to give you some kind of statistical calculation. I do think that there were Christians being persecuted, and I don't think we can dismiss that.
[00:03:27] There absolutely were. And sometimes it was quite significant.
[00:03:31] But in the first century or so, it was almost all local persecution and it was not very few people actually being martyred, apart from the martyrs under Nero and a couple of Christians who were, who were killed. Otherwise we basically don't know very much. We don't hear anything from Roman sources, for example.
[00:03:53] Okay, next question.
[00:03:56] To what extent do the Gospels, as we have them today, stem from the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus as opposed to earlier manuscripts and fragments?
[00:04:07] And so the background of this is that our two earliest complete manuscripts of the New Testament are one that was discovered in the Vatican Library, and so it's called Codex Vaticanus, and one that was discovered on Mount Sinai at St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai. And since it's on Mount Sinai, it's called Codex Sinaiticus.
[00:04:29] They are our two oldest complete manuscripts of the New Testament. They probably date toward the end of the 4th century, say around the year 375 or so.
[00:04:41] They are high quality manuscripts as far as manuscripts go, which means that when we are able to know with pretty, pretty good certainty what the reading was of a verse, you've got a verse that's worded in different ways in different manuscripts. And, and there are ways to figure out what probably is the oldest form of this text.
[00:05:02] If you do that and you go through that, you do like a thousand or two thousand of those instances, you can kind of figure out which manuscripts tend to have that reading or that reading, and which ones tend to be the best manuscripts. And these two are always among the very best manuscripts. They just are.
[00:05:17] It's not just because they're the earliest, but they also appear to have had a good bit of care taken in the copying of them.
[00:05:26] This question wants to know what about earlier manuscripts? And are the Gospels based mainly on these two or on earlier ones?
[00:05:34] We don't have many earlier manuscripts of the Gospels. From these, we certainly have some fragments. Our oldest fragment of a manuscript is called P52.
[00:05:46] It's called that because it's on papyrus. So that's what the P is for, for papyrus, which is the oldest writing material for biblical manuscripts. And it's 52 because it was the 52nd biblical Manu New Testament manuscript that was discovered and cataloged. And so. But it's the size of a credit card that has a few verses from John 18 and John 19 on it.
[00:06:10] So if you want to know something about what the Gospel Mark said, it's not going to help you. It just has a, you know, a few lines from John 18, 19. But it's great because it's early. It's. It's usually dated to the first half of the second century.
[00:06:23] And so it'd be, you know, much earlier, a couple hundred, 250 years earlier than Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. But it doesn't help as much.
[00:06:31] We look at all the manuscripts we have and we see how much text they have and how, how they relate to each other and so forth. The oldest manuscripts of the Gospels that are like semi extensive, the oldest manuscripts are. There's one that's called P45, there's one that's called P66, and one that's called P75. P75 is especially a very good manuscript. It has sections of Luke and John. And P75, in terms of its wording of the text is very close to Codex Vaticanus.
[00:07:03] P75 was from around the year 200, so it's about 150 years or 175 years earlier. Earlier than Vaticanus. But they agree on a lot of stuff. So what scholars do is they take all the manuscripts, they figure out which ones are the best, but they look at every textual variant that survives and they try to figure out which is which. And the Gospels are based on not one manuscript or another, but on scholarly decisions and what probably was the earliest text based on a wide range of criteria. And so it is fair to say that Sinaiticus and Vaticanus play a very large role in reconstructing our Gospel texts.
[00:07:37] And if those two agree with each other and a P75 agrees with them, that's considered to be really good external evidence. But then you have to look at other factors as well, such as if you've got two different readings. Is there one reading that simply does not match the style or the theology of the author.
[00:07:57] And the other one fits in really well. Well, that might be evidence that the one that fits is more likely to. To have been written by the author if you have two forms of reading the text, and one would have been highly controversial and highly upsetting to scribes. And the others just fine describes which is likely the original. Well, oddly, the one that would be upsetting to scribes is the one more likely original because that's the one.
[00:08:20] That's the one they'd be more likely to change.
[00:08:23] And so, yeah, there are things like that and you get down into the weeds. The basic answer is that the Gospels are based on. On a wide range, but Codex Sinated because Vaticanus do figure more prominently than others.
[00:08:35] Okay, next question. I guess this is related to the first question I've heard that Nero blamed the Christians. The emperor Nero blamed the Christians for the burning of Rome. Is that historically accurate? If so, would that provide an independent source on Christians outside of the Bible in the first century?
[00:08:54] Ah, it turns out to be a trickier question than the questioner might assume, but because. Okay, so I'll tell you the deal with Nero and the fire in Rome. The fire in Rome was in the year 64.
[00:09:09] It was a major fire in a city that was very highly populated.
[00:09:16] Rome in the first century was probably more densely populated than any of the major urban centers. We think of today as being completely overpopulated.
[00:09:27] Very tight. The building structures were tight. They were made out of wood door to door. I mean, wall to wall to wall to wall. And for the most part, over a million people lived in Rome when the fire started.
[00:09:40] And it was very hard to put out fires in the ancient world because you didn't have fire engines.
[00:09:47] You had people with buckets and you had other things.
[00:09:51] They had ways of controlled burning where, you know, they'd have to burn down neighborhoods to keep the fire from spreading further.
[00:09:58] But it's very, very difficult to set out a big fire. And the fire, the fire, the fire started when Nero was away from the city at one of his other places. And he came back during the fire to see what was going on.
[00:10:14] And it burned down. It burned down a huge chunk of the city.
[00:10:19] Many of the districts were just completely leveled. Others were very, very seriously damaged. And a lot of people were burned out of house and home. A lot of people died. A lot of people had no place to stay.
[00:10:32] So it was a big deal.
[00:10:35] Our source of information, our principal source of information about this is not a Christian source. It's Tacitus, the Roman historian who, in the year 115, wrote his book on the annals of Rome, which is kind of a history of the city of Rome. And he deals with this episode, and he explains about the fire, and he talked about how, you know, how long it burned. Burned for days and days, and then it started up again when they. And it. And he talks about the devastation.
[00:11:04] He says that.
[00:11:06] That the populace, some. Some people started to suspect that Nero himself had ordered the fire.
[00:11:15] And the logic they had was that he wanted to institute some architectural designs for parts of the city, which he couldn't do as long as parts of the city were standing.
[00:11:26] And so the idea was that this sometimes thought to be crazy emperor had ordered arson to burn down part of the city, and it got out of hand.
[00:11:36] So according to Tacitus, that was the report. And people.
[00:11:41] People, basket.
[00:11:44] Could you all mute yourselves? Jen, could you mute everybody?
[00:11:50] Jen, you. There you go. Thank you very much.
[00:11:55] So what Tacitus reports is that people suspected Nero started the fire. Nero needed to put the blame on somebody else, and he chose the Christians in Rome because he said that they were the hatred of the human race, which in Latin more likely means that he was. That he knew that.
[00:12:17] That the Christians hated the rest of the human race.
[00:12:23] And it could mean that everybody hated the Christians, but it could also be, it's usually taken, that the Christians were known to hate everyone else on the theory the Christians thought that everybody else is going straight to hell and they're the only ones God loved.
[00:12:36] Whatever it was, he. According to Tacitus, he rounded up all the Christians that his. His people could find, and he subjected them to horrible punishments.
[00:12:47] He had some crucified.
[00:12:49] He had some.
[00:12:52] He had some who were wrapped up in animal skins and set wild dogs on them to be ripped to shreds. He had some that he had rolled in pitch and were.
[00:13:07] And had them set a fire to keep his gardens alight at night.
[00:13:12] So this. So that's Tacitus's report. What he says is that he's not sure. Tacitus himself isn't sure whether the rumors are right or not that Nero started the fire. He somewhat suspects that Nero did. Tacitus does.
[00:13:32] So this is coming from a Roman Source being written 50 years later.
[00:13:38] Okay, so it is accurate. I think it is accurate that Nero blamed the Christians. This is often talked about as the first imperial persecution of Christians if they're sponsored by an emperor.
[00:13:49] And that's kind of true and kind of not true.
[00:13:52] The deal Is. Is that these people, these Christians who are martyred, were not martyred for their faith.
[00:14:00] They were not executed for being Christians.
[00:14:03] They were executed for committing arson.
[00:14:07] Now, it's a false. Probably. Probably a false charge. There are historians who think that maybe Christians actually did it.
[00:14:13] We don't know. But the charge was arson. The charge was not. It's illegal to be a Christian. Nero never did make Christianity illegal.
[00:14:23] The attack on Christians was located only to the city of Rome. It didn't have effect anywhere else in the empire.
[00:14:29] And so it's. So it is kind of the first imperial persecution. But Christianity was not declared, in effect, declared an illegal religion for, well, until the middle of the third century, after about 2, 4. Well, depending on whether you count Decius or not. But around 250 to 270 is when it first became illegal. Okay, right. Next, very different. If you were to attempt to map out the genealogy of the quest of the historical Jesus, where would you put its beginnings?
[00:15:06] Did it start with the Enlightenment?
[00:15:09] Did it start with Reimarus like Albert Schweitzer thought? Or perhaps with the Reformation, like Dale Allison has suggested? Where do you trace its start?
[00:15:21] This is a great question, and it is unanswerable, except to the extent it's asking me what I would do.
[00:15:32] And as to whether it starts with Martin Luther's Reformation or with the Enlightenment and Raimarus, my answer is yes and yes.
[00:15:42] So the deal is this.
[00:15:44] The reason it's ultimately unanswerable is because throughout. Throughout the Middle Age, you know, from early Christianity throughout the Middle Ages down through the Renaissance, down, up up until the 16th century, basically, and into the end, including the 16th century, everybody simply thought, assumed that the Gospels were giving historically accurate accounts what Jesus said and did.
[00:16:12] Fair enough. Most people still think that today.
[00:16:15] The change, in a sense, did begin with the Reformation. It began with the Reformation because Martin Luther proposed and argued that the.
[00:16:30] That truth, Christian truth, came only from Scripture, sola scriptura, that Scripture is the only basis for understanding what's true about God, about Christ, about salvation, for theological truth.
[00:16:44] And so he wanted to bracket everything the Church had said over the years, everything the Pope was saying, everything that was coming out of the Vatican, everything that was tradition that you could trace back to the 5th century or the 4th century or all. Everything. If it's not in the Bible, you can't trust that it's true. Only the Bible is your is truth.
[00:17:02] So that was his view. And that meant you had to study the Bible very carefully.
[00:17:07] And on the heels of that, there were Scholars who started realizing that if you want to understand the, say, the New Testament, if you want to understand Paul, you have to put yourself back in the day of Paul. You can't be interpreting Paul as if, like, Paul was living in the 15th century. He's not living in the 15th century, living in the 1st century. And so scholars started doing things like learning the languages more. Instead of the Latin Bible, they learned the Greek of the New Testament. And they started at some point, you know, in the 16th, 17th centuries, they start looking into the historical situation of Rome and Roman culture and Greek culture, and that goes into the 18th century. And so scholarship developed, beginning with the Reformation, because of the importance of understanding Scripture now, which is far more important than anything if you're interested in the Christian faith. And so it begins the historical method of studying the New Testament. Contributing to that is Luther's view that only the literal interpretation is the right interpretation.
[00:18:11] Only the literal interpretation throughout church history, from the. I mean, going back to the third century at least, actually, you could argue going back to Paul and Matthew and other. Yeah, going back to the New Testament, the idea was that Scripture is literally true, but that's not the only truth.
[00:18:28] There are deeper levels of meaning within Scripture.
[00:18:32] There developed a sophisticated system of figurative interpretations, different kinds of figurative interpretations to get to the real truth of the Scripture. Once you've got the basic literal meaning. And the basic literal meaning is just kind of the literal meaning, but it wasn't the real truth that God was trying to convey. You have these spiritual, metaphorical meanings. Luther cut through all that and he said, no, it's a literal meaning once you know that. In other words. So you can't come up with some kind of parabolic meaning, some kind of hypothetical construction that you're making up in your head and saying, that's what Scripture's teaching, even though it's not what Scripture said, you've got to get the literal meaning.
[00:19:07] Once you say that, you have to figure out how you acquire a literal meaning. And that requires serious hardcore work.
[00:19:14] So all of that is the background to understanding the Gospels in a historical way.
[00:19:21] With Reimarus, Hermann Samuel Raimaris was a German theologian and philosopher who wrote a book about the historical Jesus. And it is our first book that is not written from a kind of devotional point of view, but is actually trying to reconstruct what actually happened in ways that are at odds with what you get in the New Testament. I mean, yeah, at odds. At odds with what Christians have always thought and at odds with what the Gospels Themselves actually say that there are materials in the Gospel that are not historically accurate and there's historical information that the Gospels are trying to cover up.
[00:19:59] Raimarus view was that Jesus actually was a zealot figure. He was a political revolutionary who wanted to overthrow the Roman world and who was.
[00:20:11] Who in the end was captured and crucified as an insurrectionist.
[00:20:16] But his disciples decided they rather liked the free life they were living with people giving them food and supplying them with things and having authority, and they wanted to continue that. So they stole Jesus body from the grave and declared he'd been raised from the dead.
[00:20:34] So Raimaris wrote that book, but he did not publish it because he knew that if he published it, he'd get fired from his job in Germany. They didn't have tenure back then. And that would be. That would have been very. He died and the. The philosopher Lessing discovered this manuscript or was given it by the family, I can't remember which, and he published it posthumously.
[00:20:57] And you can still get it. Can get it on. Just look up Herman's. Look up Reimarus Life of Jesus. You could still read it today.
[00:21:05] So the other thing I'll say about this is that, you know, when Reza Aslin wrote his book called Zealot, he takes this thesis, and this is the thesis that he had. And I think. I think Raisa's book probably was the first book that was written about Jesus, A study of the life of Jesus that was number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
[00:21:25] And he has Raimarus's view. And I don't know if he knew about Raimarus.
[00:21:31] He doesn't mention him in the book. I don't know if he knew that this was not a new idea.
[00:21:35] I just don't know.
[00:21:37] By the way, you probably don't know the book that was longest at number one, the historical Jesus book, longest at number one. If you do know Bill O'Reilly, killing Jesus, the longest number one book on Jesus. And if you read it, it's, you know, whatever your political views. Yeah. So it's kind of interesting. This is not the question, but I'm going to say it anyway. It's kind of interesting because Jesus was upset with the Romans who were controlling Israel, and they were demanding tribute, and it was just out of proportion.
[00:22:10] And so they were demanding too much tribute and they were kind of overextending, you know, the control of the promised land and hindering things going in the promised land. What Jesus wanted with smaller government and lower taxes.
[00:22:25] That's the Argument. I'm just. I'm just saying that's the argument. No wonder is number one.
[00:22:32] Okay, right.
[00:22:36] Next question.
[00:22:38] Going backwards. Right.
[00:22:42] All right, this one.
[00:22:45] You know, all of these questions. We could spend an hour on one of these.
[00:22:49] This one's very good one.
[00:22:51] If Christian doctrine ascribes at least equal reality to the existence of the spiritual realm and the existence of heaven, where safe souls go after death, as it does that at least much reality to that, as it does to the natural or physical realm, then is a physical resurrection really necessary for Christianity, or would a spiritual resurrection be sufficient to underpin and integrate with its other doctrines? And I think this person is asking not about the future resurrection of the dead, but I think this person's asking about Jesus resurrection. Since the spiritual realm is just as important as the natural realm, why can't you just have a natural spiritual resurrection? Why do you need a natural resurrection? Or could you have? And this person goes on to point out that when Paul talks about the resurrected Jesus, Paul talks about the resurrected body of Jesus as a spiritual body rather than a physical body.
[00:23:50] So why do you need a physical resurrection? Why do you need an empty tomb? Why do you need a body there? Yeah, so it's a very good question.
[00:23:58] I would say that the early Christians didn't think about it this way, that they needed to have a physical body.
[00:24:04] But I think that they did have a physical body, and I think Paul did too.
[00:24:09] Paul really believed that Jesus body was no longer in the tomb.
[00:24:14] So let me explain this because it'll take a minute or two.
[00:24:18] The place I discuss this the most is in my book.
[00:24:24] Which book is it? I think it's how Jesus became God.
[00:24:29] It's how Jesus became God where I try to explain why there has to be a physical body for Paul and the others.
[00:24:34] And it has to do with the fact that the idea that Jesus was raised from the dead came from Jews, Jewish apocalypticists.
[00:24:43] Jesus himself was a Jewish apocalypticist, thoroughly Jewish, with apocalyptic views, that said that the way God is going to make right everything that's wrong is that at the end of time, which is coming soon, he'll come into judgment against the world and destroy everyone who's opposed to him. Everyone on his side will be brought into a glorious kingdom for eternal life in that kingdom. And that will apply not only to the people who are alive when it happens, but also to everyone who's died.
[00:25:17] God will physically raise people from the dead and they'll face judgment.
[00:25:22] Those who've sided with him will enter into the Eternal kingdom. Those opposed to him will be sent off to eternal fire.
[00:25:28] Okay, this was a very Jewish view. And the traditional view is view of the human being is that it's that the human being is not a distinct body and spirit.
[00:25:41] It's not body and soul.
[00:25:43] It's one being.
[00:25:45] We are one thing. We're not two things.
[00:25:49] One way to look at this is that the. The word spirit in Greek, pneuma also means air, and it means breath.
[00:25:59] Humans are fleshly beings that can breathe.
[00:26:04] And so when God creates, Adam creates the first human, he makes this humanoid figure on the ground out of the dirt. And it's just a lump lying there. It looks like a human, but there's no humans yet. It's got this lump on the ground, and God breathes into it.
[00:26:20] When he breathes into it, it comes alive. It's animated now.
[00:26:25] And when it loses its breath, it's no longer human.
[00:26:30] And so it's like what we think when we say that if somebody dies, they stop breathing. We don't ask, where did the breath go?
[00:26:39] Did the breath go to heaven? Of course the breath didn't go to heaven. It's just like the breath is the thing making the body alive.
[00:26:44] And that was the traditional Jewish view.
[00:26:47] The traditional Greek view that was popularized by Plato was that the body's one thing, the spirit's a different thing. The body dies and corrupts and disappears eventually, but the spirit cannot be destroyed. It lives on.
[00:27:01] The Christian idea that you go to either hell is the. Is the idea that your spirit lives on. When your spirit lives on, when your body dies, that becomes the Christian view. Because most Christians by the end of the first century already are from Gentile stock who've been trained in Greek ways of thinking rather than Jewish ways of thinking. So it's just natural. Your spirit lives on. The earliest Christians who believed that Jesus was raised from the dead were apocalyptic Jews.
[00:27:30] They didn't have the idea that your soul lives on afterwards. They had the idea that your body comes back to life. Jesus body had come back to life. It was a physical resurrection.
[00:27:40] So what do you do about Paul saying that it was a spiritual body, not a physical body?
[00:27:45] So Paul is using more Greek philosophical categories for his understanding of things, but his categories for spirit and body and soul are not the same that we have today in Greek philosophical thought. Um, especially in Stoic thinking. Well, actually, very broadly, except for some very, very kind of extreme Platonists, the spirit that is within us is a separate thing from our body, but it's not non Material, pneuma, what we think of as breath or air is actually a substance. It's stuff.
[00:28:31] It's just more, it's more refined stuff than this coarse stuff that makes up our current bodies.
[00:28:38] So they talk about, you know, the pneuma going through your blood, you know, going through your body like, like the wind or something. But it, but it's a, it's a kind of essence of thing. It's a thing, but it's much better, much more refined than this body. And it can't die like this body.
[00:28:55] So it's not that it's non physical, it is stuff, it's just a different kind of stuff. What Paul argues is that Jesus was not simply a reanimated corpse.
[00:29:07] He didn't come back with the same body. The body he had was transformed into a spiritual body.
[00:29:15] It was still a body, but now it's made of pneuma, which cannot die, versus the stuff we have, the Hillock stuff we have that can die.
[00:29:25] And so it's mistake to think that when he says it's a spiritual body, he means that it's some kind of, you know, ghost or spirit or something. He means that it's a body that's been transformed. And we too for Paul will be transformed to have pneumatic bodies rather than these Hillock bodies we have now. So was it necessary for them to have a physical resurrection? I mean, it wasn't that they kind of thought it out, it's just what they had. I mean that if they believed in a resurrection, that's, that's what resurrection meant for apocalyptic Jews.
[00:29:54] Christians ended up with a problem with this whole thing because the idea that Jesus was raised from the dead was related to the idea that Christians in the future would be raised from the dead.
[00:30:06] But Christians by the end of the first century, into the second, third centuries and stuff, started thinking that when you died, your soul went to heaven.
[00:30:13] So if that's the case, if your soul's in heaven, why do you need a resurrection of the body?
[00:30:19] So it's like these two views are somewhat at odds with each other. And the irony is that Christians today who go to a church that recite the creed, who say that we believe in the resurrection of the body or the resurrection of the dead, either way, they're saying they believe in that when they actually. The truth is they believe your soul is going to go to heaven or hell. They don't really believe, but it's because this resurrection of the body is so much a fundamental part of Christian confession that Resurrection of the body stayed in the creed even after people stopped believing it.
[00:30:54] All right.
[00:30:56] Right.
[00:30:57] Next question.
[00:30:59] I've heard that Hebrews 9:27 is about the particular judgment according to several of my Catholic friends, so. Right. I probably should have a Bible with me when I'm doing this, shouldn't I?
[00:31:15] That's the. That's the verse that says, that is but given. It is given but once for a human to die. And after this, the judgment.
[00:31:28] Okay, and so when this person is saying, that sounds like a particular judgment, which means that you're individually judged.
[00:31:35] Right. When you die.
[00:31:39] So I've heard that Hebrews 9 is particular judgment.
[00:31:43] One friend calls it an exit interview upon death with Jesus himself. So Jesus, like, you stand before the judgment, throne yourself, there you are. And Jesus says, yeah, up or down. Okay, so that would be the particular judgment. They also View Matthew, chapter 25, verses 31 to 46, the sheep and the goats, as a worldwide general judgment at the end of time.
[00:32:10] Is this simply a contradiction or duplication between two books of the New Testament concerning our final judgment? Yeah, no, it's a really good question. Are you.
[00:32:20] Right? It's a really good question.
[00:32:22] So once again, this has to do with different views of the afterlife.
[00:32:27] Is it that you die and your soul is judged to go one place or another? Or is there like this massive resurrection at the end of the time where entire masses of people are judged at once?
[00:32:39] And it's the same problem, really, because originally Jesus himself believed in a resurrection of the dead, that all people would be raised from the dead and there'd be a day of judgment where whichever side of things you were on, you'd either be thrown into the fire to be annihilated, or you'd be brought into the kingdom.
[00:32:57] But as Christianity went on, people started thinking more in terms of individual judgment when you die, your soul going to heaven or hell. And so Hebrews appears to have one view of this, and Jesus had a different view.
[00:33:11] This is the irony that my book Heaven and Hell deals with. This is the irony that Jesus believed in the future resurrection, and Christians gave up on it.
[00:33:21] You know, that's not what they think anymore, so seems like an irony to me.
[00:33:28] Okay, next.
[00:33:32] What is Pentecost?
[00:33:34] Okay, where in the Bible before the Acts of Apostles, is it mentioned? What did it celebrate? And do we know what the celebrations look like? I'm interested in the original context rather than the later Christian reinterpretation.
[00:33:49] Okay, now for this, what I'd say is, you know, if you. This is a. It's a really good and important question. And this kind of question is the kind of thing that, like, if you're, you're like me, you're read something Bible, you just wonder more about it, you know, and you want, well, where do I, how do I find out about it besides coming to a monthly Q and A? So the, the first thing that you should do if you haven't done this is you should buy an annotated Bible.
[00:34:12] A scholar, like a study edition Bible. There are lots of those out there. Some of them I do not recommend.
[00:34:19] Those are the ones that disagree with me. The ones I do recommend are the two that I think are.
[00:34:27] The two that I think are the best are the HarperCollins Study Bible, which I still think is the best study Bible there is. It introduces each book.
[00:34:39] It has notes at the bottom of each page. And when you run across something that's like you puzzled about, hopefully they'll have a footnote on it.
[00:34:46] So the HarperCollin Study Bible, the Oxford Annotated Bible, is another one that a lot of people use in universities, for example, classrooms.
[00:34:57] And there's a new one called the SBL, the Society of Biblical Literature. The SBL Study Bible.
[00:35:03] The SBL Bible is meant to replace the HarperCollins Study Bible.
[00:35:09] I refuse to buy it for a very compelling reason, that its pages are too thin.
[00:35:16] Seriously.
[00:35:18] He's like, you know, I use, you know, if I'm going to use a Bible, I want, I want thick pages, but I don't want these things to rip. It's not like I, you know, I know it might be cheaper and thinner, but I'm just saying, man, give me, give me pages. So I, I don't, I don't use it. I just don't use it. But it's probably really good. I probably, like most my friends have written, I just don't know.
[00:35:38] So SBL Study Bible, HarperCon Study Bible or so, or the Oxford Annotated. The other thing is if you really, you know, if you really want to be a Bible geek and you really, you like, want heavy duty stuff, you can go heavier duty than that by getting a Bible dictionary, like a Harbor Collins Bible Dictionary, one volume dictionary that will, it's like a, it's like a small encyclopedia.
[00:36:03] The other, if you want to be a real geek, then it's kind of out of date in some ways. But I still use it all the time.
[00:36:10] It's called the Anchor Bible Dictionary.
[00:36:13] The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Six volumes, thick volumes. That's encyclopedic on everything.
[00:36:21] Theoretically related to the Bible. It was done in the 90s. And so it's stuff dated, but it's still just filled with information.
[00:36:30] And I use it still all the time. And you can probably get it used. I mean, it's kind of expensive, but you can probably get used copies for relatively cheap. So this is asking about Pentecost. If you look up Pentecost, the day of Pentecost in Acts, chapter two is referring to a Jewish festival. The Jewish festival itself is referred to in Leviticus, chapter 23, Leviticus in the Torah, the book of Leviticus. In this, chapter 23, it lays out the three major festivals of the Jews. And so Christians are most familiar with Passover and Pentecost.
[00:37:06] So Passover is on the set date. These are all agricultural festivals and more or less Passover, celebrating the beginning of the harvest season.
[00:37:18] Pentecost, it's called that, that's the, that's the Greek term for it, pentecost, penta, meaning five.
[00:37:30] And it's called that because it, it occurs 50 days after Passover.
[00:37:38] So the, in the, in the Old Testament, it's called the, it's called the Feast of Feast of Booths, the Sukkot, S U C C O T H But Pentecost. So it's called pentecost because it's 50 days after, after Passover. And it's the, it's celebrating the end of the season, the end of the harvesting season of the spring harvesting season. So it's usually May or June.
[00:38:07] And so in the Bible, in Leviticus, it explains what kind of sacrifices you're to perform to God in honor of the, the collecting of the crops in the spring.
[00:38:16] Okay.
[00:38:17] And so the deal is, in the Book of Acts, Jesus dies on the Passover, right? You know, the day, day after the Passover meals eaten in Matthew, mark and Luke. 50 days later is the day of Pentecost. And that's when the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples.
[00:38:35] Okay, next question. In connection with the recent conclave, several Catholics stated that the Church would now choose the successor of St. Peter.
[00:38:46] Is this claim supported by historical evidence?
[00:38:49] I think what the person is asking is, is there a direct line of popes goes, you know, so you go back from Leo to Francis to Benedict, and you kind of keep going back. And does it actually go all the way back to Peter? Is it historically accurate that. That these are successors of Peter?
[00:39:09] And that question is actually a kind of complicated historical question about whether Peter was the first bishop of Rome, the pope, the word pope, same word for papa, means your papa he's the leader of the church and.
[00:39:28] Right. Was Peter the first. Oh, so let me provide a little bit of historical context for that.
[00:39:37] The big issue is that Peter traditionally is said to have been the first bishop of Rome and that he appointed his successor, who appointed his successor, who appointed his successor. And kind of went like that until they started voting on things.
[00:39:54] You all mute yourselves, please.
[00:39:57] I don't have the ability to mute people. Hold on a minute. Unfortunately. So I need you to. I'm sorry. I can do it. Hold on just a minute.
[00:40:04] Wait a minute. We leave at 1:00. Oh, tomorrow. Virginia just said we leave at 1:00.
[00:40:10] Okay, sorry. I didn't know that you couldn't do that.
[00:40:14] So. Right. Is that true? Was Peter the first bishop of the church in Rome? I think the answer is no, historically.
[00:40:22] So let me tell you what we know about the early church in Rome.
[00:40:29] Our very first piece of evidence that there was a church in Rome is in Paul's letter to the Romans.
[00:40:35] He writes this letter to the Christian church in Rome, and he's quite explicit that he had not been there before.
[00:40:44] He is writing the letter to introduce himself to the church, apparently because they have some ideas about him that he thinks are wrong and he wants to straighten them out.
[00:40:54] But he writes this letter as a way of getting them to support him because he wants to take a trip further west. He wants to missionize as far west as Spain. And so he wants to use Rome as his kind of base of operation.
[00:41:10] And so he wants their moral support, he may want their financial support, so he can take the mission to Spain, which for them was the ends of the earth, and then the Gospel will have gone to the ends of the earth.
[00:41:21] So he writes this church, and it seems to be a fairly large church because at the end of this letter in chapter 16, Paul, who's never been there before, greets a number of people by name.
[00:41:36] He knows over 25 people there that he greets who are leaders of the church.
[00:41:44] It's one of these chapters that, like most people read and say, oh, a bunch of names. I'm not going to bother with this. But if you look at the names, it ends up being pretty interesting for several reasons.
[00:41:54] One thing, maybe the most noted reason, is that a number of the leaders of the church that he talks about in Romans 16 are women, including the woman who's carrying this letter for him, Phoebe, who is a deacon, not at Rome, but in another church in Centuria. And so she's a deacon. Yeah, she's A deacon? Well, that means she's a minister.
[00:42:17] Deacon is just the word for minister. She's a minister of the church of Centuria. Okay.
[00:42:21] There are a number of women who are said to have supported Paul and helped Paul and his mission. There are women who hold churches in their own homes.
[00:42:33] There's one woman who's called Chief among the Apostles, Junia.
[00:42:39] So when you read a chapter like that, you might kind of blow through it like you're not interested in these names. We start looking at these names, you say, whoa, wait a second. That's kind of interesting.
[00:42:47] So he greets these people over, you know, over 25 people. And these are people he knows by name in a church he's never visited before.
[00:42:55] That's gotta mean it's a. It's a big church. And almost certainly it's gotta be more than one community.
[00:43:02] Churches met in houses, private homes for a very long time. Before there were church buildings, there weren't any. We don't have any.
[00:43:11] We don't have any physical evidence of a church building until about the year 250.
[00:43:17] And so Paul's writing 200 years before that to a church that has. It's got a kind of. I don't know how many people it has, which has a lot more than 25.
[00:43:25] And if you're meeting in a home, the home has to be able to accommodate the number of people. You've got a house church in a fairly big home could be maybe 40 people or so. And so I think pro. And Rome is a big city at the time, as I said before, over a million people. So they're probably house churches scattered around.
[00:43:44] Scattered around. So how did the church begin? Was it with Peter? Well, of the people that Paul greets, he doesn't mention Peter.
[00:43:54] And surely if Peter was the leader of the church, you know, Paul knows Peter. He's visited. I mean, he spent time with Peter. So I don't think Peter was there.
[00:44:04] Did he come there later?
[00:44:06] Well, according to later tradition, Peter did go to Rome.
[00:44:11] We have an account of him going to Rome in a second century legendary account called the Acts of Peter, where Peter, Peter does go, go to Rome.
[00:44:24] But in the. Even in the Acts of Peter, which is from the end of the second century, it's highly legendary. It's the account we get things like Peter being crucified upside down in.
[00:44:35] And it's everybody. You'll. If you read it, just read it, you can get it.
[00:44:40] It's a very interesting account, but it's highly legendary. But even there Peter comes to Rome because Paul has already left Rome.
[00:44:48] So it's already after there's a church there.
[00:44:50] So did Peter found the church in Rome? No, I don't think there's any way he founded the church in Rome. Did Peter ever go to Rome? I don't know. He is that in this legend, but that. That's all we know.
[00:45:02] So I think whoever. So a bishop in the early church was whoever was overseeing the church. The Greek word that's translated bishop is the word episcopos, like as in the Episcopal Church. And episcopos is one who's an overseer. He overlooks the community.
[00:45:20] Who was that originally, Rome? We don't know, but I guess I'm. I'm. I guess. I mean, I'm pretty certain actually that it must have been whoever hosted the first community. How did the community get there? We don't know. But Rome was a center of traffic. People came to Rome more than any other city. People traveled away from Rome more than other city people who could travel, which means, you know, merchants or wealthy folk.
[00:45:45] Somebody came to Rome who either was a Christian trying to bring Christianity there, or possibly a resident of Rome who converted somewhere else or a traveler from somewhere else. So we don't know. We don't know how it was founded, but it almost certainly was not founded by Peter and certainly wasn't founded by Paul. And so this idea that everything goes back to Peter is a later invention.
[00:46:08] We start getting the event, this idea that Peter founded the church in Rome in the late second century, but it's hard to trace earlier than that.
[00:46:20] Okay, that's kind of a long answer, right?
[00:46:24] Next question. Was Yahweh the God of the New Testament, or had the New Testament authors developed a different conception of God?
[00:46:31] All right, Yahweh, that's the name of God in the Old Testament.
[00:46:35] It's spelled with just four letters because ancient Hebrew did not use vowels. And so it's the four letters, Y, HWH that are called the tetragrammaton, the four letters.
[00:46:49] Traditionally, Jews do not pronounce the name because it's sacred. The sacred name that is not to be pronounced.
[00:46:58] But that is the name that's like. It's the personal name of God in the Old Testament. He's called lots of things. He's called God. God Almighty, Lord, you know, so you get El, Elohim, El Shaddai, Adonai, et cetera. These different words, but those are descriptives. They're not named. The name was Yahweh Yahweh, though, is the God of Israel, the God who creates the world, the God who calls Israel the God who gives the law to Moses, the God the prophets talk about. He's the God of the Old Testament. This question is, do the New Testament people have a different God?
[00:47:32] No, that's the God they had. They didn't call him Yahweh because they weren't speaking Hebrew or Aramaic, they were speaking Greek. And so they don't. They don't call him that.
[00:47:45] The. The word Yahweh, when it gets translated into Greek, gets translated not with a personal name, but with the word Lord. Kurios.
[00:47:58] But the word Lord can mean lots of different things.
[00:48:01] The word Lord can mean a God. It can also mean a husband or a boss or somebody who's a higher status than you.
[00:48:13] It can mean lots of different things, but usually means somebody who's kind of the head of the other of everything else, head of the family, head of the business, head of whatever.
[00:48:23] So Christian followers of Jesus understood that their God was Yahweh, even though they didn't use the word and they did not change their views about this.
[00:48:31] Contrary to what for some reason evangelicals have been saying for some while now, Jesus is not understood to be Yahweh in the New Testament. He's understood to be the Son of God, that Yahweh is the Father, he's the Son.
[00:48:47] And so did they have a different conception of God?
[00:48:50] No, they don't have a different conception of God per se, but they do. Do they start the process of Jesus himself is divine in some sense?
[00:49:01] Okay, next question. And we just got a query that I'm going to answer very question. Doesn't Irenaeus give us a list of early bishops of Rome? Yes, and he's at the end of the second century, as I said. So before the end of the second century, you don't get that kind of thing.
[00:49:18] All right, what is a key passage or two in the New Testament that you feel has been commonly mistranslated and thus commonly misunderstood?
[00:49:28] Yeah. On the blog recently, I had a back and forth with somebody about Luke, chapter 17, verses 20 through 21, which is a difficult two verses to translate.
[00:49:41] It's where Jesus is talking to the Pharisees and he's telling them that the kingdom of God is not something that you can look for here or there. It's not going to be here or there. The kingdom of God is entos homo, which often gets translated, is within you. The kingdom of God is within You.
[00:50:05] And that is used often by people who feel that, you know, a spark of the divine was within them, that God somehow is resident in them, that God's kingdom is within them. And they take it as a kind of spiritualized understanding that the kingdom of God is not a place that's going to appear here on earth.
[00:50:23] It's something within us that we need to bring out. And so I'm not going to comment on that theology. You know, people have that theology, and it's absolutely fine. But I don't think that's what the verse is saying when it says entos is you, you plural. Enthos is a word that frequently does mean inside or within.
[00:50:48] And so it does sound like it could be, you know, within you, like inside of you. But inside can also mean among, like this word. And toss is used when you talk about what's located and toss. The walls of a city.
[00:51:03] What's inside the walls of the city?
[00:51:05] You don't. When you say what's inside the walls? You don't usually mean what's in there with the brick and mortar, you know, with the rocks and mortar. You don't mean like inside the construction. You mean, what is it entailing?
[00:51:18] And I think what Jesus is saying, not that the kingdom of God is resident inside of you as an individual, but that the kingdom of God here is present in your midst.
[00:51:30] One reason I think that is because Jesus is talking to his enemies, the Pharisees.
[00:51:37] And I don't think there's any way Jesus tells his enemies, the Pharisees, that. That they have the kingdom of God inside of themselves.
[00:51:44] I think quite the contrary, he doesn't think so.
[00:51:48] More than that, when you read through Luke generally, you see that Jesus understands the kingdom in a slightly different way. Well, in a different way from Matthew and Mark, but not that it's internal to each individual.
[00:52:02] Luke emphasizes that the kingdom of God is present in the ministry of Jesus, that what Jesus does manifests what the kingdom is like.
[00:52:16] So when the kingdom of God comes, there's not going to be any suffering. Nobody's going to be sick.
[00:52:21] So Jesus heals the sick.
[00:52:23] Nobody's going to be possessed by a demon. So Jesus casts out the demons. No one is going to die. And so Jesus raises the dead.
[00:52:32] Jesus ministry is a manifestation of the kingdom, and it's not just the miracles. Luke has a special emphasis that Jesus teaches that we have to take care of those who are in need.
[00:52:45] Especially in Luke. Luke doesn't say, blessed are you who are poor in spirit. It's blessed are you who are poor.
[00:52:52] He doesn't say blessed are you who are hungry and thirst for righteousness. It's blessed are you who hunger and thirst.
[00:52:58] In Luke, Jesus has a social agenda for, for taking care of those in need.
[00:53:03] And well, that's what the kingdom will be like. Needs will be taken care of, so nobody will be in need. When Jesus says the kingdom is entas, I think he almost certainly does not mean some kind of mystical thing about it being inside of you, but that it's present in the life of Jesus and the lives of those who are following his dictates because they're manifesting what the kingdom's going to be like.
[00:53:27] So I think it's mistranslation. Okay, last question.
[00:53:30] What's an example or two of a position that you hold that's a minority position as opposed to the academic consensus? And what evidence has convinced you to hold that position?
[00:53:42] Right. Okay, so he asked for, or she asked for one or two. I'll give you three.
[00:53:48] Why not?
[00:53:50] First, I think that most scholars, it's. Look, you know, this is the perennial problem. You probably hear everybody talk about this. What does it mean to say most scholars.
[00:54:03] Well, yeah, I would say, though, that the majority of scholars who study the New Testament, first of all, they're all, most, almost all of them are Christian. So, you know, you got that. But, but I would say that almost all critical scholars of the New Testament, including Christians, agree that the tomb of Jesus somehow or other was empty on the third day.
[00:54:22] I think it just, I think that's just generally thought that the tomb was empty. And I don't think so.
[00:54:29] I don't think Jesus was given a decent burial.
[00:54:32] That would be contrary to the rules of. Not the rules, but the policies that Romans had. I don't think they made an exception for Jews.
[00:54:42] I don't think they made the exception for somebody who is thought to be the Son of God because people thought he was the Son of God. Why would they make an exception for Jesus? It seems like they would because he's the Son of God, but they didn't think he was the Son of God. And plus, the whole point of crucifixion was to humiliate the person even past death so that people would pass by in these public places and see these bodies rotting on the cross and being attacked by scavengers.
[00:55:05] It was a horrible, horrible thing. But whenever you look up references in Greek and Roman sources to what happens to the remains they're left on the crosses.
[00:55:16] So I don't So I don't think there was an empty tomb because I don't think. I mean, something happened to his body. Of course they, they disposed of his remains a few days later, week later. I don't know why didn't the Christians know that? There weren't any Christians around. The disciples had fled. So I don't. So I don't think. I don't think there's any two. That's one number two.
[00:55:37] I think there's. I think there's a wide consensus that the beloved disciple is, is claiming to write the Gospel of John.
[00:55:45] This is Hugo's view. Hugo Mendez, if you took his course, Hugo. Hugo's written a big book on the Gospel of John and he absolutely thinks that the author of John is claiming to be Jesus beloved disciple. And he really wasn't the beloved disciple. So the author is writing forgery. He's claiming to be somebody he wasn't.
[00:56:08] I don't have any problems with thinking John's a forgery, but I mean, I don't have problems with that, although I don't think it is.
[00:56:14] I don't think the author is claiming to be the beloved disciple.
[00:56:18] I think it's quite clear. If you read the two passages that are referred to, what is it, 19:35 and 21:24, I think are the two verses, it's quite clear the author is differentiating himself from the beloved disciple.
[00:56:33] It's especially clear in chapter 21 where the author says he's talking about the beloved disciples. That one has testified to these things and, and we know that this testimony is true.
[00:56:45] It's not how you talk about yourself.
[00:56:47] It's him and us. It's like saying, yeah, George said that, but we don't believe it. But you never think you're George then.
[00:56:56] So I don't think, you know, I just don't.
[00:56:59] So I don't think so. I think people are raised thinking that there's blood. It just kind of seems like he is. And then like you argue for it. I don't. I. So I'm in the minority on that. I think the other thing I'm in a minority on, I think is that I'm one of those scholars who thinks that Luke chapters one and two were not originally part of the Gospel of Luke.
[00:57:20] I talked about that in my recent. I did this recent course on the Gospel of Luke, and I think I spent a whole time or two, a whole lecture on that.
[00:57:31] I think Luke started with what's now the first four verses where the authority says that he's writing an accurate account for Theophilus. And then it goes straight into what is now chapter three, verse one, with Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist, that there was no infancy narrative, that the infancy narrative was added later, possibly by the same author, but that it wasn't the original form of the gospel, so it ended later. And I don't think that's the majority view.
[00:57:57] It's not a view that people would consider wacko or anything. But I think that most.
[00:58:04] I just think most scholars think it probably has those for those chapters in it, and I absolutely don't.
[00:58:10] So. All right. I have used up my time and probably your patience. So thank you all. Thank you all for coming. I really, really appreciate it.
[00:58:21] And I'll let Jen finish off. I will say that I really enjoy doing these things and I enjoy your questions.
[00:58:27] If you keep them short, they're more likely to be answered and I'm happy to take anything you got. So looking forward to doing this next month.
