Gold Q&A - September 2023

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Okay. Rick, how you been? I've been doing very well. How about you? Yeah, pretty well. Sarah's off in England for three weeks, so she's doing better than me. She's on leave this semester. Trying not to rub it in too much. Yeah. But things are good. Yeah. Hey, Ken. [00:00:24] Speaker B: Hello. [00:00:25] Speaker A: How's it going? [00:00:26] Speaker B: Very well. I've missed several of these little get togethers, so I'm glad I finally made it to one. [00:00:32] Speaker A: Well, I haven't done one for a while for this Q and A because my schedule has been so busy that I haven't been able to plan ahead when I was going to do it, and this time I was planning ahead by a day, but at least that's. [00:00:48] Speaker B: Better than yeah, that's pretty good, actually. [00:00:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:00:53] Speaker B: Can I forget where you're arkansas. [00:00:56] Speaker A: Oh. Whereabouts? [00:00:58] Speaker B: Uh, Russellville. It's just northwest of Little Rock. North central Arkansas. [00:01:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. [00:01:06] Speaker B: We're going to be ground zero of the total eclipse next April. So just so you come to town to see that, you're welcome to come. [00:01:19] Speaker A: Was a some years ago, there was a total eclipse. That where England was the hotspot, and we were all pumped for it, and we were there, and it was unbelievably cloudy. [00:01:34] Speaker B: I was going to say that was England. [00:01:36] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. It did get dark. We couldn't see anything. [00:01:44] Speaker B: We've got some friends coming to stay with us, and rather than pay the multiple crazy times what it's worth price for a room around here. [00:01:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:01:56] Speaker B: But I've told them, hey, don't hold it against me if it's raining, because it's right. [00:02:02] Speaker A: Well, you could probably fund a trip to Greece or something if you could charge for that room. [00:02:09] Speaker B: If I wasn't such a good friend, like an idiot, I let him stay for free. [00:02:15] Speaker A: Right. Okay. Yeah, that's what happened. So we have some other people with us. William, you with us, I think. Can unmute yourself maybe william's not with us. Craig is with us. Hello, Craig. Hey, Dr. Erman. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm doing okay. How are you doing? Oh, pretty good. Pretty good. Kind of ugly weather around here. Big change in the weather the last couple of days. Where do you live? Ohio. In Ohio? Yeah. Whereabouts in Ohio? Columbus. Proper? Yeah. Okay. My brother lives in Kent, and he teaches at Kent State, and that's where my mother lived the last five years of her. Yeah. So have you lived there your whole life, William? You sound like you have more of a Southern accent. No, pretty much my whole life. I spent five, six years in Europe, but other than California, but other than that Ohio. Where were you in Europe? I stayed in I studied at the University of Maryland, believe it or not, in Heidelberg. What? Maryland has, like, a satellite campus in Heidelberg? They do or did? Wow. Okay. That's quite a satellite campus. Did you learn German when you were over there? I learned German in Monterey, California. Okay. Craig, you've been around the world? Yeah, I've been around. Okay. Settled in Ohio. Okay, good. Right. Karen, you're with us. Hello, Karen. Hi, how are you? Good. Yeah. How you doing? I'm doing great. Where are you located, Karen? I'm in Richmond, Kentucky. Richmond, Kentucky. Okay. I usually hear about Richmond, Virginia, because I've got friends who teach there, but where is Richmond, Kentucky? It's just south of nice area. Yeah, right. William now is with us. Hello, William. Hi there. How are you doing? Good. I'm in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Oh, another Arkansas. Yeah. I was just noticing that. [00:04:41] Speaker B: Just up the road there. [00:04:43] Speaker A: Okay. Not too far. I actually am staying in Russellville for the total eclipse. There you go. [00:04:52] Speaker B: I hope they're not sticking you too bad. [00:04:54] Speaker A: They are, yeah. What do you do? Yeah, what do you so hello, Rod. Hey, Doctor. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm doing fine. How are you doing? I'm fine. I'm in Florida. Okay. Whereabouts? Lakeland central Florida. Okay. Very nice. Have you lived there for a long time? A couple years. We moved from Ohio. Moved from Ohio. Where? In Ohio. Just east of Cleveland a little bit. The snow capital of Ohio, 10ft a year. Okay, right. Yeah, they do get snow. Right. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, Florida is a little different. I assume congratulations are in order, right? Pat Jones is with us. Hello, Pat. You're okay? Pat, you may not be with us. Is Frank with us? Frank Nemek muted as well. Okay, I'm here. Thank you. Oh, there you are. Hey, Frank. How you doing? Good, how about you? Good. You got some serious books behind you there, Frank. Yeah, you have room to I'm a I'm a book guy, but my wife is a fanatic. We have libraries in my house and still have books stacked everywhere. It's like you can't even walk. It's really quite crazy. At least we like to read them as well. Okay, I think we need to get going. It's five after eight. This is being recorded. If you would like your picture not to be shown when others watch this, you can just take your video off if you don't care, it's fine. It's completely up to you. The way I'll be doing this is the way I normally do this is I've got a list of questions that I've received. And I'll be reading these. Hold on a SEC. That's not working. Yeah, so I'll be reading these and then providing answers. And I'm planning on taking 50 or 60 minutes, and then we'll stop that and I'll just say, hey, again, and we'll take off sound. All right. So if you could please mute yourself so that any background noise doesn't come in. Just about all of you are. There you go. I think we all think you're all muted. I can probably mute everybody if I want to. Let me see. Maybe if I mute, people can't unmute themselves. Yes, that's what I'll do. Okay. That way, we just don't have to worry about it. Okay, ken, you can still hear me okay, though, now that I muted that. Okay. Right, here we go. I'd like to welcome you to our October 2023 Gold Q and A. This time I'm recording this live with some members of the blog, some Gold and Platinum members with us, who will simply be listening in as you are at a later date and in a different venue. I've received a number of excellent questions this time around. I always do. These strike me as particularly good, and some of them are particularly challenging, and so I won't be able to get through all of them because there's a lot, but I am going through ones I think I can answer in a relatively short amount of time. And so I'm going to jump right in. The questions, as you'll see, are extremely diverse. So, number one, this questioner asks, other than certain letters of Paul, are there New Testament letters or epistles that scholars think were actually written by the author they claim? Okay, well, there it is. So starting off with a rather controversial question, obviously there are 13 letters in the New Testament that claim to be written by Paul. Seven of them are letters that scholars call the Undisputed Pauline Epistles, because they are pretty much agreed on by everyone. They're not actually undisputed as to authorship because we're talking about scholars here, and scholars tend to be a bit cantankerous and don't agree with about anything, so you'll always find somebody or other disagreeing with something or other, and sometimes it's in order so they can write a book. Sometimes it's because they really think everybody else has gotten it wrong. But basically there are seven that scholars call the Undisputed letters, and that if anybody writes a book about Paul, about his teachings, his life, they stick to the seven letters unless they're fundamentalists. Even many evangelical Christians, if they write a book for a scholarly audience, will often you know, I personally think that Paul wrote Ephesians and Colossians, but for the sake of this study, I'm going to restrict myself to these seven letters. Okay? Even evangelicals sometimes do that. The six that are disputed are Ephesians, Colossians, and Second thessalonians those three all by three different authors, and first and second, Timothy and Titus, probably by the same author. And so they're before later authors, all of them claiming to be Paul. And in the judgment of the majority of critical scholars, were people other than Paul writing later than Paul taking his name. In the modern world, we call that a forgery. When New Testament scholars talk about that phenomenon, they tend not to call them forgeries. They tend to call them pseudopigrapha. They call them pseudopigrapha because nobody knows that that means forgery. So it doesn't sound as bad. And it's kind of funny because some of these scholars will talk about, first, Timothy as a pseudopigraphon. But they'll talk about a book outside the New Testament that claims to be written by Paul, as they call that a forgery. Well, why? It's the same thing. And in the ancient world I'll say that people also considered this to be a form of lying. In fact, the common term for this kind of book by somebody claiming to be a famous person when they're not that person, the common term for that in the ancient world is Sudoi lie. These books are lies. So it doesn't mean the content's wrong and it doesn't mean that's incorrect or anything. The content could be fantastic, but the author is not who he says he is in the New Testament. The four Gospels are not those sorts of things. They're not forgeries or pseudopigrapha because Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the authors, don't claim to be Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And so when we talk about a forgery or a pseudopigraphon, we're talking about a false authorial claim, an author claiming to be someone other than he is. And so if somebody writes anonymously, like the author of Hebrews, for example, doesn't claim to be anyone, and so he's not lying about it, doesn't make any claim. But there are authors who make pseudo epigraphic claims. And there are other books that were accepted into the New Testament because church fathers were convinced that certain people wrote them and they were given titles with their names in those books. And so, for example, the book of Second John, first and Second and Third John, they don't claim to be written by somebody named John. And so church father said they were written by John. And so it's not the author's fault, necessarily. So I wouldn't call those four trees myself. This question is, are there any letters or epistles in the New Testament that are actually written by the author who's claimed to be their author, other than the seven letters of Paul? And the answer is no, in my judgment. On top of the six Pauline letters that are disputed, you have James and first and Second Peter, 1st, 2nd, 3rd John, and those are the letters, and none of them were written by those people. Probably. I give an extended evaluation of why that is. These are not particularly unusual views among scholars, even though many don't talk about it much. But I give explanations for why we don't think that the book of James was really written by James, the brother of Jesus, or why we don't think Second Peter was written by Second Peter. And about some of these, there are debates. Some scholars would say that James wrote James. Some scholars would say that Peter wrote first. Peter? But I wrote two books on this one called Forged. Why? The Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are was the subtitle they gave to it. And the other book is called Forgery and Counter Forgery the Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. That book is heavy hitting scholarship. So if you want to see the real story, you can go there. As it turns out, I think the only book that is probably written by somebody who calls himself his actual name is the Book of Revelation. It's written by some guy named John, but he doesn't say which John he is, and he certainly wasn't John, the son of Zebedee, but he doesn't claim to be John, the son of Zebedee. In fact, in his book, he appears to see John, the son of Zebedee and he doesn't look sounds like he's looking at himself. So I think Revelation might be considered to be an authentic book and authentic in terms of authorship and the seven Paulines otherwise known. Okay, next question. Very different. Did Jesus die on a torture stake or a cross? I've done some digging and found that the Greek word stauros means torture steak. Is that right? So I guess even torture steak isn't unambiguous since you can torture people various ways on steaks. Torture steaks were used in some rather hideous ways in the ancient world for impalement, which was different from crucifixion, where they drive the stake through parts of the body and leave the body hanging there. That may be what this questioner has in mind. There are certain groups within Christianity today, the Jehovah's Witnesses, who do not think that Jesus died on a cross, but on a stake. A stake would be a single upright and a cross would have a cross being in the shape of a t, and that would be a cross. So what do we know about this? The word stauros could mean either it could mean either a torture stake or could mean an upright with a perpendicular cross beam. Which did Jesus die on? It appears that the Romans used crosses. It appears that they did not impale people. Appears they used crosses with crossbeams. My reason for thinking so is that we don't actually ever have a description of what Jesus'cross looked like. We don't have literary accounts. You would not expect this. It's unusual and interesting and most people don't know this. We don't have any description of how they crucified people in terms of what the actual technique was. There appears to have been a variety of techniques. According to Josephus, when the general of the Romans, Titus, overthrew Jerusalem during the war that ended in the year 70, the soldiers who had captured Judeans coming out of the city would crucify them in front of the walls, putting them in very unusual shapes, nailing them in OD postures in order to mock them and to terrify the people inside. It's normally thought, though, that people were tied or nailed to the crossbeam and the upright would hold it up. We don't know how they kept the upright up, but there are various ways you could imagine them doing it, or you've seen movies. You can see ways the directors imagine them doing it. Why do I think is in the cross and not a single uprise? Because when people describe crosses, they don't describe crucifixion, but they describe what the cross looks like. A cross looks like they describe it by saying that it looks like a mast of a ship or it looks like the shape of the face, like this, like the eyes going one way and the nose going the other way. And so they describe it as a T type figure. Moses. When Moses was standing up, according to one of our early Christian authors, he was preventing a battle down below, and he had his arm stretched out at his side, and it was the sign of the cross. So it looks like that's what it roman. When the Roman emperor Constantine made this labarus, the labarrus was this image that he had seen in the sky, apparently, that told him he was told he needed to make a design for this so that he'll win his battles. He makes it, and we actually know what it looks like. It was in the shape of a cross, and by the cross, he will conquer. And so I think he does have a cross beam. Okay. All right, next question. Can you okay, what can be said what can be said about Jesus views on slavery based on the parables of the Gospels, including slaves, servants, for example, the parable of the talents, the parable of the unforgiving servant, the parable of the master, and the servant. Can these parables be considered as part of the original text of the Gospels? The last part of this is the easy part. Yes. These are originally in the Gospels. There are no manuscripts that are lacking them. There are no reasons for thinking these were not original. They almost definitely were original. Is it slave or is it servant? When Jesus tells these parables and when he talks about people who are slaves or servants, he uses the term in the New Testament, the Greek word is dulos, and that's the word for slave. It is not the word for servant. These are not people who are being employed. There are people who are owned. Slavery in the Roman world was different in many significant ways from slavery in antebellum south here. It was not race based. It was a more structured system in a sense that slaves could be at a number of different kinds of social levels. Some slaves were just sent off to the mines where they might the salt mines where they might last a month or two under hard labor. There were others who were highly educated, tutors to the aristocratic elite kids. And so you have people who are philosophers, who are slaves, and you have people who are just really just really going through it and suffering horribly. But they were owned. Slaves were owned, and Jesus talks about slaves. Jesus never condemns slavery, but we can't really blame him for that too much, because we don't have anybody in the ancient world who condemns even apparently it wasn't even thought about as a moral problem because it had always been the case that some people were slaves and some aren't, just as today. Some people are born very poor in very rough neighborhoods, and in 2000 years people are saying, why they had enough money in the world. Why were they letting these people suffer like that? I don't know. People just do let them suffer like that. Why do you have slaves? I don't know. They just nobody. It was never condemned in early as Christianity, but it wasn't condemned in Roman and Greek moral philosophy either. And it was simply the way that world ran. Rome and Greece both were slave economies, and apart from the slaves, nobody objected. Slaves often would object, but slaves had ways of buying their freedom, for example, and slaves could improve their lot, and sometimes slaves were paid. It was a very different kind of institution, but it was still ownership of a human by another human. Okay, next question. Can you please explain why Paul did not seek any information about the Jesus of the flesh, that is, the human Jesus? You, meaning me, have written that Paul quotes only three of Jesus'teachings. It's astonishing to me that he did not want to know about Jesus at the same time as he's becoming the leading interpreter of Jesus. So why didn't Paul try to find out more information? It's a very good question. It's complicated though, on a lot of levels. One is we don't know how much information he actually had. And even more, we have no idea what he asked for by way of information. So the question presupposes that Paul did not seek more information, but I don't know how much information he sought. We have no indication. What we do have an indication of is what he says. All we have are seven letters. And in those seven letters, Paul explicitly quotes Jesus three times. And it's all in the same letter. It's one Corinthians, chapter seven, chapter nine, and chapter eleven. In each of those three chapters, Paul quotes Jesus and says he's quoting Jesus. Nowhere else in his writings does he quote Jesus and say he's quoting Jesus. There may be passages where he's quoting Jesus and not saying he's quoting Jesus. You see what I mean, where he'll say something that is recorded as something that Jesus also said, or something close to it. And so it's possible that in those passages, like for example, where both Paul and Jesus talk about how love your neighbor as yourself fulfills the law, paul says that in two places, in Galatians five and Romans 13, and Jesus is recorded as saying that in the Gospel of Mark. Is Paul quoting Jesus? He might be, but he doesn't say something like, well, as the Lord said, loving your neighbor fulfills the law. So we don't know if he's quoting Jesus, or if this is the kind of saying that's floating around that people said all the time, we don't know. Why doesn't Paul say more? We don't know why. It may be for the reason this questioner is assuming that Paul didn't know anymore and he didn't want to know anymore. It's possible, as the questioner points out, it'd be a little bit OD, but OD things happen. There are ways of imagining why Paul doesn't quote more. Other reasons. One reason often deduced is that Paul's letters were all written to deal with specific situations in his churches where the people he converted were facing problems about what to believe, about how to behave, and Paul's dealing with their problems. He's not writing a gospel. He's not trying to record every saying of Jesus he's ever heard. He's writing to deal with problems in his churches. When I write emails, I usually don't quote Jesus either, but I mean, I could just like there's no reason for me to. And so some people say that may be part of the explanation and it might be part of the explanation. I will say, though, that those three occasions when Paul does quote Jesus, he quotes him because quoting Jesus adds authority to what he wants to say. In one Corinthians, chapter seven, he wants to tell people they shouldn't get a divorce. And he quotes Jesus to say don't get a divorce to support his view. In chapter nine, he wants to tell people, the Christians in Corinth that they need to pay their pastors. And he quotes Jesus to tell that a workman is worthy of his hire. And in chapter eleven, he's trying to tell the people in Corinth that they need to observe the Lord's Supper the way it was meant to be observed. And he quotes Jesus at the Last Supper. So when he wants to, he can quote Jesus to support a point of his because it buttresses his authority. Given that, it's kind of surprising he doesn't quote him anywhere else because he says a lot of things that Jesus also talks about and doesn't quote Him, even though it's an effective tool that he uses sometimes. So one explanation is he didn't know, you know, that's kind of quoted what he knew, so that's possible. Another option is these are all kind of related to each other. But another option is Paul was so focused on Jesus'death and resurrection that the teachings of Jesus simply were not that important to him. What mattered to Paul was that Jesus died on the cross and got raised from the dead. That's what salvation is about. And so Paul tells the Corinthians earlier in the letter that when he was converting them, when he was with them at the beginning, he and his companions, we knew nothing among you except for Christ and him crucified. That's what they were interested in, the crucifixion. And then obviously the resurrection of Jesus, that's what matters. For salvation. So possibly Paul doesn't talk about Jesus teachings because he just doesn't think they're really the thing that matters much. So I don't know the answer. I mean, I don't know the answer. I suspect it might be a combination of all those things. People think Paul must have known more. He spent two weeks with Cephas and James in Jerusalem. Cephas, Peter's right hand man, and James, his brother. I mean, if he spent two weeks with them, probably weren't just talking about the weather, right? I mean, surely he would have found out something about Jesus. He's worshiping Jesus. You would think he asked something and yeah, you would expect that. I would expect that, but I don't know if it happened or not. Paul went to Jerusalem to consult with them not to find out about Jesus. He thought he already knew about Jesus. Jesus had appeared to him and had commissioned him to preach to the Gentiles. And that's all Paul on one level needed to know. He went to Jerusalem to get them to back his mission. He wanted their backing, and that's why he goes to Jerusalem, not to learn about Jesus. But still, you would think that something would come up. Oh, yeah, one time Jesus and I mean, surely you would think so. I don't know. I don't know the answer, why he doesn't say more, but I think these are possibly contributing factors. Okay, next question. I've been studying the Apocalypse of Peter quite a bit, and I desire to understand its historical and cultural impact more on early Christianity. Generally, when we speak of a church father who quoted and used it, we think of Clement of Alexandria. Probably most people don't think of Clement, Alexandria in connection with Apocalypse of Peter, but that would be because most people don't really think about the Apocalypse of Peter or Clement of Alexandria. But okay, he's right. When people are knowledgeable about this, they say, yeah, Clement of Alexandria mentions it. I was wondering if you happen to know other significant church fathers who also used the book The Apocalypse of Peter as an authoritative resource and or scripture. Okay, so let me give you some background. This has been a favorite book of mine for a long time from outside the New Testament, a book that almost made it into the New Testament, the Apocalypse of Peter. It is the account well, let me put it this way. We have three apocalypses of Peter from outside the New Testament. I pointed out that we have all these books in the New Testament where people claim to be someone they're not or that somebody attributes to somebody who didn't write it well outside of the New Testament that practice proliferates, especially books that claim to be written by apostles. We have a gospel of Peter. We have a letter of Peter to James. We have a preaching of Peter. We have a number of books of Peter, including three different apocalypses by Peter. Allegedly, none of these books was written by Peter. But in any event, this Apocalypse of Peter claims to be written by Peter. And this particular one that this person's asking about is an account of Peter and the disciples talking to Jesus after his resurrection. Jesus wanting to explain what's going to happen at the end of time, and then Peter asking Jesus to let him know about the fates of the wicked and the righteous. And Jesus giving Peter a guided tour of heaven and hell. And so the account describes the tortures of those in hell and the glories of those in heaven. Fascinating book. It was written in the early second century, so not long after most of the New Testament books were written, it claims to be written by Peter. Its description of the tortures in hell are much more graphic and detailed and frankly, interesting to most readers than the glories of heaven, in part because what can you say? People are having a great time up there. It's fantastic. I mean, great sights, great smells, great things to do. What do you say? It's great. But the torments in hell, he goes and he describes a series of punishments, different punishments for different sins, and he describes these in graphic detail. The point of this book is pretty obvious when you read it. He's trying to tell people that if you want the glories of heaven and you don't want to be tormented forever, you better stop sinning. And so it's kind of a pretty straightforward message. This book was thought early on in Christian history, early centuries, by many people, to be part of the Christian Scriptures. Our first list of books of the New Testament by somebody who thinks, okay, these are the books that are Christian scripture, is a book called the Muratorian Fragment. It's called the Muratorian Fragment because it was discovered by an Italian scholar called Muratori, so they call it after him. He discovered this thing. It's written in Latin, and it's a copy of a Greek original Greek composition. And it lists the books that this unknown author, this anonymous author, writing around the year 180 or so, probably the end of the second century, probably this author thought, these are the books of the Christian Scriptures. He has the four Gospels, and he has the Book of Acts. He has most of Paul's letters. He's got most of what we those bits of the New Testament. But he has other books too, including both the Apocalypse of John, the Book of Revelation, and the Apocalypse of Peter. But he says there are some people who don't think we should read the Apocalypse of Peter. And so he's saying that he thinks it's in the canon, but not everybody agrees with him after that. We do. To get Clement of Alexandria around the year 200, he was a famous teacher and thinker and writer Christian in Alexandria, Egypt. He wrote many books and. We know from another source that he wrote a commentary on every book that was in his New Testament that he thought was part of the New Testament. And he included The Apocalypse of Peter as one of those books. We also quotes in writings of his that we do have. He does quote the Apocalypse of Peter on a couple of occasions and calls it Scripture. So that's him. So this question wants to know, are there others besides him who thought that it belonged? There are several others. I discussed this at length in my book, this book that came out a year or so ago called Journeys to Heaven and Hell. This is a book that describes these visits to Heaven and Hell, the guided tours of Heaven and Hell in early Christian sources. These are the earliest forerunners of Dante's Divine Comedy, the earliest Christian forerunners of Dante's Divine Comedy, one of which he knew he knew a book called The Apocalypse of Paul. Dante did. He knew the apocalypse of Paul. And the Apocalypse of Paul is largely based on this Apocalypse of Peter. This Apocalypse of Peter is our first example of this in Christian circles. There are other examples in Greek, Roman and Jewish circles of people being given tours of the afterlife. And my book is a study of these journey narratives. One of my chapters deals with why the Apocalypse of Peter did not make it into the New Testament when the book of Second Peter did. And the thing about Second Peter is, even today, this is the one book that virtually everybody says, yeah, Peter didn't write that. I mean, fundamentalists won't say that and conservative evangelicals won't. But just about everyone else, my beloved professor Bruce Metzger, who's very conservative theologically in many ways, a very pious and devout Christian, did not think Peter wrote Second Peter. The evidence is just way too overwhelming. And even in early Christianity, the guy I wrote my dissertation on didymus the blind in the fourth century flat out said that Second Peter is a forgery. The interesting thing is that Second Peter, in the first three centuries, nobody thought of it as the Bible. But starting in the fourth century, it became part of the New Testament. And the Apocalypse of Peter was the opposite. It started out with the people who knew it were calling it Scripture, but in the fourth century, it got creamed. And my chapter is about why it happened. Why did those two things reverse themselves? Why did second Peter get in but not the Apocalypse of Peter? So in that I evaluate every reference we have to The Apocalypse of Peter by other authors. And there's some interesting ones. I'll give you a couple here. There's a opponent of Christianity named Porphyry. He was one of the most brilliant enemies of Christianity. He was a pagan philosopher who was influential on emperors. And he was boy. Yeah, he was the real deal philosopher. And he wrote an attack on Christianity. We have parts of it. And one of the things he did is he attacked the Christian scriptures as being nonsense. And he had read them. He read the Gospels, he read Paul, and he talked about how completely wrong they were about everything in detail. So he does this with the Gospels and with the Book of Acts and with Paul and with the Apocalypse of Peter. He doesn't do the rest of the New Testament. He doesn't do Hebrews or James or second, Peter doesn't do the Book of Revelation. He does the apocalypse of Peter. He thinks that's the Christian Bible, the Gospels acts Paul and the Apocalypse of Peter. Okay, that's interesting. Second century going back to the second century, this author okay, sozeman in the fifth century, we have a church father named Sozaman who writes a church history, writes a history of early Christianity, where he says that in his day in the fifth century, the Apocalypse of Peter is being read by the monks of Palestine on Good Friday. Okay, so these people were treating it as a scriptural text for the worship services. Back to the third century. We have a church father named Methodius who was an influential church father in his day Methodius. He quotes the Apocalypse of Peter a couple of times and declares it to be scripture and so forth and so on. By the fourth century, most people are saying no. But early on, people thought, yes. And so what I argue in my book is that the reason it ended up being excluded is because in its original edition in its original edition, we have several later editions that survive now. But in its original edition, the author declared that when Christ died, he went down to Hades and he evacuated it. He took everyone there up to Heaven. Christ was so powerful that death could not defeat him. Hades could not defeat him. The devil could not defeat him. Sin could not defeat him. Nothing could defeat his salvation took everyone to Heaven. The other church father? No, you cannot have everybody going to Heaven. There got to be some people tortured down there. Sorry. So they wouldn't include the book. Okay, I try to argue that in my study. All right, next question. I'm curious about Jesus'last words. When he's crucified in the Gospel of John in the other three gospels, his last words have significance to the writer's story or message. What do scholars think it is finished means in John's context, those are Jesus'last words. In John. It is finished. And she wants to know what does it mean in that context? The following sentence, she says, appears to be dosetic when the writer says, Jesus bowed his head and gave up his spirit. Are the two related? Okay, so let me just explain the question a little bit. First of all, the thing about it being dosetic, as you may know, the heresy called Docetism was declared a heresy. In early Christianity, it was the view that Jesus was so much God that he could not be a human being. God Christ is god cannot suffer. God can't suffer physical pain. So Jesus only seemed to be a human. He only seemed to suffer and die in the ancient world. And even some modern scholars have two ways of explaining that view. One way, I think we shouldn't call Docetism, and the other I think we should call docitism. The way that I think true dosetism says that Jesus didn't really have a flesh and blood body. He was a Phantasm, didn't really have a flesh and blood, he only seemed to have that's where the word daque from where Dosetic comes, doketo means to seem or to appear. And so he just seemed to be a human. That's what some heretics teaching false teachings said in early Christianity. Another view that was more popular, especially among gnostic Christians, was that there was a man Jesus who was flesh and blood. But the divine Christ came into him at some point, say at his baptism. Christ entered into the man Jesus and empowered Him to do his miracles and to deliver his spectacular teachings. And then at the end, the divine Christ left the man Jesus to die alone. And so Christ appeared to suffer. So sometimes that is called docitism. Still today I don't like calling it docitism because it confuses it. Because one thing is where Jesus is a Phantasm and the other is where Jesus and Christ are two separate things. So I call one thing docitism and I call the other thing separationism. This person is saying look, it looks like in John Jesus says it's finished and he gives up his spirit. It sounds like the Spirit has left him now. And that sounds like kind of that separationist docitism. And she wants to know what do scholars think it actually means it is finished in this context, in John's context, let me say the other gospels, of course, they do not say it is finished. People have, many of you have heard of the seven last words of the dying Jesus. That's a phrase people use, the seven last words of the dying Jesus. And the idea is that while on the cross, Jesus says seven things. The way you get to those seven things, it happens to be the perfect number in the Bible. Of course, the way you get to those seven things is by taking what he says in Mark, what he says in Matthew, what he says in Luke, what he says in John, and smashing them all together. So he says all seven things, which you can do. You can do that. But this questioner has an astute point that when you don't do that but you just see what each gospel has Jesus say at the end, it's something different. And it paints a very different picture of Jesus. For example, the only words of Jesus. In Mark's gospel, the only thing he says on the cross is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And he dies forsaken whoa. You don't get that in Luke. In Luke, Jesus doesn't say that. In Luke, instead of saying that Jesus says, Father, into your hands I commend my spirit, well, that's quite different from being forsaken. You put the two together then, and you end up with like, I guess he doesn't mean either thing. I don't know what he means. It's confused. It's confused. And in John, he doesn't say either of those things or any of the other things he said to have said in John. At the end he says it is finished. What does John mean by that? In John's gospel, the overarching view of Jesus is that he came from God above, that he came from Heaven, that he was a divine being who was with God before he became a human, before, in fact there was any humanity at all before the world at all. He was a divine being. There is a word of God that was a divine being that created the world. And that word that created the world, that was the divine being, became the human Jesus. He came to Earth as an incarnate being, a divine being in the flesh, so that he could preach the message that would bring salvation. That if people would believe that he's the one who came from above, that he's the one who gives salvation, if they believe that they will have eternal life, that's his mission on Earth. I have come that you might know the truth, and the truth might set you free. When Jesus and John says it is finished, it's an entirely appropriate thing for him to say in that context. He's had a mission during his incarnation, and now it's over. His mission is done, and now he will return. Whence he came, he'll return to the Father. When it says he gave up his spirit, that's simply a euphemism for he died. It doesn't literally mean that he's being separated at that point. It means now he has died. It's like we say, he breathed his last breath. You say something like that, it means he died. So giving up the spirit means that. Okay, good question. Right. Moving on to the next excuse me. Do you think the Gospel of Matthew was written to be a completely separate gospel from Mark? Or is it possible that Matthew was just copying Mark and changing it to say what he wanted it to say in order to distribute it and replace the original Gospel of Mark? Good question. This is what I think, and I think the basic outlines of what I think are pretty much what most scholars think, which is this mark was one of Matthew's sources. Matthew had a copy of Mark available to him. It's not clear if the copy of Mark he had available to him is exactly like the copy of Mark we have today. Surely it was different in some ways, but we don't know how. But he has entire episodes that are exactly like Mark's. He has sentences that are word for word the same as Mark in Greek. And so he's copying Mark. And there are reasons I won't go into here for thinking Mark didn't copy Matthew, but Matthew copied Mark, and that Luke also copied Mark. But Matthew and Luke are much longer than Mark. They have a number of incidents not found in Mark, and they especially have a number of sayings of Jesus parables, for example, and one line sayings, and a number of stories, birth narratives and so forth, that they have that Mark did not have. So Mark was being copied by Matthew. Matthew was copying Mark, but he wasn't just copying it. If Matthew had been happy with how Mark presented Jesus'life and death and resurrection, he would have just made a copy of Mark and distributed that. He wanted to put a different spin on it, and he wanted to add material. And he did both things. He added material. He took away some stories, some sayings and stories, and he took some, and he altered them in ways to transform their meaning or their sense for how they're to be understood. He rearranged the order of a number of stories. So he was taking Mark and rewriting it with new material. And so the question is, what was his goal in that? I think he did think that his gospel was superior to Mark's, probably. I mean, I would assume so. It's hard to think otherwise. Otherwise he wouldn't have done it. And I think he probably did think that his gospel was the one that ought to be read. They lived in different communities almost certainly. They almost certainly didn't know each other. Matthew got a copy of this gospel, Mark, and then made his own gospel for his own community, probably thinking that this is a better account than Luke did the same thing somewhere else. And John, it's not clear to me at all that he knew the other three, but John's kind of doing his own thing somewhere else. And so I think he did mean for it to replace Mark within his own community, but I doubt if he went on a rampage burning copies of Mark or anything like that. As it turns out, both were preserved, and both then made it. Okay, next question. I remain fascinated by the paricope adultere. There we go. That's the story of the woman taken in adultery in John, chapters seven and eight. That's where Jesus says, let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her. And all of the accusers of this adulterous woman leave, apparently because of their shame. And Jesus says, there's no one left to condemn you. She says, no, Lord. No one. And neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more. The Jewish leaders have caught this woman committing adultery and they've dragged her in front of Jesus to set a trap to see whether he'll forgive her or urge them to stone her. Because if he urges them to stone her, then he's breaking his own teachings about love and mercy and forgiveness. But if he teaches to forgive her, then he's breaking the law of Moses. So they're setting a trap and Jesus gets out of it, as he always does. And so this questioner is saying, I remain fascinated by the paricope adultereye. Many additions to the Gospels appear to be related to theological questions. Like when somebody ascribe for example, might add a story or change something. Often this person often is for some kind of theological reason. But the story of the woman taken in adultery seems less obviously related to any hotly debated topic. So do we know why it was added? And could it have come from some non canonical gospel text that was floating around? Could there be some other gospel that had it in it, that whoever inserted it into John took it from some other gospel? Or was it a free floating story? And then the question ends by saying, is there any evidence of the canonical Gospels ever borrowing from extant non canonical Christian texts? I'll answer that last one first. So the question to unpack this for you, he's asking, do Matthew, Mark and Luke and John ever take a story that we know about from some other surviving Christian account of Jesus? That they've borrowed something from some other surviving account? The answer there is no. The four Gospels of the New Testament are the earliest we have. The other gospels are all later. So by definition, the gospel writers of the New Testament could not be borrowing from them. But he's asking the two questions, really, what's the point of the story? Why did somebody add it? And secondly, could it have been from a non canonical gospel text? So there's been a lot written on this story. For those of you who are not aware, this is a story that scholars are virtually unanimous in saying was not originally in the Gospel of John. This is a story that was added later. The acceptance of this is so unanimous that this is a view I had when I was a fundamentalist Christian. I knew it was added. I didn't even try to save this one. It was like, this is not in the manuscripts until much. And so there are lots of reasons for knowing that it was not original to John. Translators sometimes include it still in their translations, even though they know it's not originally in John. They do that because they want people to buy their translation. They know people are going to be upset if they don't put the story in it's. The most famous story about Jesus in the Gospels. You find it in every Hollywood movie. You got to have this in there. And so they'll often put it in. They might put in brackets or they might put in a footnote. They'll do something to get it in there. So the person saying, Why was it added? Because it doesn't seem to be solving any theological problem. I think the reason it was added was because a scribe of some sort someplace was interested in what was happening in the context of this account. In John chapter seven. If you read John chapter seven very carefully, there are a couple of stories that are directly related to the need to deliver judgment that is righteous and not to judge people unfairly and to show mercy. Whoever put this in, I think read was reading this in the context and remembered a story that he had heard that illustrated this point being made in the context and possibly put the story in the margin of a manuscript. He's copying the Gospel of John and maybe that story, and he writes the story out in the margin. And then maybe the next scribe comes along and looks at that manuscript, sees the story in the margin, says, oh, this guy left out his story. He had to put it in the margin. Okay, I'm going to put it in now. So he puts it in the margin, then he puts it in the text. Then that manuscript is copied, and that manuscript is copied until pretty soon all the copies of John have the story in it. I think something like that has probably happened, and it's put in because the story illustrates the importance for righteous. And just so I think that's what's going think. I don't think it's a historically authentic story. I don't think it really happened. There are huge problems with this story. One of my favorite problems with this story is kind of the obvious one that many people haven't noticed, which is this woman was caught in the act of adultery, and she's supposed to be stoned to death. Both people are supposed to be stoned to death if she was caught in the act, where's the guy a little more patriarchy than you want in this one. There are lots of problems with this story. But anyway, that's why I think it was added. Did it come from some other gospel? I don't know. I'd say there's no way to know. It's not found in any surviving gospels. But I will say that my guy that I mentioned earlier didymus the blind writing in the fourth century Alexandrian church father in the fourth century. He's the first church father who appears explicitly to refer to this story. And he says that it's found in many gospels. I mean, he's writing 300 years after the Gospel of John, but still, maybe it was in a number of gospels. There's some indication it may have been in a gospel that is known as the Gospel of the Hebrews, which we just have small quotations, so maybe got from or maybe just heard the story or something else. Okay. Right, here's a question that will take all hour. Now that I have ten minutes, I've been wondering about the origin of the thoughts within Gnosticism. I know it's an umbrella term, but since all the Gnostics seem to share at least the idea of esoteric knowledge, they must have had a common origin. So where did they come from before Christianity? Were there precursor undercurrents in Judaism or in some of the Grecoroven religions? Okay, so I'm not going to be able to describe Gnosticism here. Just my lecture giving the basics of Gnosticism to my undergraduates takes 50 minutes, and so let alone where it came from. What I will say is that Gnosticism is called that after the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis. G-N-O-S-I-S gnosis. Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge. Gnosticism refers to a large number of religions, only some of which we know about a number of religions, all of which that emphasize the importance of correct knowledge for salvation. There are some Gnostic groups that are probably non Christian, but there are Gnostic groups we know about that are clearly Christian, where Christ is the way of salvation, but it's not Christ's death and resurrection. Those don't matter for salvation if they happened for Gnostics. What matter for salvation are his teachings, his secret teachings that only Gnostics can understand. We have a group of Gnostic writings that were discovered in 1945, sometimes called the Gnostic Gospels. Scholars call them the Nog Hamadi Library because they were discovered near a village called Nog Hamadi in Egypt. They contain Gnostic writings. And so we have a pretty good idea of what at least these Gnostic authors thought about some things. The question is, where did they come from? When I was in graduate school in the, it was widely thought that Gnosticism may have originated before or alongside Christianity and that some books of the New Testament were influenced by the Gnostics. That view has come into disrepute over the last 30, 40, 50 years. So that now it is commonly thought, and I think correctly, that what we call Gnosticism is a development that does not show up in any kind of solid form until the second Christian century, maybe early part of the mid second century. That's when we start getting texts, and it looks like that's when it originates. I think there were predecessors that had similar views to Gnosticism before that. There were mystical groups, for example, that did Jewish mystics and some kind of Christian mystical groups. Probably the main component now that scholars think was important to Gnosticism, though, was not Christianity, but was middle Platonism, a form of philosophical thought. Platonic thought the thought of Plato that developed some 500 years after Plato, but it's based on Plato and Plato's idea that there's a differentiation between the world of the Spirit and the world of matter. And in middle Platonism, there are a number of tiers that kind of separate, that combine, that connect this material world with the spiritual world above. And so gnosticism is complicated. Middle Platonism is complicated. The answer to this question is that I think the majority of you now among scholars, is that middle Platonic thought helped create a syncretic form of religious and philosophical understanding. Syncretic means you're taking stuff from all sorts of different traditions. Various traditions are feeding in. And so you've got some Old Testament, you've got some New Testament, you got some teachings of Jesus, you got some middle Platonism, you got some mysticism, you got like, these things that kind of combine into these various forms of gnosticism. That was not a very satisfying answer to me anyway. Okay, next question. I recently saw it argued that Romans 16, in fact, may be from a separate letter of Paul that was written for some community other than Rome. How plausible do you think this is? Okay, good question. I haven't gotten this question for a long time. This is the kind of question makes me feel like I'm back in my PhD exams. This was one that's kind of debated back then. Romans 16, the book of Romans is Paul's longest letter. It's one of the undisputed letters written to the city of Rome, the Christians in Rome, a city that Paul's never visited. He tells in the letter, he says, I've always wanted to visit. I haven't been able to get there yet. He wants to come. He's writing his letter to get them to support him for the mission that he wants to take for the west to Spain. And so he wants their material, probably, and moral support. And so he's writing this letter to explain what he really believes, what he preaches, what his gospel message is, so that they'll get on board with him for his mission. Chapter 16. So the first eleven chapters are laying out Paul's understanding of his gospel message about how salvation was brought to Christ from Christ through his death and resurrection, and how that death and resurrection brought salvation to both Jew and Gentile. But even though Gentiles are in the church, they have not replaced Jews. Jews are still the people of God. So chapters one through eleven are all that chapters twelve through 15 are Paul's moral instructions, his ethical instructions, twelve through 15 based on his gospel message. And then chapter 16 is where he greets members in the congregation in Rome. Some people have argued that chapter 16 does not belong to the letter of the Romans, and there are a number of arguments that it does not belong. I'll give you two of them. One is that Paul had never been to this church. He greets over 25 people by name. How does he know all these people? He's never even been there. I mean, that seems weird. Secondly, chapter 15 ends with what sounds like the end of the letter. He says, Pray for me so that I might be delivered by the unbelievers when I go visit Judea, so that by God's will I may come to you with joy and be refreshed in your company. The God of peace be with you all. Amen. Sounds like the end of the letter, but then he says, I recommend to you our sister Phoebe, a deaconess of the Church of Centria. And then he starts naming people that he's greeting. It goes off for like 2026 names and he hasn't even been there. It has been argued that that was an additional from a different letter. And the theory that was around earlier, like 50 years ago, was that this actually came from a letter to the church in Ephesus. So another letter to the Ephesians, okay, that's been studied a lot. There was a book that came out probably in the late 70s by Harry Gamble, professor who's retired now from University of Virginia. I think he's retired a book devoted to this question. It was his dissertation at Yale where he showed convincingly this thing's originally part of Romans. The fact he hasn't been there. He knows a lot of people. The people he's greeting are people that he's met somewhere else. And so they're people who have worked with him before. Rome is the place that everybody went, and so he just happens to know a lot of people there. It would have been a big church and he knew a lot of them. Chapter 15 sounds like the end of a letter, but not necessarily that kind of benediction at the end. The request for prayer and the benediction with an amen at the end happened in other places in the middle of letters. It's not that unusual. So there are lots of reasons for things. This actually goes back to Paul, and I think it probably does. Okay, I have time for just one more question. This one says this person grew up from infancy in an active Christian church. In this church, they made no distinction between the terms son of God and Son of man. And the person said, I just thought they meant the same thing. But when I started reading the Bible critically, they appear to mean something different from each other. So my first question, why use two different terms for the same entity? Second question can you explain the difference? Right, okay. Well, the answer is they're not referring to the same. They mean different things. That doesn't mean they have to be applied to two different people. The word brother and the word son mean two different things, but you can apply them both to me. I'm both a brother and a son. So son of man and Son of God do mean different things. And the interesting thing is, in the ancient world, especially in earliest Christianity, they meant the opposite of what people tend to think they mean today. Later, as theology. Developed, especially getting into the third, the fourth 5th centuries, son of man. And Son of God meant son of man meant Jesus is a human son of man. Son of God. Jesus is divine. He's the Son of God. So son of man means humanity. Son of God means divinity. And it makes sense. I mean, a son of a dog is a dog and a son of a cat is a cat. So a son of a man is a man, right? And so son of God is a god. And so that makes sense. But that's not what they meant. Actually, in early Christianity and in fact, in earliest Christianity and in Jesus himself, the meanings are reversed. In ancient Judaism, Son of God was a way of talking about a human, and Son of man was a way of talking about a divine being. Ain't that confusing? But you can show it because in the Old Testament, the term Son of God is used for humans and it's used for beings who are not gods. For example, the King of Israel was called the Son of God. King Solomon, sinner that he was, was called the Son of God. God was his father. He was his son. The king is called Son of God. Hezekiah the Son of God. So it just meant that this is the person that God is using to manifest his will on earth. The king of his people, son of God, son of man, appears to be taken from a passage in the Book of Daniel, chapter seven, where the author of Daniel has this very wild vision of four beasts. Coming up. Out of the sea and one by one, taking over the earth and wreaking havoc on the earth, especially opposing the people of God, followed by instead of a beast, one like a Son of man who does not come from the Sea of Chaos but comes from the Heavenly Realm. He comes on the clouds of heaven. The four beasts are taken out of power, they're wiped out, and the Son of man is given control over the earth to inherit the earth. This was taken in Judaism, Jesus day, to refer to a divine cosmic judge who was coming from heaven and judgment on the earth. Jesus talked about the Son of man who was coming as the future judge. The later Christians after Jesus'death thought he was the future judge, and so they called him the Son of man. They also thought he was the future king, so they called him the Son of God. But over time, as those earlier Jewish notions disappeared, as most Christians were Gentile, they started saying Son of God means a divine being, son of man means a human being. And so that's what the terms probably meant in Jesus'day and then how the terms got changed. Okay, I'm going to stop there. I've enjoyed answering these questions. I had more that were also interesting. I'll be doing this again next month. I want to thank all of you who are Gold members for being Gold members. I hope that you enjoy the blog. I hope that you're finding it useful, and if you find ways that I can improve it, please let me know, because I want to make it as good as we can. Because obviously, one of the major goals we have is to raise money for charity. Me we've been doing that thanks to your donations, and I really very much appreciate it. Okay, till next time. Thanks. Bye.