Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Right. I guess it's five o'. Clock. Do you need to say anything, Jen, to get us going?
[00:00:04] Speaker B: No, just welcome everyone to our November Q and A. And as always, thank you all for the support of the blog.
I say it every time, but we couldn't do it without you, so we really appreciate it and thank you for submitting interesting questions. That always makes this fun when the questions are interesting. So I look forward to hearing you answer the questions from this month part.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: Okay, well, not only, not only couldn't we do it without you, you know, we wouldn't do it without you blog members, but we especially, especially appreciate you all being on this on the gold level because it, it makes a big difference for what we can do together.
So is my, is my volume okay?
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Your volume is okay. And I'll just remind everyone to stay muted throughout, otherwise we get lots of feedback that can be distracting. So just remember to keep yourself on mute.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:01:03] Speaker B: You sound great, Bart.
We don't want you mute. Bart.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: You don't want what?
[00:01:07] Speaker B: We don't want you to be muted.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: No, I do not want me to be muted. Okay, let me just go to my, my file. So we got, we got a bunch of questions this week, this month, and they were all, as Jen said, they're all good as, as always. And I'm not going to be able to answer all of them, but I'll get through as many as I can in the time we have and so.
Right.
So first question, Jen, is this recording, by the way?
[00:01:41] Speaker B: This is recording, yes.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Okay. All right, we're on record.
Good. All right. All right, first question. What are the grounds for claiming that the so called Son of man was understood to be an angel, divine cosmic figure who will arrive from heaven at the end of the age?
Why can't the phrase refer to a human being?
Which is how the phrase is used throughout the Hebrew Bible. And this person lists a number of verses from numbers, Job, Psalm, Isaiah 51, Ezekiel 2, 3, etc.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Namely, used in the Hebrew Bible as a human being chosen by God to execute judgment on humankind and have dominion over the world.
Several things about that.
In the Hebrew Bible, of course.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: There are several ways son of man gets used. And most of these passages are not about somebody chosen to execute judgment or have dominion over the world.
You know, you can just look it up. I mean, numbers 23, 19, job 25, 6, etc. Psalm 84.
But it's absolutely right that the word can refer simply to a human being instead of a divine cosmic being. And this person wants to know why doesn't it mean that when Jesus is saying it?
[00:03:01] Speaker A: It's a complicated question. As it turns out, as some of you know.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: There are entire books devoted to what Jesus means by the Son of Man.
And these books have different views.
Therefore there's a variety of views and views that one could have about this.
The, the phrase Son of man definitely can refer to simply a mortal human being.
It is used that way throughout, for example, throughout the book of Ezekiel.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Where it'll get translated in different ways, but it would be something like, you know, Ben Adam in, in Hebrew, son of, Son of a human, Son of man. And in Ezekiel, some translations will say oh mortal one. To emphasize that this is talking to Ezekiel, a mortal being as opposed to God, a divine being.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: The question is what it would mean in any particular context.
And I think almost everybody would agree that it means different things in different contexts. And so the issue is what does the term Son of Man mean in this context or another? And this question is asking about the early Christian tradition and I think specifically about what the historical Jesus was saying.
And so with that, some very basic background, which is that Jesus does use the term Son of Man. And he uses it in three different ways.
Two of them are pretty similar.
The first way, Jesus uses the term Son of Man simply as a self reference.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Where he says that foxes have lairs and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head, referring to himself that he's an itinerant and he doesn't have a home because he's an itinerant preacher.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: So that's one usage, just as a self reference by Jesus. Second reference is a, is also a second kind, is a self reference as well. But in this case it is a specific reference to Jesus having to suffer. The Son of Man must go to Jerusalem and be rejected by the scribes and the elders and be executed and then raised from the dead. Says Jesus says that there are three passion predictions like that in Mark and in Matthew, four of them in Luke. And so sometimes he uses the term Son of Man to refer to himself as the one who has to suffer.
There are other passages in the Gospels where Jesus is talking about a cosmic figure who's coming on judgment over the earth.
Whoever is ashamed of me, says Jesus, in this sinful and adulterous generation of that person, the Son of Man will be ashamed when he comes on the clouds of heaven in the presence of the holy angels.
And so in that case he's talking about some kind of figure coming from Heaven.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: In judgment on the earth, and that people who reject Jesus and his teachings will be rejected by this Son of Man.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: So scholars, as I've said, have debated what the usage is in each case, and it's usually agreed that Jesus does talk of himself as the Son of Man, both as one in his current existence and in his need to suffer.
The issue is the third category, where he refers to the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven.
And the interesting thing about those references, the one I just quoted you is from Mark 8, 38.
And so you can just read it.
He says that right before he says that the kingdom of God will come in power.
While some of the disciples are still alive, it seems to be indicating that the Son of Man will come in destruction of those who are opposed to Jesus and bring in a good kingdom for those who are in support of Jesus.
The thing about that third category of sayings is that if you just look at those sayings as freestanding sayings, as they almost certainly were, the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels are put into their particular context depending on where the gospel writer wanted to put these sayings.
And so you'll have a number of sayings in Matthew that are also Luke, but they're always in different places. The Gospel writers are deciding where to put these.
When you see these sayings, just in isolation, before they get put in their context, these Son of man saying as the coming from heaven, there's no indication Jesus is talking about himself.
Whoever is ashamed of me, of that person, the Son of Man, will be ashamed.
If you didn't already think that Jesus was the Son of Man, you wouldn't think that he's talking about himself.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: That's why I think that those sayings go back to Jesus.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: The followers of Jesus after his death, thought he was the judge of the earth who was coming from heaven.
The second coming of Jesus, the return of Jesus, these sayings don't indicate that.
And it looks like he's not talking about himself. So I think he really said those things. And the later disciples then started saying, oh, he's the one who's coming.
This understanding of Jesus is a cosmic figure who will judge the earth is based on Daniel 7, 13, 14.
You can look that up where the prophet Daniel has a vision of the future of earth in which a future. There are going to be future rulers of the earth who are portrayed as wild beasts, who are then overwhelmed by the one like a Son of man who comes from heaven.
And this came to be an apocalyptic understanding that God would send a judge of the earth.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: Jen, could you go ahead and mute everyone else if you could? Thanks.
And so this usage of the Son of Man as a cosmic figure is found in other apocalypse, other apocalyptic texts, including most notably the book of first Enoch, which is not in the Bible, but it was a widely read text among Jews in the days of Jesus. And so my view is that that's what Jesus is talking about himself, that later his disciples thought that he was the one who was coming in judgment. And then they started attributing other sayings to him where he talked about himself as the son of a.
Okay, well, that was kind of a long answer. It would take a much longer one to satisfy anybody. Question number two. If Luke, in other words, the author of Luke hats, was so heavily influenced and supportive of Paul, why is his idea of salvation so different from Paul's? As you've noted, Paul's Gospel presents an atonement based salvation, while Luke's salvation is forgiveness dates.
And so this is a very interesting phenomenon. I don't think that it's been widely noticed, certainly among most readers, it isn't even widely noticed among most scholars who study these texts that Luke actually has a doctrine of salvation that does not appear to have the atonement. In other words, for Luke, the death of Jesus is not for the sins of others.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: Jesus does have to die.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: And when people realize that this innocent man has been put to death, this prophet of God who, whom God has sent to preach his word, that people have killed him, they, they realize the great sin in the world, they recognize their own sin, they repent, they turn back to God and God forgives them.
It's not that Jesus death is an atonement that pays for their sins.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: But Paul and virtually all the other authors of the New Testament do understand Jesus death as an atonement.
And so the question is, why would Luke, who has Paul as his hero in the book of Acts, portray Paul's message of salvation and Luke's own message of salvation different from Paul's?
[00:11:32] Speaker A: And so the first thing I'll say it again is that most people don't notice this, but if you read Luke and Acts, you'll see there's not atonement language.
People are forgiven by God when they repent.
It does seem weird that the one author that we know had Paul as his hero misrepresents Paul's own view on this.
[00:11:55] Speaker A: And so why would that be? Well, the author of Luke Acts appears to be writing about 25 years or so after Paul.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: There's nothing in Luke or Acts to suggest that. I, I think there's no firm evidence at all that this author had read the letters of Paul that we have where Paul emphasizes atonement.
But you think, well, how could he, how could he possibly get it wrong? And so I think it's the same thing as why do most people today misunderstand, get it wrong? And both in terms of the are lots and lots of people in the world, 2 billion people in the world who worship Jesus and very few of them actually.
[00:12:38] Speaker A: Know what Jesus probably actually taught, like what his main message was.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: I mean, just, it's just kind of the reality. And most people misunderstand what Paul was talking about, even though they read Paul.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: And so if people today who are faithful followers of Jesus and devoted to Paul misunderstand what Jesus taught, well, Paul said, well, it's not that weird that somebody else in the ancient world did too.
In fact, we have lots of evidence that there were people in the ancient world who took Paul's teachings and misunderstood them. And this is a frequent complaint. Paul makes the complaint two, Peter makes the complaint about Paul.
We know of second century church fathers who are interpreting Paul in ways that are just not what Paul himself said. And so it just kind of happens.
But it does seem weird that it'd be loose, Luke in particular, because Paul's his hero. But he seems either not to have understood Paul's doctrine of atonement or to have disagreed with it and subtly changed it.
Okay, if you want to see that, just look at in the Book of Acts, read Paul's speeches. When he's converting people, what does he say to convert people? He never says that Jesus died for your sins.
[00:14:01] Speaker A: Even though that's the thrust of his own message in his writings.
Okay, there it is.
All right, question number three, another Paul question. Why was Paul so accepting of the pagan practice of speaking in tongues in Corinth? He was not so accepting of other pagan practices such as eating food offered to idols, etc.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: Okay, good question.
I would say first off that I don't think that speaking in tongues is necessarily a, a pagan practice.
It's a practice that you can find in a wide range of religious circles even today.
It is a cross cultural phenomenon and it is usually taken to indicate that the person who is speaking these tongues is inspired by God or by a God or by a divine spirit.
[00:14:53] Speaker A: Speaking in tongues was a kind of a miraculous event.
And I would say it's no more pagan than, for example, healings. Healing miracles are pagan.
Certainly the Early Christians knew about healing miracles, and you have healing miracles throughout pagan traditions as well.
You have pagan and Jewish traditions about.
[00:15:17] Speaker A: People casting out demons.
That doesn't make it a pagan tradition. Just it's how religions talk about religious people is that they can do things like they can heal people, they can cast out demons, they can speak in tongues.
[00:15:31] Speaker A: And so I don't think that this was seen as taking over a pagan tradition.
I'll also say that I don't think eating food offered to idols was a pagan tradition per se. I mean, it's true the pagans did eat food offered to idols, but eating food to idols was not a pagan religious practice.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: It was simply what people did if they wanted to eat meat.
Because there weren't butchers in the ancient world, except for priests in temples. If you're going to kill an animal, you offer it up to a God.
And if you do a public sacrifice where you take a. Say, you know, you take a sheep and you take it to the temple for a sacrifice to a God, then the. You would eat it afterwards, but there would be meat left over and the priest then would sell it, and that's how people would buy meat.
And so it wasn't that eating this meat was a religion practice. It was so much as it was simply how you got meat to eat.
And so the issue with Paul was that some Christians thought it was okay in Corinth to eat this meat.
They were saying, look, we're not participating in the worship of other gods.
These idols are not really gods. They're just wood and stone statues. So it's perfectly fine to eat this meat.
And other Christians in Corinth said, no, actually, you're participating in pagan worship because this meat was offered to a divine being who's not true God. And so you're worshiping another God. Paul actually agreed that these other gods don't exist.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: And so he thought technically it was fine to eat the meat, but he told the Corinthians not to do it, in part because other Corinthians thought it was wrong.
And if you eat meat and they see you doing it, they think it's wrong, but they do it anyway because it's like, you know, maybe they'll be violating their own conscience.
And so just don't eat the meat, says Paul.
Okay, next question. Do sociopolitical factors in early Christian communities, for example, persecution or heresy disputes, show up in textual variants?
And the answer to that is yes.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: My.
The first book that I wrote that was not a book for just New Testament technicians in Greek manuscripts was my book Orthodox Question of Scripture.
That book was all about how disputes over Christology, about whether Christ was fully human or whether he was God or whether he was two beings. One is like both a divine being and human being, but two separate being. Or like how you understand Christ, how those disputes affected scribes who changed their texts in places in order to make sure that people understood, readers understood that Christ was God and he was human, but he wasn't two beings, he was one person.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: And so there are a number of theological variants in our textual tradition where scribes change their texts to emphasize their own theological views and sometimes change their text in order to prevent what they saw as a misreading of the text to support some other views. So that was. So I published that book in 1993, and I do some of that in my book Misquoting Jesus, if you want to see it at kind of a general level rather than an academic level.
I had a graduate student years later who did a dissertation with me, name was Wayne Canada.
And he wrote a dissertation that got published as a book by Oxford Press on how Christians involved with defending the faith against pagan.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: Accusations. How Christian apologetics affected scribes who changed their text in places in order to make the texts more the New Testament text more useful for apologetic purposes.
[00:19:42] Speaker A: I've talked about these and other things a few times on the blog, if anybody wants to look up. I have a few posts on this that I just checked it out before this event.
I did some blog posts in February 2023 and you can see them where I talk especially about some anti heretical changes of the text and also some anti Jewish changes, because Christians were not proto orthodox Christians were not only attacking heretics, Christological heretics, and they were not only attacking pagans in their apologetics, but also they were attacking Jews. And there are places where there are anti Jewish variants where scribes change the text to make them more opposed to Judaism and Jews.
There are places as well where there are some passages that have been changed apparently in order to deal with issues involving the role of women in the church, where there are some anti sort of changes opposed to women trying to silence them even more and to kind of lower their status in the church, some textual variants like that. And so these are all things that can be found in the textual tradition and there is some scholarship devoted to them. But I suppose probably, if you're interested in just kind of a basic portrayal of it, misquoting Jesus might be a place to go.
Okay, next question. Would the apologetic movement of the first century and thereby the Jesus movement have occurred if Antiochus iv, Epiphanes, had not tried to Hellenize the Jews and start the Maccabean Revolt.
Okay, okay. So what this question is asking about is the rise of apocalyptic thinking within Judaism that is often traced to around the time of the Maccabean revolt, about 200 years before Jesus ministry.
The deal was that Israel at the time was subject to the rule of the Syrians.
Not the Ass Syrians, but the Syrians.
And the Syrians had taken control of Israel. And there was a particular monarch who's called Antiochus iv, nickname Antiochus Epiphanes.
He had decided that he had a large realm to rule, and he thought it would be useful if he could Hellenize his entire realm to provide a kind of unity of culture throughout the various lands that he had conquered.
This worked better in some places than others where he's trying to make the conquered peoples adopt Greek culture. So that's what it means to Hellenize is to enforce Hellenistic or Greek culture on other peoples.
That was successful in parts of Israel, including in parts of Jerusalem. But there was an uprising to oppose it called the Maccabean Revolt, because the. There was a family that kind of started it. They were called the Maccabees.
And so it's called the Maccabean Revolt. And it was a kind of a. It was kind of a guerrilla warfare event that took place over a number of years until, in fact.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: The Jewish army and the Jewish guerrilla warriors defeated the Syrians and drove them out.
But before that happened, Antiochus really was trying to Hellenize the Jews, and he made it illegal for Jews to practice Judaism.
If women. We know about this from two books, they're worth reading.
They're not in the Protestant Bible, but first and second Maccabees are parts of the Apocrypha, and you can easily find translations of them.
First and second Maccabees reveal what happened leading up to this revolt. And there are horrible things that happened.
Women who were just trying to obey the law of Moses, who had their babies circumcised.
According to these accounts, the Syrian soldiers, if they found out, they'd go into the household, they'd kill the baby and hang the baby around the mother's neck as punishment.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: People were forced to violate their kosher food laws on pain of torture to death.
All sorts of things that were going on that were very nasty. And.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: It was at this time that apocalyptic thinking started to rise up.
Where some Jewish thinkers started Maintaining that the reason they were having such horrible suffering was not because God's punishing them for anything, the way that most of the prophets of the Old Testament, say in the Old Testament, Isaiah or Amos, Hosea. These prophets all maintain that the reason God's people are suffering is because God's punishing them for disobedience.
But during this Maccabean revolt before it, I mean, they're suffering for actually doing what God says.
So they can't, you know, it's not that God's punishing them because they're doing what he tells them to do. And so there must be evil forces in the world that are opposed to God that are bringing this suffering against us.
This is the rise of apocalyptic thinking, where you have the powers of evil that exist, these supernatural powers of evil. Can I close the door?
That empower these supernatural powers and evil that empowers humans to do evil are opposed to God.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: The powers of good that are on the side of people who follow God. And so this begins the apocalyptic movement, and it becomes prominent.
It's a very widespread movement by the days of Jesus.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: And it believed that God was eventually, very soon, in fact, going to destroy all these powers of evil and bring in the good kingdom that he had originally planned. This question is, would that have happened if it weren't for Antiochus Epiphanies? And the answer is, we don't know.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: I guess I could have just said that, right?
[00:26:00] Speaker A: There's no way to know what would have happened.
Would something else have led to that?
Some people think that the apocalyptic movement was actually inspired by. By Persian religions, especially Zoroastrianism, which is also a dualistic religion, although dualistic in some significantly different ways. And that since.
[00:26:24] Speaker A: Israel had been under, at least Judah, Judea had been under Persian influence before the Greek and the Syrian influence. Maybe the Persian influence had led to the rise of apocalyptic thinking. That's entirely possible.
I personally don't think that that was the thing, though, because.
[00:26:45] Speaker A: The apocalyptic thought developed only decades after the Persian involvement, not during the Persian involvement. So I think it developed internally.
Okay, all right, next question. I heard recently a Christian saying something like that the Gospel of John must be written before 70 CE as it talks about the Pool of Bethesda. Bethesda in the present tense.
But Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE, therefore, the gospel must have been written before the destruction of the Pool of Bethesda.
But you placed John later in the 90s. So how would you respond to that?
Okay, well, a couple things to say.
The first thing is not particularly compelling. But I do have to point out that all of our gospels that are written later are, do have traditions in them that go back to earlier times.
And so if you have a tradition that is, was written before, you have a tradition that was circulating before 70, it's not weird that somebody writes it down later and they're, they're talk using the tradition as they heard it in which the pool of Bethesda may still been around.
So.
[00:28:00] Speaker A: You know, you could argue that I, I don't really argue that too strenuously.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: But.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: You know, something to think about.
I think the idea that a text written later would not use the present tense for something that didn't exist anymore is not a convincing argument. For one thing, later texts that are narratives are meant to sound like contemporary reports.
[00:28:31] Speaker A: And so if you want to add verisimilitude to your account.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: You put it in the present.
And so you say, oh yeah, there's this pool in Bethesda. And so you report it as a, you know, as something there to provide verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is a very common. It's not a word you'd probably use at most cocktail parties, but.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: It'S a term that gets you used widely in literary studies where you're trying to make something sound like it's believable in its own context.
And so you provide some kind of detail to make it sound like it's authentic. And so if you say, yeah, there's this pool Bethesda, you know, and then you tell the story, well, it sounds like, you know, it's kind of, it's kind of situated in Jesus day, so it sounds authentic.
The problem is though, that it is common in writings, especially including ancient writings, to talk about something that is no longer existing as if it is existing when you're telling a narrative.
A good example of this is that we have a number of rabbinic texts, Jewish rabbinic texts that are written centuries after the destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, that talk about the temple as if it's still functioning. Talking about what priests do in the temple. Well, they have been priests for hundreds of years, but it's just how you talk about a phenomenon that involves your religion.
And so I think talking about pool Bethesda in the present tense is not really a very strong argument that John was written before 70, especially because there are very good reasons for thinking John was written well after 70.
[00:30:15] Speaker A: So for all that, yeah, we can talk more about that on the blog or some, in fact, we have about how you date these Gospels.
[00:30:25] Speaker A: Okay, next seven. Is there any historical merit to imagining that early Christian baptism could have functioned not only as a ritual cleansing or a symbolic death, but also as a rite of social reclassification, something akin to adoption ceremonies in the Roman world?
[00:30:50] Speaker A: Very good question.
First point.
Baptism meant different things to different people at different times in the early Christian tradition, just as it means different things to different people today in different denominations.
In the Roman Catholic denomination, baptism of an infant is to remove original sin.
So that's how you get rid of your original sin.
You're baptized as a baby.
[00:31:18] Speaker A: That allows you later to have, you know, to have full salvation.
In the Presbyterian tradition, baptism is a replacement of circumcision to show that you have joined the covenant of you're one of the covenantal people.
You're one of the people of God. Just as in the Hebrew Bible, boys were circumcised to show that they are now part of the people of God.
All babies.
[00:31:46] Speaker A: Boys and girls, and everyone else are baptized to show that they are now part of the people of God in the Presbyterian tradition. In the Southern Baptist tradition, people are baptized as an outward show of an inward reality. There's nothing that actually happens at baptism other than you're demonstrating the faith that you already evidenced in Christ.
And so there are different views today. There were different views in the ancient world.
John. The Baptist view, which probably was the view of Jesus himself, was that.
[00:32:19] Speaker A: One time, baptism was to show that you've been cleansed of your sins because of your repentance.
[00:32:28] Speaker A: In preparation for God's coming kingdom.
That is not the view that Paul has.
Paul's view later is that when a person is baptized.
[00:32:38] Speaker A: They are buried in the water, just as Christ was buried in his tomb.
And they are brought up from the. And they're brought up out of the baptism so that they have died to their previous life and now they have a new life.
[00:32:56] Speaker A: And for Paul, there's something mystical that actually happens when somebody dies with Christ. They actually are united with Christ mystically in his death.
This is a very interesting view that's hard to explain to people today because we don't really have anything analogous to it in most of our religious traditions. But Paul believes that a person is mystically unified with Christ in his death.
[00:33:21] Speaker A: So that just as Christ died, death killed the power of sin. Those who are united with Christ are dead to sin, or sin is dead to them. Sin is a cosmic power that's trying to control human beings. For Paul, it's like a demonic force that compels you to violate God's will.
But when you're baptized with Christ, you have participated with Christ in the death of the power of sin. So sin has no more power over you, so you don't have to sin anymore. That's Paul's view.
The question is.
[00:34:00] Speaker A: Could it have been seen as some kind of rite of social reclassification?
So I wouldn't quite put it that way. It's not quite like baptism and not quite like adoption in the Roman world where you go through a ceremony of being adopted by someone else.
Although I guess you could kind of look at it like that because it's that place that a person becomes fully a member of the Christian community, fully a member of the body of Christ.
[00:34:29] Speaker A: It is, though the way I would put it is that it is also and becomes primarily an initiation rite.
[00:34:39] Speaker A: In early Christianity. It is not so much to be a ritual cleansing for forgiveness of sins. And it's not a symbolic death with Christ.
It is an initiation into the Christian community, an initiation ceremony.
Usually in the very beginning, so far as we could tell, in the Book of Acts, for example, or in the writings of Paul, it looks like as soon as a person came to faith in Christ, they would be baptized.
Later on, there was some instruction that was necessary.
You have to know something to be a member of the body of Christ, and you have to know some things about Christ and God and salvation and the creation and sin. And you need to know things. And so it takes a period of instruction.
[00:35:25] Speaker A: As time goes on, there are more rules about what really counts as baptism and how it's to be performed. Already in the Didache, around the year 100, there are instructions for how to baptize.
So that's around the year 100, near the end of the New Testament period.
100 years, 120 years later, we have fuller instructions in some Church fathers, some of which indicate that there has to be a long period of instruction where you're actually being, you're getting a solid training in the Christian faith. And at the baptism, more or less, you've got a final exam, you're being asked questions. And in one writing that we have, allegedly by Hippolytus, Roman church leader, early third century, there is a three year waiting period.
[00:36:20] Speaker A: After you convert and be a follower of Jesus. Then before you can, you've got to be baptized. Before you're baptized, it takes three years and you can't take communion or participate fully in the life of the church until you've had that baptism. So it Definitely is an. It becomes an. An initiation rite.
[00:36:39] Speaker A: Okay, next question.
[00:36:43] Speaker A: Is there any plausible scenario in which the.
[00:36:49] Speaker A: Early Christian movement could have remained a Jewish sect indefinitely? Something like a charismatic renewal within Judaism, if not for a few key historical events? Which events matter most?
Great question.
[00:37:08] Speaker A: Could Christianity have remained a Jewish sect?
There were a number of Jewish sects that we know about that the ones we know about were distinct from each other. And Jews who belong to one sect or another were often at odds with each other, sometimes with rather heightened hostility.
And so the Essenes, who. One group of which produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Sadducees, who were the leaders who were in charge of the temple cult in Jerusalem, the Pharisees, who insisted on coming up with ways of making sure that you kept the Torah faithfully.
We have various groups. Most Jews did not belong to any of these sects.
[00:37:53] Speaker A: We're told by Josephus, who was intimately familiar with them because he was living at the time, that the Pharisees were the largest sect and it had 6,000 members.
[00:38:06] Speaker A: This is in a. A world where there are over 4 million Jews.
So the largest sect had 6,000 members.
Okay, so according to Josephus, so most didn't belong to one sect or another. But even those who didn't belong to one sect or another had certain kind of views and certain ways of understanding Judaism that were different from other ways of understanding Judaism. A lot of people today seem to imagine that ancient Judaism was like a thing.
In fact, I think probably most people imagine ancient Judaism, ancient Judaism as one thing. And many people today, especially non Jews, understand Judaism today is one thing.
I, I often get questioned. You know, somebody will say, now what's the Jewish view of the afterlife? Or what is the Jewish view of the Messiah? Or what is the Jewish view of abortion? Or what is the Jewish view of X, Y, or Z?
And my response is always, which Jew are you talking about?
Because Judaism is remarkably diverse today.
It's kind of like asking, what's the American view of X, Y or Z? Which American are you talking to?
[00:39:20] Speaker A: And Judaism was a bit like that in the ancient world.
[00:39:24] Speaker A: But Christianity, the followers of Jesus, definitely started out as a distinct form of Judaism. And what this person is saying is, could have been that as. Because. As opposed to becoming a religion that mainly had gentiles in it and that ended up taking over the Roman world, could have just remained a Jewish group, a Jewish sect of some kind. And the answer, I think, is absolutely, yes, it could have.
[00:39:48] Speaker A: And I think I. I personally think that there's only one there's kind of one thing that kept it from doing that, which I guess if you wanted to narrow it down very narrowly, it'd be the conversion of Paul.
[00:40:03] Speaker A: It sounds a bit audacious to say the conversion of one person mattered that much. But I think, you know, look, it may have happened without Paul, but what happens is about three years after Jesus death.
[00:40:16] Speaker A: The followers of Jesus are converting other Jews to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.
When Paul had his vision, whatever that was, he believed, he came to believe that the death of Jesus was the only thing that put a person in a right standing before God.
And since it was only the death of Jesus that mattered, it didn't matter whether a person was Jewish or not.
They didn't have to keep the Torah, they didn't have to keep laws of kosher or the Sabbath or festivals, or they didn't have to do the things of Scripture that Jews had to do to be Jews in order to be followers of the Messiah, Jesus.
Paul began to preach that a Gentile could be a follower of Jesus without becoming Jewish.
I think without that move that, so far as we know was Paul's idea, we would not have Christianity as a worldwide religion.
Most people in the Gentile world were not at all inclined to become Jewish.
[00:41:18] Speaker A: But as it turns out, they were inclined to follow a God who was the most powerful of all the gods, who was more powerful than their own God or their own gods.
And if they were convinced that the Christian God was more powerful than their gods, that would lead them to convert, but they would not be inclined to take on the ways of Judaism.
And so I think the one thing is Paul's conversion and his proclamation that had greater success than the mission to the Jews.
I think clearly Paul's gentile mission had far more success than. Than Peter's or James's or anybody else's Jewish mission. So I think, yes, it could very well have. I think without the conversion of Paul, maybe something else would have triggered it. But that is the thing that did trigger it. And it's conceivable that. That you'd simply have another sect, this one, believing that a certain person was the Messiah.
[00:42:16] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: The Gospel of Mark.
[00:42:25] Speaker A: Uses abrupt scene cuts, present tense narration, and discontinuous geography that would be considered cinematically experimental today.
Okay. Is there any evidence that ancient audiences perceived Mark's style as stylistically strange, or was this considered normal oral narrative texture?
[00:42:53] Speaker A: It's a great question.
I'll say that most people reading Mark don't notice these things about it.
And so far as we know, they didn't notice them in the ancient world either.
It is very hard to know what ancient Christians thought about Mark's Gospel in particular for several reasons.
One thing is we have no early commentaries.
[00:43:21] Speaker A: On Mark or Matthew or Luke. We have no commentaries from the first couple hundred years on these gospels. So we don't even know what learned readers were thinking about them, let alone the person just in church would have thought about it. That's one thing.
[00:43:39] Speaker A: Second thing, Mark's Gospel was not as widely read as any of the others.
It was by far the least read gospel in early Christianity.
[00:43:50] Speaker A: So there's, there's, that is an undisputed point because there's excellent documentation for it.
When I, when I did my dissertation on the Gospel quotations of a fourth century church father, Didymus the Blind, who quoted the Gospels a lot, there are lots of places we could tell he's quoting John.
And there are lots of places you could tell this is just from Matthew, he's quoting Matthew. This is just Luke. There's almost nowhere where you can find him just quoting Mark.
Part of that is because Matthew and Luke have taken over so much of Mark that if Didymus quotes a line that's in Matthew, Mark and Luke, you can't tell which gospel is getting from it because all three have it. But Matthew has his own distinctive stuff. Luke has its own distinctive stuff. Mark does have some distinctive stuff. And it's, it's like impossible in church fathers to find anything that's just, it's very rare to find things that are distinct from Mark. So it wasn't read as much and people would even talk about it not being read as much, in part because.
[00:44:48] Speaker A: In early Christianity it was often thought that Mark was a kind of condensed version of Matthew.
And so why read the condensed version if you got the whole thing, you know, why do you read the Reader's Digest Bible when you can just, you know, read the Bible?
And so it wasn't read as much.
[00:45:07] Speaker A: So there are those things.
So I don't think people did notice. But the other thing is I don't think people did who were reading Mark carefully really notice so much. The style, even though my sense is, based on what we know about the history of people talking about these gospels, is that people, they might have noticed things, but they didn't consider them strange in particular, but they did find them interesting in places. I'll give you one example. In the modern world, modern scholars of Mark have noticed, oh my God, that's really interesting. And that's subtle. And I bet people haven't noticed that.
I'll give you an example that, you know, I never noticed until some scholar pointed it out to me. This really interesting passage about the cursing of the fig tree. The way it works in Mark is Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem, the end of his life. And he's.
He's going up to the. He's going into Jerusalem. He's staying out of town. He's going up to Jerusalem. He comes upon a fig tree. And he's hungry, so he goes to the fig tree to look for some figs. There are no figs.
And Mark tells us that it's not the season for figs. And so, you know, I'm not quite sure why Jesus would be ticked off because there are figs. Because, you know, it's not. It's not not harvesting time for figs. But he curses the tree for not bearing fruit.
He curses it, and the disciple take note of that. And then they go off to the temple. And that's where Jesus sees what's going on in the temple. He gets upset. He overturns the tables of the money changers. He drives out those who are selling animals. And he says, this is to be a house of prayer for all the nations, but you've made it a den of thieves.
And then he leaves the temple and he goes back. And as they're going back to disciples, see that the fig tree has withered.
[00:46:58] Speaker A: Wow.
He cursed it and now it's dead and withered.
So this is showing his powers, of course, his divine powers.
But there's something more going on that careful readers have noted that I never noticed before.
It's that Mark has taken a story and divided it in half and stuck another story in between the two.
[00:47:24] Speaker A: This is something Mark does on occasion, and it's a brilliant way to do a narrative. For one thing, it kind of go, go, go, boom.
[00:47:38] Speaker A: It extends the narrative in time. So you have a sense of, like the passage of time in a narrative that otherwise boom, boom, boom, boom, boom in March.
But the other thing is, it probably means something.
[00:47:52] Speaker A: In scripture, Israel is sometimes likened to a fig tree that God has planted.
And God says that the tree needs to bear fruit or he will destroy it.
John the Baptist says every tree that does not bear fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
Jesus curses the fig tree and. And in between. And then he condemns the leaders of Israel for corrupting the temple. And he engages in an act of destruction where he overturns the table, he drives people out. It's like the Day of Judgment in a nutshell.
And then he goes back and the fig trees withered.
This is a kind of a prediction that Israel is going to be destroyed, Jerusalem is going to be destroyed.
[00:48:42] Speaker A: But Mark does this in this clever way by having the destruction of the temple enacted after the fig tree is cursed and then finding that it is destroyed.
And so this is a lesson about Israel rejecting its Messiah, rejecting God, and God going to be destroying it because it's not bearing fruit.
Whoa.
So it's brilliant. And by the way, that's one reason for thinking that Mark is written after the destruction of Jerusalem and probably is the first gospel after 70.
Okay.
[00:49:20] Speaker A: Right.
Which.
[00:49:24] Speaker A: Biblical passages do you think are responding to now? Lost rival narratives?
[00:49:32] Speaker A: Are there places where you can feel the gravitational pull of another text, one we can no longer read beneath the surface?
Yes, I think that that absolutely happens. It ends up being somewhat speculative in some places, but you could argue this, I think, pretty clearly. For example, for the Gospel of Matthew, The Gospel of Matthew has Jesus insisting that his followers have to keep the law better than the scribes and the Pharisees.
[00:50:07] Speaker A: And so he says, for example, in chapter 5, near the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, don't think that I have come to destroy the law.
I've not come to destroy it, but fulfill it.
[00:50:24] Speaker A: And then he goes on, that is to say that his followers have to keep the law better than the scribes and the Pharisees.
So don't think that I've come to destroy the law.
Well, why would he even say that?
Unless there were Christians who thought that Jesus did away with the law?
And Matthew's trying to insist, no, he has not done away with the law.
You have to keep the law.
Later in chapter 23, Jesus actually says that he's talking about the Scribes and the Pharisees. And he says, the problem with the scribes and the Pharisees are that they're hypocrites. They don't practice what they preach.
But he tells them in chapter 23:2, tells his disciples, you have to keep the interpretations of the scribes and the Pharisees.
[00:51:14] Speaker A: He goes on to say, they don't do it themselves, but they preach the right things. They just don't do well. Wow, really?
So he seems to think the teachings of the scribes and Pharisees are right.
Well, he's not clearly preaching against somebody, and it's often thought that he's preaching against Paul.
Is he possibly preaching against some other gospel traditions where he's trying to counter them.
It is interesting that in Mark's gospel, this is one that we do have. In Mark's Gospel, when Jesus says that you shouldn't worry about what you eat, you shouldn't be worried about what you put in your mouth. You should worry what comes out of your mouth, what you say. And you know, what's evil comes out from within. It doesn't go in, it comes out from within. And Mark says, thereby Jesus declared all foods clean.
[00:52:09] Speaker A: Meaning there are no more kosher foods.
You can eat anything. There's no unclean food.
For Mark, Matthew has that same passage and he gets rid of the comment, Jesus thereby declared all foods clean.
Whoa. So there's a counter narrative where you actually can see, I mean, he's taking Mark, he's actually reproducing, but he's taking out that kind of thing.
I would say in a number of Paul's letters, it is clear these aren't narratives, but there have been narratives behind these letters. Galatians, Romans, Corinthians. Paul is arguing against Christians who have different views from his.
And sometimes, such as in the letter to the Romans, it's clear that the people he's writing to have heard what Paul says and they're offended by it.
And Paul is writing to set the record straight.
[00:53:02] Speaker A: So there are oral narratives about Paul's teachings, especially if you read Romans carefully, especially chapters 9 to 11, it's clear that his opponents are saying that Paul is claiming that God has given up on the Jews.
[00:53:17] Speaker A: And that he's moved to the Gentiles. And Paul is insisting, no, that is not right.
[00:53:26] Speaker A: God has not forsaken the Jews. The Jews still are his chosen ones.
[00:53:31] Speaker A: And so he explains what his views really are. Or in the letter to the Galatians, his enemies in Galatia are.
There are these people who are insisting that you have to keep the Jewish law if you're going to be a follower of Jesus. And they're claiming that Paul got his message from the other apostles and he corrupted it.
[00:53:55] Speaker A: Peter and James and others had a Gospel message. Paul learned it from them. And then he changed it to say that Gentiles don't have to keep the law. So that's why Paul in Galatians 1 and 2, gives a bit of his autobiography where he says, I did not inherit the Gospel from any of those who preceded me. He says he got it straight from Christ. He didn't even talk to the disciples until he'd been preaching already and establishing churches. So it's a counter narrative.
[00:54:27] Speaker A: One really interesting counter Narrative in the New Testament that I think you can show the connection to is one that's not widely noticed, which is the Book of James.
James, of course, the Book of James indicates that a person's not justified only by faith, but they need also to have works.
[00:54:47] Speaker A: Not by faith. It's not by faith only. You've got to have works as well as faith.
Many people since Martin Luther have argued that he's arguing against Paul.
[00:55:00] Speaker A: I think he's not actually arguing against Paul.
The author of James is not arguing. He might think he's arguing against Paul. But Paul never says you don't have to do good things.
[00:55:10] Speaker A: Paul indicates that if you're saved, you will do good things if you're justified.
So he and James kind of agree on that. The letter to the Ephesians, though, that claims to be written by Paul is quite insistent. You are not saved by doing good works. You're saved only by faith.
[00:55:30] Speaker A: This is a later author claiming to be Paul who is taking Paul's doctrine of justification by faith to an extreme.
That works have nothing to do with it.
It's only by faith. I think James is responding to that kind of view of Paul, which is beyond what Paul had.
[00:55:51] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:55:55] Speaker A: Right.
Some passages attract disproportionate interpretive energy, says this person. Such as the example Genesis 1:3, Romans 5 and John 1.
Do you think these passages are intrinsically hot, or have traditional liturgy magnified them at the expense of equally rich texts that simply never receive the same canonical spotlight?
Well, it's a very interesting question.
Why do people focus on particular passages and, like, ignore many of the rest?
Is it that they are just, like, inherently the most interesting or not?
[00:56:35] Speaker A: My view is that nothing is inherently interesting and nothing is inherently important.
They're interesting or important to some people in some circumstances for some reasons.
It's interesting that the questioner. I have no idea who these questioners are. Maybe one of you uses Romans 5.
That's interesting to me because I've always thought that Romans 5 is widely underlooked by most people who read Paul, that Romans 3 is popular. But Romans 5 people don't pay as much attention to interesting Genesis 1:3. I would say Genesis 1:2 are widely popular.
Genesis 3, Cain and Abel, somewhat. But I don't think people focus on it so much as the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2. John 1, the prologue, at least John 1:1 18 is the most discussed passage among scholars of the New Testament.
[00:57:33] Speaker A: The second most is Probably Philippians Chapter 2, another account of Christ coming into the world. Both John 1 and Philippians 2 talk about Christ coming into the world from heaven, from being a heavenly being who becomes a human being.
[00:57:50] Speaker A: So those are important passages, but I would say my view is that they're important.
They're largely important because of what people find to be important in their Christian faith. And that's largely because of.
[00:58:06] Speaker A: Because of what they think about the Christian faith and what they've heard about the Christian faith and what they turn to.
Let me give you some examples.
There are lots of passages that were never basically were not a big deal at all until they came up for some other reason. Give you some examples. Micah 5:2.
Ancient Jewish commentators did not talk about the Messiah having to come from Bethlehem.
[00:58:32] Speaker A: It's only in Micah 5:2 that a savior will come from Bethlehem. Later, Christians made a big deal of it because they started saying, oh, Micah 5:2, the Messiah comes from Bethlehem. Jesus was born in Bethlehem. It's a fulfillment of Scripture.
But nobody ever thought that Micah 5:2 is going to be like the Messiah had to be born in Bethlehem. There are lots of people who are declared Messiah by Jews who had nothing to do with Bethlehem.
Or Hosea 11:1, which is talking about the exodus of the children of Israel out of Egypt. Out of Egypt have I called my son?
Okay, Israel, the son of God is brought up out of Egypt. It's only with the Gospel of Matthew that anybody starts saying, oh, that's a reference to the Messiah.
And so, you know, it's in Handel, Handel's Messiah. And so it becomes a big deal. But it wasn't a particularly big deal in Jewish interpreters.
[00:59:33] Speaker A: We have examples of this in the modern period where a verse that people knew about but nobody made a big deal of have become a big deal. Example Jeremiah 1:5, Jeremiah 1:5. The prophet Jeremiah says, you knew before I was in my mother's womb, you knew me.
It talks about how God had chosen him before he was conceived.
So before I was in my mother's womb, you knew me. That verse is used widely today to show that the fetus is living, a living human being, because Jeremiah was alive and known by God before he was born.
[01:00:17] Speaker A: That's interesting.
And it's. It may be the one verse of Jeremiah that. That many people know today.
[01:00:24] Speaker A: But it was never kind of seen that way in the ancient world or in modern times, really, when I was an evangelical. I don't think we ever quoted it for that.
But. But it has become that. What's interesting about that verse, by the way, is that it does not say that the fetus is a human being.
It says that God knew the prophet before he was conceived.
[01:00:47] Speaker A: So if you want to take it literally, as people are when they say the fetus is therefore a human being, if you want to take it literally, what it's literally saying is that Jeremiah was alive before he was conceived.
[01:00:59] Speaker A: Meaning that he had his soul pre existed.
And I know very few people want to say believe in the pre existence of the soul, but that's what it literally means. But it became, it's become a big deal.
Another thing that is a big deal. Very interesting. This is not from the modern period, but here's something almost like, man, I didn't realize this again until somebody pointed it out to me.
We think of Genesis 1 and 2, especially the Adam and Eve story, as central.
The fall of Adam and Eve, it's like central to the whole Bible.
[01:01:35] Speaker A: Adam and Eve are never mentioned in the Hebrew Bible after that.
[01:01:41] Speaker A: The Garden of Eden, the fall, the serpent, the thing that led to the need for salvation.
It's not read that way in the Jewish tradition.
It's not an important passage in the rest of the Bible. It's not mentioned. Unlike other things like the Exodus, which is mentioned all over the place. Adam and Eve are not a big deal.
[01:02:05] Speaker A: And so the idea that this is when sin came into the world or it's what led to the need for a messiah, that's not part of the Jewish tradition, it's part of the Christian tradition.
[01:02:17] Speaker A: And so I don't think that any passage is inherently or intrinsically hot.
I think they become hot because of other interests that people have who are reading the text. And the text then is useful for what they want to think about and talk about.
Okay. Unfortunately, I am out of time.
So that's it. Thank you again for being gold members on the blog. We really appreciate it and I enjoy these things. If you've asked a question, it hasn't been answered, then ask it again next time because there's some good ones I couldn't get to.
Jen, any final words?
[01:02:54] Speaker B: We are recording this, so I will get the recording out tomorrow. So if you want to, if you couldn't stay for the whole thing, you can review it. Or for those of you who aren't able to join us, you have the recording now, so I will get that out tomorrow and I will just echo what Bart said. Thank you all, we really appreciate it.
