Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Well, I'd like to welcome you to our October gold Q and A. I've got a list of very interesting questions, and I don't know that I can get through them all, but I'm going to try because they're all good questions and I'd like to get through them all. But I also don't want to shortchange any of these that need a more expansive answer. And so we'll see how that goes. But it will go for about an hour. So I'm just going to go in the sequence that they were handed over to me. I'm not sure why the sequence. All right, first question is, how did the earliest Christians understand the teaching to turn the other cheek? Did it change as the church began to have more influence in the government of the state?
[00:00:47] Yeah, well, you know, how did Christians understand? It is kind of like, how do Christians understand it today? Depends which Christian you ask. And, you know, I suppose some took it quite seriously and actually did believe in nonviolent resistance.
[00:01:05] We don't really. We don't really have a good record about how most Christians interpreted it, but they certainly knew. Knew it. Most did.
[00:01:13] I think we can say that there were a lot of Christians who didn't observe it at all, including some of the authors of the New Testament. I mean, the author of the Book of Revelation is not interested in turning the other cheek.
[00:01:28] He's interested in vengeance against his enemies, and he thinks God will inflict vengeance on his enemies. And there's nothing about, you know, being merciful or kind or loving to an enemy or to any. Anyone else. And in Revelation, most, I think most Christians historically have understood turning the other cheek to be more of a kind of a personal ethical issue rather than a governmental issue. This person asks about, did it change when the government got more influential on Christianity?
[00:02:09] Governments, of course, cannot turn the other cheek or they won't exist very long. And so if US Foreign policy was to turn the other cheek, we wouldn't last three days. And so it doesn't really work as a governmental policy.
[00:02:22] Jesus, of course, was not trying to teach governmental policy. He was trying to teach individuals how they ought to live their personal lives. It is interesting, though, what happens with Christianity with respect to judicial punishments once the government becomes Christian, which happens in the 4th century, at the end of the 4th century, the emperors had been Christian for a while. And there's an emperor on the throne named Theodosius I, who is the first one to declare Christianity more or less to be the religion of the state. The emperor Constantine did not do that.
[00:03:01] But it's interesting to ask, how did becoming Christian affect the government?
[00:03:07] And what I would have expected, and I think what most people would expect, is that it would make it more merciful and kind and generous and forgiving.
[00:03:18] And it turns out that's wrong.
[00:03:21] There's a Yale professor some years ago now, a very, very well known, a very. He's a extremely good scholar named Ramsey McMullen who wrote an article on what difference did Christianity make?
[00:03:38] And he argued that actually when the Empire became Christian, there's no. There does not appear to be any improvement in kind of social mores or social ethics, including things like sexual ethics, don't seem to have really taken much of a turn, even though you might expect them to. And he, he kind of goes through a list of things. He says the, the one area that he can detect, he's a. He's like a Roman historian. He's an ancient Roman historian. He says the one thing he can detect changing are judicial punishments and so punishments for crime. And he shows that after Christianity took over, they became far more harsh, which is not what I would have expected.
[00:04:19] But he, he actually goes through a list of things that kind of punishment you get already, starting with the Emperor Constantine that are really quite severe.
[00:04:29] If, you know, if, if somebody, if an official accept a bribe, he used to have his hands cut off.
[00:04:37] If a guardian of a young woman turns out that the young woman is involved in some kind of sexual fling, the parents are to have. The guardians are to have molten lead poured down their throats.
[00:04:52] There are punishments, there's some punishments for people doing this or the other thing, whether to be tied up in a sack with poisonous snakes and be thrown into the ocean.
[00:05:08] All of these are on record, right? We have these codes of laws. And so his argument is that Christianity actually made the government more harsh.
[00:05:17] It's surprising to me, but it's the way it is.
[00:05:21] So I think in the long run, of course, Turn the Other Cheek has had a big effect on our civilization, but I think it's far more on the individual level. And it's when people are kind of inclined to do that.
[00:05:34] I think a lot of people don't. Okay, second question.
[00:05:38] This person indicates that they are a community minister in a Utarian Unitarian Universalist church, and they're very interested in issues of morality, where they came from and who advocated what. And this person just wants to know what is the, the possible release date of my upcoming book on the ethics of Jesus?
[00:06:02] Yeah, well, I do wonder when that's going to be done.
[00:06:05] And so I'm not done with it yet, but I'm nearly done with it. And I'm actually going to be offering it to for a large donation for people who have some money to throw away. I'm going to offer it for a donation to the blog. I'm going to offer people a chance to read it.
[00:06:23] In the past I've usually asked people for a large donation, a thousand dollar donation to read a manuscript of mine and I haven't decided yet. I'm debating whether to actually ask more and get fewer. But last time I did this, we raised thousand dollars I think and you know, I gave it all the way to charity and I might do that again this time I hope to have it finished by Christmas.
[00:06:48] And so that would mean it would come out probably in the spring of 2026. It takes about a year to publish something once you finish it, which seems ridiculous, but that's how it is in the publishing industry, always has been as long as I've been publishing. So I don't think you'll, I don't think you're going to be getting it anytime soon.
[00:07:08] But I really like the book. I mean it's like this has been, this has been a very eye opening book for me to write to talk about how the ethics of Jesus transformed our conscience, our moral conscience. You know, when the hurricane hit, there's an outpouring of concern around the country and around the world for places like Asheville and in the ancient world that never would have happened in the Greek and Roman worlds. And so I'm going to be arguing that actually that idea of being, being concerned about somebody who's suffering when you don't know them and you'll never know them and if you did know them, you probably wouldn't like them being concerned about them anyway. I'm going to be arguing that comes from the teachings of Jesus.
[00:07:58] He picked it up from Judaism, but I think he changed it in ways. And because Christianity took over the Roman Empire, it became, eventually became the common sense that we should help people in need even if we don't know them. So that's, that's kind of the thesis of my book. All right.
[00:08:15] Right. Next question. I've been reading Bruce Metzger's book on the history of Bible translation. So Metzger was my, the director of my work in my graduate program. He directed my master's thesis and my PhD dissertation. He was the chair of my committee. And so I, I went to study with him. And so I was very close to him. And so this is a book that I know, of course, the history of Bible translation. The question this person says is now and then he'll say things like Jerome, the church father, Jerome used the Hebrew original for the Old Testament, or that origin, in producing his. One of his books transcribed the Hebrew text. But what does that even mean? Says the questioner. Are we to assume that Jerome in origin had access to the original texts of the Hebrew Bible in the 4th and 3rd centuries A.D.
[00:09:09] wouldn't it be more accurate to say that they use whatever probably corrupt texts they could get their hands on?
[00:09:16] And that is correct. I'll explain, I'll explain what all that means here in a second. But I will just say, yes, that is correct, and Metzger knows that it's correct. And Metzger is speaking in shorthand, so I'll just say that much. But so the question, what this person's talking about is that Origen was a church father. He was the most brilliant and influential theologian before the Council of Nicaea.
[00:09:45] He was a very influential theologian. And one of the books he produced, this is a book many people don't know about. It was called the Hexapla. People don't know about it because it doesn't exist, but it did. And we know a lot about it. It's called the Hexapla hex, meaning six.
[00:10:02] Because what he did is he took the, he took the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, and he printed it in six columns where like you have Genesis Chapter one. And say, say that this first page would be chapter one, verses one through 20. So he didn' he didn't have chapters and verses yet, but what we would call chapters and verses and say that, say that's his first page. One column would be the, the Hebrew text that's widely known. Another would be the Hebrew text that by some other, by some other translator, another Hebrew text by some other, another would be the, the Greek text, another be the Latin text. It kind of went like that. And so, and one would be kind of literally translating. So he. So it had six columns. So you could compare what these different versions were of, of the, of the Old Testament.
[00:10:54] So we don't have it because it was such a monster of a book. Nobody bothered to copy it. So far as we can tell, it was a really big book.
[00:11:03] But, but, you know, Metzger says, well, you know, he used the Hebrew text or when Jerome translated the Old Testament, Metzger says, well, you know, they, he used the, translated the Hebrew text. And this person's saying, you know, they didn't have, like, they didn't have the original Hebrew text. What were they translating? And what's Metzger talking about? What Metzger means by that is that that they're actually using the Hebrew itself, not Greek translations.
[00:11:30] He doesn't mean that they had access to the original Hebrew text, whatever that would be.
[00:11:36] He means that when, for example, when Jerome translated the Old Testament, he was using.
[00:11:43] He didn't translate it from Greek like other people did, or. Or from Latin, you know? Well, he was translating into Latin, obviously, but he was actually translating the Hebrew. And Origen actually had access to Hebrew texts. And he's not saying those are like, the original texts of Hebrew. We have no way of reconstructing what the Hebrew texts of any of the books of the Old Testament looked like in detail. We can take really good. We have really good guesses in some place, lots of places, but we just can't know. And Metzger, of course, is an expert on this kind of thing. Know. Knew that better than most of the rest of us.
[00:12:18] Okay, next question. This one's different. Why does Jesus use wine skins as a metaphor when Galilee and Capernaum primarily used clay vessels for wine storage, and it was nomads that primarily used wineskins.
[00:12:36] And so this is referring to this passage where Jesus says, nobody puts new wine in old wine skins.
[00:12:48] The idea behind this is the. The. The idea that Jesus is developing with that metaphor is that the wine, as it ferments, would expand the skin and it would rip the skin. And so you don't. You don't ferment the wine in a wine skin. You know, you do, because it break the skin. And so you put old. Old wine. And I fermented wine already in the.
[00:13:14] Do I mean fermented? Whatever. I mean, when grape juice becomes wine, it.
[00:13:21] That you put it in old skins and you put new.
[00:13:24] You put new wine in new wine skins because those will expand. So they're saying. This person is saying, well, that's weird, because where he lived, they would. They wouldn't have used wine skins. They would have used storage, storage jars.
[00:13:40] The person goes on to ask whether this choice of imagery could signal sympathy for faith. Salas in the war against Herod Antipas.
[00:13:50] I'm not sure what that means. And so I can't really answer, but I don't think that Jesus had in mind anything about.
[00:13:58] Anything about Herod Antipas wars, who's the ruler of Galilee at his time. So I'm not sure the imagery would have anything to do that. It's an Interesting question, though, about wineskins and storage jars. So, so interesting. And since I didn't know the answer, I asked my, my colleague Jody Magnus, who is one of the world's leading archaeologists of Israel. I sent her an email this morning. I said, jody, tell me. And she said, yeah, she said, okay, like here's the deal.
[00:14:25] They, they, you, you store wine in, you know, in amphora or in, in big clay pots, big clay pots. That's where you store it. But you don't let it ferment in those things.
[00:14:40] You, you let it ferment in wine skins and you transport it in wineskins. You mainly transport it in wineskins. So if you're going to, you're going to take a wine shipment, you're a merchant, you're taking a wine shipment someplace on a ship. You don't put it in big clay things because they're not portable, they're so heavy to begin with. And you fill one of these things up like one of these tall, you've seen these tall things, these tall, you know, these tall clay jars. You, you fill them up and man, you can't lift the thing. And so they, they transport them in wine skins. And so wine skins were known and used in Jesus day in his part of the world, almost certainly. So that's the answer. All right, next question. Two of the best known additions in the Gospels are the end of Mark and John's story of the woman caught in adultery.
[00:15:32] What would be number three on your list? This is a good question. All right, so, and the person actually in the, in the middle of this, two of the best known later additions. And they put in parentheses pericopes.
[00:15:48] That's a word you all should learn. Pericope. It looks like pericope, P E, R, I, C, O, P E, but it's pronounced pericope.
[00:15:58] It comes from two Greek words. Peri means around something and cope means cutting. So you cut around something. What that means is if you've got, in the New Testament where you've, or any book, if you've got a passage that's a self contained unit, okay. It's like, it's got a, it's like this, this story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's a self contained unit. They call that a pericope because you can analyze it on its own terms.
[00:16:28] And it's often thought that pericopes were circulated orally. And the gospel writers would take a full story, beginning, middle and end, and put it into their narrative, but they would keep it as a pericope so anyway, that doesn't matter. It's just a little side note.
[00:16:46] The person's pointing out that two passages I often talk about as not being originally in the gospels, the last 12 verses of Mark are where Jesus is not only raised from the dead. And not only do the women find out that he's been raised from the dead, because they find an empty tomb and somebody there tells them that he's been raised. In the last 12 verses of Mark, Jesus appears to his disciples and they see him and they have a conversation with him and such. But those 12 verses were not originally in Mark. Mark originally ended with the women finding out that Jesus has been raised and not telling anybody.
[00:17:30] And so somebody added the ending.
[00:17:33] That's not really. That's one of those kind of solid findings of biblical scholarship that isn't really much debated.
[00:17:40] So to the woman taken in adultery, where Jesus says, let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her. And that passage where they're trying to trap him about whether they should stone this woman or not, that. That passage, which is in John at the very end of chapter seven and the first bit of chapter eight was not originally there either. And so these are additions that scribes put into. Into their manuscripts that have survived today. And the translations based on, you know, the King James translation, for example, is based on manuscripts that happen to have those two stories. And so they became very familiar to English readers. And turns out they're two of the more popular stories of the New Testament, the two stories that weren't originally in there. So this person wants to know if those are two of the. Like, the big ones. Is there, like a. What's my third? So I don't know if my third means the third that is the one that I think is the longest, or if it means the one that I think that is my favorite. And so I'm going with the favorite.
[00:18:43] So my favorite is. And it actually is one of the longer ones, it's this passage In Luke chapter 22, when Jesus is praying in the garden of Gethsemane.
[00:18:55] And in Luke's version, in many translations, again, according to the King James and many others, Jesus leaves his disciples and he takes with him Peter, James, and John.
[00:19:07] And he tells them to pray while he goes off and prays by himself to God. And he goes off and he prays to God, let this cup pass from before me. And he doesn't want to go through the crucifixion if it can be avoided. And so in Luke's So you have that passage, and then he gets up from his prayer, he goes back to his disciples, they're asleep. He gets a little bit angry with them because, you know, why are you asleep? I asked you to stay and pray for me here. And then Judas comes and betrays him. And then. And he gets, he gets arrested. In Luke's version of this, and only in Luke's version, where Jesus goes off and prays, we're told that he became in great agony and he started sweating.
[00:19:51] His sweat drops were so big, they were like blood dropping to the ground. And an angel came to comfort him.
[00:19:59] And then it continues from there. So it's two verses. It's chapter 22, verses 43 and 44. Luke I.
[00:20:11] I've long been interested in this passage because those two verses are missing from some of our best and earliest manuscripts. The two verses of the angel coming down and comforting Jesus and him sweating blood. He's actually sweating sweat. That's like blood. But that's where we get the term sweating blood from.
[00:20:34] Long been interested in it. And one reason is because my first academic article on the New Testament itself was on this passage where I tried with. I wrote it with a friend of mine in graduate school. We were like first year graduate students and we got this thing published miraculously.
[00:20:52] But it's arguing that those two verses were not originally there, they were added by scribes. And that's why our earliest and best manuscripts don't have them.
[00:21:02] But that's not the only reason for thinking. So I've actually talked about it on the blog a number of times. If you look up bloody sweat, you'll see on the blog where I talk about it. So that would be another one. It's not nearly as long as the others, but we don't really have other lengthy editions of that size in our manuscripts that are not original. But we do have some that are very interesting and important, and this is a particularly important one because if you take those two verses out of Luke's account of Jesus praying before his arrest, without those two verses, Jesus is never said to suffer any agony going to his death. In Luke, even though he's terribly agonized in Mark and Matthew, Luke got rid of all the agony for some reason. And so except for these verses which were added later.
[00:21:58] Okay, all right, next question.
[00:22:00] Given the potential political undertones of Paul's letters, particularly his appeals to Roman authority in texts like Romans 13, to what extent should we view Paul as shaping his message to ensure the survival of his communities rather than offering an unbiased theological framework.
[00:22:24] Now, this is a good question.
[00:22:27] What this person is referring to is that In Romans, chapter 13, Paul insists that the, that the church members in Rome obey the government because the, the governmental officials, the Roman officials were appointed by God to keep the peace, and so don't oppose them.
[00:22:51] And, you know, he says things like, pay your taxes and, and do, you know, and, and so revere the authorities. And, and this person saying, you know, is he just kind of saying this because he doesn't want them to be persecuted by the Roman authorities?
[00:23:09] And so instead of like giving an unbiased theological treatise, he's like, you know, getting into politics here about how you ought to be a citizen of the empire. And I would say that it's true, Paul is getting into politics here.
[00:23:28] I would also say that in the ancient world, no one that we know of separated politics from religion.
[00:23:38] These were related phenomena.
[00:23:41] So much so, here's a little weird piece of information. So much so that in Greek, there's no word that means just religion and no word that means just politics.
[00:23:55] They don't have words for them.
[00:23:57] In the Roman world, broadly, it was understood that the government was intimately involved with religion.
[00:24:06] In Rome itself, in the city of Rome, where this letter, to which this letter is written, becoming a priest of one of the major religions was a political appointment. You didn't have to have any religious qualifications or even any religious beliefs.
[00:24:22] The priests were the ones who knew how to perform the correct sacrifices, and it was an official duty.
[00:24:30] The empire had long maintained that it had become successful as an empire because the gods had protected it and helped it win its wars. And so the state sponsored the worship of the gods because they helped us, we worship them. When we worship them, they help us more. And so throughout the world, in the Roman world, there was a close connection. In the Jewish world, of course, there's a close connection between politics and religion. The, The King of Israel is anointed by God.
[00:25:04] He's the Messiah, the Mashiach, the anointed one.
[00:25:07] And so the idea we have of a separation of church and state, which is firmly in, entrenched in many of our. In many of us, we have a constitutional establishment clause. And the government's not supposed to, like, you know, establish a particular religion. Although I think, I think that constitutional issue is coming under attack these days by people who insist that this, that the government should sponsor one religion or another. But even so, we tend to talk about a separation of church and sedate in this country. But it didn't happen in the ancient world.
[00:25:46] Paul, of course, was an ancient person.
[00:25:50] He doesn't separate politics and religion. He says in this thing as well in Romans 13, that God's the one who's appointed the emperor. But it's kind of a strange thing to say, given the fact that Paul knew, as others did, that Christians were being persecuted sometimes and that sometimes authorities were participating in these persecutions. Why are you supposed to obey them if they're persecuting you?
[00:26:15] You know, if they're. I mean, you. Does that mean, like, if they tell you not to preach, you don't preach?
[00:26:22] You know, if you don't, you. They don't want you to convert anybody. You don't convert anybody? Obviously, Paul would say no, but then why does he tell you to obey the governing authorities? Is it just a kind of a political ploy?
[00:26:31] Well, yeah, I suppose it is a political ploy.
[00:26:34] I will also say, though, that not only in the ancient world, but also in the modern world.
[00:26:39] I mean, in the ancient world, it's impossible to separate out politics and religion for the most part.
[00:26:46] And I'd say it's really hard in the modern world, too, because a lot of religious issues simply have political implications.
[00:26:56] You think about issues related to LGBTQ issues, for example, or you think about abortion rights, for example, where people appeal to religious authorities for the political views and sometimes push for political agendas for religious reasons. So was Paul doing that? Yeah, probably in part. In part.
[00:27:21] Other. Other authors of the New Testament, of course, have the opposite view of Paul. They don't think you should obey the Roman emperor at all. I mentioned the book of Revelation again. In the book of Revelation, the Rome and the emperor are the enemy of God, the Antichrist. And so, yeah, no, you know, don't. Don't. Don't mess around with them. In fact, you know, God's going to destroy them, and, you know, and you. You should hate them as much as God does, basically. Okay, next question. This is. The next one's a question I've never had before.
[00:27:53] How early did holy water develop as an element of Christian worship?
[00:27:58] What insight can we have on its early development and use? Is it connected with baptism? Is there any scriptural reference that the practice builds on?
[00:28:09] I'll answer that last question first. And there's certainly nothing in the Bible about holy water. No, but of course, with anything, you can. You can quote verses for just about anything if you choose well enough.
[00:28:25] And, you know, you might pick, for example, the fact that Jesus was baptized in water. And so that shows that this is A, this is a holy, a holy phenomenon that it is something that the Son of God made sacred. Something you could, you could say things like that.
[00:28:41] The original. The question is, how early did this develop? It's not in the New Testament, the idea of having holy water. The first reference to it that I know about, and I think this might be the first reference, is in a document called the Apostolic Constitutions.
[00:28:58] This is a very interesting book, the Apostolic Constitutions. It is usually dated toward the end of the fourth century. So, you know, like in the 390s, something like that. Four, maybe up to 400 or so, something like that. It's called the Apostolic Constitutions. It's constitutions because it's giving rules for how, how churches are to be run and organized.
[00:29:25] And so it's kind of a practical model about how to, how to engage in ritual practices and in baptism and in Eucharist and in, in what the various offices of the church are supposed to be, the various officials, how that, you know, who they're supposed to be. It's called the Apostolic Constitutions because it claims to be written by the apostles.
[00:29:46] It claims to be written by the 12 apostles even though they've been dead for over 300 years.
[00:29:53] So I, I've decided, when I got this question, by the way, I decided, you know, I'm going to, on the blog, I'm going to reprint, I'm going to publish some excerpts from a book I wrote some years ago called Forgery and Counter Forgery, where I discuss this Apostolic Constitutions because I've always found it really interesting for, in part because of this idea that the author is claiming to be the 12 apostles with very interesting implications. One is when he lists the books of the New Testament, which are of course all written by apostles by the. Around the year 390 or so, most people are pretty much agreeing on which books should be in the New Testament. He lists the books of the New Testament, but he includes the book he's writing now, the Apostolic Constitutions, that's also in the New Testament. He says it's written by the apostles.
[00:30:40] And in, in places, in places it's not just the group writing this individuals. And so you'll have, you'll say, it'll say something like I, James, say to you about this issue that so and so and so and so. I, Peter, say to you so and so and so and so. I, John, say to you so and so and so and so and so. It gives you these things and at one and so, in part of it Each, each apostle is claiming to be giving information about church order and church organization of things. The holy water thing comes in when Matthew speaks.
[00:31:13] When, when Matthew speaks his turn, he gives instructions for how to bless the holy oil and the holy water.
[00:31:25] He doesn't explain fully what that means, but it's. It's usually thought that oil is, is what is used for healing ministry.
[00:31:34] When somebody is sick, you anoint them with oil. And water, of course, is used for baptism.
[00:31:40] And so you're to use holy water and holy oil, it's supposed to be blessed in a certain way. And in this Apostolic Constitutions, the author claiming at this point to be Matthew, tells the church officials how to go about blessing the water and the oil.
[00:31:57] So in its earliest reference, it is referring to baptism. It could not have been referring to baptism in the early church, because in the early church, baptism was not conducted by sprinkling some water on the head in a church or pouring water over the head in a church from a basin. In the early church, the insistence was that water, that people be baptized, if possible, outdoors and preferably in running water.
[00:32:24] Running. One way to say running water in Greek is living water. So it's not still water. It's living. It's. It's like it's moving like living beings do. And so you'd be baptized in living water. Well, you can't, you know, it's not contained then, so you can't really bless it. So you have like a contained amount of holy water. So I think it originally did refer to baptism water as part of the church rituals. But no, it cannot go to the back to the early church.
[00:32:53] All right, next question. How do we reconcile the lack of external non Christian attestations to the historical Jesus from the first century with the widespread growth of early Christian communities?
[00:33:08] Excellent question. So what the person's saying, look, Christianity is spreading widely already in the first century, and so it's being spread throughout the Roman world. This is something I'll be talking about in my talk on the Book of Acts is the spread of Christianity starting in Jerusalem, going into Judea and into Samaria, going into Galilee, going up into Asia Minor, which now Turkey, going over to Greece, going over to Rome. You get these churches starting everywhere. And so with this kind of growth, what, why, how do you explain then that there aren't any non Christians who refer to it?
[00:33:47] Good question.
[00:33:49] Two things to say. We do have one non Christian who mentions Christianity in the first century, and that's Josephus in the year 93 in his book the Antiquities of the Jews, who, especially in chapter 20, he has a statement about the followers of Jesus down to his own day.
[00:34:10] The second thing is that I think it's important to talk about the growth of Christian communities and how many Christians we're talking about and how much influence they were having on the Roman world at the time.
[00:34:22] This is the topic, one of the topics that I deal with in my book, the Triumph of Christianity. This book here, the Triumph of Christianity. I talk about how the church grew, how fast it grew, where it grew, you know, why it grew, why people were converting, and, you know, persecution. Talk about all those things. One of the things I do in the book is I try to explain what appears to be the rate of growth of the early Christian church.
[00:34:56] For this, I'm riffing on material that was already advanced by Rodney Stark, who's a sociologist of religion who has a book called the Rise of Christianity, who, as a sociologist, he knows how to crunch numbers when it comes to population growth, and he tries to crunch the numbers for how quickly Christianity grew. And my analysis is somewhat dependent on his, but I have to refine it because his doesn't work in key ways. And so I have to refine it a bit. But the basic idea is there that you have a pretty good idea of how many people there were when Christianity started, and you have a decent idea of how many Christians there were, say, around the year 300 or the time Constantine converted in the year 312.
[00:35:44] It's actually easier, I think, to know how many we started with. And people always get upset with me because I usually say that, well, it started with about 20 people. People, they say, well, what are you talking about? Jesus taught all these people all over the place. And like, you know, and like, he must have had hundreds and hundreds of followers. Well, I'm not personally not sure he did, but even if he did, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about how many people listen to him preach or were impressed with him. I'm asking how many people were those who believed that his death and resurrection brought about salvation.
[00:36:19] That's. That's more what Christianity is than, you know, turning the other cheek. I mean, turning the other cheek is part of being a Christian, but you can turn the other cheek without being a Christian.
[00:36:31] If you believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus, you are a Christian. And so my question is, when did that start that, like the idea that you had to believe in his death and resurrection? Well, it began after his death and after his resurrection, after they believed he was resurrected.
[00:36:46] And in the New Testament itself, the people who believed that to begin with, the beginning group were the 11 remaining disciples and the women who had accompanied them to Jerusalem. And so to round it off, I say 20. You know, it wouldn't have been 100, wouldn't have been two. If, if the New Testament's right. If the New Testament's not right, I think it's probably fewer than 20, but not more than 20, because it wasn't a large group who went to Jerusalem with him. And they, you know, maybe they did convert a lot of people, maybe they did, who had heard Jesus but had to learn about the death and resurrection. It is an interesting thing that, you know, it's. I don't think I'd ever noticed this before, but, you know, in the. When you have accounts of people converting in the New Testament, like in the Book of Acts, it's never somebody who heard Jesus preach before.
[00:37:38] That's weird. You'd think you'd go up to Galilee and talk to all those people, but they don't. They don't for some reason. Anyway, let's say it starts with 20. By the time you get to Constantine or so you got about 5 or 4 or 5 million Christians in the world. Probably the world had the Roman of. And we're just in the Roman Empire. Probably we're okay. So the question is, how do you get from 20 people to, like, you know, 4 million at the time of Constantine?
[00:38:05] I think probably around the year 300, there may be 2 or 3 million. There are reasons for these numbers that I go into in my book. I'm not going to go into here, but you can read the book and see what you think. But scholars, they rarely think there are more than, you know, 4 or 5 million at the time of Constantine, out of the empire of 60 million. Okay, well, how fast does it grow? It's, of course, not growing at a steady rate, but you, you can calculate the percentage of growth if you know the beginning number and the end number and you know, how many years separate those two, you can calculate the percentage rate of growth. Not that you're not saying, oh, yeah, every decade it grew 36%, you know, because it is. Sometimes it's like this, but over time, you could come up with the average. If you do it that way and you figure out, okay, how many Christians were there in the first century? At the end of the first century? Well, by the end of the first century, by my calculations, there would have been seven to 10,000 Christians. Seven to 10,000. So take the upper limit, 10,000. The empire has 60 million people in it.
[00:39:19] If my math is right, doing this off the top of my head here, 10,000 would be. 1/60 of 1% of the empire had become Christian by that time. 1/60 of 1%.
[00:39:35] And so how influential were they and how widely were they known? Well, not very.
[00:39:45] And so, yeah, so that's, you know, so I don't. I would not expect pagan authors to be talking about Jesus. The pagan authors are all highly educated urban elites who've got their own things they're talking about and are not concerned about some tiny little religions that's just started that they probably haven't even, you know, maybe haven't even heard of.
[00:40:08] And so I'm not surprised at all by the lack of references to Jesus.
[00:40:14] I'd be more surprised if there's. They're actually lack of Seneca started talking about him or something. Whoa. Well, really, that would be good. All right, all right, next question.
[00:40:26] In searching for an explanation for sightings of Jesus after the crucifixion, it seems plausible, says this person, that Jesus and Barabbas were switched after the trials. The Romans wouldn't have recognized one over the other and wouldn't have noticed a switch. And so they could crucify, or they would crucify Barabbas, thinking he was Jesus.
[00:40:51] After the crucifixion, Jesus goes around saying hi to everyone and then skips out of town realizing how close he is to die. So, Bart, what's the possibility of this happening?
[00:41:04] Well, you know, I don't calculate possibilities of historical hypotheses the way I calculate population growth. And so I don't have a percentage to give you. I would say the possibility is very, very, very slight. Like, I mean, there's got to be some possibility because it's possible. But with me, my view, things like this is when you have a suggestion like this, I think every suggestion has to be taken seriously.
[00:41:33] Every hypothesis has to be taken seriously. The hypothesis has to be evaluated on the basis of known evidence.
[00:41:43] And so you look at the various explanations for things, and you look at the various possibilities that lead to those claims, and then you evaluate them based on what you know.
[00:41:54] Okay, so based on what we know, is this a likely scenario that Barabbas and Jesus were switched? And then. So Jesus survived and he's close to dying, and he showed up and people thought he had been raised from the dead. Okay, so it's. Yeah, let's just say it's possible.
[00:42:12] How do you establish the probabilities. Now, remember, the question that's being asked is, why did people say they saw him afterwards?
[00:42:20] Are there reasons people say so? And I. I'm assuming this person does not believe Jesus was actually raised from the dead. So let's just. Let's work with that. You know, let's let's just say for the purpose of this argument that Jesus was not actually raised from the dead. And so you have to have some explanation or why people said they saw him raised from the dead. Well, are there.
[00:42:43] Are there instances that we know of where people report seeing somebody whom they did not really see?
[00:42:52] I'm thinking Elvis, for example, or I'm thinking, you know, I mean, so is it possible that there are other explanations? And to weigh the likelihood of one of the explanations, you have to weigh it in relationship to the other explanations. Okay? That's just how you do history. You get the explanation together, away. Which one's more probable there? It happens all the time, that people will see someone in a crowd and not realize who they actually are.
[00:43:20] I remember one time giving a lecture, a public lecture, where I was convinced that the guy Sitting in the sixth row was my father who had died 10 years earlier. Looked just like him. I think, oh, my God, this is really spooky, weird. But then when I got up to see him up close, I realized, yeah, okay, that's not him. I mean, I knew it wasn't him. It's just like. But it's, you know, it's just like one of those things. And those things happen a lot. People see somebody, they mistake her identity. That happens a lot. People.
[00:43:53] People see things that aren't there.
[00:43:55] That happens a lot. One out of eight of us will see a deceased loved one. Like, I thought I saw my dad. Mine wasn't like a genuine vision kind of thing. It's just like a mistaken thing. But one out of eight of us will see something like, you know, your grandmother coming into your bedroom a few weeks after she died and talking to you. One out of eight people in America have that kind of thing and person not really there. And so things like that happen.
[00:44:21] Sometimes people lie about what they saw, you know, oh, yeah, you know, I saw Michael Jordan the other day. You know, they're just kind of lying about it. That happens a lot. So there are things that happen a lot. So did switch identities for crucified victims happen a lot?
[00:44:38] If it did happen a lot, we have no, to my knowledge. I don't know of any record of that ever happening in the ancient world or any report of it happening, in part because Romans were pretty careful about whom they crucified.
[00:44:55] That's one big thing. They were not careless. And if somebody were tried and condemned to crucifixion, they weren't put in a trial room with lots of other people. In Jesus's case, the trial itself almost certainly would have been just him and Pontius Pilate. If Pontius Pilate, even. I don't know. But. But they. They take the person and the person is judged individually. Like, Pilate isn't condemning a group of 100 people or something, or even two people at once. He's condemning his separate trial. But as soon as they're condemned, they're taken out to be cr.
[00:45:30] And so there's not like a waiting period.
[00:45:33] Jesus was condemned. He was taken off to be crucified. And so I think it's unlikely he got switched with someone else. The other big problem with this question, I think, is that there are serious questions about whether the Barabbas incident itself is historical.
[00:45:50] I don't think so. I don't think there really was a Barabbas.
[00:45:55] If you, if you don't remember the story, the way it works is Jesus is on trial and Pontius Pilate doesn't think he's done anything wrong and is not willing to crucify him. Doesn't want to crucify him.
[00:46:08] But.
[00:46:09] And so he. He says, look, I've got this. I've got this policy. Every Passover, I release one. I release a criminal for you. And, you know, I'd.
[00:46:21] I, you know, how about Jesus? Will you take Jesus? You know, I can release him, because I always release somebody. And the crowd cries out, no, not Jesus. Barabbas. Give us Barabbas. Jesus. You want Barabbas? How about Jesus here? No, no, we want Barabbas. Ah. And so he releases them Barabbas, and he's got to crucify Jesus. And they take Jesus out to be crucified. I really don't think that happened.
[00:46:45] The Barabbas bit.
[00:46:47] We have no record of any Roman governor, let alone Pontius Pilate, who, by the way, was known to be particularly vicious.
[00:46:55] We have no record of Pilate ever releasing a criminal at the Passover or at any other time. We have no record of a Roman governor releasing a criminal to satisfy a crowd at a festival time. Never. I mean, just. We don't have any record of anything like that ever happening. In this particular case, we're told that Barabbas was a. Was somebody who had been arrested during an Insurrection attempt and that he had murdered somebody. Well, who do you murder in an insurrection attempt? You murdered the enemy. In this case. He must have murdered a Roman soldier if the story was true.
[00:47:32] So you're saying that Pilate is releasing an insurrectionist who's known to have murdered a Roman soldier to the crowd. So what, he can go out and commit insurrection again? That makes no sense. We certainly have no record of that incident or any incident like with Pilate or any incident with anybody in the Roman world. And so I think what's going on is that Christians are trying to. Christian storytellers have come up with a story about Barabbas. I don't think it's historical. The idea is they're trying to emphasize how guilty Jews are in the death of Jesus and how innocent Pilate was. Pilate wanted to release him, but the Jews insisted. Even when Pilate said, pilate, I'll release him. No, no, give us the other guy.
[00:48:23] And by the way, why only Barabbas? Here's. Here's something I hadn't thought about for a long time, ever.
[00:48:30] Jesus was crucified with two other people that morning.
[00:48:34] Why was the choice between Jesus and Barabbas? Why not those two? Why wasn't one of them up for crabs or the others crucified, maybe that day? So anyway, I don't think it happened. I think what Christians are trying to emphasize is that Jews rejected their own Messiah and they preferred an insurrectionist, a murderer, to the son of God.
[00:48:57] That's who they wanted. The Jews wanted a murderer. They wanted somebody who supported a violent overthrow of the Romans. But the followers of Jesus supported the one who's willing to die for the sins of the world. And so those Jews, you know, this anti Jewish polemic, those Jews not only killed their Messiah, they show that they just are violent and they're out to destroy Rome and we're not. It is no accident, by the way, probably that this man's name was Barabbas. In the story, the name Bar Abbas, Bar Abba. You may be familiar with the fact that Abba means.
[00:49:36] Means daddy or father. In Aramaic, bar means son. Bar Abbas is son of his father.
[00:49:48] Which son of God do Jews prefer?
[00:49:52] Well, they want the violent criminal. They don't want the pacifist who's willing to die for others. That's who the Jews prefer.
[00:50:01] So I don't think it's historical. And so I don't think it's possible there could be an identity switch myself. It's possible. Okay. It's possible.
[00:50:08] I think it's incalculably small possibility in my opinion. Okay, next question.
[00:50:14] How do you explain what appears to be two contradictory statements in John's Gospel? The first is in chapter 10, verse 30. The Father and I are one.
[00:50:27] The second is in John 14:28, where Jesus says, the Father is greater than I.
[00:50:36] This person is asking, how do I explain this contradiction? If Christ is one with the Father, how can the Father be greater than Him? Yeah, okay, good question. I think. I think a lot of it hinges on what it means that we are one.
[00:50:54] Jesus is not claiming to be identical with God.
[00:51:03] He's also not claiming that he is of the same substance as God in some way. He's claiming some kind of unusual unity with God.
[00:51:19] But it's a unity that appears to be in something like, we agree on everything. Our purpose is the same.
[00:51:29] Our motives are the same. We are after the same results.
[00:51:34] We agree on everything. There is nothing that divides us. We are one.
[00:51:43] Let me stress this passage is not Jesus saying, I am Yahweh.
[00:51:48] He's not saying I am Yahweh. He says, we are one. In other words, we are in agreement. And he's not saying that he's identical with God because he doesn't say the Father and I am one. It's plural. Two of us, we are one. And so in John's Gospel, the Father is greater than Jesus, but Jesus agrees with God up and down the line. And he's come to do God's mission, and he's doing God's mission, and he's not. He's not taking one step out of line. They are completely unified. So I don't think it's a contradiction. And as you know, I'm not against contradictions. So it's not. I'm trying to reconcile it. Next one. In what ways might the speeches and Acts be viewed as rhetorical constructions rather than historical events? And what implications does this have for understanding early Christian identity? I think they are absolutely rhetorical constructions, and they are not historical records of what the apostles said.
[00:52:44] I'll be saying this at some length, talking about this at some length in my course, which is coming up in early November on the Book of Acts.
[00:52:56] We know how ancient speech writers wrote their speeches. Speech writers, when I mean historians who are writing speeches going back to Thucydides 400 years earlier. Thucydides, he had to record the events that took place during the Peloponnesian War. And he records a bunch of speeches.
[00:53:15] He was not there to record these speeches. And he tells us how he came up with the information about what a particular speaker said, and he tells us he had to make it up.
[00:53:28] How else is he going to get it? He looked at the situation the speaker was in, tried to understand the situation, tried to understand the speaker as well as he could, try to understand what their values were, what their goals were, what their orientation orientation was.
[00:53:41] And based on what he knew about the speaker and what he knew about this situation, he made up a speech to fit the situation.
[00:53:48] And that's what the author of Acts did.
[00:53:51] We have good reason for knowing this, in part because we have the speeches of Paul in Acts, and we can compare what Acts says Paul preached with what Paul himself says he preached.
[00:54:04] And I'm going to be arguing in my course that they're fundamentally different on the key issue, how does one have salvation?
[00:54:17] The book of Acts has Paul saying something different from what Paul himself says.
[00:54:23] So I've talked about that on the blog, too. I'll talk more on the blog if I want to later. But let me just say, these are definitely historical, rhetorical constructions. We don't know what these apostles actually said at any one time from the Book of Acts.
[00:54:38] All right, next one. This is kind of a long question. I'm going to. I've only got two questions left. I'm going to get them both in, but I want to kind of condense this one.
[00:54:49] Well, I'm not sure. I can't. Did Jesus or whoever wrote the Gospels believe the Torah and its cruel and brutal commands, such as to kill children who cursed their parents, or to kill Jews who work on Sabbath, or to kill witches, et cetera? Do they still think those are valid? And the questioner says, well, I ask that because In Matthew, chapter 15, verses 4 through 6, Jesus is upset with the Pharisees for not following the commandment at Exodus, chapter 21, verse 17, to kill children who curse their parents.
[00:55:22] And so Jesus seems to get angry with the Pharisees because they're not following this commandment, says this person. Okay, so I need to pull out my handy Greek New Testament. Make sure my handy New Testament here to make sure I quote this passage just right. I don't think I. I will say Jesus is not angry with the pharisees in Matthew 15 for not killing children who disobey their parents. Yeah, I'll just. I'll paraphrase it so you can look it up. It's chapter 15, verses 4 to 6. Jesus is upset with the Pharisees for making laws that they expect to be followed that are not laws found in the Torah in the Old Testament.
[00:56:08] And their, their idea, the Pharisees. And this is historically right in some sense because the Pharisees made laws that were meant to elaborate the laws of the Old Testament in order to make sure that you would follow the laws of the Old Testament. Like they were kind of stricter laws. About the same thing, that if you follow the stricter laws, you're certainly going to be following what Ten Commandments says. And in Matthew 15, Jesus says, you know, you're doing this, you're making all these laws, but you're not obeying the law. You say, for example, that if somebody, somebody wants to make a gift, they should make it to the temple of God rather than give it to their parents.
[00:56:51] But the law says you should honor your father and mothers yourself.
[00:56:57] And so, you know, in the name that doesn't honor their father and mother is to be put to death.
[00:57:02] And so you are breaking the law, one of the Ten Commandments, to have your law about where you should give your excess resources to, to the temple or to, to your parents. And so the idea is you're supposed to be supporting the temple as according to the scripture, but you're, you know, you're doing that instead of honoring your parents, and that's wrong. So this person is saying, so he wants them to kill the children because the Exodus says you shall, you know, that a disobedient child is to be executed. But Jesus is not saying that. Jesus is saying, look, the Torah has a very serious commandment. If you, if you don't honor your father and mother, by the way, that's a commandment given to adults about what they're to do about their elderly parents. You're to honor your father and your mother, but, you know, instead of that, you're giving your money to the template. The first thing is to follow the commandment, then you can follow your other commandments. He's not encouraging people to kill their children because they disobey. He's simply quoting the commandment.
[00:58:04] Jesus, of course, thought that human life was more important than keeping any of the laws.
[00:58:11] And so I don't know whether if he was pressed whether, yeah, we ought to do this one or not. Probably not. We don't have record of people actually following those laws literally like that. So I don't think Jesus probably thought so.
[00:58:23] Last one, Paul in Galatians 3:13 says that Christ redeemed us by, from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.
[00:58:35] What the heck does Paul mean and how Does Christ becoming a curse help us?
[00:58:42] Okay, this.
[00:58:44] We could have an entire webinar on this one question. I will condense the answer.
[00:58:50] Paul believed that the law that God gave the Torah was good. He says, so it's good, it's righteous, it's holy.
[00:59:00] In Romans, he says that.
[00:59:03] But the problem with the law that God gave people is that it told them how to behave.
[00:59:10] You know, supposed to do this, that, and the other thing. It did not give them the power to do what it commanded.
[00:59:19] So it says, for example, you shouldn't covet your neighbor's property. Well, how do you help? You know, you like your neighbor's boat. You'd like that boat. Yeah, don't do that. But, you know, so, like, we're not actually able to keep from sinning. And the problem is that the law tells us how not to sin, but it doesn't give us the power not to sin. And since we are born into the world with sin, we sin naturally. That means that the law, even though it's good, curses us because the law tells us that there's punishment for breaking the law. And we can't help from breaking the law because we have sin in us. Okay? That's Paul's view. Christ, though, took the curse of the law away from us because he became a curse.
[01:00:01] Paul is referring to a passage in the Scripture that says in the Old Testament that anyone who hangs on a tree is cursed by God. This is in the book of Deuteronomy. Anyone cursed is he who hangs on a tree.
[01:00:19] For Paul, Christ became cursed by God by dying on a cross because God curses anybody on a tree. But for Paul, Christ did not die for his own sins because he didn't have sins.
[01:00:35] He must have died for the sins of others.
[01:00:40] And when he died for the sins of others, he took away their curse.
[01:00:46] The law had cursed them, but Christ bore their curse.
[01:00:52] He died in their place.
[01:00:56] That's Paul's fundamental doctrine of salvation, that Christ died for us. And in Galatians he says, by becoming a curse so we don't have to pay the penalty for the breaking the law.
[01:01:11] That idea, by the way, that Christ died in our place, that he was an atonement for our sins. That is precisely what is lacking in Paul's speeches in Acts.
[01:01:24] Read all of them. Read the 1 in 13, chapter 13 of Acts, and try to find where Paul says anything about Christ dying for you or for anyone. He doesn't. He has a different way of understanding the significance of Christ's death. Not an atonement.
[01:01:39] Okay, that's it. I've got a little bit over, but I wanted to get through all the questions this time. It's the first time I've ever done that. I think probably the last time I'll ever do that. But thank you so much, all for being Gold Members.
[01:01:49] I very much appreciate it. And if there's anything we can do in order to improve your experience as a Gold Member, please let us know.
