Monthly Gold Q&A - January, 2026

[00:00:01] Speaker A: I just want to say welcome to everyone and thank you so much for joining this first Q and A of 2026. We always, you know, we really appreciate you supporting the blog at the gold and or platinum level. So thank you for doing that. We truly couldn't do what we do without the support that you guys give at those levels. So thank you and also thank you for submitting great questions. It's always so interesting to see the batch of questions that come. Come in and this is a good batch. So thank you for being creative and sending us. Sending us good questions that make Bart think a little bit. So with that, I will. Yes. And I have my young biblical scholar here, as Brent has pointed out, so she's hopefully going to behave. But that is all I have to say. Bart, I will pass it over to you. [00:00:54] Speaker B: Okay, very good. So, yes, well, you know, we always do get good questions for these things. Sometimes I get a bunch of stumpers and, well, these things are going to look up a lot. And this time I think this might be the best batch of questions we've gotten. It's like, they're all good. I don't know. I doubt if I'll be able to get through them all, but I will definitely try to get through as many as I can. And I think I'm just going to go through them in the order in which I received them, which I've never done before because usually I've got to rearrange things somehow. So. Okay, got a bunch of them. Here we go. Number one. The first one is I found a book by de Bailious explaining form criticism. Okay, so this is referring to Martin de Balius, who is a German scholar who was writing. I think he was. I think his book on form criticism came out in the early 1920s. I'll explain what that is in a second. The question goes on to say, I went on Wikipedia for form criticism. It said that form criticism is no longer thought valid. I'd like to access your learning on the subject of the different criticisms. Okay, well, I'm not going to get into many, like all the criticisms, but I will say something about. About form criticism. This is a technical term. The way it happened was in the 19th century, a lot of scholars were very interested in the Gospels and the sources of the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Did any of them use each other? If so, who used whom and what other sources were available to the Gospel writers. And that was called source criticism. That's where you get the idea that Matthew and Luke used Mark for their Source, and that Matthew and Luke had some other source for many of their sayings called Q. And, you know, John maybe depended on Matthew, Mark and Luke, or maybe he didn't depend on Matthew, Mark and Luke. But that's all dealing with the sources. And part of what was driving source criticism in the 19th century and still today is that in the 19th century, especially if you could get to the earliest source, that would be the one closest to Jesus, and theoretically that would be the most accurate one. That's what they thought. And when they could show in a way that's still convincing to most people today that Mark was the first gospel, they assumed that Mark was the most accurate gospel, and they went from there. Form criticism arose out of source criticism. I'll explain why it's called form criticism in a second. Form criticism was interested in where the gospel sources got their information from. And scholars like De Bailius and his even more famous contemporary, Rudolf Bultmann, whom I think, safe to say that Rudolph Bultmann was the most famous and influential New Testament scholar of the 20th century, both Germans, they got interested in the fact that when you read the gospels, you have a bunch of stories that have. They have different details, but the basic kind of story is the same thing. Like repeatedly, for example, if you've got a miracle story, these miracle stories in the Gospels tend to have the same structure. And so Jesus learns that somebody is ill. Maybe the person comes up to Jesus, or somebody comes up to talk about someone else who's ill. Jesus hears the person's ill, he goes to the person. He speaks with the person, he touches the person or says something to person, he heals the person. And all the crowds marvel like, boom, boom, boom, boom. You could set it up like this is the outline. And then you just put in different names and different illnesses and different circumstances, but the form is the same. And the theory developed in the early. Around the end of the. Around 1919, it started. But people started thinking, you know, the reason these are in the same form is because these are oral traditions. And when you tell. When you tell oral traditions, they tend to have the same formal characteristics. And so a controversy story between Jesus and the Pharisees, it'll have the same kind of sequence of events. And so form critics got interested in what was going on at the oral level of storytelling prior to the sources that are lying behind the Gospels, thinking again that that might help us get closer to the historical Jesus, because you're going behind the sources. And so it's called form criticism because it involved a formal characteristic of these stories in the Gospels and with the assumption that there are oral traditions behind it. And there were two questions that were formulated by these form critics, the two basic questions. One was what is the formal structure of these kinds of stories, miracle stories, controversy stories, you know, various kinds of stories that you get in the Gospels, what's the formal structure? And second of all, what is the sitzen leben from which these kinds of stories emerged? Sitzenleben was, is the German term that means situation in life. And the question that they're addressing is not where did this particular story, what kind of historical situation is this particular story? Where does it come from? But where did this kind of story emerge from what was going on in early Christianity to lead to these kinds of miracle stories or these kinds of controversy stories? Just to give you one example, in a lot of the controversy stories, Jesus does something or his disciples do something. The Pharisees get all upset. They accuse Jesus of breaking the law. Jesus responds to them by giving them a one liner that withers them, and that's the end of the story. What would be the context within the Christian church that people would want to tell stories like that? Well, it made sense to these form critics that the sitzen laban, the situation for a story like that would be that Christians themselves were being confronted by Jews who thought that Christians were not true followers of God because they didn't keep the law properly. And so Christians came up with a bunch of stories in which Jesus was accused of not keeping the law properly and withering his Jewish opponents with a one liner showing that you don't, you know, that the human need is more important than Sabbath, for example, or that it doesn't matter what you eat, the kosher food laws are not what ultimately matters before God and so forth. And so in a sense, this was a way of formally understanding the formal characteristics of gospel stories. And it was a way of trying to get back into Christian history to understand where stories like this emerged so that we'd have a better sense of what kinds of situations were being confronted by Christian storytellers in the early church. This form criticism was still being used when I was a graduate student in the late 70s and early 80s. Although it was a bit on the wane and it has since been seen to be somewhat problematic by most people. Nobody actually practices form criticism the way that it was 100 years ago. But my view is that the basic idea that there were oral traditions behind these sources and that we can use the sources to figure out some things about the oral traditions. I personally think that's still valid in some ways. Okay, great. How do you interpret John 8, 41 where the Pharisees say to Jesus we were not born of porneia? Doesn't this suggest that they've heard rumors about Jesus legitimacy? Or do they mean porneia metaphorically? Okay, porneia. Porneia is the Greek word that means something like sexual immorality. It's the word we get pornography from. And Jesus is in this discussion with Pharisees and they're having a dispute about whether all Jews, including these Pharisees, whether they're actually descended from Abraham or not. Jesus is saying that just because you're born from Abraham, it doesn't make you a child of Abraham. And so it has to do with their kind of lineage. And one of the nasty replies of the Pharisees to Jesus in the story is well, well, we weren't born of porneia. And if you emphasize the we there, it sounds like they're saying, yeah, unlike you, we were not born a porneia. And so that's what this question is asking. Does this verse suggest that they've heard rumors about Jesus legitimacy? My view is that I think that that's probably right. I mean, I don't think you can demonstrate it. I don't think there's no proof for it outside of this, this passage. But I think there were clearly stories about Jesus birth floating around in early Christianity. The stories of the virgin birth that you find in Matthew and Luke are plausible. Plausibly they are evidence that outsiders were accusing Jesus of being illegitimate. And the Christians responded, yes, he did have an unusual birth. And you're right, Joseph was not the father, but it was because he is born of a virgin. John does not have a virgin birth. I would imagine that the author of John knew about the stories about Jesus virgin birth, but he doesn't include those stories. Unlike Matthew and Luke, John indicates that Jesus was a pre existent divine being who became a human. In Matthew and Luke, when Jesus is born of the, when he's conceived of a virgin, it's not, it's not that he existed before and then was conceived by a virgin. The conception is when he comes into existence. In Matthew and Luke, it appears John has a different idea that he's an incarnate divine being who existed before. But I think all three of these books suggest that possibly Jesus was known to be to have had unusual circumstances at his birth and that there were rumors going around at least that he was born out of wedlock. And some people continue to think Some scholars continue to think that he probably was born out of wedlock. I don't think we can know that, but I think that there were stories about it, and it's reflected here in this John 8 passage. Next question. Jews, both ancient and contemporary, have viewed blood as a sacred substance, the essence of living being. And the Torah strictly prohibited its consumption. So it's difficult to envision that the idea of turning Jesus blood into wine, or vice versa, and then consuming that wine would be a Jewish idea. Could you comment on this? Yeah. So first thing I'll say is that in the oldest Christian traditions that we find in the New Testament, and that continued on for a long time, it was not understood that Jesus blood turned into wine or that the wine turned into Jesus blood. That's the doctrine of transubstantiation, that the substance has been transformed. Trans substantiation that developed later in the Catholic tradition. It is not what the earliest Christians think. They didn't think they were literally drinking Jesus blood. They're drinking the wine in commemoration of his death, that the red wine represents his blood, but it's not his blood. And so absolutely the earliest Christians didn't think they were drinking the blood of Jesus, even though there's metaphorical language that kind of sounds that way in, for example, John Chapter six. But they were celebrating the communion meal as a commemorative event. Only later did the doctrine of transubstantiation come into account. Would that have been a Jewish idea? No, it's a good point. This would not have been a Jewish idea that you're actually drinking the blood of Jesus. This was developed by later theologians, much later theologians, centuries later, who were not Jewish. Okay. With Christmas in the rear view, there's still a lingering thought that clicked when I was reading Matthew the other day, says this questioner, that it's not a birth narrative. An infancy narrative, yes, but not a birth narrative. But it's ingrained in us to call it a birth narrative. Chapter two jumps right into the time of King Herod after Jesus was born. What are your thoughts? I'd say that it's true that in Matthew you don't really have a narrative of Jesus birth. It just, you know, you're told that he was born. And so the narrative is what happens after he's born, and the wise men come to worship him and King Herod finds out and tries to kill him. And so it's describing events in the aftermath of Jesus birth in chapter two of Matthew. But I think I would go even further and say that it's not, how do I say, I would say that even in the New Testament, we don't even have a narrative of a virgin birth. What we have in the New Testament is the idea of a virginal conception. And so the conception is virginal. It's only later in the next century, in the second century, that we start getting narratives of a virgin birth where Mary gives birth as a virgin, meaning that even after she gives birth, she's still a virgin. That becomes a doctrine within the. Within the Catholic Church that she not only gave. Conceived as a virgin, but gave birth as virtue. That means that even though she gave birth, she, in kind of physiological terms, her hymen was still intact. And that became an idea within Catholic thinking that she not only conceived as a virgin, but gave birth as a virgin. And then there developed soon after that, the idea that she was perpetually a virgin, so she never had sex. And so, yeah, so I would agree with this. Matthew does not really give a birth narrative. It just says he was born, but then it gives the narrative of what was going to happen, what happened after that. Okay, all right. You've said a few times in the past that some things we now firmly believe we believe are true will turn out to be false in the future. And I assume that that means, says this person, I assume that means with relevant, better evidence. And so my question is, this person says, if you had to guess, what is something you're really adamant about now that has the biggest probability to turn out to be false with better evidence? This is a really good question. And I've spent some time thinking about it, and I've come up with. I don't have an answer to it. I don't know, because almost everything I'm adamant about that New Testament scholars tend to be adamant about are things that we're adamant about because we think the evidence is really secure. I also think knowing the history of scholarship, not just in the New Testament, but the history of scholarship period, in virtually every field, that things that people take to be absolutely, fundamentally, almost necessarily true are later shown not to be true. I'll just give you an example that just even before I looked at these questions this morning, I was in. One of the things I do in the morning is read some nonfiction. And some of you may know that Bill Bryson had this book that came out called A History of Nearly Everything that came out 22 years ago, and he's come out with a second edition of it. And I'm very interested in the kind of science things he. He deals with, because I'M not a science, I'm not a science guy and I can't get my mind around the technicalities of science. But I'm very interested in developments within science. And I was just reading this in his book in his new edition today about how at the end of the 19th century science, every, every ref, every reputable science on the planet thought that there was an ether, that there was ether in the universe, that, that we're surrounded by this kind of, this ether, this thing that you can't see and you can't touch and you can't sense. But it was, it, it explained a lot of, a lot of the pro. Properties of physics that we knew were true. And everybody, everybody basically thought that until the idea was completely shattered at the beginning of the 20th century when they, to gauge the speed of light which showed that in fact there's not, there's not an ether which led, then led to it end up leading to quantum and it led to Einstein and everything else. So nobody believes in the ether anymore, but 140 years ago everybody believed in ether and they were adamant about it. And even after it was proven not to have existed, there were still people who had thought it was adamant, they were adamant they were actually sure about it, who still said it had to be right. But they, you know, after about five years that disappeared. So yeah, I, so I don't know what's, that's, that's the thing about paradigm shifts. When something really, really changes from what everybody knows to be true. It's like, okay, it's something big that nobody expected because you're really sure about it. What's it going to be? Is somebody going to prove that Jesus never existed? Yeah, I think so. Are they going to prove that there's like more than four gospels? I don't think so. Are they going to prove that, think the, the synoptic, that the synoptics didn't use the same sources? I don't think so. Are they going to show that Paul wasn't Jewish? No, I don't think so. The things I'm adamant about, I, you know, it'll take, it'll take really good, really good proof. And so that's why I, but if you just look at the history of my discipline and virtually every other discipline, it happens. And when it happens, people are caught by surprise. Okay. Okay. As the Gospels get increasingly anti Jewish, so as you go in the chronological order in which they're written, can it be discerned how much of this anti Jewish content was original with the authors as opposed to how much may have been added or subtracted later. Okay, what this questioner is pointing out is that if you line up Matthew, Mark, Luke and John chronologically in the sequence, that for other reasons we think they were written in. So we have very good reasons for thinking Mark was the first, Matthew was probably the first of our Matthew and Luke to copy Mark. Luke was probably the third Gospel. John was almost certainly the last Gospel. This is how we chronologically arrange the Gospels. And as it turns out, when you look at each of the Gospels, they get increasingly anti Jewish. So that Mark is anti Jewish, but not nearly as anti Jewish as John is, for example. You can see that in particular by looking at the trial narratives of the four Gospels. If you just are keen to seeing how anti Jewish a Gospel is, read Mark's account of who's at fault for Jesus death. And you know, it's the Jewish leaders who call out for his death and they're the ones who push the issue and Pilate ends up killing him. But the Jews are, they're the ones who are pushing the Jewish leaders. Jewish leaders. When you get to Matthew, Pilate actually washes his hands and says, I'm innocent of this man's blood. And the Jewish crowd cries out, his blood be upon us and our children. They accept the responsibility. You get to Luke's Gospel and Pilate three times declares Jesus flat out innocent as to this King Herod. And, and there Pilate wants nothing to do with this. And look, and it's the Jews who insist. The Jewish leaders insist. And so it's more and more, more and more anti Jewish until you get to John where it's even, it's even more so. So this person, what this person is asking is if that's the case, do we know whether this anti Jewish content began with these authors or is it added on later? And I assume what this questioner is asking is it is the anti Jewishness heightened in the manuscript tradition of these gospels or is what we read is the anti Judaism that we're reading in these Gospels today from the authors? And I think the answer isn't coming from the authors. I think that it's not just that the authors themselves are more anti Jewish though, it's that the communities that they are living in over time become more anti Jewish. The history of Christian anti Judaism is a very interesting one and a very important one. And I think it can be shown that over time as Christians, followers of Jesus became increasingly gentile and they insisted increasingly that the Hebrew Bible was their scriptures. And not the Jewish scriptures. And they insisted that Jews had rejected their own Messiah. As that goes on over time. And authors themselves who are in these communities tend to become more anti Jewish. So I think that this anti Judaism comes from the four authors because of the community lives that they're living, the situations that they're in. It is true that there are some textual changes that scribes have added that increase the anti Jewishness of these gospels. Just to give you one example, in the Gospel of Luke when Jesus is being nailed to the cross, this is only Luke. You don't find this the same I'm going to quote in Matthew, Mark or John. It's just in Luke, when Jesus is being nailed to the cross, in only Luke's gospel, he, he prays father, forgive them for they don't know what they're doing. Now I, when I was younger, I had always interpreted that to mean referring to the Romans, forgive the Romans, because these soldiers, they don't know what they're doing. But I later came to realize that in early Christianity this was always interpreted as a prayer for the Jews who were responsible for Jesus death. Forgive them for they don't know what they're doing. That becomes a prominent theme in Christianity, that the reason God destroyed Jerusalem 40 years later is because Jews had killed their own Messiah and God's punishing them. That's an ancient tradition you get already at the end of the second century. And so the thing is, would Jesus be praying for the forgiveness of Jews if God did not forgive them? Scribes took out the line, father forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. Some scribes removed Jesus prayer. Why? Because then Jesus doesn't pray for forgiveness for Jews. And so I would see that as an anti Jewish variant reading. And so there is, there's some heightened anti Judaism in the later textual tradition ascribed through copying the text. They sometimes made it less pro Jewish or more anti Jewish. But I think the main emphases we get in these gospels actually go do go back to the Gospel writer themselves. Next question. To what extent do you think early Christianity, like Rabbinic Judaism was shaped by the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE? Was the fall of the Temple as formative for Christian identity in literature, especially Mark, says this author, as it was for the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism from Pharisaic traditions? Okay, yeah, really good question. First thing is that the destruction of the Temple had a huge effect on Judaism. What this person's calling, Rabbinic Judaism, that's the Judaism that develops among rabbis, teachers of Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem. Our early Jewish sources, our main early sources for understanding how Judaism developed after the Hebrew Bible are produced by later rabbis, including the Mishnah, which appeared about the year 200 or so, and the Jewish Talmuds, the Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian Talmud, which were a couple hundred years after that. These are reflections and teachings of rabbis after the fall of Jerusalem. And these are the texts, the Mishnah and the Talmud has the Mishnah within it. These texts, these Rabbinic texts shape Judaism for all time down till today. So all forms of Judaism today go back to this Rabbinic Judaism. This Rabbinic Judaism was incalculably affected by the fall of the Temple because when the Temple was destroyed, then the regulation for how to worship God as found in the Torah could no longer be observed. Because the the religion of Judaism in Israel and Jerusalem in the days of Jesus were focused on the Temple and sacrifices in the Temple as laid out in the Torah. But now there's no Temple, you could have no more sacrifices. And so Rabbinic Judaism develops into less. It's no longer a religion of sacrifice focused on the Temple. It's a religion of the study of Torah, religion of understanding the teachings of God found in his holy book. And that's what Judaism continues to be till today. So it incalculably changed Judaism. Did it change Christianity as much? No, I don't think it changed it as much. I think it did change Christianity. I think it had an effect on Christianity. The idea that Jews are responsible for Jesus death is related to the fall of Jerusalem probably. Mark is usually dated to around the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, maybe a couple years later, usually dated to the early 70s of the common era. So in the aftermath of the fall of the Temple, Jesus repeatedly predicts the destruction of the Temple in Mark. And Christians came to think that Jesus actually was opposed to Jewish sacrifice. And Christianity became in that sense anti sacrificial as well. That it's the death of Jesus, not sacrifices, that put a person into a right standing before God. That was around before the destruction of the Temple. That view that the death of Jesus is what which that produces and sustains a right relationship with God. That Paul had that idea back in the 30s and so that view had been around. But it's more or less cemented when there's no more Temple because you can't really follow what the Torah says anymore. And that allows for Christians then to claim superiority over Judaism who can't even practice their own religion, Jews. So I think it did have an effect. I don't think it had the monstrous effect that it had for Judaism. A huge, just as big as you can imagine, change in Judaism. Okay, in your December, this past December, Q and A around the 22 minute mark, I'm told here, referring to Luke, chapter three, Jesus baptism, you mentioned, this person says that in one Greek manuscript and in some Latin texts, the text says, the voice from heaven says, you are my son, today I have begotten you. And you follow that by saying, there are really good reasons for thinking that's the original text. What's the manuscript and what are those good reasons? And then it asks, is there an English translated Bible in your view, with the most correct version of the original text? Generally speaking, I think most modern translations do a good job of reproducing translations of the original text. As far as the translators can tell, not too many have this wording of the text of the voice of the baptism. In Luke, you are my son, today I have begotten you. I didn't have time to look up which translations might have it. I think a couple do. But most translations have the more attested text. The voice says, you're my beloved son, in whom I'm well pleased. The best manuscript that has this, the old manuscript, is Codex Bize. It's from the. It's written around the year 400. It's one of our oldest manuscripts. It is an idiosyncratic manuscript in many ways, but sometimes it has idiosyncrasies that look like. Or the original idiosyncrasies. So what I mean by that is, in Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus gets baptized by John. And in all three, when he gets baptized, the Spirit descends upon him in the form of a dove and a voice comes from heaven and says something. In Mark, the voice says, you are my beloved son, in whom I'm well pleased. In Matthew it says, this is my beloved Son, in whom I'm well pleased. Slight difference, but it actually changes the meaning. Is the voice talking to Jesus as in Mark, you are my son, or is he talking to the crowd? Or John the Baptist, this is my son. Big difference. But in this, in, in Luke, we have a textual variant. Most manuscripts of Luke say exactly what Mark says, you are my beloved Son, in whom I'm well pleased. But this one Greek manuscript, particularly old manuscript that has some original readings and not in other manuscripts and, and some Latin manuscripts also have this rewarding of it. Instead of my beloved Son and whom I'm well pleased, it says, you are my son. Today I have Begotten you. What are the good reasons for thinking that's the original text? Well, I actually did a. I actually did a podcast on this that I think is coming out in a couple weeks for my. For my Myth Quoting Jesus podcast, where I went into some length about why I think that's the original text here. I'll just say that it's the least harmonized text. When scribes were copying Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and they came to a verse that was worded differently, they would often inform one of the texts, the text that was the aberrant text to the others. They would rarely take a text that agreed with the others and take it out of conformity with it. And so the harmonized reading is more likely to be the one the scribe created. And in this case, the harmonized reading is the one that sounds just like Mark, which is in most of the manuscripts. Moreover, you have to ask which of these ways of wording it in Luke would a scribe be likely to want to change? If a scribe had seen Luke's voice saying, you're my beloved son, in whom I'm well pleased, would there be a reason to change that? Nobody changes in Mark. Nobody changes. Matthews. But here, somebody wanted to change. Why would they want to change? Was there a problem with that? I don't know what the problem would have been. But suppose the original Manus, the original text said, you are my son. Today I have begotten you. Would there be a reason to change that? Oh, boy. Would there be a reason to change that? That suggests that Jesus becomes the son of God at the baptism today, I have begotten you. Begotten is a word we don't use anymore, usually because we're talking about the Bible. But the term refers to the. When a woman gets pregnant, she conceives the child. The man has begotten the child. So it's the man's bringing the child into existence. So today I have brought you into existence as my son. What? One of the issues is that in our manuscripts of all of our manuscripts of Luke that we have today have chapters one and two, where Jesus becomes the Son of God at his birth. And so if he's born the Son of God, how does he become the Son of God as a baptism? Well, some scholars, including me, think Luke didn't originally have a virgin birth story, that the first two chapters weren't originally there. And if that's the case, then what begins with Luke's Gospel is the genealogy of Jesus in chapter three, where his genealogical line is traced, not Back just to David and not just back to Abraham and not just back to Adam. It's traced back to God so that he's the Son of God by genealogy. And then you have the baptism where he's the Son of God by being declared the Son of God, he's adopted to be the Son of God at his baptism. So I think this is the original text. I have a lengthy discussion of this if you're interested in a discussion. It turns out I looked this up. It turns out I don't discuss this one in my book Misquoting Jesus. I had to limit the number of textual variants I could talk about there for a general audience. And I didn't want to get into the weeds too much in that book. But I do have a fuller discussion. If you have my book, the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, I have a pretty full discussion of why I think this is the original text. The original text there. Okay. So I have read that a major reason for you losing your evangelical faith was over the issue of human suffering. And I agree that's a major problem. I would join you in the agnostic camp, but for the idea of a random universe, I can't conceive of it. Have you ever addressed the issue from that perspective? If so, can you direct me to a blog or a book to answer? If not, you might consider addressing it here. So, several things to say about this. So I actually left the evangelical tradition within Christianity not because of the problem of human suffering, but because of my biblical scholarship where I realized that the Bible is not an inerrant revelation from God, that there are places we don't know what the text originally said, that we don't know a lot of things that Jesus said and did, that there are contradictions in the Gospels and between Paul and Acts, and that I've realized that the Bible was problematic as a revelation from God. And so I left the evangelical tradition because of my problems with understanding the Bible and the history of early Christianity. I left Christianity altogether for this reason. So I'm just clarifying. That's not when I left evangelical Christianity. It's when I left Christianity and is because of the problem of suffering. If the Jewish and Christian traditions are right, that there's a God who is active in the world and who intervenes when his people pray to him and that he wants the best for people and he's able to provide the best for people because he's God, he could if he wanted to. Clear he does not to me. I mean, just, you know, look around our world it's clear to me he doesn't intervene. And it's clear to me he does not answer prayer, even though of course I, I heard hundreds of stories and experienced stories myself where I thought he did answer prayer. But now I see those things happening, even for people who don't pray about them. I don't think he answers prayer. I don't think so. I don't think God exists. And this person is saying, okay, I, you know, I'm on board with that. But it would mean that this is a random universe. Like, there's no, there's, there's nothing driving it. And this person can't conceive of that. A couple things. One is that I am not adamant that there is no divine being in the universe. I, I don't think so. I don't believe there is. So I'm an atheist because I don't believe that there's some kind of sentient power controlling the universe. But I don't know whether there is or not. If there is some kind of sentient being behind the universe. I don't think it's the Christian God, because the Christian God isn't like, isn't an absent God. He's an active God. I don't think that act of God exists. Does some other kind of God exist? I doubt it. I don't think so. But, you know, I, you know, but I concede it's absolutely possible. How would I know? Doesn't the random universe bother me? Well, yeah, of course it does. But I think that, you know, I think it's. As, to the best of our knowledge, this universe came into existence with a Big Bang and, you know, and nearly 14, you know, billion years ago and, and it's been expanding ever since. And that there are physical laws that started at the, at the Big Bang just as time and space began at the Big Bang. And that is random. There's no purpose behind it. I have no trouble believing there's no purpose behind it because I look around and I see lots of things that have no purpose behind them, in my view. So I don't, I don't have that problem. It does bother me. I mean, it's like, wow, it's, it'll blow your mind when you start thinking about just the thing, about the expansion of the universe just within the first evening. You know, many, many, many milliseconds of the Big Bang is already like 100 billion light years apart. I mean, it's like, it's incredible. It's like, it's hard. You can't you can't keep your mind around it. You can't get around mind around quantum physics either though. But it's absolutely true. I mean, you know, there are, there are subatomic particles and, you know, there, there's, there is entrapment and there's, you know, there. And hardly anybody can explain it, but, and even people explain it often don't, usually don't understand it, but it's there. So I don't, I don't think my inability to conceive of something means it isn't true. And it strikes me that it's more likely to be true that it's a random universe than that there's a almighty power overseeing it. Okay, in view of your very next question, in the view of very scant information about Mary, Jesus mother in the four Gospels, how do you feel about reconstructions of her based on much later writings, legends and later traditions? Do they have historical value? The answer to that, in my judgment, is no, they don't have historical value. I think all that we can know about the historical Mary comes from our early sources. And what we know is very sparse, very sparse indeed. So there are lots of legends that start cropping up. I mentioned one already about her being a virgin when she gave birth. That is in one of our earliest, I guess it is our earliest set of legends about Mary in a very interesting apocryphal book that's called the Proto Gospel of James the. Which had huge, a huge impact on the theology and thinking of Christianity in the Middle Ages, down to the modern period, down to the Enlightenment, really. But it's legendary and I think all of the later accounts are legendary. And so they, I don't think that they have historical value. I think we can learn some things about the mother of Jesus from the New Testament. You know, I think that she was a Jewish woman who came from Nazareth, who lived in poverty, who had a relatively large family by our standards, whose husband was somebody named Joseph, who probably was a. Worked with his hands in the small town of Nazareth. Small village, it's like a hamlet. It's a tiny little place. She had in the Gospels, four brothers are named and a group of sisters. And so there had to be at least two sisters. So that'd be six, counting Jesus as seven, family of seven, at least. And at that time that probably meant she had other children who didn't survive infancy. So she had a lot of children. And, you know, we don't know much else about her except from what we can intuit from what we know about the economic and social, political situation of rural Galilee at the time, she would have spoken Aramaic and. Yeah, so we know that much, maybe. But no, I don't think. I don't think the other gospels. I don't think the other materials outside the gospels provide us with much help. Right, so next question. I have a PhD in physics, says this person. So over the years I've read and heard lots of speculation from people with similar background as to the nature of the Christmas star. Okay. I have trouble that. Really, I have trouble, my mind getting around the idea that there could be PhDs in physics who talk about the nature of the star of Christmas. Okay, so that's what this person says. And she has the Ph.D. and I know, so maybe they do. But it occurred to me recently, says this person, that all the speculation might be asking the wrong questions. Yes, indeed. In trying to find physical explanation for the story, after all, this person says Luke's story, but it's not in Luke. It's only in Matthew. After all, we have no, no idea how much astronomy Matthew actually knew. It seems to me instead that we should be exploring how stories of celestial phenomena show up in Greco Roman writing in general. For example, is there a genre that uses such tales to demonstrate the importance of the person involved? Okay. And so on. Right. Okay. Yeah. Well, lots to say about this one. This would be. Yeah, this would be. This would be fun to talk at length about. When I moved to chapel hill in 1988, I had. My kids were young at the time. They were, I GUESS they were 5 and they were maybe 6 and 7 years old, the two kids. And UNC has this fantastic planetarium. And it was where they actually trained some of the earliest astronauts at this planetarium. And they put on great planetarium shows. And one of their planetarium yearly events is to have a thing on the star of Christmas where they speculate on could it have been a supernova, could it have been a comet? Could have been this, that, or the other thing. How does it work? And so I guess there are people in physics who think about this kind of thing. But if they would just read the account in Matthew. This cannot be a star, you know, like light years away. So the star in Matthew is leading the wise men to Jesus. And so they come from the east and the star is shining, and they're following it from the east and it takes them to Jerusalem. And they apparently been on the road for up to two years. Herod learns that the child was two years or under from them. And so they apparently been following it for a long time. Presumably it started to shine at the birth and they followed it for all these months or maybe over a year and has led them to Jerusalem. It disappears. So they have to go into Jerusalem to ask where the king of the Jews is to be born. When they learn it's in Bethlehem, then they start heading to Bethlehem and the star reappears and it stops over the house in which Jesus is born. So this is. It's not a star for all sorts of reasons. To begin with, if it were actually a star and they were following it, they wouldn't be able to follow it in a straight line because of the rotation of the Earth and the revolution around the sun. They'd be going loopity loops before they got anywhere. It would take a lot longer than two years because of the way stars don't stand still. So that's one thing. Second thing, it disappears all of a sudden over Jerusalem, takes them straight to Jerusalem, then disappears. It reappears again and this time it takes them Bethlehem. How does a star stop over a town? More than that. Stops over the. Over the house. How does the star stop over a house? So it's not a supernova and it's not a comment. So, so yes, this person's absolutely right there. People are asking the wrong questions when they're, when they're trying to figure out what this thing was because it wasn't anything. We have no, no idea how much astronomy Matthew knew. Well, yeah, or anyone else. I mean, we. There were people who observed the stars, obviously, and they knew about constellations and they. But they had no idea what they were. No idea what they were. So. But the question is, should we be exploring how stories of celestial phenomena show up in Greco writing, Greco Roman writing in general? Yes, that is, that is absolutely the way to go. It's one of the two ways to go. So there are accounts of celestial phenomena that signify what's to happen on Earth or to signify what has happened on Earth. The most famous one probably was written. It wasn't written. The most famous one happened some 20 years before Jesus birth, when Julius Caesar died. When Julius Caesar died, there was a kind of a civil war over who would be the dominant person in the empire. His nephew was named as his heir. His nephew Octavian or Octavius was named as his heir who inherited all of his wealth and eventually established himself as the one who would be his successor and became, then Octavius became the first Roman emperor. This is so, this is, you know, before, Before Jesus was born and he's the first Roman emperor who became. His name had been Octavius. They started calling Octavianus. And so his name was Octavian then first Roman Emperor. And, and one of the ways he secured the. The popular opinion for him becoming the emperor is that it just so happened that after Julius Caesar's death, there was a comet that was visible moving across the sky. And Octavian claimed that this was Caesar's spirit ascending to heaven because he had become. He was becoming a divine being. This showed that Julius Caesar had become a divine being because of this comet, which was very handy, by the way, for Octavian, because if his father was God, what does that make him? Makes him the Son of God. Makes Octavian the Son of God. Okay. And so that's when you start getting imperial worship, the worship of the emperor as being a divine being, son of a divine being, but also himself a divine being. So I said that's one of the things. Yes, you need to look at Greco Roman stories about celestial phenomena. The other thing though is you need to look at Jewish phenomena. And so I'm hesitant because I understand Judaism to be one of the Greco Roman religions. Okay. So but if you differentiate Judaism from the other religions, this story in Matthew actually has probably has more to do with, with, with the Jewish tradition than with the Greek and Roman traditions. Probably. And it's because Matthew is using this as another fulfillment of scripture in the birth narrative of Matthew. In on seven occasions he points out that something has happened to fulfill what the prophet said, that he'll be called a Nazarene, for example, that he'll be born of Bethlehem, that be born of a virgin. He quotes scripture to demonstrate these things has happened, to demonstrate that these things happened were fulfillments of scripture. And so they're prophesied. So they're miracles. Natural. Of course, it's a miracle that he gets born. That gets born of a. A virgin. But it's a miracle because these things have been predicted hundreds of years earlier and now it happened. But there are other things in Luke's got, in Matthew's Gospel that Matthew doesn't bother to point out. Our fulfillment of scripture, that's interesting too. And this is one of them because of Numbers, what is it? Chapter 24, verse 17, which talks about a star coming out of Jacob. It's a reference to a future kind of savior of the people, a future leader of the people who will come up out of. Out of, from among the sons of, of Israel. And it's the star will rise out of. So this. So stars, also in Judaism, as in Greek and Roman world, are sometimes understood as divine beings. Even in the Hebrew Bible, the stars are portrayed as divine beings, angelic beings. And so Jesus is fulfilling this prophecy that a star will rise up. And so out of Jacob. And so the star is leading the wise men to this, the fulfillment of scripture, the Messiah. So, yes, I think trying to figure out what, you know, what this is. This is a comic or a comet or what's the phenomenon. I think that's the wrong question. You should ask what the symbolism of it is. Next question. What is one scholarly position you changed your mind on in the last 10 years, if any, and what evidence forced the change? Yeah, so I have, you know, I do have. I do change my mind. I do change my mind about things as I, as I engage in more and more study, you know, this. I mean, it seems like the study of the New Testament shouldn't be that complicated. I mean, you know, it's these. It's not that long of a set of books. You know, it's got 27 books and read a few times, and you kind of know it. So, like, you know, how hard can it be? And so, like, it kind of seems that way. But the scholarship on the New Testament is massive, beyond the capacity of anybody to master. It would be impossible to. It would be impossible to read everything written on the Gospel of John that's produced every year. I don't think it'd be possible to read everything that scholars publish about the Gospel of John. And a lot of it is stuff, you know already. I mean, like just about, you know, it's really hard to come up with stuff you haven't read. But there are things that do come up. Wow, didn't notice that before. And so that does happen. And so scholars do change their minds about things. There are a lot of things that I've not changed my mind about. Even though people think that I'm being a Neanderthal, some of my scholarly friends think that I'm just being stubborn. I suppose I am. I have been known to be. You know, I still think there's a cue. I don't think that John used the synoptics, and so the pendulum is swinging on those things. But I haven't found convincing evidence for those kinds of things. There are things that I've mentioned before that I have changed my, my mind on. One that I'll. I'll mention is I don't think I've actually ever mentioned this one before is that I think that I, I Think I've changed my mind. I'm not sure I've changed. I think I've changed my mind about the final passage in Luke. The final passage in Luke, Jesus appears to his disciples on the day of his resurrection and he gives him final instruction. This is all in Luke's last chapter, chapter 21. And then you have a verse chapter. It must be verse 51 or it's 51, I think in chapter 21, 51, that says that he then was taken away from them. And it's a just. It's an account of him. He was taken up into heaven. So it's an account of his. Of his ascension. And it's a textual variant because there are some manuscripts that don't have that verse about him being taken up into heaven. And the question is, did Luke originally write that or not? In my book, Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, I made a lengthy argument that indicated that Luke did not originally have that verse. That at the end in chapter 21, verses 51 and 52, Jesus is not said to have ascended to heaven. The issue that is involved is not just that some manuscripts don't have it. The issue is that in the Book of Acts written by the same person, the first book of the Book of Acts indicates that Jesus spent 40 days with his disciples after his resurrection. He spent 40 days with them. And after 40 days you have a narrative of him ascending to heaven. And so the question is, did a scribe take out that verse in Luke so that it didn't contradict Acts? Because in Luke it is crystal clear this happens on the day of the resurrection, but in acts it happens 40 days later. So did describe take it out of Luke to prevent the contradiction. I argued in the orthodox corruption of Scripture that no, the contradiction, the contradiction was not originally there, that a scribe added the verse, that the scribe added the verse even though it created a contradiction. He added the verse because he wanted to emphasize something that scribes were emphasizing at the period in which this thing was added, namely that Jesus was an actual physical being, that he wasn't some kind of spiritual being, he was actually a flesh and blood body, and that the ascension is a bodily assumption emphasizing the bodily character of Christ. So I add, I argued that it was a textual change made in order to emphasize the bodily nature of Christ in opposition to docetists who said that Jesus was spirit but not body. So it was an anti docetic change of the text. I argued that. And in recent years I've had questions about whether that's right or not. And now I'M inclining to the other position that I was right. I was right before I thought that before I came up with that solution for Orthodox Russian scripture, I wasn't sure. Now, I think probably Luke did not have the verse. Now I think that Luke probably did have the verse. That Jesus probably is said to ascend in chapter 21 of Luke and that it is a contradiction. So there are lots of reasons for thinking it is. One is most manuscripts have it, which isn't decisive, but it is worth. It's always worth bearing in mind. And I always do bear it in mind. Another thing is that if it creates a contradiction, that'd be likely something scribes to want to take out. And so I don't know. I do waffle. I tend to think now that I was wrong in the Orthodox corruption of Scripture, but I don't think I've ever. I certainly haven't published on that and I have ever said in public before my knowledge. Okay, so that's one. Okay, last question. Why do you think the New Testament doesn't mention Jesus physical appearance at all? Okay, good question. The answer, I think, is because it wasn't important to anybody. So, yeah, I mean, modern biographies, you would do that, but ancient biographies, not necessarily. I don't think people really care what Jesus looked like. I will say that there are some passages that people take to indicate that they do know something about Jesus physical appearance. There's one that we used to tell as a joke when I was at Moody Bible Institute. And I realized recently somebody actually wrote a book seriously arguing it. I had no idea until, I don't know, like a couple months ago, I noticed this, that somebody had written this book. Maybe. Maybe just come out. I don't know. I don't know who wrote it or what the book is called, but it's a pa. It's a passage in Luke. And so the passages. It's the. It's the tax collector Zacchaeus. So if. Remember if you ever went to Sunday school and you sang songs, Zacchaeus in the sycamore tree. So the narrative is that Jesus is surrounded by a group of people and he's walking into this town that this head tax collector named Zacchaeus lives in. And Zacchaeus, like everybody else, is kind of crowding around to see him. And he couldn't see him. It says he couldn't see him because he was short. So he climbed up a tree so that he could look down and see Jesus. And that's always taken fairly sensibly to mean that Zacchaeus was sure. But a Moody, we pointed out, could mean that Jesus was short, so he couldn't see him because of the crowd. Because Jesus was so short that you. You know, he's surrounded by people who were taller than him, so he couldn't see him, so he had to climb up the tree. And so we always thought that was pretty funny. And. And then we started telling jokes about who is the shortest man in the Bible. Was it Zacchaeus who's so short he had to climb up the. Had to climb up the tree? Was it. Was it the prophet of the Old Old Testament, Nehaimaya? Huh? Or knee high Nehemiah? Nehai's up as tall. Or was it the figure in Job, Bildad, the shoe height? He was as tall as a shoe. Shoe height, build adhesion? Or was it the apostle Peter who slept on his watch? So we had all these. So. So. Right. Well, I think that's the shortest we came up with. So anyway, it was a joke for us, but somebody's written a book on it arguing that Luke is. Is maintaining that Jesus actually was short. So I don't think so, but whatever. So why didn't they mention. I don't know. You know, why. Why didn't they mention so many things about it? Why didn't you know? Why didn't they tell us? Oh, God. You just. If you actually think what you'd like to know biographically about Jesus, like, just make your own list. Make it even. Just make 10 items. Make 50 items. Like, most of them are not talked about. And it's too bad. It's too bad we get some information, but we get nothing about his physical appearance. Okay, that is it. That is at the end of my time, the end of the questions I can answer now. And so I'd just like to end by saying thank you to all of you who are here who came to listen to us, to me, and thank you so much for being members of the blog and for being gold members and platinum members. We really appreciate your contributions to what you do, and as always, if we can make it better, just let us know. Jan, any last words? [01:03:29] Speaker A: No, I just want to say thank you to everyone, and as usual, I will get the recording of this out within the next day or so. So keep an eye on your inboxes if you want to go back and review any of this. But I will just echo Bart and say thank you so much as. As always.