Ancient Language Expert on BANNED Bible, Book of Enoch & Jesus Origins | Wes Huff • 257

Council of NAIA doesn't even talk about the books of scripture so nothing at the Council of NAIA has anything to do with the cannon of scripture that's already an established fact and oh within the second century within the second century you but for the Roman Empire though cuz they were still torturing Christians at that time but the Roman Empire is still Pagan by the time you get the Edict of Milan and the decriminalization of Christianity I know that's what I'm saying so what so how would they have how would the Roman Empire have gotten along

with the acceptance of what the gospels are oh they don't no this is this is established by Christianity so I know so Christians already have the 27 books that we call the New Testament and who who would you say establish that like it may not be one person but like what people said yo this is what we're going with so there are lots of Canon Lists within the early church so what's up guys if you haven't already please smash that subscribe button and hit that like button on the video and if you don't have time

to watch this episode right now I'd really appreciate it if you saved it to your watch later playlist on YouTube finally if you'd like to follow me on Instagram or X those links are in my description below Wu all the way from Toronto all the way from Toronto how was that flight In it was good yeah uneventful that's what you want in a flight don't you it's also like Toronto's so close I never think about that until buy someone a ticket from Toronto it's like an hour and a half it's not too bad yeah didn't

take long at all and you had never been to New York before no not officially I've been to the state but not like New York New York yeah I've driven through actually a couple Summers back I have a mentor of mine who was a retired uh Philosophy Professor who donated his library to me and he lives in Texas so just uh East uh no west of Waco and so I flew down and I filled a U-Haul trailer or truck full of 2,000 books and I drove them back up to Toronto from Texas so I I've

driven through the state right yeah right but first time experiencing the buildings sure it's not I was telling you as far as like hobok and New Jersey City goes the actual view of CM Manhattan for the first time doesn't get Better than that it's pretty set yeah there are very few like very quintessential skylines the Toronto skyline has the CN tower but yeah there's just something about a city like New York that's a little bit more identifiable Belly of the Beast man yeah but anyway your your your Instagram has really been popping off over the

summer and everything and my producer alesi alaman who is out of town today so your boy is going to be the producer on this One we'll we'll be doing this live I I'll clean it up after twoo to make sure all the camera angles are right but he was the one who had found you and showed me some of your videos where you're responding to like a lot of different guys on the internet who are making claims about ancient history things like that sometimes things that you may view has evidence to the contrary for sure

but you do like a a really nice educational background on it and Obviously you're coming at it from the lens of being a religious person yourself you're Baptist part of the Protestant religion of Christianity so you have an expertise and also a belief system there but you know what were did you grow up religious as well was this always something that was a part of your life yeah so I was a pastor's kid and a missionary kids so I grew up with my parents both coming from Christian Heritage um but I I really uh kind

of Made an aspect of that my own in my later teens and then really digging into some of the historically that I was just genuinely curious about that I I it wasn't that it wasn't present when I was growing up it was just not in the same sort of conversational vein as how I'm interested in it now in terms of like the history of the Bible some of the biblical language stuff and um ancient near East GRE Roman Antiquity that kind of stuff but I grew up Christian and you also you had an experience as

a kid where you were like paralyzed or something like that yeah and you heal cuz you're not paralyzed now I'm not paralyzed now walk in this room thanks but what happened there yeah so just before my 11th birthday I was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition called aute transverse myelitis so that's a word you can forget as soon as you hear it but what happened was I was uh homesick on a Wednesday Afternoon from school and I'd gone down i' you know was camping out in the bathroom for reasons we don't necessarily need to go

into but I had gone down for an nap and when I woke up I couldn't feel my legs and so I called my mom and she eventually called uh there was a there's a program I still think it exists in Ontario and Canada called tellah Health where you can basically call a nurse and they said you need to call an ambulance so they my mom Called an ambulance I was rushed to the local hospital and then on to um London Ontario children's hospital and so um in the the the Pediatric wing and I was diagnosed

with that condition and what they told me was that my body's immune system instead of attacking the flu it attacked the nerve endings of the base of my spinal oh yeah and it caused inflammation um to the the myelin sheath on the spine and cut off connection uh Between the communication of my legs and my brain now how do you fix that you don't so you do and you don't so what they basically told me is um transverse myelitis is a condition that's related to Ms in the sense of uh it's degrading and the quicker

the paralysis happens the the less likely the chances of recovery are and so they what I was told was since it was instant as far as they know right I was you know I don't think I was asleep for more than you know 30 40 minutes right and you went to bed feeling perfect your legs are all good I was totally fine yeah when I woke up actually the the numbness was about at my mid thigh and by the time I went uh from the ambulance to the hospital it had actually creeped up to my

waist and it it it stayed at my waist but because it was so quick the ACC ESS of it right in that acute transverse mtis they told me that the chances of me walking were very very low To None So I did do Physiotherapy after that but um the physiotherapy was a little bit of a joke cuz it was like Hey move your legs yeah what are you doing nothing's happening yeah yeah yeah um and I I truly believe that um I experienced what I would label as a miracle and the doctors actually were the

first ones to use the word miracle my parents are very hesitant to use that term they're very matter of fact people in fact if you ask them they would say you know they never prayed for Healing they prayed that God would be glorified in whatever the outcome was um but that they actually never prayed directly for healing uh they're just like very you know old school matter of fact people um which when I found out years later I was like well thanks like appreciate that one uh but it was exactly one month from the day

uh that I woke up so I woke up on a Wednesday on January 8th and couldn't feel my legs I woke up on uh February 8th of that year One month exactly to the day I woke up got out of bed walked over to my wheelchair and sat down and that was it like did it did it did it register though that you're like wait a minute I just walked to this thing so I remember sitting in my wheelchair knowing that something had happened and I couldn't tell you what it was because when literally I

mean I spent a week in the hospital it was 11 days and so when they were doing tests um they would do things Like uh I would wake up and there would be these pin Pricks in my legs cuz they'd have taken a syringe and they have gone up and down the legs at the um guess the the points at where there would be responses for the nerves um that sounds fun yeah I know right um and so I lived in the hospital for 11 days and then I went home and I had so my

bedroom was upstairs and they' moved my parents had moved the my bedroom down onto the main floor of the House uh I was sleeping on the couch because I couldn't go up and downstairs and so I had basically for the last you know two weeks kind of fallen out of bed and crawled over my wheelchair and pulled myself up so it had at that point become more or less like a pattern yes so I knew something was different in the way that it had taken place that morning and I um I couldn't tell you how

long ex exactly was could have been 5 minutes could have been 15 minutes I don't know I don't remember the sort of time frame but I remember looking down at my toe and I wiggled it and so that was kind of this way wait a minute moment and I yeah and I ended up running upstairs um to get my parents and then my mom cried while she made me run up and downstairs a whole bunch of times yeah so in terms of my like own faith Journey that marked a very powerful what I would say

is a supernatural experience yeah did you have I mean you're young you're 11 years Old when this is happening other than you know your parents taking you to church and saying like oh you know like Jesus Christ is son of man like did you have any real concept of your faith at that point yeah I think I did I think I did have like a legitimate uh genuine faith it was very naive I mean as an 11-year-old Faith probably is um me in particular and this is why I think it's very important to when you

look at things like this is kind of a separate Sub subject but like Faith healers and the faith healers yeah have you ever heard of Faith healers like Benny Hinn and they they have these whole these big conventions and they like in the name of Jesus they heal people with cancer the devil will come out of you yeah it's it's very it's very showcasing um I have a little bit of a um and one of the reasons why I have a problem with that is because often it's tied to these people's Faith where They'll tell

them well your faith wasn't enough that's why you didn't get healed oh and knowing that 11-year-old Wes's faith I mean it was there but I wouldn't have said it was strong I wouldn't have said it was yeah you're 11 yeah yeah totally so that marked a powerful Supernatural experience in my life but you would think that then that would like being raised in Christianity and then hearing medical professionals say you know you're going to be a paraplegic For the rest of your life and then saying we don't know why you're not a paraplegic anymore and

that that would kind of solidify a lot of the faith things for me but I really struggled as a teen with some of the more intellectual questions where I thought what do you mean intellectual well intellectual questions in terms of I understood that I my parents had raised me to believe something and I didn't think that it was the worst reason to Believe it but I also didn't think it was the best reason and so questions of who was the historical Jesus you know where did the Bible come from there are other worldview perspectives that

also make truth claims just because I was raised in a particular one does that necessitate that it's true what about Islam what about Mormonism what about Buddhism or Hinduism and luckily I grew up in a household where um so I mentioned my parents were missionaries My mom was actually a missionary she grew up in India and then I was born in Pakistan spent a portion of my childhood in the Middle East and we had things like the babag Gita on the living room shelf we had the Book of Mormon we had a copy of the

Quran oh wow so you had access yeah and there was always this it wasn't overt it was kind of an unspoken idea at least how I understood it is that these things are not scary these things are not banned we hold to our Particular belief but we hold to it on the basis that if it's true it can stand up against scrutiny and so go ahead you know the Book of Mormons there give it a read if you want and so so when I was in high school I wouldn't call it a crisis of faith

I think that's way too over exaggerated for what took place yeah I'm just wrestling through some of these questions and part of that entailed you know I did read the Quran cover to cover for the first time how was that um Confusing I mean I would go on later in life to really study the Quran a little bit more in in like my formal education in University and studying world religions and stuff uh I didn't realize at the time that the Quran was very different than the Bible even though there's some crossover and that the

Bible is a little bit more chronological where the first book is in the beginning and the last book is at the end yes uh the Quran is situated with the longest Chapters at the front and the shortest Chapters at the back H so um it it it reads a little bit more confusing you don't necessarily start from the beginning and work through because the way that it's organized is just not the same way that something like and it's also one book more than the Bible is 66 books and it's 66 books it's written over a

period of 1600 years on three different continents by close to 40 different authors in three different Languages and so it's an anthology right you're dealing with different cultures different linguistic perspectives job is a very different book than the book of Acts which is yeah it's amazing the the range yeah whereas the Quran is is kind of situated in one particular vein of History it's written in 7th Century Arabia it's written in a single language Hai script Arabic and so even though it's claiming to hearken back to stories that predated and you Know reflect on some

of the stories that you find in the Bible of the prophets of Abraham of Moses of Jonah even Jesus John the Baptist Mary there and there um it's still very much one place at one time yes in a different way way that the Bible is do you like so you're studying this when you're a teenager obviously you're older now you've been studying it for years and years and years we were talking off camera having a great Conversation about all the different languages you look at and stuff like that we'll get to that today but I

always ask the question of my different guys I've had in here like say on the ancient history side of stuff who have some theories about things I always ask them if their belief system because that is a belief system too ever they feel like it drives the results they end up getting like a confirmation bias if you will do you ever think about that with Respect to your faith because that's obviously something very personal to you as well yeah I mean we all have biases yes I mean find me the person who's neutral and you're

not dealing with a real individual right so I'm totally fine with the biases that I hold and particularly in regards to the confessional biases that I have confessional yeah so confession of something saying like Jesus Christ is God that's a confessional statement Based on like so in Christianity you literally have historic confessions like uh the nyine Creed is a confessional statement or the Apostles Creed or there are some um catechisms there's the Westminster catechism the London Baptist 1689 catechism like these are different parts within the history of Christianity that state the belief systems and so

the idea is that those conf professions and the idea of where they come from in church history that has a vote and a Voice but ultimately scripture has the veto The veto The veto so as a Protestant as a historical Protestant which is a you know breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church in the the 14 15 yeah yeah late 15th century um I follow in the footsteps of individuals like uh Luther and Calvin and zwingley and munan in that they saw what was going on in the church and they reformed it back to what

was original to the faith and sort Of like scraping away some of the trappings the Moss that had grown on the church and so um as part of that there are there are certain belief systems that I hold to one of which during the Protestant Reformation was Sola scriptura scripture alone and so the idea of that was not that other things like tradition or experience don't have a place within the conversation but that Sol of scriptura was that scripture is the sole infallible rule in faithful Practice in the church okay and so the idea is

that ultimately you're looking for the meaning that comes out of scripture and I totally admit that that gives me a bias in the sense that I adhere to thinking that that is true thinking that the claims and particularly the worldview claims that something like historic Christianity in the Bible that that had that those are truth statements that can be verifiable but that are true ultimately and that Does create a bias yeah but I think you know you can hold a I mean my field in biblical studies there are a lot of secular Scholars and they

also come in with a bias and so it's not that it's like religious Scholars versus secular Scholars uh I mean we agree on a whole host of things but often it's not the evidence and the rationale that we're disagreeing on it's the conclusions that we then draw right yes okay so within the Bible it's it's obviously an un it's An unbelievable book towards any part of human history because it has so many so many stories that are relatable to life so many teachings and there is thing there are things that are literally confirmed historical fact

within there throughout the Bible for sure but there's also a lot of stuff that it's like we were talking about one off camera like all right did Jonah really get swallowed by whale and living there for three days there's things that I've Always looked at as like that's a lesson rather than a history furthermore you know and I always bring this up when I'm talking with guys about anything ancient text I think you have to you know we're human beings so we're fallible we we we make mistakes there's there's some sort of there's a name

for it but like the basic experiment where they have like 20 people sit in a circle and they each whisper a story into each other's ear yeah the telephone game Right the yeah so yeah that's the way to put it so by the end it changes by whatever small percentage it is maybe it's like five or 7% or something so like you think about that in one setting in one minute in one day and then you think about the fact that like the Bible is composed of all these stories that in many ways were passed

down for in and many times like thousands of years if not hundreds of years and it's like well human bias can change it story changing Can change it do you ever struggle with you know what's real and what's not just on the base of like human F ability with anything you read and that doesn't just include the Bible that also includes other things you read from anything in what we would call ancient history yeah definitely I mean in the UK they call the telephone game Chinese Whispers And it's a good PC Canadian somehow that doesn't

seem appropriate but um yeah I mean so uh just as a uh to back up I'm a Trained historian so that's what my education is in and so I think as a trained historian I'm perfectly I'm perfectly comfortable with saying that historiography draws conclusions to the inference of the best explanation and ideally what you're looking for is cross reference sources ideally independent sources that can have different angles or perspectives on particular story and that's not always possible now with the New Testament we have a lot of that but When you're talking about something like the

Old Testament I would grant that there are different levels of probability to certain stories now I don't think that means that um they're not true but I think as a if I put my historian hat on I would say that something like Jonah being swallowed by the fish has a less probabilistic conclusion in terms of its truth than something like and would put the resurrection in a high category Simply because you have multiple independent lines of witness testimony that are indicating that Jesus lived he was alive he died and then people saw him not dead

and so you have multiple lines of streams of evidence and individuals from different places at different times who are corroborating that fact now you don't have that with something like Moses coming down from Mount Si right that doesn't mean it's not true it just means as a historian I Put things on a a different level of probability so yeah I obviously I would Grant and I would even say that's some of the miracles of Jesus when Jesus turns water into wine at kaaa um in the beginning of John's gospel that has a lower probability of

Truth in the grand scheme of things from a historical perspective than the resurrection because it's only being referred to as coming from one source so the and and I remember this morning when we were going To Dunkin Donut we were talking about this a little bit but obviously people watching right now weren't with us as Dunkin' Donuts but we were going through how I believe in the Coran they say Jesus wasn't crucified right they say someone else like stood in for him maybe it was Judas or something like that but the evidence does point to

the fact that because like we know Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure we that's all Confirmed in everything we know he did a lot of things and was a huge public figure but like the evidence does point to the fact that he was actually crucified because of all the witnesses that were there up to and including like the Roman guards themselves not being able to mistake a guy who was so known like this so therefore if you also have I'm extrapolating this but if you also have evidence on the other end of that of

People who after witnessing him be killed on the cross witnessed him alive you know come out of the Tomb that's why you're saying something like the resurrection has like good empirical data even though the actual event itself you know technically defies the laws of physics and humanity and pretty much every [ __ ] thing we do yeah sure I mean we call it a miracle for a reason right the people don't usually rise from the dead if they did then it wouldn't be A miracle but um yeah in the sense of it's a historical question

in saying someone's alive someone's empirically dead but then they're being seen alive again so what is the inference to the best explanation for that and there are a number of uh conclusions based on secular materialism of say the mass hallucination Theory or the mistaken Theory you know there are individuals in the past historians who have tried to come up with um alternative explanations I just find them and not just me I mean the vast majority of New Testament scholarship has said um believing or not that they're really not very strong in the grand scheme of

things and that's why so when I was investigating Islam one of the main problems that I had was this historical problem where in Chapter 4: 157 of the Quran it said say that Jesus was not neither was he killed nor was he crucified but it was made to appear to them and then it says actually That those who believe it are um not totally sure about this fact which is why does it say that your guess is as good as mine in fact the problem with that particular Surah that particular chapter of the Quran is

that in the Islamic sources you have a lot of commentary so you have other Islamic literature you have the Quran which is the holy book then you have um the Hadith and the and included in that group of literature are authoritative Commentaries but there is no authoritative commentary on this particular passage and so there's a lot of different theories dependent on how you interpret that it was made to appear to them so this is part of what we're talking about at Duncan Donuts and for me I mean even if you go to the most skeptical

iteration of historical biblical scholarship if they can say basically we can know very little if anything about Jesus they'll say We do know that he was crucified under pontious pilot and we know that because not only do we have these four biographies that we call the gospels we have Paul and then Jude and James all testifying to it and then you have other sources like the um the Jewish Romano historian Josephus Jose how do you spell it j o s e p h u s I believe so Josephus was um he was one of the

key historiographers particularly commenting on um ya flavus Josephus so he lived uh In the the end of the first century beginning of the second century and he specifically recounts not just mentioning Jesus's name but also Jesus's brother James and talks about the fact that James was stoned to death in Jerusalem so there's a lot of um historical credibility not just on the historical Jesus but not that he was crucified particularly crucified under pontious pilate other individuals tacitus whose um uh key figure in how we Get information about the Roman emperors tacitus there were a few

individuals um there was tacitus there was Plutarch there was cassus Dio there was um you know these individuals who were Roman historiographers within this period of GRE Roman Antiquity who are writing on people like the Emperors a lot of them mention what years are we talking about with them writing approximately so end of first century beginning of second century okay so like 100 200 years after Jesus no So within a 100e period so the first century is when Jesus lived so Jesus he lived till 33 ad right yeah 3033 ad and then you have these

individuals commenting but that's pretty common I mean when we're talking on Ancient writing we do have to be careful because we come from a hyper literate culture so almost everybody is literate and we write a lot of stuff down in the ancient world at the height of the Roman Empire only about 10% of Rome proper was literate and in somewhere like Roman occupied Judea and Galilee where Jesus was coming from it probably never toed about 3% yeah and these these were hyper oral cultures so actually there's a lot of um a lot of talk no

pun intended um in the writing of some of these uh these famous orators in the ancient world Greek and Roman talking about how important it is that you memorize things in fact Socrates decried writing and Reading because he said it would make people lazy and they wouldn't remember things Socrates said this Socrates said this yeah ironically we only know that because Plato wrote it down in part of his dialogues but Socrates says that people would get lazy if they read too much because they wouldn't be dependent on how good their memories could remember things yeah

so um so there was a completely different pers perspective in the ancient world and memorization Was a whole part of this um you had this this you I'm the opposite of that that's crazy I just looked at yeah you're right I was looking that up yeah but we live in a completely different culture right we have these supercomputers in our pockets and so we know a lot about a little but we don't know um did did I say that right a little about a lot we know a little about a lot we don't know a

lot about a little yeah so because we can just look things up on Wikipedia right uh like you just pulled up but in the ancient world that wasn't possible and part of being and showing your education was that you could not only memorize things but that you could paraphrase it very accurately so someone like Josephus is writing and he is writing um so he writes a a document called the Antiquities of the Jews where he literally goes back and he tries to write this Treatise of proving to the Romans you shouldn't annihilate us Because we

are origin goes back into ancient times as well because were the Romans thinking about annihilating them so at the time he was writing that yeah so uh in 70 AD so the problem with the Jews in Roman occupied Judea is that they were constantly rebelling because they saw themselves as God's people right Israel was the promised land now they're being occupied by an imperial system and particularly by uh an emperor who's calling himself God and at the time who was the emperor that we're talking about 70 um tiberias um well not not so tiberias was

during Jesus um but I think right after tiberias I'll take a look yeah and so uh who is it does it say uh I just see spouses right now what oh successor Caligula yes so okay so so they're quashing all of these rebellions I mean this is where you get the group called The zealots so there were different groups factions of Judaism so if you Ever read the gospels you're going to come up with groups like The Sadducees and the Pharisees yes and the zealots the zealots were basically I mean there's a reason why we

have that word in English we've kind of imported it is they were a group of very hyper religious Jews who just basically believed that they were going to they were going to force the Romans out and so in fact one of Jesus's disciples is Simon the Zealot and um so there's in Degrees as to like how intense his zealotry was uh part of the complicatedness of who he was was that one of the other disciples was a tax collector Levi or Matthew was a tax collector and the tax collectors were literally the Opposites in terms

of the political Spectrum from the zealots so the tax collectors are talked about very unfavorably in the gospels and in a lot of Jewish literature from this time because they were the sellouts not only Were they seen as working for Rome but they were actually collecting the money from the people that was funding the the occupation and so don't tread on me yeah so there were lots of there was lots of political turmoil in the first century um which is why when the the Pharisees asked the question um of to Jesus of should you pay

taxes to Caesar it's not actually about taxes it's about moral compromise but anyways so going back to your question about you know the Uprisings um there were a number of uprisings immediately after Jesus's death and the one that really uh hid its peak culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem so the Romans go in in 70 AD and they say we've had enough of this they sack Jerusalem and they destroy the temple so the temple in Jerusalem is destroyed in 7080 and never built back so that's the Temple mount that the Dome of the Rock is

on right now in in Jerusalem okay so this is under Wow there were a ton I'm just looking through the Roman emperors there were a ton like in a very short time span a a lot of these guys were getting whacked I guess so this is under vaspian yes yes yes under vaspian wow there were like 10 in between him in tiberious yeah [ __ ] there was there was a lot of turnover for various reasons um in the Roman imperial system so and this becomes actually a very concrete number is usually when we talk

about dating Christian documents particularly the New Testament it's either a question of is it pr70 or is it post 70 because the destruction of the temple becomes such a big event and Jesus predicts it in the gospels so part of the Reon yeah so Jesus in the gospels um says that the temple will be destroyed and that no stone will be left um on top of another and then he uses that as an analogy to say destroy my bot destroy this Temple and I will raise it up in three days so He uses it as

this like because his disciples are saying look Jesus look at the temple look how great it is and he says yeah but you know the temple is finite and they're like Jesus what do you mean the temple is finite and he uses that as an example of saying no I am the true Temple like the because the temple is the presence of God on Earth and so he's saying that no it's not about this building I'm going to be that and actually the beginning of John's Gospel says that it says in John 1:14 that the

word became flesh and made his dwelling Among Us and the word that's used there in Greek is literally he tabernacled Among Us and the Tabernacle was before the temple was built it was the place where God's presence dwelt in the holy of holies so there's Jesus plays on this and predicts the destruction of the Temple and so some Scholars say well Jesus couldn't have done that PRI 70 AD so these gospels Have to be written after and it's been imposed back on the mouth of Jesus is is part of the argumentation for dating them later

um but there was a lot of rebellion going on yeah it's a wild time it's a also because that that area the holy land is just throughout human history I mean there's a reason it's called The Holy Land there's a reason everyone fights over it there's been Wars there and everything so even when you have something as large as like the Greater Roman Empire that at this point is controlling like all of Europe into Africa and into Asia like this is just one area of it and there's a lot of different cultures there that are

fighting over things that are no intended like biblical to them so it makes a lot of sense that that there's Uprising but it's also you know the fact that you have someone like a Jesus of Nazareth living kind of smack dab in the middle of that time period is Also I don't know patternislamic you had like millions of people like [ __ ] yeah we love Jesus that took a long time so you keep on bringing up the the gospels I think this is a really good place to kind of go to the history with

that but we have the four main gospels in the Bible there are other gospels that are written we can kind of get to that totally but what can you just walk me through the timeline of when they were written and and and who wrote them And how they came upon the stories within there yeah so this is a really debated topic within um New Testament studies I would take a very early dating of the vast majority of the New Testament with some caveats so I would I would date Matthew Mark Luke and Matthew Mark Luke

what are sometimes referred to as the synoptic gospels so um meaning that you can put them side by side and you have similar stories right um sinos meaning uh to put side by side and then Optic meaning to see so seeing them side by side and there's an agreement upon the fact that there's some literary dependence on from those three gospels that the three authors of those gospels are using each other in some way for Source okay literarily and then John is off on his own because John kind of does his own thing now I

would put the synoptics Matthew Mark and Luke pr70 um I would put them pretty close to the earliest one for argument sake I would Say that Mark is the earliest which is kind of the the general scholarship recognition Mark writes first he's probably writing anywhere between uh 10 to 30 years after Jesus and then Luke and John are writing afterwards and then I would actually put sorry I said that wrong Mark writes first then Matthew 30 years for Mark um after Jesus anywhere between uh 50 and 70 see the thing is that the author of

The Gospel of Luke is a traveling companion of Paul and part Of Luke's writing is that he writes the gospel the gospel of according of Luke and he writes the book of Acts they're kind of like part one and part two yes and a big line of reasoning and I'm I'm taking this from a a scholar named Richard balam um who taught uh in the UK um for a long time I think he's still there I think he's a I think he's an um an adjunct at Cambridge at the moment um and he argues which

I think is right that Luke is making this kind of articul Of Peter and Paul as apostle Brothers in the faith and that's kind of this concrete argument in the book of Acts the book of Acts starts you know Jesus he uh ascends up to heaven he's taught people for 40 days after his resurrection and then you have the disciples particularly Peter going out and preaching this news and then you have the The persecutor Saul of Tarsus who then becomes a convert and he becomes uh the Apostle to the Gentiles So he starts preaching to

the Gentiles and so there's this kind of thread throughout that these are two individuals who are very different but have this kind of same goal in mind now we know from external sources that are outside the Bible that both Peter and uh Paul are martyred in Rome yes around 64 to uh 66 ad so wonder if them was like crucified upside down yeah yeah Paul no Peter yeah Peter was Crucified upside down yeah the story is that he says um that he you know they say we're going to crucify you and he says you know

it's it's too great of an honor to die like my savior and so they're like well we can fix that so crucify that um God they were so nice I know right the Romans Romans always put a put a nice little bow on everything I guess so so uh part of the argument about this though is that Luke actually records the deaths of a number of Individuals uh he records the deaths of St he records death of James but for who was Steven uh Steven was um one of sort of the he wasn't one of

the 12 disciples but he was the first martyr so he got stoned to death uh very early on in the book of Acts by the Jews yeah for you know BL blasphemy you know preaching that Jesus was who he said he was okay um and so Luke actually records these deaths but conspicuously doesn't record the deaths of Peter and Paul and The argument is that if he knew about them it would have been the perfect ending to the book because it would have put the Capstone on the whole argument that he's trying to make so

whatever is going on Luke needs to be written before their death it needs to have concluded before the death of Peter and Paul to make sense and Luke is definitely using Mark and Matthew there's a question as to is Matthew using Luke as a source or not so Going back to your original question Luke and Matthew sorry John and Matthew are disciples they're part of Jesus's 12 cohort the apostles Mark is not and Luke is not so Luke is a traveling companion of of Paul like I said before and Luke right at the beginning of

the Gospel there's a preface and he says hey I'm not an eyewitness I didn't see these things but he says I am writing an orderly account drawing up relying on Eyewitnesses and um he writes so that both Luke and acts are actually letters that he writes to a guy named Theophilus so he says at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke most excellent theopus I'm writing you this account of the things that you have believed and um that many others have undertaken to write up an account of and he says I'm writing up an orderly

account and he's interviewing eyewitnesses so he's he's WR up At the preface he's saying I wasn't there but I'm doing the due diligence to make sure I get the references from those who were there guys if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button please take two seconds and go hit it right now thank you and there is actually some connection curly eyewitness account yeah yeah and and saying like he actually parallels some other ancient writers um so there are Like Lucian is an ancient historiographer and then there are some

who predate Lucian who talk about Josephus is one of them who these guys talk about how you should write history and they particularly say it's very important that you a interview our Witnesses and B write up an account and they use this very specific word which is the same word that Luke uses now I don't know if Luke is aware of individuals um like Lucian I mean Josephus comes afterwards but there there are other historiographers Aristophanes for example um who talk about the way you should write these biographies and if Luke hasn't like had firsthand

experience with them he's at least drawing on a tradition that appears to be the way that you write ancient historiography and biography in this time period and he's going to lengths to try to communicate these Things and so he understands he wasn't there he was an eyewitness but he's going to make sure he's getting to the source and we see that throughout the Gospel of Luke is it's easily I think John has components of this but it's easily one of the best examples of ancient historiography in terms of biography in particular it's up there with

individuals um like tacitus and um uh tacus cioo individuals who are writing about other individuals from the Time now a at this time obviously on the one hand down in the Holy Land especially you have the Jewish faith which we have an understanding of of of what they believe the difference was that they they just didn't recognize Christ as the Savior at this point you have the earliest days of the growing Christian faith but on top of all of it is the aformentioned Roman Empire where at this time it's a pagan religious Empire so they

believe in a bunch of Different gods we don't have to go into all the details but feel free to go into whatever you want to and they continue to believe that and they actually as we'll probably cover at some point here they persecute Christians along the way I mean they put Paul and Peter to death over it and before eventually turning to Christianity and the the turn to Christianity is what really fascinates me and it's something I have a lot more to learn about but I I I've looked at it A bunch already and and

I'd love to have some people in here heard some experts on it but you have this Council of naah in the 4th Century it was like three 325 yeah 325 so this is this is where my brain wires get like blocked a little bit because you have a power structure the Roman government led by the Emperor uhhuh who now sees this new growing idea where there's many Christians within his Empire and he's going oh [ __ ] we're having trouble putting putting a button On this like they really believe in this guy Jesus Christ and

what happened and by the way we kind of put him to death that's not a good look so they have this big meeting with a lot of different people and they dictate guess what we are now the Holy Roman Empire we believe in Christianity and here's everything that that happened and the question is you have power hungry men in this meeting sure who are now dictating taking legitimate pieces of History but deciding what we're going to tell the public about or what we're going to make the book and the reason I bring this up is

because within this meeting and subsequent you know practicing of the religion throughout the Empire afterwards there was a decision made where these are the four gospels we use not these other gospels that we found as well and one of the alleged gospels there but there's all of them are interesting is that you know Like Mary Magdalene had had a gospel and she's not written about in great terms or at least in implied great terms in the four gospels they chose as opposed to her gospel and other gospel is written it's like yo she she wasn't

like a [ __ ] she she was Jesus's companion perhaps his wife and then it gets into like oh does Jesus have a kid or something like that that's kind of a step further but like what do you make of the fact that the religion Which you are not a part of the Catholic church right you're a part of protestant but allr Heritage exactly all Christianity branched off from that that's where we'll get to Martin Luther later I I wanted to put a pin in that but like what what do you think of the fact

that like there are political power structures that took this history and decided what people are going to see and then basically said this is why we believe that way because they also at This meeting allegedly decided there we're going to make Jesus divine even though I agree with you I think that there's historical evidence before that that points to people saying oh yeah no no he is divine he did rise from the dead so some some corrective history there so um you had a period of persecution which was dispersed that started basically right away I

mean Nero who was one of the Roman emperors in the first century is famous for burning Christians to light his Gardens paths light his guard yeah he would he would burn them as torches and the Christians were these really easy targets because they were these unusual people who became a really easy target for um like a scapegoat for the problems wait so he would hold on a minute I'm I'm still stuck on the garden thing so would he like stick them on a steak and hold them like a Ticky torch uh yeah the story is

that they would be tied to Stak so along Uh the rows of his Gardens and then they would be lit to lit the Gardens at night but remember this is the guy who burned Rome right he was understand czy he he he was he was known to be a little bit nuts um as were some other Roman emperors so you you have this era of persecution but it's really dispersed so it's worse in some places um better in others under about it's so it's a few Emperors before Constantine you have a guy named Diocesan and

Diocesan has a a Un Universal era of persecution now even before that so one of our earliest mentions of Christianity outside of the Bible from uh an imperial source is a letter from Plenty the younger to the emperor Tran because you have these people running around who are calling themselves Christians and the Roman governate system is trying to figure out what to do with them because they're saying very strange things they're saying things like the your gods don't Exist and this doesn't bow well under the ancient culture of GRE Roman Antiquity and so um they

I mentioned before they become easy scapegoats there's an ancient historian um named tralian and he has this line where he says if the Nile River is too high or the Tyber river which is the river in Rome is too low the cry will ring out the Christians the Lions and the reason for that is because when there are say famines or floods or things like that And you're trying to figure out okay well why might this have happened one thing you can point to is where there are these crazy religious people running around saying that

the gods don't exist and so if I'm in Athens and there are people saying that Athena doesn't exist that's probably ticking atha Athena off and so why might there be a flood well it's because of these guys so they were an easy target for persecution and in fact when PL of the younger writes to Trun he says I don't know what to do with these people I torture them um and they don't they don't you know they keep going yeah and he basically is saying like uh hey hey Emperor am I am I doing everything

right and he's like yes yes you're doing everything and um so we have this kind of evidence of persecution and actually that's an important letter because early on he says you know these people meet they meet early in the morning and they sing A Hymn as Christ to a God and so we have this kind of early evidence of people already worshiping Jesus as God um under uh very early on within that time period but so you have these dispersed eras of persecu but that really comes to its fruition and head under diation where he's

like I'm going to wipe these guys off and so he's uh you know he institutes this system where you have to in order to buy and sell you have to go into the equivalent of your like local Town hall and you have to take a pinch of pinch of incense and you have to offer it as a uh an offering on the altar of Caesar and you have to say the words Kaos Caesar is Lord and the reason they did this specifically was because one of the earliest confessions of the Christian faith was Jesus is

Lord and so they knew that Christians if they were believ in Christians would not say this but if you don't say it you don't get this piece of Paper that they called a lialo and if you didn't have a lialo you couldn't buy or sell and so this was one of the ways along with you know weeding out people who they thought might be Christians um throwing them in prison so people would hold on a minute so people wouldn't say that to pass and and and I I I don't I don't mean to be like

you know nonchalant about it but I would think if I were a Christian yeah yes it feels sacriligious to not say That in that way and say someone else's Lord but I would also think and I'm trying to put myself in their shoes like okay if I live my life practicing the teachings of Jesus and I'm a good Christian and whatever and this Empire is trying to persecute me and potentially kill me meaning I'm not going to be able to continue to spread the good word or whatever if I'm dead I feel like Jesus would

let you say something else just to kind of pass off But they didn't feel that way no I mean Paul in his letter says to live as Christ and to die as gain because if you are a Christian if you truly believe that Jesus is who he says he is then he died for you you can live for him but ultimately he paid the ultimate sacrifice on your behalf dying on the cross and taking your sins you dying as a confession of your faith becoming a martyr not that you're pursuing martyrdom the early Christians weren't

pursuing martyrdom but they weren't afraid of martyrdom either right um and so this was the perspective of early Christians and it actually became a controversy because some Christians did have the perspective that you're articulating where they would say you know yeah sure I said Caesar's Lord but I didn't really mean it or sure they asked me if I had say Christian documents and I did but I I lied for the sake of you know carrying On these documents now Constantine before his conversion he decriminalizes a bunch of things including the during the Edict of Milan

in 312 ad he decriminalizes Christianity now he doesn't do that solely but in part and parcel to some of the other stuff that he's decriminalizing with the adict of Tolerance Christianity gets lumped in there and now all of a sudden it's no longer illegal to be a Christian and so the Christians are coming out of the Woodwork and this actually becomes a controversy within the church called the donatist controversy where you have yeah dontist and part of that is that there was a group of people who had say not given up Christian documents who maybe

were uh a little bit glib with the truth in terms of are you a Christian and they maybe didn't weren't as transparent and they were called the trors oh and this is actually where we get the word traitor from yeah and now They're all part of groups of church communities and remember Church in Greek just eklesia just means uh congregation so they're part of these congregations these local congregations but there are these other groups who have said that they're going to give up Christ and say well we didn't really mean it but then there are

also people who have come out of prison who have lost limbs for their faith or have had family members who died as Martyrs and this becomes a big Problem in the church and so they they have to figure it out and it's it's one of the earliest controversies that took place it's called the donus controversy yeah I just want I pulled this up while you're were saying just want to read this so people have background do donatism was a I guess it became a Christian sect leading to a Schism in the church in the region

of the Church of Carthage from the 4th to the 6th centuries donus argued that Christian Clergy must be faultless for their Ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid donatism had its roots in the long-established Christian Community of the Roman province Africa proconsularis present day Tunisia the northeast of Algeria and the western coast of Libya and morania tinana roughly with the northern part of present day Morocco in the persecutions of Christians under Diocesan named after The Berber Christian Bishop donus Magnus donatism flourish during the fourth and fifth centuries donatism mainly spread

among the indigenous Berber population and donatists were able to BL Christianity with many of the Berber local Customs so it's an it's it's an offshoot but they had a clear at the front end different idea on on I guess how the church is supposed to be carried out well it was particularly um what happens if you have a an elder within Your local congregation who say has baptized you but they offered an inch of pentant sorry I didn't say that right offered an inch offered a pinch of incense easy for me to say on the

altar of Caesar um is your baptism legitimate that was the question in terms of that like and so part of this theological question was uh where is the power of your baptism is is it in your confession of faith and the actual immersion or is it in the Person who has been set aside as clergy who has done this to you yes because you had these individuals who um they they didn't become Martyrs when maybe the other groups thought they should become Martyrs and now they're leaders in the church so that was part of this

donatus controversy now this is all leading up to the Council of n i remember yes so you have I was waiting in anticipation I know let me just say right off the bat the Council of NAA the reason it was Called was to deal with an issue called aryanism so there was a guy named Aras who was a uh he was a a minister in North Africa and he believed in he believed that Jesus was God but he believed that Jesus was created by the father and the godhead so the godhead yeah so in trinitarian

belief the godhead is usually the term that's referred to as you know Father Son and Holy Spirit in the one being of God there are three co-equal co-eternal Persons the Father the Son and the spirit so that's sometimes referred to as the godhead um so one of the earliest heresies in Christianity was a belief called modalism that that believed that God the Father God the son and God the Holy Spirit were actually the same beings and persons reflected in different modes so in the Old Testament the father was God then the father becomes Jesus dies

on the cross in the mode of Jesus and then now In the church age exists in the mode of the uh the Holy Spirit okay yeah and so early Christianity jumped on this and they were like this doesn't make any sense it doesn't make any sense philosophically it doesn't make any sense theologically um it would mean that Jesus is praying to himself that's not what trinitarians believe and um ultimately it led to what is referred to as Patra passalis that the father died on the cross in the person of Jesus oh Okay and they said

we don't we don't believe that okay so Aras is seeing some of the ways that trinitarian theology is being articulated and his motivations are actually I think correct in that he's trying to guard against modalism which had been I think appropriately condemned by the church as something that doesn't actually reflect what we see within the scriptures but in his while his motivations might have been correct his Method was then to kind of overcompensate and develop this theology where the father creates Jesus at a point in time and so the Son and the spirit did not

exist eternally as God whereas God the Father existed eternally as God and so um his Bishop his kind of the guy in in charge over him actually says like hey we this is not true it's it's it's not accurate from what we see and they actually hold a mini Council and they condemn him there but what year Is that um so this is like uh probably it's between uh 320 and 325 but it's leading up to the Council of NAA so this this is the topic of the Council of NAA the topic of the Council

of NAA actually had nothing to do with the books of the Bible so the books of the Bible had already been established centuries before not for the Roman Empire though what do you mean meaning this is where the Roman Empire makes officially kind of makes their Shift to like yay we're Christians now right like that's so it isn't it isn't no so uh Constantine converts to Christianity but he doesn't make Christianity the this the Imperial religion of Rome that's not not lawfully right right yeah so that's under theodosius which is after him but it becomes

accepted as a result of this it becomes decriminalized yes previous to this before he even converts right but I'm saying like the council Nia now gets To Yo our Emperor's converting by the way Christians it's cool you're decriminalized you can be here and we kind of support it you don't have to be a Christian but we that's fair to say right yeah but the caveat to that is that uh the of n doesn't even talk about the books of scripture so nothing at the Council of NAIA has anything to do with the Canon of scripture

that's already an established fact and when oh within the second century within the second century You but for the Roman Empire though because they were still torturing Christians at that time but the Roman Empire is still Pagan by the time you get the the Edict of Milan and the decriminalization of Christianity I know that's what I'm saying so what so how would they have how would the Roman Empire have gotten along with the acceptance of what the Gospels are oh they don't no this is this is established by Christianity so Christians so Christians already have

the 27 books that we call the New Testament and who EST who would you say establish that like it may not be one person but like what people said yo this is what we're going with so there are lots of Canon lists within the early church so because the earliest Christians were Jews there was an understanding that the promises that God makes you might have heard the word covenant yes so the Covenant that God Makes are always followed up by written documentation so God makes a covenant with Moses and you have literal inscription in the

tablets right and then you have the law you have the the the Torah um Exodus Leviticus Deuteronomy and numbers that come together with that and then when you have the prophets uh declaring things to the people and declaring truths that God is telling the people of Israel sometimes it literally says inscribe This on a tablet write this on a scroll and so there was always an understanding ing between the promises of God and written documentation that led up to that and so when you have Jesus come on the scene and he establishes the New Covenant

which was prophesied in Jeremiah 31:31 which says that God says I'm going to make a new covenant with my people and I'm going I'm going to describe the law in their hearts so they're not going to need the written Law in the same way they're going to live in a different way and so that's the cultural expectation during Jesus's day is that the Messiah would come and he would establish this new covenant so Jesus predicts this in the sense that I would argue he fulfills these expectations and these prophecies and then he predicts his own

death and resurrection and then he pulls it off as a sign and a symbol that he's overcome death and that he's been Approved by God and then I think the natural and organic question that people would ask these early Christians who are Jews themselves is okay we have the Covenant where are the books because the old Old Testament was a story in search of a conclusion because there was this idea that you have these well they 39 books in our Old Testament a prent Old Testament they're the same books in a Jewish uh it's called

a tanak the Tor The neim and the Kim right um the same number of books but they put them in a different order so oh I didn't know that yeah so they um they have the same number of books as the Jewish uh alphabet as the Hebrew alphabet um and so they do things like they group all the prophets together whereas the Christians divided them up um we have first and 2 Chronicles first and second Kings the Jews just have Chronicles and Kings got it and so if you were to go Out and you were

to buy a Hebrew copy of the what would be the Hebrew scriptures well we would call the Old Testament they would call the Tanakh the last book in that Bible is going to be Chronicles whereas the last book in the Christian Bible is going to be Malachi and the reason for that is we've organized it more or less chronologically he's the last prophet whereas the Jews had this idea that they ended the book with the davidic Reign And the expectation that someone would come and fulfill that the Messiah is coming yeah and so interestingly enough

the only two books in the Bible that start with a genealogy are Chronicles in Matthew and I think the reason for that is because I believe and I'm not alone here there's a you know idea within biblical scholarship Matthew knows that he's writing one of these documents that would have been considered the the graph the writing as part of the scripture That would have been included within the scriptures that followed up the Covenant and so where does he start he starts where the Bible that he has leaves off it starts with the davidic expectation tracing

Jesus back in that lineage and so we see this cultural expectation so even though it would we kind of have this idea that somebody somewhere got together and voted on books or tried to reach some consensus about books and realistically that never actually took Place in history it was a lot slower and a lot more organic than that and there were disagreements on some books and not others so very very early on you have the gospels nobody disagrees on the gospels and nobody disagrees on that no everybody agrees that these are the four books what

everybody well all the Christians so here's here's the thing the Disciples of Jesus had disciples and those are individuals who we call the apostolic fathers yeah because they have A direct association with it's like a bloodline almost yeah yeah it's the it's the um it's like the paper trail that that goes back to the chain of custody that goes back to Jesus and and part of this is that we have individuals who know Mark and we have individuals who know Mark who say hey this Mark guy is not a disciple but he's a traveling companion

of Peter and he follows Peter around and he writes what Peter says and so we have a number of individuals like This eras polycarp um papius and so they give us this unanimous confirmation within this early Community because it's not a very big community at this point and saying okay well we know who the authors of the gospels are and we have this direct chain of custody paper trail that goes back to the earliest Jesus community and one of the criteria for deciding okay well what goes in this group of of documents this T testamentum

right um that's the the word We get so it's actually the word covenant so in Greek the word testament is De which is Covenant so it's the old Covenant New Covenant in Latin it's testamentum so that's where we get Old Testament New Testament and they say well we we know who the earliest Jesus Community were we know who were the disciples of Jesus we know who the Disciples of the Disciples of Jesus were and so we can trace these back so when other gospels pop up up Gospel of Mary Gospel of Thomas Gospel of Judas

and they're analyzed they know the people who are connected with this community so they can look at the Gospel of Thomas and say this isn't from Thomas a because we know people who know Thomas and B the content in it doesn't reflect anything accurate in its representation of either who the disciples were or who the the Jesus who we know and have known from this community to be and so the When I talk about unanimous agreement on the gospels I'm talking about the earliest Jesus community that actually had a direct succession from either someone who

knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus so we have this unanimous agreement on the gospels and we have this unanimous agreement on the letters of Paul but we have some disagreement about some of the other books if for no other reason then there are a lot of books floating around with Very distinct names on them like The Book of Enoch are you talking about like stuff like that no that's actually previous we can talk about that if you want yeah yeah well let's not get you off topic but we'll come back to

that yeah so there are a lot of letters and writings with uh names associated with John and Peter and so you have okay we have a common name yeah right um well you have the Gospel of John but then you have First second and third John and then you have the acts of John and you have the revelation of John and you have the Epistles of John like you have to figure this out yeah so there are some books where the church is like okay 24 of the 27 we can we can say we know

where these come from but we got to make sure we do our due diligence so that we're not recognizing books that are not an accurate representation of the actual authors and so that's why it took the Dust to settle a little bit more on 1 second and third John 1 and second Peter Jude and James because they're like we got to make sure these books are actually connected to the people whose names they do that um the same way they did it with the other ones so they they looked back and looked at both the

content and the provenance of the actual documents so where are they being written who can we connect them with where are these documents Coming from and what communities are they coming out of so there was no actual criteria for can it but they did ask questions and so these are in scholarship sometimes referred to as apostolicity which is does it have a connection with an apostle or someone who knew an apostle um Orthodoxy which has nothing to do with the Eastern Orthodox Greek Orthodox Church orthos means um right and doca means in a number of

its different semantic ranges Teaching so Orthodoxy means does it reflect the right teaching in that the apostles established churches and they've been teaching in the churches the things that have been handed down from those who Jesus gave the authority to teach and so when we look at some of the content of these things so for example the last line of the Gospel of Thomas has Peter looking at Jesus and saying hey Mary's here get Mary out because women are not Worthy of life and so Jesus says don't worry I'm going to make her into a

male that resembles you male and the last line of the Gospel of Thomas says every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven like transgenderism so it's I'm [ __ ] with it's just complicated right they were before their time right so the early church looked at this kind of content and then they went what is this like that's not we know what the teaching of Jesus sounds like it ain't that and so they would both look at the content and look at the provenance in terms of the actual communities that they

were coming out of so you had apostolicity and you had Orthodoxy and then you also had the third criteria which was catholicity once again nothing to do with Roman Catholics Kata means concerning and hos means the whole concerning the whole universal church and so they're saying okay is there enough unanimous agreement From the church Universal from the churches that were established by the apostles that we can say these are being read widely within Church communities that actually reflect a provenance of going back to the earliest Jesus Community right within yeah within those communities though but

the thing I always worry about and to be fair I worry about this with everything it's not just we happen to be talking about Christianity right now but I'd Make the same argument for or this raise the same possibility I should say for literally anything that points to any form of religion or historical understanding of the history of the world like when you have a call it closed in community you have a handful of people y who are left behind after Jesus who knew him who are to carry on his word as he wanted as

he would have wanted it you have to understand that even if they may have Been really standup people and done a good job there's still a human bias that occurs where it's like well I'll take that I take that sure he he wouldn't have minded right that could still happen no yeah yeah no and I think that's that's a good observation um from a late perspective and from a historical perspective and one thing that's very unique about some of these documents is there's a criteria with within historiography that's referred to as the Criterion of embarrassment

and so the idea is if there there is something within the writing that reflects very poorly on either the authors the people connected with the authors it is a good assumption to say that it is probably true not that it's always true but it's probably true because you're you're not going to put your right this is what I was um we were talking earlier about some of the perspectives of prophethood in Islam versus Christianity my Muslim Friends have a problem with the prophets looking as bad as they do in the Old Testament because they're like

a representation of a man of God wouldn't look like that and they and they you and I were talking off camera about this earlier Muslims view prophets as like a form of divine like a form of relative Perfection or at least there's an understanding within say um Sunni Orthodoxy that uh I don't think it's un it's it's not all Muslims but sort of Historical Sunni Orthodoxy within Islam would largely have an understanding of prophets being close is sinless if not sinless and so if you have someone like King David who in the Bible he's a

murderer he's an adulterer he even he sleeps with baath Sheba and then baath sheba's husband comes back from war the same David with Goliath yeah well he did kill Goliath he killed Goliath but that was that was a good move right yeah so he kills Goliath he goes on he's a great King but he always has this problem of he just loves the ladies too much right nothing wrong with that so the story is he's standing on the roof he sees B Sheba she's on her roof and she's bathing and he's like oh I like

that and so he calls her and he's in and he sleeps with her but her husband is fighting on the front lines for him and her husband comes home and he's like H this is a problem so he tries to put he tries to put um her husband even more on The front lines so that he dies please die and then he dies right and so he's like purposefully like micromanaging the death of This Woman's husband so that he can basically because she becomes pregnant and that's problematic because her yeah he brings her back him

back from war and wants her husband to sleep with her so that he might think that he got her pregnant and he's such a devotee of David that he won't go home he sleeps in Front of um The Palace gate because he's like you know my comrades in arms they're out on the battlefields they're in the trenches his wife's getting knocked up by the king oh my God so all all that to say [ __ ] from a historian perspective we look at this and we're like hey this is like the good guy David's the

good guy he's the king right but he is a bit of a scumbag like he does these things so we can look at that and we can say especially within The ancient near East you never make the king look bad so in this regard that's probably true these events probably took place because you look at all of the ancient other ancient near Eastern the Mesopotamian the Egyptian kings the Pharaohs and they're always going Beyond above and beyond to try to make them look good and so in the Criterion of embarrassment when you look at something

like the gospels what's really interesting Is so it sometimes I like I like to refer to it as the disciples because they're like not getting anything Jesus is saying Jesus is like hey I'm teaching these things and they're like oh okay like they they they continually fail to understand what Jesus is saying he's predicting his own death he's saying he's literally saying I will be handed over to the authorities and will die and then when it happens they're like we didn't see this coming and then they all And they abandon him yeah and then Peter

who's like you know number two to Jesus right he's he's like he's the person who at the Last Supper says I will die with you I will fight for you he's like I'm going to deny you you're going to die deny me three times yeah yeah and then he does it yeah and so bad luck and what's interesting is that is particularly clear in the gospel of Mark which all the early eyewitness testimony dictates comes directly from Peter So the gospel of Mark portrays Peter kind of in the worst light and if we're to trust

the early Source information which I think we can that's coming directly from Peter and so the question is looking at something like the Criterion OB embarrassment this bows well in that you would think that they would try to gloss over over some of those things that these people betrayed Jesus that they denied Jesus that they all ran away and They hid meanwhile the women are like taking control they're going to the tomb to um so I I totally agree with you that I think we really need to be careful of the fact that you have

kind of uh mythological drift over time and you need to be careful however there are criteria we use as historians within the methodologies that we would look at any document to try to figure out okay how do we conclude how do we make that what I mentioned earlier That inference to the best explanation and weed out what is the reliable source information within this and the interesting thing about the gospels in particular is not only not only are they early not only do they reflect eyewitness testimony not only do you know individuals like Luke uh

admit their blind spots and saying like hey don't don't confuse me for an eyewitness I'm not an eyewitness but I'm interviewing these eyewitnesses and Sometimes he names the people in a purposeful way to say like hey go ask right go ask this person um they're dead but still ask them well they're alive at that point I'm kidding with yeah um but so we have these kind of levels of credibility that exist within something of the gospels that when I do historical analysis with someone um like uh CIO Dio or um uh tacitus or or plutar

I'm using the same kind of criteria that I would with the gospel is to try to figure out Okay what can I deem as credible and what can I deem as not credible and interestingly enough the gospels have a very high inference of this because I think the authors are going over and above to communicate what we're talking about you can place within a time and a specific location and there are people involved here are the names of some of the people go talk to them they're still around and so I think there is um

we do need to be Careful of mythological drift uh or embellishment which I think we do see in some of the other gospels we in so the non-biblical gospels we see aspects of shoehorning of particular belief so a lot of what do you mean shoehorning so Jesus the historical Jesus is a first century itinerant Jew uhhuh the gospels like the Gospel of Thomas Peter Judas portray Jesus not as a Jew but as a pagan Mystic a pagan Mystic yes like Pagan towards what Roman paganism Believed at the time or just like to a certain degree

in the sense of so you and I uh previous to recording were talking about um what sometimes referred to as substance dualism in the ancient world where they believe that the physical world is bad and the spiritual world world is good so there were groups um like there was a group called The the doic or the doxs uh Doane in Greek means to seem so whereas some people today might have a problem with Jesus being God in the ancient world they didn't necessarily have that problem they had a problem with him being man like that

he was a human was a problem because if Jesus is gone they're like he can't be physical physical is bad so they would strip that of him and so this is particularly true in the gospel of Peter because the gospel of Peter has a floating Jesus he's a doic Jesus he's not actually there and so in the instance of the crucifixion Jesus is Pretty chilled because he's not even really being crucified and so that is a pagan idea that comes from platonic philosophy that is written onto Jesus and so from a historical perspective is it

more likely that the biblical Gospels portray Jesus as a Jew when really he was a pagan or is it more likely that Jesus living in first century Judea growing up in Nazareth living in Galilee and traveling in these areas was a pagan right so all you're saying all of the Non-biblical gospels portray him as Pagan they have some aspect of pagan theology which is interwoven yeah what do you mean by that so just like expand right so the gnostics so part of gnosticism you might have heard that category before so gnostics were uh so their

gnosticism as a kind of Eastern ideological concept comes from the East and predates Jesus the problem with the overarching concept of nosism is that there isn't one group called The Gnostics that's a modern category there were like dozens of groups that we now call Gnostic so in one sense it's a little bit academically problematic to just call them gnostics it's putting everything in one basket yeah nonetheless if we're going to paint with a very broad brush that's fine yeah the gnostics if we can boil down the essentials even though they all disagree with each other

and contradict one another on multiple levels believe in Nosis nosis in Greek means knowledge and the idea is that you have these Divine figures which are imparting secret knowledge to particular people and so Jesus in the biblical gospels is very public with his ministry he's preaching in public he's telling Parables which mind you can be a little bit cryptic at times but his actual overt Ministry is very public in that way he's preaching to literally thousands of people um the opposite is True in the Gnostic Gospels Jesus is kind of covert and he's Whispering something

into this person's ear and he's Whispering something into that person's ear and he's trying to trying to keep the secret knowledge close and he doesn't want it to be you know out there and to the public and it's very it's cryptic to the point of being elgible so you read something like the gospel of Phillip and if you ever sit down and read the gospel of Phillip you Find it doesn't make any sense in fact I've translated through the Coptic of the Gospel of philli from the nonat library and it's even hard to translate sometimes

because the words seem like they don't fit like they say things and you're like I don't know what this means I don't understand I'm translating it as it looks but it's illegible and that's on purpose because the idea is if you're enlightened if you realize that it's not that Jesus is divine but actually you're Divine and you realize your Divinity you unlock that by this nosis this secret knowledge and so this is very different than what we see in either anything that resembles Judaism or anything that resembles what I would say is is traced back

to the historical Jesus M so it has these kinds of ideas that are more palatable for say a Roman Pagan audience they would have had no problem with these ideas whereas a lot of the things Jesus is saying are kind of antithetical To Common understandings within broader Roman paganism all right real quick I just have to go to the bathroom but I want to ask you how they're antithetical right when we get back so let's put a pin in that and I have you throughout the day today so we're definitely like this is so interesting

man you're doing a great job we're definitely going to do a patreon episode as well so we'll we'll do this and then we'll we'll have some more content there and the patreon link Will be linked in description but one sec we'll be right back y all right we're back so you were going to talk about why it was antithetical to like broader Roman paganism expand upon that yeah so what you have in an understanding of Jewish and Christian what sometimes refer to as atonement right how do you become right with God in ancient Judaism you

have the sacrificial system that's set up in the temple and so in the levitical law you Have in the Book of Leviticus sandwich right in the middle between the two Holiness codes you have yam kapore the day of atonement right where they would make this sacrifice on behalf of the nation and the peoples the surrounding Nations and so there was always this understanding that salvation was something done to you on the basis of God's work however in paganism that was not a concept right salvation is not something Done to you salvation is something that you

can attain on your own So within you yeah and so the the gnostics in particular capitalize on this where like I said before it's not just that Jesus is divine it's that you're Divine and you unlock this Divinity through the secret knowledge so this is not something that would have been compatible with either ancient Judaism or particularly Christianity because the whole message of Christianity was you Can't do it you are unable to do it the wages of sin is death but Paul says the gift of God is eternal life and it's salvation is something that's

done external to you based on the finish work of Christ on the cross but that's not what we get within these other gospels we get something very different which strips down Jesus to a very simplistic kind of pagan philosopher rather than being a Jewish rabbi who steeped in the Judaism of his Day but then incorporates and fulfills these um ideals and uh m iic expectations so let's bring this back to the Council of NAA yeah because what what and this is really good background you've given but what you've been talking about is how kind of

like within the early church itself they worked out what's what's there and what's not but what you had said at the beginning of this when we were talking about the council was that None of this as far as like the Roman Empire goes they just kind of took what the church was doing on the Tex so the quote unquote banned gospels was some of the problems that you had within them as far as like where whether they they had paganism aspects or whatever like they just put those to the side on the recommendation of the

early church well sort of um sometimes it's portrayed as if there is like uh these dozens of groups which we categorize as gnostics Which are really you know a dispersed group they contradict each other they have their individual right Jesus is either Whispering into Mary's ear or he's Whispering into uh Peter's ear or he's Whispering into Philip's ear the things that are said about these particular people are contradictory within each of these documents they don't even agree on what everyone else is saying but they're also not very popular and they're really only Delegated to specific

places at specific times so by the time the coun of NAA rolls around nosism and all these different groups have really had their Heyday they've they're almost dying out now a lot of these Gnostic groups end up Surviving past Christianity but and past the Council of n in particular but right in the Middle Ages right you have the cathars we're we're going to get to that yeah okay but um by the time the council NAA they're Almost exclusively dead so it's not even really In Contention and these other writings where the difference of having you

know a a dozens of copies of the 27 books of the New Testament all over the ancient world hundreds if not thousands by the time you get to um the third fourth Century um you really only have maybe a few copies of the Gospel of Thomas in an isolated area within Upper Egypt um you might have the gospel of Peter in a particular area of Egypt you Might have some of these other documents but they're not nearly as prolific and they're really isolated to particular areas so the New Testament scholar Larry herado um who has

now passed away but he did a really good job of sort of tracking this information um him and there's another another guy um FF Bruce who wrote a book on the cannon of scripture um and they both talk about the fact that whoever these gnostics were they were neither popular nor Prolific within the ancient world in in comparison to broader Christianity so the Council of n is called it's called because Constantine decriminalizes Christianity and he sees okay now we have Christians coming out of the woodwork now some historians have said that there are as high

as 60 to 70% of the Roman empire being Christian at that time I do not think the evidence bears that out I think it's a lot lower than that and with all due respect to the People who say based on what evidence though what evidence um based on the Christian communities that we can both look at terms of the written documentation and where it's coming from and based on the previous persecutions as well as the actual physical evidence archaeologically of things like early Christian communities um they did things differently uh they communed differently and so

I think it's it's far more likely that that number is closer to Like 15% and I think that that's pretty high either way but they're everywhere Christians are everywhere I think I think that's what's more important and Constantine is not seeing this as a power grab as much as he's seeing this about the Pax Roma the piece of the Empire he doesn't want people disagreeing and he wants to make sure that people are living peaceably and so he sees this disagreement which is kind of escalating in the church communities And he implores the religious officials

the Bishops and the traditional number is that there are 318 people who show up at the Council of NAA I think the number is realistically way higher than that because um they would come not just the bishop would come like with a con like like a community there'd be church leaders interestingly enough the bishop of Rome the quote unquote Pope doesn't show up um he doesn't seem to have any Kind of overarching responsive power at this time he sends two delegates but none of the documentation that comes out of the Council of fascinating indicates that

the the bishop of Rome in particular had any more or less Authority than any other Bishop across the chrisan Empire um and at this point saying Christian Empire is anachronistic because there wasn't a Christian Empire yet but they get together and remember that this is immediately after a pretty Stringent era of persecution so there are people showing up to NAA who have lost limbs for the confession of their faith and so this idea that you kind of get from the D Vinci Code that this is where the Divinity of Christ is decided I mean if

the if that were truly the case and uh Constantine says okay I'm going to get you all together and now you're going to believe this I know you might believe something else but you're going to believe this now well there are People showing up who are like I'm sorry we were willing to die before why would we just go along with but there was and and to be clear like The Da Vinci Code also fictionalizes a lot of things because it's a it's a story for sure like there's there's certainly great aspects of History within

that Dan Brown puts within that but there's also things that are you know for the story that's said there is some kind of compromise though right Because I'm just thinking like let's say the people especially the ones who are showing up without limbs because they've been so strong about their faith they've literally lived under the tyranny of their faith being persecuted literally physically upon them say nothing of emotionally and spiritually by this Empire and now suddenly this Empire is saying hey not only is that gonna stop but we want to include like the emperor himself

wants to meet with you guys to Discuss a way forward for your religion could isn't there certainly a possibility that maybe some some simple compromises are therefore then made at that meeting such as maybe what what dates they choose to put certain holidays on that may have matched previous things that the Romans did under their Pagan religion and stuff like that sure yeah I mean it's it's not a question of possibility almost everything is Possible it's a question of probability and so at this point you already have the fact that Christianity was decriminalized over a

decade before so you already have a 10 plus years of kind of Constantine showing his cards he converts in that time and I actually think based on how it is described that his conversion was legitimate I think he actually believed because part of that is that it was at Great detriment to his actual political power it it was yeah Well CU this small percentage yeah you're right well and remember before that the way that Diocesan got away with what he did is by literally making himself the God right and the Roman populists were fine with

that the imperial religion was actually not something they ever had a a beef with and so if Constantine really wanted to grab at Power he could just make himself a God again or he could continue on in Sun worship which he was basically doing He could uh continue on in Soul Invictus in worshiping the son as um Saturn as is God and that would have been completely both acceptable and understandable in fact part of the debate about early Christians and some of the accusations that were lobbed against them is that they were atheists in that

they denied the gods so a being the negative participle and then Theos meaning God right not that they didn't believe in any God but that they didn't believe in The gods and that they were called antisocial because the religious P the religious festivals and going on in the Roman Empire were inherently religious ah yes so they were atheists and they were antisocial if Constantine wanted to sort of continue with the status quo he totally could have and it would have actually made him look way better in the eyes of the populace of most people who

were still practicing Roman paganism and So his conversion is not actually a very strategic move in terms of his political power now I think it it ends up being um better for him in the end but he's still he's still in the fence about a lot of things uh but at this point by the Council of NAA in 325 he's already at least to some degree to the Christians shown okay I'm not going to kill you guys I'm going to decriminalize this and um it's actually said that he commissions copies of the Bibles to be

both produced and to be spread around and uh this is very expensive like to the tune of what would be millions of dollars today I mean we we have what we think are some of those so there's a document called codc cicus um that's at the the British library right right now what's this so this is one of our earliest examples of what we would consider a Bible so before this you had individual books so you have manuscripts that float around from the You know second third centuries of say the gospels or um the letters

of Paul or um you these documents but they're independent largely so they're specific manuscripts and there's a categorization system for this in fact if you look up CS nm.org csnn is in Nancy yeah yeah NTM yeah o RG pull so that's the center for the study of New Testament manuscripts so this is done uh by uh Dan Wallace so if you Click digital manuscript collection so this organization goes around the world and they try to preserve manuscripts so what you can actually do is you can go over to the classification on the left hand side

click po so go down click Papyrus and then say start in second century and in third century and then you can even scroll down and be a little bit more choosy um so you can say I just want so you go Let's say the the the the book of uh go to the gospels because you'll get the highest percentage of that and then you have them listed so you can view so let's scroll down and go to a a key a key example go to p66 on the like main body oh on the main body

yeah so if you scroll down go to so this is the numbering system so p66 right there uh not that one go back okay go to the second one p66 second third Century so this is a copy of the Gospel Of John whoa and so this is what they would have looked like um so this one is actually in uh Geneva Switzerland um at the um bodmer foundation and this is one of our what the bodmer foundation so it's it's just an an in institution um so this is one of our earliest examples of a

cover to cover I actually have a full fact simile of this in my office that I do academic work on is this written in Aramaic so this is Greek Greek yeah so if you look at you can Actually click it and it'll get close um oh like get a magnify yeah yeah uh woo that's pretty close so you have there oh yeah that is Greek holy [ __ ] so like the first line scroll the top um the very first line of this yeah you can read ancient Greek right yeah so and AR and and

Kos and pronon in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God um so I actually have a video on my YouTube Shamus plug where I work through the first two pages of This uh document and I explain I site translated and I explain the syntax in the grammar and what it says because the interesting thing about this is where there's some a lot of manuscripts have differences within the manuscripts for various reasons scribes make mistakes scribes insert insert things they're just there hundreds of thousands of um but

the interesting thing about the preface to John's gospel is this reads exactly like a modern translation so When I translate through verses 1 to 14 verses were added later in the the 16th century but the equivalent of verses 1 to 16 1 to 14 um it reads exactly identical to what we would have in our with no like not even issues with spelling or word order or anything it's very very interesting and you were telling me off camera that like in ancient Greek the way that the the sentences are structured it like didn't matter the

order they put it in I think An example you gave is like I went to the club with Bill and it they might say like Club I went bill with or something like that yeah and that's how it translates but you're supposed to then figure out that it means well when you would translate it out from the Greek um it you would put it in the proper word order in English so you could have it in any word order in Greek as long as the right syntactical and grammatical structures are there but it would it

Would translate out to the exact same thing okay um and this is so the earliest manuscripts in ancient uh Latin and Greek and Coptic are this which is called scriptio continuous so it's all capitals no spaces in between words and little to no punctuation so in my um doctoral work in my PhD research what I do is I study scribal habits and I study what are called paratextual features you study scribal habits yeah ancient scribal Habits is my area of expertise what does that what does that mean so all the people who copy the documents

have these like little idiosyncrasies that they develop so like if you if you uh zoom in um so pull it up a little bit so you'll see a DOT right there between uh the final Sigma and the Omega um or the omran right there yeah so that is essentially a uh a verse divider now at this point verses didn't exist but p66 is a good example of a manuscript that Was produced probably for public reading I in fact my doctoral research uh what I'm trying to prove is that the vast majority of these documents were

produced for public reading because it's Christians who start to develop things with an ancient Greek like punctuation and spacing and paragraphing and that's because they were reading these out loud Christians did that yes and when Christianity is decriminalized and um Constantine produces these Bibles uh Other scribes non-Christian scribes actually start looking at this stuff and they say hey that's a lot easier to read and they start copying how the Christians have done it all the way along now you were telling me I'm GNA get the names wrong here I think it was it was earlier

in the podcast or right before camera that it was Socrates y who said you shouldn't write things down yeah because you won't have a good memory of it it would make lazy yeah Yeah EX exactly you make people lazy so they're taking the opposite end here Christianity essentially oh yeah Christianity was inherently and Christianity is interesting because literacy in the ancient world there was a very established Book trade but it was almost exclusively uh Rich upper class educated males a lot of the Christian I know right a lot of the Christian Community were not any

of those things a lot of them were women a lot of them Were not educated and a lot of them um were lower what we consider low were middle class A lot of them were women a lot of them were women why in fact uh Cicero who is a uh a philosopher he critiques Christianity and he calls it specifically uh the religion of the foolish religion of slaves women and children and the reason for that was because th that was a group of people within the ancient world who did not have any Agency so of

course yeah Christianity comes along and Paul says things like in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek there is no male nor female there is no slave nor free there is no no um uh and he he says uh uh skan or Barbarian so he adds he has like categories of uh social class gender um what we I essentially call um ethnicity and religion he says Hey guys you're all one in Christ and this Paradigm breaks Through The Narrative of ancient Rome it's very Countercultural and that's why Cicero looks at this and he mocks it

not that Christianity was all slaves women and children but that they were giving any agency and credibility to Slaves women and children people who weren't even considered human in some regards now why that's interesting though Le let's just focus on the women aspect of it real quick uhhuh this is a church that ends up being built upon all males controlling it and yet a lot of The following was women yes what's the I mean that's a very interesting Paradox there if you will yeah so there's a different uh there's definitely a church hierarchy and structure

that exists however it also has the idea that everybody irrespective of your gender is created in the image of God so male and female are both created in the image of God now when it says that in the Beginning of the book of Genesis that is also countercultural because in the ancient near East if you read things like the Sumerian king lists or or um the enuma leash or some of the Sumerian Tablets they specifically refer to royalty being created the image of God but not everybody is creating the image of God and they have

a hierarchy right cherry picking it yeah and there are different um so there's often parallels drawn between the code of hamurabi and The levitical law and I think some of those parallels are totally legitimate in the sense that you have these two ancient near Eastern societies who exist alongside one another and so you would expect to see parallels and you would expect to see things like hey murder is bad because I think we can largely agree that that's true um where it goes different is saying no it's not just royalty that are created in the

image of God everybody's created in the image of God and actually the levitical law says that there is no hierarchy in the punishment whereas in the um code of hamurabi there's a different penalty depending on where you are in the social structure so if if you're upper class and you commit a crime against another upper class person there's a different level of penalty than if you're upper class and you commit a crime against a slave it's own type of cast system if you will yeah so coming back to this That was a bit the side

so this is what man this is what largely if you had a copy of the Gospel of John it would look like this this is a codex another interesting thing about Christianity is that Christians didn't invent the book what we would call the Codex but they were the ones who pioneered it as a writing for format cuz right they perfected it if you will well the ancient world preferred Scrolls so Christians almost unanimously Use Cotes and we're not sure why can you explain to people the the cotesy aspect there so a cotesy is just a

book like you would take instead of taking a long line of Papyrus and writing on it and then rolling it up like this instead yeah you would bind it on one side and you would write on both sides of the Papyrus this is long long long before the printing press and everything so this is physical writing yeah yeah um and so so this is much more analogous of What people would be considering when they were thinking of scripture when they were thinking of the Bible so the word biblos is simply the Greek word for books

so it's plural and then eventually it was the book right because for a period of time in the Middle Ages the only book you might ever had seen in your life was the Bible but when they refer to the scriptures they're not thinking of a single bound volume like we would today we just sort of uh we Revert to that because that's sort of in our conscious imagination when we think of the Bible we think of it you know you have the King James with the leather cover on the and you know maybe thumb indexing

on the pages right right but it didn't fall out of the sky like that um a lot of them were independent written documents like this now Constantine commissions to Great expense of the Roman Empire a number of of what we would then consider as more of a Bible Genesis to Revelation so if you look up did he commission that at NAA uh no previous to this previous yeah yeah yeah yeah almost is like a peace offering um to like hey Christians I'm on your side but if you look up codex sinus. RG codex Cod how

do you spell caticus so it's codex with an X I think you got it yeah codec sinus. Org the British Library once again oh something went wrong all right hold on let me Google it codex Sinicus see this yep that's it all right cool so you can click um see the manuscript at the top so this is put on by the British library and then so Genesis is not a very good example so the thing with codex is is that the front and the ends are very vulnerable yeah what are we looking at right here

yeah we're looking at Genesis CH 21 so this is all that survives of that that's all that's left yeah so did people like fill in the Blanks with what they thought it said I mean we have tons of these manuscripts so the answer is both yes and no so we have both codec anticus and then we have also um a number of other ones but this is probably I mean you can also so click at the top Genesis where does it say that so WR up choose a passage it says just above there oh got

it so go up click Genesis go down all the away and go to Matthew okay it's going to look a lot Nicer than oh yeah that's clean yeah so and then you can even look so what they've done is you can actually go to chapter and verse um and then they have it on the side right so they have the transcription in the what is a modern Greek script and then the translation on the bottom they done a pretty good job and you can zoom into this and you can look at the different aspects this

is another document that I I work pretty Often with interestingly enough when Billy Carson refers to the sign Bible he's talking about this the when he said is that the whole thing where he talks about like Jesus going to the pyramids and [ __ ] no he he says that the crucifixion is not in the Sinai Bible um and he credits this as one of if not the earliest Bibles and you're saying this is the same thing I'm saying this is not just the same thing but this reads exactly like your copy of the Gospel

of Matthew today and it says the opposite of what he's saying it says what any other Bible translation you're going to work with so and you can find that through this codec CTIC yeah you could just go to chapter and verse and read through it nonetheless we're pretty sure this is one of the Bibles that Constantine commissioned based on the dating of it why are we only oh so we're just doing it based on what of the date that's why we don't know for sure that He said we're doing this um well no we have

his decree that he did this and then but not for this one necessarily no he doesn't like so this one we kind of uh conclude based on its dating and based on just how expansive it is so this book would have taken 360 sheep to make it would have been exorbitantly expensive So based on the fact that we know that a Constantine commissioned these Bibles to be produced and B that he did so at Great expense um this is What it would have looked like so this is one of the clearest examples because we can

actually like walk through the text um but there are other ones uh in fact there's one that here in the states codex washingtoni Anis which is in um it's in the Smithsonian in Washington DC um we have codex alexandrinus which is another one that comes from this time and codex vaticanus which is in the Vatican library and so all of these documents have you ever been there the Vatican no I haven't okay um but interestingly enough it was like you couldn't see codex vaticanus it was like they're very like uh uh choosy with who could

and couldn't and then 5 years ago they digitized the whole thing and they allowed people in so I actually know people personally who have had access to the Vatican library to look at codex vaticanus in person um but you have these examples and they say what what's online matches up oh yeah Yeah yeah pictures yeah shout out to the vanin on that one I know right um so we have these examples of uh what are probably like we can't say with 100% certainty but based on the fact that these are are these are pretty a

they're professionally done and B this would have been like Way Beyond the scope of any even a rich person at this time to annihilate an entire flock of sheep simply to make a Bible like it makes sense that based on the dating of these That it was probably part of this um commissioning by Constantine so this is all in the intermediary period leading up to so in terms of your question of why would they trust Constantine I think Constantine had actually done a pretty good job of proving both with his actions and with his words

although not perfectly um that he was a genuine believer and that when he calls the Bishops to get along at the Council of Messiah and it's also Important to keep in mind that he's not actually part of the proceedings he says Hey I want you to get along and then he backs off and one of the reasons we're we're pretty confident that that is the case is because Emperors like to take credit for all sorts of things you don't say and if he I know right no politician does that today wait are you telling me

the politicians like to take credit for things listen I didn't say anything I Don't know if I can believe that in this day and age um and he doesn't we have no record of him taking credit for anything in fact we have record of him specifically backing off and letting the proceedings of the council take place and then the council of NAA was specifically to address this issue of aryanism where Aryan and his his followers um were saying there the specific line is there was a time when the sun was not now there's a story

That's very fun but it doesn't actually come from this time it comes from later okay that St Nicholas like Santa Claus St Nicholas yeah because he's from Myra in Turkey um he is a four is turkey he's a fourth Century Bishop no [ __ ] so the story is although keep in mind this is a little bit apocryphal coming afterwards when Aras says there was a time when the sun was not St Nicholas stands up and punches him in the face that's bad santa isn't that isn't That a fun story it's probably not true I

want that to be true but you can find um Eastern Orthodox icons of uh St Nicholas hitting um love that all right little Humanity there you know got to get the got to get the energy out sometimes yeah so that was the major issue the major issue was hey we got to sort out this thing because we have ay pretty articulate theology on how the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit operate within the one being of God and What you're saying does not adhere to what actually scripture articulates on that the secondary issue and

you're exactly right in terms of um saying that there were some dating issues in in in regards to holidays the secondary issue was the date of Easter uh when do we celebrate Easter based on what we see from some of the descriptions of when it could have been within the gospels yeah they need to set like a set date on that every year that pisses me off it's like Is it going to be April it's gonna be March is it that week is it you know what I mean well it's based on the Jewish calendar

is why yeah set date yeah yeah fair enough um but that was the main issue so the Council of n had nothing to do with any books of scripture and it had nothing to do with establishing any actual doctrine that wasn't already believed but it addressed a theologically problematic belief that was becoming popular that was not in Line with what scripture actually articulated but they quote scripture within the documents that come out of NAA which includes the nyine Creed which sort of the bare minimum of what every uh Christian denomination what's that like the I

believe in one God the Father Almighty no that's the Apostles Creed although I'm impressed that you know that was right somewhere floating around in there yeah yeah no that the N Creed is a little bit more wordy than that but Um they come up with that and then they come come up with uh uh 40 kind of statements that come out of that um in a letter so we actually have the actual documentation it's not hard to figure out what n was actually about we have the the receipts from what actually took place so that's

why when you have something like Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and he's saying that all sorts of things took place every scholar on planet Earth who had ever even done a cursory glance At NAA was like hold on like this is this is pretty easily demonstrated to be not just not the case but like way off on a different Universe yeah again though but that's like I said this earlier but I didn't realize like people were taking all that seriously maybe I'm like really naive on that it's also he wrote a fictional story based on

some truth but like of course you're it's not all exact like if you're getting the Council of NAA history from Dan Brown That's not Dan Brown fault that's your fault you would be surprised we shouldn't be yeah I want to get Dan Brown in here badly like at some point so I'd love to ask him about that I mean Dan Brown in the preface to the book says that the narrative is not true but that the details are true so all of them um well he claims that a lot of the things are actually representative

of what took place in terms of this idea of Jesus being married drawing from um the Gospel of Phillip and and other things I think that now I I'll I'll say on that not a scholar yeah look around on that but I I think there's an interesting story there for sure I I do I do think that there's no doubt in my mind that there was some sort of tacit agreement or straight up if you want to say like conspiracy to devalue Mary Magdalene and therefore devalue any feminine influence within the church not to say

the church should Be like feminine or something I don't think it should be masculine or feminine I think it should be a [ __ ] church but to paint because we kind of got off this so maybe it's a good time to come back to that to paint her as a prostitute which is like the lowest that is incorrect so she wasn't a prostitute in the gospels so that's actually a mistake from a PO because there are two stories there's one story of a prostitute who comes to Jesus and There's another story of Mary Magdalene

and they get conflated but they're they're not the same story so there's actually a his name eludes me at the moment but there's a pope at a certain point in time who specifically in uh I can't remember if it was a sermon or a letter he wrote or a commentary he conflates the two but in the gospels themselves Mary Magdalene is never described as a prostitute okay but and I I'll take your Word for that you know a lot more about this than I do either way they also paint her as not they her gospel's

not accepted her gospel is an interesting story she's therefore not involved with the church and they they paint her as you know just someone who was kind of around Jesus's life or whatever and they made this this is what's always kind of [ __ ] with my head the church puts this thing on sex right M You have to wait till you're married it's like this holy sacred Union whatever it's run by a bunch of dudes who don't have sex though unless it's the Catholic church in which they have some elicit sex with little boys

but I'm saying like it's run by people who then say oh we're not going to do that we're going to be chass and whatever and Jesus I think there's some talk where he talked about like I am I'm paraphrasing here but like I come from the father so I'm I'm married to heaven or whatever rather than Flesh on Earth or's something like that but like what would be so like it seems like the church established at some Point like early on after Jesus's death the early Christians established that he was this celibate Godlike figure who

did not commit the sin of having sex on Earth and no wasn't married what why why is that so important I think it's kind of weird that like again if he's Divine maybe It's not weird but like on the surface it's like a 33y old dude back then which is like your [ __ ] 50 isn't married and doesn't have kids that would be an odity if anything like why is that such an important part of the Christian Church frankly I've always thought that's like very stupid it's just my opinion but like why is that

like a critical part of the teaching and then makes like sex this thing when in reality by making sex this thing that's Like a no no you're everything's about sex we we call her the Virgin we call her the Virgin Mary we talk about the celibate Jesus the celibate like they're making it about sex you see like the the the Paradox the almost The Catch 22 in in their wording there yeah I think there's definitely an imbalance that has taken place in terms of maybe the communication of what sex is I mean ultimately sex within

Christian and Jewish Heritage is a sacred thing it is A beautiful thing it is something that God designed I mean arguably the first mandate that God gave Humanity was be fruitful and multiply like this is something but the the cultural or not cultural the covenantal understanding of what sex is is that it exists within the parameters of something that is Holy in terms of the Union the first Covenant was marriage in Genesis and sex operates within the bounds of what marriage is now the whole issue of celibate priests Aside I'm not a Catholic I don't

think the celibacy in the priesthood was ever a good thing or even a Biblical thing um as a Protestant I believe in the priesthood of all believers so uh we don't have that and we don't have that because I think that that is both Incorrect and problematic and I agree with you but also as you said earlier to the credit of protestantism in this case you guys branched off and took away some things like that which is great but you Still descend from the people who created that religion who that was like a part of

it sure I mean in terms of the status of women I would actually say the inverse is true is that you know you have this cultural expectation in GRE Roman Antiquity where there is no natural way in classical Latin to say male virgin because the idea of a male virgin was not a thing from an early age you would have been expected as a particularly a Roman male Like a citizen but not um not exclusive to that to have sex with whoever you want whenever you want at any time okay that would be the expectation

on the inverse side there are 25 ways to say female prostitute in Latin because there is this understanding that it males Chastity is not a thing however you want to be married to a chased woman and the women were actually held to a higher standard and prostitutes were Looked down upon although there is this category of um of uh priest prostitutes within the religious system where you could go and sleep with a a priestess and that would be part of a worship ceremony a priestess yeah yeah like like in say the Temple of Athena had

you would the temple prostitutes were a common thing but nonetheless um Christianity comes along following Judaism which has this idea of the sacredness of sex that sex is Something that's beautiful that's ordained by God for a specific purpose in a specific time for the normative function of both marriage and procreation but not limited to that because you have The Book Song of Songs or Songs of Solomon in the Bible which is basically a giant love poem from Solomon to his lover like that exists within the Bible it's a thing sex is is has and always

will be beautiful thing within judeo Christianity now that goes Ary when we try to make it into something where we almost over sexualize everything yes and then um if if everything is sexual then it's almost like nothing is sexual yeah and I I do agree with you in the sense that I think that is problematic however Paul then comes along and he actually says husbands you need to you need to look after your wife and sacrifice yourself for your wife like Christ did for the church and Christ died for the church and Paul actually holds

men to the same standard that women are held to within the Roman ethic and says no you can't just go around and sleep with anybody you want you need to hold to the sacredness of this institution that is going to sit at the Bedrock of humanity in that the first creation mandate was be fruitful and multiply and so once again that was seen as countercultural and actually held men to the same agency that women Were held to in that day which was seen as um very uh feminizing to the Romans they looked at Christianity and

they said this is this is at minimum it's stupid yeah um but what all of this does going back to what I was saying about Cicero in in in chastising Christianity is the religion of women is because women started to both be given agency and be given an ability of uh equality Within Christianity and there are some interesting studies that have been done Where you can track the agency and rights of women across the ancient world and it's exactly correlative to Christian missionaries going in previously so Christian missionaries go into an area and 5 to

10 years later the agency of women and them actually being seen in some instances as actually human starts to pop up and it's because Christianity although it has not been perfect has always given a level of credibility to women because it holds to This Foundation that we are all created in the image of God right so and let's give them credit for that so within the community uhhuh they do that and there's evidence for that why in the power structure did they not have that why was it all do I mean it still is I

mean there's nuns but they don't have any power yeah I mean I I think that there's so um uh I I am hold to a position of what's called complementarianism that men and Women have different roles both in their genders and in the operation of the church that are they are equal but they complement each other in different ways and so when you look at how Paul writes to the churches and says hey here's how the church structure should be operating you have Christ as the head and then you have elders and deacons and he

specifically says those are men now what that's not saying is that these are the most important People and this is something that the Protestant Reformation when they reformed the church I think brought back to a level of okay we need to re-evaluate this we need to recalibrate this because the priesthood has been elevated to something that it never should have been and this is why um you have uh in protestantism you and and even Protestants don't do this very well there are lots of churches where you have celebrity pastoris I would say that Is actually

anti-protestant in the sense of historical Pro protestantism I mean I think they're the worst people on the planet like like anyone who I mean you see this latest one they're like selling plots of land in heaven to people oh yeah but that's just stupid yeah it's stupid but I'm saying like people who who bastardize what's such a well-intentioned thing that Focus that plays on people's ultimate question in Life which is the meaning of it and where it goes and what they do right special place in hell for you yeah I mean Jesus warns against that

in saying that there will be wolves among the Sheep wolves in sheep's clothing he specifically says that and says there will be false prophets um in first John it calls them the antichrists literally you know we think of the Antichrist but really scripturally there are multiple antichrists in the sense that they are The opposite of what Jesus is actually teaching right and I would I would say that a lot of these people you know not everybody is a wolf and sheep's clothing but there are some very overt wolvves and sheep's clothing but going back what

I was saying um about women is part of the problem of something like celebrity pastoris is that it makes it look like the endall and Beall of the Christian Community is the pastor and that is not necessarily true and I would actually Say that when you look at how scripture articulates the purpose and intention of women as people who both have the ability to procreate to create other human beings and then raise them to be things like good citizens and and and Godly men and women I would say that that is actually potentially a more

important role within the life of both Christian church and within Society than anything like a pastor could ever be because the pastor is a Shepherd right That's where the word um in Latin pastor means Shepherd and that's where that comes from but women have always been the the current that sits at the heart of the structures of everyday life and we see this even in the New Testament when Peter writes he writes and there's a specific section where he says hey Christian women if you have a husband who is not a Christian you need to

make sure that you are being an example to them and you are being a wife that up Until the point of like being asked to do something which is uh like problematic and sinful you need to show by example how you can lead the family and we have lots of examples of this of of of converts who the the wife comes to Faith within the Antiquity and then the family follow suit afterwards because women are such an integral point and the normative position of a wife is to then be you know the the mother in

that Community obviously there are caveats to That and things happen but the the normative position of marriage is procreation and the furtherment of things like Society right yeah yeah I I I there's so much of you know when when when you look at how Society functions and what the role religion plays in that from a cultural aspect it's impossible to deny how much that has rubbed off like you can look at people now who you know may not know anything about religion and Aren't religious at all and yet Customs that they have practiced every day

of their life are almost like direct descendants of of of what was perhaps within Christianity or within other religions as well depending on where you live there's a great book by a guy named Glenn scrier who were actually bringing over he lives in the UK he runs an organization called Speak Life and um we're bringing him over uh in November to speak at a conference we're running In Ontario and he wrote a book called the air we breathe and he goes through a number of these things historically where uh he talks about how Christianity is

actually the it's the progenitor of a lot of these things that we just assume within modern society and one of the things he highlights is consent consent is a Christian ethic in the sense of if you look at ancient cultures but sexual consent yeah the idea that this should be consensual like I mentioned before You know the whole idea of there not being a natural way to say a male virgin but 25 ways to say a female prostitute like that was the Roman deal and that was just normative and it was seen as just the

the neutral position whereas Christianity always looked at that and saying like those women have value and purpose and meaning they bear the image of God and so they need to be both protected and valued and seen as equals what about Judaism which wasn't you know The Holy Roman Empire they had their own sect as well yeah I mean I think this ethic sits at the heart of what Judaism should be but things definitely go arai we don't always do this well and um that's what Jesus a lot of the time criticizes is The Sermon on

the Mount in Matthew Chapter 5 a lot of it is about this where he says you have heard it said but I say and so he he looks at the law and it sounds like he's correcting the law but he's that's not what he's Doing he's actually going back to the intention of what the law meant so when he says you have heard it said do not kill your brother but I tell you anybody who has hatred in his heart for his brother has committed murder he's not saying that you know if you hate your

friend that you're actually committing murder but he's getting to the heart of the issue of what the law actually meant like the purpose of the intention of these things communicate ethics and Values before they actually communicate prescriptions of how things should actually be and part of the problem was that you had these sects scts not SE ex um that I mentioned before like the Pharisees and the Sadducees who were hyper religious and Jesus looks at them and he says hey you're tithing your like mint leaves that's stupid that's missing the point of what tithing is

about like stop the stop going so into the specifics of The law where you're actually missing the force for the trees and part of that I think is this development which we see within um Judaism which is a Nega negative uh patriarchal aspect I mean I don't think that patriarchy is necessarily a bad thing in and of itself but there's a negative aspect of patriarchy in the same way that if you look at the content of Christianity and you pour it out you get things like love your neighbor as yourself pray for those Who persecute

you but Christianity has a long history of not doing that well there's another great book by a guy named John Dixon who is an Australian New Testament scholar he wrote a book called uh bullies and Saints and he goes through a lot of these examples of where he points out okay things like public education that was a Christian institution things like universities Christian institution um public Healthcare Christian institutions but Then he says you know Jesus says make sure you take the log out of your eye before you start pointing at the speck in your brother's

eye let's look at the logs in our eye let's look at some of these examples of where Christianity has really done a terrible job at articulating and living by its essence when you say those are Christian institutions is it literally they're started by Christians on the basis of their Christian faith or they're started By people who happen to be Christians and therefore the Christian institutions you understand what I'm saying yeah well if you look at their motivations yeah for why they're doing what they're doing a lot of it has to do with like the education

Factor um was we want people to be able to read the Bible like a lot of the the the origins of public education come out of uh individuals like John Knox in Scotland who was like hey I'm a Protestant We're translating The Bible into English I want people to know what it is and the interesting thing I mentioned uh to you earlier before the show Tom Holland the historian not the actor Spider-man always have to preface with that um in his book Dominion highlights has a big section on slavery and says there is no abolition

movement anywhere in history that was not both a Christian one and was motivi motivated specifically by Christians Why because they said we see the fact that we're all created in the image of God and in fact the one of the first abolitionist movements was in the 4th Century by the capian fathers and what they did is um uh GRE I think it was Gregory nantis um preaches this sermon where he says how dare you think you can pay a price for God's image you can't do that because there is no image on there is no

price that could actually pay for how valuable the image of God is in Every individual and so they're the first ancient abolitionist movements and then you also have Augustine who's raiding these slave ships him and his church members are going in and raiding the slav ships and and releasing them and he writes and he says I don't know if this is right to do like ethically go in and like literally clear out these slave ships because you know this is to detriment of these people who this is their uh this is their job but at

the Same time I can't help but do this yeah and so you have these institutions which are not just motivated but even the Abolitionist Movement in both England and then later in the United States they were all Christians none of them were not Christians and even when the abolitionists there's a great section in Tom Holland's Dominion where he talks about how a number of the British abolitionists went down into North Africa to try to convince some of the Sultans um within North Africa to get on board and they laughed at them they laughed at them

and actually uh one of the lines I think it was in um Libya the Sultan of Libya said the only institution that goes back to Adam is slavery in that it's like as inherent as it is for Humanity to be Humanity slavery has also come alongside it and I mean slavery I'm there's still slavery going on in a lot of Muslim world but the word slave comes from the fact that North African Muslims were selling the slaves from Europe into slavery white slaves was literally where we get the word slave from it's the slavics so

a number of these institutions that both Tom Holland who's not a Christian and Glen scrier who is a Christian write about in Dominion in the air we breathe point out very uh very both articulately but prettyy exhaustively and certainly Tom Holland's book is exhaustive where a lot of these things That we just assume within modern Western the modern Western world because the modern Western World largely has a Christian origin these come specifically from judeo-christian values you're not getting it from Islam you're not getting it from um ancient Roman paganism or european paganism you're not getting

it from Hinduism you're not getting it from Buddhism this is specifically predicated on the idea that Humanity has self-worth intrinsic Worth not extrinsic worth well at the at the center of this is the uniqueness of Christianity from a cultural perspective and what I mean by that is let's look at the three most recognized religions right Christianity Judaism and Islam Judaism is also a race right Islam does exist now across some different races but it's highly highly centered on say the Arabic world and and near that Christianity in part I think because of its birth and

the timing of its birth Considering the ancient Roman Empire comprised of a lot of different places with different cultures and races and then the idea spread throughout that Empire and then beyond Christianity doesn't have a race Christianity represents everything so when we look at the humanities and and let's say more modern history like especially like and by modern I mean like the last 5 600 years especially where the world has spread and Globalized the new world America and the West forms and things like that you have you're going to have such a downstream effect culturally

of say the Christian Church inevitably because it's spread so far and wide across many different literally racial cultures sure for sure yeah yeah and and it's it's transcultural in that and this is why you have Korean Christians and you have Nigerian Christians and you have French Christians and you have Indonesian Christians and Canadian Christians is because it transcends any one religion or one ethnicity or geographical location and that was partly confusing to a lot of the Ancient World um but like I mentioned to you before there was this moment early on in in Christian history

in the book of act s they get together and they have to decide okay if you believe in Jesus as the Messiah if you've accepted him as your lord and savior do you need to convert to Judaism Do you need to both obey certain laws and get circumcised and they unanimously say no because that's not what this is about this is not about just this specific ethnicity God has chosen people of every tribe tongue and nation and the Covenant is so in ancient Israel Israel operated um as a city on a hill is how it's

often described in in the in the the Old Testament in that they were this example to the Nations we are God's chosen people and we are going to live a Certain way or we're called to live a certain way obviously they don't do it very well a lot of the time that's what most of the books of the prophets are about um to be a reflection of God's goodness to the people in Christianity it's okay now everybody's indwell with the Holy Spirit so we are not we are not relegated to a particular area or a

temple or a country or an ethnicity it's beyond that it's it's bigger than that God's Mission Which was always the intended Mission transcends those things those things that we look at in ancient Judaism are pointing to what is the greater fulfillment this in the New Testament there's a book called The Book of Hebrews and the book of Hebrews is all about this how all of these motifs in the Old Testament are fulfilled and actually we pointing to Jesus all the way along this is the kind of thing that Like we could go down every tangent

like every five seconds with what you say because there's so many pieces of history and evidence that that we got to run through to butress it and like I'm really Amazed by the by the scope of your knowledge on this stuff and I think we mentioned it earlier but just just to be clear for people out there you're proficient in multiple languages including ancient Greek what what else well they're all dead languages so I Don't know if that counts for anything it does count for nobody speaks them um so people spoke them in the past

you stud they did yeah they did and we can debate as to how they actually pronounced it um because we have no idea yeah so primarily Greek and Hebrew um sorry Greek Hebrew and Coptic are the languages that I operate Coptic is like Egyptian Coptic is a form of ancient Egyptian so I know a little bit of demoic which is ancient Egyptian prior To Coptic um and uh I've dabbled in some languages that are related to Hebrew so the afro semantic languages uh like Acadian and like Aramaic and then very very very recently like as

in I got some lexicons in the last week I've been trying to make sense of some more Sumerian um but Sumerian is a weird one because it's a language isolate and it is not related to any of the other languages in any specific way right so it's kind of off on its own we have some Of these examples of language isolates whereas like at minimum um semetic languages have some correlative crossovers so if you know Hebrew you can you know figure out Aramaic based on the Hebrew you know you can figure out sadian based on

that uh but that is not true for for um surian now you've studied the we talked about some of it today but you've studied the history of the other religions too obviously Judaism it's tied very quick cor related To Christianity but Islam you mentioned you read the whole Quran and you have colleagues like in the space and talk with them when it comes to the history of say like the Pagan religions that predate this stuff like we've been talking about ancient Rome today right ancient Rome Ancient Ancient Greece have you studied the origins of their

religions as well yeah definitely um can you would you mind let's let's start with Rome can you explain the basis of What they believed in you know starting in the in the BC times for people out there yeah so it's a little bit tricky in the sense of um there are multiple religions working alongside one another within GRE ran Antiquity in that the ancient world was not just polytheistic and that they believed in multiple gods but they were henotheistic and what henotheism is is that there's a all the gods exist on a hierarchy and so

when my Patron god um I go to war and I defeat You that's a symbol that my Patron God is actually stronger than your Patron God and uh some of our Gods could actually be the same Gods by different names so Zeus and Jupiter there's a lot of crossover between Greece and Rome because the idea was within a henotheistic worldview that they were actually the same Gods we just called them different things and maybe we have some different articulations of different stories and we have good Evidence for this obviously yeah and they had no problem

with going in and doing things so um I was in Egypt last summer and uh if you go to Luxor in the one of the the quintessential Temple of Luxor um you go in and uh the temple is very very old thousands of years old but there's a section in what is actually the end of the holy of holies in that Temple where Alexander the Great has built a like a separate little box and it has a roof and if you didn't know if You couldn't read the inscriptions on the wall you wouldn't necessarily identify

it as having been Alexander the Great other than maybe there's a few helenistic Greek motifs on some of the columns or whatever but in the actual pictography of the hieroglyphics Alexander the Great is portrayed as a pharaoh and he's being portrayed as a pharaoh that is being uh seen as um being approved by the gods and this was not problematic to Alexander the Great being a worshipper of Zeus because it's not it's not a competition to his religion in Egypt raw rules the day in Greece Zeus rules the day so when you're in Egypt you

just give homage to the fact that the god of Egypt is you know the way you convince everybody that you're the king is then you you know portray yourself as being approved by said Gods so this was just how the ancient world operated there are multiple gods there were even house Gods So but they don't have anything like the sorry to cut you off but the it's not like there are stories that are paralleled with like a physical being like Jesus that then resurrects no not in the same way so any of the sort of

so this is an idea that's often referred to as Jesus mythicism okay that the idea of a a a god being virgin born and having 12 disciples and then uh being crucified and and rising from the dead on the third day that this Is just all uh it's a parallel to other ancient uh Gods like um like Addis or mithis or Osiris or and so Jesus mythicist draw these parallels that actually if you read the the documentation don't actually exist there is no example of all those things within these other gods and even the closest

thing if you want to say that Osiris was resurrected well okay maybe but the story is that he's cut into a whole bunch of pieces he's thrown into the Nile River and his wife Isis goes and collects all of his body parts uh except for his penis she can't find the penis um because it's eaten by the ox rinkus fish in the Nile and so she creates a wooden penis and then um and then she wraps it all together and this is the first mummy because she wraps all the body pieces together so that it's

one unit and uh and he comes back to life as the revivified mummy god of the Dead she the wood dick he he has a yeah he's a a Wood Fus which he actually sleeps with and then creates Horus that's the origin of Horus um and that's with a that's possible listen No but we're we're talking ancient Egyptian mythology here but nonetheless so some people say well that's actually that's an example of is that where we get the term Woody from I don't know I'm not going to I'm not going to go there my head's

going there um when some people point to that and they say oh well that's actually a Virgin birth right that's the Virgin birth of Horus oh but but they're stretching tens his purpos is that is nothing even analogous to what the the gospel describ as a virgin birth so you're really you're you're pulling at any type of parallelism that you can possibly find so there's a scholar named NT Wright um he currently is uh NT like the letters n yeah so what's his name it's it's yeah it's the letters NT and then w r i

g HT English Theologian yes Very prolific Pauline scholar he wrote a book called um that right there the resurrection of the son of God second one is the green one um he goes 150 years before Jesus and he goes 150 years after Jesus and he tries to find any parallels in any other ancient Pagan stories what do you find nothing there's nothing analogous now is but this guy this guy is a Christian right he is a Christian yeah but he's a pretty prolific Historian right but there could be like a bias there hypothetically there could

be but um I think it's related to the fact that the ancient world thought that Resurrection was nonsensical so anything that you could think of as a resurrection like Osiris being the mummified god of the Dead I mean he doesn't even actually leave the realm of the Dead He's relegated to the Land of the Dead at that point so using that as an example of the resurrected Jesus who Comes back in a new glorified body that is real where he he talks with the disciples he eats fish they they touch him they speak with him

um the this is sometimes referred to as multivalent experiences where it's not just them seeing him but they actually touch him they eat with him they speak with him they walk with him um that kind of thing to say that that is the exact same thing as what happens to Osiris is pretty ridiculous a stretch yeah and I think This goes part and parcel for every other example that you can find now there are some parallels obviously but the parallels that match up are just broad examples of uh Horus gets in a boat and Jesus

gets in a boat you're like okay well I can agree with that one you know um some of these people are called the Great Shepherd okay well the shepherd was a common Motif in ancient new Eastern uh Society so I'm fine with that one but it's when You go to the particulars of Virgin birth and what that means within Christianity very specifically um having 12 disciples uh B being baptized by John the Baptist who is his cousin uh which is another thing that actually Josephus mentions is John the Baptist um and yeah there's some interesting

stuff in Islam with John the Baptist too sure yeah yeah yeah um um so all of these very specifics about Jesus's life I can agree on a lot of parallelisms that are uh at Best cursory but it's the differences that make the difference and when we're really getting down to the specifics do you know what the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy is no okay so the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy in uh the like formal rules of logic uh comes from the idea that you have a Texas a Texan with a pistol and he's firing in the side of

a barn and he's just firing at random and then he goes and he finds the closest cluster of bullet holes and he Draws the Target around them thus making himself look like a great shot yeah and so when we yeah right when we come to things like historical parallelism we need to make sure a we're not committing the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy and just looking for all the closest cluster of things even though there's a mound of differences over here but you know these five things actually correlate and we're not committing the correlation versus causation fallacy

Because some things are always going to correlate that don't necessarily cause that thing you have to draw a direct line within historiography to proving okay a follows B and that's really hard to do in the whole Jesus mythicist Theory never mind the fact that um there's a whole field of study called uh the discipline of the historical Jesus or historical Jesus studies and what's this it's it's a form of Historiography uh that's not necessarily A a like a believing Christian one there's a journal of the historical Jesus which has both like believing and non-believing Scholars

that publish in it but all of them believe in historical Jesus and have actually published pretty widely on dismantling all of this Jesus mythicist stuff because it just doesn't add up wait maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying but like G Jesus of Nazareth is a historical character That's that's proven fact whether or not you believe every single thing that's like written down in text that's Up For Debate and stuff are are you just saying that they're confirming that he was a historical figure or that the actual narrative around him is um both and so a

part of Jesus mythicism is an argument that Jesus never existed and that the reason why we can show that he never existed was because of all these parallels that he was actually just a Copycat so it's a version of historic but he was just copying [ __ ] I know that they invented him afterwards to justify the religion but we but we know he exist yes like that's historical yes but so what's the point but these communities exist online and there are some more type of I mean do you see other communities exist online too

hey you're not wrong there but it's but there are some more kind of academic formulations of this um there's a guy named Bob price Um who who has a formal PhD in history who uses some of these arguments in order to deny that Jesus actually existed um uh there are there are a few others of them but of the thousands of Scholars that exist within historiography the ones that deny the historical Jesus based on these arguments I could probably count on one hand yeah who who have like actual accreditation well another thing here too we

haven't like I think it it's come Up intermittently today I I can't remember what we were talking about before versus what we were talking about on camera so apologies if this came up more than I thought but you know when you're looking at all these texts and I'm not just talking about the Bible or ancient texts related to Christianity I'm talking about everything every topic every religion all of it there are all kinds of potential translations sure I mean you will have one line in the Bible That people translate [ __ ] 40 different ways

and word being there versus that word being here can completely shift the meaning with this so how like as someone who can actually translate some of these language H how do you how do you even navigate that if sometimes something is like wait all these versions of the bible translated this different you know and and it could throw off the whole meaning of like an entire book or something like that or a Story within the book like how do you navigate that yeah so translation exists on uh a Continuum of philosophy so typically what you're

looking at is what's often referred to as formal versus Dynamic equivalence and that's sometimes uh parsed out by using the terms phrase for phrase and thought for Thought okay so we have this like incredible amount of English translations of the Bible to the point where we do not need any more English Translations of the Bible like it's it's it's a problem um and this is not something that other languages have I have friends who are say uh Cantonese or Korean or even French they only really have a handful of translations in their language in English

we have just so many and this is uh it's an epidemic of the fact that a lot of scholarship has existed in the english- speaking world for a long long time but um they exist on this Continuum of getting the thought For Thought or the word for word in that if you have said number of words in the Greek or Hebrew you're trying to render them in that number of words in English now that's not always possible and even the most like literalistic translation is going to have to deviate from that at some point so

let me give you an example of this in the sense of in one of the most quoted verses of the Bible in the Bible is a version of Exodus 346 okay where God Appears to Moses and he says That he's a compassionate God that he is abounding in love and mercy and and then in the Hebrew it literally says and I am long of nose now now no translation renders that in any language that I'm aware of specifically English as long of NOS so what does that mean well it's an idiom it means that he's

slow to anger right so even the most literalistic translations there are a few out there The New American Standard Bible is pretty literalistic the English Standard Version is pretty literalistic they're not going to render that as long of nose because it just doesn't make any sense and so some are going for more of and this is kind of my beef with some more classical translations um so in if you come to my church at West Toronto Baptist we have Pew bies in that you sit in the seats and there's a Bible in front of you

that's an ESV an English Standard Version it's a pretty darn good Translation of the Bible on what basis I don't love it on the basis of that it's it's pretty it has a very knowledgeable Committee of Scholars who are committed to rendering the text to the best of their ability however it's a very realistic translation and so particularly in the Old Testament I don't love some of its translation choices because it just feels awkward so actually when I was on the plane uh flying over here I was looking at an ESV An English Standard Version

and I was looking at Mark chapter 1 where Mark chapter 1 quotes Isaiah saying the prophecy about Jesus via John the Baptist calling John the Baptist one who's crying out in the wilderness but it starts by by saying I'm sending a prophet before your face now that is literally what the Greek says I'm sending him before your face but if you jump to a more Dynamic equivalent translation like the NIV the new International version or the ne the new English translation it's going to say something like I'm sending a prophet ahead of you because we

just don't say before your face right like um hey Julian I'm I'm going to send this thing before your face right it yeah it doesn't make sense it's awkward but that is literally what the text say that's what I would say it's awkward I I feel like it almost makes sense it's just awkward like why would you say it that Yeah yeah some of these translations are like driving an old stick shift yes where like you can figure it out but you got to really get it into gear and you got to fight with it

sometimes whereas some translations are going to go and really try to render the meaning of the text now academically there's a debate what do you want do you want something that is very uh emblematic and and authentic to the actual words because Jesus did well um Mark did not say Sending him ahead of you he said sending him before your face or there's another example in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus says to his disciples uh um uh oh what's What's the phrase it's um let these words sink into your ears now that's literally what

the Greek says now a more form a more Dynamic equivalent translation is going to say listen carefully to what I'm about to say now Jesus did not say that but that's what he meant and so this is and we can Ascertain that yeah and it's fair it's fair to make that leap you're saying totally so you have these issues like idioms you have these issues like kind of awkward wording that if you just translated them directly it doesn't you got to figure it out and so actually if you go to um this a Shameless plug

if you go to Wesley huff.com oh I know right you got to get in there we'll have that link in description okay I appreciate that I actually have a Section so uh one of my should have made it Wes huff.com two syllables I already bought the domain so unfortunately there's a tab at the top that says infographics this podcast was called Trend to fire at one point which dumbest name of all time and now it's not I'm just saying there you go I could switch it up it still is my name though okay here we

go I'm pulling it over to thisen for us so if you if you scroll down I actually have I actually oh [ __ ] no go Down keep going keep going keep going keep going right no keep going sorry I thought that was it that's not it under manuscripts no I think it's under the Bible Archaeology is it not there I hope it's there translation so up that one so that is my trying to map the Continuum of Bible translations uh via thought for thought and word for word and so these are like the main

English translations that if you go to Amazon and you're looking for English Bible translation and you can see there's a lot there like there's there's too many right and and so it exists on this Continuum of dynamic and formal equivalence and um so this uh I often tell people see this less as a spectrum and more of a lot of these translations are actually on top of each other more than they're like one is slightly further to the left or to the right okay But then you have paraphrases on the end and paraphrases are um

something that I would not recommend um because it's not actually trying to translate the words as much as it's trying to create a paraphrase of what's being said um but to your question wait who's making this determination again I might have missed that in there me right so this is just you um it's it's an educated perspective on Bible translations more generally so I am Getting advice from other people some of whom sit on the translation committees for these very Bibles uh who I have kind of what are the backgrounds of those people are they

always like all Christian or no it's all over the place all right that's good I like that most Bibles will have a translation committee so there are some like Evangelical Bible translations which are pretty good so the NIV The New International Version is an example of a more sort of Evangelical Bible translation but the people are still Bible scholars like they're the top of their field um but if you have something like the nrsv um or the um amp or you know these even the ne is done by uh is headed by the individual who

runs the organization that I showed you before the center for the study of New Testament manuscripts so he has out of um Dallas Seminary uh put together his own Committee of Bible experts and they came up with the new English translation um which has exhaustive footnotes so one of the things about the ne is that I don't always love the way that they translate the text but they go to length like sometimes I have a a paper copy and the footnote are longer than the actual text of the Bible because they're like hey any possible

issue you have with like interpretation or manuscripts or variants or whatever translation we're going to try to give it to you as best We possibly can that's legible so usually when people ask me a question about the Bible or like a specific verse and I'm like I don't know what I do is I pop over the ne and I look at what the translation notes say because it's exhaustive um so your question about translation and complexity of translation is a good one because whether we're talking about the Bible now fortunately we have all of this

stuff with the Bible which is why When people ask me what's the most accurate Bible I usually say that's I don't know the answer to that question because I don't know what you mean by accurate because some bibles are really great at rendering what the meaning of the text is others are really great at rendering like the actual literal words some are a mix but I what's more important that's the debate and ultim I don't know because sometimes you miss things in one or the other see I and This just you know armchair non-expert tap

but I would think the the best translation would be the literal words that then as a second layer once you have the literal words of whatever was written in the language on paper you could then have some sort of expert translation of some say some of the idioms or culturally unique things that would have been said within those Lang languages that don't translate perfectly to English or whatever language you're Translating in yeah and there are some Bibles that try to do that but I think they don't do a really great job of that so the

the amp the Amplified Bible gives you all the possible translations of given words and that's like interesting but largely unhelpful because words almost exist exclusively in their meaning in their context so sure these are all the possible uh hypotheticals of what a word could be translated but what does it mean in that context Because it it doesn't mean all these things and it could just mean one of those things and so that's where I don't actually recommend something like the Amplified Bible where they're trying to do that but they're almost they're almost going over and

above in an a helpful way I mean all this caveat aside is the fact that we have phenomenal English translations like the amount of scholarship that's been poured into the English Bible is ridiculous and large Largely the reasons why we debate about these things is because there's so much the problem remains when we don't have this 2,000-year history of translating the Bible and looking at all the different um options and versions and with other documents so when you're talking about something like the Epic of Gilgamesh you're riant on really only a handful of translations unless

you're able to go back and read you know a cad and kuna for right Which is far more Unique for sure and there look there's still arguments on how things are translated within the languages that we have far more understanding on totally I mean you you're you're familiar with my buddy Danny Jones's podcast right Danny Jones podcast so Dan is one of my best friends and he's a [ __ ] gangster because you know he's such a humble guy but a a lot of people don't realize before he was ever a podcaster he was a

worldclass documentarian and Cinematographer all these things M and the reason I think he's one of the best on planet Earth he might be second best in my book behind Joe Rogan is that he doesn't give a [ __ ] who he's talking to he wants to capture what they say put it out there document it and let other people decide so you're talking about a guy who talks to people from every end of the spectrum literally known to man and the the range of his podcast at this point with with the opinions of guests Has

gotten I don't think there's anything else like it online now he had a guest somewhat recently like in the last 6 months named Ammon Hillman and and this is where I see you smiling about that this is where I also want to make sure I'm clear like as the guy hosting the show just kind of where I stand yeah on some stuff I'm gonna come back to alen I I was not the biggest fan of him but just so people understand where I'm at I don't I I grew up Catholic you know St Anthony's the

name of the family I I I we I wear dependent in that way but like I'm not a practicing Catholic I do believe there's a God there's a Creator I think I'm going to have to answer that someday so I want to live well on here I think that a lot of people in the world use different organized religions like Christianity for good there's a small percentage that uses it for bad I have some issues with you know some of the History there and and things that have gone on but that's just like my personal

end of it so when I tell you I look at these hardcore ancient histories and what we were told versus hardcore religious people and Scholars like I really come at it somewhere in the middle here and and am open to what people say that said I think everyone from either angle is motivated by the things that happened to them so to bring this back to Amon this is a guy who to Empathize with him has been attacked mercilessly for years by structures up to an including the literal Catholic church where you know they got him

kicked out of jobs and [ __ ] like that and at the base case as a as someone on an expert of languages there's no doubt that he has a massive understanding it doesn't mean he's right about everything but he has a massive understanding of ancient languages and certain parts of that that very few if any people study There are guys like Brian morcu who who talk about and have cited him before and talk about what what a what a brilliant guy he is that said the reason I wasn't the biggest fan is because I

think you know in the equal but opposite reaction to life that I talked about earlier he has been strongly behaviorally motivated by anger at what has been I agree unfairly done to him in many ways that has kind of pushed him to a point where he wants to get to the opposite Conclusion no matter what so it's not good enough that like for example the Catholic church and the teachings of Christianity are wrong it's like no Jesus used kids as drugs and it has to go too too far that said with you know I haven't

I listen to that podcast back when it came now I haven't listened to it since so I'm a little there were a lot of things in there I'm a little hazy on some of the stuff I know you've gone through that and whatever but what were What were some of the biggest points of contention that you felt you had evidence against that that he made from let's say like a translation basis in there yeah that's a good kind of segue within this conversation because Ammon does have a very specific level of expertise and he's very

proficient in classical Greek as it relates to Medical texts now classicalism in terms of ancient Greek literature is huge I mean there's a wide spectrum of all sorts of Things that fall into Classics um everything from like Plato and xenophon to these uh medical texts that individuals like Ammon are dealing with I think part of the problem and aside from the character assassination that I I can't speak to because I I've only seen bits and parts of it and would probably agree with you that it's not that's not fair his arguments in particular are not

just Fringe they're him against the entirety Of the scholarship and that's where he's taking very specific parameters for words and he's then applying them in ways in context where they just do not apply and individuals who I greatly disagree on a whole range of things individuals like Dan mlen and um Kip Davis um who um Kip is actually a a fellow Canadian he lives out in British Columbia but have pointed out the fact that what he's doing is he's applying a very specific level of terminology Within the ancient Greek language in cases where it doesn't

apply and so it's the equivalent of saying so in my own sort of sphere and and field um there are specific terminologies that exist within theology like we talk about Christ condescending and what we mean by that is literally the Latin con meaning with and descend to come down and so when we're talking about the condescension of Christ what we're talking about is the Humility of Christ to step out of his eternal Throne as the second person of the Trinity stepping into humanity and but if you were to say to someone after this if someone

said like hey you you met West Huff how was he and you went is condescending you wouldn't be talking about my humility no right because that word has a different meaning in its different context and part of the problem with something like what Ammon says is that he's taking Terminology that exists within the parameters of a specific field and then he's applying them in areas where there's an entirely different contextual meaning and um uh uh Spectrum of understanding so part of what he said that some people jumped on was that he he says that the

word Christ comes from the Greek wordo which it does right to anoint and in uh ancient Greek medical texts there is a usage of that which he has capitalized On with applying drugs to your eyes now more broadly Rio does mean to rub particularly a liquid ointment or substance on your body so this relates to everything from bathing to Ritual uh practices in religious circumstances but you could likewise say if you put on if you were an ancient Roman and you had a bath and you came out and you put on cream skin cream so

your skin didn't dry out that that was an example ofo you were applying it to your body well Within the religious connotation of Christianity is the translation of the Greek word messiah messiah which likewise means anointed one right there were multiple anointed ones in the Old Testament it was just a word that was referred to priests or Kings or and had a very specific connotation in the Messiah who would come and be different and the Greek translation of that which both the Greek translation of the Old Testament and in in the New Testament Both 's

is Christ why because it means anointed one so Ammon takes that and he says well in this very specific instance in uh this stream of classical medical literature it means to apply a drug to your eyes specifically in related to um uh not the botfly what does he say the um he relates it to a fly uh and I don't remember the detail but well and it does mean that in the particular instance that it's being used but this is where semantic range is very Important and this is the problem that um some others have

uh yeah should we should we pull up this clip by the way just so there there's there's context I I think I have it I just want to see so that because I want people to follow along with what you're what you're getting at here so this [Music] is let me turn this bad boy up hold on right what is the Antichrist what is the Christ you have to know the Antichrist you have to know the Christ right it's a greatek word for for applying a drug to your eyes so that they may be open

that's what the Christ means in Greek yes it's from the verbo to be stung by the gadfly huh who's the Gat fly it's a state of mania they call it in Greek o Mania to be in an altered state right it's a thing they had going on remember they have orgies And stuff like that so you better buckle up okay so that and and that's kind of what you were just getting out with with with what he says there but you're saying that like he's stretching some of his knowledge on the pharmacological history of language

and bringing that into say Jesus's lexicon and how he says things yeah so so there's there's two sort of terms that are used specifically within biblical studies but this applies to anything within the ancient world Where we're trying to come up with translations in deriving meaning the first is there's a there's a discipline called hermeneutics and hermeneutics is this interpretation it's the methodology of interpretation that we use on a particular text before hermeneutics is exag Jesus and exag Jesus is a Greek word that literally means to bring out right the opposite would be isog Jesus

to read into so when you're exting something and you're looking at an Ancient language you're trying to get at the author's intention by different levels of contextual application so there's immediate contextualization there's document contextualization there's historical contextualization unfortunately what Ammon is doing is he's confusing and conflating whole Realms of how we do interpretation of ancient languages and how those operate within a specific context so in the Biblical documents Christ has a very specific meaning and application that doesn't mean that Rio does not mean applying a drug to your eyes that you may see that's not

what anybody is saying I don't think anybody who reads classical Greek would say that that's not true it's just that that's what it means in a very specific instance right I could talk about the right to bear arms and I could be talking about Firearms or I could be talking about a Grizzly bear right and and talking right so you're saying it's cherry-picking it's not even that it's cherry-picking it's broad brushing it's broad brushing to um to in a way that I think it's very clear that Ammon has a lot of proficiency In classical Greek

yes but he doesn't appear to have have as much of a Proficiency in coin Greek which is what the Bible is written and So Co means common so if you read something like so when I was doing my Language exams um as part of my entry to my PhD program I had to do a series of different exams that uh span different levels of Competency and one of them is I had to translate a section of this ancient writer uh xenophon xenophon wrote a a biography of of Plato and then he wrote a number of

other uh philos opical exercises that are very important xenophon's Greek is very very different and far more complex than something like the gospel of Mark and even in the New Testament the Greek spans between very simple and very uh like complicated so the gospel of Mark actually I mentioned earlier when Luke says that he's writing up an orderly account and that others have written accounts he's implying that there are accounts that are not orderly and I and a number of other Scholars think he's actually referring to mark because if you read Mark in Greek it's

very very simple it's almost written like a child it has what's called Parataxis formulations parataxis yeah so children when they say things like my son will say uh Daddy and then I went to the park and then I got on the slide and then I you know and then and then and then and then then Mark continually says the phrase caus and immediately everything is immediately and immediately Jesus got up out of the water and immediately he went out into the Wilderness and immediately he was in the temple and immediately and It's just a symptom

of very simple writing yes it's called parataxis and so a lot of the times you'll see this in the translations but sometimes they just leave out the end immediately because it's just superus it's just it's not needed because it's just like ad nauseum repeated all the time and if it's deemed to not actually be communicative to what Mark is saying in that particular instance it's just kind of the repetitiveness of the phrase then Some translations actually leave it out in some instances entirely so you have this spectrum for a long time Scholars looked at the

Greek of the Bible and they were confused by it because they were like why is it so different than the classical Greek why does it operate on a at times a more simplistic level but it just looks different and there was a period of time um in the Middle Ages where they referred to it literally as Holy Ghost Greek where they said Actually this is what inspired Greek looks like this is this is divine Greek and then in the 1800s between 1864 in 1867 these two guys grenfell and Hunt who were fresh graduates from Oxford

University Queens College they are they head over to Egypt to look for not a statuary or Monumental architecture which was the standard for the time in egyptology they were looking specifically for manuscripts and they end up going you know all up and down The Nile they're you know running out of finances they don't know what to do and they stop in this city called oxar rinkus and they turn to the garbage dumps and they dig up the garbage dumps and they find thousands a half a million papy in the garbage dumps in the garbage dumps

because oxus was this key center of learning however a lot of it is just what's sometimes called documentary Papi Where it's things like receipts or it's things like communication from um political officials and lo and behold this Greek looks like New Testament Greek and so that's when we get this classification of Co of marketplace Greek of common Greek and actually it was the opposite of what scholars in the past thought this isn't like special Divine Greek this is actually regular people Greek this is what you would have been talking in the marketplace and so The

gospel authors are writing in this way a because it's simple and B because that's what the average person is going to be able to understand if they are or have some level of literacy they're not going to be reading Plato they're not going to be reading Cicero but they may be able to read you know their receipts their laundry lists yeah the the cisero I'd love to get your thoughts like I'd almost love to see you watch the whole Ammon podcast and keep pausing it and Like react and see m maybe there's even some stuff

you're like oh but some of the stuff he has on Cicero cuz that's separate from like the biblical things I mean I don't know if it's right or wrong or whatever but that was eye opening for sure and I know that was eye opening for Danny too that said your point about amen having a a knowledge that very few people have on certain aspects of like linguistic patterns in ancient languages like I I forget some of the terms of Them I'll [ __ ] that up if I try to say but you're point there is

is right and I also think that's that's the slippery slope with a guy like him too because I will tell you I don't care what the topic is whenever I hear someone come out and say I'm the only guy that knows about what's happening with this language because I've been studying this my whole life right and there's really no one else who's gone to Israel and studied the Greek among the architecture there when I hear that that says to me like he's there say he's therefore saying because I'm the only knowledge on this you have

to listen to me and he's he's precluding that there could be any defenses against what he's saying because other people don't know which you know it's a strong word to use but when I hear stuff like that I go uhoh is that like charlatanism you know because you're trying to say like you got to Come through me there there's there's no other Bridge here to this knowledge yeah there is a logical fallacy that's the logical fallacy of the um of the populace in saying that the majority is always right and and I think it's not

true that the majority is always right I mean I hold positions that is not the position of the majority even within my field but it's a matter of then then do you have good evidence to push back against the consensus cuz I'm fine with People holding Fringe views I hold a bunch of views the fact that I date the gospels Matthew Mark and Luke as early as I do is not the consensus within my field however I think there are good reasons to do that and unfortunately there are positions within Ammon to give him the

credit where it's due in saying he knows classical Greek and in a particular vein incredibly well however he then extrapolates that and says this expertise allows me to make conclusions Like the Greek translation of the Old Testament is not a translation it's the original and the Hebrew is the trans translation when of the tens of thousands of subtag gental Scholars so that's the Greek translation of the Old Testament that subt tuent no one holds that position right not like there's a few little there's a contingent here nobody and I think unfortunately it's emblematic of the

fact that specificity and expertise in one Area does not necessarily then extrapolate into all of the areas that could possibly be to that that's a good point that's a real that's that's really well said listen I want to get to one more main topic in here and then we're going to do a patreon episode there's going to be stuff in there we'll talk about the Templars we'll talk about Evolution we'll talk about the Biblical timeline and all that but on the actual episode here just because we talked About it earlier and got off it and

said we come back some of the other ban books quote unquote of the Bible you got things like The Book of Enoch uh Nephilim I my buddy Mark gagnan actually just did an episode with a guy that I have seen yet that's like popping off where they went into all this so I got to check that out everyone check out camp Gagnon great show but like where what what's what with with let's start with Enoch like what's what's the History there and what's like the arguments against that being a part of the Bible yeah so

we've talked about a number of documents that would fall into the category of Apocrypha literature and so Apocrypha the the Greek word apocryphos uh just means secret or strange and it becomes sort of the the categorical term within early Christianity to describe Des cribe anything outside of that which is canonical so the Canon is what's Considered scripture everything else is apocryphal that doesn't necessarily mean it's heretical but it just means it's in a separate category within the category of apocryphal you also have documents that are sometimes referred to as pseudo graphical right so think of

pseudo like a pseudonym right it's not your real name pseudo and graph it's a it's a strange writing it's a not your like pseudo means false and then a Gra writing so pseudograph documents are Documents like The Book of Enoch which have a label of being written by a particular individual who it's largely agreed upon is not the individual and so that's in a category of its own the thing with Enoch is that it was never considered banned it was always part of a group of Jewish literature which was very important within sort of the

Jewish understanding so we've largely been talking almost exclusively I think about Documents that postdate the New Testament documents right so the gospels um that were written by the various Gnostic groups those are after Jesus Enoch comes before Jesus and it's in a category of literature that was written between the last book of the Old Testament and the first book of the New Testament so there's about 400 years there between I mentioned in the Protestant Old Testament you have the last book is Malachi between Malachi and Matthew there's a 400 year gap which is sometimes referred

to as the 400 years of Silence which is a bit of a misnomer because it wasn't silent there was a whole bunch of Jewish literature being written but it was there was this cultural understanding within ancient Judaism that the voice of God was not being communicated through prophets in the same way so that's why it's sometimes referred to as that however the Jews are writing all sorts of things And one of those things that they are writing on was The Book of Enoch now we also need to be careful with the Book of Enoch because

what we call specifically first Enoch there's a first and second Enoch when the Book of Enoch is usually referred to it's usually referred to uh we're usually pointing to the book of First Enoch the book of First Enoch as it exists you can go by a copy of first Enoch in fact there's a a pretty recent very good Translation of it um by the the publisher hermania um which is the most updated one takes into consideration things like the Dead Sea Scrolls and what you have there is a collection of various Jewish texts that span

about a period of 200 years before Jesus and about 50 to 100 years after Jesus in multiple languages so you have sections of the Book of Enoch in Aramaic you have sections in Copic and you have sections in Greek and those are all brought Together in what we call First Enoch now the old sections are really really old the old sections are about 200 BC they're in the 3rd Century BC and they're uh largely written in Aramaic and Greek and those predate Jesus by a ways and actually the New Testament shows recognition of it in

the book of Jude it refers to a section of the Book of Enoch so it's present in the Bible now that doesn't mean they thought it was Scripture because we know unanimously they did not think it was scripture Jude is simply referring to a piece of literature that they would have been familiar with to make a particular argument um Paul also quotes quot uh he quotes um menander the Greek philosopher he didn't think menander was uh divinely inspired he's just using the literature of the day to make particular arguments but when we're talking about the

Book of Enoch Jewish scripture occasionally Refers to supernatural beings like Angels like seraphim like cherubim like demons but it doesn't really or the Watchers is another one Jin no that's different that's that that's that's uh that's yeah yeah that comes along that's about um 600 years after be lover somewhere like God damn it Julian yeah know the Gin are a separate thing um that they're got entirely they're good and bad Jin they're not even in this sort of category but so you have These things mentioned in the Old Testament but they're never really explained and

So within this 400e period between the old and the New Testament the Jews are like okay what do we think of this how are we to understand and these supernatural beings um that uh are created by God that exist in some sort of parallel world in the the Unseen realm and they're interacting with one another and they have different forms and functions so one of the issues is That we often refer to a bunch of these things as Angels Angel is not what the thing is it's what the thing does so um uh malah in

the Hebrew or Angelos in the Greek means messenger so so it is not a description of its ontology what it is it's a description of what it does got it these are supernatural beings who go and they they uh communicate messages to people they're in some sort of relation in terms of their Supernatural to other creatures like the seraphim and like the Like the cherubim who are Supernatural Divine Throne Guardians which was a concept that was not foreign to the ancient world you have lamu which are the winged bulls with the human heads in Babylon

and you have sphinxes in Egyptian and helenistic culture these were just Concepts that existed within the ancient world the gods have Throne Guardians and within biblical Judaism these are the seraphim and they are the cherubim so sometimes you'll see those Memes the biblically accurate Angels yeah those are cherubim that's what they are it's not actually an angel it's kind of a a misnomer in terms but I I get it because we kind of broad brush with all the categories The Book of Enoch is part of the literature that's trying to explain that what on Earth

is this um actually if you go back to my Wesley huf.com I do so every Monday I do these posts uh that I call manuscript Monday so if you go back to the homepage um Yeah click that scroll down you'll see the blog post keep going keep going right there so biblically accurate Angels so I actually explain some of these if you go down um go up right there so like Angels uh seraphim cherubim and then how these are portrayed and I particularly go through the manuscripts and how both Christian and Jewish interpretation of them

reflects them differently but these are these characters which The Book of Enoch Is trying to make sense of along with demons and so the way that they go about that is by capitalizing on the events that happen immediately before Genesis chapter 6 in the biblical flood where you have the great grandfather of Noah Enoch as this character who is explaining some of these Fallen Angels or beings um Genesis chapter 6 says that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were pleasing to the eyes and slept with them and that these created Uh

men of renowned and that's the word Nephilim ah there it is so the trickiness of this is that in um in ancient Judaism when it's translated in other languages Nephilim is almost exclusively translated as Giants but the word emically in Hebrew nephal literally means to fall so there's this whole narrative within ancient Judaism of the the these things are Fallen Angels um and so but that's not the same Thing necessarily in ancient Judaism as demons and that's where it gets complicated okay so I'm just reading the background here so people have it the Nephilim let

me pull this over here so it's on the screen the Nephilim or mysterious beings are people in the Bible traditionally imagined as being of great size and strength the origins of the Nephilim are disputed some including the author of The Book of Enoch view them as The Offspring of fallen angels And humans others view them as descendants of Seth and Cain the reference to them is Genesis 6 1-4 but the passage is amb is ambiguous and the identity of the Nephilim is disputed according to the numbers 13:33 10 of the 12 Spies report the existence

of Nephilim and Canan prior to the conquest by the Israelites similar or identical Biblical Hebrew term read as Nephilim by some Scholars or as the word Fallen by others appears in the Ezekiel 3227 and Is also mentioned in the dter deuterocanonical dudo canonical books Judas 166 sarach 167 baruk 326 to 28 and wisdom 146 yeah so let me read that for us when men began to multiply on the face of the land the daughters of them were born the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were attractive and they took as their wives

any they chose then Yahweh said my spirit shall not abide in man forever for he is flesh his days shall be 120 years the Nephilim Were on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bore children to them these were Mighty Men Who were of old men of renown so that's literally what the the Hebrew says and so um it's not like the w IIA article accurately says it's not entirely clear what's going on there but Enoch is part of the Jewish conversation

and trying to flesh this out but and particularly in the book of the Watchers which is the Oldest book um and so that's what Enoch is now part of the confusion about the Book of Enoch is because the Book of Enoch is never considered scripture by the Jews but ends up in the Ethiopian Bible and part of Ethiopian Bible yeah so the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has uh is like a a is a wing of you know you have these different sort of overarching denominations of Christendom you have uh today Protestants Eastern Orthodox uh Coptic Roman

Catholic and Then the Ethiopian church and the Ethiopian church we know that around the 4th Century missionaries from Syria went down to what then was referred to as the kingdom of a which is in modern day Ethiopia and they brought with them a whole host of literature and part of this literature was New Testament books in Greek and the septu the Greek translation of the Old Testament which at that point was finalized and um the Ethiopian Church uh Took all of this literature which included literature that nobody considered scripture of the time and they appear

to have just been non-discretionary and included everything so all of the debates that were happening in the Latin West and the Greek East about what was and wasn't scripture they looked at that and they said uh we're not really interested in that we we'll just take everything so in being non-discretionary They end up just canonizing everything which leaves them with a Canon of scripture that is completely unique and includes books like Enoch which the ancient Jews and every ancient Christian didn't well actually I should preface that there were a couple of early Christians who said

we think this could be scripture but then they accept when you know all the debates happen that okay those are pretty good reasons we're not going to accepted in the end Um and so I don't know where the idea came from but there is definitely a prevailing myth on the internet that the Ethiopian Bible is the oldest Bible and that's not true in fact the oldest copy of the Ethiopian Bible which is full in terms of a Genesis Revelation copy um is 14th century so it's a long long time after [ __ ] but some

there's a lot of talk online about Enoch and particularly the copy of Enoch that is in the Ethiopian Bible and that oh well that's Actually reflective of the original Bible because the Ethiopian Bible is the oldest I don't know how that myth started it's patently untrue um but what ends up being what we call the Book of Enoch ends up in its final form in the ethiopic Cannon it's a lot on the bone today man yeah you know a lot of stuff sorry about that I'm opening up the fire hose that's exactly what we want

we want the fire hose coming out I I I really appreciate You sharing so much knowledge I'm sure people will have all kinds of opinions online in the comment sections and stuff but you know all of ancient history where it ties into religion and ideas and how we formulated today like because it all comes back to today it's so fascinating to me so I appreciate guys like you coming in here and doing this we're going to go do a patreon episode now I went through some of those topics we'll definitely get into the Templars And

and some of the things in in the Middle Ages that that that I think are interesting when you look at the history of the Christian church and some other stuff including Evolution so people if you want to join on patreon or YouTube membership you can hit that link in the description below that's down there but we will have your links as well down below Wes so people can follow you on Instagram we'll have your website as well and I appreciate you coming here From Toronto to do it brother I appreciate you giving me a platform

my wife is certainly bored of hearing all this stuff so she better listen to this one though you're here anyway we'll do it again sometime all right sounds good all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace thank you guys for watching the episode before you leave please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video it's a Huge help and also if you're over on Instagram be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory podcast or also on my personal

page at Julian D Dory both links in the description below finally if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes use the Julian Dory podcast playlist Link in the description below thank you