#2252 - Wesley Huff

Wesley Huff is a Christian apologist, public speaker, and current Central Canada Director for Apologetics Canada. www.wesleyhuff.com Go to https://www.expressvpn.com/ROGAN and find out how you can get 4 months of ExpressVPN free! Don’t miss out on all the action this week at DraftKings! Download the DraftKings app today! Sign-up using dkng.co/rogan or through my promo code ROGAN. GAMBLING PROBLEM? CALL 1-800-GAMBLER, (800) 327-5050 or visit gamblinghelplinema.org (MA). Call 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY). Please Gamble Responsibly. 888-789-7777/visit ccpg.org (CT) or visit www.mdgamblinghelp.org (MD).21+ and present in most states. (18+ DC/KY/NH/WY). Void in ONT/OR/NH. Eligibility restrictions apply. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino & Resort (KS). 1 per new customer. Min. $5 deposit. Min. $5 bet. Max. $200 issued as non-withdrawable Bonus Bets that expire in 7 days (168 hours). Stake removed from payout. Terms: dkng.co/dk-offer-terms. Ends 2/9/25 at 11:59 PM ET. Sponsored by DK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  Wes, very nice to meet you.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Joe, pleasure.

• 0:14Joe Rogan?

  So, I, like many people, was introduced to you because of the debate that you had with Billy Carson.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Quote-unquote.

• 0:21Joe Rogan?

  You know, it's one of those things where it's very unfortunate when people get caught with their pants down. And I'm not an expert in many things, but the things that I am an expert on, you could wake me up at 4 o'clock in the morning and ask me about those things, and I go, "Oh, yeah, no, um, this is what it is."

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:40Joe Rogan?

  I know, you know, like martial arts or comedy, I could tell you, I could give you an expert version of reality.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 0:50Joe Rogan?

  It seems like he does not have that, and he is a wonderful talker, and it's a lot of fun. I like watching his videos. I love all that ancient history stuff, and even the most ridiculous tinfoil hat aspects of ancient...it's fun.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  It's entertainment.

• 1:07Joe Rogan?

  But I know that there's a different...like Andrew Schultz and I had a discussion about this. Like, he said when he had Billy on the podcast, he said, "We're not gonna fucking research anything. We're not gonna search anything, we're not gonna do anything, we'll just let him talk 'cause it's fun."

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19Joe Rogan?

  Andrew's awesome. But when he was on with you, it was quite apparent that you are an actual expert in the Bible and in many religious texts, and that he didn't necessarily have the facts straight.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36Joe Rogan?

  So what was the fallout of all of that?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting you say the expert thing, 'cause I literally was asked to do it 24 hours beforehand, so I had, like, the least amount of preparation going into it, and I was okay with that, because I listened to Billy Carson. Well, and I listened to the stuff he'd said, so I knew enough about the ways that he'd articulated, things about the ancient Near East and the Bible and Christianity, to know enough that his level is pretty surface, but the fallout was that not only did he not want us to release the conversation, but then he started throwing out cease-and-desist letters, and then he started, you know... Trying to sue people. So, I mean, I was never worried because I'm a Canadian.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  And anybody who's tried to sue internationally knows that.

• 2:29Joe Rogan?

  Good luck.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Yeah. As far as I understand it, he would have had to file a claim in a Canadian court that would have been reviewed to have legal precedents. He'd have to prove that he could win.

• 2:43Joe Rogan?

  What was his argument?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Apart from the fact that he was embarrassed that he lost?

• 2:49Joe Rogan?

  Well, yeah, that's, well, that's not really an argument, right? We've all been there. You're hungover, thinking about all the dumb stuff you did last night and wondering if anybody remembers. Unfortunately, someone does remember everything you do online and they've got receipts. I'm talking about your internet provider and data brokers and every shady marketing company that gets their greedy hands on your private activity. But this year is going to be different. Give your online privacy a fresh start with ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is an easy to use app that encrypts your online activity and reroutes it through secure servers, keeping your browsing history private from third parties and it hides your IP address,

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• 4:17Joe Rogan?

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• 4:26Speaker 01

  Well, the cease and desist letter, yeah. The cease and desist letter said, "I don't want you to use my name or my face."

• 4:34Speaker 01

  In anything going forward and anything you've used up until this point, you need to remove. And I was given 24 hours notice to do this.

• 4:41Joe Rogan?

  But if you're a public figure, he's clearly a public figure, is that even, can you actually say?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  No, no, you can't do it.

• 4:49Joe Rogan?

  So what was the, does he have a lawyer that wrote this cease and desist?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:53Joe Rogan?

  Is he a lawyer?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  No. So he actually, it's interesting, because he, Mark Menard, who was the guy who hosted this interaction, he sent Mark a handwritten one. And then he eventually gave Mark an official one from his lawyer. So I actually was sent one by his lawyer, which I, you know, screenshotted, posted publicly online and said, I'm going to ignore this. And then, but he'd sent Mark, who was the podcast host, as far as I'm aware, numerous cease and desists, and Anton, who was the media manager, he'd sent a number of cease and desists.

• 5:28Joe Rogan?

  It's unfortunate.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  It is unfortunate.

• 5:31Joe Rogan?

  You're, when you get caught with your pants down, you're supposed to say, I got caught with my pants down.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:36Joe Rogan?

  That's what you're supposed to do.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:38Joe Rogan?

  Especially if you're public, like, it's very clear that you're incorrect.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Well, the irony of this situation is if he'd just kind of left it, it probably wouldn't have made anywhere close to the splash.

• 5:49Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  That it's made. And we told him that. We said, like, hey, Barbra Streisand effect.

• 5:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Is going to happen.

• 5:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Like, you're a big enough personality that if I make a video and say, like, hey, I had this conversation, didn't go well for Billy, and Billy doesn't want it released, that's going to start to gain traction sooner or later.

• 6:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It's, you know, the problem is to really delve into these subjects. It takes a tremendous amount of research, years and years and years of research. You really have to know what you're talking about. Most of us don't.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Well, especially with languages.

• 6:29Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Like, we didn't get into it. I hoped to have, in our initial conversation, kind of press him a little bit more on the more overt things he'd said about like Greek and Hebrew and Sumerian, because I've studied a number of ancient languages, and when you study the languages, you realize the complexities of these things. And so when someone hasn't and they're making statements that are obviously indicative of someone who hasn't studied them, it's super apparent.

• 6:57Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  And so I think it's one thing to be making claims about, say, like, Christian history or the Bible, but when you start to get into like linguistics and philology, it gets messy. And if you don't know what you're talking about, it gets really apparent really fast.

• 7:10Joe Rogan?

  So, the gentleman who brought the two of you together, what was his goal? Like, what was... This episode is presented by Searchlight Pictures' Wild Horse 9. Shortly before Chile's 1973 coup, two CIA agents, played by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, find their mission on Easter Island spiraling into a web of conspiracies, unexpected alliances, and chaos. Wild Horse 9, only in theaters Friday. Get tickets now. All your favorite NBA players are back, and DraftKings Sportsbook, an official sports betting partner of the NBA, is the place to bet on NBA stars this season. Follow your

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• 8:47Joe Rogan?

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• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he's friends, or I should say was friends. He was friends with Billy. They live in the same neighborhood.

• 10:12Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  So it's actually become really, um, it's become pretty rough for him. So he released a video yesterday, which I think people should go and check out, where he kind of gives his perspective. He's been friends with Billy for years. He was at Billy's wedding. Billy had 15 people at his wedding. Mark was one of them. And they're, they live in this community in Florida. Their, their sons are friends. Their wives would hang out. And, um, Mark told me, he's like, I've been hearing Billy say, you know, he wants to debate, nobody will debate him for years. And so as far as I think Mark was concerned, he was giving Billy the opportunity that Billy had told a lot of people he wanted.

• 10:57Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  And so he, you know, this was set up in that Mark and Billy have been talking, they've been on each other's podcasts in the past, and they've been friends, but more like business colleagues. Like Mark has come out and said, I hadn't really gone into the stuff he'd said about Christianity, or ancient religions, or whatever, that much. Mark is a, he's a Christian. He has like a public profession of faith, and he, him and Billy had talked about the fact that they wanted to talk about like faith stuff and some of their differences. And that, that Mark was kind of prepping for this, and his media manager, Anton, had sent him some of my stuff, and said like, Wes has done some stuff on some

• 11:38Speaker 01

  things that Billy has talked about. And, you know, maybe you should look up some, some of this stuff, you know, read into it. And Mark, very last minute, was like, well, I'm, I feel inadequate. Do you think I could just ask Wes? And so he DM'd me on Instagram, and just kind of laid this out, like, hey, I'm gonna have Billy in my studio in 24 hours. I can tell him you're coming, can tell him who you are, I can like, give him your background. But would you be willing to come? And so that's what I did. And so that's how it got set up.

• 12:10Joe Rogan?

  So, correct me if I'm wrong, but was Billy aware that this was going to be a debate? Or did he think it was going to be just a discussion? Like, what did he think it was gonna be?

• 12:21Speaker 01

  No, he'd been given all of the prerequisites. Like, he knew we're gonna go over some of his stuff that he'd said about Christianity, that I was gonna come in, who I was, what my name was, some, some of my background, and that part of the conversation was going to be me kind of asking him some clarifying questions, and rebutting some of the things that he said. So he, you didn't watch the three hour livestream that they did, did you?

• 12:48Joe Rogan?

  I watched chunks of it.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 12:50Joe Rogan?

  I, I watched a little bit, and I'm like, oof, and then I shut it off, then I watched a little bit more, oof.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So unfortunately, Billy there says he had no idea going in. And, I mean,

• 13:01Speaker 01

  As Mark said in his video that he released yesterday, I mean, that's patently false. He knew what it was going to be, who was going to be involved, and even some of the things that we would be talking about.

• 13:14Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, okay. And he also was claiming that it wasn't a debate, that he had been involved in debates before, and that he would prepare for debates, but this is something he didn't prepare. But again, it's like, if you ask me about things that I know about,

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:28Joe Rogan?

  you can wake me up.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:30Joe Rogan?

  Out of a full sleep, and give me a couple of seconds, I'll go, oh, okay. This is what it is.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:37Joe Rogan?

  If you know, you know.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  And it wasn't a debate in one sense. Like, it wasn't. Like, we didn't do, you know, opening statements and cross-examination and rebuttal.

• 13:45Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  It really was a conversation.

• 13:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  And it only kind of turned into a debate in the sense that Billy, I think, got caught out, and so the things that were talked about kind of showed that, you know, that he needed to go on the offense.

• 14:03Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:04Joe Rogan?

  Well, again, it's all very unfortunate, but the good part of it is, I was introduced to you and your work.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  And there you go.

• 14:12Joe Rogan?

  Very, very extensive and very fascinating. And the videos that you sent me on Instagram, I watched both of those today as well.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 14:19Joe Rogan?

  So really, really interesting stuff. And your knowledge of the history of the biblical texts and the codex, Cynaticus, and all these different things, very, very fascinating stuff.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 14:32Joe Rogan?

  So let's just get into your background. Like, how did you get started in your research? And how did you, how did you get into this?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I grew up in a Christian home. I, my parents were missionaries. So I was born in Pakistan and spent a portion of my childhood in the Middle East with my parents working in Oman, Jordan. And then we came back from, from the Middle East when I was pretty young. And so I grew up in this very, like, diverse home in the sense that my mom was a missionary kid who grew up in India. And so we had a lot of, like, worldview kind of perspectives represented in our home.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Like I often say, we had the Bhagavad Gita and the Book of Mormon and the Quran on the shelf.

• 15:15Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think, you know, that always, although my parents were never overt with this kind of stuff, they always had the perspective that, you know, we're Christians, we believe that this worldly perspective is true, but hey, this stuff isn't scary, this stuff isn't, you know, off limits. You know, we can investigate these things, and they never said that outright, but that I always felt this kind of attitude of that kind of perspective. And, you know, having been exposed in majority Muslim contexts and seeing that kind of stuff, and my mom having like a, a pretty good knowledge, growing up in India, of things like Hinduism and Sikhism and, and that. And I don't know how much of the kind of testimony stuff you watched of mine,

• 16:01Speaker 01

  but just before my 12th birthday, I actually was diagnosed with a neurological condition that left me paralyzed from the waist down.

• 16:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I did see all that.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that, so that's a condition that's called acute transverse myelitis, which I often say is a forget, is a word you can forget as soon as you hear it, because it's a complicated one. But what happened was that I had the flu and my body's immune system attacked the nerve endings at the base of my spinal cord and caused swelling and cut off the communication between my brain and my legs.

• 16:30Joe Rogan?

  Instantaneously, right?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically. I'd, I'd gone down for a nap, I was camping out in the bathroom floor for flu reasons, and when I woke up about 30 minutes later, I couldn't feel my legs. And so, yeah, that's the acute part of the acute transverse myelitis was that it was basically instantaneous. And that's what made the diagnosis as severe as it was. Like, they said there's a 30% chance, it was, it was like a small percentage of probability that I, I would recover, but a much higher percentage that there would be a lot of either complete paralysis for the rest of my life or some kind of issues with walking.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  It's related to like diseases like multiple sclerosis in that it's, it's neurological and it affects that kind of thing. And one month from the day that I, I woke up and couldn't feel my legs, I, I woke up on a Saturday morning, got out of bed, walked over to my wheelchair and sat down.

• 17:33Joe Rogan?

  One month?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  One month, yeah. January 8th to February 8th, exactly.

• 17:38Joe Rogan?

  Very fortunate.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  You're telling me.

• 17:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. What treatment did they give you?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  So there initially, they gave me steroids to reduce the swelling. But so I spent 11 days in the hospital being overseen by pediatric pediatric neurologists and specialists in this because it's a very rare condition. And so they were studying me and they gave me steroids and they they did some other tests. But really, there was no true kind of treatment in that. So I was doing physiotherapy. I would be pulled out of gym class in school. But it was a little bit of a joke, like, can you move your legs? You know, can you? It was.

• 18:26Joe Rogan?

  Could you move anything?

• 18:27Speaker 01

  No, nothing.

• 18:27Joe Rogan?

  Could you feel anything?

• 18:28Speaker 01

  No. No, in fact, when I was in the hospital, I'd I'd wake up and there'd be pinpricks in my legs because they'd be testing where like where the reactions were and they'd have used a syringe. And so I'd wake up and there'd be tiny little pinpricks in my legs because they'd been testing while I was asleep to see what the kind of, you know, whether it was registering neurologically with anything. But I couldn't feel anything. I was fully a paraplegic. Yeah, but but going back to that, like, so I've I experienced this, what I consider to be a true supernatural experience in that I walked into the hospital to the doctors that had overseen me and they were the first ones that used the word miracle.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  They said, we really don't have any type of medical explanation and mainly because there was no atrophy. Because of the the cutoff of the communication, my muscles in those 30 days were fine. And it's a short amount of time, but they said there should be something and we're we're picking up nothing.

• 19:32Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy because I've broken limbs before and had them in casts and just in the six weeks that you have a cast on.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:40Joe Rogan?

  You have massive atrophy.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, so that was the kind of predication for them using the word miracle. And so that's kind of, it marks this, what I do consider to be like this supernatural, something happened and, but.

• 19:57Joe Rogan?

  Did you feel like that was like a calling that like led you to a very specific mindset after that?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  It's an interesting way of putting it. I mean, as much as you could at 12 years old.

• 20:09Joe Rogan?

  Right. But it must have had a significant impact on your psyche and your perceptions.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it definitely led to things like later in life, I got very involved in athletics and in track and field. And part of that was feeling a conviction that I knew what it was like to not be able to wake up and walk out of the room.

• 20:29Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  And so taking that pretty seriously and, and competing competitively well into university. Because even though, you know, I wasn't the most naturally talented individual on the team. I, I felt like a motivation to be able to, okay, I don't want to waste this.

• 20:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  And then later on, in terms of your original question, the, the difference in that was that I, I realized, okay, there's something out there, something happened that I can't totally explain on naturalistic terms. But how do we, how do we go from that to saying, okay, well then, this worldview is correct. And so despite, you know, being raised in a Christian home, I felt like my parents telling me what was true is not the worst reason to believe it, but it's also not the best. And so as a teenager, I did a lot of kind of soul searching. And like I said, you know, I was able to do that to a certain level of degree because of

• 21:32Speaker 01

  the openness within my household, where I did, I pulled the Quran off the shelf and I read it, you know, front to back, just trying to figure out, okay, what, what's going on here? What's all this about?

• 21:42Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  And it was through that period of like searching and it wasn't a crisis of faith. That's, that would be an over exaggerated term, but it was kind of.

• 21:53Joe Rogan?

  An inspiration of faith, perhaps?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Maybe, yeah. Digging through, okay, well, what do these guys believe?

• 21:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  What, what is this perspective?

• 22:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  And that was about a period of about a year and a half. And at the end of that, I, I did truly feel that, okay, well, I think. In the ways that I, in my limited ability as a teenager, to investigate these things, I think that Christianity is true. But it wasn't until I went to university where I was engaging with people of other faith perspectives in Toronto at York University, where I was talking to Muslims and Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and atheists, you know, from the gamut. And I was having these conversations and I was expressing kind of my perspective on what I believed.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  And they would say things like, "Well, that sounds great, Wes, but, you know, that's all the Bible. You can't trust that." And so that's where I started to take the...

• 22:54Joe Rogan?

  Do Mormons say that to you?

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Well, yes.

• 22:56Joe Rogan?

  Because that's kind of crazy.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, in the sense that, so...

• 22:59Joe Rogan?

  The Mormon one is the craziest one.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:01Joe Rogan?

  Because we know who wrote it.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:04Joe Rogan?

  And he's a shady dude.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  He is a shady dude. Well, no, they did in the sense that the Book of Mormon trumps the Bible. So they would believe, I think it's the 10th article of the Mormon Church is that they believe the Bible insofar as it is translated. And so they, they have this perspective that there's been things that have been affected. I mean, Joseph Smith made his own translation of the Bible, and it's rough.

• 23:28Joe Rogan?

  And when he was 14.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Well, I think it was later on that he, he made the Joseph Smith translation.

• 23:32Joe Rogan?

  Oh, really?

• 23:33Speaker 01

  But I don't even know if the official LDS Church ascribes to the Joseph Smith translation because I think they even see like, "Ugh, like, this is, we know what the Greek and the Hebrew looks like and this is not even..."

• 23:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:45Joe Rogan?

  Well, he was, you know, legitimate con man. You know, which is fascinating. That it's, people have such a, a deep search for meaning and truth that if you are confident, and if, which is what a con man is, you know, confidence man. If you are really good at expressing yourself and really, like, you show confidence in your convictions, you can, you can persuade a lot of people.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Confidence is not competency.

• 24:14Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  And unfortunately, those things get confused a lot.

• 24:18Joe Rogan?

  Well, it covers up for competency sometimes.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  In, in religion and politics and like all sorts of things, right?

• 24:24Joe Rogan?

  And everything.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:25Joe Rogan?

  And everything. I mean, I think it's, I think because people want to, like, it's very difficult to be an expert in a subject. And I think people want to believe that they are and they don't want to do the work.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I think that's why, you know, experts themselves feel a lot of inadequacy.

• 24:48Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  They study a subject and realize like, I'm never gonna get to the bottom of this hole.

• 24:53Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  So unfortunately.

• 24:55Joe Rogan?

  Most subjects are very, very nuanced and very deep.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:00Joe Rogan?

  Especially when you're talking about ancient religion.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:03Joe Rogan?

  I mean, you're, you're, you're talking about things that were a oral tradition for a long time before they're even written down. So it's, it's a long, long trudge to get to the, the bottom of things.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and part of the whole, like, what I was trying to get Billy in that conversation that I had with him, to get to the bottom of partly was a question of methodology. Like, I think he got, he got frustrated at me at one point because I kept asking, you know, what are the criteria that you're using when you're looking at one source versus another source? And coming up with a conclusion? Because in historiography, it's, it's the inference to the best explanation. And so there are different ways that you go about that, different methodologies. And historians very rarely disagree on the, the data and evidence.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  It's the conclusions that you draw from that.

• 26:03Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  But then there are some things that are just out and out false. And I don't think Billy totally knew what I was talking about. But it's those criteria that we look at when we look at something that does come from like an oral tradition and eventually gets written down and, and becomes a literary text. And then you analyze that on the basis of it being a literary text.

• 26:26Joe Rogan?

  This is sort of the problem between, with being self-taught rather than conventionally academically trained.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 26:34Joe Rogan?

  Where you're trained in very specific disciplines and you're taught to understand the foundation before you understand like how to put a window in.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:46Joe Rogan?

  There's a lot of things that you have to know from the base, from the beginning. Like, do you have a water line? Do you have power? Like, there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of things going on when you're trying to construct an expertise in something, especially something that is so complicated. And one of the things that I've gotten out of, I probably watched. Probably twenty hours of your stuff over the last couple of weeks. And you you've spent a lot of time on this. This is not a casual cursory examination of these texts and of religion. This is it. This is a long, long journey. And that's what's particularly exceptional and really interesting to me.

• 27:31Joe Rogan?

  Because I'm always fascinated by people that have really gone down the road, like really, really, really gone down the road. Because you don't meet a whole lot of them. You know, I know a lot of Christians that can quote you some, you know, some versions of the New Testament. You know, some Psalms, some they but but the real, the go all the way to the back. Way, way, way, way, way. And that's that's what you've done. That's very interesting. So this is like, how old are you?

• 28:00Speaker 01

  I'm thirty three.

• 28:01Joe Rogan?

  Which is very young for someone who has

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Spring chicken.

• 28:03Joe Rogan?

  The depth of knowledge that you have, you know. Um, so you've been doing this essentially from that miraculous moment. You've that ignited this spark, even though you came from missionary background. And then from then on, so for the past eleven years, twelve years or twenty years, thirty years. Like it's your whole life, essentially. It's all been this.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, to a certain degree, I mean, I went to university with full intention of going into the police force. I did like my undergraduate studies and then I'd kind of mapped out this plan that I was going to become a police detective. And that was my goal. And I think I realized

• 28:44Joe Rogan?

  Why not?

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Um.

• 28:46Joe Rogan?

  Because you like getting to the bottom of things?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  It could be.

• 28:48Joe Rogan?

  Because you do.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, well.

• 28:50Joe Rogan?

  Well, someone who spends twenty one years like getting to the bottom of a religion, you know, you'd probably be pretty good at cracking cases.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  I hope so. Um, I think that might have been part of it. I also there was an aspect of when I was in high school where they were like, you got to figure out what you're doing. You're going to be homeless and you're going to die.

• 29:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I remember that part.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  I felt that like

• 29:08Joe Rogan?

  That was terrifying moment in life.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Man, I always tell people when they're in high school, like you can chill out, like it's going to be OK.

• 29:14Joe Rogan?

  I don't think so.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  You don't think so? I wonder if it's different now because

• 29:17Joe Rogan?

  I think you should have a certain Amount of desperation.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:20Joe Rogan?

  Cause I think that it ignites the fire within you to do something.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  There's probably something to that.

• 29:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:25Joe Rogan?

  The people that I know that have been too pampered and taken care of and didn't have a fear of everything going completely sideways. They never really get the momentum that's necessary to accomplish things in life.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's probably something to that. I mean desperation.

• 29:42Joe Rogan?

  Little desperation fear, I think is good for you.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:45Joe Rogan?

  Everybody wants to be comfortable. I don't think, I don't think that's necessarily a good path. I mean, I think you should have perspective and you should enjoy your life as a young person and, and, and have those. But you should also realize you got work to do.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Well, and stress is good, right? Stress creates perseverance and creates patterns that allow you to succeed.

• 30:05Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  I mean, this is like athletics 101, right?

• 30:07Joe Rogan?

  Uh huh. I think that's very important.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  You gotta push yourself. And I think actually part of that also let in like, I'm a big believer in athletic discipline. Needs to go hand in hand. I mean, I know you are too. Needs to go hand in hand with any other type of like, whether it's an intellectual endeavor or like, because it trains you to be able to go into places that are uncomfortable.

• 30:30Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  And that uncomfortability allows you to then become stronger. You know, realize where your inadequacies are. And especially when you're with people who are better than you. I mean, when I was running at York University, there were two guys on our team who, uh, cause I, I was okay individually. But I ran for the relay team. Yes, I was a sprinter. And, um, one of the guys was part of the, uh, he, he, they medaled when Canada medaled at Worlds. He was part of that relay team. And then my other training partner, Busy, who, um, he ended up competing in Tokyo for Canada. And when you're beside someone who is like just a genetic freak, you're like, oh, okay. Like that's different.

• 31:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Right? And, and it both pushes you, but it also reveals your limitations. Where that doesn't inhibit you, like you shouldn't, that shouldn't discourage you to go up to that line of being able to push yourself. But at the exact same time, it, it creates a realism that like, I'm never gonna, I can train as much as I want to. I'm not gonna run like that, right?

• 31:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  And, um, so, yeah, but, but going back to what you were asking, like. I think there was part of that in wanting to go into the police force. But then realizing like around my third year of university, that my passions and motivations were very, very different. And that I didn't know how to go about that or where the proper place to do that was. But I knew that I needed to lean into that to some degree. Particularly with the Bible. Cause I was, I was claiming that this Bible talks about this guy, Jesus, and I'm a Christian. So I have a friend, Andy Bannister, he's out in the UK. And he says, if you take Christ out of Christian, all you're left with is Ian.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  And Ian's a great guy, who's not gonna save you from your sins. And so like, if, if I'm wrong about the Bible, those people who push back on me, right? Those skeptics of various worldviews. If the things they were saying about the Bible were true, then it did actually legitimately undermine what I believed. And so I needed to take that seriously. I had an obligation to actually investigate those things as far as I could.

• 32:52Joe Rogan?

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• 33:33Joe Rogan?

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• 34:09Joe Rogan?

  What is the oldest version of the Bible or the stories in the Bible? Is it the Dead Sea Scrolls or are there older versions?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest of the Old Testament. So when they were discovered, I mean, so they were discovered in 1946 to 1957. And at that point during their discovery, they pushed back a lot of our previous oldest manuscripts, a thousand years, which was a big deal.

• 34:35Joe Rogan?

  How old are they?

• 34:36Speaker 01

  They're anywhere between the 3rd century B.C. and the 1st century B.C. So it's kind of tricky because the Dead Sea Scrolls are, they're like a library that we refer to. So it's approximately 970 documents, but it's distributed out between 10,000 and 11,000 fragments. So there's a lot going on there, right? So and some of these, I mean, are so fragmentary that you look at them and it's like confetti. Because they're, I mean, 3,000 years old, but not quite that. They're like 2,000 plus years old.

• 35:13Joe Rogan?

  Animal skins too, right?

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Well, all sorts of things. Animal skins, papyri, and then some of them are actually done on copper. They're like inscribed in copper.

• 35:21Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of the coolest ones, actually this relates because I know you're a Marco Allegro guy. The first time I was introduced to Marco Allegro was not his Sacred Mushroom and the Cross stuff, but he published a book on what's called the Copper Scroll because part of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments are, is this inscribed document on copper, which is an ancient treasure map.

• 35:40Joe Rogan?

  Can you see it online?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Jamie, pull up the, hey.

• 35:43Joe Rogan?

  There it is. Wow.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's in Hebrew and it is wild. So it has these sites where it says buried treasure is found. And there have been a number of guys who have tried to like look for it and so.

• 35:58Joe Rogan?

  Does it say what the treasure is?

• 36:01Speaker 01

  You know what? Off the top of my head, I don't know. But.

• 36:05Joe Rogan?

  Look how crazy that language is.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  I know, right? And so, but the Dead Sea Scrolls, so it's like stuff like this, it's papyri, it's animal skins, and it's a number of different languages. So the vast majority of it is in Hebrew, but there's also a lot in Aramaic, and then Greek, and in Nabatean. So it's like a, it's like a, an umbrella term to describe a whole bunch of literature. So a lot of it is biblical, because it was written by this group out in the desert called the Essenes, who lived at Qumran. So, but then other stuff of it is just, you know, it's just Jewish literature of various stripes that is, were hidden in caves all around the Dead Sea.

• 36:50Joe Rogan?

  So the scrolls, as it were, aren't all biblical. Some of them is just a counting of the times.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, Jamie, look at that. 65 tons of gold and 26 tons of silver.

• 37:02Joe Rogan?

  65 tons? That's a lot. That's a lot? How many Cuban links can you make out of that?

• 37:08Speaker 01

  You can see why someone would try to track that down.

• 37:11Joe Rogan?

  Boy.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:12Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  And, and you know, when we're talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, like you have ones like the Great Isaiah Scroll, which is fully complete. Like, it's a, it's a copy of the Book of Isaiah, and it's a full, complete scroll. But then other ones are so fragmentary that we, we think they're written in Hebrew, but we can't actually tell.

• 37:30Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Because no one's willing to, like, piece these, and this is true for a lot of stuff. So, like, the largest grouping of, of papyri literature in the world is the Oxyrhynchus Collection, which we get a good portion of our oldest manuscripts of the New Testament from. But if you go to Oxford and you look at the Oxy, or the Oxyrhynchus Collection, and you pull out that drawer, it just, it's like a jigsaw puzzle. And you're like.

• 37:59Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Like, most of it is, is untranslated, untranscribed, because the amount of man-hours that it would just take to even put it together, never mind then go to the effort of transcribing and translating it.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Most people are not willing to do that.

• 38:16Joe Rogan?

  And if you're missing chunks, how do you even make that puzzle connect?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Well, that's part of, so part of my area of speciality in research is in regards to that. Is, so I study paratextual features. We're really gonna get nerdy today.

• 38:33Joe Rogan?

  Let's get nerdy.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Where, so you look at the features of the manuscripts, not necessarily the words, but things like the spaces between the words, the development of punctuation, indentation or out indentation, and I look at the margins. And I try to, based on the average size of manuscripts in and around that time, and also the average spacing of words and the margins on top, bottom and the side, recreate what the manuscript could have possibly looked like.

• 39:04Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:05Joe Rogan?

  So when you say the Book of Isaiah is intact, how similar is it to the Book of Isaiah that's in the Bible?

• 39:12Speaker 01

  So, that one is fascinating. So this isn't true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but when we discovered the Great Isaiah Scroll, previous to that, the earliest copy of Isaiah that we had was in the Masoretic text, which is in the Middle Ages.

• 39:26Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was literally a thousand years. We literally pushed back our understanding of Isaiah a thousand years. And the thing that really shocked scholars, like I said, this isn't true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but one of the things that shocked them about Isaiah was that it was word for word identical to the Masoretic text.

• 39:42Joe Rogan?

  Word for word.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Word for word.

• 39:43Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is the Great Isaiah Scroll. So if you go to Israel and you go-

• 39:47Joe Rogan?

  Is that papyrus?

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Yes. No, I think that one is vellum.

• 39:52Joe Rogan?

  What is vellum?

• 39:53Speaker 01

  So, uh, so I should be more specific. So parchment is animal skin. Vellum can be used synonymously with the term parchment. Technically parchment is, is like baby animal skin, like calves or lambs. But this is the Great Isaiah Scroll, and you can see like they stitch together the parchment, cause it's, it's so long.

• 40:18Joe Rogan?

  God, it's so beautiful. The way they wrote back then was so beautiful. I mean, maybe it's because I can't read it. That's so fat. Maybe if I saw English, I would think that's beautiful too.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:27Joe Rogan?

  Especially script, like cursive. Cursive is very beautiful. But that is so fascinating because the, I mean, obviously coming from a point of ignorance, the letters look so similar.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 40:38Joe Rogan?

  Like so many, this is what I always got about cuneiform. When I look at that, I'm like, It's just one particular sort of character.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:47Joe Rogan?

  That's this way and that way and up and down and.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Oh, cuneiform is wild.

• 40:51Joe Rogan?

  Weird.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  It's really, really tricky. And that's the thing when, like, if you're studying ancient languages and you, you start to study Greek, like, Greek, the Greek alphabet is similar enough that you're like, okay, alpha, looks like an A.

• 41:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Delta looks like a D. So you can figure it out. And so it tricks you because you start off and you're like, oh, this is phobias, fear. I don't know what phobia is. And you've got this false sense of like encouragement. And then, you know, the further you go down the rabbit hole, you're like, oh, I'm screwed. So, um, but Hebrew is completely the opposite. Because the, like, writing system is so different. The learning curve is hard at the beginning and then you're like, everything is just three letters with a suffix added to it. And so it feels like, whereas the opposite is true with, with Greek. Greek, you're like, ah, I get this. And then when you really go down the rabbit hole, you're like, oh, crap. None of the things that I learned about that are supposed to be standard, all of them have exceptions.

• 41:51Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  But, uh, yeah, cuneiform is a wild one.

• 41:54Joe Rogan?

  Do you know who Rick Strassmann is?

• 41:55Speaker 01

  No.

• 41:56Joe Rogan?

  Uh, he's a, he's a scholar and he did a lot of work, early work, FDA approved work on psychedelics.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 42:04Joe Rogan?

  And he spent 16 years teaching himself to read ancient Hebrew.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 42:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. So, because he wanted to really understand the Bible from the original source of ancient Hebrew. And to understand it in context, because ancient Hebrew, the way the words are structured is so different than English. And that, that something must be lost in translation. So he spent 16 years.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:26Joe Rogan?

  Teaching himself.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 42:27Joe Rogan?

  How to read ancient Hebrew. That is so cra- that is such dedication. 16 years.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  It's a long time. That seems too long.

• 42:34Joe Rogan?

  Well, you're self-taught. I mean, he's doing it himself.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Self-teaching. Yeah. I, I self-taught myself Greek at first. And then when I started learning it formally, I realized how much you miss when you self-teach yourself.

• 42:47Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I'm sure. Well, how many people can teach you ancient Hebrew? How many courses are available?

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Oh, you can take it at any graduate college.

• 42:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah?

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:53Joe Rogan?

  And is it, um, it's not something that we know what, what it sounded like, correct?

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this is the big debate with ancient languages.

• 43:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Like, same thing with, yeah, arguably, we don't know how any of this was pronounced.

• 43:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  I mean, modern Greek speakers get really mad at me when I say that because they're like, of course, we know how it's pronounced. Pronounce it like we pronounce it, right? And, and on all my videos where I'm like, site translating Greek manuscripts, all, like, there's so many comments of, of modern Greek speakers getting mad at how I'm pronouncing things. But realistically, yeah, we don't, we, we don't really know how most of the things are pronounced, with anything.

• 43:30Joe Rogan?

  But isn't that very bizarre when you're translating, like, if you go back to, like, say, the Epic of Gilgamesh?

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 43:37Joe Rogan?

  You don't, we don't even know what the words sounded like.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:40Joe Rogan?

  We kind of know what they represent, and then we do a literal translation of what they represent, but if you've never heard, no one can speak ancient Sumerian.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, Sumerian's a wild one. Because it's a language isolate.

• 43:55Joe Rogan?

  What does that mean?

• 43:56Speaker 01

  So, so, uh, so Hebrew is a, is an Afro-Semitic language. So Hebrew is related to all of these other languages like Aramaic and Akkadian, but language isolates have no adjacent comparisons.

• 44:14Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  So, because I tried to teach myself Sumerian, and I failed, and I just gave up. Because I couldn't do it, because I had nothing to really compare it to.

• 44:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  So Sumerologists are very like, they're a field of their own. Because I learned a little bit of Akkadian because I had studied Semitic languages, and there's enough crossover between things like Hebrew and Aramaic and Akkadian. But Sumerian, you have nothing to compare it to.

• 44:42Joe Rogan?

  What did it, what did it eventually become?

• 44:45Speaker 01

  It just died.

• 44:45Joe Rogan?

  It just died?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  It just died.

• 44:47Joe Rogan?

  How? Do we know?

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, the Sumerians lost to the Assyrians and the Assyrians got taken over by the Babylonians. I mean, it's just the, you know, the course of history where things happen. But there are a number of ancient languages that are language, language isolates like Linear Elamite. We had no idea what Linear Elamite even said until 2021.

• 45:10Joe Rogan?

  Well, I never even heard it until five seconds ago.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  I know, there you go. Jamie, if you pull up, if you look up, uh, what's it called? There's a cup, a silver cup. It'll come up if you, if you Google image Linear Elamite. Cause you think cuneiform looks wild. Linear Elamite is completely different than that too. And, um, there's a silver cup, which we had no idea what it said. And then a bunch of researchers, ancient Near Eastern researchers developed, well, so let's, in, in the corner there. That one on.

• 45:42Joe Rogan?

  Far left corner?

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, here. Now it's moved because you clicked it. That one. Yeah, yeah. Click that. So that's Linear Elamite. And so that's in and around the same time that languages like Sumerian. So there's this very interesting kind of, if we're talking about the story in the Bible, like the, the Tarababbel, where it says that God confused their languages and everybody started speaking different languages. You have these languages that just pop up and out of nowhere and have no relation to one another. So Akkadian starts to adopt certain words in Sumerian, but they're still Sumerian where it's like pizza is Italian, right? Or like kayak is Inuit.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  But when you're looking at the words that carry over, it's not because there, there's a relationship between Akkadian and Sumerian. It's because you have these cultures that live side by side and eventually Akkadian starts to adopt these things. But Sumerian is, so that's why. When I see people like Billy Carson talk about being able to read Sumerian, I'm like, dude, I read ancient languages and I can't, I've tried and I can't make heads or tails of Sumerian.

• 46:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. That's a tell.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, it kind of gives away.

• 47:00Joe Rogan?

  Listen, I like Billy. He was a nice guy. I really enjoyed talking to him. I really do. I think his videos are fun. But I also think truth is important.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  I have no problem with him as an individual.

• 47:11Joe Rogan?

  He just needs to course correct.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, course correct and, and recognize what you know and what you don't know and that. You're not doing people a service, especially people like myself that aren't educated in this. Like, we, we turn to others who claim to have a vast knowledge of this to help me out. Tell me what's going on. When I sit down and talk to you, tell me what's going on. And if you don't really know, you're kind of, you're fucking over a lot of people, unfortunately, for yourself.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:41Joe Rogan?

  This, this, um, how do you say it again? Linear?

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Linear?

• 47:45Joe Rogan?

  Linear.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Elamite.

• 47:46Joe Rogan?

  Can you put that back up again, Jamie? So this was, um, in 20, can you show me that, that image that you'd showed me before?

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Actually, see if you can find the cup.

• 47:55Joe Rogan?

  That's pretty dope right there.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  If you scroll, there's a, there should be a, I think it's called the dashed.

• 48:00Joe Rogan?

  Is that it? In the lower corner?

• 48:01Speaker 01

  No. No, if you go, it's got, yeah, if you look up cup, yeah, that, that guy. So, so see that inscription at the top beside the face?

• 48:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  So that's the one, so it goes around the top of the cup and they crack that.

• 48:13Joe Rogan?

  Look at that dude's honker.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  It's got big nose, isn't it?

• 48:15Joe Rogan?

  That's a hell of a nose.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, he can smell that linear elamite. And so when, so actually, interestingly enough, if you pull back, Jamie, that's my, that's my, uh, so there's an infographic that I made that just popped up. So if you click that guy, that's the one I made.

• 48:30Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Why is it coming up like that? Someone else reposted it. Oh, okay.

• 48:35Joe Rogan?

  So is it just bad resolution, is what you're saying? Oh, there it is.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Oh, no, it is mine. So, so actually, here, I'll be self-serving. If you go to wesleyhuff.com.

• 48:44Joe Rogan?

  That is, can we just look at that for a second? That is so cool. And how old is this?

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Uh, for, I mean, 20th century B.C.

• 48:54Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:56Joe Rogan?

  So 4,000 plus years ago.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you go, Jamie, to Wesley Huff dot com and then click my infographics tab at the top. So I started making these things for the graduate students I was teaching. And yeah, so if you go down, there should be an archaeology section. And in the archaeology section, I have that one on, I'm blanking on what it's called. I make ones for manuscripts, too.

• 49:20Joe Rogan?

  What a great website you've got.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. Appreciate that.

• 49:22Joe Rogan?

  This is awesome. It's so detailed.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a Linear Elamite one.

• 49:26Joe Rogan?

  What a fucking phenomenal resource this is.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Right there.

• 49:29Joe Rogan?

  Oh, there it is.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, Marv Dash, that's what it's called. So yeah, you see this, so I have Sumerian, Linear Elamite, Akkadian and Paleohebra there at the bottom, the comparisons. And these are languages that operated like alongside one another. But are almost completely foreign to one another. So there is crossover between Akkadian and Paleohebra.

• 49:52Joe Rogan?

  So that's interesting. Sumerian, when I'm thinking of cuneiform, I'm not thinking of that, right? That that looks different than some of like the clay scrolls, where they've, you know, the the imprintations that they make with a clay wheel.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's all done with the stylus. So it's like a little wedge stylus. So there are different variations of it. But ultimately, it's done with the stylus. The thing that's interesting, like, like, you're probably thinking more of what that later Akkadian looks like, right?

• 50:22Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  The wedges?

• 50:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so they, Akkadian basically borrowed the writing system. And and it had development over time, but it was is very close.

• 50:34Joe Rogan?

  So when they conquered them, did they have their own writing system initially and just incorporated Sumerian writing to theirs?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that one. But.

• 50:43Joe Rogan?

  God, I'd like to know.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  I know, right?

• 50:45Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it's so long ago, but not, you know?

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:49Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it's so long ago in terms of a human life.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:52Joe Rogan?

  But it's not that long when you think like, we went from 4,000 years ago to that, to large language models.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's pretty crazy.

• 50:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, quantum computing.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, even if you look at the, I mean, language systems develop. Paleohebra turns into what we saw in the Dead Sea Scrolls, whereas Paleohebra is a little bit different than what we eventually see in the Dead Sea Scrolls, because there's like a development within the language. And then Modern Hebrew adopts the Hebrew in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but Modern Hebrew has.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  It has vowels where that were developed in the Middle Ages to to figure out how to pronounce it because basically ancient Hebrew doesn't have a vowel system in its writing that's overly comprehensive and so in the Middle Ages when you have these groups of Jews who are copying these Hebrew scriptures who aren't speaking it as much as they're reading it you gotta figure out how to pronounce it as because vowels make a difference but if if you took all the vowels out of English if you're a natural English reader you could probably figure out what was what if you're looking at the page and so in the Middle Ages the

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Maseratic scribes come up with these vowel pointing systems and that's what you see when you like look at a Hebrew Bible today is you see these these vowels and sometimes like the introduction or removal of the vowel is significant in the changing of the words.

• 52:20Joe Rogan?

  It's it's also interesting and you know we're kind of seeing language change written language while right now in this current era because of the because of the we've kind of abandoned cursive.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:37Joe Rogan?

  So if people in the future go to read ancient scripts of of human beings that lived in the 20th century they'll be like what is this shit?

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:47Joe Rogan?

  And then you know there wasn't a lot of it like there's no cursive on the internet. I mean there's cursive on the internet but I mean no websites are written in cursive or very few at least.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:56Joe Rogan?

  It's all printed. And so they've essentially in school stopped teaching most classes don't teach cursive. Like we all learned cursive as children it was the way you could write things quicker.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:07Joe Rogan?

  And then once printing and typewriters and computers became ubiquitous like it's gone.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:12Joe Rogan?

  And everybody's just texting.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well let's hope people in the future are still able to read the Declaration of Independence.

• 53:18Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Like because that's what it was written in, right?

• 53:20Joe Rogan?

  Right, yeah. That's really interesting, right? Because if you did were not taught that and then you went to read that and you said this is English like what are you talking about like I recognize a few of these letters but it's so vastly different than the printed text.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, language models are wild.

• 53:36Joe Rogan?

  Wild.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:38Joe Rogan?

  The whole thing is wild that people figured out how to associate sounds with little symbols and then they did completely different shit in Korea with completely different shit in Russia.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:48Joe Rogan?

  It's it's so fascinating.

• 53:51Joe Rogan?

  And then you have to have these experts who can translate these things and you're dependent upon them forever, which that was what Lutheranism was all about, right? Like Martin Luther wanted to have phonetic translations of the Bible. And there was a lot of resistance to that because the people that knew how to read Latin were like, hey, hey, slow down.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, partly, I mean, there were proto Reformers before Luther. Were there guys like, like, uh, Wycliffe? So John Wycliffe and, um, uh, William Tyndale both translated the Bible, uh, parts of the Bible into English and they predated. I mean, and they weren't very popular for it either. I mean, Wycliffe was declared a heretic and then his body was exhumed and burned because of the, of, of the work that he did. But yeah.

• 54:32Joe Rogan?

  Burned him after he was already dead.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, Tyndale's, um, Tyndale's line was that he wanted, I believe it was Tyndale. It was either Wycliffe or Tyndale. My friends who are specialists in the, specialists in this are gonna get mad at me for this. But, um, one of those two guys said that they wanted the plowboy to be able to read the Bible and know it as well as the priests. And so that's, that was their motivation is that they're like, you know, public education for literacy in these areas was largely because they just wanted people to read the Bible. But that was a big motivation behind Luther was he's like, I'm gonna translate this thing into German. Because part of his kind of kicking off of the, what we call the Protestant Reformation was that he read the Bible in Greek.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Cause there was a guy named Desiderius Erasmus who, uh, was a, they called them humanists, but they, it means something different than now. Humanists were like scholars who were trying to figure out the entirety of human knowledge up until that point.

• 55:32Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Like Renaissance men, kinda, right? So Desiderius Erasmus is like one of the last true Renaissance men. But he was compiling and he, he produced the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament. And so he comes out with this printed edition of the Greek New Testament and Luther gets his hand, his hands on it. And so he's reading that and he notices that in Matthew's Gospel, the word that's in the Latin is penitentium agite, do penance. In Greek is metanoiaite, which is repentance. And the church was using this as like, you need to do penance. You need to, you know, do all of this stuff to show that you're sorry. And part of that was, you know, paying the church. And Luther reads this and he goes, hey, guys.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  This means something different. This means repentance. It means changing your mind. It doesn't mean like to actually do things. And so part of his motivation is like, the Latin isn't reflecting, at least at the point that Latin had developed in that day. Like, maybe when Jerome translates the Latin Vulgate back in the fourth century, and it's called the Vulgate because Vulgata means like, regular. Like, if you think of vulgar, right? It's just a regular people language. Part of the reason was that in the fourth century, very few people were reading Greek. They were reading Latin. And so they're like, hey, Jerome, you need to produce a Bible in Latin, because nobody can read the Bible anymore.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  And so he produces the Latin Vulgate. And ironically, by the time you get to Luther, a thousand years later, no one can read Latin, and they're all using the Vulgate.

• 57:10Joe Rogan?

  Wow, that is fascinating. Wow.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  And even Erasmus was, so he dedicates his first few additions to the Pope, because he knows that the Pope is gonna get wind that he's producing Greek New Testament, New Testaments, and the Church is using the Latin. And he's risking his life. So if he dedicates it to the Pope, maybe the Pope will take it easy on him.

• 57:34Joe Rogan?

  Did it work?

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it did.

• 57:36Joe Rogan?

  Nice, a little flattery.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. See, it goes a long way.

• 57:39Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's part of the problem, right? Is that you're dealing with these priests, you're dealing with human beings. And when human beings are the sole purveyors of truth, that becomes a problem. It's power. It's too much power. Most people suck at power. They're just, it just makes them drunk with it, and they abuse it. And you see that in many, many religions. You see that in cults, you know? For instance, is the best example of it. Because, you know, like, when you know the person who created this thing, and you know this person is fucking insane, and you have a bunch of people that follow them.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  They're just looking out for your best interest, Jim. Right? They just, they just wanna make sure you're doing the right thing.

• 58:21Joe Rogan?

  Did you see Wild Wild Country?

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 58:23Joe Rogan?

  It's fucking awesome.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Unfortunately.

• 58:25Joe Rogan?

  It's so good. It's so crazy. I mean, I'm so glad I wasn't there and a part of it, but it... They all look good in the beginning. That's what's really wild. All these cult documentaries, all these exposes, in the beginning, like, these people haven't made. They're all eating together and they have community and they're praying together and they seem wonderfully happy.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. One of the ways my wife and I bond, we have very different tastes in movies, but we, there's enough crossover that are like, our guilty pleasure is cult documentaries.

• 58:55Joe Rogan?

  I love them.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  They're so interesting.

• 58:57Joe Rogan?

  I love them because there's something about people like absolutely believing things that's so appealing to me. I don't know why that is. Like, I like watching Islamic scholars speak, you know, with like full confidence that their, their version of truth is truth. I'm just interested in that mindset. I just, I think it's a, like a very deeply cut groove in the human psyche that people can fall into. And when, but when there's a cult, it's like, God, it's so obvious. Like, there's the guy. That's the guy. Like, here's a good example. There's a documentary called Holy Hell.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 59:35Joe Rogan?

  And you know that.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:36Joe Rogan?

  I bought the building that Holy Hell was, like, the, the, the actual theater that this guy had built. It's a beautiful theater that he had his followers build so he can dance in front of them. That was gonna be the comedy mothership, the first version of it.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 59:53Joe Rogan?

  So I was under contract for that building. It fell apart. Thank, thank baby Jesus. Thank somebody. Thank Allah. Thank somebody. And then we found this new place on Sixth Street. But that documentary is so fascinating because you, you can see this guy who is a gay porn star and a hypnotist.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  So wild.

• 1:00:14Joe Rogan?

  Take a bunch of really lost people and send them down this crazy road and then eventually it all falls apart and...

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  You know what's interesting about that is I have less of a problem with the objective truth claims and more of a problem with them saying, "But don't look into it." Like, don't test it. Like, what I say goes, and you're not allowed to explore it. Like, talking about the Mormon church, they recently did this thing where they're like, "You don't need to go on the internet, and you don't need to..."

• 1:00:42Joe Rogan?

  Don't watch the Book of Mormon.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, guys, I don't think you realize what you're sounding like when you come across in that way.

• 1:00:49Joe Rogan?

  Mormons are the nicest cult members. They're the nicest people. They really are so nice. I love them. I mean, Mormons that I've met have been so friendly, they're so family-oriented.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:01:01Joe Rogan?

  There's something, I mean, it's like really easy to like, think, "These are great people, I'll join them."

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  We know why they're family-oriented, right?

• 1:01:08Joe Rogan?

  Why?

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Is because in what Joseph Smith wrote, there's an idea that everybody's soul pre-exists, and you were born as a spirit child in a previous life, and the reason you need to have children is you need to bring those people's souls into existence. And so, there's like, because you have a heavenly father and a heavenly mother, and you're all children of God in the actual, like, physical sense, and that the pursuit is exaltation, where you will be a god on your own planet, if you've done everything right.

• 1:01:40Joe Rogan?

  You get your own planet, which is pretty dope.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  You get your own planet. And this is so, Joseph Smith, in the King's Fall at Funeral Discourse, this is what he wrote, this is where he like formulated this idea, where God, the Father, has a body as tangible as ours, of flesh and blood, and that he lived on another planet, and he was, you know, circled around this star called Kolab, and that if you do everything right, you will also be the god on your own planet. And so, you gotta encourage people to have kids, because you're pulling those spirit babies out of the spiritual realm. But you're right, they are, they're incredibly nice people.

• 1:02:21Joe Rogan?

  The nicest.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  The nicest.

• 1:02:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's a really great cult, you know? I mean, or religion, whatever, I mean, I used to have a joke in my act that, "A cult is fake, and it's made by one guy, that guy invented it. In a religion, that guy's dead." This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right, JoeRogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links.

• 1:03:06Joe Rogan?

  Head to Squarespace.com/Rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code ROGEN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This episode is brought to you by NOCO. You're miles from home, you turn the key, nothing. Dead battery. Normally, that means finding another car, someone willing to give you a jump, and dealing with old jumper cables. But what if you didn't need any of that? Keep a NOCO portable jump starter in your glove box and jump start your car yourself. No cables, no second vehicle, no waiting for help. It also works as a power bank and has a built-in LED flashlight. NOCO, the end of jumper cables.

• 1:03:50Joe Rogan?

  Use code ROGEN10 for 10% off select jump starters at NO.co.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Hmm. There might be something to that.

• 1:04:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and some, for sure. But the question to me is always, what were they originally trying to do?

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:10Joe Rogan?

  What was it based on? What, in the beginning, there was light? What is all of that?

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:16Joe Rogan?

  What are those stories?

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18Joe Rogan?

  And when you take these stories and you are telling them for so long, that's why the book of Isaiah, what you were telling me, is so fascinating, that a thousand years later.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:28Joe Rogan?

  You have the exact translation of this, at a time where most people were illiterate.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, for, I mean, it's only really been recently that we have the levels of literacy that we have today. I mean, this is part of the reason why you have these long spans of time between like when people live and then the ancient biographies that start to pop up about them is because most people are just illiterate.

• 1:04:50Joe Rogan?

  But imagine how crazy that is, that something in a time where there's no printed press and something that had been passed on for so long as an oral tradition is exact word for word written, you find in a cave in Qumran.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Joe Rogan?

  And then the same thing you get in the English translation of the Bible today. That's nuts.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, up until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament manuscripts predated the Old Testament manuscripts by a long shot.

• 1:05:19Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, because the Christians were, the Christians were less discerning in their proliferation of written documents. So the Jews had this whole system where you had to be a trained scribe and they were very, very careful with the procedures that you went through, whereas the Christians were like, we want to get this thing out as fast as we can, as, you know, often as we can, which had a lot of benefits in that like their goal was a proselytization and evangelism and that worked. But the downside of it was that you get really messy copies, where you have copies all over the place, but human

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  error gets involved with like spelling differences and, you know, additions, deletions, mostly for completely like understandable reasons. But we actually have manuscripts where we know the person copied it and they didn't know how to read it because they make mistakes that you wouldn't make if you knew how to copy. There's this really great example of a guy who copies, I believe it's the genealogy of Matthew, and he, he's looking at a manuscript that has Two columns and he's copying it from left to right and he's copying it like this. Whereas it's like the column you go down and then the next column. So in the genealogy of Jesus, he's got all the wrong people begetting all the wrong people.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  And you're like, you wouldn't, you wouldn't do this if you knew how to read. Because God is in the middle of the genealogy. So like that kind of thing.

• 1:06:50Joe Rogan?

  That is a real problem.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  That is a real problem. But ironically, with the, the Christian manuscripts, because we have so many. It's actually because of the mistakes that we're able to trace the text back with a high degree of confidence. Because if you have copies that are floating around, you know, North Africa and places like Egypt. And then you have copies in Syria and you have copies out into Asia and into Europe and the British Isles. When mistakes pop up, they're geographically located. And because you have so many, you can compare and contrast them and figure out, okay, well, this obviously happened here at this time. And you can pinpoint those things. So this is a field called textual criticism.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  Where you, and we do this with all ancient documents, like the Bible is a, a more kind of fleshed out field of textual criticism because we have so many manuscripts. But we do it with, you know, Marcus Aurelius. We even do it with Shakespeare with the different copies. Because if you only have one copy, you have to trust that the person who copied that got it right.

• 1:07:56Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which is the issue that we have for the Beowulf. We only have one copy of Beowulf. And so we don't know what it looked like prior to that. So we just kind of accept that, okay, this is Beowulf. Like there's no way to compare and contrast the, the tradition of the manuscripts of Beowulf.

• 1:08:17Joe Rogan?

  God, when you're saying this about taking copied versions of it and comparing errors and going back and like, you're talking about so much time.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Joe Rogan?

  So much research.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  It's legwork.

• 1:08:30Joe Rogan?

  So much legwork.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and fortunately, like in the modern era, we get computers involved. And that cuts out a lot of the like just manpower.

• 1:08:41Joe Rogan?

  I would like to see AI get to the bottom of all this.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Well, there's an interesting so in Germany, at the the Center for the Study of of New Testament Research in Münster, there actually it's called CBGM, the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method. And it's tracing not manuscripts, but readings within manuscripts and finding the relationships between the different ones by like computer models. And so they are actually get so this is actually the way that like modern era textual criticism is being done is with these these language models that operate on tracing readings and how certain readings are related to one another, which has allowed us to do things like look

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  at fourth century manuscripts and actually see that their readings come hundreds of years earlier in other manuscripts that we have in collections. So one of the the clearest examples of this is there's a manuscript in the fourth century called Codex Vaticanus, because it happens to be in the Vatican right now. And there is a manuscript from the second century, which has the exact same scribal conventions that Codex Vaticanus does in particular readings. And so we know for a fact that the scribes who created Vaticanus did not have, I think it's P75, which is a Papyrus 75, but they had some sort of collection of manuscripts that were similar.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  And so we can have confidence that the readings, although they're fourth century in particular areas of Codex Vaticanus, are actually second century in their origination. And a large part of this is because of these like models that the computers got involved in.

• 1:10:21Joe Rogan?

  Wow, that is so fascinating. Now, when they're going over things like ancient Sumerian and they're reading things like the Epic of Gilgamesh. Like, if we can't say, we don't know how to make those words. We don't know what they sounded like. How are they translating it into an English version? Like, when you, like, one of the things that's been compared quite a bit is the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah and the ark. The Great Flood. There seems to be some parallels.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Joe Rogan?

  Like, how close is it?

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  In some ways, it's very close, and in other ways, it's not. So, that's the story of Upnupishthim, which is kind of a side story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh is, he realizes his mortality and he's trying to find eternal life. And there's this guy Upnupishthim, who he runs into, who tells him this story of the gods gifted him with eternal life because he saved all the animals on a boat. And so, there are actually parallels between that and, say, the Genesis 6 Noah ark story. In, like, making a big boat, putting all the animals on it, and then they get off and they make a sacrifice to, in his case, the gods in the Bible, God. And I think what you're looking at there is probably a cultural remembrance of something that did take place.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  And so, you have these adjacent cultures who, they're existing within this framework of the ancient Near East, and you're seeing these kind of parallel echoes of things that actually did happen. So, there are definite parallels, but I think sometimes people look at those and they overplay that. So, one of the examples I often give is Advil and arsenic both come in pill form and have an A on the bottle. But it's not the similarities that matter in that case, it's the differences. And so, if you look at the differences, there are significant differences in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Upnupishthim story and the Genesis 6 story. If, for no other reason than, the Noah ark story is a very small part of the book of Genesis.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  And the story of Upnupishthim in the Epic of Gilgamesh is a little bit more stretched out. It has more to do with the theme of what Gilgamesh is doing in his epic. So, but there are obviously parallels between that because these are both ancient Near Eastern stories, and they're products of their day. In the same way that I think you see parallels between some of the New Testament gospels and other ancient Greco-Roman biography, in that, you know, these are products of ancient history, and so they're gonna look like other ancient historical writings that kind of parallel around that. Does that make sense?

• 1:13:07Joe Rogan?

  No, it does make sense. It's just, when you're talking about the oldest of old stories, it's always so interesting to wonder, like, when, what was, like, when they're taking these oral traditions, like, like, Socrates is famous for saying that he didn't believe that you should write things.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, make people lazy.

• 1:13:29Joe Rogan?

  Right, it makes you lazy. You need to learn how to remember things. You need to exercise your memory, which is so fascinating when you think that there must have been people that were in charge of memorizing these oral traditions.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:43Joe Rogan?

  And when you're talking about, particularly if you're talking about the Old Testament, the series of writings, like, these are long stories that someone had to remember and pass on to generations. So, the thing with me was always like, well, what was the origin of all this? Like, what was the first version of it? And where the hell did it come from? And what was it? What was going on? Where these people felt like, in this time of incredibly difficult survival, right? You're essentially, you're hunter-gatherers, right? We're talking about thousands of years ago. And these people took great time and made great effort to preserve these stories.

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 1:14:27Joe Rogan?

  And then there's always human error, right? There's human error, as you were saying, with transcription and trying to decipher things and writing things down where you don't really speak the language. You gotta wonder, like, how much did we lose in this oral tradition? Like, what was the original story? And what were they trying to convey?

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that there's an aspect of, like, a message that's trying to be communicated. I mean, we are modern people of the Enlightenment. So, we almost have a perspective where we want something to be very, like, exhaustive, that ancient writers didn't have those same sort of conventions. Or, so they're going to capitalize on certain...

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  Ideas and concepts for the purpose of when someone tells you a story, you don't memorize everything. Right. You remember, this is, you go to university, you write notes, right? The people who are writing everything the professor is saying, word for word, probably not the people who are going to remember what the professor says as well as the people who write down the main things. And when you write down the main things, the main points, without all of the other stuff that kinda is, is just, it's icing, then you get the main idea more. Ancient writers talk about this. So there's a guy named Quintilian, who exists in the first century B.C. And there's this, this series of writings that we call Pro Gymnasmata, which are basically

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  like, how do you do good writing? So he's training people, maybe even individuals like Plutarch, who is one of the best-known ancient biographers, and saying like, it's just as important what you don't say as to what you do say. Because you don't want to, A, writing in the ancient world is expensive, really expensive, and B, you want to make sure that your audience is actually getting the message that you want to convey. And so this is something that when you read like, German scholars, biblical scholars of

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  the 19th and 20th century, or even prior to that, like 18th, 19th century, they look at the Gospels and they're like, this isn't biography, because it's not capitalizing on Jesus's childhood. And we all know that good biographies tell about your childhood and psychologize and these sorts of things. Whereas if you look at some of these ancient writers who are talking about how you should write biography, they say, if there's nothing in their childhood that's that significant, don't write it. It's going to distract from, like, if there is something, say like, Jesus's birth, or Luke tells a story when he's 12 of Jesus, when he goes with Mary and Joseph and, you

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  know, Mary and Joseph lose the Son of God, and they start going home without him, and they're like, where's Jesus? And they gotta go back to Jerusalem. That's a significant story, and so it appears that Luke includes it because there's a significant reason to include that. But they wouldn't have had any... Problem with leaving out large portions of someone's life if it didn't contribute to what the ultimate goal of telling that person's life was.

• 1:17:45Joe Rogan?

  I think what's also what's important is we have to try, as difficult as it might be, to put our minds in the context of people who lived in a time where most people were illiterate. And you're telling these parables, you're telling these stories as an oral tradition, and that they have a different mindset in terms of the distribution of information.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:18:10Joe Rogan?

  And what the significance of these things are.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, these are documents, well, in terms of the Bible, like, as someone who identifies as a Christian, I would say that these are, the Bible is written for you, but it wasn't written to you. It had a completely different original audience.

• 1:18:27Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  But you should do your best at figuring out who it was written to and how that made a difference to them, because then the application is gonna come out even clearer for you. And that should be ultimately, you know, the goal of everyone who's looking at ancient documents. Who was the original audience? How would they have understood it?

• 1:18:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  Because you can read all sorts of things, because of your modern conventions, into what someone is talking about in the ancient world, and completely bypass what they're actually trying to convey in their intention.

• 1:18:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and again, it's almost impossible to put your mind completely into the context of these people that were living then. It's almost impossible to imagine the way they viewed the world and the way they communicated. You know, and when you're dealing with, like, really old stuff, like the Sumerian text, and then people have translations of it, which can be fantastical, like the Zecharias Hitchens stuff, it's like, you have to be a scholar in ancient Sumerian and understand the origins of language, and you have to, and then still, there's massive debate, there's a whole website called SitinIsWrong.com.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Joe Rogan?

  But he's the most fun.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  He's fun? I'm not convinced he could read Sumerian either.

• 1:19:46Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47Joe Rogan?

  I think he was bullshitting.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt. He just, he takes so many liberties with the stuff he's commenting on that I have a hard time getting my head around.

• 1:20:00Joe Rogan?

  So if he couldn't read it, where would he be getting his translations?

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  From actual translations.

• 1:20:06Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so he would take these translations and then make his own assumptions and his own interpretation? Is that what it is?

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think to a certain degree. I mean, even something like Nabiru is not a Sumerian word. It's an Akkadian word. But he makes a big deal about it being related to Sumerian. And it is a word that appears within Akkadian.

• 1:20:29Joe Rogan?

  And Akkadian is what time period?

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  Akkadian is just after. So it exists kind of in a crossover, where Sumerian predates Akkadian, but Akkadian develops alongside. And then, you know, as cultures like the Assyrians come into power and kind of subvert the Sumerians.

• 1:20:46Joe Rogan?

  So all this Sumerian writing is what? What's the oldest timeline? Like 5,000, 6,000?

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, around that. I think like 4 to 5,000 years ago.

• 1:20:58Joe Rogan?

  Okay. And then Akkadian is when?

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  There's some overlap, but it develops into a language like just after, like the rise. And Akkadian develops into like, it has stages. And then you have like Babylonian, Proto-Babylonian, Persian, Old Persian, Elamite as we look at.

• 1:21:21Joe Rogan?

  We don't have, there's no writing at all at Gobekli Tepe, correct? It's all just iconography.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, or at least that we've figured out that looks like writing. Yeah, I'm really hoping to go to Gobekli Tepe.

• 1:21:34Joe Rogan?

  What's your take on this whole reluctance to further excavate? And how they have such a small amount of the site? It's only 5% that's been uncovered, but through Li Darr, they're aware there's a bunch more.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not an archaeologist. I have friends who are archaeologists, and I think it's... Archaeology is tricky because so much of archaeology is dependent on governments and institutions and funding. That getting mad at archaeologists for not excavating is kind of like getting mad at construction workers for not fixing your potholes.

• 1:22:09Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  Where it's like, yeah, like, they're kind of doing the last stage. So, yeah, I mean, I think there's certainly incentive by the Turkish government to want to capitalize on that being a tourist destination. And you really need to safeguard archaeological excavations. Because otherwise, it's, it's being compromised.

• 1:22:34Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  And like pillaging and, and stuff like that, it happens. I mean, when I was in Egypt two summers ago, and you go to the Valley of the Kings, they've got security cameras up everywhere. Because there are tombs there that we still haven't discovered. And so they're like, we don't want people digging around in here looking for.

• 1:22:54Joe Rogan?

  Well, they've lost so much over their history.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  Oh, we've only discovered 1% of ancient Egypt.

• 1:22:59Joe Rogan?

  That's so nuts.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  1%. Isn't that crazy?

• 1:23:03Joe Rogan?

  That is the nuttiest part of all of history is Egypt to me. I, I still have not been.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  You gotta go.

• 1:23:09Joe Rogan?

  I know, I almost, I almost went in December, I just couldn't find the time, I'm just too damn busy. I will though, I will, I definitely will. But it is the, to me, the nuttiest time in history because good luck explaining the Great Pyramid. Good luck.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  And, and it's such a big timeframe. Like, there's a thousand years between the pyramids being built and Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings.

• 1:23:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  A thousand years.

• 1:23:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, nuts.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  It's so crazy. Egypt is one of the wildest places you'll ever go.

• 1:23:37Joe Rogan?

  Well, it just doesn't make sense. It's like, how? What, what were you guys using? What were you doing? How'd you do it? How'd you measure it? How'd you figure it out?

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've been to Greece, right?

• 1:23:46Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  Have you been to Jordan?

• 1:23:47Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  Oh, you gotta go see Petra.

• 1:23:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Petra's phenomenal.

• 1:23:51Joe Rogan?

  Jordan was, I mean, Greece rather was fantastic.

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  They're all crazy.

• 1:23:54Joe Rogan?

  God, it's just like, when you're just there in the presence of these things and just trying to put your brain back thousands of years. And imagine what society was like back then.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  It's crazy. It's crazy, Egypt was crazy because Egypt is like Greece in that you have like, you can go to the Pantheon and you see that kind of stuff, right? But.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  You go to Egypt and and there's 4,000 year old paint on the walls. And you're like, what? I can't I can't get paint to stay on my wall for 10 years. And it's it's almost exclusively because of the climate and it got buried in sand. But it's so wild. So.

• 1:24:36Joe Rogan?

  When you say that 1% of ancient Egypt has been discovered, what do you really mean by that?

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  Of the percentage of what we know that happened in in Egyptian history, 1% has been excavated in terms of what we can actually pull out of the ground and look at artifacts. So there's whole eras of pharaohs that we just, we don't know where they're buried. We like even when Tutankhamun was discovered, he was kind of a footnote in the pharaohs that we knew about at that time. And we didn't know he he was, you know, as extravagant, as rich as, you know, until we discovered his actual tomb. A lot of people at that time didn't even think it was he was worth looking into because we have these lists of pharaohs. And the thing with the pharaohs is that they're always trying to the next pharaoh is always trying to prove that he's the better one.

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  And this is why you go to Egypt and you find statues of Ramses everywhere. And part of it was because Ramses, I think it was Ramses the second, was he commissioned so many statues of himself because he's like, oh, I'm the best, I'm the greatest. And what they actually they couldn't keep up with the commissioning and they started actually rubbing off the names of previous pharaohs on statues and just putting Ramses on it.

• 1:25:51Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  Because he was just so you go like the from the top of Egypt to the bottom of Egypt and you're going to find statues of Ramses.

• 1:25:58Joe Rogan?

  He wanted to leave his mark.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  He wanted to leave and he did, right? Like it worked.

• 1:26:01Joe Rogan?

  We're talking about it now in 2024.

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:26:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that is nuts. So when you go there and you're in the presence of these things and you try to put yourself back into that time period, like what do you have you ever tried to think like what what was the motivation to make something as great as the the Pyramid of Giza, the Great Pyramid?

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  People definitely want to make their mark, right?

• 1:26:25Joe Rogan?

  Right, but that's a mark that just doesn't even make sense.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  There's something to that. I mean, if you think you're a god.

• 1:26:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  And, and you have this whole kind of worldview perspective of, and theology that, you know, you need to make something that, and bury yourself with all this crap because that's gonna make a difference in your afterlife, then you're gonna go big rather than going home, right? So, the perceptions of people in the ancient world are just so different. We got it so good right now.

• 1:27:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  Like longevity, health, food is just on a completely different scale. And so, the, the conventions of needing to make sure that, especially if you're like the richest guy around, that you tick off all the boxes, because you know you're gonna die, and you're probably gonna die sooner than you want to, sooner rather than later, and you have this whole perception of, well, you know, if I bury myself with all this stuff, and maybe even some of the people, we're just gonna kill them and include them too, because they're gonna help me out, that's gonna help me out in the afterlife.

• 1:27:41Joe Rogan?

  You need slaves in the afterlife if you're a pharaoh.

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course you do.

• 1:27:43Joe Rogan?

  You can't just kill by yourself.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  Why not, right?

• 1:27:45Joe Rogan?

  That's ridiculous.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:47Joe Rogan?

  So, Khufu's pyramid, what's the timeline that he was even in power?

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  I don't know, I'm, I'm not an Egyptologist, or an archaeologist necessarily, but he was, I think that was, what, like 4,000 years ago? We only really have a tiny little statue of him. We don't actually have that much about him.

• 1:28:08Joe Rogan?

  I guess he was busy making a pyramid.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  So they say, right?

• 1:28:12Joe Rogan?

  So they say.

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  Billy thinks different, but.

• 1:28:14Joe Rogan?

  Well, a lot of people think different, you know? That's what's interesting about it is, the, like, the archaeological argument that like Dr. Robert Schock makes about the water erosion in the Temple of the Sphinx.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:28Joe Rogan?

  That's a fascinating argument, because it does appear like that's water erosion. And that would put the timeline way, way back.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think even just looking at the Sphinx, you can tell that, no matter what your perspective is, you, you should entertain the idea, at minimum, that the head was built later.

• 1:28:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  Because it doesn't fit the body.

• 1:28:47Joe Rogan?

  It has much less erosion. But you could also attribute that to the different densities of the stone. Like, that's one of the things about these layers of limestone. It's like, some of them are much more porous and some, they erode easier.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:00Joe Rogan?

  You do see that.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:01Joe Rogan?

  You know, and I think they're doing a terrible disservice by covering the Sphinx with like, new stones. And, you know, they redid the paws and they're doing all that, like, my god, people, like, leave it alone. Like, leave it the way it is.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's this tricky balance between...

• 1:29:17Joe Rogan?

  Restoration and recreation.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:20Joe Rogan?

  Because they're in a recreation stage.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:22Joe Rogan?

  And it was, obviously, they're doing it with smaller stones, and it like, looks different. It's not the same thing. It's not what it initially was. It was carved from one piece of stone.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  Have you seen some of the restoration stuff that Saddam Hussein did?

• 1:29:34Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  In Iraq?

• 1:29:35Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  Jamie, you gotta pull up the Ziggurat at Ur.

• 1:29:38Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  So Saddam Hussein was a bit of a nut job, but he believed, as, this is as far as I understand it, that he was the recreation of Nebuchadnezzar.

• 1:29:47Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  So he did all of this restorative work in, uh, in Iraq, on things like the walls of Babylon. And in Ur, he rebuilt the Ziggurat.

• 1:29:59Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  So if you look at that picture over there, this is 1932 and 2022, um, that's what he did. Is he basically tried to rebuild this entire thing.

• 1:30:08Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  And it's amazing. I am trying hard to get to Iraq, because I wanna, I wanna see this thing. Interestingly enough...

• 1:30:16Joe Rogan?

  Don't die.

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:17Joe Rogan?

  Don't die, dude. Don't go over there.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  So that's actually Ur.

• 1:30:20Joe Rogan?

  So, I'm sorry, but that, so this is the, this is the modern version with the small bricks. The original version, was it all carved from one piece?

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  No, it would've been clay bricks.

• 1:30:30Joe Rogan?

  So is, these were clay bricks. So what do we, the, can you, Jamie, can you go back to the 1930 image, please? So we could see what it looked like. God, I would rather just have that. You know, I mean, I wanna see what it looked like and what it looks like all these years later. I don't wanna see a recreation, which is very similar to what they've done to the Sphinx.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Sphinx, even when I was in Egypt, they were doing some work in like.

• 1:30:56Joe Rogan?

  Can you, Jamie, can you go to the rehabilitation of the Sphinx or whatever they would call it?

• 1:31:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, they just clicked on like the ruins of it. I was gonna go back to the 30s or 40s or something.

• 1:31:06Joe Rogan?

  Well, the restoration part is the interesting part, like you could see the restoration. If you go to just Google restoration of the Sphinx, pause.

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  Well, and they're talking about putting in casing stones on the pyramid.

• 1:31:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I've heard that too. God, don't do that.

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  I don't think they should do that either.

• 1:31:22Joe Rogan?

  No, you shouldn't do anything. I mean, obviously, they took the original casing stones off, but that's also history. So now you can see like the new paws. Well, that's, that seems like the difference between buried and unburied.

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:37Joe Rogan?

  So like even when Napoleon came upon, like right there, like isn't that restored?

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, cuz it was, there was much more erosion than, Napoleon came upon it, it was buried, right?

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  I think so. I think that was the case.

• 1:31:49Joe Rogan?

  Over time, because you're dealing with these crazy sandstorms, over time, everything gets kinda buried.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  Oh, so much of it is under sand for so long. Like the Temple of, the Mortuary Temple of Hachepsoth was mostly under sand for a long, long time.

• 1:32:05Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  Before they like uncovered it. Unfortunately, like the aridness of Egypt preserves things like crazy.

• 1:32:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, see, that's what the paws look like now. That's a disaster. That's so gross. Um, when, you know. This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits, we enter another season of change. Time to shift gears, drop the dead weight, and upgrade the wardrobe for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change: your phone. The smartest upgrade this season isn't a new phone, it's a better wireless plan. Switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $20. Twenty-five dollars a month. That means keeping the phone you already have, ditching your overpriced phone bill, and pocketing some savings for yourself.

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• 1:34:05Joe Rogan?

  If you do take that timeline, the Robert Shock timeline, and you say, okay, so you're talking about thousands of years of rainfall. You have to go back to when there was rainfall in the Nile Valley. So now you're back like nine thousand years. Like, one of the more interesting things about hieroglyphs and the interpretations of it is that the ancient hieroglyphs, well, the ancient versions of pharaohs, rather. Like, when they go back, you know, past the established dates of 2,500 B.C. and before that, you get to like 30,000 years ago. And then they say that these are myth. And these are not, this is not representative of an actual history. This is some sort of a mythical history.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, numbers are tricky in ancient languages because...

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  It's not entirely clear whether numbers are meant to be representational.

• 1:34:53Joe Rogan?

  Is that like why they said that Noah lived 600 years old?

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's part of it. I mean, you have that, and you have the Sumerian king lists, which have people living thousands of years, hundreds and thousands of years too. And I mean, there are some interesting academic articles on like the probability of the numbers that come up in those, because we have a, we have a base 10 counting system because we count our fingers. Ancient Near Eastern cultures like the Babylonians, the Akadians, the Assyrians, they had a base 12 counting system because they would count each hinge, or whatever you call these, like spaces, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

• 1:35:32Joe Rogan?

  There's different joints of the finger.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, the joints, that's what I was looking for.

• 1:35:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  And so that's why we have 360 degrees in a circle, 365 days in a year. Like, this comes from the Mesopotamian counting conventions. And you look at some of these lists, and they're operational and, and all divisible by like 12 and 60, and you're like, what's going on here? So not all of them, but enough of them where it's statistically impossible. And I don't totally know what to make of those things, because you do have the genealogies, I believe it's Genesis, Chapter 4 and Genesis, Chapter 11, where they're all divisible by these types of numbers that were very common in the Ancient Near East. They're not random, whereas if you look at the, the genealogies later in like Chronicles

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  and Kings of the, the ages of the Israelite kings, they're random. And so I, it's just like, what do we do with that?

• 1:36:28Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  Because numbers are also far more representational, which is why we see numbers like 12, and 40, and 7 come up in the Bible, but also other Ancient Near Eastern literature. Like, there are certain numbers in Egyptian society that also were seen as like perfect numbers, or like...

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  Numbers that you wanted to incorporate?

• 1:36:52Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:36:53Joe Rogan?

  The, what is, what's the earliest interpretation of calendars? Like, what is, what is the earliest where they did decide what a year was?

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  I have no idea.

• 1:37:06Joe Rogan?

  Because you gotta imagine, if you're, you know, the average lifespan wasn't so good back then.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:11Joe Rogan?

  A lot of people got infected, died of war, famine, all these things. It would take quite a long time for people to figure out what a year was.

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:21Joe Rogan?

  If you have no, you're, you take, I mean, we're going thousands and thousands of years ago. We have to establish like, okay, a day is, let's put this stick in the ground. When the shadow is here, this is where we start.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:32Joe Rogan?

  And the shadow goes all the way around like that, okay, now, maybe we can like, mark these off, okay? Now we've got a sundial.

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  And there are different timekeeping conventions, depending on society. Like, ancient Jews had a different timekeeping convention than ancient Romans. And so, that's why you see like, in Genesis chapter one, it talks about there being evening and there being morning. Is because, well, Jews today, right? You start the Sabbath on sundown the day before, right? So that's why, it's because there's, there's different cycles? And so, we go on a 24-hour time system. But ancient Jews had a different convention of that, ancient Romans had a different convention of that, ancient, you know, Mesopotamian cultures had their own kind of conventions about these things. And calendars were all over the place.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  In, in, you know, when you get to the Julian calendar and they're like, we gotta, we gotta standardize this thing because everybody's operating on a different, you know, the Julian calendar and then the Gregorian calendar.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  Ancient timekeeping is very inexact and very messy. And so, you kinda gotta take certain things with a grain of salt.

• 1:38:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  In terms of that, but, yeah, ancient calendars, I don't even know, I know that actually the, talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The group in Qumran, who were like, they were a sectarian group of Jews.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Who believed that the Jews in Jerusalem had basically capitulated and were not holy enough. And part of their reasoning is that they believe they have a perfect calendar. And so they use a different calendar that doesn't have to do things like incorporate an extra month every certain number of years because you know their their thing is not perfect. And part of their reasoning as to why they're like the chosen is that they have a timekeeping system that they say is perfect.

• 1:39:18Joe Rogan?

  Many cultures used a 13 month calendar, right? Like, what was the logic behind that? Does that work?

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:39:29Joe Rogan?

  The idea was 13 months, 28 days each month, and you wouldn't have to have leap years and all that shit.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:36Joe Rogan?

  Archaeologists, okay, there it is. World oldest calendar, 12,000 years old.

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's wild.

• 1:39:41Joe Rogan?

  So it is on Gobekli Tepe. Oh, the ancient carvings of the sun, moon, and various constellations sits on a pillar. Gobekli Tepe, 12,000 years old. Researchers believe the ancient people used a so-called loony solar calendar to mark the changing of the seasons.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:57Joe Rogan?

  Interesting. So it was at least representative of the fact that we know when the days start getting shorter, it starts getting colder, and then, okay, and then and then it warms up again, the days start getting longer.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  This is why solstices are so key in like most of human history.

• 1:40:14Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  It's because you gotta figure out like, what's a marker point?

• 1:40:17Joe Rogan?

  Right. Which is one of the things that's so fascinating about some of the constructions of the pyramid, where on the summer solstice, these pillars line up so perfectly that the light shines straight down these hallways and illuminates everything.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:40:32Joe Rogan?

  How did you guys nail that?

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, just because they're ancient doesn't mean they're stupid.

• 1:40:36Joe Rogan?

  Well, they're just brilliant. Yeah. They weren't just stupid, they were fucking brilliant. That's what's, I mean, they weren't just ancient. It's just so weird that people were so vastly more intelligent, at least in in terms of their ability to build things, than anyone else anywhere around there. That's what's so weird about Egypt to me. It's like There's amazing pieces of, like even ancient Greece is incredible, but I can kind of believe you did it. You know?

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:05Joe Rogan?

  When you deal with 2,300,000 stones in the Great Pyramid and some of them like 50 tons, 60 tons.

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  That's pretty, pretty crazy.

• 1:41:13Joe Rogan?

  From 500 miles away, like what did you do? How, how the hell did you do it?

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  I mean, there have been a lot of things that have been lost. We still, as far as I'm aware, don't know how the Romans made their concrete. That Roman concrete is like this thing that survives. They're made, they're able to make domes out of it.

• 1:41:30Joe Rogan?

  Well, you know about terra prata in the Amazon? Do you know about that?

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:41:34Joe Rogan?

  Oh, terra prata is their particular rich soil that is man-made soil.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, I did know. I do know about that.

• 1:41:42Joe Rogan?

  Combination of charcoal and bacteria and it's incredible.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:47Joe Rogan?

  And it's unbelievably fertile in terms of your ability to grow food on it. And they made it and we don't know how they did it.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Joe Rogan?

  And it's man-made stuff.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:57Joe Rogan?

  Which is so bananas. It's like a giant chunk of this stuff. That is all over the Amazon was made by people specifically to encourage the growth of plants.

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  I mean, this is why history gets me so excited.

• 1:42:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's so amazing. And it's so, it's so interesting too. I was watching something on YouTube yesterday about the mine culture. And the Aztecs, it was, I went on a deep dive when I started getting into like getting ready for this. But when you think about how many people existed back then. And then Europeans come and everybody dies. Everybody dies of disease. And it's like, how many people died? Like millions, millions of people died here, millions of people died there, like holy shit. And you go through like the, the story of the, the collapse of the Mayan civilization, the collapse of the Aztec civilization, like.

• 1:42:50Joe Rogan?

  The accounts that these priests had of visiting these Aztec markets. And how incredible they were, these people from Rome who'd come to visit the mines, like this is unbelievable, or the Aztecs rather. Like this is unbelievable how sophisticated they are. And then.

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  Gone.

• 1:43:09Joe Rogan?

  Everybody's dead.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  Dunzo.

• 1:43:11Joe Rogan?

  Just, you, you just gotta go, wow. How many times has this happened in history?

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:16Joe Rogan?

  Where people have visited places and brought their cooties and killed off a giant swath of the population. And one of the things that they're discovering now in the Amazon, which is so fascinating, is through use of lidar, you know, discovering like, oh my God, this was like all populated.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:29Joe Rogan?

  This whole thing was populated.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 1:43:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  The ground penetrating radar stuff.

• 1:43:33Joe Rogan?

  And the trees and all the, the rainforest is mostly from manmade agriculture.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's wild.

• 1:43:38Joe Rogan?

  Nuts.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  Wild.

• 1:43:40Joe Rogan?

  And this is all recent.

• 1:43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:41Joe Rogan?

  That they're figuring this out.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:43Joe Rogan?

  Which is also so fascinating about history is that it is a constant and never ending search.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:50Joe Rogan?

  And that even in today, with as much information as we have, you can pick up your phone and ask them, you know, when was Nero born? It'll tell you like instantaneously. We still don't have answers to a lot of really fascinating questions like the Olmecs or all these other civilizations, like who, where, where did they come from? Why, why do they look like this?

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:09Joe Rogan?

  Why'd they make these big stone heads? Stone heads, you know, or Stonehenge, it's another one, like Jesus, what is this?

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:16Joe Rogan?

  There, there's so many versions of that all over the world and it just, it, the search for our origins is one of the most human endeavors, one of the most, because to, to know that we are particularly unique. We're so different. We stand out from every other animal on this planet. And there, there's this crazy, wild war of, of biology where life is just eating life all around us. And we just got to some crazy place that far beyond any other creature that's on this planet.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:52Joe Rogan?

  And we did it in a bunch of different ways. We did it in a bunch of different ways all over the place with different scribbles and different icons and different gods and different things. And we're all wondering, like, which one, where did it start? What was the origin of all this? Like, what was the need to write these things down? What purpose did it serve to have these myths and legends and stories? Like, was it just to keep society together? Or was it to retell a very important story? That was a very unique thing that happened at the dawn of time?

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  And that's why you see, I mean, the literary comparison of ancient Near Eastern origin stories is like a really interesting thing to do. Because when you look at something like the Yenuma leash, which was the Babylonian creation story, and then you look at something like Genesis, Chapter 1, there are obvious crossovers with, like I said before, these ancient Near Eastern conventions. But then you can see that the author of Genesis is making these points that are actually rebutting something like the origin stories of the surrounding cultures that largely believe that matter is like eternal and the gods come out of the created world.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  And that there's this narrative of the battle that takes place where some gods fight against other gods and the world around us that we see and like human beings are the end result of this battle. And so they would read this on every Babylonian New Year. And one of the main themes was basically that like it's all chance. It's all a random mistake. You were created without purpose and intention because Tiamat gets destroyed. And she's the god that you know you come from. And then you read Genesis, Chapter 1, and it says, "In the beginning, God creates the heavens and the earth, and he makes it good." And there's this idea that like that's countercultural in the idea that the Babylonians did not think that the world was good.

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  And that like at every, at the end of every refrain, it's, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good, and then it's very good at the end. And that humanity in particular is created in the image of God. Like, that's a very, not just like kings, which a lot of ancient Near Eastern cultures believed that kings were created in the image of God, but that humanity in general is created in the image of God. And this idea of the Amago Day, that you're, that's why you're different. Like, why are you different from all the animals? Because you're given something that exemplifies of a unique quality. And then The ancient Near Eastern cultures that believe that, you know, the planets are gods

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  and that the sea is a god and that Genesis, chapter one, looks at that and it kind of subverts the expectations of the day in getting to this ultimate question of why are we here, what are we supposed to do while we're here and how do we get out of here? And it says that, no, there's purpose, there's meaning, there's intention. And actually, a lot of the things that you worship, it's pretty stupid because God created them.

• 1:47:59Joe Rogan?

  What is the original origin story, or the earliest, I should say, origin story?

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  Of?

• 1:48:06Joe Rogan?

  Of humanity.

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:48:08Joe Rogan?

  Would it be the Mesopotamians? Would it be the Sumerians? Like, who had the one that's the oldest?

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  I mean, the Enuma Leish is pretty old. There are a number of different variations. The problem is that we're largely relying on like our complete copies are coming in languages like Akkadian where the ones in Sumerian are very fragmentary. So like even the Epic of Gilgamesh, the copy that we have that kind of is the final, if you go and you read a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's going to be the one from, in Akkadian, from the Library of Asher Beni Paul. But the earlier versions in Sumerian don't even have the flood story in them.

• 1:48:46Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, and they're more pieced together. And we actually do have another flood story in the Atrocites, which appears to have been influenced, the Epic of Gilgamesh stories influenced by the Atrocites. But in terms of like written language, I guess it's the Enuma Leish. I wouldn't actually, I don't actually know what like the oldest, oldest one is. But you get a lot of these origin stories and they have these themes. We see it in the Bible, too. The ancient Near Eastern cultures were very preoccupied with chaos and order. And so it's all about kind of creating order out of the chaos of the world. And that's where I think you do see the parallels.

• 1:49:32Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's the establishment of society, right?

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and establishing chaos and certain things being representational of chaos within the created order, like the Bible included, but a lot of other ancient cultures saw things like the ocean as the embodiment of unpredictability and chaos. And so that's why you have, sea monsters are this very common depiction. The Leviathan in Job, which is this, you know, sea monster. And it's representational in a way of, because it appears actually in Babylonian literature too, the Leviathan.

• 1:50:12Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:50:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's encompassing chaos in the world. And the point of God bringing it up to Job in the book of Job is like, God has the ability to tame this thing. And even in the book of Revelation, at the end of the Bible, it says that in the new heavens and new earth, there will be no sea. And it's not because, you know, I had a friend who is Australian and we were kind of working through translating sections of Revelation, and he's like, hold on, there will be no sea. He's like, I'm Australian, I love the sea. And, but the point of that, though, is not necessarily that like the body of water is not going to exist. It's that the ocean, the sea, is so unpredictable.

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  You go out there and storms, you know, can come out of nowhere and you die.

• 1:51:01Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  And so there are these like motifs that are representational in the ancient world. And we see a lot of those in these creation stories.

• 1:51:09Joe Rogan?

  So would it be that the dangers of the sea would no longer exist?

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah, so the sea kind of working as an analogy of that which is unpredictable. And actually, there's a lot of concepts of the realm of the dead being in the sea that we see throughout this literature. If you read the book of Jonah. There's this kind of stylistic, which you miss when you read it in the English, but it's very apparent in the Hebrew, where Noah keeps going down. He goes down from his town to the dock, and then he goes down into the boat, and then he goes down into, you know, the inside of the boat. And then the storm happens, and then they throw him overboard, down into the sea, and down into the fish. And he, eventually, the fish takes him down into the depths of the sea.

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  And when Jonah prays, he says, "I cry out from the depths of Shael," which is the realm of the dead. So there is actually a form of Jewish interpretation where it argues that Jonah actually died and was resurrected when he was spit up by the fish. And it could be, because in the Gospels, Jesus says, all, the people are following him, and they keep asking him for miracles. Because they're like, "We saw you do miracles. Do more miracles for us." You know, "Come on, do a trick, do a trick, Jesus." And Jesus says, "The only miracle you're gonna get is the sign of Jonah. That just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, I will be in the belly of the earth three days and three nights." You know, prediction of his own death and resurrection.

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  But there is an argument within rabbinical literature that when Jonah says that he's crying out from the depths of Shael, it's because he's actually dead? And that's one interpretation. But another interpretation could just be that he saw and understood, as a person of his day, the depths of the ocean as where the dead people ended up anyways. Like, your soul gets, goes down into the chaos and the disorder of Shael, which is the realm of the dead.

• 1:53:07Joe Rogan?

  Is that where they disposed of bodies?

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  In the ocean?

• 1:53:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:53:11Joe Rogan?

  No?

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:53:13Joe Rogan?

  Vikings did, right? Didn't they, like, light boats on fire and push them out there?

• 1:53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:18Joe Rogan?

  But it wasn't a common practice amongst other civilizations?

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  Not that I know of. I mean, Jews would definitely, I mean, really ancient Jewish conventions of burial, you would just bury someone in the earth. And then by the time you got to Jesus's day, you had, like, family tombs and stuff.

• 1:53:33Joe Rogan?

  Well, there was an ancient hominid that's not human, and one of the things that they were so fascinated about was that they buried their dead.

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:53:44Joe Rogan?

  And that they did so in a cave. Do you remember that, Jamie? Do you remember who was discussing that with us? It was, uh, they did not think that this, uh, version of, uh, ancient primate was capable of these things. And then, um, they seemed to have confirmation through these, uh, very extensive cave systems. That there was at least one area where they would put their dead.

• 1:54:11Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:54:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And it was a difficult path to get to this, too.

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:54:17Joe Rogan?

  At least this is a very small hominid, and I think people have tried to make their way through it, and it's really hard. Like, some of these caves, you're like, basically crawling on your stomach, which is fucking terrifying. Cause people have died that way.

• 1:54:29Speaker 01

  Are you claustrophobic?

• 1:54:30Joe Rogan?

  No, I'm not claustrophobic. Not normal stuff.

• 1:54:33Speaker 01

  You just don't wanna crawl in a cave?

• 1:54:34Joe Rogan?

  I don't wanna crawl in the middle of the earth into something that's like 11 inches high.

• 1:54:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:40Joe Rogan?

  You're like squirming slowly, that's what they're doing.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:42Joe Rogan?

  Your body barely fits in there. And a guy died recently.

• 1:54:45Speaker 03

  Brian Maresco, I think.

• 1:54:46Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it was Brian, yes. That's right.

• 1:54:49Speaker 03

  Then, I'll pull it up, then Teleti Chamber.

• 1:54:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, so they've founded this ancient hominid, uh, which, you know, didn't really look like us.

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:00Joe Rogan?

  Was, uh, burying their dead.

• 1:55:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, burial conventions change over time. The ways that they're burying, like, in the ancient Israelite days are very different in the conventions than when you get to Jesus.

• 1:55:13Joe Rogan?

  Karen, it's archaeologists uncover evidence of intentional burial cave engravings by early human ancestor. What did that sucker look like? Um, so the Denaldi Chamber, what is the, uh, type of Homo na na na lalidi, right? Homo na lidi. Go, you Google that, see what they look like. Homo na lidi. What we think they looked like, right? Whoa, that's crazy.

• 1:55:41Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy. So as a Christian, what do you think about all this stuff? Like, what do you think about ancient hominids, Australopithecus, Neanderthals? Like, what was God up to with all this?

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not a scientist, so I gotta stay in my lane. I ultimately would be an advocate for intelligent design, where I would say that that God purposefully created humanity in a way... You had Stephen Meyer on, right?

• 1:56:15Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:56:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, I mean, he's one of those guys who talks about kind of the issues that he sees with

• 1:56:22Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:56:22Speaker 01

  evolution. And I think I have some of those issues, too. My friend Jonathan McClatchy is a biologist, and he does some really great presentations on the ways that he sees kind of the intricacies of Neanderthalian evolution as not quite explaining some of what's going on with things like the fossil record and some of the gaps that we have in there. When you talk about early hominids, I mean, ultimately, I think that there are aspects of the fact that there are ancient cultures, which, I mean, humanity obviously looks very different today than it did, you know, if we're going tens of thousands of years ago.

• 1:56:57Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  And so I think that there's a different kind of convention and understanding. But ultimately, I would ascribe to there being an original Adam and Eve, and that those are our, like, if you want to call them like our first parents, kind of thing. But there are other Christians who I would disagree with, but I think have interesting articulations of that in terms of theistic evolution. I disagree with them, but it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility to find explanations. I don't think the Bible is trying to explain how people came into existence in the same way that maybe we want it to.

• 1:57:37Speaker 01

  And a lot of people read the origin stories in Genesis as a scientific textbook. And I think ultimately that misses the point of what Genesis is trying to say. This goes back to what we were talking about with like, how did the original audience understood this?

• 1:57:52Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  When they read Genesis, chapter one, do, are they looking at that as an exact prescription of what God did? I mean, in some ways, maybe, but in other ways, that they, they could see that as this like counter apologetic to the other ancient Near Eastern stories, like I explained. So I, I just think we need to be careful when we're looking at, or even like counting up the genealogies and coming up with a, you know, how, how old the earth is. I think that might be missing the forest for the trees in what we're actually looking at when we look at ancient documents and how we're trying to interpret them. But it is a big question, right?

• 1:58:32Joe Rogan?

  Well, the, the question of evolution is a fascinating one, right? Because there's obviously something happening, particularly with us. If we really are related to Homo nodaldi, Nolite, Nolite, or there's, there's something clearly is happening. This is like process of change. And if we don't completely understand all the factors in that process of change, we might miss out. The, the equation might be incomplete. It's like we're, I mean, we know a lot now about evolution that we did not know before. But like all sciences, new data comes in and you have to recalibrate things like, have you been paying attention to this?

• 1:59:14Joe Rogan?

  There's a new discussion about dark matter and dark energy.

• 1:59:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:59:20Joe Rogan?

  The, the new discussion is that it might not be a correct theory. And that what it might be is that time moves differently in the voids between galaxies. And this is a, a new theory. And, you know, like new enough and discussed enough among people that really understand it, that it's getting to me. Right? So I'm reading it. So see if you can find that. Yeah, it's very, it's a very complex and nuanced conversation, but most of the universe is dark energy, right? It's a giant percentage of the universe is dark energy and dark matter, and we don't really know what that stuff is.

• 2:00:00Joe Rogan?

  And so this is proposing that there's an additional possible theory that might explain it better.

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  I mean, that area of science is crazy. Nuts. Crazy.

• 2:00:13Joe Rogan?

  And then you have the James Webb Telescope that's giving us even more data than ever before, and you have to look at all of it and go, wait, why are those things here? How are they there so long ago? Like, what are these red things at the beginning of time? Like, what the fuck is all this?

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  The universe is bonkers.

• 2:00:26Joe Rogan?

  Nuts.

• 2:00:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, I think, we get that in history, too, whereas we have these kind of what we think are established conventions, and then all of a sudden we discover something, and it like completely overthrows the ideas that we have.

• 2:00:37Joe Rogan?

  Like Clovis first.

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, or Go back to Latepe.

• 2:00:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:40Speaker 01

  Or actually, good segue.

• 2:00:41Joe Rogan?

  That's the best one, right?

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I made one, I made something for you.

• 2:00:44Joe Rogan?

  Ooh.

• 2:00:47Speaker 01

  So. I make papyri facsimiles. Oh, my description is a little bit wonky here, I'll fix that. So you were talking about like, what is our oldest manuscript evidence? So this guy is P52, John Ryland's 457. So that is, so that's a genuine Egyptian papyri that I made, I cut it out for you, and then I transcribed the text on that manuscript. So when we're talking about what is potentially our oldest evidence for the New Testament, this manuscript, that most likely comes from Oxenius, Egypt, is the one that usually is universally accepted as our oldest one. And that contains John 18, where Jesus is on trial before Pilate.

• 2:01:31Speaker 01

  And, yeah, so that's the one, it's in the John Ryland's library in Manchester, England.

• 2:01:35Joe Rogan?

  So this is a copy of that exactly? This is exactly what it looks like?

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, I cut that out on the papyri with a scalpel, and then I transcribed the text on.

• 2:01:45Joe Rogan?

  You did a great job, dude.

• 2:01:46Speaker 01

  And.

• 2:01:47Joe Rogan?

  This is, you nerded out.

• 2:01:48Speaker 01

  I know, I'm.

• 2:01:49Joe Rogan?

  For real nerded out. This is a real nerding out of.

• 2:01:52Speaker 01

  So that's actually, yeah, so that's someone else's facsimile, which is not as good as the one I made.

• 2:01:55Joe Rogan?

  It's not as good. Yours is better.

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  And where, where Jesus is on trial before Pilate, and Jesus says, everyone who follows the truth, who is following the truth, follows me. And on the back has the words of Pilate saying, what is truth?

• 2:02:14Speaker 01

  But so part of my research, so the reason I bring this up is because before this was discovered by C.H. Roberts in the 1940s, the convention was, because of a guy named C.H. Bauer, that the Gospel of John was second century. And so he had this, he was a student of Hegel. Have you ever heard of Hegelian dialectic? No. So you have like a thesis, synthesis, and antithesis? Yes. So Hegel had this philosophical theory, and his student Bauer takes that and incorporates this into history. And he says, you know, the earliest Gospel, Mark, has this very,

• 2:02:52Speaker 01

  this very Jewish Jesus. And then the later Gospels have a very, like, the last of what I call the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Luke has a very kind of more divine Jesus. And so he says, based on this, John is the last, last written one. And it combines these two, where you get a very human and a very divine Jesus together. And so based on this, he says that John has to be second century. Well, we discover this guy, C.H. Roberts is, you know, literally going through these piles of manuscripts in these drawers that are being like stashed away. And he finds this guy, and he sees that it's written on both sides, which is almost exclusively a Christian convention. Because in the ancient world, they used scrolls. And the Christians, for reasons we're not entirely clear on,

• 2:03:35Speaker 01

  they start to make codices, books. And so they write on both sides. And so he says, okay, this is written on both sides, it's probably a Christian manuscript. So he sends it off to the leading paleographers, who are guys who date manuscripts. And they all say, this is the beginning of the second century. And so there's still debate about the dating of this. But the unanimous consensus is that it's comfortably second century, second century, potentially the beginning of the second century, which means that this is found in Egypt, John is probably writing his Gospel in Ephesus. So it has to be written by John, spread around, find its way to Egypt, be copied, and then end up in this manuscript. Which means that

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  at minimum, you've already pushed the Gospel of John back into the first century comfortably. And potentially even, like, most likely into the lifetime of the eyewitnesses of these events. And so all of the literature up until that point, from the scholarly consensus about the dating of the Gospel of John, gets totally rewritten.

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  And it's because of that, I end because of my academic work where I was telling you like in paratextual features, when we look at these tiny manuscripts and you figure out, okay, well, what does that look like on the page? I also made you. So this is, I used two different variations of papyri.

• 2:04:59Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:05:00Speaker 01

  So you have there where P52 would have been on the page and based on the, it's called codicological conventions, the spacings of the words and the way that the size of the margin that we can see, where it would have been on the page and how big the page would have actually been. So this is like a reconstruction and then I filled in the rest of the text in the same sort of style, stylistic hand of the scribes at that time. What that page would have looked like. So this would have come from, would have been essentially a like a pocket copy of the Gospel of John.

• 2:05:39Joe Rogan?

  Wow. That's unbelievable. Wow. That's so fascinating.

• 2:05:46Speaker 01

  So this is, this is the kind of work that I do in terms of trying to figure out, okay, you have these fragments, how big would have this codex actually been? How big would have the document been? And then, then you compare and you contrast them to say like, uh, non-Christian literature, like Thucydides or Tacitus or Pliny or Cicero or Cassiodio, those kind of guys. And look at the differences between how these documents would have been put together and written in their day.

• 2:06:15Joe Rogan?

  God, it's so beautiful. It's just so bizarre to imagine these people writing this stuff down so, so long ago.

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  You know what's wild is when you actually get the chance, which I have a number of times to actually handle.

• 2:06:31Joe Rogan?

  Ooh.

• 2:06:32Speaker 01

  The original documents.

• 2:06:33Joe Rogan?

  Oh my God. Do you have to wear rubber gloves?

• 2:06:35Speaker 01

  No, you know why? Is that we used to do that, but actually the oils in your hands are more abrasive than latex or even cloth. So.

• 2:06:43Joe Rogan?

  The oils are more abrasive?

• 2:06:45Speaker 01

  No, no, sorry, I said that wrong. They're less abrasive. So it used to be that you always had to handle things with, you know, gloves and nowadays we don't do that anymore.

• 2:06:53Joe Rogan?

  Ooh, that's wild. So you're touching it with your actual fingers?

• 2:06:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:58Joe Rogan?

  That's gotta feel bizarre.

• 2:06:59Speaker 01

  I was at the, um, two summers ago, I was at the University of, uh,

• 2:07:03Speaker 01

  Pennsylvania and I was looking at a manuscript called P1 or Poxi 2, 1.2. And it's a beginning of the third century copy of the first page of Matthew's Gospel. And when I requested access to it, they told me that the last person to request it was when Pope John Paul II came and visited the States and they pulled it out for him. So on the like, you know, in the library, when you used to like have to punch your name, write your name on the cards.

• 2:07:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:34Speaker 01

  If there was a card, yeah, that guy. So I made a facsimile of that one, too. And that one is the, that's the genealogy of Jesus from, from Matthew's Gospel.

• 2:07:43Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  Actually, you know what, Jamie, if you go up to the search bar and put CSNTM, those letters, CSNTM.org.

• 2:08:01Speaker 01

  So this is the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. So if you click Digital Manuscript Collection. So they go around the world and they try to digitize all the existing New Testament manuscripts to preserve them. And so you can actually, you see there on the side, you can click, well, I want to look at a papyri and you can go the different conventions of, you know, the date or the time.

• 2:08:27Joe Rogan?

  And so you could read the translation and then go and look at the original source of it?

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so ideally you always want to go look at the original, but because of organizations like CSNTM, which is actually in Dallas, you, you, people like me don't have to go to Europe where a lot of these manuscripts are housed. We can look at them and because these are such high, high grade that you can figure these things out. So actually.

• 2:08:55Speaker 01

  A guy I know, Elijah Hickson, he used that and he actually figured out that there was a prominent manuscript, P50, which is a forgery. And so he used that based on like, looking at the digital.

• 2:09:10Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, he filled in the gaps within the rips and saw that the words didn't match up when he filled in the gaps. And so when he's transcribing the text, he's like, wait a minute, I don't think that word fits in there. And based on that, he's like, yeah, that's a forgery. Because someone has written the text in after that piece of papyri, which is, these forgeries are almost always a genuine piece of ancient papyri. Someone gets it from like, the black market antiquities.

• 2:09:37Joe Rogan?

  Oh, and then just writes on it afterwards?

• 2:09:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, right there. So, P50, so if you fill in these holes, they're called lacunas, the words, a lot of the words don't fit. So someone's come along and they've like, written, done a really good job, because it fooled scholars. And they've written in the text, but not quite good enough to figure out that not all of the words fit in the gaps that you presented.

• 2:10:05Joe Rogan?

  What is your take on the Voynich manuscript?

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  I have no idea what to think of the Voynich manuscript. But it's Middle Ages.

• 2:10:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:13Speaker 01

  It's just a weird one.

• 2:10:14Joe Rogan?

  It's a really weird one.

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, because people have been trying to crack that code forever. You go, what is this? Is it just gibberish? Is it just fake words?

• 2:10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's...

• 2:10:24Joe Rogan?

  And why so much time and effort put into making this fake book?

• 2:10:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:29Joe Rogan?

  Was it like a crazy schizophrenic person who made their own language?

• 2:10:32Speaker 01

  I don't know, they must have been a rich schizophrenic person.

• 2:10:34Joe Rogan?

  Well, didn't J.R.R. Tolkien, didn't he create an entire language for Lord of the Rings?

• 2:10:38Speaker 01

  So a lot of the languages, because he was a linguist.

• 2:10:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:41Speaker 01

  A lot of the languages are based on existing languages.

• 2:10:44Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so he just combined them together to form his own version of it?

• 2:10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, like Elvish and Dwarvish, and like, they're all based on like, ancient Norse or Old English or, so he would like, take like, those languages and he'd actually, he had, I mean, if there's anyone who's the best at world building, like, you can learn Elvish.

• 2:11:05Joe Rogan?

  Real language.

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  Because he developed the language.

• 2:11:09Joe Rogan?

  That's so crazy.

• 2:11:10Speaker 01

  That is crazy.

• 2:11:11Joe Rogan?

  That is so crazy. The dedication. That's so bananas.

• 2:11:13Speaker 01

  I mean, he was a genius. Guys like him and even Lewis, they were friends. C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien.

• 2:11:20Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Tolkien played a big part in Lewis's conversion. Because Tolkien was Catholic. And I think Lewis was Irish, and so he couldn't quite become a Catholic, but he became a Protestant Anglican. But, yeah, they were, the Inklings Society, they would meet in Oxford at the, oh, what's the pub called? People are gonna listen to this and get mad at me because there's something in Childs.

• 2:11:47Joe Rogan?

  One of those UK pubs that's been around for a thousand years?

• 2:11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. And they would meet and talk. They were called the Inklings Society.

• 2:11:54Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. What is Eagle and Child? Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:58Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny when you read how Tolkien was, Tolkien really didn't like Lewis's stuff because he said it was it was way too, way too, like, straightforward. He's like, you got a Jesus lying? Good one. Like, nobody, no, you're not beating around the bush on anything when you got a literal Jesus who's sacrificed? Come on. Rises from the dead? What are you doing here?

• 2:12:26Joe Rogan?

  That's funny.

• 2:12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they were friends.

• 2:12:28Joe Rogan?

  That would've been an interesting conversation to be a fly on the wall.

• 2:12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:31Joe Rogan?

  Tolkien breaking down Lewis's.

• 2:12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:36Joe Rogan?

  That would be fascinating.

• 2:12:37Speaker 01

  Apparently, the guy who wrote Dune sent a copy to Tolkien before he published it.

• 2:12:42Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:12:43Speaker 01

  And Tolkien didn't like it.

• 2:12:44Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:12:45Speaker 01

  He sent it back and said, like, "I got nothing good to say, so I'm gonna say nothing at all."

• 2:12:48Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:12:48Speaker 01

  Isn't that crazy?

• 2:12:49Joe Rogan?

  That is crazy. Well, he was wrong. Even geniuses, well, I mean, some geniuses are just, like, so in their own head.

• 2:12:57Speaker 01

  Different strokes.

• 2:12:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And that's part of the problem. But it's also what makes them so great in the first place, that they have this, like, singular vision and dedication, and so much so that they're writing an elvish language and combining words for it.

• 2:13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:11Joe Rogan?

  Jamie, did you find that thing about the dark matter? Did you find what I was asking about?

• 2:13:16Speaker 03

  Well, I stopped because I found a video and I saw some people explaining it, and it didn't. It started saying that was almost like they started off with a theory and that's how they do things and then they start working through the theory until someone has a better theory.

• 2:13:31Joe Rogan?

  There's such a giant problem today in that if you just post some fantastical claim in a headline, like that the theory of dark matter's been debunked and then you get clicks.

• 2:13:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:44Joe Rogan?

  And so you can kind of get away with doing that now.

• 2:13:48Speaker 03

  That felt like the six plan, like I'm five on Reddit had a pretty top comment or one percenter.

• 2:13:53Joe Rogan?

  So dark energy is a problem, modern cosmology is most problems in science. You start with a model, you go out and make measurements, you find your measurements don't fit your model, this is a problem. When this happened, scientists go off and try to come up with new theories, I think that's meant no models, I think they meant new models, new models which do fit the new data, in the case of things like dark energy, we get hundreds if not thousands of new theories. ACDM is the current best model of cosmology, the CDM stands for cold dark matter, it's a model that includes certain theories to explain dark matter and the lambda A is a cosmological constant.

• 2:14:31Speaker 03

  That's the Greek word lambda, or the Greek letter.

• 2:14:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, which is used to model dark energy, note that this mathematical model doesn't explain what dark matter or dark energy are, it just incorporates them to make the maths work. So this is a long, I don't know if this is exactly what they were saying about, it was like a much more of a synopsis, but what they were saying was that it might be that time moves differently in between galaxies, see if you could Google that.

• 2:15:02Speaker 03

  Physics and cosmology are just wild.

• 2:15:04Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's just, it's so insane because we're so separate from it because of light pollution, that the most majestic thing that you could ever see, we gave up so that we could drive at night. It's really weird. It's really weird because when you go to a place, you know, I've talked about it a bunch of times, but I'll say it again. I went to the Keck Observatory many years ago and we got there on a perfect time where the, uh, the moon was not out at all. And the sky was insane. It was like you were in the cockpit of a spaceship. And, you know, it was just like you were in a giant glass cockpit, which is essentially, we are kind of in an organic spaceship hurling through the universe. So it should look like that, but it just doesn't because of the fact that we're constantly inundated by light pollution.

• 2:15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:49Joe Rogan?

  And I think the ancient societies and ancient cultures didn't have that. And because they didn't have that, I think they had a much more humble view of our place in the universe. Cause you're just presented with something that's absolutely impossible, impossible to imagine.

• 2:16:05Speaker 01

  We definitely lose our sense of awe.

• 2:16:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:07Speaker 01

  When we can't see kind of ourselves in the grand scheme of the universe.

• 2:16:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:14Speaker 01

  And you're right. When you go somewhere where there's no light pollution, you look up at the sky, it's like, even not at somewhere like the Keck Observatory where you can like get a crazy view of it.

• 2:16:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:23Speaker 01

  When you just go out in the country and look up and you're like.

• 2:16:27Joe Rogan?

  That's the Milky Way. You can see the Milky Way. Dark energy debunked by lumpy universe expansion. Uh, yeah, this is the one. Uh, learn how the existence of dark energy is being challenged due to new evidence that the expanding universe is actually lumpy. So what they mean by lumpy is this, we're talking about how time moves differently. See if it has a synopsis of it.

• 2:16:48Speaker 03

  It's like a, a recent article I found gets into the, explaining what dark energy is and then.

• 2:16:52Joe Rogan?

  Gets into the weeds.

• 2:16:53Speaker 03

  Probably a paragraph at the bottom that sort of says what you're looking for.

• 2:16:56Joe Rogan?

  What is the timescape model? This is it. So timescape model rejects the idea that dark energy is the driving force of universe expansion. Improved in, uh, analysis of type LA, LA supernovae, uh, has suggested that the acceleration based on light curves seen in 1998 was a case of misidentification. The timescape model amends this by considering differences of time in void and matter dense areas. The model suggests that time. Moves much slower in matter dense areas like the Milky Way galaxies than in voids. With more time passing in voids, increased expansion takes place, making it seem like expansion is accelerating as the voids.

• 2:17:37Joe Rogan?

  Increasingly spread through the universe. Dark energy therefore is not needed to explain the expansion of the universe. According to the researchers.

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:17:45Joe Rogan?

  Who fucking knows? It's too much. It's too much like, what are you even saying? How, how crazy is this? You know, like, one of the more controversial aspects of the James Webb Telescope was this theory that perhaps the universe was quite a bit older than thirteen point.

• 2:17:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:18:00Joe Rogan?

  Whatever, billion years.

• 2:18:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:18:01Joe Rogan?

  And they were trying to push it back to twenty-two based on the existence of galaxies that put like. And people are pushing back against that and there's a lot of debate about that, but the, the bottom line is all of it is too many numbers for your brain to even register.

• 2:18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:15Joe Rogan?

  That, you know, however many billions of years ago, there was nothing.

• 2:18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:20Joe Rogan?

  And then all of a sudden there was something. And Terrence McKenna had a great line. That said that, um, science requires one miracle.

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:18:30Joe Rogan?

  The Big Bang.

• 2:18:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:18:32Joe Rogan?

  It requires a miracle.

• 2:18:33Speaker 01

  Well, I always say that when people ask me about, you know, the miracles in the Bible. And I say, well, you know, if the first miracle happened, if everything, you know, nothing became everything. Then, you know, Jesus turning water into wine.

• 2:18:45Joe Rogan?

  That's a easy one.

• 2:18:46Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 2:18:47Joe Rogan?

  That's a party trick.

• 2:18:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:18:48Joe Rogan?

  It really is nothing compared to the birth of the universe, but we're, we're convinced at the creation of the universe. And we're very skeptical at other miracles.

• 2:18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:58Joe Rogan?

  Very odd.

• 2:18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean.

• 2:18:59Joe Rogan?

  It's very odd.

• 2:19:00Speaker 01

  I think there's an inconsistency there and you do see when the Big Bang is first hypothesized that there are individuals. Who are uncomfortable with that sounding like in the beginning. Because before that, the idea was that the universe was eternal. And, and if you propose a point in time where everything starts to exist, well, that for, and you, you see some of these people are pushing back on it. They, they, they say things like, well, that sounds too religious. That sounds like a beginning point in time. And at that point, if there's a big bang, you have to figure out, okay, well, what's the big banger?

• 2:19:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:19:31Speaker 01

  And, I mean, that's ultimately, it's an, it's a, it's, it's a metaphysical religious question. How did that thing get kicked off?

• 2:19:40Joe Rogan?

  Brian Cox was explaining to us that there was an actual environment that existed pre the Big Bang. Don't they call it the environment? Is that what the, the term of it is?

• 2:19:50Speaker 01

  Is this like Lawrence Krauss, having a definition for nothing?

• 2:19:53Joe Rogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:19:53Speaker 01

  It's not nothing?

• 2:19:54Joe Rogan?

  I don't know. It was just like, what are you even saying? You know, and then there's Sir Roger Penrose, who thinks there's a series

• 2:20:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:20:02Joe Rogan?

  of these things that happen. And then it's just this constant birth of universes and death of universes and birth of new universe. And it's like, Big Bang, expansion, heat death.

• 2:20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:14Joe Rogan?

  Contraction, Big Bang, like, but we're almost like, that's too much. I don't want to. I can kind of wrap my head around 14 billion years. I can't wrap my head around eternity.

• 2:20:25Speaker 01

  In, in theology, it's often described as the difference between understanding and comprehension, which my wife tells me are synonyms and that's nonsense. But the idea is like, you can understand eternity is a long point in time.

• 2:20:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:20:39Speaker 01

  You can comprehend it.

• 2:20:40Joe Rogan?

  It's like numbers.

• 2:20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:41Joe Rogan?

  You can, you can understand how many zeros are in 14 billion years.

• 2:20:45Speaker 01

  How much water's in the ocean?

• 2:20:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:20:47Speaker 01

  I can comprehend, like, it's like, that's a lot of water.

• 2:20:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:50Speaker 01

  But when you start talking about like, tens of thousands of gallons, I'm like, lost me.

• 2:20:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I don't really know what that looks like. I kind of do. My brain's not set up for that.

• 2:20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:59Joe Rogan?

  Which is part of the, the weird thing about people, is that our, our brain is clearly set up differently than any, every other creature that exists. You know, and if you have, if, if, if evolution is the only thing that created us, is just evolution, how the fuck did we get so far ahead of everybody else?

• 2:21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:17Joe Rogan?

  I mean, not even just, and we're the doughiest, like weakest, softest, but also the smartest. Like, we gave up that. That was the trade-off. And somehow or another, by evolving into this particular form, we figured out a way to uniquely, uh, change the environment in ways that no other creature has even come close to.

• 2:21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:37Joe Rogan?

  And it's, it's interesting to me that there are certain things that we think of in terms of like, unexplained phenomenon that we'll accept because we have some sort of a scientific definition of what this unexplained phenomenon is.

• 2:21:51Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:21:52Joe Rogan?

  Like the Big Bang. I mean, and you can say that there's theories, it's not, it's not completely unexplained, they kind of get it, but you kind of don't. Something that's smaller than The head of a pen that becomes the entire universe that we see is pretty fucking crazy.

• 2:22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:04Joe Rogan?

  You know, and just to say that that just happened and you don't, you don't really, I know you don't wanna say you don't know, but you really don't know. There's no way you can know. It's not really possible to know. There's no like working theory where you can convince me that the whole universe gets compressed into something smaller than the head of a pen and then instantaneously becomes everything that you see.

• 2:22:26Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's why you see natural materialism being woefully inadequate to really explain the ultimate worldview questions that we have.

• 2:22:33Joe Rogan?

  Just the universe itself, right? Just what, we don't know enough. Maybe we one day will. Maybe these, you know, sentient AI systems that we're gonna create with quantum computers are gonna be able to figure things out in a way that we can't. But at the end of the day, you have one miracle. You have the Big Bang. All of science agrees this happened. That is so much crazier than anything that any religion is proposing, that it's so interesting to me that we're, cause well, we say we have echoes of the Big Bang. There's, you know, radio echoes.

• 2:23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but also if a miracle did take place, like let's assume that there is actually a higher power that occasionally interacts with human beings. And if a miracle did take place and you were there, you don't have a camera, you don't have a cellphone, you don't have a pen, you can't write things down, maybe you can't even read. And you have this thing that happens to you and this thing changes the course of human history. This thing changes the direction, that the ideology that these people subscribe to and the moral and ethical structure that they lived their life by, it changes untold billions of human beings from that point on.

• 2:23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:46Joe Rogan?

  Pretty fascinating. That in itself, even if this is just a revelation without a divine interaction, that's a fucking miracle.

• 2:23:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:55Joe Rogan?

  It's a miracle that it was created at all. Like the whole idea that Christianity, when you're saying that the book of, was it the book of Isaiah?

• 2:24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:03Joe Rogan?

  That the same book is exactly the same as, like, that's a miracle. That's pretty. Fucking crazy.

• 2:24:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is crazy.

• 2:24:11Joe Rogan?

  If you just imagine the sheer number of illiterate people, the the sheer number of days that have to go by, where people are telling the story exactly the same, and that it's entrusted in the hands of these very few people that are so dedicated to it that they get the exact words right a thousand years later, pretty bananas.

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that is kind of the the crazy thing about Christianity where you have this Jewish itinerant guy who's walking around first century Roman occupied Judea. He's making some pretty audacious claims, claims to be God himself. And then he predicts his own death and resurrection. And then his disciples are, they think it's over. Like, they're like, he's dead, we're done.

• 2:24:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:56Speaker 01

  And then they go from eleven, you know, scared men, because Judas commits suicide, scared men in an upper room to completely overhauling the Roman world in only a couple hundred years. Because of this claim that they say they saw Jesus resurrected. Like, there's something different that goes on there, that they're like, this is a miracle, right? Dead people don't usually rise from the dead.

• 2:25:22Joe Rogan?

  So what is your personal belief when it comes to the resurrection? What do you think hap- do you have a belief, or do you just try to interpret the text and try to see what is the message?

• 2:25:37Speaker 01

  Well, I think, so as a historian, I do think it is a historical question. You have a guy who objectively lived. He objectively died, and then individuals close to his inner circle claim that they see him not dead.

• 2:25:52Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:25:53Speaker 01

  Again.

• 2:25:53Joe Rogan?

  This is a highly unusual activity.

• 2:25:56Speaker 01

  Highly unusual.

• 2:25:57Joe Rogan?

  Right. So, but it's hard when you're dealing with illiterate populations. You're dealing with thousands of years of time. You're dealing with an oral tradition. And then you have us sitting here talking about it in 2024, trying to figure it at the end of 2024, trying to figure this out, literally the end.

• 2:26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:19Joe Rogan?

  Last couple of days. It's um, this episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Scams have gotten smarter because criminals use AI to flood you with fake texts, emails, and phone calls that are designed to be more convincing than ever. One wrong click could put your personal information and your identity at risk. So protect yourself with LifeLock. LifeLock helps detect and alert you to threats. And if your identity is stolen, LifeLock will step in to fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Dedicated US-based identity restoration specialists will work with you until your identity is restored, backed by the million-dollar protection package with up to $3 million in coverage for eligible losses and expenses.

• 2:27:04Joe Rogan?

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• 2:27:46Joe Rogan?

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• 2:28:18Joe Rogan?

  It's very difficult for anybody who thinks of themselves as an intelligent person who's secular to even entertain the possibility that someone died and come back to life.

• 2:28:28Speaker 01

  And I get that, but we've already talked about the fact that we don't think that the only thing that exists is matter in motion. We as in you and I, right?

• 2:28:35Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:28:35Speaker 01

  Like, we believe that there's something else going on in this world that's a little bit crazy.

• 2:28:40Joe Rogan?

  There's something else, yeah.

• 2:28:41Speaker 01

  And that, to I think exclude that, I think excludes something that you're kind of putting blinders on for. And you do have, I mean, you're right in terms of all of these ancient conventions and the ways that things were spread around, but the Gospels are written in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses. And they're written in this period of time where you have groups of individuals who could have fact-checked those things. So...

• 2:29:06Joe Rogan?

  How do you fact-check someone coming back from the dead?

• 2:29:09Speaker 01

  Well, if you...

• 2:29:10Joe Rogan?

  How many people saw his body, right?

• 2:29:11Speaker 01

  Well, Paul says that 400 people saw him all at once.

• 2:29:14Joe Rogan?

  400 people saw the crucifixion?

• 2:29:16Speaker 01

  No, saw the resurrected Jesus.

• 2:29:18Joe Rogan?

  Saw the resurrection.

• 2:29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says that Jesus appeared to the disciples, and then he appeared to 400 people all at once. I mean, if we read the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of, or Gospel of Luke and Acts, so same author wrote these both documents, he says that Jesus was walking around teaching them for 40 days after he was resurrected from the dead. And so, these are written within a time period when you have people who would have seen Jesus's ministry, who were there, say, at something like the feeding of the 5,000, who could have been able to verify or debunk some of these things that are being

• 2:29:58Speaker 01

  said. And you go from a bunch of scared guys who, because Jesus wasn't the only messianic figure who arose and claimed to be the Messiah.

• 2:30:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:30:09Speaker 01

  There were a number of individuals, both prior to and after Jesus, but they die and the movement dies with them.

• 2:30:16Joe Rogan?

  Do you think it's possible that he didn't die? And do you think it's possible that they thought he was dead? Because that does happen. There was actually a case very recently where a guy was about to be harvested for organs. They thought he was dead, and this guy started moving again and came back to life. It's a very, very bizarre case because his family had been told that he was going to be harvested for organs. They were preparing for that. And this guy comes back.

• 2:30:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we know a lot about Roman crucifixion. And we know that, and we know that they, they did their job well.

• 2:30:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:55Speaker 01

  And so, in fact, if you look at, say, very skeptical biblical scholars, like non-believing atheist, agnostic Christian scholars, they will say, if we can know anything about Jesus, like they'll cast a doubt on a lot of the things that we read about in the Gospels in terms of the actual historical Jesus of Nazareth. They'll say, one thing we can be sure of is that he died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. Because we have not just multiple detested documents that we refer to as the New Testament, but Roman and Greek and Jewish writers refer to that claim afterwards. And talk about the fact that you have this guy, and it's mocked within earliest Christianity.

• 2:31:36Speaker 01

  So, one of our earliest, in fact, not one of, the earliest depiction of Jesus on the cross is called the Alexamenos Grafito. And it's probably from the, the end of the first century. And it's a, it depicts a, an individual with their arms raised in an act of worship, worshiping a man with a donkey's head who's being crucified. And right beside it, it says, Alexamenos worships his god, in Greek. And it's mocking, right? Because crucifixion was for the lowest of the low. It was for like slaves. In fact, if you were a Roman citizen, you were banned from being crucified.

• 2:32:11Joe Rogan?

  Who wasn't they gonna crucify it upside down?

• 2:32:13Speaker 01

  Peter.

• 2:32:14Joe Rogan?

  Why, was it because like regular crucifixion wasn't good enough for him? Or what was, he didn't deserve it because Christ had gone through it?

• 2:32:21Speaker 01

  Well, so the story is that they say, we're gonna crucify you. And he says, it's like too big of an honor to die like my lord. And they say, well, we can fix that.

• 2:32:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh, Jesus. Shut your mouth, buddy.

• 2:32:30Speaker 01

  Listen, the Romans were pretty brutal.

• 2:32:33Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:32:34Speaker 01

  But this is why we know, like, we have, it's interesting. We know a lot about crucifixion, but crucifixion was seen as so disgusting. I believe it was Cicero who said that like the word crucifixion shouldn't even be on a Roman man's lips.

• 2:32:47Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:32:48Speaker 01

  I mean, the word excruciating.

• 2:32:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:32:50Speaker 01

  X is off of in Latin and cruc, off the cross.

• 2:32:55Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 2:32:56Speaker 01

  So that's where we get that word is because this was designed to humiliate and it was designed to be as painful as possible. There was actually a really good article done by JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, which was done by a number of, I think it was in the 70s, early 80s. It was done by a group of biblical scholars and then medical professionals. And so they looked at the conventions of what we do know about Roman crucifixion and then they looked at the descriptions in the gospel to try to figure out, okay, if we could diagnose how Jesus died, how would he have died? And so they basically came up with this idea that it's, he probably asphyxiated to death. You kind of drown in your own blood.

• 2:33:39Speaker 01

  But the chances of Jesus surviving the crucifixion, I think are narrow to none. And the chance of him appearing three days later, completely fine? I mean, you don't, if the first thing you do, if you survive a crucifixion and then you go and you find your disciples, the first thing you say is not, you know, peace be with you. It's get me to a hospital, right?

• 2:34:06Joe Rogan?

  Do they have them back then?

• 2:34:06Speaker 01

  No, not really.

• 2:34:08Joe Rogan?

  Are we entirely certain of their measurement of days?

• 2:34:12Speaker 01

  So this is an interesting question because of the differences between when, when the Gospel of John says Jesus died compared to the synoptics. Because John appears to be using the Roman convention of counting time and the other Gospels, when they describe the timing, appear to be using the Jewish ones. And actually, if you, if you correlate between the two, they match up pretty well. So.

• 2:34:42Speaker 01

  The thing is with Jews, any part of a day was considered a day. So three days and three nights becomes almost an idiom for any part of that day is the day. So if on, if Jesus, and because they count evening and morning, evening to morning is the day. It's very possible that it wasn't like how we would think of 324 hour days, especially if he dies on Friday and wakes up on Sunday.

• 2:35:09Joe Rogan?

  So that would actually make it less time than, than more time.

• 2:35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:13Joe Rogan?

  So it's not like he had recovery time.

• 2:35:15Speaker 01

  Oh, no, he didn't have recovery time.

• 2:35:16Joe Rogan?

  That's what I'm saying. It's not like it was three days, it was actually three months.

• 2:35:20Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 2:35:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:21Speaker 01

  No, not like that.

• 2:35:22Joe Rogan?

  So then 400 people saw him afterwards.

• 2:35:26Speaker 01

  That's the claim that, that Paul makes.

• 2:35:28Joe Rogan?

  Paul makes this.

• 2:35:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:30Joe Rogan?

  And how many different people have some sort of a recollection or a writing or, or something that's attributed to them of being witness to his resurrection?

• 2:35:42Speaker 01

  Well, you have Peter, Paul, Jude, James, and Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The thing with Matthew, Mark, and Luke is that Matthew and Luke, or Matthew and John are attributed to direct disciples of Jesus. Luke and Mark are not. So they are not eyewitnesses within the Jesus community. In fact, Luke prefaces his gospel by saying that. He, he's right up front about this. He's like, hey, I'm not an eyewitness, don't confuse me with an eyewitness. But he, he actually uses conventional writing. What's the term I'm looking for? He uses writing conventions of the day that would fit within regular biography that was written within the Roman world.

• 2:36:25Speaker 01

  So you have a guy named Quintilian, who is basically, I mentioned him before with the, he, he's teaching people how to write. And he says that if you're gonna write biography, You need to be interviewing eyewitnesses and you can't be too far away from the event to be able to write these things. And Quintilian, Lucian, and Josephus, who are all these very prominent ancient biographers and writers of history, have a lot of crossover in the way they describe how you should write history with the words that Luke uses at the beginning of his gospel, where he says, "I'm interviewing eyewitnesses and I'm writing up an orderly account." And so, he's saying, "I'm going to use these methods that are expected as good history of my day.

• 2:37:10Speaker 01

  I'm not an eyewitness, so I'm going to try to find the people who are eyewitnesses and I'm going to try to encapsulate this within a document that communicates what is being written."

• 2:37:22Joe Rogan?

  So, we have an account of the resurrection. Do we have an account of the denial of the resurrection? Is there an historical record of him just dying and this, like a refutal, or rebuttal, rather, to what they're saying?

• 2:37:36Speaker 01

  No, the only ones from the ancient world that deny his resurrection are groups that come on afterwards that sometimes are described as gnostics. And they're not necessarily denying it for the reasons we might think they were. They're denying it because they have incorporated ideas of pagan philosophy, where they believe that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad. So, if Jesus was crucified, so, let me back up. If Jesus is God, he cannot have a physical body. So, they deny that he actually had a physicality to him. This is sometimes called docetism, because "docain" in Greek means "to seem."

• 2:38:16Speaker 01

  So, these groups that we describe as the docetics, they are denying that Jesus had a physical body, he only seemed to have a physical body. And they wrote documents later on. So, the Gospel of Peter, which comes around in, you know, 2nd, 3rd, 4th centuries, is being written, and it has Jesus kind of chilling on the cross, because he's not really physical, because he's divine, and physical entities don't have physical bodies. So, we don't actually get like a concrete denial of his resurrection in that way until you get things like the Gospel of Barnabas in the Middle Ages, which is a...

• 2:38:56Speaker 01

  It's actually the document that Billy brought up to me in the conversation we had is the evidence that Jesus was never crucified, the Gospel of Barnabas. Well, Gospel of Barnabas is 15th century. It paraphrases Dante's Inferno. It's not an ancient document. So, but in the ancient world, no, nobody really had that big of a problem with these kind of supernatural claims. More, the more of the kind of skepticism was why you would worship a crucified individual to begin with.

• 2:39:23Joe Rogan?

  Wow. So they were less surprised that he was resurrected?

• 2:39:28Speaker 01

  Or, or that you would, you would worship a crucified, like, teacher was just seen as silly?

• 2:39:37Joe Rogan?

  Because it's so humiliating to be crucified.

• 2:39:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, and that, like, a god would let himself go through this?

• 2:39:45Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:39:45Speaker 01

  Like, what are you, what are you talking about? In fact, the ancient world didn't really have a problem with supernatural events. There is an ancient writer who mocks Christianity, and he particularly mocks Christianity in saying that, of course, Jesus did miracles, because Jesus had a childhood in Egypt. And he goes, all of those Egyptians are magicians anyways. So he just learned the magic when he was a child. So, he actually confirms, incidentally, two things, that the narrative in the Gospels where it says that the Holy Family fled to Egypt during the reign of Herod, he corroborates that he actually thinks that happened, and that Jesus did miracles. He just attributes the miracles to Jesus being

• 2:40:28Speaker 01

  a traveling magician anyways. And, you know, anybody who lived in Egypt knows some magic.

• 2:40:32Joe Rogan?

  That is what's really fascinating, that the mindset of the people that lived back then was that whatever was going on in Egypt was so crazy that they had to be magicians.

• 2:40:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, but everybody believed in supernatural events. Like, there's no such thing as, like, a secular work in the ancient world. Even Plutarch, who's one of the most famous biographers in the ancient world, he wrote 90 biographies, of which 60 still survive today, he was a priest of Apollo. So, like, he's already assuming

• 2:41:01Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:41:02Speaker 01

  that the gods exist, that crazy things are gonna happen in the world. And, so... They didn't have a problem with people doing miracles or crazy things happening.

• 2:41:15Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's also why it's so interesting trying to put your mind into the context of people that lived back then when you try to interpret what these stories were all about. Because they did believe in things that weren't real.

• 2:41:27Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:41:28Joe Rogan?

  So when they talk about this thing that we're supposed to believe is real, when you have all this evidence that they believe things that aren't true.

• 2:41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:37Joe Rogan?

  It's interesting, right? Because like, you're now saying, yeah, but this one really was true.

• 2:41:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:41:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's so many different things that they thought of and believed that weren't true.

• 2:41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this historiographically is, so when we do history, it's an inference to the best explanation. And so there are probabilities of things that have happened in history where we can say, okay, there's a higher probability of event A happening and a lower probability of event B happening. So the example I often give is like Jonah being swallowed by the fish. Like, that's low probabilistically. Not that it didn't happen, but that like, as a historian, we gotta like, say, well, there's no independent cross-reference sources. You don't have multiple attestation for this particular event. The interesting thing about Jesus is that we have more evidence from different writings

• 2:42:31Speaker 01

  in the ancient world than we probably should have for someone of his stature. Because we have Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John, these four biographies. There's really only one other person in and around that time that can claim to have that much kind of independent testimony of their life, and it's the Roman Emperor Tiberius. So he also has four biographers. He has Cassio Dio, Suetonius Tacitus, and Velius Peterculus. And so the Roman emperor, who's the most famous, most powerful person at the time, has a similar amount of historiographical evidence biographically for his, you know,

• 2:43:16Speaker 01

  the events of his lifetime that Jesus does.

• 2:43:18Joe Rogan?

  What is the interpretation of Jesus from non-Jesus followers at the time? What did they think he was or who he was?

• 2:43:28Speaker 01

  He was a crucified traveling rabbi. Yeah, I mean, I mean, you have, you have, so you have individuals like Josephus mentions him, end of first century, beginning of second century. He was a, he was a Jewish Roman writer. Tacitus mentions him, who also wrote about the emperor. And, you know, you have a number of these individuals, Cassio or Suetonius. But what they're doing mostly is describing what they're, what the followers of Christianity are saying about him. So you do have to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt in that they're not saying things that they believe happened. They're saying, they're talking about things that Christians believe happened.

• 2:44:07Speaker 01

  And Christians are this very unusual group because they're monotheistic in a world that does not believe in monotheism. And Jews are monotheistic in that time as well. But there was this idea that your religion could be tied to your ethnicity and that was okay. Like, the Jews believe in one God and that's weird, but they're Jews. Whereas the Christians start to convert people who are of all different ethnic backgrounds. And so they're like, well, what the heck is going on here? Because why, why are you saying? So the earliest criticisms of Christianity were actually that it was atheistic. Ah, being the negative participle and theos meaning God. Right? Because the ancient world was polytheistic. Right.

• 2:44:52Speaker 01

  But more than that, it was what's sometimes referred to as heterotheism, in that it's not that they believe in many gods, it's that they believe in many gods. And your gods could be my gods, right? Jupiter could be Zeus, just same god by a different name. And your cities could have gods, right? Osiris and Ra can live in Egypt. And Zeus and Athena can live here. And that doesn't compromise anything. But then the Christians are coming around and they're saying, actually, no, none of those gods exist. If they exist, then they're demons, but they don't actually exist. And this was a big point of persecution within early Christianity, is that A lot of physical events were tied to supernatural events.

• 2:45:36Speaker 01

  So there's an ancient historian who has this line where he says, if the Nile River is too high in Egypt, or the Tiber River is too low in Rome, the cry will ring out the Christians to the lions. Because if you have a, say, a famine in Athens, and they're going, okay, what's the reason for the famine? Well, Athena's mad, because there's a bunch of people running around saying she doesn't exist. Okay, well, let's deal with them.

• 2:46:06Joe Rogan?

  To the lions.

• 2:46:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's get rid of them, and that'll solve our issue. So Christians were this very oddball group.

• 2:46:14Joe Rogan?

  Kind of crazy that it wound up taking over the area.

• 2:46:17Speaker 01

  Well, that's part of, I think, the argument of, well, how do you explain that? How do you explain it going from 11 scared disciples in an upper room, to being willing to go out and die for the proclamation that you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and you saw Him, and you touched Him, and you ate with Him, and, you know, He wasn't a ghost, you actually ate fish with the resurrected Jesus?

• 2:46:42Joe Rogan?

  How does Constantine fit into this? Like, what is Constantine's education in Christianity?

• 2:46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Constantine is a pagan, up until a point in time when he converts, so...

• 2:46:54Joe Rogan?

  Who educates them?

• 2:46:56Speaker 01

  Uh, good question. I don't know in terms of his education. I know he does have some, like, crossover with some prominent Christians later on. He's a sun worshiper, but right before, right before Constantine, you had a guy named Diocletian, who was the emperor, who basically had the goal of wiping out Christianity entirely. And so, he, the worst point of persecution was under the Diocletian rule. He actually made it so that if you had to go into... Like the equivalent of your town hall. And you had to take a pinch of incense and offer it on to the altar of Caesar. Him, right, the king.

• 2:47:41Speaker 01

  And say, Caesar is Lord. And part of this was that they knew that Christians say, Jesus is Lord. And Christians wouldn't do that. So here's how you outed them.

• 2:47:56Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:47:56Speaker 01

  And if you didn't do this, so if you did do it, you were getting this given this piece of paper. It's called a libelus. And a libelus allowed you to buy and sell. If you didn't do it, you didn't get a libelus, which meant that you were not allowed to buy and sell.

• 2:48:09Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:48:10Speaker 01

  And so you have this incredible air of persecution where Christians are being like killed. And Christian literature in particular is being destroyed because they're hunting it out. So Constantine comes after this. And he knows that this is bad for Roman society. And so him and Licinius get together. They're both ruling the Roman empire at the time. And in 313, they put out this edict of tolerance, which includes Christianity. So it's called the Edict of Milan. And it decriminalizes Christianity. So it's no longer illegal to be a Christian.

• 2:48:48Joe Rogan?

  What was their motivation?

• 2:48:50Speaker 01

  I think they just felt like in order to establish peace within the empire, you need to make sure that people aren't fearing you constantly to that degree. And so it wasn't just Christianity that benefited from the edict of Milan. A number of religion, you know, religious minority groups were benefited from this particular event. But this happens between 313 and 325, Constantine converts. And so he becomes friendly to Christians. He also, he, he commissions books of the Bible to be written.

• 2:49:35Speaker 01

  And so this is where we first get our understanding. Like when we think of a Bible, we think of it as like in a single bound volume. Like, because we have the 66 books of the Bible and, you know, has a nice cover on the page and or on the front. But in the ancient world, those existed independently. So like P 52, like that would be a separate copy of the Gospel of John. And that's what it would have been understood as scripture. Well, Constantine, as like a peace offering, commissions all of these documents to be brought together and published in one book. And so we actually have what we think are some of these documents.

• 2:50:14Speaker 01

  So the, when I was talking with Billy Carson, he brought up the Sinai Bible, Codex Sinaiticus. Codex Sinaiticus is probably one of these documents that Constantine commissioned because it's one of our earliest examples of a cover to cover, Genesis to Revelation, copy of the Bible. And it comes from the fourth century. And based on both its dating and based on the fact that this would have been incredibly expensive to make, like it took 360 sheep just to put together.

• 2:50:46Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:50:47Speaker 01

  Which would have been the equivalent of like, I don't know, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars today. So the reason why we're pretty sure that documents like Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Phatticanus, potentially even Codex Alexandrinus or Codex Washingtonianus are documents that could have been part of this commissioning is just because they're such giant, giant projects in, you know, very few people would have had the ability to produce something like this other than an emperor. And so we actually have some of these, these documents that, that survive today.

• 2:51:25Joe Rogan?

  Are there any books that were designed? And how did they pick the order that these, these stories are in the Bible? And are there any books that were excluded?

• 2:51:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:51:38Joe Rogan?

  Where there's debate on it?

• 2:51:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Great question. So this is the issue of what's sometimes called the canon of scripture.

• 2:51:43Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:51:44Speaker 01

  So very early on, when you have Christians having these conversations, the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are you, there's unanimous agreement about those.

• 2:51:56Speaker 01

  Particularly, and that's not to say that there aren't other gospels that pop up. It's that you have this chain of custody that goes back to the earliest Jesus community. Jesus has disciples, and there's a group of individuals who we call the apostolic fathers, who are the disciples of Jesus's disciples. And so they comment on the books that the disciples of Jesus, or that people within the community of the disciples of Jesus wrote. And so we actually have a very close connection to the time. And we see early on that you have guys like Ignatius of Antioch arguing that there are only four gospels, he's in the second century, and there couldn't be any more than four. Or Theophilus of Antioch makes the similar argument, and they name Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

• 2:52:41Speaker 01

  Now, Ignatius of Antioch also talks about other gospels, but he specifically highlights the fact that the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Truth, Gospel of the Hebrews, Gospel of, you know, these ones that we kind of hear about, Mary, Judas, that the reason we know that they're not associated with the names that are attached to them is because they're being written in times when those people were dead, and they have these rings of pagan philosophy that are incorporated into them, which is completely foreign to first-century Judaism. So Jesus would not have... So in the Gospel of James, Jesus is worshiping a goddess named Sophia. It's like, okay, well, no first-century Jew is going to do that. That's obviously paganism.

• 2:53:26Speaker 01

  And so we have these early conversations. But when Christians are thinking about, well, what is and isn't Scripture? The earliest Christians are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah. And the Jews had this idea that the promises of God are followed up by the writings, the documents that establish those. So the word that's often used is covenant, right? God makes a covenant with people, and that's always followed up by written text. So this is why sometimes... Well, in the case of Moses, it's literally inscribed on a tablet, right? And in the prophets, sometimes you get this command, write this on a scroll, inscribe this on a tablet. And that the Jewish scriptures in Jesus's day were seen as a...

• 2:54:15Speaker 01

  Were seen as a story in search of a conclusion. Because they were looking for this figure, this Messiah, who would come and fulfill things like the reign of David. So they're talking about these things, they're actually expecting them to happen. And so, the story in search of a conclusion, in the Christian understanding, is that Jesus is that individual. He comes, and he does things like he says at the last Sabbath, right before his crucifixion, that he's establishing a new covenant in his blood. And so, the earliest Christians, mostly who are Jews, who believe in Jesus as the Messiah, they see, okay, there's a new covenant, which is actually promised in Jeremiah 31:31,

• 2:55:00Speaker 01

  when God says that he's going to make a new covenant and inscribe the law on people's hearts. That covenant has come, okay, the promises have come. So the earliest Christians very organically say, okay, where's the writing? Because we expect this to happen. Promises are followed up by writings. And so they start to have these conversations of what are the writings? And where can we find them? And so, very early on, because the New Testament has 27 books in it, very early on, 24 of the 27 are unanimously accepted. So by the time you get to the middle of the second century, we have lists in documents, like there's a document called the Miratorium Fragment, which there's debate on its dating,

• 2:55:43Speaker 01

  but it's probably like mid to late second century. And it includes 24 of the 27. And it gives reasoning why. Now, the other books that are in our New Testament that aren't in that 24 are ones that were discussed because the earliest Christians were trying to figure out, okay, can we tie this to either...

• 2:56:07Speaker 01

  An apostle or someone who knew an apostle. Because we have a lot of books flying around with the names of John and Peter on them. So you have the Acts of Peter, and you have the Revelation of Peter, and you have the Gospels of Peter, and you have... So how do we do our due diligence to try to tie this back? So there's two letters of Peter, First and Second Peter, in the New Testament. And the early Christians are like, we've got to make sure we can tie these to Peter. Or the Book of Jude and the Book of James, which are ascribed to the brothers of Jesus. They were like, can we really say that those are written by those people?

• 2:56:46Speaker 01

  And so there are some books that the dust kind of takes time to settle on within the whole 27 canon. Because these groups are debating and discussing, you know, well, why do we have these ones and not other ones?

• 2:57:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:57:06Speaker 01

  And so there are various canon lists that come up throughout the ancient world, where some people are hypothesizing, well, maybe, you know, this book is part of it, or maybe this book is part of it. But it's this ongoing conversation of people. And by basically the end of the second century, we have more or less unanimous agreement of the 27 books being those that encapsulate Scripture that can be tied to either someone who knew Jesus, or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus.

• 2:57:34Joe Rogan?

  And so these books that were not included, are any of them interesting?

• 2:57:38Speaker 01

  They're all interesting.

• 2:57:40Joe Rogan?

  But is... Does any of it seem like it belongs in the New Testament?

• 2:57:45Speaker 01

  Well, so, part of the problem with some of these other books is they appear to be almost completely reliant on the other books. So you do have... And some of them have an agenda to them. So like, the Docetic Gospel of Peter seems to be uncomfortable with the fact that the biblical Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, have women being the first witnesses to the empty tomb. Because in the ancient world, women were not seen as good eyewitnesses. So you almost have this apologetic, trying to solve that problem by having all the right people be witness to the resurrection. So you have all the Roman and Jewish officials camping out in front of the tomb, which also

• 2:58:24Speaker 01

  gives away the fact that like no Jewish priest on the eve of Passover is gonna be camping out in front of a dead body. Like they didn't do that. So it betrays that the author of the Gospel of Peter has no understanding of purity ritual rites within first century Second Temple Judaism, but is also clearly trying to remedy this embarrassing fact.

• 2:58:49Joe Rogan?

  Wow. That's what's so interesting about trying to interpret this stuff. You have to think about it in the terms of the culture of the times.

• 2:58:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And one of the most interesting ways that we figure out, okay, how can we tie, say, the Gospel of Matthew to the first century in Judea is studies that have been done on name frequency. So this is called onomastic congruence, where we look at the most popular names within a particular geographical area and we compare it to how names are differentiated. So the name Joe is pretty common. So when you have a room and there's more than one Joe, you differentiate, okay? That's Joe Rogan, or you know, that's MMA Joe, you know, we figure out a way to do it.

• 2:59:43Speaker 01

  And that's called a disambiguator. And we see this in the New Testament. When you have lots of Peters, right? You have Simon Peter, you have Peter the Canaanite, you have, you know, or James the son of Zebedee, or you have lots of Marys. So you have these disambiguations. You even have lots of Jesuses, which is why Jesus is often described as the Lord Jesus or Jesus of Nazareth, because... Yehoshua is a common Jewish name. And so, we can look at the popularity of names written in documents and actually pinpoint some of these documents to particular times and particular places.

• 3:00:22Speaker 01

  In fact, Jamie, are you able to, if you go on Apologetics Canada, our YouTube page? So, the first episode of the Can I Trust the Bible series we did? We made an animation about this, where we looked at the data and then we actually compared it to one of these other gospels, the Gospel of Judas. And so, in the first episode of Can I Trust the Bible in the Right Books? Partway through, it's near the end, the last animation, if you can find it, we had a guy put this together for us, where we looked at the studies, and there have been some really recent ones by a guy named Luke Vanderwey, who published this in, I believe it was at

• 3:01:06Speaker 01

  Cambridge, no, no, no, Birmingham University, he did his PhD on it, and he narrowed the gap within all of these literary bodies that talk about names. And we're able to pinpoint and actually show, yeah, so, if you go to, yeah, right here. Those particular decades that they're writing. A series of scholarly studies has shown that, though Jews were located in many places across the Roman Empire, people's names often tended to be geographically located. By observing literary and archaeological artifacts, a list of common names can be clearly identified. By narrowing down the most popular names in places that Jesus lived, traveled, and ministered,

• 3:01:49Speaker 01

  and by comparing these to the lists from the studies, an interesting correlation can be seen. Just as we see today with popular names, a qualifier or nickname is often used. For example, notice that when Matthew lists the disciples in his gospel, certain names have a qualifier or nickname and others do not. Simon called Peter and Andrew his brother and James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector, James the son of Alpheus and Thaddeus, Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him. As we would expect, the most popular names are those that have an added description.

• 3:02:30Speaker 01

  When we compare the most popular names in Judea and Galilee during the first century with names we see listed in key places in the biblical gospels, we find that all the names with qualifiers match with what we'd assume if they were actually written in the time and place they claim to be narrating. In contrast, the Gospel of Judas only has two names that would fit, Jesus and Judas, but contains a host of other characters whose names match not with first-century Judea or Galilee, like the biblical gospels, but with names that were popular in Egypt during the second and third centuries. Consider how difficult it would be for someone living outside of the locations and times

• 3:03:12Speaker 01

  that these events took place to get the right names with the right qualifiers. We have four biblical gospels with four different authors, and yet each gets this test of naming, frequency, and attribution right every time, a test and standard that the non-biblical gospels simply do not pass.

• 3:03:32Joe Rogan?

  That's interesting.

• 3:03:34Speaker 01

  So, we can use so-

• 3:03:35Joe Rogan?

  That is so interesting.

• 3:03:36Speaker 01

  Isn't it?

• 3:03:37Joe Rogan?

  God, that's so interesting.

• 3:03:38Speaker 01

  This is-

• 3:03:39Joe Rogan?

  Totally makes sense, too.

• 3:03:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's the levels of methodology that we can use to find internal accuracy. If we really want to figure out, okay, where was this written? And is it coming from early eyewitness testimony? We look at something like the biblical gospels, and they fit the bill for something that's written in first-century Judea. But if we look at something like the other gospels, they're doing things like the Gospel of Judas does, where other characters are coming up with names that are almost either nonexistent or like very unpopular in places like Judea and Galilee, but are popular in third and fourth-century Egypt. So, what do we, what can we then conclude from that? Well, this is being written in third or fourth-century Egypt.

• 3:04:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:04:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:22Joe Rogan?

  Wow, that's, that's really amazing.

• 3:04:25Joe Rogan?

  It's such a complex and fascinating subject. It really is. And I think it's because of the barrier to entry is so, it's so high. There's so much to learn, there's so much to dig dig. Most people barely scratch the surface of this stuff.

• 3:04:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:04:41Joe Rogan?

  And it takes someone like you to really kind of, because it's like real easy to lean into the fun stuff. It's real easy to lean into the Anunnaki stuff and, but the actual real shit that we know is 100% the accounts of people that lived back then.

• 3:04:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:59Joe Rogan?

  That, that to me is as fascinating, if not more than even We Were Made by Aliens. Like, all of it is bizarre. And the fact that we're still going over these texts thousands of years later is also fascinating.

• 3:05:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And lots of this stuff, like the Unamastak congruence is something that has really only been studied to the level that it has within the last like 50 years.

• 3:05:24Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 3:05:24Speaker 01

  So we're constantly discovering ways that we can use different types of methodological analysis to figure out the historical validity of something. So this is, we call it verisimilitude, which is historians are looking for what can show us the appearance, likelihood and probability of something being true. And so sometimes documents out themselves as being unreliable and not true because they inadvertently include these, these clues like, so the Gospel of Barnabas, which I mentioned before, which Billy Carson has brought up as an evidence that he sees as denying the crucifixion. It talks about Jesus getting in a boat and traveling to Nazareth. But Nazareth is landlocked.

• 3:06:08Speaker 01

  So that person clearly did not know anything about the geography of like first century Israel.

• 3:06:16Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:06:16Speaker 01

  Because. You're not getting in a boat to go to Nazareth, right? So, so, but if you're writing, you know, I mean, in the case of the Gospel of Barnabas, you're talking about like a thousand plus years later. But if you've never been there and you don't understand, it's like, have you ever seen middle age paintings of lions?

• 3:06:35Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 3:06:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06:36Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:36Speaker 01

  They had no idea what they were.

• 3:06:38Joe Rogan?

  Well, we brought that up the other day because I was in Ravello.

• 3:06:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:06:42Joe Rogan?

  And there's a church, an ancient church in Ravello, and it has a depiction of the whale. And

• 3:06:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:06:49Joe Rogan?

  The whale doesn't look anything like a whale. Like, it has wings.

• 3:06:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06:52Joe Rogan?

  It looks like a lion's head. It's so weird.

• 3:06:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, a lot of the Middle Ages, throughout the Middle Ages.

• 3:06:56Joe Rogan?

  There it is.

• 3:06:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 3:06:58Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it looks like a dragon.

• 3:06:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:07:00Joe Rogan?

  Crazy.

• 3:07:01Speaker 01

  And, and lions look a lot like dogs.

• 3:07:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:03Speaker 01

  Because they're like, what's your frame of reference?

• 3:07:06Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 3:07:07Speaker 01

  Right?

• 3:07:07Joe Rogan?

  And also, you're getting someone describing it to an artist.

• 3:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:07:10Joe Rogan?

  You probably can't paint it.

• 3:07:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:07:11Joe Rogan?

  So you have to describe it.

• 3:07:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:07:12Joe Rogan?

  Like, yeah, that's what it looks like.

• 3:07:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, tertiary, secondary. So, um, and, and a lot of these writings kind of out themselves as that, literarily, within the things that they choose to include. Names are a small example, but geography or distances between places, you know, the biblical gospel is described going up to Jerusalem. And we can kind of read that and not think anything about it, but Jerusalem on the elevation of sea level, you do go up to it. And so it's like these small clues that we as historians are looking for, or on the parable of the Good Samaritan, it's going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. And you literally, you go down like an elevation in sea level to go to Jericho.

• 3:07:59Speaker 01

  Or the, the story of Zacchaeus, who's the guy who climbs a tree to see Jesus. He's a wee little man. He's like, like a, is, is a, he's short and he can't see over the crowd and he hears this miracle worker, Jesus is coming, so he climbs a sycamore tree. And the gospels specifically say he climbs a sycamore tree. Well, this can be like a detail we can pass over, but we know, based on kind of the acidity of the soils, that sycamore trees only grow in those areas.

• 3:08:30Speaker 01

  In that, you know, timeframe, so we can look and see, okay, well, Luke, whoever Luke is getting this from, he's adding this detail, maybe he's not even even aware of the significance of it. But whoever he's getting this from has been there. Because they actually know what tree would have been growing there and tell him that Zaccheaus climbs a sigmar tree. And so it's like fauna and flora and distance between locations, things that actually other ancient writers get wrong sometimes.

• 3:09:01Joe Rogan?

  Have you ever had a debate with a snarky atheist?

• 3:09:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:09:05Joe Rogan?

  I think that would be fun.

• 3:09:06Speaker 01

  Like a, like a, a formal debate?

• 3:09:09Joe Rogan?

  No, not even a formal debate, just to, I think it would be a fascinating conversation, because I'm sure, well, atheists, um, they vary, just like Christians vary. But, uh, the worst versions of them are essentially believers in the religion of atheism.

• 3:09:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:09:24Joe Rogan?

  They, they worship the concept of there being no God, and this is it, when you die, nothing happens.

• 3:09:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:09:30Joe Rogan?

  And that, to me, is always so arrogant. I just, just the fact that you exist at all is so bizarre and so spectacular. The idea that you know for sure that when the lights shut out, that that's a rap, like, because there's no evidence of the contrary, well, okay.

• 3:09:47Speaker 01

  Kind of assuming your conclusion there.

• 3:09:49Joe Rogan?

  Absence of evidence is not evidence, especially when you're talking about something that's as bizarre as death. And especially when you have people that have near-death experiences that are radically similar.

• 3:09:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:10:00Joe Rogan?

  Those are really weird. They're really weird how, how many similarities people have in these near-death experiences from accidents and all sorts of things that people, you know, come back from, where their heart stops beating, they see themselves above their body. There's, there's a lot of weirdness to it that makes you, I just think, it seems it's a little silly. Because how could you know what you don't know?

• 3:10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:10:22Joe Rogan?

  You cannot know what you don't know. And it, the problem is that there's a cachet, that there's a social credit amongst academics in particular, that's, um, that's ascribed to a person who is atheist. A person who is, he's brilliant, he's not silly, he doesn't believe in myths, he doesn't... I get it. I get why there's social pressure in that regard. I get it, but to not look at the universe itself, just the, this creation engine of planets and stellar nurseries, just of

• 3:11:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:11:02Joe Rogan?

  The bizarreness of the epicness of it all, and to not wonder if maybe you're, you have a very narrow perception

• 3:11:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:11:10Joe Rogan?

  Of what this whole thing is all about.

• 3:11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Deny the virgin birth, but not the virgin birth of the universe.

• 3:11:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Well, all of it, like, everything, just, the, the, the big ver- there, there's so many more impressive miracles than any of the things that people think of in the bo- it's just they're, they're so weird in our day and age

• 3:11:29Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 3:11:29Joe Rogan?

  That we're not willing to like, if, we want, we, we wanna think that things are very clean and easy to measure

• 3:11:39Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 3:11:39Joe Rogan?

  And they often are not. And, you know, I think most of what it means to be a human being in a, in a meaningful way is not measurable.

• 3:11:49Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 3:11:50Joe Rogan?

  Most of it. Love and friendship and community, these things are not very measurable. They're very strange. You know, the, the, the bond that people have with their family and their loved ones and it's very strange.

• 3:12:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:12:03Joe Rogan?

  That love connection, whatever love is, whatever good is, it's a very real thing and it seems to not exist, certainly not in the volume in other animals that exist in us.

• 3:12:15Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 3:12:16Joe Rogan?

  There's obviously nurturing in other animals, they nurture their loved ones, but their perception of life and death and all of it is very different than ours.

• 3:12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:12:24Joe Rogan?

  So it leads me to why? Why? Why is, why is our version of life so much more rich and complicated than any other being that exists? And why do we have this insatiable desire to learn and know more?

• 3:12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:12:42Joe Rogan?

  What is it?

• 3:12:43Speaker 01

  Why does this, you know, however many, three pounds of gray matter in my brain, why is that able to plummet the intricacies of the universe?

• 3:12:51Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:12:52Speaker 01

  Right? Like, and, and I think that that's, that's ultimately the questions that we should be asking in terms of, you matter more than you are matter. There's something going on.

• 3:13:02Joe Rogan?

  There's something going on with all of us.

• 3:13:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:13:04Joe Rogan?

  We kinda know it, we don't know it. You know, but it's just, you can't measure it and you can't put it on a scale. And so people don't like that.

• 3:13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:13:12Joe Rogan?

  They don't like that. It makes them feel dumb to believe in that. It makes them feel dumb to even speculate. You know, to even just say, what do you think happens when you die? Like even that conversation is like, people don't like that. Nothing? It goes dark and that's it? It's over. That's it. You die. Like, how the fuck do you know? Have you died? Like, you don't know.

• 3:13:32Speaker 01

  So, in all of this, what do you think of Jesus? Like, in terms of your own, like, journeying and trying to find answers to ultimate questions? What do you think of the historical person of Jesus?

• 3:13:45Joe Rogan?

  Well, it certainly seems like there's a lot of people that believe that there was this very exceptional human being that existed. So the question is, what does that mean? Does it mean he was the son of God? Does it mean he was just some completely unique human being that had this vision of humanity? And this way of educating people and spreading this ideology that would ultimately change the way human beings interact with each other forever. So, what is, is he the son of God? Well, are we all? That's another question, right? Do we all have that inside of us?

• 3:14:27Joe Rogan?

  Do we all have that ability to change everything around us, inside of us? Do we all have that unique connection to the divine? And is he a representation of the best version of that? Or was he an actual person that was the son of God? And is it important?

• 3:14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:14:45Joe Rogan?

  I don't know. I mean, what does it mean? It's, just the fact that it's a question to ponder is a miracle in itself, in a way. Just the fact that there's this concept of this person that died for our sins as the son of God. But you have to buy a bunch, you have to believe in a bunch of stuff to go that way. Like, just the concept of that is interesting to people. Because what it can do to people is offer them...

• 3:15:15Joe Rogan?

  A very unique way to change the way they feel about the world itself. And if you do follow that, I know a lot of Christians or hardcore Christians are some of the nicest people you'll ever meet in your life. So it does work. Right? Like if you do live like a Christian and you do follow the principles of Christ, you will have a richer, more love-filled life. So it is true. Right? But you have to submit to this concept that this guy was the child of God who came down to earth, let himself be crucified, came back from the dead, explained a bunch of stuff for people and then said, all right, see you when I come back.

• 3:16:00Speaker 01

  And you don't know how you can wrap your head around that particular claim?

• 3:16:04Joe Rogan?

  And if he came back, here's the thing, if he came back, who the fuck would believe him today? With all the fake news and all the CGI and AI, like imagine, that would be the most bizarre thing of all time. If we get to a point where artificial reality is indiscernible from regular reality and Jesus chooses to come back at that moment, boy, that's the ultimate test of faith. Right? When it's impossible to discern. If we really reach a point where virtual reality is indistinguishable from regular reality, which we're probably 100 years away from that or something, like how, maybe not even that.

• 3:16:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that's probably why Jesus came in the first century and not the 21st century.

• 3:16:49Joe Rogan?

  But imagine, imagine if that's the, that's the big catch, like Jesus does return, but when he returns, we're just so confused that we, we can't even tell.

• 3:17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:17:02Joe Rogan?

  Or maybe that's how he returns in the first place. Maybe he returns through AI.

• 3:17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:17:06Joe Rogan?

  Maybe that's the portal to Jesus. I don't know anything about that.

• 3:17:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean.

• 3:17:10Joe Rogan?

  That scares the shit out of me.

• 3:17:11Speaker 01

  I really appreciate, I mean, guys that you're friends with, right? Like the Jordan Petersons and the Douglas Murrys of the world, or, you know, the Tom Hollands, not the Spider-Man actor, the historian, who talk about this stuff. I think I really like the way that Jordan Peterson articulates it, but I think he misses the forest for the trees.

• 3:17:28Joe Rogan?

  How so?

• 3:17:28Speaker 01

  In that he sees Jesus as an archetype.

• 3:17:31Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:17:32Speaker 01

  And I don't think actually even Jesus gives you the opportunity to see him as the archetype. Because I, I both, I have this love-hate relationship with all of Peterson's stuff, because he's, he seems to get so much right where he walks up to the line, but he doesn't want to cross over.

• 3:17:47Joe Rogan?

  And is the crossover, you think, connected to a life in academia?

• 3:17:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 3:17:51Joe Rogan?

  What do you think it is?

• 3:17:52Speaker 01

  I, I wonder, and I'd love to talk to him about this, like, how do you remedy this issue that, because he seems to think it, that the concept of Jesus as an example is more important than the actual flesh and blood, first-century itinerant Jewish preacher who was crucified and rose from the dead physically, which is the claim of the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, that that's, that's an example for us to look on and live by. But I, I actually think that Jesus condemns moralism. And ultimately, what I see Peterson doing is looking at Jesus as a moral example, and

• 3:18:37Speaker 01

  if Jesus is nothing but a moral example, then you can save yourself and you don't actually need a savior.

• 3:18:42Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:18:43Speaker 01

  And so, I think actually Jesus would have critiqued that, because Jesus was very against moralism.

• 3:18:47Joe Rogan?

  And what, how does he, how do you define Jesus being against moralism? Like, what do you mean by that exactly?

• 3:18:53Speaker 01

  Well, Jesus looks at the religiosity of his day with, like, particular groups like the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who are these other, like, uh... These other groups of Jews during his day, so we talked about the Essenes, actually aren't mentioned in the Bible, but there are other groups like the Pharisees, who are like lay scholars, and the Sadducees, who are professional priest scholars. And he's constantly critiquing the fact that they have this hypocritical religiosity to them, where they're doing things like tithing their mint leaves, like to make sure that they get all of, this is where we get the idea of the letter of the law versus the intention of the law. Like, Jesus critiques them for that, because he says, "You're trying

• 3:19:37Speaker 01

  to do everything right, and you're missing the point." So, one of the things he says is like, "If your donkey falls in a ravine on the Sabbath, do you pull it out, or does that work?" Like, what's the point of the Sabbath? Is it to not do any work? Like, is it to make sure that you're not working too hard, because you might be breaking the Sabbath? Or like, what is the point? He says, like, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." And that there's this intention, this is the whole Sermon on the Mount, Matthew, Chapter 5, is, he keeps saying, "You have heard it said, but I say," and he refers to the Mosaic Law, and it looks like he's critiquing the Mosaic Law, but he's not actually, he's getting

• 3:20:20Speaker 01

  back to the intention of the law. So, and he says, you know, "You have heard it said, do not commit murder, but I say to you, anybody who harbors a hate for their brother in their heart, has already committed murder." And, and what he's getting to is like, what's the intention? What's the meaning of the law that God puts, gives to you? Because the law is like a mirror, it shows you how dirty you are. But his critique is, he's like, "You guys are trying to clean yourself with a mirror. That's stupid. It's just gonna, if anything, it's gonna make you more messy. Like, get in the shower. The law is not what cleans you, the law is what reveals that you're dirty." And so, in that sense, I think, you know, if Jesus is a moral example, it actually

• 3:21:04Speaker 01

  misses what I think Jesus actually said about what his purpose was, in that you can't do enough to actually live up to the standard that God holds you to. And so, if you keep striving, you're, you're actually gonna wear yourself out and be exhausted.

• 3:21:22Joe Rogan?

  Like atheists.

• 3:21:25Speaker 01

  I didn't say you did, Joe.

• 3:21:26Joe Rogan?

  A lot of them go crazy. They go crazy when they get older.

• 3:21:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:21:32Joe Rogan?

  Um, listen, Wes, this is such an awesome conversation and I'm sad that it went down the way it went down with you and Billy, but the good thing out of it is that a lot of people became aware of your work and it's such exhaustive work. It's, it's really amazing what you've done. Thank you so much for these gifts. We will find a great place for them on the wall here. And thanks for, and let's do it again. And I would love to do it with you and someone who disagrees too. I think it would be a fascinating conversation.

• 3:22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 3:22:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think it would be really cool.

• 3:22:02Speaker 01

  This has been a pleasure.

• 3:22:03Joe Rogan?

  My pleasure. Thank you very much. Oh, tell everybody how to find you, how to find, um, all of the different, you have two different YouTube channels. You have your own and you have this new one.

• 3:22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:22:12Joe Rogan?

  Apologetics Canada.

• 3:22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I work for a national not-for-profit and in Canada that is an organization. We want people to have an intellectually robust and a biblically grounded and a, a, um, uh, faith. We want, want people to know what they believe and why they believe it. And so, uh, we produce materials, like we played that clip from Can I Trust the Bible? That's a series that's ongoing. Uh, you know, I'm going to be traveling in 2025 to produce more of that content to try to, you know, get this stuff that's all up here out into people so that they can be able to access it.

• 3:22:45Joe Rogan?

  Do you have two of them that are on? Well, there's more, but there's the two I trust, do, Can I Trust the Bible?

• 3:22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:22:50Joe Rogan?

  Versions, one, two. I watched both of those.

• 3:22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, awesome. Yeah. So, yeah, wesleyhuff.com is my website. Apologeticscanada.com is, uh, where, you know, if you want to see where I'm speaking or what we're up to, I'm part of a team that does a lot of this stuff. So, uh, those are the two places. All my social media handles can be found on wesleyhuff.com.

• 3:23:08Joe Rogan?

  All right. Beautiful. Thanks very much. Appreciate it. Thank you, everybody. Bye.