Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan

YERRR – the guys brought on Christian apologist and Bible expert Wesley Huff to break down faith, philosophy, and help us understand the history of the Bible. He breaks down misquoted verses, the myths about Jesus and his travels, why Christianity split so many times, and why Christmas is NOT a Pagan holiday. All that and more on this week’s episode of FLAGRANT. INDULGE. 0:00 start 0:50 Wesley Huff vs Billy Carson in Turkey 3:25 Wesley Huff: Scripture Scholar 6:50 What is the OLDEST Bible? 10:30 Christianity in the earliest days was a fringe movement 13:15 John the Baptist, underrated and unexplained 23:10 Jesus wasn't the only revolutionary messiah 28:38 Misunderstood Mary Magdalene 32:30 Did Jesus ever go to India?? 34:00 Jesus' life was not well documented 40:05 Christians dealing with Biblical discrepancy 51:30 Bible is written FOR you, not TO you 1:04:00 Biblical translation against LGBT 1:12:11 Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation Reasons 1:15:40 Catholic's Reason for the Pope vs Orthodoxy 1:22:36 the removed Biblical apocrypha books 1:31:23 Pagan Myths Debunked 1:37:10 Why did Judas kill Jesus? 1:50:30 are there giants in the Bible? 2:02:21 Hyperbole in the Bible 2:10:15 do Non-Christians go to Heaven? 2:29:25 the misunderstanding of Hell 2:37:10 Babies going to Heaven and God protecting the innocent 2:39:22 an example of God's punishment 2:41:40 Karma, transactions and the Bible 2:48:10 the only sin you won't be forgiven for 2:56:22 What Christians can do that Atheists cannot 3:07:30 the father, son and holy ghost explained Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  You sound horrible.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  I feel worse. This flu is not playing around.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Dad, you promised you'd be in my band. And it's showtime. Then it's Dayquil Intense Flu time.

• 0:42Speaker 03

  For fast and powerful relief of your flu symptoms, try Dayquil Intense Flu.

• 0:46Mark Gagnon?

  Hit it.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  Dayquil Intense Flu. The fast-acting daytime coughing, aching, aching, aching fever power through your flu medicine. Use is directed. Keep out of reach of children.

• 0:58Speaker 05

  What's up, people? Today, we are joined by the most bodaciously brawlic Bible expert you've ever seen, a true man of God, Wesley Huff, or as Billy Carson calls him, "White Devil", is here to break down the big questions. Which version of Christianity is the truth? Did Jesus make it to India? That explains how he walked on water, because it's so polluted. Also, were there actual giants in the Bible? What's up with the Book of Enoch? Are Christmas and Easter just some old pagan holidays? And can non-Christians still get into heaven? Indulge.

• 1:33Speaker 05

  Wesley, thank you so much for taking the time. I'm very excited for you to be here. We must state that I'm not taking any credit for your success. Neither is Mark, neither is Alex, neither is Akash.

• 1:42Speaker 06

  Never. I'll give it to you.

• 1:43Speaker 05

  No, no, don't do it. Because you earned your success, okay? And, Jesus, look at that fucking thing. God bless. Make me a Christian. And the other thing.

• 1:53Speaker 06

  You gotta put the test back in New Testament.

• 1:56Speaker 05

  There we go.

• 1:57Mark Gagnon?

  Let's go.

• 1:58Speaker 06

  Come with bars, bro.

• 1:59Speaker 05

  Come with the bars, okay. The Billy Carson debate, does it sprout from you reacting to Billy on our podcast?

• 2:10Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:11Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:12Speaker 06

  Because I made response videos

• 2:13Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:14Speaker 06

  to you guys.

• 2:15Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:15Speaker 06

  Because people kept sending it to me.

• 2:17Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:18Speaker 05

  Now, did you watch the whole episode when we were like, "We're not fact-checking any of this. This is just for fun"?

• 2:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. And you were like, "I'm gonna fact-check this."

• 2:28Speaker 06

  Well, because people kept sending me these clips.

• 2:30Speaker 05

  I know. The thing about Billy is like, I know he's full of shit, but he doesn't know he's full of shit. And that's why, at least, I didn't think he was a con artist. I was like, he really believes it, and this is kind of fun. So we're like, listen, we're gonna have some fun today. But then when things get clipped out and put on the internet, people believe it 100%.

• 2:48Speaker 06

  Well, and he's so confident.

• 2:49Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:50Speaker 06

  You know what's funny? I was just in Turkey, and Billy's now in Turkey. I missed him by a week. We were in the exact same location.

• 2:56Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:56Speaker 06

  We could have. I had this thought.

• 2:58Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:59Speaker 06

  When we went, because I went to Darren Cuyu, which is the underground city in Kabbadosia.

• 3:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:03Speaker 06

  And I had the thought when we were like going in, I was like, what are the chances I run into Billy Carson down here? Because he'd said in an interview last year that he was gonna go to Darren Cuyu in a year. And it was like almost the exact same timeframe. I had that thought. Didn't happen. Would've been fun.

• 3:17Speaker 05

  What would happen if you guys ended up in the same place?

• 3:20Speaker 06

  He's ducking you, bro. I don't know. I don't even know. Yeah.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  Have you guys spoken since? What's up with the lawsuit? Like, fill us in, dude.

• 3:26Speaker 06

  No, the lawsuit didn't amount to much because there was no credibility to the lawsuit.

• 3:30Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 3:31Speaker 06

  You can't sue for not liking what you yourself said.

• 3:36Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:36Speaker 06

  Right? So, it's okay. But, yeah, I mean, I haven't heard anything from him, nor do I necessarily need to. I don't want to be the guy that took down Billy Carson. I don't want that to be my legacy.

• 3:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't think that's her legacy.

• 3:49Speaker 06

  It can be my origin story.

• 3:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:53Mark Gagnon?

  He's still doing, he's still doing all right.

• 3:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, Billy's gonna be fine. You know, people still want to believe in aliens. They want to believe in all this stuff. You believe in the anal tablets of toth, you got a necklace about it.

• 4:03Speaker 05

  Al is 100% locked in. Al's a flat-earther. There's a lot of things that we know. What do you think about Flat Earth? What's your?

• 4:09Speaker 06

  I don't know. I mean, I've been in an airplane and in the sky, and I think I've seen the curve, but I don't know.

• 4:15Speaker 05

  You don't know. Okay.

• 4:16Speaker 06

  I'm not a scientist.

• 4:17Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 4:18Speaker 06

  Don't make me say sciencey things.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  What are you exactly?

• 4:21Speaker 06

  I'm a historian.

• 4:22Speaker 05

  Yes, we know that. But then there's another thing.

• 4:24Speaker 06

  What is it?

• 4:25Speaker 05

  I don't know. I was looking up your exact title and I was like, there's no way I'm gonna memorize it. But your specialty, your PhD is in?

• 4:32Speaker 06

  Biblical manuscripts.

• 4:33Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 4:33Speaker 06

  So ancient scribal culture. So I study ancient scribes.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:37Speaker 06

  And how they produce and copy and disseminate manuscripts.

• 4:41Speaker 05

  So you're testing for efficacy of these ancient scribes?

• 4:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, different things. So like, there's a field called textual criticism, which looks at the text of particular documents.

• 4:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:50Speaker 06

  Because in the ancient world, we don't have any originals. Everything is a copy, no matter what it is. And even if we found, quote-unquote, "an original," I don't know how we'd verify it.

• 4:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, what makes something an original?

• 4:59Speaker 06

  Uh, the author writes it.

• 5:00Speaker 05

  But like, oh, so the author could write 40 of them and then we would deem that an original?

• 5:04Speaker 06

  Well, like, whatever. Like, say, uh, we find Plato's Republic and it was one that was written by him. Or like, how would we verify that it was actually? But everything we have are copies and most of them are like hundreds of years after because old things wear out.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:20Speaker 06

  And so textual criticism looks at the text and the copies and looks at internal and external factors and traces the original back.

• 5:28Speaker 05

  Okay. Question.

• 5:29Speaker 06

  That's not what I do, but it's related.

• 5:30Speaker 05

  Okay, I just have a question about this.

• 5:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:32Speaker 05

  Okay, so it is possible that you could find an older version of the Bible.

• 5:38Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  Or there could be a newer version of the Bible that is more accurate than an older version of Bible. Because the older version had a copying mistake.

• 5:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:51Speaker 05

  And, right, and so how would you identify that?

• 5:54Speaker 06

  Because there are so many copies. The thing with the Bible is that you have so many copies, far more copies than you have of any other ancient document.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  Okay. Why is that?

• 6:04Speaker 06

  The Christians really wanted.

• 6:06Speaker 05

  Because we're the best. We don't got enough of these things.

• 6:09Speaker 06

  Get your copying up, Jews and Muslims. You get a copy, you get a copy. Well, part of it was like, the Christians were the, I mean, Muslims call us the people of the book, right? Christians and Jews, because we have a scripture and that's like central to.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  The belief system.

• 6:25Speaker 06

  We believe. Whereas that's not necessarily true for like other ancient religious practices.

• 6:30Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 6:30Speaker 06

  In fact, that's the argument. There's a end of first century, beginning of second century Jewish guy named Josephus.

• 6:36Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 6:36Speaker 06

  And so he writes a document called The Antiquities of the Jews. And in it, he talks about the differentiation between like the Greek religious practices, the Greco-Roman religious practices, and the Jewish religious practices by saying, "We don't have just a..." Unlimited amount of religious texts like you guys have. We only have this. And part of the reason we know what the books of the Old Testament were in Jesus's day, part of the conversation is that Josephus outlines them. He gives a number and an argument for the list of books and what the books are.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  Okay, so from there, we have this idea. Because why would he lie or mislead about this time if his argument is to prove that this is the limited amount of books that we have?

• 7:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, he has no reason to like make it up one way or the other. And then you have, so the New Testament authors quote the Old Testament.

• 7:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 06

  Like a lot.

• 7:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:26Speaker 06

  And so we have evidence from, okay, well, Jesus, Paul, Peter, they're quoting this stuff and they're saying like, this is scripture. They're advocating for it and arguing like theological stuff.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 06

  On the basis of these texts. So we can also look at how they're treating scripture.

• 7:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:44Speaker 06

  And then there are other stuff, Dead Sea Scrolls and things like that.

• 7:48Speaker 05

  Okay, what is the earliest version of the Bible? How do we, what is the Bible?

• 7:51Speaker 06

  This question sounds familiar.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:55Speaker 06

  Well, what do you mean by version?

• 7:57Speaker 05

  I think that's where I'm going with the question, which is like, what were people consuming at the time?

• 8:03Speaker 06

  So all of these books are like independent scrolls. So there's no such thing, we think of a Bible and we think of like the single volume.

• 8:11Speaker 05

  When do we get that?

• 8:13Speaker 06

  Fourth century.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  So we don't get that until the year 300?

• 8:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, anywhere between, so Constantine decriminalizes Christianity in 313.

• 8:21Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 8:21Speaker 06

  The Edict of Milan, the peace of the church. So he makes it so that it's no longer illegal to be a Christian.

• 8:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:27Speaker 06

  Because before him, there was a guy named Diocletian, who was the emperor.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:31Speaker 06

  And Diocletian in 308 says, I'm gonna wipe these people out. So he makes it illegal for Christians to gather and he beheads all the church leaders and he like, it's this systematized persecution. So there's persecution before that.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  Right.

• 8:45Speaker 06

  The emperors were kind of loopy.

• 8:46Speaker 05

  Right.

• 8:46Speaker 06

  So like Nero is famous for burning Christians in his garden as like the lights.

• 8:51Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 8:51Speaker 06

  He's nuts.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, he got the lead poisoning, right?

• 8:54Speaker 06

  Probably.

• 8:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:56Speaker 06

  I think he was the one who made his horse his general and like made a marvel.

• 8:59Speaker 05

  Wild boy.

• 9:00Speaker 06

  Not like a few screws loose.

• 9:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 06

  So there was persecution, but it wasn't like empire wide until Diocletian.

• 9:08Speaker 05

  Diocletian comes in, he's like, yo, we're getting rid of this shit.

• 9:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, so easy and he's gonna destroy the Christians. That's his kind of motivation. Constantine eventually takes control of the empire.

• 9:19Speaker 05

  Now, in his effort to try to destroy them, does he just bolster the strength of the religion?

• 9:24Speaker 06

  Which one?

• 9:25Speaker 05

  Diocletian.

• 9:26Speaker 06

  Diocletian bolster, like, you mean for Christians? Like banning a book makes it sell more? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 05

  Does it see, is it more poppin', is it more badass? Is more, do more people want to go do it because of that?

• 9:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not a bad way of putting it. Sort of, so Christians thrive under persecution, which is an interesting, like, factor. But largely, in spite of all of this stuff that's being spread about them.

• 9:50Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 9:51Speaker 06

  So Christians do things like, the Romans practiced this ancient form of abortion where, like, particularly if you have a girl, they, it's called exposure. So they'd take the children, they'd put them out in the garbage dumps or like the, outside the city gates. And the Christians would go save them and would raise them. And so there was this, like, disproportionately large group of women in the Christian communities, statistically, because

• 10:16Speaker 05

  Smart.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  The Romans didn't want the women.

• 10:21Speaker 06

  Famous church right now, right?

• 10:25Speaker 06

  It's like a Matt Rife comedy show. I'm a girl. Girls there. So, but, and then they have, like, the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, right? Yeah. Jesus talks about, this is my body, this is my blood. And so the, the Romans catch wind of, they do this ceremony where they're talking about drinking blood and eating flesh. Sounds wild. And they're grabbing all these babies. Sounds wild. It's Hollywood, yeah. Right, so in a midst of like, stuff like that, where they're like, they're eating the babies, they, they, they still grow. And a large part because they like, they're, they, they're philanthropic, they help people. Right. So we have some, like, Roman leaders who write and they, they decry the fact that Christians are not just taking care of their own, they're taking care of like, they're like, they're taking care of our people. Everybody else. This is embarrassing us. Oh.

• 11:10Speaker 06

  So, but there are lots of factors that go into that.

• 11:14Speaker 05

  Take me even earlier then, like, what's happening immediately after the, you know, the big day?

• 11:20Speaker 06

  The big day. Ground zero. Ground zero. What's happening? What do you mean before that? No, no, after. What's happening after? Like the time of the early church after the resurrection of Christ? Between resurrection and 313 or whatever. Right. So Christianity is this like small fringe movement of a bunch of, and, and early on, they're still associated in the pagan world with the Jews. They're like a group of Jews. They just follow this. So they're thought of as Jews at the time, but like an offset of Judaism? Yeah. Because they kind of are, right? But stranger, because so your religion in the ancient world is largely tied to your ethnicity. Right. And so conversion wasn't unusual. This is interesting. Conversion wasn't unusual in the ancient world. In fact, if you got married and you were like

• 12:04Speaker 06

  a pagan Roman, it was expected that you would convert to your husband's religion. Particularly if they had house gods, which was common. Okay. But the Christians and the Jews were unusual in that they just denied everybody else's gods existed. Fire. So, so actually, one of the earliest accusations for Christians is that they're atheists. They deny the gods. So they're accused of being atheists and they're accused of being antisocial. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. Like atheist, no gods. Yeah, yeah. You guys believe in a thousand gods, why don't we believe in one? Yeah, and the ancient world is not just polytheistic, it's what's called henotheistic. Okay. So you don't just believe there are many gods, you believe that there's like hierarchies of gods. And actually, your gods could be my gods by another name. So like Zeus and Jupiter.

• 12:49Speaker 06

  Yes. Like that's why the Greeks and the Romans have the similar, if not the same gods by different names. Right. They have like different stories to them. So that's assumed by one another. You're like, okay, we both believe in these different gods. You have different names for them. That's fine, but we're both part of the same belief system. The emperor's a god. Everybody's a god. And where Jews and Christians are coming around, they're like, that ain't the case. Yeah, not only are your gods not like powerful, your gods just don't, they straight up don't exist. You're making them up. And so persecution for Christians becomes this, they become this easy scapegoat. Because if you're like in Athens, and the city god is Athena, and there's some sort of like famine. And you go, "Why do we have a famine?" Well, Athena's mad. Why is Athena mad? Well, because there are these guys running around saying she doesn't even exist.

• 13:34Speaker 06

  So, there's this early church historian named Tertullian, and he has this famous line where he says that if the Tiber River in Rome is too high, or the Nile River in Egypt is too low, the cry will ring out, "The Christians, the lions." Because they become like this easy... Why is crap happening?

• 13:51Speaker 05

  Why would our gods punish us?

• 13:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. We have no reason.

• 13:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, so that happens pretty quickly. And Tertullian also said, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." So, we get martyrdom stories very early.

• 14:06Speaker 05

  Right.

• 14:06Speaker 06

  And a lot of them are because that Christians become this easy scapegoat.

• 14:11Speaker 05

  Got it. So, there's tons of persecution early. I actually want to go back even before crucifixion. I want to go to John the Baptist. I'm really interested in this John the Baptist guy. And I don't feel like he gets enough shine.

• 14:22Speaker 06

  Doesn't get the press he deserves.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  He's an underrated character in the Bible. Yeah. Okay, so he's offering forgiveness through baptism, right? Is this happening in the woods? Okay, well, maybe you clarify, so I don't misinterpret.

• 14:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, so he is starting this like, this movement of group repentance.

• 14:44Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 14:44Speaker 06

  Where he is saying... So, baptism isn't necessarily an unusual thing to do in ancient Judaism. Like, ablution, cleaning, is part of just ritualistic purity. The Jews, the ancient Jews, were obsessed with ritualistic purity. And then you have groups like the Essenes out in the desert, who they're like, "We're just gonna do this all day long." Like, we're basically, we're gonna... There's baths everywhere in Qumran, which is their community.

• 15:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:10Speaker 06

  And they're just constantly washing themselves for ritual purity.

• 15:13Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 15:14Speaker 06

  So, it's not that John the Baptist is doing something unusual. It's that he is then saying that Israel communally needs to repent. And that you need to be doing this there for this reason. And that... Then this Jesus guy shows up and he says he's the one that is the reason why I'm doing this.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  Aren't John and Jesus like homies or cousins? Yeah, so like they kind of grew up together, no?

• 15:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 05

  Okay, but and John knows this this entire time that Jesus is gonna be the Messiah or at one day he realizes it?

• 15:50Speaker 06

  I don't know. I mean, that's not explicitly said one way or the other. But Jesus shows up and asks John to baptize him and John says, I'm not worthy to baptize you.

• 15:59Speaker 05

  So he knows.

• 15:59Speaker 06

  You should be baptizing me, not the other way around.

• 16:01Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 16:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, but he would have at least heard something because we have this story where Mary finds out she's pregnant and then she goes to her cousin Elizabeth.

• 16:10Speaker 05

  She feels.

• 16:11Speaker 06

  Who's John the Baptist's fa- mother.

• 16:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:13Speaker 06

  Don't mess that up.

• 16:14Speaker 05

  Uh oh.

• 16:16Speaker 06

  And.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  Progressive Bible.

• 16:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, right. And so there's, there's like a knowledge there that that's something.

• 16:24Speaker 05

  Something special might happen.

• 16:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, something special going on.

• 16:26Speaker 05

  Okay, so, so the thing that John is doing that is novel, you would say, is all is saying that they should repent.

• 16:33Speaker 06

  Sort of.

• 16:34Speaker 05

  Like, what is he doing that is dissimilar from everyone else at the time?

• 16:38Speaker 06

  He's, well, he's a like a wild man is wearing camel skins and he's eating locusts and honey and he's like living out in the desert.

• 16:47Speaker 05

  So he's not offering forgiveness?

• 16:49Speaker 06

  Well, he's saying repent. He's saying, so he's not offering forgiveness, but he's saying you need to seek forgiveness from God and you start by doing this like act of going through like a public declaration of your repentance and the Jewish leaders kind of get mad at him because he's implying that they, they, like their ethnicity isn't enough. So they come and they're like, well, we're children of Abraham and his line is, you know, God can raise up children of Abraham from these stones is what he says.

• 17:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, just, just being the child of Abraham is nothing special. You have to do the acts.

• 17:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, he's also speaking out against the political system, so he.

• 17:31Speaker 05

  So he's the first person recognizing that there's something that he deems corrupt happening in society at the time.

• 17:36Speaker 06

  I mean, there were other people doing stuff like that.

• 17:39Speaker 05

  But he is one of these people that is recognizing there is corruption and the only way that we can thwart this corruption is through repentance and hopefully there will be forgiveness.

• 17:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  More or less?

• 17:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 05

  I'm just trying to understand like what's happening in society at the time that compels a guy like John the Baptist to even do that.

• 17:54Speaker 06

  Well, there's cultural expectations in the day that the Messiah is gonna come.

• 17:58Speaker 05

  Right, cuz the Jews are saying, yeah, Messiah is gonna come.

• 18:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:01Speaker 05

  So that's, okay, so that's already been set. So they're looking, they're like, who's gonna be the guy?

• 18:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, and there seems to be, in the New Testament, this like buzz, that it's gonna happen soon. Cuz when Jesus talks with the woman at the well.

• 18:13Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 18:14Speaker 06

  Like, he's, he's talking to her, and she basically says, like, the Messiah's gonna come, and he's gonna reveal all these things. There's this like cultural expectation.

• 18:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 06

  This guy's gonna come, things are bad with the Romans, and he's gonna rescue us from the Romans.

• 18:27Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 18:27Speaker 06

  But they, they kinda thought that that would be military leader.

• 18:30Speaker 05

  Right.

• 18:31Speaker 06

  Right, so the expectation was that the Messiah was going to, he was gonna save us from the Romans, he wasn't gonna get murdered by the Romans.

• 18:36Speaker 05

  Hmm, got it.

• 18:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  Okay, so Jesus comes around.

• 18:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:40Speaker 07

  Really quick, have you heard the claim that Jesus just took up the teachings of John the Baptist, and basically co-opted it to then create his own cult, so to speak?

• 18:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, there...

• 18:51Speaker 05

  It's never happened in religions before?

• 18:53Speaker 06

  No, no.

• 18:54Speaker 05

  What are you talking about? You're saying, one guy with interesting ideas, and then a really smart businessman comes around and like forms religion around it?

• 19:00Speaker 07

  I'm just saying, this is an early blasphemy that I don't believe.

• 19:04Speaker 05

  Okay, okay, yeah. Maybe you can clarify that, yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, keep the blasphemies to a minimum.

• 19:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 05

  Have a church, not a business at all.

• 19:10Speaker 07

  I have three more.

• 19:11Speaker 05

  You have three more?

• 19:12Speaker 06

  Right, we're counting them down.

• 19:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, so explain Scientology, yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay, well, let's say aliens. Go, go, go. So, I mean, yeah, that, that, there is an idea there. I think all the evidence we have of the historical John the Baptist kinda points otherwise, and there are actually followers of John the Baptist in the second century that kind of outlived Jesus. Um, and, and so you have these different factions. And some people are still following John the Baptist.

• 19:38Speaker 05

  So some people don't choose up with Jesus?

• 19:40Speaker 06

  No.

• 19:41Speaker 05

  They stay true to, to John?

• 19:43Speaker 06

  Well, and even in the Gospels, there's this, so, John the Baptist speaks out against, uh, like, the, the local leader. The local leader has a party with his daughter, and is, he gets his daughter, well, she dances, it's kind of a weird scene. She dances, inherits palace, and then he says, "I'll give anything to you up to half of my, like, empire." And she says, "I'm with the head of John the Baptist." So she kinda gets coerced to have him bring in the head of John the Baptist. While John is in prison for speaking out against them, he has doubts, and he sends some of his followers to Jesus to ask Jesus, "Are you the one we're waiting for? Should we wait for another?"

• 20:27Speaker 06

  So even John the Baptist starts to struggle with his own faith when things aren't going his way. And then it's really interesting because Jesus's reply is, "Go tell John what you've seen. The dead are raised, the blind see, the lame walk." And there's this interesting connection with that's, those are statements in the Old Testament of what Yahweh is going to do when he like, when he reunites his kingdom in the restoration. And there's a Dead Sea Scroll fragment called 4Q 521, which is part of these like Essene community. And

• 21:07Speaker 06

  it talks about the fact that everybody will see God's Messiah, and the dead will be raised, and the lame will walk. And, and so it has these connections. So those are verses from the Old Testament.

• 21:20Speaker 05

  Yeah. How much writings is there when he raises some dead?

• 21:24Speaker 06

  What do you mean?

• 21:25Speaker 05

  Like, do we have, like, is everybody going, "This is insane"? Like, Are you saying like, how many scrolls are there? Yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, every copy of like, the Gospel of John with the story of Lazarus, and Mark is the, Jairus's daughter.

• 21:38Speaker 05

  But do you have anything outside of that? Is there just like a newspaper clipping? Like, this guy's on it? No, but like, Twitter clip?

• 21:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's on X.

• 21:46Speaker 05

  We hear a lot about the walking on the water and the wine. The raising the dead one is...

• 21:50Speaker 06

  Yeah. What's funny about the raising the dead one is that then the Pharisees, the Jewish leaders are like, trying to figure out how to kill Jesus after that. And like, "Did you see what just happened?"

• 21:59Speaker 05

  We gotta get this guy out of here.

• 22:00Speaker 06

  We gotta kill this guy. And then how are they gonna kill Lazarus again? It's like, "Well, that didn't work the first time."

• 22:06Speaker 05

  Okay, go on, go on.

• 22:07Speaker 06

  But, yeah, so I mean, all the copies that we have of John and Mark would include those stories. But the ancient world was largely illiterate. So that's something we also have to keep in mind, is that our world is hyper illiterate. So we're constantly writing things down and most people know how to write and read. It's not true in the ancient world.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  Right.

• 22:25Speaker 06

  So at the height of the Roman Empire, probably was only 10% literate. And there would be like pockets of communities that would be able to read and write.

• 22:35Speaker 05

  Right.

• 22:36Speaker 06

  But usually, like, the first bibles were audio bibles, in the sense that you would have someone within your community.

• 22:44Speaker 05

  That had memorized the entirety of the Bible.

• 22:45Speaker 06

  Or they would just read it out loud, right? So Paul writes letters to the churches, there'd probably be a few people in the church who could read it, but they would just hear it.

• 22:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:54Speaker 06

  Most of the time.

• 22:54Speaker 08

  All right, guys, dates. Before I go to hell, see me in Salt Lake City, June 19th through June 21st. Oklahoma City, these shows might have to get rescheduled, but as of now, that is July 18th and July 19th. August, I'm in Kansas City, Missouri, on the 1st and 2nd. Perrysburg, Ohio, on the 8th and 9th. Liberty Township, Ohio, why am I doing so much Ohio, on the 22nd and 23rd. And we got more dates coming, we got a bunch for the fall, so get your tickets. Akashsingh.com is the website. I love y'all, thank y'all.

• 23:23Speaker 07

  What's up, guys? Really quick, I'm on the road. That's right, I'm going to Indianapolis, and then I'm going to Buffalo, Raleigh, Poughkeepsie, Portland, Fort Worth, Austin, Stanford, Philadelphia, Levittown, Washington DC, San Diego, Burlington, Montreal, Toronto, and a bunch of other dates. You can check them out on my website, MarkYagdonLive, and we can have a great time. See me, come hang out after the show.

• 23:40Speaker 08

  I'm not asking, because he's asking.

• 23:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm not asking for anything, I'll be honest, a few people after the show were like, hey. A few people after the show were like, hey, I'm not gonna do what Akash told me to do, but I just wanted to say, hey. And that's great, that's all I need, okay? See me at the show.

• 23:53Speaker 08

  Well, no, I mean, he wants you to suck his dick, that's why he's sitting like this.

• 23:56Speaker 07

  See you there.

• 23:57Speaker 05

  Jesus is crucified.

• 23:58Speaker 06

  Uh huh, I've heard of it.

• 23:59Speaker 08

  Runs it back.

• 24:01Speaker 05

  Okay. What? What are you, what? What are you, why are you laughing?

• 24:08Speaker 06

  It's accurate description.

• 24:09Speaker 05

  What? It is, this is what happened.

• 24:10Speaker 06

  Run it back.

• 24:11Speaker 05

  He run it back. Okay. Um, immediate fallout after running it back.

• 24:17Speaker 06

  Yeah. Who's seeing him? So, the disciples run scared. They hide because they basically figure, okay, the movement's dead. So, Jesus isn't the only messianic movement that happens within this time period. There are guys before him and after him who try to create like revolutions. So, after, just a short period after Jesus, there's a guy named Simon Barjiora. And he's famous, and then there's Simon Bar Kokhva. So, the Bar Kokhva revolt is the one that kind of launches things that eventually gets Jerusalem destroyed under Titus, who then marches into Jerusalem. He sacked Jerusalem and they destroyed the temple.

• 25:02Speaker 06

  That happens in 70 AD.

• 25:04Mark Gagnon?

  Was Simon claiming to be the son of God also?

• 25:06Speaker 06

  No, so that's unusual. So, most of these guys are just like military leaders. So, Jesus's messianic claims are kind of unique in that he's doing things that people didn't really expect them aside to do or be, in that they're still expecting a military leader. Because, have you heard of Maccabees? Yeah. First, Second, and Third Maccabees? The Maccabees is the story of Hanukkah. So, the Greek emperor guy, he marches in and he takes over Israel. And then he does something real bad for the Jews in that he sacrifices a pig on the altar in the temple to Zeus. So, all a bunch of layers of not being kosher. Right.

• 25:48Speaker 06

  And then, the Simon, or not Simon, Judas, Judas Maccabeus, Judas the Hammer. He goes in and he kicks them out and he rededicates the temple. That's the story of Hanukkah. Got it. So, he's like a military leader in that sense. So, he's seen as not the messianic figure that they're waiting for, but a messianic figure in the sense that he's established, like he's kicked out the bad guys and he's established the kind of unification of the Jewish nation at that point. So, they're kind of looking for that again. And Judas Maccabeus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, which is also what Jesus does. So, when Jesus does that, it's kind of a callback. Like, okay, and the people are like, I think we know what's gonna happen.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  Okay, when he rides back in on the donkey, first of all, incredibly, and I'm gonna use the exact term badass, right? Like, super flex. But super flex, do you come in on the donkey? Like, I don't need some big shiny horse, I'm gonna come in on like, the little... I'm trying to be very respectful of my language, now we're talking about Jesus.

• 26:54Speaker 05

  A little bitch ass fake horse, right? And then, so immediately is everybody like shook, are people running, are there people that are rejoicing? Like, what is that immediate reaction upon return?

• 27:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, when he rides in the triumphal entry? Like, when he goes into Jerusalem? Yeah, they're waving palm branches, that's why, like, Palm Sunday. We wave palm branches, because they're waving palm branches, they're putting their coats down, and they're saying, "Hosanna."

• 27:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I listened to that song this morning.

• 27:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, nice.

• 27:18Speaker 05

  Shoutout Hill song.

• 27:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, but, it's the same crowd that then, at, when he's like, on trial with Pilate? Is then saying, "Crucify him." So they turn fast.

• 27:34Speaker 07

  I feel like the funniest thing of Jesus going to Jerusalem is that no one thought that a guy, like the Messiah, could come from Nazareth? Or Galilee? And that there's a reference, and they go, "What good has ever come out of Nazar...?" Like, they talk shit about it.

• 27:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's the boonies.

• 27:52Speaker 06

  Jersey.

• 27:54Speaker 05

  It's like the middle of nowhere. Yeah, yeah. Somewhere small in that, like, he's a heck.

• 27:59Speaker 07

  And who says it? I forget exactly who makes that comment.

• 28:03Speaker 06

  I think it's when Jesus is ministering in Galilee, and they're like, who, you know, what good can come from Nazareth? Like, it's just such an unusual place. Once again, like, subverting cultural expectations. He's born in Bethlehem, which is where he should be, which is like from the house of David. But then he lives and grows up in Nazareth, which is like, Nowhereville. And so, and then, even when he goes back, they're like...

• 28:29Speaker 06

  Because he ministers in Nazareth at one point. And everybody he's doing like-

• 28:34Speaker 05

  Now I'm seeing the Star Wars parallels. I never got it before. But they just ripped off the Jesus story completely.

• 28:39Speaker 06

  Everybody rips off the Jesus story.

• 28:41Speaker 05

  Unbelievable. They gotta pay their little 10%.

• 28:44Speaker 06

  Star Wars. Wait, how's the Matrix one? The Matrix? Yeah. Is the chosen one?

• 28:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, but outside of that, like-

• 28:53Speaker 05

  I'm talking about like- That's a good point, honestly. Y'all laughing, but outside of that-

• 28:56Speaker 06

  But there's a Judas, right? There's a Judas who betrays him.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  That's fair.

• 28:59Speaker 06

  And then there's a John the Baptist. He shows you the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who like, like makes the path straight?

• 29:05Speaker 05

  That's right. Morpheus is John the Baptist. And he's like, "I'm not the one. He's gonna be the one."

• 29:09Speaker 06

  There's a Mary Magdalene.

• 29:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, but what happens with-

• 29:12Speaker 06

  All right.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  What happens with him and Mary? What happens with him and Mary?

• 29:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's true, that's true. Hollywood, Hollywood. That's Hollywood Jesus.

• 29:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. You don't think that Jesus, Jesus was, I'm trying to be respectful, obviously, but you don't think Jesus was, you know, testing the profession?

• 29:28Speaker 06

  Nah.

• 29:32Speaker 05

  She was a pro, right? Like allegedly, isn't that what some say, or is that-

• 29:36Speaker 06

  No, no, no. So that's a, so Mary Magdalene is not the prostitute that it is.

• 29:40Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 29:40Speaker 06

  That was a pope's fault. He, he connected those dots and that they were wrong and then the, the church had to, the Roman Catholic Church had to backtrack on that.

• 29:48Speaker 05

  They did backtrack on that. Okay, good.

• 29:50Speaker 06

  I always thought she was a prostitute. No.

• 29:54Speaker 08

  This is, I'm obviously not Christian, so this is a much broader, maybe ignorant question. Is there like a Matrix kind of thing in Christianity? Like in Hinduism, we call that Maya, which is like, all this stuff that you see is illusion. The reality is the afterlife. Is that like a thing?

• 30:07Speaker 06

  No.

• 30:09Speaker 08

  That's fine.

• 30:12Speaker 05

  So maybe a couple characters. A couple characters like the Matrix. Yo, I love confident Christians, bro. Get your goofy ass multi-god religion out of here.

• 30:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, what are you talking about? No, well, because there's a, there's a differentiation between like, Eastern mysticism has this idea of- Like that this world is an illusion, right? So you have things like samsara, the cycle, that's Buddhism, right? Not Hinduism, but the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. And you're trying to escape this.

• 30:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's Hinduism.

• 30:44Speaker 06

  And so that would be, that would be ancient platonic philosophy that gets mixed in with like the Gnosticism that develops in the second century, where the physical is bad and the spiritual is good. And so when you have the early Christians arguing against the Gnostics, they're doubling down, not that Jesus is God, they don't have a problem with that. It's that Jesus is a human, because they believe if you're human, you can't be God. You can't mix that. You're in a meat prison and your spirit's trying to get out of there. But Jews and Christians have the inherent belief of the resurrection. So we are embodied. You're not a spirit that has a body. You're a spirit and body. Those two things can mix. And heaven is a layover. It's not the final goal.

• 31:26Speaker 06

  Heaven is the place you go to wait for the final resurrection, when we will all be given new resurrected bodies. And that's why Jesus is called the first fruits. It's because everybody believed in the resurrection. So when Jesus keeps saying, you know, I'm gonna die and I'm gonna rise again. They're like, yeah, all of us Jesus. They don't understand that he's talking about something that's unique and that he's gonna do it now as like a preview of what everyone's gonna get in the afterlife. Like you have heaven and then the resurrection, where heaven and earth meet and all things are restored.

• 32:03Speaker 05

  I had no clue that's what the real heaven was. I didn't know that this current one is... Dude, I really should. I started on the Old Testament. It's dense. It's a lot of rules.

• 32:13Speaker 06

  Get to Leviticus.

• 32:14Speaker 05

  The rules were so much.

• 32:19Speaker 06

  I don't wanna be disrespectful. You got to the part with the like, the sore with the white hair.

• 32:23Speaker 05

  No, I got to the part where it's like the temple needs to be six inches from the...

• 32:29Speaker 06

  The cubits and the...

• 32:30Speaker 05

  And I'm running on a treadmill and I'm listening to the audio version and they're constructing a temple out of like certain materials and the fabric needs to hang three inches from the thing. And I'm like, I'm not a GC. You know what I mean? Like, I don't need to know, like, what's going on here? I'm not building the temple. Like, we're going to heaven, you know? So I didn't even get to the fun stories.

• 32:48Speaker 06

  You start with the Gospels.

• 32:49Speaker 05

  I need, I should have started with the Gospels. Why do you guys, I still wanna get into, I still wanna get into...

• 32:55Speaker 06

  What do you mean, you guys?

• 32:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're right. I'm one of them. No, I wasn't baptized, so I don't get...

• 33:00Speaker 06

  But my parents were, how does that work? We can, we can get that done for you. Really? Should I go to the? Baptize? Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 06

  But should I go to like, is it? You should. Go to the Jordan. Figure it out up here before you start jumping in the water.

• 33:13Speaker 08

  You don't think they want 10% of your income, dog? That does you so fast.

• 33:17Speaker 07

  It went up as 15, no.

• 33:18Speaker 06

  No.

• 33:19Speaker 08

  It's like tipping.

• 33:20Speaker 06

  That's Old Testament. You don't gotta give 10%. You're released to give as much as you want.

• 33:24Speaker 08

  Wait, hey, Jews, you're that.

• 33:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 07

  Right, actually, on the topic of India and Hinduism.

• 33:33Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 33:33Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, did Jesus make it out to India? Yeah, what do you think of that claim?

• 33:36Speaker 06

  No, I don't think so. So, the claim comes. So, there was a guy named, um, I'm gonna forget his name. He was a Russian researcher in the 1800s. And he made this claim that he went out to Tibet and he found a document in a Tibetan monastery that talked about Jesus studying there in India. His name's eluding me. It'll, it'll pop in my brain. Yeah, Nicholas Notovich, that's him. Um, so, the problem is that he basically, with all these things, right? Emerald help us of those, all the evidence disappears, right? And then you have, like, trust me, bro. Uh, and, and actually, a statement came out from the monks at this particular monastery. And they're like, we have no idea what this guy's talking about.

• 34:19Speaker 06

  We, no, no Russians ever showed up here. But he made this claim that Jesus went to India and when he was in his childhood missing years. Got it. So, you have his birth story, right? And then you have a story in the Gospel of Luke where he's 12 years old. And Mary, Joseph, and Jesus go to Jerusalem. And then Mary and Joseph conveniently lose the Son of God. And they heck it out of there and then realize he's not with them. They go back to the temple and he's, he's teaching. Home Alone is the fucking Jesus story too. I know, it's all, it's all the Jesus story.

• 34:50Speaker 08

  Yeah, Matrix is Hindu. That's my point. But Home Alone, that's, Home Alone.

• 34:54Speaker 07

  You, you let us have that one.

• 34:56Speaker 08

  This? Yeah. Pass you all.

• 34:58Speaker 07

  Lost in Jerusalem.

• 35:00Speaker 06

  If he's the Messiah, why aren't they keeping track of everything happening throughout his entire life? Good question. So. The Gospels are a form of ancient biography. And when you read, there are stipulations for ancient biography. So there are guys like Lucian, who writes a document called "How to Write Good History" in the ancient world, right? So he's a little bit before Jesus. And he actually talks about, and some other ancient biographers, historians, talk about how do you write good history? And the editing process, they say, is just as important as what you include. So in the 18th, 19th century, a lot of these German scholars looked at the Gospels and they said, "These can't be biographies, because we know that biographies include stories of your childhood and particularly psychologize."

• 35:45Speaker 06

  So we have to remove these as, thinking about them as biographies. What they failed to understand is that there was already a category in the ancient world for what biographies looked like. And whether the Gospel authors were reading, like Lucian and Celsus and Aristophanes or not, which I don't think they necessarily were. It was in the zeitgeist that you include what's important and you make sure that you don't add fluff. Particularly because these are very arduous and expensive to write. And so you include what's, if there's something noteworthy about. So the birth is noteworthy. The story where Jesus goes to the temple and all of these teachers in the temple are amazed by this 12-year-old boy who's teaching them stuff. That's in there.

• 36:28Speaker 06

  And then you fast-forward to when he's 30, because... So from 12 to 30 is just fluff? Well, he's just kind of living. So this is he's...

• 36:37Mark Gagnon?

  I'm thinking. I'm thinking. Yeah, my boy. I had some good living.

• 36:43Speaker 05

  You've got magical powers from 13 to 30? You're going to Thailand.

• 36:47Mark Gagnon?

  Well, so that's...

• 36:48Speaker 05

  Come on. Come on, with all due respect. With all due respect. I'm not mature enough to have this conversation. With all due respect, if you have magical powers from 13 to 30, and then at 30, like, I'm on my longevity shit right now. I'm 40, right? So I'm switching things up in my life. Obviously lifespan was a little bit less back in the day. So at 30 comes around, you're like, "Now I'll change the world forever for the better." But there's got to be a time where you pop down to the Nile, see what's good over there.

• 37:12Speaker 06

  He's a carpenter. He's doing his job.

• 37:14Mark Gagnon?

  He's laying wood.

• 37:17Speaker 05

  With all due respect.

• 37:18Speaker 06

  He's an Hindu. He doesn't understand. So I don't... You get a pass. So it's a good question. So, well, I mentioned before when Jesus goes...

• 37:26Speaker 05

  Fuck this, he would get a pass. Oh, because he gets hell.

• 37:28Speaker 06

  Anyway. I didn't say that. Yeah, but you meant it. You inverted. No, no, no, no. You didn't say a lot about saying it. He's trying to eliminate his existence anyways, right? Yeah. That's the goal, right? He'll be back. He'll become back in the next life as a Christian. No.

• 37:40Speaker 06

  So, there's this story where Jesus goes back to Nazareth. Yes. And they're like, who is this guy? Isn't he, don't we know his mom? Don't we know his dad? Isn't he the carpenter's son? Yeah. So, there is the equivalent of saying like, we went to prom with this guy. What's he doing? Like, how do you end up like this? Like, they're surprised. But don't they also know that he was immaculately conceived? They may or may not. Why would they know that? Oh, that wasn't like, you know, people talking.

• 38:03Speaker 08

  It's small town, people talk.

• 38:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're not broadcasting it. You don't think that she would have...

• 38:08Speaker 08

  Joe didn't confide in nobody. He would go to your boy and be like, hey, man, I don't know what's going on. This girl pregnant. I didn't do anything.

• 38:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, there must have been a little bit of conversation about it. I mean, maybe some people knew, but they're surprised. Right. And so, there's an indication from the historical records of the Gospels that people, like Jesus during his childhood, couldn't have been all that crazy because they're surprised when he's showing up and he's doing miracles. Right. But there is a category of literature in like 100 years plus after Jesus. Yeah. It's called infancy narratives, where people are coming up with stories where, what would, you know, magical Messiah Jesus have done? And so, there's stories that he's like playing on the playground. He knocks it into a kid. But these aren't firsthand accounts. And that kid dies, then he raised... Oh, no, no, no. These are clearly embellished and... Let's stick on the firsthand accounts because these are the ones that are really exciting, right? Because you can verify these, kind of. We would hope.

• 38:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're at minimum, they're our only source material from the timeframe that Jesus lived. Okay, why was he in Egypt? Why did he pop over to Cairo? He went to Cairo? He did go to Egypt. I went to the church that they were hiding out in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the claim that they make. That's fake? Well, I'm not saying it's fake. He's fucking Egyptians. No, no, no, no, no. I swear to God. Brother, brother, brother, loot at the temple. I'm riding a donkey down the street to go see where Jesus was hidden. It's a bullshit? You got a good deal. I got a good deal for you. Yeah, you want one church, I have another church for you. This is unbelievable. No, no, no. Okay, I'm not saying it's fake. You're gonna tell me Jews built the pyramids now? No.

• 39:41Speaker 06

  Ain't gonna start it. That was aliens. Yes, it was aliens. I watched that documentary. Yes, it was a great documentary. So, it's not that that church is fake. It's just that the stories that come up around these particular... Things are much later and they their reliability is iffy.

• 39:59Speaker 05

  Okay, I went to the anointing stone when I was in Jerusalem. Is that real?

• 40:02Speaker 06

  That has a lot more early provenance. The stuff in Jerusalem has a lot more credibility because we have records going back to the second century of people going there in pilgrimages. So a lot of the like locations for the Holy Sepulcher or like, like that kind of stuff, they go back to Constantine's mom, who went to Jerusalem and established some of these things.

• 40:25Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 40:25Speaker 06

  But she did so based on like a world chain of custody where she went to the places where the locals were saying, we've been going here for hundreds of years and this is, these are the connection points.

• 40:36Speaker 05

  Got it. So that's some word of mouth right there.

• 40:38Speaker 06

  It is, but it's like the chain of custody going back arguably to like, there's a reliable sense. So are there questions about all these things? Sure.

• 40:46Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 40:48Speaker 07

  I have a quick question on the like, some of the discrepancies that occur in the Bible. That's something that I struggle with sometimes.

• 40:55Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 40:56Speaker 07

  I was a Catholic, you know, we have a little, a little broader, you know, papal authority. But I'm curious, like, how should Christians deal with discrepancies in the Bible, whether it's like the birth story or like the death of Judas or things like that?

• 41:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 05

  What do you mean by discrepancies? Can you explain some of that?

• 41:09Speaker 06

  So there are differentiations in detail because we have four gospels.

• 41:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, explain what the gospels are to the people out there like me.

• 41:14Speaker 06

  Yeah. Good Catholics like you. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are these biographies of Jesus's life. So two of them claim to be written by eyewitnesses. Matthew is Levi, the tax collector, and John is the disciple, John. Luke and Mark are not. So Luke is a traveling companion of Paul, who writes this two-fold document, Luke and Acts. And then Mark is in the earliest church tradition, he's a traveling companion of Peter. So he gets his source information from Peter, which is really interesting in the fact that Peter does not look good in Mark. Like, that's where, you know, get behind me Satan, he's the duh disciple, like he's continually not getting what Jesus is saying.

• 41:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:58Speaker 06

  And he like runs away, denies Jesus. So if, if the earliest source material is true, which I think we have no reason not to think it is, especially because they don't then call it the Gospel of Peter. Which they could, if they're like, well, this is Peter's source information. They call it the Gospel of Mark, who Mark's generally a nobody. That only gives credibility to the fact that Mark probably wrote it. And then it has this connection directly with Peter himself. So four Gospels, two are claimed to be eyewitnesses who wrote them. And then two claim to be like associates of-

• 42:33Speaker 05

  Secondhand, yeah.

• 42:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, so when the church is looking at all this literature and they're saying, okay, we have an Old Testament, like testamentum just means covenant. Diathek in the Greek, you just translate it into Latin and it's testament. The Old Testament, God's covenants are always followed up by written texts. So that's why they collected, you have guys like Philo and Josephus, they talk about this stuff. What are the books? And then the Christians see Jesus, he establishes a new covenant. He's fulfilling what the prophet Jeremiah said in Jeremiah 3131, where he says, "I'm gonna make a new covenant with my people. I'm gonna write my law on their hearts." Jesus claims to fulfill those things. And then the early Christians who are Jews, who believe in Jesus as the Messiah are saying, okay, here's the covenant, here's the promise, where are the written texts?

• 43:18Speaker 06

  And so they have these conversations of canonicity, which just means like, canon in Greek means a rule. So it's the standard. You know, you have like a Harry Potter canon and then you have stuff that's non- or Star Wars canon, or Lord of the Rings canon, whatever. So the canon of scripture, and they're saying, okay, what's in, what's out?

• 43:36Speaker 05

  What's in, what's out? And these are all the stories about Jesus and his teachings at the time. Firsthand account, secondhand account, thirdhand account, some are some rumors. And they have to go through, parcel through to find what has the most efficacy?

• 43:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, so what the conversations are having is what are the documents that are either from someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus? That's the standard.

• 43:57Speaker 05

  Got it, got it. So yeah, it's either what is empirical evidence? Or like, what is one derivative away from that?

• 44:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, and for the Gospels in particular, like these four biographies of Jesus's life, they're the ones that the early Jesus community agrees upon the most because the disciples of Jesus had disciples. They're called the apostolic fathers.

• 44:15Speaker 05

  Right.

• 44:16Speaker 06

  So there were people who like Peter and John- And Paul disciple themselves. And then those people talk about, okay, I heard John say this, I heard, you know, so, so and they give credibility. So there's this like direct chain of succession and line of custody to the apostolic community.

• 44:34Speaker 05

  But is each, sorry to interrupt here. So is each one of the apostles teaching their version of Jesus's life? And do those differ slightly? And is Christianity kind of like fracturing a little bit in those first few hundred years?

• 44:54Speaker 06

  So yes and no. So this goes to your question in terms of the differentiation in detail. So the fact is, we have four biographies. And sometimes they tell the same stories, but they give different angles on the stories. So we have a similar thing with the emperor at the time, Tiberius. So the only other person who's sort of comparative to Jesus in terms of source information is the emperor. So you have Jesus and then you have the most powerful, the most well-known, the richest person at the time. And he also has four biographies of himself, or at least four, don't kick that, please.

• 45:26Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 45:27Speaker 06

  Not what I'm talking.

• 45:28Speaker 05

  Forgive me.

• 45:32Speaker 06

  So he, so Tiberius has Valius Paterculus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio and Tacitus, who are all writing source information for him. So if we can do like a comparative analysis for someone with Jesus, the emperor is a good guy to do it because he likewise has four individuals who are writing about his life.

• 45:52Speaker 05

  You're saying as an example of their importance and impact?

• 45:55Speaker 06

  Or like, how can we look at source information? Now, the Gospels are a little bit different because they're pretty comprehensive and they're only about Jesus. Whereas these other guys are writing, say, about emperors more broadly. And so it's the like snippets here and there. But what I was getting at is we have differences in those stories too. Or like Socrates.

• 46:13Speaker 05

  I get what you're saying.

• 46:14Speaker 06

  Socrates has three biographers.

• 46:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's three different sports writers writing about the game. They might have different angles, but at the end of the day, this is the score. And these are how much these people played and they're going to reference who the superstars were.

• 46:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, and the detail, so I would say a differentiation in detail doesn't necessarily amount to a contradiction. So I haven't found something that I think is an outright contradiction. That's not to say there aren't hard ones. So the death of Judas is a hard one. Because one gospel says that he, uh, he went and hung himself in the potter's field. The other says that he falls headlong and his entrails fall out.

• 46:51Speaker 05

  He falls headlong and his, like, insides fall out. What does that mean, falls headlong?

• 46:55Speaker 06

  Like, like it falls on his head.

• 46:57Speaker 05

  And his insides fall out.

• 46:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  What?

• 47:01Speaker 06

  So that's what it says happens. So there are a few things going on here. I think it's entirely possible to harmonize that and say he hung himself and

• 47:07Speaker 05

  You guys ask questions?

• 47:09Speaker 06

  and it fell and he, he, like, it's not, you can see how you could get these kind of things. Even if some people think you're playing loose and fast with that kind of thing.

• 47:18Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 47:19Speaker 06

  You also have the fact that in Hebraic Semitic idea, your entrails, like your, your intestines are where your credibility comes from.

• 47:30Speaker 05

  Ah, got it.

• 47:32Speaker 06

  So there's, there could be a play on words in that he could have physically, like, his, like, cut open and his, his intestines fell out. But there also could have been this idea for the Jewish mindset of like, this is the guy that betrayed Jesus. Of course his entrails fall out because that's where your, like, credibility is.

• 47:53Speaker 05

  Now, is there, could you argue that there is credibility in the authenticity of the gospel, of the gospels? Because?

• 48:03Speaker 06

  The gospels?

• 48:03Speaker 05

  The gospels.

• 48:04Speaker 06

  Those are my favorite.

• 48:05Speaker 05

  Because, me too, it's a cereal. Because, because there are differing accounts? Like, if every account was identical, you don't need four accounts. The fact that they differ slightly and they don't make the changes to make them match up offers more authenticity to me.

• 48:20Speaker 06

  Well, I, I would say if

• 48:21Speaker 05

  Like, if, if, no, like, if you're gonna change it, change it.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  It's sort of like the, the headspace of like, uh, if you're like sort of cheating on a test or like, uh, Yeah, you have to make one thing wrong to make it not look like you can.

• 48:33Speaker 05

  Well, I guess you can make it, so like

• 48:35Speaker 02

  No, no, I don't mean it that way. I mean it almost in the way that you're correct. I've never thought about it that way.

• 48:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, because, because the criticism from the outside is, hey, they're just changing these things to make it look the best so that they can exert power and influence over the people that they rule. That's the outside perspective from like an atheist, perhaps. And on the societal utility, or not even societal, of like how the power structure uses religion, right? So, but I'm like, okay, well, that's not a really good one if you're putting quote unquote mistakes or differences, you're like, unless they thought it was important to maintain the authenticity of these stories, so they left them in there despite the differences. Well, if they all said the same thing, you could accuse them of collaborating and collusion. That, yeah, maybe that was a really quick way of saying what I've dabbled about. That's why you brought me on. Yeah. It's good, it's good.

• 49:21Speaker 05

  I guess, yeah, yeah, okay, but to, so what are these circumstances that there are discrepancies that are causing you to have a lack of faith, you fucking fraud? Wait, no, that's what I said.

• 49:32Speaker 07

  What is that?

• 49:34Speaker 05

  Let me come and say. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, I'm just saying, dude. This guy's a non-denom, this guy's a non-denom, dude. He's like one of those guys that was like celebrating when Jesus came in on the donkey and then when he's up there on the cross, oh, God, God. Don't do that to Mark. He's a flip-flopper. What is true? He's a flip-flopper.

• 49:52Speaker 06

  No, no, no, no, I, so the Gospels are writing to the different authors with different intentions, writing to different audiences. So, some of them are clearly writing to Jewish audiences, and so they're capitalizing on certain things.

• 50:05Speaker 05

  For example?

• 50:05Speaker 06

  So, Matthew is making this connection between Jesus being the new David and the new Moses. So, he's doing certain things in his Gospel where he's capitalizing on aspects of Jesus's life, where, so he gives a different genealogy than Luke does for Jesus's ancestry. So, some people look at that and they're like, well, this is a problem, you got two genealogies of Jesus. And, but what we know about genealogies, particularly Jewish genealogies, is that sometimes they're not meant to be either exhaustive or gapless.

• 50:35Speaker 05

  What does that mean?

• 50:36Speaker 06

  So, we today, if I'm doing a family tree, I'm gonna make sure that everybody's listed, right? Grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather.

• 50:45Speaker 06

  The ancient Hebrews are more concerned with the right people being named for the right reasons. So, and they also have this idea that's called Gamatria, where every letter in the Hebrew alphabet has a number associated with it, and your name ends up having a number. So David ends with the number 14, if you like, count up the things. Matthew's Gospel starts with a genealogy that has three lists of 14, ending with Jesus. And the point of that, and we know that it's not like he leaves people out, because we can go back to like First and Second Kings, First and Second Chronicles, where we have longer lists of these people. And Matthew is leaving people out. Or he's like squishing whole generations and just one person.

• 51:30Speaker 06

  So you could look at that and say, in our modern mindset, well, that's playing loose and fast with the data. But an ancient Jew would say, okay, well, why is this happening? Ah, you have lists of 14, that's David. And so he's, to his audience, he's communicating, this is the new David. Okay, and he's doing things that are fulfilling the expectation of who David should be, like as the king, as the anointed one. And you have things like Moses goes up on a mountain and receives the law. Jesus goes up on a mountain and gives the law, a new law, right? And so throughout the Gospel of Matthew, you have these constant insertions that are capitalizing on details to, for his audience, to make sure that they know,

• 52:15Speaker 06

  this guy Jesus is this person who is the person you're waiting for. He's fulfilling the Davidic reign. He's the prophet like Moses that's predicted back in the Torah, and he's accomplishing these things.

• 52:27Speaker 05

  Is this what you mean when you say the Bible is written for you, but not to you?

• 52:32Speaker 06

  I like that, yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 52:34Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 52:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, because it has a different audience, right? And so understanding the context helps you. That's why the like German rationalists in the 18th and 19th centuries didn't, like, they did the wrong thing. They said, this is how we would write, therefore. And they didn't look back, because there's like linguistic and cultural levels to it.

• 52:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:55Speaker 06

  Right, so you could just translate the text directly, but it's context that's going to tell you the difference between a butt dial and a booty call. Even though they might be the same words in Greek or Hebrew, right?

• 53:06Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 53:06Speaker 06

  But you could read that and you could be completely misled.

• 53:09Speaker 05

  A butt dial and a booty call. Completely different things.

• 53:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, so there's versions of that in the ancient literature.

• 53:18Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, totally. And this is with everything.

• 53:20Speaker 05

  And then some guy is just guessing at that point and just making an inference.

• 53:24Speaker 06

  In terms of like today?

• 53:25Speaker 05

  Interpretation, yeah.

• 53:26Speaker 06

  Well, you study the ancient culture. So fortunately, we have like the ability to look at things and understand idioms.

• 53:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:32Speaker 06

  And people talk about stuff. And that gives you a frame of reference.

• 53:36Speaker 05

  And slang, like I'm sure they're using slang.

• 53:37Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, apparently there's all these issues with like biblical translations as they're trying to translate it in like the 20th century to all these different cultures. And when they're putting in their native tongue, like there's one specific that I remember, I did this field trip to Wyclef and it's a it's a Bible translator in Florida. Have you heard of it?

• 53:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 07

  And and one of the things like this one specific tribal culture in Africa, there's this idea of Jesus knocking on the heart. But in that culture, thieves knock. And so they're like, OK, we can't make it knocking because then they're going to think Jesus is a thief.

• 54:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:11Speaker 07

  And so what they did is like they would cough or something like that. They would like clear their throat to indicate that there was someone on the other side of their hut. And so they had to translate it to Jesus coughs at the door of the heart or something to that effect.

• 54:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:23Speaker 07

  And that when you're translating things, you have to be super specific to the culture that you're translating to.

• 54:27Speaker 06

  So this is the difference between what's called a formal equivalence translation and a dynamic equivalent translation.

• 54:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is a dynamic equivalent translation.

• 54:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, so dynamic is like the thought for thought idea, right? So in the Gospel of Luke, in the Greek, there's this line where Jesus says, let these words sink into your ears. Right? That's exactly what Jesus says. Let these words sink into your ears. So if you have a dynamic equivalence, like the New International Version of the Bible in English, they're going to say, listen carefully to what I'm about to say. Because that's what that means. But that's not what Jesus said, right? So whereas the New American Standard Bible, the NASB, is more of a formal equivalence, they're literally going to say, let these words sink into your ears. Because that's the words that Jesus spoke. So it's the question of what's because people always ask me like, what's the best translation?

• 55:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:14Speaker 06

  And I don't know the answer to that. Like, the best Bible is the one you're going to read. So just figure out the one that you're going to read and then read it.

• 55:20Speaker 05

  New International Version, baby.

• 55:22Speaker 06

  There you go. So like, let these words sink into your ears. Or and this gets tricky because you have turns of phrase. So one of the most quoted verses in the Bible of the Bible is a version of Exodus 34 6, where Moses goes up on Mount Sinai and God says that he is a gracious God, compassionate, steadfast in abounding love, and and the Hebrew says, long of no's.

• 55:44Speaker 06

  You're like, what? Long of nose. Well, it's a Hebrew idiom, meaning slow to anger.

• 55:51Speaker 05

  Are they?

• 55:53Speaker 06

  That's what that means. So.

• 55:57Speaker 05

  How do we know that that's what it meant? What else does it mean?

• 56:01Speaker 06

  Hebrew is a Semitic language. We have other Semitic languages.

• 56:07Speaker 06

  Get out of here. This guy.

• 56:12Speaker 06

  Here's why I use that illustration. Even the most formal equivalent.

• 56:15Speaker 05

  Okay, well, okay, how would you say someone just got a long nose back in the day? How would they say that? Probably the same way.

• 56:22Speaker 06

  Well.

• 56:23Speaker 05

  How do you know it wasn't just a descriptor?

• 56:25Speaker 06

  A descriptor?

• 56:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:26Speaker 06

  Because why would you describe God as long of nose? So we have other examples within other Semitic languages and portrayals of it.

• 56:32Speaker 05

  I got a fucking idea too.

• 56:40Speaker 05

  Like, why wouldn't you?

• 56:42Speaker 06

  But this is why.

• 56:43Speaker 05

  They said, "Gentle, golden hair."

• 56:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 56:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, but they probably were describing the way his hair looked. That was good safe.

• 56:51Speaker 06

  This is just God.

• 56:52Speaker 05

  Oh, you mean Jesus is God?

• 56:53Speaker 06

  Long.

• 56:53Speaker 05

  In my religion, Jesus is God. I don't know about you.

• 56:57Speaker 05

  Oh, we are? Okay.

• 56:59Speaker 06

  But I use that example to say, like, even the most formal equivalent isn't going to translate like that because it doesn't make any sense.

• 57:05Speaker 05

  Right. So, but long of nose, you think that they were just using a common?

• 57:08Speaker 06

  It's an idiom.

• 57:09Speaker 05

  It's an idiom.

• 57:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:12Speaker 06

  This guy's an idiom, dude.

• 57:17Speaker 05

  It's not like an insane.

• 57:21Speaker 06

  But so Hebrew is a Semitic language.

• 57:23Speaker 05

  If like a Chinese guy was described as like small of eye.

• 57:29Speaker 05

  No, I don't think it would be an idiom, right? No, it's an idiom for good at math.

• 57:35Speaker 05

  Like, one could say that, or you could be like, oh, this might have been a descriptor.

• 57:38Speaker 06

  I just picked up on why you guys are laughing.

• 57:43Mark Gagnon?

  I'm slow, I'm slow, yeah.

• 57:45Speaker 05

  No, so Jesus time.

• 57:48Mark Gagnon?

  And he's back. Pretty easily. He is risen. He just resurrected to the sense of human.

• 57:54Speaker 07

  I like it.

• 57:55Speaker 05

  You understand what I'm saying, like, maybe it was just a description, like...

• 57:58Speaker 07

  But if everyone's got big noses, then it wouldn't be a description.

• 58:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:02Speaker 07

  If everyone's got big noses...

• 58:03Mark Gagnon?

  Not everyone.

• 58:04Speaker 05

  Not, but if you're God, you wouldn't have the big...

• 58:07Speaker 06

  Who are you saying has a big nose?

• 58:08Speaker 07

  That's what I was, Italians or something.

• 58:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's what we're talking about.

• 58:11Speaker 05

  Jews.

• 58:13Mark Gagnon?

  Yes.

• 58:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:14Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:15Speaker 05

  So if, so wouldn't the Jewish God also have that?

• 58:18Speaker 06

  Well, so this is, this is an idiom that we find in other Semitic languages. So, like, Akkadian and Aramaic and like, so this is a language found...

• 58:26Speaker 05

  Languages that are in the region.

• 58:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:30Speaker 05

  Where the Jews live.

• 58:33Speaker 05

  You're not seeing the parallel here. You're a historian, you gotta know about this.

• 58:38Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, I understand the context. You gotta understand the context.

• 58:41Speaker 05

  Know who he's speaking to. He's saying, he's one of y'all.

• 58:46Speaker 06

  I mean, maybe. Contextually, no.

• 58:50Mark Gagnon?

  Listen, leave it up to the historians.

• 58:52Speaker 05

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:53Speaker 07

  Comedically, yes.

• 58:54Speaker 06

  Comedically, yes.

• 58:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:55Speaker 06

  Okay, wait. Just because Ari Shafir looks like that today... Doesn't necessarily mean...

• 59:03Speaker 05

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 59:04Speaker 06

  Ari Shafir.

• 59:07Speaker 06

  The legendary proper... Looks like that.

• 59:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay, fair enough.

• 59:09Speaker 07

  I get you, I get you. We need to get Dove in here, dude, we're getting, we're getting on the line right now.

• 59:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, we're getting close, okay. All right, so you were saying, so...

• 59:15Speaker 06

  Dynamic formal equivalence translation stuff, that's, that's, how do we start this? You brought it.

• 59:20Speaker 05

  You were talking about...

• 59:21Speaker 07

  Translation of a...

• 59:22Speaker 05

  You just said there are a bunch of long noses running out...

• 59:24Speaker 06

  Get out of here.

• 59:25Speaker 05

  Looking for Jesus.

• 59:26Speaker 06

  I'm gonna kick you out of your own pocket.

• 59:27Speaker 05

  Okay, sorry, sorry, sorry. I thought it was disrespectful.

• 59:29Speaker 06

  So, this is what runs up all the time.

• 59:31Speaker 05

  I thought it was disrespectful. And we're like, the long noses are trying to crucify him, I'm like, you can't...

• 59:35Speaker 06

  No, no, no, I didn't say that.

• 59:36Speaker 05

  Wesley, Wesley, Wesley. You said something like that and we're like, we gotta put a stop to this.

• 59:41Mark Gagnon?

  Slow to anger people.

• 59:42Speaker 05

  And, yeah, and then you were like, no, it's an idiom for the time.

• 59:44Speaker 07

  Abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

• 59:46Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly. What language was that?

• 59:48Speaker 06

  Huh?

• 59:49Speaker 05

  What was, did you speak, what language was that?

• 59:51Speaker 06

  Abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness?

• 59:53Mark Gagnon?

  Bro, I had no clue. We were very like, what the fuck?

• 59:56Speaker 05

  Was that another window moment? I just know. That's why I stopped.

• 59:59Mark Gagnon?

  Did you understand what he said?

• 1:00:01Speaker 05

  I thought he was speaking Hebrew, I had no clue, yeah, but I appreciate what you just said.

• 1:00:04Speaker 07

  He just did Busta Rhymes, you know?

• 1:00:08Speaker 05

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:00:09Speaker 06

  I twisted on you.

• 1:00:09Speaker 05

  Let's, uh, let's, let's center ourselves.

• 1:00:12Speaker 06

  So he was talking about like translation issues and that happens all the time.

• 1:00:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16Speaker 06

  And like you're translating the Bible into Peruvian in a culture that like doesn't know what a donkey is. Do you then say it's a llama? Or is that like taking too much liberty with the text? But this is stuff we run into all the time. So this is why the best commentary on the Hebrew Old Testament, Greek New Testament is gonna be the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament.

• 1:00:36Speaker 05

  And the Greek New Testament.

• 1:00:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, but there are things that we learn about these languages, like the King James Bible.

• 1:00:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Speaker 06

  It's translated between 1603 and 1611. There were terms that they just didn't know what they meant.

• 1:00:46Speaker 05

  Huh.

• 1:00:47Speaker 06

  And they transliterated them. We now know what they are because we've like through.

• 1:00:52Speaker 05

  And then have they adjusted the King James Bible since?

• 1:00:55Speaker 06

  Well, no, you don't. Well, new translations, dude, there's a new King James and KJV.

• 1:01:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:00Speaker 06

  And they would, so 1 Chronicles 2618.

• 1:01:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Speaker 06

  And the King James Bible says at Par, at Parbar westward for the causeway into it Parbar. You're like, what does that mean? Right? But if you read the NIV, this guy's favorite translation.

• 1:01:14Speaker 05

  That shit is light work.

• 1:01:15Speaker 06

  The New Indian Verbs Lit.

• 1:01:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:18Speaker 06

  It says, as for the court to the west, there were two at the court and for the road itself.

• 1:01:22Speaker 05

  I didn't even know what that meant.

• 1:01:23Speaker 06

  So Parbar is not an Elizabethan English term. It's just a transliteration of a Hebrew word that they were like, we don't know what this is. So we're just gonna call it a Parbar.

• 1:01:32Speaker 05

  Like croissant.

• 1:01:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. That's a.

• 1:01:37Speaker 05

  I think, I think he's right on this.

• 1:01:38Speaker 06

  Okay, okay, we'll go with it.

• 1:01:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, we didn't have a word for that type, like a what, what, what?

• 1:01:43Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:01:43Speaker 05

  Gay bread, so we just called it croissant, right? Like we don't have an English word for that. Yeah, so we just go, okay, let's just call it their thing.

• 1:01:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:50Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:01:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure, we should just leave it in Latin.

• 1:01:53Speaker 05

  Why you guys look at me like I'm dumb? It's the exact same thing that the English did, right? They didn't have a word for it, so they're like, all right, just leave it there.

• 1:01:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, cultural appropriation.

• 1:02:00Speaker 05

  Yes. Yeah. But in like the best version of it, we want you to appropriate Christianity. That is what Christians would hope, that everybody appropriates it.

• 1:02:10Speaker 06

  Sure, but then we figure out what the word is and it's fine.

• 1:02:11Speaker 05

  And then it's fine.

• 1:02:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Speaker 05

  Okay, okay. I'm like, I'm jumbled up here. We still haven't figured out your discrepancies in the Bible.

• 1:02:19Speaker 06

  No, I think we, I think we kinda.

• 1:02:21Speaker 05

  That was the only one. What were the other things? You have a biblical scholar here, right now, he's a historian, he benches 240.

• 1:02:29Speaker 06

  You're, you're lowballing.

• 1:02:30Speaker 05

  Come on. What did he put up there?

• 1:02:32Speaker 06

  285 for 5, easy.

• 1:02:34Speaker 05

  You could have carried that cross for days, bro.

• 1:02:38Speaker 05

  You guys got a bench press here? When, no.

• 1:02:40Speaker 06

  Oh, okay.

• 1:02:41Speaker 05

  What, why were you about to throw something out for us?

• 1:02:43Speaker 06

  We could test it.

• 1:02:43Speaker 05

  315. 315?

• 1:02:45Speaker 06

  I've done 404 for 1.

• 1:02:46Speaker 05

  Whoa, what?

• 1:02:48Speaker 06

  Nah.

• 1:02:48Speaker 05

  Body of Christ, Jesus.

• 1:02:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Speaker 08

  Shifty, he has a question.

• 1:02:53Speaker 05

  Yes, we need, are you miked?

• 1:02:54Speaker 08

  Shifty knows the Bible.

• 1:02:56Speaker 05

  Okay, Shifty.

• 1:02:57Speaker 09

  Uh, we were talking about translations and mistranslations.

• 1:02:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:00Speaker 09

  And I've heard a lot of people say that gay, gay marriage and gay relations are just mistranslations of the verses, like Romans, the ones in the Old Testament. Do you think they're mistranslations and the Bible is saying that they don't ever just talk about gay marriage or gay relations in general? Or do you think that they're mistranslations?

• 1:03:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the accusation is usually that the word homosexuality is, it gets incorporated into the Bible in like the modern era. So the words in Hebrew in the Old Testament Leviticus, Paul, particularly in 1 Corinthians 7, plays off of what the Greek translation of the Old Testament has and uses this word arsenacoites, which literally means to, like, to lie down a man with a man. And so I think it's not a mistranslation because the concept is there. Like, what it's talking about is not obscure. It might be controversial, but it's not obscure in the Hebrew and Greek.

• 1:03:59Speaker 06

  The accusation is usually that it's not talking about like same-sex sex. It's talking about something like, uh, men sleeping with boys.

• 1:04:10Speaker 09

  Heterosexual.

• 1:04:11Speaker 06

  Prostitution. I don't think you can really rationalize that. There's a guy named Robert Gagnon.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  That's your last name?

• 1:04:17Speaker 06

  Yeah. Robert Gagnon. Do you say Gagnon?

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, these people don't understand.

• 1:04:23Speaker 05

  Wait, hold on. Is this guy about to justify homosexuality?

• 1:04:26Speaker 06

  No, no, no. So Robert Gagnon is a scholar. He did his dissertation, he taught at Princeton for a while, on this, like, the linguistic and cultural context of homosexuality in the Bible. So his is kind of like the volume. So he goes through all this stuff.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Why are you laughing at that?

• 1:04:43Speaker 06

  And talks about...

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  Mark comes from a long line of people.

• 1:04:49Speaker 05

  Long line of croissants. We just call them croissants.

• 1:04:51Speaker 06

  You just call them croissants.

• 1:04:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. Okay. So he's a croissant historian, and then what did he find out?

• 1:04:58Speaker 06

  Well, these concepts are like, if you went back to Moses and you had two dudes and said, "We want to get married." Moses is not...

• 1:05:05Speaker 05

  Like, for what?

• 1:05:07Speaker 06

  What?

• 1:05:07Speaker 05

  He would say, "For what?"

• 1:05:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, that wouldn't be, he wouldn't, he'd be like, "That's not what marriage is."

• 1:05:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Speaker 06

  Yeah. So it's not like, it's just because the word homosexuality exists now in English, doesn't mean that the concept isn't there

• 1:05:21Speaker 05

  Back in the day.

• 1:05:22Speaker 06

  within the Bible, yeah.

• 1:05:25Speaker 05

  So within the Bible, it was frowned upon even, like, whatever translation, whatever, texturally, okay.

• 1:05:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Speaker 05

  Okay, so what happens, what happens, are you guys done with the gay stuff?

• 1:05:39Speaker 05

  What happens, so after Jesus comes back, what do his disciples go do? Do they go separate? They go around the world, right? And they're going to spread the gospel?

• 1:05:47Speaker 06

  Well, they hide because they think their movement's done. They think their leader's dead. That's kaput. And so...

• 1:05:53Speaker 05

  But then he comes back.

• 1:05:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. So that's what changes their mind. So that's what, when they go from 11 scared disciples because Judas killed himself in the upper room, to then going out and being willing to actually lose their life for this proclamation. It's because Jesus shows up and then teaches them for 40 days.

• 1:06:10Speaker 05

  Oh, so they do another 40-day stint?

• 1:06:12Speaker 06

  They do another 40 days with Jesus.

• 1:06:13Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:06:14Speaker 06

  That's, yeah. So that's what Luke talks about. This is 40-day period, and then you have the mountain of ascension. He goes back, and then they spread out. Well, first, they go back to Jerusalem and start preaching that at ground zero, where it happened. Which, if you were trying to make it up, you wouldn't go back to the place where everybody saw the guy killed and say, like, "He's resurrected. The tomb's empty." Like, that's, you go somewhere else.

• 1:06:38Speaker 05

  And people check the tomb, and it's empty.

• 1:06:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, they would have, right?

• 1:06:43Speaker 05

  So that's a bar that I've seen a bunch of pastors on TikTok use. It's fire.

• 1:06:47Speaker 06

  It's like. The tomb is empty?

• 1:06:49Speaker 05

  No, no, it's a, if you look at Mohammed's tomb, he's in there. If you look at Moses' tomb, he's in there. If you look at my God's tomb, it's empty.

• 1:07:01Speaker 06

  That's fun.

• 1:07:03Speaker 06

  And then they start doing. I'm, it's good, it's good. I've just heard before, so it's all nervous.

• 1:07:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. That's all it takes to convert this guy. They don't make any sense.

• 1:07:14Speaker 05

  They're gonna be cast, don't they? He's still down in the tomb.

• 1:07:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Jesus ain't there.

• 1:07:19Speaker 05

  He ain't there.

• 1:07:20Speaker 06

  Yeah. And then Stephen is the first martyr and he gets killed. And so the disciples know that this is risky.

• 1:07:26Speaker 05

  But they're still willing to go do it.

• 1:07:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, so like when I was, last week I was in Turkey.

• 1:07:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Speaker 06

  And I went to Ephesus, which is where the body of St. John is. And I went to Herapolis, which is where the body of Philip the disciple is. So like they went out and they started preaching these things. And there's various stories of like, some were martyred. Those reports are sketchier than others. But we know at minimum that Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome in and around the time between 64 and 68.

• 1:08:03Speaker 05

  So every single one of them gets killed?

• 1:08:06Speaker 06

  Not that we can reliably. At minimum, they are persecuted. Some were probably killed for their faith. And a lot of them suffered physical harm because of it.

• 1:08:17Speaker 05

  And the idea is that they all have disciples as well. The religion continues to grow.

• 1:08:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Speaker 05

  And you see a difference in the religion from certain areas, right? When does, when do we have like the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church separate?

• 1:08:33Speaker 06

  Well, that's in like, that's a thousand years after.

• 1:08:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, but it takes time for those beliefs to separate. And what is the true one?

• 1:08:40Speaker 06

  What is the true? Well, I mean, so I'm biased because I'm a Protestant.

• 1:08:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44Speaker 06

  Right? So nobody wakes up one day and is like, purgatory. We all believe that now, right? Like, there's a slow fade for these traditions that develop over time. And so it's not like it.

• 1:08:58Speaker 06

  So if you talk to Roman Catholics, they, you know, it's the 2,000 year old church. Pope Leo XIV is the successor appear and that goes right back. Yeah, from Chicago.

• 1:09:08Speaker 05

  You like that, though, you like that.

• 1:09:09Speaker 06

  I mean, I'm not gonna say I influenced it while I was in Rome, but I'm not gonna say I'm not.

• 1:09:15Speaker 05

  Talk to some Cardinals.

• 1:09:16Speaker 06

  I believe it, I see a Pakistani pope. A Pakistani. I don't believe it. I'm in, I'm in, I like the Italian guy named Pizza Bola. That was the, that's what I was writing for, just because his name is Pizza Bola.

• 1:09:25Speaker 07

  That was, that was a frontrunner, Pizza Bola. Funny, this is most Italian, it's like a made up Italian name.

• 1:09:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, if you were to like, invent an Italian.

• 1:09:32Speaker 06

  It's an Italian virus.

• 1:09:35Speaker 06

  Nice.

• 1:09:40Speaker 06

  Don't you want Trump saying Pizza Bola, though?

• 1:09:42Speaker 05

  Yes, I do.

• 1:09:42Speaker 06

  It's a Pizza Bola, that's great.

• 1:09:43Speaker 05

  Oh, Pizza Bola. Uh, okay, so tell me, so.

• 1:09:47Speaker 06

  So the, the east and the west split.

• 1:09:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:49Speaker 06

  Over, I mean, there's language divisions, Latin and Greek, and all sorts of things. And then they ultimately disagree on the formulation. There's a bunch of things that happen, but on the formulation of the Nicene Creed. Where does the spear proceed from the Father? So there's a bunch of things that go on, but they eventually excommunicate each other. Interestingly enough, under a Pope Leo.

• 1:10:13Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:10:13Speaker 06

  So.

• 1:10:13Speaker 05

  So here we go, run it back.

• 1:10:15Speaker 06

  And then Pope Leo.

• 1:10:17Speaker 05

  But how different are the religions at the time? And is there, is there enough communication between the different factions to maintain one, like, singularity of belief? Like, there is a printed book at the time, there is one story.

• 1:10:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:29Speaker 05

  Yet, the Roman Catholics have a pope and the Orthodox do not.

• 1:10:33Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:10:33Speaker 05

  And, so, is, I mean, I would imagine there's infighting here, I imagine there's like, I don't wanna say like blasphemy thrown around, but I imagine like.

• 1:10:42Speaker 06

  Well, they excommunicate each other.

• 1:10:44Speaker 05

  They excommunicate, and what year does that happen?

• 1:10:46Speaker 06

  Uh, one... I don't know, give it a goog. Which 1,000.

• 1:10:52Speaker 05

  So, we're pretty deep into the X.

• 1:10:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're a thousand years afterwards.

• 1:10:55Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 1:10:56Speaker 06

  But the, and that by the time you get to like 1517.

• 1:11:00Speaker 05

  1054.

• 1:11:01Speaker 06

  1054. So by the Great Schism, by the time you get to 1517 and Martin Luther posts his 95 theses on the castle door in Wittenberg, Germany. That and launches the Protestant Reformation, like that's then the next, and he didn't want to start a different denomination, like that wasn't his purpose. He wanted to reform the church.

• 1:11:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Speaker 06

  But the church wasn't willing to get along with that.

• 1:11:27Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:11:28Speaker 06

  And so then that created the division.

• 1:11:30Speaker 05

  So, just so I can understand this, Orthodox have been holding it true this entire time. Then the Catholics kind of change it up a little bit.

• 1:11:40Speaker 06

  Well, no, it's trickier than that.

• 1:11:41Speaker 05

  And then the thing that the Catholics create gets changed up again. And then.

• 1:11:46Speaker 06

  Well.

• 1:11:46Speaker 05

  It gets changed up again, and gets changed up again, and gets changed up again. But them Orthodox have been holding it true this whole time.

• 1:11:53Speaker 06

  I mean.

• 1:11:54Speaker 05

  Kind of crazy how that.

• 1:11:57Speaker 06

  You gotta talk to the cops.

• 1:11:58Speaker 05

  I'm just saying.

• 1:11:59Speaker 06

  They got Jesus's house in Cairo, so.

• 1:12:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was there for that.

• 1:12:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, so that's the Coptic. So they're another group.

• 1:12:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:07Speaker 06

  So you got, you got a bunch of different factions, right?

• 1:12:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:09Speaker 06

  But I think you have a central core, which you would all adhere to approximately, but then you have differentiations and like theological disagreements. The Protestant Reformation was to reform all of that and go back to the primitive church.

• 1:12:22Speaker 05

  The primitive church is?

• 1:12:23Speaker 06

  Well, like what scripture teaches.

• 1:12:26Speaker 05

  Which would be closest to.

• 1:12:28Speaker 06

  I don't think it's necessarily closest to any of them. Like, I don't claim that.

• 1:12:30Speaker 05

  It feels kind of Orthodox to me. It feels like you don't want to admit it.

• 1:12:33Speaker 06

  No, no, I'm not Orthodox.

• 1:12:35Speaker 07

  No, this guy is like a diehard Orthodox Christian.

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  I just went to Turkey and I had a tour guide and he was breaking the whole thing down to me. I was like, oh, I've been lied to my whole life. Orthodox are really the real ones.

• 1:12:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46Speaker 05

  What is that church in?

• 1:12:49Speaker 06

  Hagia Sophia.

• 1:12:50Speaker 05

  Istanbul, yeah, Hagia Sophia.

• 1:12:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, Hagia Sophia.

• 1:12:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. Have you visited?

• 1:12:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was just there.

• 1:12:54Speaker 05

  And thoughts?

• 1:12:55Speaker 06

  I mean, it's a beautiful church. It's a mosque now, so.

• 1:12:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. How'd we let that one go? That was the first one, right?

• 1:13:01Speaker 07

  This is in Muslims.

• 1:13:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, they got it.

• 1:13:03Speaker 06

  They got it.

• 1:13:04Speaker 05

  We had it for a while.

• 1:13:05Speaker 06

  They got a lot.

• 1:13:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Speaker 06

  They got a lot. All those regions were Christian.

• 1:13:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:08Speaker 06

  Christian and Jewish.

• 1:13:09Speaker 05

  We stopped them right there, though.

• 1:13:10Speaker 06

  Seventh century.

• 1:13:11Speaker 05

  They didn't get into Europe, you know?

• 1:13:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, Charles the Hammer. You stop, that's why we get croissants from. You know that?

• 1:13:16Speaker 05

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:13:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, they ate the Turks for breakfast. That was the line.

• 1:13:20Speaker 05

  Oh, because uh...

• 1:13:21Speaker 06

  That's as a crescent.

• 1:13:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23Speaker 06

  That's largely why we have coffee is because the Muslims were taking over Spain and they went up and they grabbed all these beans from like Kenya because they were making coffee for a long time. And then when they retreated, they left, the story is that they left these beans in Spain and Portugal. And then when Charles the Hammer of France, he pushes them back. They leave all these beans and they get some of the Muslim captives and they're like, what is this stuff? And they're like, oh, this is this drink we make. And there's a lot of pressure on the Pope to ban coffee as the drink of the devil. And so the story is that the Pope at the time drank it and he said, this is the drink of the devil. We need to baptize it for Jesus. And but it was just like this feud because it was it was pitted as the anti-wine.

• 1:14:07Speaker 06

  So wine was like the drink of the Eucharist and coffee is the drink of the infidels. And so, but that's largely, and then the Capuchin monks in Italy, they took it and they didn't like the taste. They mix it with honey and they mix it with milk and...

• 1:14:23Speaker 05

  Cappuccino?

• 1:14:24Speaker 06

  Cappuccinos, yeah.

• 1:14:25Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:14:27Speaker 06

  That's awesome. Hell yeah. Thank you Muslims.

• 1:14:30Speaker 05

  You could be Billy Carson-ing us right now. And I would totally believe every single thing. We're not fact checking anything, Joey. Okay.

• 1:14:37Speaker 06

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 1:14:38Speaker 05

  So you haven't really told me the difference between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.

• 1:14:42Speaker 06

  Well, it would be, well, so... The Eucharist is... The Catholic Church has a papal primacy.

• 1:14:47Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:14:48Speaker 06

  Right? So they have the Bishop of Rome.

• 1:14:50Speaker 05

  How does that come about? Why did they decide that there is a Pope? And why does the Orthodox Church decide that there isn't one?

• 1:14:55Speaker 06

  I mean, this is one of the disagreements between the East and the West because the seed of Peter becomes very important in the West. And the East Church says, well, we have all basically every other apostle. So we're not too concerned with the Bishop in Rome. But there is a point in time where like papal infallibility starts to develop. And then when the Pope chooses the Emperor, so Charlemagne is crowned the Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope.

• 1:15:22Speaker 06

  I think it's the year 800, give it a goog. And that's when I would argue.

• 1:15:29Speaker 05

  I love you, dude.

• 1:15:29Speaker 06

  That's when it starts. Great. Fact check me. I can't remember the day.

• 1:15:34Speaker 05

  Every once in a while, the Canadian bursts out.

• 1:15:37Speaker 06

  That's Canadian. Give it a goog.

• 1:15:38Speaker 05

  Give it a goog.

• 1:15:39Speaker 06

  Was it 800?

• 1:15:40Speaker 05

  You got it.

• 1:15:41Speaker 06

  So, yeah, Pope Leo, another Pope Leo.

• 1:15:43Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:15:44Speaker 06

  The Third, he crowns Charlemagne the Emperor. Before that, the Emperor kind of had influence who the Pope was. And this is where you get this like subversion. And that's where I personally would say the Roman Catholic, big R, big C, church starts. That's controversial. Roman Catholics don't like that I say that. But that's when you start to get this idea of a papal primacy and the magisterium as this concrete body. The East is not on board with that.

• 1:16:10Speaker 05

  At all.

• 1:16:10Speaker 06

  No, well, they don't, they just don't care. They don't think that the Bishop of Rome has any more or less authority than any of the other bishops. So they have the patriarchs and they have that kind of setup.

• 1:16:20Speaker 05

  Which do you think is most similar to the earliest forms of Christianity? Because was there a Pope in the earliest forms of Christianity?

• 1:16:29Speaker 06

  Well, there was a, so bishops are like the leaders of the church.

• 1:16:32Speaker 05

  Like one singular bishop? Was there, then he was just the guy? Or is that kind of like an invention of like?

• 1:16:37Speaker 06

  Well, the bishops are like leaders within the church. So Paul outlines this like hierarchy of, yeah.

• 1:16:43Speaker 05

  He won't give it to me, huh? He won't give it to me.

• 1:16:44Speaker 06

  He doesn't get it yet. Of course not.

• 1:16:46Speaker 05

  Guys hanging out in Turkey, you know, at the source. You keep going to the source, you're not going back to Rome, my boy.

• 1:16:52Speaker 06

  I know.

• 1:16:52Speaker 05

  Because you know where the truth is.

• 1:16:53Speaker 06

  I crossed the Tiber and I took apart my boat and I made a pulpit and I started preaching to the other side. That's what I'm talking about. Well, so at the Council on ICA, 325 AD.

• 1:17:04Speaker 05

  If you had to make the argument, if you had to make the argument for the Orthodox Church being the closest church toward for. Could you do it? If you had to, if you had to do it to save humanity, what would you say?

• 1:17:15Speaker 06

  Sure, it's possible.

• 1:17:16Speaker 05

  What would you do to save humanity if you just had to save humanity?

• 1:17:18Speaker 06

  To save humanity?

• 1:17:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:20Speaker 06

  Well, I would look at the Bible. A sola scriptura.

• 1:17:23Speaker 05

  Ooh.

• 1:17:24Speaker 06

  Ooh. Scripture is the sole infallible rule and faith and practice for the church.

• 1:17:28Speaker 05

  That was English.

• 1:17:29Speaker 06

  That was English.

• 1:17:29Speaker 05

  Did you catch that one?

• 1:17:30Speaker 06

  I got that one.

• 1:17:30Speaker 05

  Barely, but I got it.

• 1:17:31Speaker 06

  Barely.

• 1:17:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 06

  I mean, that's the biggest differentiation when the Protestants come around is they say. Martin Luther's reading the Bible. He's reading the New Testament in Greek and he's saying, "I'm reading this stuff and I'm looking at the church, I'm seeing a, I'm seeing a big difference." And so...

• 1:17:49Speaker 05

  So the church isn't acting in the way that the book is written?

• 1:17:51Speaker 06

  There have been a lot of traditions that have developed that are, at minimum, non-biblical and at most anti-biblical.

• 1:17:58Speaker 05

  Ah, like, what's an example of that?

• 1:18:01Speaker 06

  Well, Pope Leo, another Pope Leo, starts this process of indulgences. So there's this theological idea called the treasury of merit that you can draw from, that's like the holiness of the saints and Mary, and the copious outgiving of the blood of Christ, that you can draw on. And so the Pope Leo in the 16th century says, "Hey, we need to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica." And so he commissions guys to go out and collect money by selling indulgences. So you can, you either can get out of purgatory faster, or if you have family members who are stuck in purgatory, you give the church money, they'll get so many years off purgatory. This is still a thing, by the way.

• 1:18:40Speaker 05

  Did that ever happen in the Orthodox Church, do you know? They ever did anything like that? They never did anything like that. Wow, it's fascinating, dude. Yeah, I feel like you should look in more to that church, because it feels like...

• 1:18:50Speaker 06

  I got some friends who are gonna be really happy you're talking like that. They're Orthodox friends. So that's clearly like, and that's what Martin Luther's 95 theses are about. We're gonna get you over here, man. We're gonna get you over to the One True. The One True religion.

• 1:19:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, that makes sense what Martin Luther doing. And do you think that there was, there were Catholics that at the time respected that idea? And they thought that the church had...

• 1:19:16Speaker 06

  Or against.

• 1:19:17Speaker 05

  The Reformation, that they appreciated the Reformation, despite not wanting to become Protestants, but they wanted Reformation for their own version of Christianity.

• 1:19:26Speaker 06

  Yes, and even some of the people that, like, fought Luther on it were sympathetic to some...

• 1:19:32Speaker 05

  To what?

• 1:19:33Speaker 06

  The first debate of the Reformation was between a guy named Desiderius Erasmus, he was Dutch, and the first debate was a written debate between him and Luther on the freedom of the will versus the bondage of the will. And Erasmus could have been like a closet reformer in some things.

• 1:19:50Speaker 06

  Because there were lots of people. I mean, there was a whole period of time with popes and anti-popes.

• 1:19:55Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, you even hear it now, like with the selection of the pope. A lot of times Catholics will be like, this pope isn't progressive enough, or this pope isn't conservative enough. So, and the hope, I would imagine, is that like maybe a more conservative pope would reform the church in a way that met what they thought was most important about their values.

• 1:20:12Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:20:13Speaker 05

  And, I don't know, maybe there's something really valuable to that, that the church can kind of sway according to like what society needs at the time. But maybe there's also something very concerning about that, too, that if you don't have the rigidity, that the religion can be manipulated and used in the way that you were saying.

• 1:20:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, so you have another reformer guy, a little bit later on after Luther, named John Calvin.

• 1:20:39Speaker 05

  Ah, yes.

• 1:20:40Speaker 06

  He's in France, or he's in, well, he's French, but he's in Switzerland. And so, he's in Geneva, and the bishop of Geneva at the time actually writes to Salito, Cardinal Salito, writes to the people in Switzerland, in Geneva, and says like, you gotta come back to the true church. Like, you're in danger of damnation, come back. And the elderly Calvin comes out of retirement. He actually writes this letter to Cardinal Salito. And he says, you got it wrong. We are the original church. We don't need to go home. You need to come home. Because you have, we've scraped all the moss off of the facade of Christianity and all that tradition that's dividing you from what scripture actually is telling you,

• 1:21:25Speaker 06

  what the core of the faith adheres to. And so, you've lost the script.

• 1:21:33Speaker 07

  What do you think about Martin Luther's removal of the Apocrypha from that original canon?

• 1:21:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, great question. So, he didn't, but...

• 1:21:41Speaker 07

  What does that mean?

• 1:21:42Speaker 06

  So, Roman Catholics and Protestants have a different number of books in their bibles. So this is part of why I was in Italy. Because we went to Trento in Italy, where the Council of Trent happened. Where the Council of Trent was the Counter-Reformation. So 1546 to 1563, I think it was. They respond to the Reformation because they're like, "Okay, Protestantism has become this big thing. We need to deal with this. So let's try to bring the Protestants and the Catholics together and figure this out." So that we can reunite the believers? Sort of, although they invite the Protestants and they say, "You can show up, but you can't vote." So they don't really... And so the Protestants hear this and they're like,

• 1:22:27Speaker 06

  "Well, we're not doing that thing." And a few show up later on. But part of the conversation is that there was no one Roman Catholic Bible. So you go back to, say, Saint Jerome in the 4th century. He translates the Greek Old Testament and Greek New Testament into Latin. That's the Vulgate. It's the Vulgata, right? It just means like common. So people weren't speaking Greek anymore. They're speaking Latin. And so Constantine says, "We need a Bible that people can actually read." So he commissions Jerome to translate the Bible into the language that everybody can read. At the time, though, Jerome doesn't believe that the Apocrypha, so this other group of books in the Old Testament, not in the New Testament, are scripture. So Jerome argues against Augustine,

• 1:23:12Speaker 06

  who does believe they were scripture. But there's always this open conversation. The only council that makes any delineation on what scripture is, is the Council of Trent. So at Trent, that is when the... So the Catholics would call it the Deuterocanonical books. And I'm a little disappointed that you didn't. You used my term, though, which I'm okay with. Sure. Because Apocrypha typically means like it's a term for things that are out. Right. I went to Presbyterian school. Nice.

• 1:23:43Speaker 06

  So the Catholics have 73 books in their Bible. I have 66 in my Bible. The 39 books of the Old Testament that I have in my Old Testament are the same books that the guy that I mentioned before, Josephus, mentions as the books that the Jews consider Scripture. Now, he gives a different number, but it's the same number of books, they're just in a different order. So the Jews order them differently. It's the same today. If you buy a Tanakh, the Torah and Neveim and the Ketzevim, what are the books of the Jewish publication, they will have the same books as a Protestant Old Testament, they'll just have them in a different order. So they group the prophets together differently. They don't have first and second kings, they have kings, they don't have first and second chronicles.

• 1:24:24Speaker 05

  Oh, so it's all the same information.

• 1:24:25Speaker 06

  It's the same books, just different.

• 1:24:27Speaker 05

  That's fine.

• 1:24:28Speaker 06

  Order. So Luther says, okay, there's all this debate, I'm just gonna stick with the core, I'm gonna cut out the chaff, and I'm just gonna, this is the Bible. However, Luther still includes them in a separate section, which he labeled "Sabbath Torah." And actually, the First King James Bible in 1611 also did that. So did the Geneva Bible, so did the Bishop's Bible. There's a longstanding history of Bibles that include them because they're written in the intertestamental period, between the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, and the first book of the New Testament. But to say that, like, Roman Catholics put them in, or that Protestants took them out, I think is a little bit messy because there is historical precedence for both lists.

• 1:25:10Speaker 06

  But I would say that the strongest evidence, the earliest evidence, is for the 66 that us Protestants stuck with.

• 1:25:19Speaker 06

  Because we said, what is Scripture to the Jews? And so Paul says, the oracles of God are entrusted to the Jews. And so guys like Jerome went back to the Jews, and he said, okay, how many books do you have? And they said, these. And he said, have you ever considered these other ones Scripture? They said, no. And he's like, okay, well, that does it for me.

• 1:25:38Speaker 05

  Historically speaking, is it easier to maintain the authenticity of a religion if it is not in power in an area?

• 1:25:49Speaker 06

  Is it? I don't understand the question.

• 1:25:51Speaker 05

  In other words, like, once the religion is tied with the power structure of the area, there might be bad actors

• 1:26:00Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:26:00Speaker 05

  that will abuse the religion

• 1:26:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:26:02Speaker 05

  to exert more power, to raise finances, etc. When if the religion is a minority group in the area, there's no real way to exert power

• 1:26:12Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:26:13Speaker 05

  outside of like maintaining its authenticity. And you have to do the most pure form if you want to get to heaven.

• 1:26:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:26:20Speaker 05

  Over here, you can bastardize it a little bit. That's maybe a strong word, but like you can

• 1:26:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, please don't use that word.

• 1:26:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm not gonna do that ever again. Sorry.

• 1:26:28Speaker 06

  Don't say it no more.

• 1:26:29Speaker 05

  Sorry, or whatever. But you can you can morph it and and the morphing of it can kind of deteriorate the authenticity of the religion. So like, what does history say about that?

• 1:26:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, you do have like power corrupts, right? People are always gonna use advantage. I mean, that's the biblical narrative, the original sin. Like, the Israelites want a king. They're like, hey, God, we want a king. And God's like, no, that's gonna, kings always end badly.

• 1:26:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:26:56Speaker 06

  You don't want that. And they demand it, and he gives them a king. And Saul is not a great guy. And then David sleeps with everybody and kills people's husbands. So, you know, it's the narrative of this story. I think that definitely happens. I think so. The common accusation is that like Constantine converts and then he pollutes things. Right?

• 1:27:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Speaker 06

  I think the problem with that is that Constantine, if he wants to exert power by converting to Christianity, it's kind of a dumb thing to do because he's converting to a minority religion that worships a crucified Jew.

• 1:27:28Speaker 05

  Why did he convert the empire to Christianity?

• 1:27:32Speaker 06

  So he converted himself to Christianity. It's only after him, under Emperor Theodosius, that Christianity becomes the religion of Rome.

• 1:27:42Speaker 05

  I thought he converted on his deathbed.

• 1:27:44Speaker 06

  No. But I know what you're talking about.

• 1:27:46Speaker 05

  What am I talking about?

• 1:27:47Speaker 06

  So he baptized on his deathbed.

• 1:27:47Speaker 05

  That's it.

• 1:27:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. He converts after the events of 312 with the Battle of Milvien Bridge. So there's this battle between Magentius, who's the leader of the West, and Constantine, who's the leader of the East. And they fight for the unification of...

• 1:28:06Speaker 05

  The empire of Roman.

• 1:28:07Speaker 06

  The story is, whether you want to consider it reliable or not, is that Constantine and his army have a vision of the Chiro, what looks like a P and an X. It's the first two letters in Greek for the word Christ. And here a voice that says, "In this sign, conquer." And so he puts that on all his shields. And even though they're going against the Praetorian Guard, which is like the elite fighting force of Magentius, they win. And so after that point, he starts to like, "Okay, what's going on here with this? I used the sign of the Christian God. And I won." And so what's... And then we do have testimony of other early Christians who seem to give credibility to the fact that he does, in fact, legitimately convert.

• 1:28:51Speaker 06

  And part of that is that if he wanted to exert power, he could just do what Diocletian did and say, "I'm God."

• 1:28:56Speaker 05

  So I'm gonna kill everybody.

• 1:28:57Speaker 06

  "What I say goes." And he doesn't do that. So it's actually...

• 1:29:00Speaker 05

  It's interesting the way that this is taught. The way that it's taught, it was, to me, as like a kid, was that there was so much momentum for the growth of Christianity within the empire that they had no choice but to convert.

• 1:29:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's not...

• 1:29:16Speaker 05

  Why even teach that?

• 1:29:18Speaker 06

  Like, I mean, why does anybody teach anything?

• 1:29:20Speaker 05

  I guess, I guess, but I think it does a disservice to like, the choice at the time. Like, it's a pretty brave choice in that regard for Constantine.

• 1:29:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it certainly would not have been popular.

• 1:29:35Speaker 05

  I thought he was succumbing to the will of the people.

• 1:29:37Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:29:38Speaker 05

  I thought it was a train. There was a runaway train. There's nothing he could do about it. He's like, "The only way that we can keep empire together is we start following that." And then there's all this conversation of them, like, including pagan rituals into this new version of Christianity, which I'd love you to speak on, so that...

• 1:29:55Speaker 06

  The pagans would more easily adopt it. Yeah. But you're telling me that this is just like completely false. So there are like, there are kernels of that that's true in the sense that like, Christians would do things like build churches over the sites of old temples. In that they're said like, you're coming here anyways to worship, now worship the true God in the same location that you're regularly aware of going to anyways. But the like, the assimilation of pagan practices, that's a myth. How do we get the eggs in Easter? That's a middle age thing because eggs were associated with both new life and spring in Europe. It's a European thing. Christmas. How do we get Santa?

• 1:30:40Speaker 06

  Santa is like a combination of Saint Nicholas, who is a fourth century bishop, and Saint Claus in Germany. I think it's a New York thing. I think eventually the Dutch in New York. Yeah, that's fire. They. Good for y'all. They, you're gonna take credit for that one? Yeah, I mean, yeah, he should. He should. Him and him. And so we like all comes together. So this doesn't exist prior? What? The celebration of Christmas. Oh, no, Christmas goes really old. Yeah. So there's a guy named Julius Africanus in the second century who's preoccupied with figuring out how old everything is and, you know,

• 1:31:23Speaker 06

  how, he gives us the date for the creation of the world and then he like adds up. So part of what he's doing is he's a Christian and he's like, when was Jesus born? So he looked at a bunch of different things and he reckons that he's figured out when Jesus was, like when the,

• 1:31:45Speaker 06

  when Mary got pregnant and then he counts nine months and gets to December 25th. And so that's, is it 24th or 25th? Why did I blank? Oh, you know why. I just ran with it. Why?

• 1:32:00Speaker 05

  When do the, when do the true Christians celebrate it?

• 1:32:03Speaker 06

  January 6th.

• 1:32:04Speaker 05

  Damn it.

• 1:32:10Speaker 06

  So the Orthodox do it on December, January 6th. But it's the same date, we just use different calendars, that's why. You guys stuck with the old calendar, we went to the new calendar, it's the exact same date, we just, our calendars changed. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. What about Halloween? Uh, Halloween is all Hallows Eve and the like pagan stuff appears to have been entirely invented by commercialization.

• 1:32:36Speaker 05

  So you're saying there's no pagan influence on Christianity?

• 1:32:39Speaker 06

  I'm not saying that, I'm just saying like the accusations of Christmas is pagan, Easter is pagan, like that's nonsense.

• 1:32:44Speaker 05

  What about the accusations that like even the Jesus story was taken from other myths in other religions? I think like the Egyptian god Ra or something like that, like what do you say about this? Is it just like a common occurrence? Like, how do you, is it bullshit?

• 1:32:59Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:33:00Speaker 05

  Really?

• 1:33:00Speaker 06

  Well, it's Jesus mythicism and no historian, like even the people who doubt that Jesus exists, don't use that argument because usually historians are aware of the primary sources. And if you look at the stories of like Horus, Ra, Mithras, Addis, they, if you look at the details and then try to find the parallels, they're just not there. It was made up by largely and popularized by the.

• 1:33:28Speaker 05

  Dan Brown?

• 1:33:29Speaker 06

  Oh. You know, the movies, I guess, like a YouTube thing?

• 1:33:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:32Speaker 06

  It's made up from thin air. So if you look at the actual stories of like Horus, Ra, the accusations of virgin births and 12 disciples and you won't find them in those things. You won't.

• 1:33:46Speaker 05

  Really? And isn't there connectivity to some Indian?

• 1:33:48Speaker 08

  I think the story of baby Krishna, I think there's some connectivity in that he, I think he was tried, the king tried to kill him, but he couldn't do it.

• 1:33:56Speaker 06

  So it's not that there aren't parallels that you can make, it's that like if you look at the actual core of the details, so there's a fallacy called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, where it's this idea that Texan is shooting in the side of a barn and. He then finds the closest cluster of shots and he paints a target around it, making himself look like a great shot, right? So if you want to find parallels, you can find them. And then you make the accusation afterwards. Yeah, so. Yeah, that makes sense. Let me, let me see if I can give you an example. So John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln were both, the presidencies were exactly 100 years apart. And Abraham Lincoln had a, he had an assistant by the name of Kennedy, and Kennedy had an assistant by the name of Lincoln.

• 1:34:42Speaker 06

  Both were assassinated by a man who went by three names, right? John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. Yeah. Kennedy was assassinated in a Lincoln. Yeah. And Lincoln was assassinated in the Ford Theater. Yeah. So like, if you want to go down the rabbit trail of trying to find all these things, you could argue that John F. Kennedy never existed. He was just a copy of Lincoln and. That's interesting.

• 1:35:05Speaker 07

  Before Lincoln died, he was in Monroe, Maryland. And before JFK died, he was in Maryland Monroe. Hey!

• 1:35:12Speaker 06

  No, no, no, no, no. I didn't say it. But it's these kind of things, right? So you can find, you can find parallels.

• 1:35:19Speaker 08

  I saw this on like a VHS when I was like eight years old.

• 1:35:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's good. That's a credible source.

• 1:35:24Speaker 08

  It was the story of baby Krishna. But the, I mean, the details are a little iffy, but I remember growing up in such a Christian country that I was like, oh, they took this from the Bible.

• 1:35:32Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:35:33Speaker 08

  But I didn't know Hinduism was older and the story of Krishna was older. So that would, that just came to me. That wasn't like, I'm trying to find the thing. And that always just stuck with me there because I remember thinking like, oh, they stole this from Christianity, which is very funny.

• 1:35:45Speaker 06

  So, so there's also like issues of correlation and causation. So if you do find parallels and you want to assert that Christians invented it, you have to find the causative links rather than just the correlations. Yeah. Because the correlations could actually exist, but things correlate all the time. Yeah. And the idea of an incarnation within Christianity is very different than the idea that you would find in something like Hinduism or even like miraculous births in the ancient world. Okay, question. Did Judas carry out the will of God by killing Jesus? Ha, yes, because he was prophesied to do so. And was he aware of this? Did he do it begrudgingly? Um, I mean, I don't know. That's not something that the Bible necessarily.

• 1:36:29Speaker 06

  There is an interesting theory that Judas was fed up with Jesus not being the Messiah he wanted him to be. And by betraying him, he was going to kickstart the revolution.

• 1:36:42Speaker 05

  Impatient.

• 1:36:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, but it's hypothetical, right? You can't say one way or the other. Something you would do, to be honest.

• 1:36:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's go.

• 1:36:52Speaker 06

  These New York Orthodox.

• 1:36:54Speaker 05

  Dude, New York Orthodox, that's like fire type of Christianity. I like that. I don't want to see, yes, yes, go.

• 1:37:00Speaker 06

  Hold on, I got something for you. Cause, when I was on Rogan, I made him a facsimile papyri.

• 1:37:04Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:37:05Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:37:05Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:37:05Speaker 06

  And he's a very important facsimile papyri.

• 1:37:07Speaker 05

  I remember watching it.

• 1:37:08Speaker 06

  P52, and it says, pilot, what is truth?

• 1:37:11Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:37:11Speaker 06

  I made you one. But, okay, order of importance, I also made Mark one, so. Cause Mark likes the apocryphal gospels. This is, uh, that's the Gospel of Thomas.

• 1:37:23Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 1:37:23Speaker 06

  That's the first page of the Gospel of Thomas.

• 1:37:25Speaker 05

  Mark, that's your guy. Aren't you Mark Thomas Gagnon?

• 1:37:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, and that's made of genuine Egyptian papyri. Oh, wow. That's sick. Yours. Thank you so much. Yeah, so order of lesser importance to great importance, because yours is far more important.

• 1:37:37Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 1:37:37Speaker 06

  So this is a Dead Sea Scroll fragment.

• 1:37:39Speaker 05

  What?

• 1:37:41Speaker 06

  I made it.

• 1:37:41Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:37:42Speaker 06

  And it's very important, uh, 4Q51.

• 1:37:45Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:37:45Speaker 06

  From Samuel, and I got the text there for you. Make sure you, make sure you read it. What does it say in Hebrew?

• 1:37:49Speaker 05

  This is, assalamualaikum.

• 1:37:54Speaker 06

  Alakum salam. Read it.

• 1:37:55Speaker 05

  It says, "Then David sent messengers to Ishbaashif."

• 1:38:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:38:00Speaker 05

  Saul's son, saying, "Give me my wife, Michal." Michael?

• 1:38:06Speaker 06

  Michal, yeah.

• 1:38:07Speaker 05

  Okay, "whom I betrothed to myself for the price of a hundred Philistine foreskins."

• 1:38:15Speaker 06

  Very, very important passage for you.

• 1:38:18Speaker 05

  Can you tell me what I just read? Cause I was concentrating so much on-

• 1:38:23Speaker 06

  Well, I tried to find-

• 1:38:24Speaker 05

  Getting the words out that sounded retarded that I didn't actually take in anything. Who's McCall?

• 1:38:30Speaker 06

  That's his wife. David's wife.

• 1:38:31Speaker 05

  Oh, okay. Masculine name, yeah.

• 1:38:33Speaker 06

  Saul's daughter.

• 1:38:35Speaker 05

  Got it. Is that Michelle?

• 1:38:36Speaker 06

  But I needed to find, sure.

• 1:38:37Speaker 05

  Got it, got it, got it, got it.

• 1:38:37Speaker 06

  But I needed to find you a passage that said foreskins.

• 1:38:40Speaker 05

  Give me my wife, give me my wife McCall, Michelle, whom I betrothed to myself. I betrothed her to me for the price of 100 Philistine foreskins. So he had to go out and collect 100 Philistine foreskins.

• 1:38:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, to kill them, take their foreskins.

• 1:38:53Speaker 05

  We don't know if they killed, he killed them, did he?

• 1:38:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, he killed them.

• 1:38:55Speaker 05

  100% killed them?

• 1:38:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:38:58Speaker 08

  Man, you can't just find some Jewish people, see if they got some stick, like floating around, you know?

• 1:39:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, start digging.

• 1:39:03Speaker 05

  Dig them up!

• 1:39:04Speaker 06

  No, no, that's not how this works.

• 1:39:05Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:39:06Speaker 06

  You know about dowries, right?

• 1:39:10Speaker 05

  Wow. This is Old, this is Old Testament, though. This is Old Testament.

• 1:39:14Speaker 06

  This is Old Testament, yeah, Samuel.

• 1:39:15Speaker 05

  So it-

• 1:39:16Speaker 06

  That's King David.

• 1:39:17Speaker 05

  King David, wild boy, right? Wait, Philistine, are those the Palestinians? Are the same people?

• 1:39:22Speaker 06

  No, no.

• 1:39:23Speaker 05

  Oh, still fucking them up, yeah. Yeah, okay, so who are the Philistines?

• 1:39:27Speaker 06

  The Philistines are the bad guys. They're living in Canaan. And they're, so like, Goliath is a Philistine.

• 1:39:34Speaker 05

  God.

• 1:39:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, the Canaanites.

• 1:39:35Speaker 05

  The Canaanites. Wow.

• 1:39:37Speaker 07

  Why did he want the foreskins? What did that symbolize?

• 1:39:40Speaker 05

  How'd he get them off himself? Did he get them off himself?

• 1:39:43Speaker 06

  The pagans? Yeah. Of course he did, he's got sword.

• 1:39:44Speaker 05

  But the old, oh, a sword, got it.

• 1:39:47Speaker 07

  No, not the Biden.

• 1:39:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:39:48Speaker 07

  Chubby, chubby.

• 1:39:49Speaker 05

  I mean, that sword gets dull, you know?

• 1:39:51Speaker 07

  That's a modern thing.

• 1:39:51Speaker 05

  Guys, we gotta put a little bit of a pause on this brilliant Bible breakdown because, um, people need their picks.

• 1:39:59Speaker 06

  That was great, brilliant, brilliant Bible breakdown.

• 1:40:01Speaker 05

  Like that alliteration?

• 1:40:02Speaker 06

  That was fire. What I do, you know what I mean?

• 1:40:05Speaker 05

  Inspired by someone out there.

• 1:40:07Speaker 06

  Shout out him.

• 1:40:08Speaker 05

  Even though it might be illegal. Is it illegal in Christianity?

• 1:40:11Speaker 06

  To gamble?

• 1:40:12Speaker 05

  We gotta figure that out.

• 1:40:13Speaker 07

  It's frowned upon.

• 1:40:14Speaker 05

  It's probably frowned upon.

• 1:40:15Speaker 07

  Some denominations say no, but then a lot of them really, yeah, it's fine.

• 1:40:17Speaker 05

  What is the, what do the Orthodox Christians say?

• 1:40:19Speaker 06

  You don't know?

• 1:40:20Speaker 05

  I don't. Cause I don't engage in any of that.

• 1:40:24Speaker 07

  Let's see.

• 1:40:28Speaker 05

  Nah, shout out y'all. Shout out y'all.

• 1:40:30Speaker 08

  No, you know who you worship? The Knicks. You know where the Mecca is? Madison Square Garden.

• 1:40:34Speaker 05

  Yo, keep talking that shit.

• 1:40:35Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:36Speaker 05

  Wow, that's fire though.

• 1:40:37Speaker 08

  Hey, come on.

• 1:40:37Speaker 05

  I do go to Mecca, low key.

• 1:40:39Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:40:39Speaker 05

  As much as I possibly can.

• 1:40:41Speaker 08

  The hardwood is your church.

• 1:40:42Speaker 05

  Headline two shows at the Mecca.

• 1:40:43Speaker 08

  Hey, there you go.

• 1:40:44Mark Gagnon?

  That's the hunch.

• 1:40:45Speaker 08

  Came a prodigal son returned.

• 1:40:46Speaker 05

  Yo, real talk, it actually happened. You can't say I didn't do that.

• 1:40:50Speaker 08

  Yeah, you did. You know who else dominating at their home? The Knicks.

• 1:40:55Speaker 05

  They got fucking rinsed.

• 1:40:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, but they're still up 2-1.

• 1:40:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, but they got rinsed.

• 1:41:00Mark Gagnon?

  His fault, bro.

• 1:41:01Speaker 05

  Whose fault?

• 1:41:01Mark Gagnon?

  Jamil.

• 1:41:02Speaker 05

  Why, Jamil, what happened?

• 1:41:04Mark Gagnon?

  In the group chat, he had no faith. He had no faith in the Knicks, man.

• 1:41:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. That's how you know he's good. Listen, Knicks, we're arrogant group. The Knicks fans, we're arrogant group, but the fact that after going up 2-0, most of us were like, I think we got it in six.

• 1:41:20Speaker 05

  Lets you know everything.

• 1:41:21Speaker 08

  Nah, but game three, if you're up 2-0, happened. Dude, the Pacers got their ass beat up 2-0. And then game four, they won. They were by 50 at one point.

• 1:41:29Speaker 05

  That was insane. I didn't even understand the score.

• 1:41:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, it was like 100 to like 56. Yeah, something ridiculous like that. So, game three loss, if you're up 2-0 at home. Yeah, game four is the one that matters.

• 1:41:41Speaker 05

  Knicks got it. I believe 100% Knicks got it. We got it in five.

• 1:41:45Mark Gagnon?

  Absolutely.

• 1:41:45Speaker 05

  We definitely getting that W tonight. Recording this on a Tuesday. I mean, Monday.

• 1:41:51Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're recording this on a Monday.

• 1:41:57Speaker 05

  Yo, why don't we get back to the Bible, man, dude? What are we doing over here? Trying to spread sin?

• 1:42:03Mark Gagnon?

  You're gonna need Jesus, bro.

• 1:42:03Speaker 05

  I do.

• 1:42:05Mark Gagnon?

  If you want the Knicks to win.

• 1:42:06Speaker 05

  We came back from 220 points. I mean, that's insane. Okay, listen, we, we, this playoffs, the question that we have right now is, can Jimmy Butler win a game on his own for the Warriors? If he can win a game on his own, then they can get to game five at 2-2.

• 1:42:27Speaker 08

  He should be able to.

• 1:42:29Speaker 05

  He kept them in it yesterday. Kept them in it yesterday.

• 1:42:32Speaker 08

  I mean.

• 1:42:32Speaker 05

  Or two days ago, I think it was.

• 1:42:33Speaker 08

  I guess the Wolves are better, but last year we saw, or I guess two years ago, we saw Jimmy Butler destroy everybody. He took apart the Celtics, he took apart the Bucks, he took apart everybody by himself.

• 1:42:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:42:42Speaker 08

  I just, with the Heat, I don't know, he seems like he should be able to get a game off the Wolves.

• 1:42:45Speaker 05

  The Warriors are a little, yeah, it's, it's really interesting. The Warriors are a little, uh... Like Draymond just doesn't have it anymore offensively and then defensively you don't even really have it like Randall was cooking Draymond's ass so.

• 1:42:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, I heard that.

• 1:42:58Speaker 05

  So if you're not, if you're scoring two points a game and you can't defend.

• 1:43:03Speaker 08

  I think he, yeah, I don't know. I think they can do it. I think if Steph was healthy.

• 1:43:07Speaker 05

  If Steph was healthy, I think they win it.

• 1:43:08Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:43:09Speaker 05

  But right now, they need something else. They need somebody else who's gonna create the shot. Like Buddy can splash, but you gotta run him around picks. Steph can go, give me the ball, I'll bring it up and I'll score. Jimmy can go, I'll bring the ball up and I'll score. And then no one else really can do that.

• 1:43:23Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:43:23Speaker 05

  On the team.

• 1:43:24Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:43:24Speaker 05

  You know, effectively.

• 1:43:25Speaker 08

  I mean, Ant is so fun to watch whenever I see anything of his, so I would not mind if they won. You know what series are the most interesting to me though? Celtics, obviously. Celtics, Knicks, and how well the Knicks are playing. And also, the Nuggets and the Thunder. The Thunder are so good.

• 1:43:40Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:43:41Speaker 08

  But somehow, it's two all this series. And there's only one game that wasn't close.

• 1:43:45Speaker 05

  Fucking what's his face is incredible.

• 1:43:46Speaker 08

  Now, Jokic is, yeah, he's the best player in the league for years.

• 1:43:49Speaker 05

  Just unbelievable.

• 1:43:50Speaker 08

  But if that series goes seven, the Thunder are the better team, but they haven't ever played in a game seven. The Nuggets, it's a small stakes relatively.

• 1:43:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:43:58Speaker 08

  So even though it's gonna be in Oklahoma City and all that, I think if it goes seven, the Nuggets will win.

• 1:44:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, I just wouldn't bet against Jokic.

• 1:44:05Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:44:06Speaker 05

  You have to figure it out. It's crazy. It's like, you don't even wanna run the, you don't even wanna run the offense through anybody else. Like, I would literally have him bring the ball up.

• 1:44:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, I'm not mad at it.

• 1:44:16Speaker 05

  It's just crazy.

• 1:44:17Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18Speaker 05

  Anyway, listen, a lot of great playoff games coming, a lot of great series. You know, Stake is the leader in global betting and US social casinos. Bet on top sports and political events. Use the promo code FLAGRANT for your welcome bonus. Now let's get back to the show.

• 1:44:31Speaker 06

  What can you tell us about the Gospel of Thomas?

• 1:44:33Speaker 05

  So.

• 1:44:34Speaker 06

  This is awesome. Thank you. You can, I went to the Comptech Museum in Cairo two years ago, and I saw the Nakamati Library. So this is Nakamati Codex 2, which was discovered in 1945, and includes a bunch of Gnostic writings, including the Gospel of Philip. But the famous one is the Gospel of Thomas. And the Gospel of Thomas, which we knew about prior to this, because it had been condemned in the ancient church, but we didn't have evidence for it in terms of physical documentation until. In the 1800s, in a place called Oxerinkus, Egypt, they found some fragments of this unknown gospel.

• 1:45:09Speaker 05

  This is the sayings gospel?

• 1:45:10Speaker 06

  Yes. 114 sayings.

• 1:45:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:45:12Speaker 06

  This is an important one because the last thing of the Gospel of Thomas has Peter saying, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Good start. And then Jesus says, "Don't worry. I will make her resemble a male like you males." And the last line of the Gospel of Thomas is, "Every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven." Look at that.

• 1:45:36Mark Gagnon?

  You said biting the foreskin is a modern thing? So there was one time when they were using a knife and somebody was like...

• 1:45:41Speaker 06

  I don't know enough about that.

• 1:45:42Mark Gagnon?

  Oh, okay. That's what I said as a modern thing.

• 1:45:45Speaker 06

  Modern biblical Judaism. Hold on. Go back to this right here.

• 1:45:49Speaker 05

  Gospel of Thomas is fascinating. But is it legit? What do they say? Was he...

• 1:45:53Speaker 06

  No, it's second century, like... So you have these other...

• 1:45:56Speaker 05

  So you're just saying some wild stuff in the name of God?

• 1:45:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it's 114 sayings of Jesus talking to his disciples. And it's, uh, it's pretty early. It's our earliest of this...

• 1:46:08Speaker 05

  But written by a guy who's never met Jesus or any of his disciples?

• 1:46:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, pretty conclusively. The Gospel of Thomas was not written by Thomas the disciple. But these other groups appropriate the names of the disciples to give credibility to their theology. So that's where you get Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Judas. It's these other groups in the subsequent centuries, and they read back their theology onto the lips of Jesus in order to like validate.

• 1:46:32Speaker 05

  After peace, go, go. So, okay. And then, is that what the, what is it? The Book of Enoch or something like that?

• 1:46:39Speaker 06

  So that's, that's pre-Jesus.

• 1:46:41Speaker 05

  Oh, that's before.

• 1:46:42Speaker 06

  Old Testament. There would have been... Yeah, it's pseudographical. So it's like, it's pseudo strange, graph A writing. So it's like, like a pseudonym is you want to write a book. You don't want people to know it's Andrew Schulz.

• 1:46:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, yeah.

• 1:46:58Speaker 06

  That's your pseudonym?

• 1:46:59Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:46:59Speaker 06

  You're Mark Twain?

• 1:47:00Speaker 05

  I'm Mark Twain.

• 1:47:01Speaker 06

  Nice. Noah was a New York Orthodox who did that. And so, uh, the pseudopigrafa are a group of writings that are associated with names that we know wasn't written. So Enoch is Noah's great-great-grandfather.

• 1:47:16Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:47:17Speaker 06

  So the Book of Enoch, we know, isn't necessarily, it doesn't come from that timeframe. Because that would be like pre-flood.

• 1:47:24Speaker 05

  It was written way after.

• 1:47:25Speaker 06

  It was written in and around the three... 300 years after the Old Testament, beginning of New Testament. So like in that period of time, they wrote a bunch of stuff. And part of it was Enoch.

• 1:47:39Speaker 07

  What do you make of Enoch? As obviously a non-canonical text, but something that the people of the region might have been consuming.

• 1:47:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, Enoch's very interesting. There's actually three Enoch's, first, second, and third Enoch. And the only one that really has any kind of credibility is first Enoch. But even then, what we call first Enoch is a collection of different... So we have fragments in Aramaic and Greek in the Dead Sea Scrolls. But then we have later ones in Coptic. And so what ends up being like published as if you buy a copy of first Enoch, it's like all of this stuff put together. Some of it is like 200 years before Jesus, but some of it could very well have been written in the timeframe of Jesus in the first century AD. But it's very clearly like a collection of Jewish musings about what happened during the flood.

• 1:48:29Speaker 06

  It's like very theologically in-depth fanfiction. I was just about to ask that, like, is it possible that it's like Harry Potter? I think it's them trying to figure, and this is common with like the super graphical work, is that there's another one called the Exchogey of Moses. So they're looking at these Old Testament stories and they're trying to figure out, okay, like, how do we explain some of these things? You have this weird story in Genesis, chapter six, where the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful. And that's where you get the Nephilim and that kind of stuff. And so the Jews are like, how do we figure this stuff out? What are demons? What are angels? How do they interact with this world? There's not actually that much in the Old Testament about that stuff. So let's explore it.

• 1:49:14Speaker 06

  They write something like the Gospel, or not the Gospel, sorry, the Book of Enoch to try to expand upon and extrapolate this stuff. Enoch is... So you don't believe in the Nephilim? Well, yeah, they're in the Bible. Yeah, the Nephilim. It just depends what you mean by Nephilim. Well, what do you mean by it? I don't know what you mean by it. I mean. I'll tell you what I believe in. I would love to believe that there's giants. Yeah, well, the problem, Nephilim is a tricky term because we don't really know where it originates. So naphal means to fall. Right. In Hebrew, and so that's where you get the idea of these are fallen angels. Fallen angels, yeah. But the Greek translation of the Old Testament translated as gigas, which is giant. Gigas. Giants. Yeah.

• 1:49:54Speaker 06

  So, and then they pop up later in Canaan when, when, what's his face? Goliath. Goliath. Well, so not just Goliath, but when, when they go into the promised land and they like, you have the story of there's these ten spies that go to scope out the land that God has promised them, and then they come back and, no, it's 12 men, and 10 of them are like, we can't go in there, there are giants there, and the term there is Nephilim. Like, they, they're giants, that, I don't know if it's like, they, they could just be spooked, they don't want to go in there, so they come up with this excuse that there are

• 1:50:35Speaker 06

  giants in there, but, because the idea of the flood is that they were destroyed, right? So everybody dies, including the Nephilim. Hmm. But then you have guys like, you know, C.S. Lewis? Mm-hmm. It's like Lewis and Tolkien had these ideas that these stories of like Zeus and the Greek gods, those were like echoes of cultural remembrances of these heroes of old, men of renown, which is what they're called in Genesis, chapter six. It's kind of a cool idea. So. I don't know what they are. Do you believe in giants? I believe that there were giants, yeah. Wow. And when you say giant, what do you mean? How big? Yeah. I don't know. Like, Andrew's a giant. Game of Thrones? You're a giant to me, everybody's a giant to me. You've been 400.

• 1:51:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, but I couldn't grow tall, so I had to grow wide. Right, fair enough. Like, Game of Thrones giants, dudes who are just a little bit taller, I mean. So the Hebrew. You go down to Sudan, you see guys that are seven feet, they look like giants, so, you know. The Hebrew Old Testament says that Goliath was nine feet tall, but the Greek translation of the Old Testament says that he was like, I think he was six foot five, so it's like, it's. Could just be a word for really tall people. It's really tall people. And I would imagine in a time. Everybody was kind of small back then. Yeah, but you don't have food readily available, and if there is a tribe that has tons of food, they grow big, then they look like giants. Is that?

• 1:51:52Speaker 05

  Being reductive to the religious texts?

• 1:51:55Speaker 06

  I don't know, not necessarily. It's tricky, because it's not like, like, these stories tell you what you need to know, not what you want to know. And so often, we have to like speculate, which is where you get the Book of Enoch. And that's like, let's expand upon this stuff.

• 1:52:07Speaker 05

  Is there ever a time where, or like, maybe the question I want to ask is like, how do you feel about the people who don't take it, take these stories literally? They take them metaphorically, but they arrive at a similar conclusion that somebody who takes them literally does?

• 1:52:24Speaker 06

  I think it depends on what you're looking at and whether it's meant to be taken literally or not.

• 1:52:29Speaker 05

  Can you give me a good example of both?

• 1:52:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, uh, so there's different genre within scripture. Because remember, 66 books written over a period of 1,600 years on three different continents, but close to 40 different authors in three different languages, right? That was English too. And so, it's a wide variety. So, don't read historical literature like you read apocalyptic literature. Don't read poetic literature like you read biography. Like, you gotta figure out what you're looking at. And some things are descriptive, they're telling you things that happened. Some things are prescriptive, they're telling you what to do. And some things are emotive. So, you read like the Psalms, and it says, blessed are those who smash the childrens of our enemies on the rocks. And you're like, that's pretty intense. Like, it's not telling you to do that.

• 1:53:13Speaker 06

  It's just this like, heartache in wartime, where you're seeking justice. And so, those type of things like are expressed. And depending on what the genre is, we have to be careful in trying to figure out what it's trying to say to us. And some things are history and poetic. So, in Canada, we have Remembrance Day, November 11th.

• 1:53:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:53:35Speaker 06

  Is it, you have the equivalent, right? Like, remember World War? Two months earlier.

• 1:53:38Speaker 05

  Like Veterans Day?

• 1:53:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, like Veterans Day. And so, we read this poem by this Canadian soldier, um, who was, uh, it's called, uh...

• 1:53:48Speaker 06

  I'm gonna forget it and all the Canadian people watching are gonna get mad at me. In Flanders Fields, right? So, in Flanders Fields, the poppies grow between the crosses row by row. And it's this like very passionate story about the graves. They're burying their compatriots in the, between the crosses in Flanders Fields. There are these poppies that are growing.

• 1:54:08Speaker 05

  So, everybody, where's the poppy?

• 1:54:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, is that history or is that poetry? Well, the answer is yes. Like, it's both, right? Like, it's not, it's not just because it's poetic, it's talking about like these dead people saw sunsets glow days ago, kinda thing.

• 1:54:21Speaker 05

  So, there are, there are parts of the Bible that are meant to be interpreted as metaphor. And they're, I'm so, I'm being like protective of you whenever I ask these questions 'cause I know like if you agree to something, somebody on the internet is gonna crucify-

• 1:54:33Speaker 06

  Do they do that? Do they do that on the internet? Has anybody ever done that to you?

• 1:54:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, never. Yeah, okay, so maybe that's not the wording. What would you find? There are parts of the Bible that are, what'd you say, prescriptive?

• 1:54:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, prescriptive, they tell you what to do. So, Leviticus, like telling the Jews what to do.

• 1:54:52Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:54:52Speaker 06

  But then you read something like, like Joshua, and they're like going in Canaan and they're killing people. And you're like, that's descriptive, that's telling you what happened.

• 1:55:00Speaker 05

  It doesn't mean you should do this.

• 1:55:01Speaker 06

  It's not go and do likewise, right? Judas hung himself. That's not telling you to go hang yourself, it's telling you that Judas hung himself. So, it's, it's, you have, that's what, like, I knew a guy who, he put little, like, sticky notes in his Bible every time someone was like raped or killed or murdered. He's like, "The Bible's so violent." He's like, "No, it's just telling you things that happened, right? So, it's not telling you to do that."

• 1:55:24Speaker 05

  Life is violent at times, yeah.

• 1:55:26Speaker 06

  So, it just depends. And then there are some passages that are trickier than others. Like Genesis, chapter 1, is a tricky one.

• 1:55:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:55:32Speaker 06

  Because it's not entirely clear. Is it telling you, like, the mechanisms of how God created everything in the way that God created them?

• 1:55:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:55:41Speaker 06

  Is there more of an expansive explanation to that? When you look at the culture, could there be almost like a defense of the fact that you have other creation stories? Like the Babylonian Innumelish, which has this big battle between the gods.

• 1:55:56Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:55:57Speaker 06

  And it's chaos, and the gods who die become the world, and you, and me. And the end theme is kinda like, everything's a mistake. You don't really have any purpose. You know, you're just the product of this big battle. And then, and now you're worshiping things like the stars and the sun and the earth. And, and Genesis chapter one says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." So the things you guys worship, that's pretty stupid because our God created them. And it's good, right? Keep saying it's good after each refrain and created the land and it was good and created the fish. It was good because that's countercultural to something like the enema leash. And then he creates humanity in his image and they're very good.

• 1:56:40Speaker 06

  And so is that the way God created everything? Sure, yeah, potentially. But is it also kind of taking a jab at something like these other origin stories? And it's subverting them and saying the stuff you believe is nonsense because this is actually how everything started? Yeah, I think, I think so too. So there's like multiple things going on in, and once again, the first being a booty call and a butt dial. Like contextual reading.

• 1:57:09Speaker 07

  Context matters.

• 1:57:10Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:57:11Speaker 07

  In that regard, something I've seen sprout up on the internet, a debate that I never really considered as a kid that I find fascinating.

• 1:57:17Speaker 06

  There are debates on the internet?

• 1:57:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, oh my goodness.

• 1:57:19Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:57:19Speaker 07

  Is the, the murder of the Canaanites. And this is something that gets brought up a lot, that basically you have this command by God to go into this land and murder all the people, men, women, children. And ostensibly, some of them are innocent, but yet all of them need to be killed.

• 1:57:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:57:34Speaker 07

  And people have kind of taken a bunch of different sides. It's like, oh, is God justifying genocide?

• 1:57:38Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:57:38Speaker 07

  What do you make of that, that text?

• 1:57:41Speaker 06

  So I don't think it's genocide in the way that we would understand genocide. Specifically because the Canaanites continue to pop up. So if they did actually wipe everybody out, they did a poor job at it.

• 1:57:52Speaker 06

  There's a few things going on in the text. God promises Abraham Canaan.

• 1:57:58Speaker 06

  And says, "I'm gonna give it to your descendants, but I'm gonna wait 400 years because the sins of the Amorites have not come to their full fruition." So, God gives them 400 years to repent. And by the time you get to like Joshua, they're not repenting if anything, they've gotten worse, right? They're doing things like child sacrifice to these agricultural gods. And so then you have something unique in the Old Testament where before the monarchy, before like Saul and David, the kings, it's a theocracy. God is the ruler of the people and he uses Israel to enact his judgment. So he enacts judgment on these terrible people in order to, so like, in the same vein, a lot of people who accuse, who say to me like,

• 1:58:43Speaker 06

  "Look, there's genocide in the Old Testament," also say things to me like, "Well, why doesn't God do anything about the evil in the world?" I would actually argue, this is an example of God doing something about the evil in the world, and that he's using his nation, Israel, to accomplish the wiping out of these people. So he sees that as justice for what they've done wrong? These are bad people. Right. And so I think there is, there's an aspect of God is saying, "Go and wipe them out. I'm done with their evil." At the same time,

• 1:59:18Speaker 06

  there's a friend of the organization I work with, a guy named Paul Copan. He's in Florida. I think he teaches at Florida State University. He wrote a book called, "Is God a Moral Monster?" And then he wrote another book called, "Did God Command Genocide in the Old Testament?" He, and he goes through some interesting parallels in other ancient Near Eastern, so like Canaanite, Hittite, Egyptian war texts, where it uses similar language in terms of like wipe them out, leave none left, kill the women, the children, the goats, that kind of stuff. And Copan argues that there's an aspect of cultural wartime hyperbole that exists. In the same way that I would say, like the Toronto Maple Leafs.

• 2:00:04Speaker 06

  Murdered the Montreal Canadiens, right? There's an aspect of, if you didn't understand what I was talking about, that that was, I'm talking about hockey, I'm talking about a team. When I say murdered, I don't mean like that they were like that. We use these kind of phenomenological hyperbole in our language today. Like, "You killed at your last set," right? Like, this kind of stuff makes sense. And so, in these kind of ancient Near Eastern texts, you have these levels of hyperbole, which could mean "kill everybody," but doesn't always mean that. And we can compare them with like Egyptian steleles, or like wartime inscriptions from...

• 2:00:44Speaker 05

  Does other hyperbole exist in the religious texts when it doesn't have to do with these type of severe situations? Like, are they hyperbolic about how fruit tastes?

• 2:00:57Speaker 06

  It's a good question. I don't know if I know the answer to that.

• 2:01:00Speaker 05

  Because if that hyperbole exists in these other areas that aren't as high stakes, then it would make a lot of sense that it would exist when the stakes are high. But if it only exists when talking about genocide, it seems like people are trying to skewer accountability.

• 2:01:13Speaker 06

  Right. No, we do get that in the sense of like, when you read the Book of Jonah in Hebrew, you get these like, there's almost like a comedic play to it, where when he does eventually get to Nineveh, which he doesn't want to go to, because God says, "Go to Nineveh, preach repentance." He doesn't want to go, so he tries to hike it in the other direction. And when he eventually gets there, it says that "everybody repents, even the cows." And it's like, it's hyperbolic, where it's saying like, "Even the cows are sorry." Like, that's how much they're repentant of what they've done. So you got stuff like that.

• 2:01:51Speaker 02

  Can I ask a question sort of based on that? I don't know anything about the Bible. I'm very non-religious, I know nothing. But it is interesting to hear that there's something funny in the Bible. You're surrounded by a bunch of comedians, is there? Like, in Shakespeare, how there's sort of mistranslated, or jokes that don't make it to modern times while reading Shakespeare, because you're not in the time period in which it took place. Are there funny parts of the Bible that are translated well or mistranslated? That people don't know about?

• 2:02:20Speaker 06

  That's a really great question. I don't know if I have a good answer to that in a room full of comedians. I wish I had examples.

• 2:02:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't mean it like you're around, but are there parts of Bible that are like lighthearted, funny? Or like? I mean, the bear is killing those, killing the kids is always funny.

• 2:02:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, Elijah, go out bald head. And he sends the she-bears after them to kill them. That's, I mean-

• 2:02:44Speaker 02

  Kind of funny. The foreskin thing is pretty good.

• 2:02:46Speaker 06

  Foreskin thing is pretty good. Yeah, you have like record of that. When Jesus is talking to the woman at the well, and she's a Samaritan. So Samaritans are like mongrel Jews. They've married with other tribes and so they, they, the Jews in like Israel don't like them very much. They also, there was a time where one of the Greek leaders was coming to, was coming to wipe out the Jews. And the Samaritans who like live up north caught wind of this. And so they send him a letter and they say, hey, I know we look like Jews. I know we sound like Jews.

• 2:03:29Speaker 06

  I know we worship like Jews, but just FYI, we're not Jews. So don't kill us when you go kill them. And also we have a temple that's like their temple, but we're actually going to dedicate it to you. We're going to start worshiping you. And so this is like a point of contention in Jesus's day where the Samaritans, this is about the good Samaritan is kind of like a play on things where who is my neighbor? And Jesus says like, it's those people you don't like. That's who you need to love and be nice to. But when Jesus is talking to the woman at the well, and she's like, well, you guys worship in Jerusalem. We worship at Mount Gerizium. Jesus is kind of like, hey, what's the name of your temple again? It was, who do you guys worship? It's kind of like Pokener, right?

• 2:04:13Speaker 06

  Because it's a callback to this story, which is not a biblical one. And we know it because of individuals like Josephus, where they actually dedicated their temple to the Greek leader and to Jupiter. And so he's like, when she says, "We worship here, you worship there," he's like, "But who do you worship?" So he's kind of like Pokener. And there's some sarcasm that if you didn't know what was going on in the background, in the situational context, you wouldn't actually pick it up. And it's actually a weird kind of comment that he makes to her, otherwise.

• 2:04:42Speaker 07

  Oh, that's funny. What about him cursing the fig tree?

• 2:04:46Speaker 06

  That's allegorical to the leaders of Jerusalem, that they look like they should. It has leaves. And so even though it's not the time for figs, it's like masquerading that it should grow figs. And he's like, "I'm gonna curse the fig tree, and it's not gonna grow any figs." He does that while he's going to Jerusalem. And the play is that the leaders in Jerusalem have all of this appearance of religiosity, but in the end, they have no fruit. So they're like dead. And it doesn't matter how good they look on the outside, right? You don't judge by what you water with, right? The judging is by the fruit,

• 2:05:31Speaker 06

  but everybody's looking at what you water with, all the good things you do. But that's not. Going to church and the reading your Bible, that's not the fruit. That's a nutrient, that's a fertilizer, that's the water.

• 2:05:45Speaker 07

  Input.

• 2:05:46Speaker 06

  And Jesus is saying, "No, no, no. It's not that that's wrong, but you gotta grow the fruit." And so if you're doing all the right things, but you're not growing the fruit, you might as well be a dead tree.

• 2:05:58Mark Gagnon?

  If you're non-Christian, can you get into heaven?

• 2:06:02Speaker 06

  Oh, important question. What do you mean by non-Christian?

• 2:06:04Mark Gagnon?

  I mean, if you just don't... Yeah, I'm agnostic.

• 2:06:07Speaker 06

  So I would say, God is not going to force anyone into heaven. In that heaven, once again, remember, heaven is not the final destination.

• 2:06:18Speaker 08

  Soft, no.

• 2:06:18Speaker 06

  The new earth is the final destination.

• 2:06:20Speaker 08

  Soft, no, right?

• 2:06:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, so essentially, no one comes to the Father but through me, Jesus says. Right? But C.S. Lewis, once again, he says that hell is locked from the inside. So I would say that if you have spent your life not living out a life that is what Jesus has called you to do, to be, then Jesus is not going to force you into His presence. You're going to go... So Lewis also says, "Heaven is God's..." Or "Hell is God saying, 'Thy will be done.'" So what you want in your life by rejecting Christ is what you're gonna get in the afterlife.

• 2:07:03Speaker 08

  Hmm.

• 2:07:06Speaker 08

  Nobody wants hell. Well, you just accept... And maybe, and I guess Hindus accept Jesus as... I read like a yogi.

• 2:07:14Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 2:07:14Speaker 08

  Essentially. But maybe not the only form of God. And theoretically, I think it aligns with Christianity in some ways, if that if God is everywhere, we could all be God. Jesus is a human that achieved His inner God. So...

• 2:07:27Speaker 06

  So that would be the Hindu way of working it out.

• 2:07:30Speaker 08

  Right? But then we accept Jesus.

• 2:07:32Speaker 06

  But even Hinduism is exclusivistic in certain regards. So like, no one is entirely inclusivistic, right? The exclusivists have to exclude the inclusivists. And the inclusivists have to exclude the exclusivists.

• 2:07:45Speaker 08

  And I'm not... Look, I don't know enough, so how are we exclusivists?

• 2:07:48Speaker 06

  Right, so depending on what version of Hinduism you're talking about, because there's polytheistic Hinduism, there's monotheistic Hinduism, and there's atheistic or non-theistic Hinduism, right?

• 2:07:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, you could be a theist Hindu, yeah.

• 2:08:00Speaker 06

  So they can't all be true. So truth by its very nature is exclusive. Right? If I say two plus two is four, well, I'll give Andrew the benefit of the doubt. Andrew says two plus two is four, I say two plus two is six, one of us is wrong. Now, we could both be wrong, but the truth is that two plus two is four, he's right. And so in that sense, that's an exclusive truth statement. So if you look at all the world religions, I would ultimately say they're all exclusivistic at some regard. I say Jesus is...

• 2:08:29Speaker 08

  Exclusivistic in the most important regard.

• 2:08:32Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, so I would say Christianity is inclusivistic in that all are called to come.

• 2:08:38Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:08:38Speaker 06

  But it is exclusivistic in that...

• 2:08:42Speaker 06

  Jesus loves you and calls you to come as you are, but he loves you too much to leave you where you are.

• 2:08:49Speaker 06

  And so you, you, the, it's, it's, it's unconditional, but it's not unconditioned. Because all you have to do is give up your life and follow Jesus.

• 2:09:04Speaker 08

  I think conditioned is conditional.

• 2:09:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:09:07Speaker 08

  It is, they're putting a condition on it. Like, that was a very poetic thing you said, but it doesn't actually mean anything.

• 2:09:13Speaker 06

  Well, it does in the sense that when I say it's unconditional, it's that Jesus says, "All are welcome to come." But there is a condition.

• 2:09:20Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:09:21Speaker 06

  There is, right? It's, it's not, it's not nothing.

• 2:09:23Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:09:23Speaker 06

  Um, and in that sense, God is either, right, the universe in like an eastern mystic kind of idea, or God is a personal being. They can't both be true. So we, I think all world religions have these like superficial agreements, but they disagree on the fundamentals, right? Who God is, who we are, why we're here, what sin is, what the afterlife is like, how we solve the problem of human flourishing. Like, all these things are important topics, but Advil and arsenic both come in pill form. But it's not the similarities that make you choose one over the other when you have a headache. It's the differences.

• 2:10:04Speaker 08

  Hmm.

• 2:10:05Speaker 06

  So as someone who has studied world religions, I would say that there is no such thing as a religion that accepts everything. Because even if I say Jesus is God incarnate, and there's only one God, he's not just a guru, and his teachings actually don't give you reason to just chop him up to a guru, then that's, that's excluding the worldview system of something like Hinduism or Buddhism, which would also include that.

• 2:10:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, I guess the difference would be, we would say, "That's fine." Like, in Hinduism, that's okay. You believe what you believe. God bless. There are many ways to the mountaintop. If that way gets you to the mountaintop, amazing. We're thrilled for you.

• 2:10:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I would say there's only one way to the mountaintop.

• 2:10:45Speaker 08

  Yeah, and that is, that is a fairly big difference.

• 2:10:48Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah, yeah, it is. So it's not pluralistic.

• 2:10:50Speaker 08

  I guess to me, and I'm also a little, I don't want to say sensitive, but like, you grow up getting told you're going to hell if you're in the South. So it's like, I would look at it as a kid more so. Now I'm less bothered by it, but I'd be like, "Man, you guys will forgive murderers? Jesus will forgive you murderers, child molesters, if he believes in them, or if they believe in him. But if you're a good person who doesn't fully believe in him..."

• 2:11:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, so to that, I would say there's no such thing as a good person. Because we're all sinners. So all good people...

• 2:11:18Speaker 08

  There's no such thing as a bad person.

• 2:11:19Speaker 06

  All good people go to heaven. That's clear biblically, right? But Jesus says, "No one is good but God." So we have a dilemma, right? All good people go to heaven. No one is good but God. What does that mean? No one's going to heaven. So, the, the issue is, is like, so this is similar to the question of, "What do you do with the person who lives on like, a random island in the middle of, you know, Papua New Guinea and has never heard the God?" The innocent, you know, tribes person. And the biblical answer is that there's no such thing as an innocent person. In that, "I deserve hell." Me, Wes Huff. I deserve hell 100% of the time. That's, like, the wages of sin is death. And that's the language that Paul uses, in that I'm like actively working at a job to earn a wage,

• 2:12:04Speaker 06

  and that's sin and death, right? But, the second part of that line is, "The gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus." So, the answer to the question is that, I think we are both worse than we realize, and have the potential to do much more good than we realize. However, I am not going to heaven because anything, of anything I've done. Right, I can't do that. That's very clear scripturally. You cannot earn your way to heaven.

• 2:12:35Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 2:12:36Speaker 06

  It's not about doing things. It's not about what I'm doing, it's about what Jesus did.

• 2:12:41Speaker 05

  So it's up to us to get some Christianity out to that island in Papua New Guinea?

• 2:12:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:12:46Speaker 05

  And is that why these people are compelled to, you know, take-

• 2:12:49Speaker 06

  And that's why missions existed. That was the motivation. So we're talking about like, the New Testament is copied like crazy in the early period, these independent-

• 2:12:58Speaker 05

  Beautiful sacrifices.

• 2:12:59Speaker 06

  The, one of the reason for that is because they were like, "We need to get this out everywhere."

• 2:13:03Speaker 05

  Well, these people aren't gonna get to heaven.

• 2:13:04Speaker 08

  So I didn't really, pretty quickly, I didn't resent the people trying to convert me. I understood their motivation. But I did resent, you know, Jesus like, "I like your Christ, I don't like your Christians." I almost felt the opposite in that sense. Gandhi said that. Gandhi said that. So, uh, I now almost felt the opposite. Like, I understand, I have empathy for the people who are trying to convert me. They're trying to save me. What is this faith that is written in such a way that a guy who's never heard of me, because y'all didn't make it out to me, is condemned to hell?

• 2:13:31Speaker 06

  Sure, but we both deny each other's central truth claims. Like you would deny the central truth claim that I just articulated, and I would deny yours.

• 2:13:39Speaker 08

  No, I'm saying, like, let's say Papua New Guinea, never heard of you, they're not denying, they don't know. How is that person going to hell for simply you not doing your job and going out to convert him?

• 2:13:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, ultimately, I would say God doesn't owe anybody anything. So the assumption is that God owes us our salvation. And I would say that it is more, if God chose just to save Abraham, he would have been more gracious than he, we possibly deserve to do that. But he didn't just save Abraham. He saves a countless number. In the sense that when John has his vision in the book of Revelation, it's an innumerable number. He can't even count it. That's how big it is. And so I think the message of Christianity, the good news, what we call the gospel, is that-

• 2:14:29Speaker 06

  You are headed towards destruction and you're actually attempting to cause the destruction. Right? It's not that, you know, Jesus has thrown a life preserver and you need to catch it. Now, you're trying to fight Jesus. You don't want the life preserver. But apart from the saving work of the Spirit preaching into the prophets use the language of, "You have a heart of stone. God is going to give you a heart of flesh." But it's God's work that does that. And so, we don't deserve that freedom, that graciousness.

• 2:15:00Speaker 05

  It's a heavy weight, man.

• 2:15:02Speaker 06

  It is, but I mean, the, the good news is that, so when I study world religions, I, I come up with this conclusion that all world religions, or all worldview perspectives are some form of survival of the fittest, in that it's a do this, feel this, or think this. Right? It's do this pragmatism, it's feel this emotionalism, or it's think this intellectualism. Right? You need to be the best at the, the knowledge, you need to, you know, be the most spiritual, you need to do the most things. And it's one or a combination of those things. Right?

• 2:15:41Speaker 06

  Christianity is the opposite of that, in that it says you can't feel, think, or do good enough. Right? So, it's not about that. It's not do and you'll be accepted, feel and you'll be accepted, think and you'll be accepted. It's, God has stepped out of eternity and into humanity in the second person of the Trinity in Jesus, and now you're accepted. Now you can think, now you can feel, now you can do, but it's not on your shoulders.

• 2:16:11Speaker 05

  I get that it's supposed to alleviate it, but in order for it to alleviate it, you first have to accept that you're a piece of shit. And what if you don't feel like you're a piece of shit? So now I have to stop feeling good about myself, and I have to convince myself that I am a piece of shit.

• 2:16:27Speaker 06

  Just as much as a murderer, a child molester.

• 2:16:29Speaker 05

  Right. Just, just so somebody else can get me back to, not somebody else, God can get me back to feeling good about myself. And I think that that really works for people who feel... Feel like they're a piece of shit all the time. But if you don't feel like a piece of shit, to convince yourself that you are. And the only way out of your piece of shitness is to believe in this one person.

• 2:16:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:16:49Speaker 05

  Who will then, through that belief, convince you to do the good and kind acts that you were already doing prior.

• 2:16:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:16:57Speaker 05

  I can see how that's like a heavy weight for people to take on.

• 2:17:01Speaker 06

  I would say there's this dichotomy.

• 2:17:03Speaker 05

  And keep in mind, I'm framing this as someone who was not raised religiously and does feel like a good person. And I think there's been this part of me.

• 2:17:14Speaker 05

  I think there's probably this part of me that's quite naive, definitely based on your description, which is that, you know what? Cause I do believe in something. I'm like, yeah, God knows my heart and you know, I try to live what is Pascal's wager. What if, yeah, like, and I try to live as if there is a God and I try to do the things that are good in the world. And those are probably prescribed to me through religion in some way, shape or form. But it would be tough for me to accept this, and I don't think that I'm perfect in any way. I do actually accept the fact that there is like sin in me and there are these, and I'm fighting those natural instincts. So I think. But the only way I can be good is if I'm just like.

• 2:17:51Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:17:52Speaker 05

  That guy like.

• 2:17:53Speaker 06

  So it's not that that's the only way you can be good. And it's not simply that you're a piece of shit. I think if it was that, then, then I think we would have a problem.

• 2:18:01Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:18:01Speaker 06

  I think what the Bible says, particularly in that creation story, right? Is that you are created with purpose and meaning and intention, and it is good. You actually bear the image of God and there's something about that is special. So in one sense, you're more of a piece of shit than you can imagine, but also you're more loved and more.

• 2:18:21Speaker 05

  That's awesome.

• 2:18:21Speaker 06

  Capable of amazing things that you can imagine. And that's the dichotomy of Christianity is that God does not need to create. Right? So God lives in a set of living, loving relationships in the Trinity. He has existed eternally in relationship and in love.

• 2:18:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:18:38Speaker 06

  That's what John says in 1 John, "God is love." And so, God does not need to create in order to experience anything. Creation is an outpouring of His love. Now, this is different than, say, a unitarian monotheistic faith like Islam. In Islam, in one sense philosophically, God does need to create to experience love. Because love requires an object and a subject. And so, in order to feel love, the unitarian God of something like Islam, needs the subject. Right? And the object, in order to feel that. That's not true for Christianity. Because the Spirit and the Father, the Father has been loving the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit forever.

• 2:19:22Speaker 06

  Yet, He chooses to create as an outpouring of His love, knowing full well that the creation will rebel against Him. Because God loves us so much. So if it's only you're a piece of shit, that's a problem. That's a problem theology for, I think, what the Bible actually says. And the piece of shitness, this is a theological term.

• 2:19:45Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 2:19:45Speaker 06

  I went to seminary. Is that we brought that into the world, right? So when, when the garden and the fruit, if we want to take that literally, or like, we want to do the Jordan Peterson thing, whatever. What we get, though, is that God knows what's best for our flourishing. And when it says that you will know the difference between good and evil, it's less of like an intellectual understanding of what good and evil are, and more of a choosing the shots on our own terms. I, even though God created me and knows all things, I actually think I know better. And I'm gonna eat the fruit because I, I think that that's better for me. And that's what sin is.

• 2:20:27Speaker 05

  You see, people do this all the time.

• 2:20:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:20:28Speaker 05

  They decide what God cares about the most, and then they, you know, care their life according to that. I guess in the circumstance with the person who lives on the island who's never heard about Christianity.

• 2:20:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:20:38Speaker 05

  But what if he lives his life... As a Christian, without, because God is omnipresent, right? Like, God maybe has given him the gospel in a different way than he gave it to you.

• 2:20:51Speaker 06

  The covenant's written on the heart.

• 2:20:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's like, what if that person is living a devoutly Christian life? And the God that he's praying to might not be named Jesus Christ, but isn't it possible that God is up there like, I know who he's praying, he's praying to me because I put it on his, his heart? Is it, is it possible that he's accepted in heaven? Again, I don't wanna, I don't want man to decide what God is capable of. And I sometimes think that like, we do that. And I'm not trying to skirt out of the responsibility of just going, hey, I gotta get baptized.

• 2:21:22Speaker 06

  You're just gonna put it on me.

• 2:21:23Speaker 05

  I'm gonna put it on you. No, but like, sometimes it's possible that man is going like, hey, God doesn't know unless you do this exact thing. And then God's up there like, listen, I get the point, what you're trying to do. But like, the guy on the island who's living this perfectly devoutly Christian religious life, he gets into, because I put it on his heart.

• 2:21:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I think ultimately, that's a question that I don't know the answer to, because it's not something that's directly outlined in Scripture. However, I think you can like extrapolate certain things. In one way, part of that is still saying you can earn it. In that he's, he's doing the right things.

• 2:21:56Speaker 05

  And he, and he doesn't even know he's doing it. He's doing it because...

• 2:22:02Speaker 06

  So I think God is not gonna judge us based on what we don't know.

• 2:22:06Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:22:07Speaker 06

  We would hope. So I am optimistic that I personally would not damn that individual, because I, I don't know what's going on there.

• 2:22:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:22:17Speaker 06

  And God is more than capable to reveal Himself. I mean, Paul says in Romans that God's divine attributes and invisible qualities have been shown throughout creation, so that no man is without excuse.

• 2:22:28Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 2:22:29Speaker 06

  So there's an aspect of, nobody can stand before God and say, I just didn't have enough, I didn't know enough. Because God is saying, creation is screaming at you that there's something.

• 2:22:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I, and I think that like...

• 2:22:42Speaker 06

  But the only way to heaven is through Jesus Christ. So that's where it does get tricky and there is a sense of Jesus saying, "I'm the way, the truth, and life. No one comes to the Father but through me." I would say, "We have an imperative to tell that person about the God that they believe in and who that is." And that's what Paul does in Acts, chapter 17, when he goes to Athens and he goes to the Areopagus and he says, "You have a shrine to an unknown God." In one sense, that's silly, but let me tell you about the unknown God. So that you go to the right place. Put a name to it and actually tell you the person that your heart is actually crying out to, because you bear his image. And in that sense, we have to be careful because

• 2:23:25Speaker 06

  if we make it about like what we do and what we believe and what we in that way, it's a merit, it's a, it's meritorious. I understand what you're saying. And the commandments, something like the 10 commandments, are less of a "thou shalt not" and more of a promise in that God is not a murderer. You're creating his image. Don't murder. God is not an adulterer. You're creating his image. Don't commit adultery. God is not a thief. You're creating his image. Don't steal things. It's actually calling you to live up to the standard of the image that you bear of God. Even though you might feel inclined to do these things. And flourish ultimately. But I would say that there's an aspect of the person who doesn't understand that sees those things as a burden and sees them as a rule.

• 2:24:11Speaker 06

  And I would actually say that it's a calling by our Creator to live up to the standard that He actually created us to be, for the sake of human flourishing. And why do you think that we would like it to be merit-based? Because I think that's, that, that we want to contribute. Humans are, are very... I also think we want heaven without...

• 2:24:34Speaker 05

  Subscribing to

• 2:24:36Speaker 08

  Also, the alternative.

• 2:24:37Speaker 05

  The rigidity of the religion. I think there's part of it that's there. It's like, hey, I'm a good person. Yeah, maybe I don't go to church and maybe I haven't accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. But I'm a good person, so I still get in, right? It's like, we still want in. We still want to, we want the eternity.

• 2:24:51Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:24:52Speaker 05

  It's still begging the question.

• 2:24:53Speaker 08

  But the alternative is hell. That's the issue I have.

• 2:24:56Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 2:24:56Speaker 08

  If there was a first class, a business class, and a coach, I'm with it.

• 2:24:59Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:25:00Speaker 08

  I don't gotta be first class. That's fine. But the idea that there is a, like, God doesn't owe you heaven. But he don't, he don't need to give you hell.

• 2:25:07Speaker 06

  Well, I think part of this is that we have these understandings of hell, which might be skewed by middle age.

• 2:25:12Speaker 08

  Okay, I would love to hear that.

• 2:25:13Speaker 06

  People burning.

• 2:25:14Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 2:25:14Speaker 06

  I would say hell is the concept of God's wrath against evil in eternal justice. But it's also a separation from his goodness. And so you see these depictions, particularly from the Middle Ages, of like demons burning people alive. And that's more, both heaven and hell in the Middle Ages is drawn more from like Greek imagery of where the gods live and what the underworld is than it is from what scripture

• 2:25:51Speaker 05

  Actually says about.

• 2:25:51Speaker 06

  Actually says about these things.

• 2:25:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I feel like Dante's Inferno defined hell for us and not scripture.

• 2:25:57Speaker 06

  Sure, sure. And that's like quintessential, you know, Middle Age.

• 2:26:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:26:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:26:01Speaker 05

  Fear mongering.

• 2:26:02Speaker 06

  What does the scripture say hell is? Well, it's, it's separation. It's separation from God. Like, God is not going to force you into his presence into that. And if, if you are not choosing that, like, if you are not in Adam, you're in, sorry, if you're not in Christ, you're in Adam. So Jesus is called the second Adam, right? Adam brings sin into the world and taints everything. Christ comes into the world and renews everything. And so the gospel message is that you're either going to be found in Adam or in Christ.

• 2:26:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:26:34Speaker 06

  That's it. And God is not going to force you into being under Christ's righteousness. And At the same time, I still don't deserve that. So this is where like, when I was talking about before, all these religious concepts, it's about the do, the feel, the think. It's also about mercy or justice, right? So I would argue that something like the eastern philosophies, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, anything that has a reincarnation, that's just, right? You get what you deserve. The good you do in this life, you get in the next life, the bad you do in this life. Sort of, there's a difference between reincarnation, Hinduism and Buddhism. But, that aside, it's like just, right? But, we wouldn't necessarily say that it's merciful.

• 2:27:19Speaker 06

  You do get what you deserve. Oh, yeah, it's not. Yeah. Then there are other religious systems, and to a certain degree, I would pin Islam in that group, because every chapter of the Quran, bar one chapter, starts with the Bismillah, God the most merciful, the most benevolent. So in that sense, the God of Islam forgives, but somewhat arbitrarily. And it's at the expense of his justice. So if you, if God will forgive you, but the wrong you've done hasn't actually been paid for, his law is kind of just winked at. Where Christianity is different is that the punishment that we deserve is taken on God himself and the person of Jesus. And so in that sense, justice is fulfilled. And because justice is fulfilled, his law is accomplished.

• 2:28:03Speaker 06

  And now mercy, so justice is getting what you deserve, mercy is not getting what you deserve, and grace is getting what you don't deserve. So, because you don't get what you do deserve, which is the punishment, mercy happens, God forgives you, but he doesn't actually, and you don't deserve that either, but then he adopts you as his child. That's grace, that's getting what you don't deserve, right? And so, when I look at something like comparative religious studies, what I see is all of these systems of the survival of the fittest that I talked about before, Christianity is the fittest stepping down and sacrificing himself for the survival of the weakest.

• 2:28:48Speaker 06

  And that changes things in that mercy and justice are not pitted against each other. It's not justice at the expense of mercy, it's not mercy at the expense of justice. They're actually accomplished together in the act of the cross, where the self-volunteering of Jesus going to the cross, right? He says, "No one takes my life from me. I give it of my own accord."

• 2:29:09Speaker 05

  This is why forgiveness is an accomplishable goal, even for the most heinous act, because God has already taken on the punishment for that heinous act that that person committed.

• 2:29:20Speaker 06

  Well, forgiveness is costly, right? Like, there's always a cost to forgiveness somewhere.

• 2:29:24Speaker 05

  I'm just saying, in general, that lack of, perceived lack of justice doesn't exist. Yes, this person killed somebody. Yeah, Jesus died on the cross for that very thing that that person did. It's not, "This person killed somebody. All right, how are we gonna reconcile this? Do we give him 20 lashes? What is the thing for this act? And who gets to decide that? It's already been decided, so now we can go over it.

• 2:29:48Speaker 06

  It's not a points-based system either, which also gets hairy with, like, so Islam has this concept within the Quran of the scales. Right? So you do bad things, you just try to outweigh them with your good things.

• 2:30:02Speaker 06

  There's a weird subjectivity to that.

• 2:30:04Speaker 05

  Right, because who decides, yeah?

• 2:30:05Speaker 06

  And the, actually Isaiah says that our righteous acts are like filthy rags. And the term there, it's debated, but could actually mean something like minstrel rags. Like, they're like, they're not just dirty and gross, and it's like ritually impure with stuff that you don't want to get near. And so, it's like, "Look, God, look at all the good things I'm doing." And he's like, "You don't understand, compared to my holiness, how, like, far that measures up." And so, once again, God doesn't need to do any of this. God doesn't need to create, God doesn't need to forgive, God doesn't need to give mercy or justice. But the fact that he does, and then calls us all into that, to turn away.

• 2:30:50Speaker 06

  So the word repentance, in Greek, metanoia, actually means to change one's mind and actions and attitudes. Like, it's less of a, "Just don't do it anymore." It's more of like, "Metanoia, change your brain."

• 2:31:05Speaker 06

  Change it entirely. Your thought patterns start. It's what I talked about before with the Ten Commandments. Like, you're seeing it as a command, and God is saying, no, it's a promise. You don't need to steal. You don't need to murder. You don't need to lie. You don't need to. Those are promises that God makes to you because of who you are, through what He can do.

• 2:31:26Mark Gagnon?

  And then if you don't change, you said you either become Adam, or you become Christ, right?

• 2:31:30Speaker 06

  Well, you're, you're, yeah, so it's like you're, when you stand before the judgment throne, you're either going to take the penalty you deserve, or you're going to be covered in the righteousness of Christ, and that penalty is on Him.

• 2:31:47Mark Gagnon?

  And coming back as Adam would be a human who sinned. So isn't that kind of like reincarnation?

• 2:31:53Speaker 06

  No, you're not coming. It's like a metaphorical language. The first Adam and the second Adam.

• 2:31:58Mark Gagnon?

  It's almost kind of how they see it, where it's just like, hey, until you are enlightened, you're going to continue being a sinner.

• 2:32:06Speaker 06

  Until you are enlightened. I don't think that's the way, because it's not, it's not like a, it's not a spiritual or intellectual awareness, in that sense. It's like, God. Yeah, so it's tricky, because the Eastern language doesn't compute with what's going on within the Semitic understanding of Scripture. So it's not like a nirvana. It's not like an awakening or an enlightenment. It's, it's Christ revealing to you who you really are and who He really is.

• 2:32:47Speaker 07

  What would you say in the case of children that die on the first day of life, or someone with like a cognitive disability where they're not able to function in society, or have any type of like intellectual understanding of Christ? What happens to them?

• 2:33:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, I would say everybody is born with original sin, and we all deserve punishment. But from who I know God's character to be in Scripture, God is free to save whom He wants to save. And based on who God is, I see no reason why He would not save children who die in infancy. He would not save people with cognitive disabilities. I don't know the answer to that ultimately, but. Once again, Scripture tells us what we need to know, now what we want to know. But I think, based on the character of God and the fact that when the Israelites are told not to sacrifice their children, it's the only time that a group is overtly described as the innocent, like the death of the innocents is what it's described to when these people

• 2:33:44Speaker 06

  are sacrificing their children to the pagan agricultural gods. So I think it's extrapolating in its conjecture, but I think, based on what I see in Scripture of who God is, that He's loving, that He's compassionate, that He's merciful, that He's abounding in steadfast love and kindness, right, that Exodus 34:6, that I see no reason to not say that if my wife has a miscarriage, that child I will be reunited with in heaven because of who God is and what His love and kindness is to humanity.

• 2:34:20Speaker 05

  So couldn't you extrapolate that to the guy on the island?

• 2:34:22Speaker 06

  That's what I would... It could be, it could be. However, there is a cognitive reckoning, and this is where I would be careful to say that this is my opinion.

• 2:34:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:34:32Speaker 06

  But I'm not denying that everybody is stained with sin.

• 2:34:37Speaker 05

  Not like an Orthodox Christian bishop or anything like that, that we would really trust.

• 2:34:40Speaker 06

  Name Andrew Schulz?

• 2:34:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. Go on, go on.

• 2:34:44Speaker 06

  So, but these, once again, these are like topics that have been discussed for 2,000-plus years, right? The Jews in the pre-Jesus times were also coming up with these questions. So there's a lot of delineation in literature and debate about these things, but I think...

• 2:35:02Speaker 07

  One thing Scripture that hung me up when I was a kid is the idea of the Pharaoh of Egypt having his heart hardened by God, and that God hardened his heart so that he couldn't see the truth of what was being revealed. And I'm curious why, in your opinion, God would step in to, I guess, orient him in a way that was against what God wanted.

• 2:35:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, why doesn't he get the same forgiveness?

• 2:35:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, to accomplish God's will. So the thing is...

• 2:35:28Speaker 05

  Well, I guess at that point in time, Jesus hadn't died already.

• 2:35:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was Old Testament.

• 2:35:31Speaker 06

  Well, God, I would... I would go to the length of saying God knows things we don't, because he's God. And so Paul talks about this in Romans, chapter eight and nine, where he comments on this and talks about the hardening of Pharaoh's heart. But it says both that Pharaoh hardened his own heart and God hardened Pharaoh's heart. So there's a mutuality going on in there in God's sovereignty and our free will. Both those things exist. And God uses Pharaoh as a tool to enact his justice. And yet also, God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick. And so he does these things, even in instances where we might not totally understand what's going on, but it's ultimately for his glorification and the purpose of, God is the main character

• 2:36:16Speaker 06

  of the story. And the redemption of his people is accomplished through Pharaoh hardening his own heart and being bitter. And yet, God also uses that in hardening Pharaoh's hearts to accomplish that narrative. In, so the book of Genesis literally ends with the story of Joseph, where Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery, into Egypt. They want to kill him. God restrains their evil. They sell him into slavery, and he ends up climbing the ranks and being second to Pharaoh. And then there's a famine throughout the land. And the only place that has food, because of the wisdom of Joseph, via the, you know, God revealing this to him, is Egypt. And so Joseph's brothers go back to Egypt, and they meet with him, not knowing it's

• 2:37:01Speaker 06

  their brother. And eventually, he reveals who he is to them, and he says, you know, what you intended for evil, God intended for good, in the saving of nations. And so God uses, he, God allows evil for good that often we don't understand.

• 2:37:28Speaker 06

  Wowza.

• 2:37:29Speaker 05

  Karma.

• 2:37:30Speaker 06

  No.

• 2:37:31Speaker 05

  Yes. No, no. You know this idea, like, I think that we have a skewed understanding. Yeah, sure. I think we have a skewed understanding of karma, and Akash can speak to it more, but this idea, like, it's transactional. I do a bad thing and then something bad happens to me later. But it might be a little bit something more like, you live within your karma. Doing bad things makes you feel bad about yourself, and then you exist within this this badness, right? You just feel horrible because of these bad things that you've done. And you could maybe say the same is true about Christianity. Living this Christ-like life makes you feel good, makes you,

• 2:38:15Speaker 05

  I'm not saying, you know, having heaven on earth, but that following this way not only gives you eternal salvation, but also makes your life better while you are here. Would you say that that would be true for most Christians? That aspiring to live a Christ-like life will actually make you feel better than a life of sin?

• 2:38:34Speaker 06

  Oh, of course.

• 2:38:35Speaker 05

  Okay, so just so we-

• 2:38:36Speaker 06

  There's a pragmatism to it, I think that only gets you so far.

• 2:38:39Speaker 05

  I'm not trying to pin you to anything. I swear to God, I'm not.

• 2:38:42Speaker 06

  No, no, no, I get it. I get what you're saying, and I do think there's truth to that in that, like, I want Canada, the US, wherever, I want laws to be based on Christian things, because I think that's actually good for society.

• 2:38:56Speaker 05

  And just for people in general.

• 2:38:57Speaker 06

  But I don't want then those to become a means to an end. Like, don't make the laws based on the Bible because people should be doing good things. Actually, a friend of mine, Andy Bannister, who runs an organization out in Scotland called Solas, he did this debate. It was him, it was the head of the secular society, and it was a Muslim Imam, and- The topic of discussion was what makes the flourishing society? Or what makes a good society? And the secular materialist guy and the Muslim basically argued for the same thing. We need to enact more rules. We need to make sure people are following them. And my friend Andy, his point was, that's not gonna work. Because everybody's gonna try to find the loopholes in the rules. Or they're gonna just do it so that they don't get in trouble.

• 2:39:42Speaker 06

  And so, the more rules you put in, the more people are gonna try to get around them from one reason or the other.

• 2:39:47Speaker 05

  Like taxes.

• 2:39:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, like taxes. Oh, taxes. Yeah, make any tax law you want, we're gonna find the loophole. Sure. Yeah, and, and so, it's not about rules. It's about changing people's hearts. They should want to do the good thing.

• 2:40:02Speaker 05

  I'm not suggesting, I'm not suggesting that we like establish these rules. And that's how societies should function. What, what I am suggesting is, what you're saying is that like by living this life, you will feel better and ultimately have a more fulfilling life. Right? And while you, a devout Christian, might say, yeah, that might be the case like while you're here, but you're not gonna get that eternal salvation. But to those people who, maybe they're not believers, subscribing to the behavioral mechanisms, not for eternal salvation, for happiness while on earth, they do get to attain some of that.

• 2:40:44Speaker 06

  I think, you know, it's not an either or. It's not just about the afterlife or just about this life. It's a both and, you know? Your will be done on earth as is in heaven. Right? So that's, that's the Lord's.

• 2:40:56Speaker 05

  Well, you get it now. I think that the people who take the Bible for metaphor, who you would call retards. Not retards, sorry, you would call idiots, sorry. You would call idiots. But those people who take it as.

• 2:41:08Speaker 06

  To find a Canadian, more Canadian way of saying it.

• 2:41:11Speaker 05

  What's a good one?

• 2:41:12Speaker 06

  Fools.

• 2:41:12Speaker 05

  Fools, hockey pucks.

• 2:41:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:41:14Speaker 05

  Don Cherry's. Yeah. Uh, but those that take it as metaphor, but still see like immense value in it. And living this quote unquote, I wouldn't say Christian life, but Christian inspired life. They, like many people, for example, who grew up like Catholic, you know, like my dad grew up Catholic, right? Not religious, but...

• 2:41:37Speaker 06

  Is he proud of you now that you're Orthodox?

• 2:41:39Speaker 05

  He's very proud, yeah. No, no, no, but not, not religious as he, you know, he had some kind of like, kind of falling out with the, the church, not on like some like, you know, pedophilia, but just like he just didn't...

• 2:41:49Speaker 06

  I get you, I didn't make any assumptions. Don't put words in my mouth.

• 2:41:52Speaker 05

  Everybody puts something in their mouth. But like, but like, I don't know a person that is, I don't know somebody that doesn't lead a more Christian life. If you asked him, he's like, "Yeah, I'm not, I'm just being a nice guy, you know, I'm trying to help people when I can." Like, he is, so, he still finds this immense value

• 2:42:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:42:14Speaker 05

  in this belief system without the belief. Now, the cost could be eternal salvation, which fucking sucks, but while you're here on earth, it seems to have really helped him.

• 2:42:25Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 2:42:25Speaker 05

  You know, so, I'm just curious how you reconcile that. Like, okay, there are these people out there that are leading these quote-unquote "Christian lives", but they're maybe not believing some of the things that you've said, so maybe they're not leading a Christian life, but they're following, they, as a matter of fact, they might be leading better lives than some of these Christians who do believe all these things.

• 2:42:48Speaker 05

  So which one does God value more? Does God value the, the Christian who's like, "You know what, I'm a sinner, I am a piece of shit, I believe that God is my Savior, I'm gonna keep on doing all this fuck shit, but I am a piece of shit, that's why I'm doing it, but God died for my sins, but I'm gonna try", but he's a piece of shit his entire life and he hurts people? Or do you think God is more favorable to the person who goes, "Yeah, I don't know if I really believe it, but I really like being nice to people and kind, and trying to help my neighbor, and trying to help anybody I can, and trying to be a positive force on the world"?

• 2:43:19Speaker 06

  Well, I think at the end of the day, it's still... Like, you're in Adam, or you're in Christ. And so, like, this is what I said when I was on Rogan, and I was commenting on Jordan Peterson, is like, we need to be careful that the law, the doing good things is the mirror. Don't try to clean yourself with the mirror. The mirror shows you how dirty you are, right?

• 2:43:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would believe a lot of these people aren't trying to clean themselves with it. I think that they're doing it because they just feel like that's the right way to be.

• 2:43:47Speaker 06

  Right, and I would encourage them in that. Because ultimately, I would want-

• 2:43:50Speaker 05

  But don't you think God recognized it? Like, don't you think God is smart enough to be like, hey, this person just found a way around the system. He just said, yo, I believe in that guy, and then he's just out here continuing to kill people. And this other person is like, I don't know if I believe him, but I am that.

• 2:44:03Speaker 08

  Isn't it also weird that he died for all of your sins, except one? Every sin, except one.

• 2:44:09Speaker 05

  What's the one?

• 2:44:09Speaker 08

  Don't believe in him. Like, you don't believe in him, so you're going to hell. Everything else, you're good. But you don't believe in him, that's the one sin I can't get rid of.

• 2:44:17Speaker 05

  Also, his own followers didn't believe in him until he came back. And now, we gotta believe with him? And we didn't even get to see him come back. So, I can't, like, I can't believe if his own followers, the people who saw him do all the cool stuff, the second he dies are like, yeah, he was bullshitting. And then he comes back, they're like, okay, we're on board. Yet, we have to have this, this undying faith that even his own closest followers couldn't have? And he has a higher expectation for us than them?

• 2:44:45Speaker 06

  It's a good point.

• 2:44:46Speaker 05

  Because if he did come back, I guarantee we'd be like, hey, I'm choosing it up. I'm doing what all your homies did too. But why do you have a higher expectation for us when we never even met you?

• 2:44:54Speaker 06

  So, the answer to that is that it's, it's not like, faith isn't simply about believing the right things, right? Because even in Matthew's Gospel, at the end, Jesus has been with them, right? Luke tells us 40 days. And at the end, he commissions them, go make disciples of all nations. And it says that they worshipped him, but some still doubted. So you've been with the resurrected Jesus. What are they doubting about? And that's where I think that ultimately, I think Christianity is true because I ultimately believe that the publicly available evidence communicates that it's true. But salvation is not merely an intellectual endeavor. In that I can't just think of all the right things and that gets me to where I need to be.

• 2:45:37Speaker 06

  There's something that's different.

• 2:45:40Speaker 05

  You're making my argument.

• 2:45:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:45:42Speaker 05

  It's not about thinking it, it's about doing it.

• 2:45:44Speaker 06

  But it's not about doing it either.

• 2:45:46Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:45:46Speaker 06

  It's about you being changed by the Spirit to not just feel, think, or do the right things, but to actually be. So when Jesus says Nicodemus-

• 2:45:58Speaker 05

  So what defines changed by the Spirit?

• 2:46:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, so here's the thing. When Nicodemus, who's John 3:16-

• 2:46:03Speaker 05

  We're about to get there.

• 2:46:04Speaker 06

  John 3:16 gave his only son, right? Yeah. Oh, John 3:16, the most famous verse. Then Jesus says that you need to be born again. There's a play on words there in the Greek, which means both born again and born from above.

• 2:46:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:46:18Speaker 06

  It's the same term in the Greek. And Nicodemus takes it as, I need to be born again. He's like, well, I can't-

• 2:46:22Speaker 05

  How can I do that?

• 2:46:23Speaker 06

  Shout me in the back of my mom, it doesn't work like that. And so, but there's something that goes beyond the like carnal in the life of the believer. That's what being born again means. Is that there's a, not an awakening in an eastern way, but an understanding of the fact that Christ has reached into your life and He's revealed something that is beyond the simple fact.

• 2:46:47Speaker 05

  Why, I guess my concern is, God is all-knowing, all-powerful.

• 2:46:56Speaker 05

  If you feel that change or transition in you.

• 2:47:01Speaker 06

  You feeling a transition, is that what's going on?

• 2:47:02Speaker 05

  Yes. No, no, no, like-

• 2:47:04Speaker 06

  Every woman who makes herself mad.

• 2:47:05Speaker 05

  Yes, but you don't think God is aware that that's Him?

• 2:47:11Speaker 05

  Like, you think that that person on the island, or the random person that grows up in Ohio, or New York, or Japan, or anywhere, that realizes that I'm going to live a better life, and I'm going to be a better person, and I'm going to do all these things which now we know through Scripture says will give you eternal salvation. And the one thing he doesn't say is, "I know that Christ is reaching in me to do it." He feels like something is reaching in him to do it. Maybe he chalks it up to evolution, maybe he chalks it up to...

• 2:47:42Speaker 06

  His God.

• 2:47:42Speaker 05

  His God, whatever it is. But you don't think God, the one God, is smart enough to go, "I know who he's talking to." You think he needs up to say him by the one specific name, and then God goes, "Oh, he said the name, okay." To me, it seems belittling to God to assume that he's not capable of understanding all the languages that we speak to the highest power in.

• 2:48:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I don't disagree with you. And I think that's where God, like what I said before, is not going to judge us on what we don't know. He's going to judge us on what we do know. That doesn't mean that we're innocent. At the exact same time, I think the Spirit of God is constantly speaking to us and convicting us. We call it a conscience, right? So like, there's an aspect of God's means of grace that is just general to everybody, in that we understand that murder is wrong. And that arguably, everybody throughout history, barring a few wackadoos, believes that. And that is the image of God that we are created in, screaming out...

• 2:48:46Speaker 05

  This is, yeah, same page.

• 2:48:47Speaker 07

  So I'm curious, even in the book of James, the Epistle of Straw, as Luther would call it.

• 2:48:53Speaker 06

  By some pious Jew.

• 2:48:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, perhaps. That in this book, God says, "Without works, faith is dead." Faith without works is dead, rather. So how do you reconcile that with this idea?

• 2:49:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, so you're not saved for your works, but you're saved... No, sorry, you're not saved by your works, but you're saved for your works. So that's the fruit in the cursing of the fig tree. It's like, if I see a friend, and he's claimed to be a Christian, but his entire life is reflecting the complete opposite, I would say to him, "Listen, I don't know what's between you and God. That's not my place. However, I have no evidence to see that the things that you actually confess..." Have an actual like outpouring in that. And I think that that should worry you. I want to grab you by your baptism. And I want to say like, I'm going to hold you to the standard that you yourself are claiming. And so

• 2:49:45Speaker 05

  So what's the inverse of that?

• 2:49:47Speaker 06

  The fruit is that which Jesus says, you will know my followers by their fruit. And that's why it's problematic when we see Christians doing things that are un-Christian.

• 2:49:58Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:49:58Speaker 06

  That's why people point out things like the Crusades or the Inquisitions. I think these are legitimate things that we can point to and say, you know, if you pour out the substance, here, let me give you an illustration. So the methodology of form and substance, I said it slow so you don't think

• 2:50:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank you very much.

• 2:50:14Speaker 06

  Methodology of form and substance has this idea that this is Black Rifle. Oh, sweet. We don't have this in Canada. You know, we don't have this.

• 2:50:20Speaker 05

  Of course not.

• 2:50:21Speaker 06

  Every time I come

• 2:50:22Speaker 05

  It's American, baby. Freedom.

• 2:50:23Speaker 06

  Man, we don't have that up north.

• 2:50:26Speaker 05

  Oh, we know.

• 2:50:26Speaker 06

  So Black Rifle Energy.

• 2:50:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:50:29Speaker 06

  Okay. I come in the room, I say, Andrew, can I drink this? And you say, yeah. I say, what is it? You say, Black Rifle Energy. I crack it open, I take a sip, it's gasoline.

• 2:50:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:50:38Speaker 06

  Okay. It is Black Rifle Energy drink in form, and that it claims to be, but not in substance, and that the actual contents are not what the can is describing. So when we look at the contents, when we look at what Christianity actually dictates, and we see things like Jesus saying, love those who hate you, pray for those who persecute you, turn the other cheek. And then you look at something like conversion by the sword. We can say, based on the actual contents of what Christianity and the Bible claims to be, that that is in form, but not in substance. And that person either is in a lot of trouble and that they're claiming to be something they aren't, or they really need to figure out what's what. And that they're going down a dangerous road.

• 2:51:23Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:51:24Speaker 06

  And so I forgot the original intention of this illustration.

• 2:51:29Speaker 05

  Faith and works.

• 2:51:29Speaker 06

  Faith and works.

• 2:51:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So you explain one version, then what's the inverse of that? What are the person that don't claim to be Christians, yet everything in their works shows that they are?

• 2:51:38Speaker 06

  Sure. I would say ultimately The substance is Christian, but the form is not. Right. So I would say that when Jesus is asked, what is the greatest commandment? He says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. All the good works, if they're not done in the love of God, that is actually a commandment that someone who doesn't believe cannot fulfill.

• 2:52:02Speaker 05

  Wait, wait, say that again?

• 2:52:03Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:52:03Speaker 05

  Say that again?

• 2:52:04Speaker 08

  Crazy dude.

• 2:52:05Speaker 05

  Say that again.

• 2:52:07Speaker 06

  So, I get asked sometimes, like, is there, is there something that a Christian can do that an atheist can't morally?

• 2:52:13Speaker 05

  Something a Christian can do that an atheist can't morally?

• 2:52:16Speaker 06

  No. And I would say, yes, and it's love God. Atheist doesn't want to, he's not going to do it, and he can't do it.

• 2:52:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:52:25Speaker 06

  And that is when Jesus is asked, what is the greatest commandment? That's the thing he points to.

• 2:52:30Speaker 05

  See, I see, see, this is where like, I think that we're not giving God enough credit. Because I think God is looking at the atheist who lives a quote-unquote "Christian" life, and the atheist goes, "I don't believe in God," and I think God's up there like, "Gotcha."

• 2:52:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:52:46Speaker 05

  So, like, because, because, but that's, but that's how high I view God.

• 2:52:50Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 2:52:50Speaker 05

  Like, I feel like God is so powerful, so intelligent, that he's aware of our little intellectualizing of who he is and how we behave.

• 2:53:00Speaker 06

  I agree.

• 2:53:01Speaker 05

  And he's like, it's like when your kid first starts learning stuff in school, and they're like 11, they start trying to tell you what the stars are, and you're like, "Yeah, yeah, sure, it's exactly what they are, and that's exactly how history is."

• 2:53:11Speaker 08

  And you just kind of chuckle.

• 2:53:13Speaker 05

  It's adorable.

• 2:53:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:53:14Speaker 05

  You know what I mean? Like, so that's what I assume God is doing, and that's how I, I guess that's how I solve the problem for the person on the island, or the good person that was never given Christianity, or the person that was given, like, this horrible bastardized version of it. They were molested by some priests, and like, they're, they're gonna feel that disconnect to this beautiful source because of that horrible individual, and now they don't get eternal salvation because of what this horrible person did? Like, yet the rest of their life, they're being good, and they're, they're being pure, and they're being true? You know, like, despite them saying they don't? I think God is looking at that like, "Listen, I know, I know your heart, and you're doing the right thing." And I think God is looking at those people who say they believe in God, but they're doing these horrible acts, and they're like, "You're not gonna trick me." I'm not, because you're acting like I'm stupid.

• 2:53:59Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 2:53:59Speaker 05

  I feel like that's insulting to God.

• 2:54:01Speaker 06

  There's layers to this. I think, you know, Scripture says, "The heart is deceitful above all things who can know it." And I think there's an aspect of, should I say it slower?

• 2:54:08Speaker 05

  Yes, "The heart is deceitful above all things that know it."

• 2:54:12Speaker 06

  Who can know it?

• 2:54:13Speaker 05

  Who can know?

• 2:54:14Speaker 06

  So, the idea is that...

• 2:54:17Speaker 06

  Even our good things are gonna be done with a motivation apart from actually understanding who God is and what our relationship to Him is properly. They're going to be, it's the people who are feeding homeless people and making YouTube videos about it.

• 2:54:32Speaker 05

  I think that's profound. I think that's like, I think that's a great way, if you were someone who maybe wasn't religious, of understanding like our evolutionary biology and why we're inclined to do certain things. And yeah, I think that's a really profound way of understanding human behavior.

• 2:54:48Speaker 06

  In the end, there's still a selfishness to a particular thing.

• 2:54:51Speaker 05

  Which is, yeah, that's what the evolution, yeah.

• 2:54:54Speaker 06

  What would you call them? The evolutionarist?

• 2:54:57Speaker 05

  Evolutionist? Yeah, that's what the evolutionists would say.

• 2:55:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, and they could be consistent in that way. However, the survival of the fittest doesn't actually give you a grounding standard for being moral.

• 2:55:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I agree.

• 2:55:17Speaker 06

  In the sense that, so my friend Glenn Scrivener, who wrote a great book called The Air We Breathe.

• 2:55:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:55:22Speaker 06

  He describes it in this way, I mean, he's British, so he talks about trousers. But when we say, the atheists, when we ask them, where do you get your morality from? Often, the response I get is, the people think I'm accusing them of not being moral. I'm not doing that, right? I think atheists can be moral, because I think they're created in the image of God, and that's like outpouring from them. But when I say, where do you get your morality from? Glenn says, it's like asking, Mark, where do you get your trousers from? And Mark going, I'm wearing trousers. You're like, no, no, where do you get it from? Like, how dare you tell me I'm not wearing trousers? It's like, no, that's not the question I'm asking. I'm asking the origin of the morality to actually ground doing something that is good. I fully believe that you can do good things.

• 2:56:06Speaker 06

  I'm just asking, where is the objective idea that that actually stems from? Because evolution doesn't get you there.

• 2:56:14Speaker 05

  I would say that, I would say evolution gets you part of the way. What I would say is that... Your evolutionary inclination to be moral only scratches the surface of the euphoria you can experience when you lean into the will of God or being a good person. In other words, just not killing doesn't make me feel good. I've not killed in my whole life. Helping my neighbor for no other reason than to just help him. And in the moment, like feels annoying. I'm like, why am I gonna go do this? Immediately afterwards, I'm like, man, I'm really glad that I did that. And like, I felt connected to that person. They felt really grateful and like, wow, I feel really that act of altruism made me feel really good.

• 2:56:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. And this is what I would say would be walking closer to God. And I think Christianity and other religions give this really compelling argument for, hey, hey, yes, you are doing these things atheists. You're already doing these good things. You could even lean further into that and feel the fruit of that connectivity. I'm just saying, I think there are people who have realized this sometimes despite religion, in spite of religion, and sometimes without religion. And they've continued to lean into it. And I think God is smart enough to realize that they're getting to the same place. And that might be what Hinduism is seeing. That's where you are. That might be. Now, I'm not trying to make an argument for it. Yeah, I get you.

• 2:57:42Speaker 05

  Obviously, you know what side I'm on. But, but I guess there is this objective beauty to it. And there's so much to glean from it. Yeah. I just think that there is a potentially, I don't wanna say it, but like belittling of God's ability to recognize his greatness within people. I tend to agree.

• 2:58:09Speaker 07

  But like even that idea of like, you'll know my followers by their fruits. It's like if you see a Hindu or like a Sikh that's feeding people at their temple, or a Muslim that's living like a very pious life, perhaps they're living a Christian life. Is it possible that that is the fruit that you can know them by?

• 2:58:25Speaker 05

  A Christless Christian life isn't a Christian life. But how do you know he's not in there? It's written on your heart. Sure, but if he's confessing Sikhism, the tenants of Sikhism. Confessing. God's going. Confessing. God's going, God's going. I guess, listen, you could call it that. You're. But so here's the thing, all religions are saying. I'm hating Christianity more and more.

• 2:58:50Mark Gagnon?

  You mulling me from Christ. That's okay. Closer than I was an hour and a half ago. I'll pray for you, I'll pray for you.

• 2:59:00Speaker 05

  Now we're cooking though.

• 2:59:02Speaker 06

  That's the learned thing that Christians say, right?

• 2:59:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:59:04Speaker 06

  Thoughts and prayers.

• 2:59:05Mark Gagnon?

  Bless her heart.

• 2:59:05Speaker 05

  Bless her heart.

• 2:59:06Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, bless your heart.

• 2:59:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:08Speaker 06

  I mean, at the end of the day, all religions at their core are saying counter things.

• 2:59:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:59:15Speaker 06

  Like I said before, like they can't be all true. It's the equivalent of if we say like, they're all true, it's the equivalent of me saying, I went to the library and I read all the books and I came to the conclusion that all the books, despite their differences, are really saying the same thing. They have words, grammar, syntax, letters, numbers, you know, it's everything from one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, to Mein Kampf is the same thing.

• 2:59:37Speaker 05

  Whoa.

• 2:59:38Speaker 06

  Right? You could conclude one of two things. I didn't read all the books. Or I read the books so poorly that I'm not giving justice to what the content of the books is.

• 2:59:48Speaker 05

  I didn't read all the books or I read them so poorly that I'm like, yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:51Speaker 06

  And I would say, the same goes for worldview perspectives. If we say that all of them are saying the same thing or getting to the same result, we either are not studying the religions themselves and what they actually say, or we're not doing justice to the fact that they say mutually exclusive things.

• 3:00:10Speaker 05

  I think that's 100% true right now with us. And I think unfortunately in this argument, and I don't want to speak for Mark or Akash because you guys are...

• 3:00:19Speaker 06

  Go ahead, speak for Mark.

• 3:00:20Speaker 05

  You guys are far more aware of like what your religions say and dictate, whereas I think Alex and I were a little bit removed.

• 3:00:26Speaker 06

  I'm not that much more aware.

• 3:00:27Mark Gagnon?

  More than I am.

• 3:00:28Speaker 05

  You know more about Hinduism than I do.

• 3:00:29Speaker 06

  He's got back from India.

• 3:00:30Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 3:00:30Speaker 06

  He knows it all.

• 3:00:31Speaker 05

  He started a war.

• 3:00:32Speaker 06

  If anybody's aware.

• 3:00:33Speaker 05

  But like Alex and I don't know exactly what the scripture is saying, so it's very easy for us to ascribe like the most open-minded terms for us, because we're like, I want to guess I'm heaven, you know, God knows my heart. So I understand what we're doing is incredibly selfish. You could frame it in that way. But remove us and whether we go to heaven or not, and we can put it on other people that we don't even know that we think might be good people. We're hoping there is some salvation for them if that heaven does exist. I don't know what the point that we were trying to make here was though.

• 3:01:01Speaker 06

  Gandhi was right.

• 3:01:03Speaker 05

  No, no, no, no, no. No, no, but it is tricky because you are so aware of exactly what the scripture and the religion is saying the requirements are, and we're here going, "Yeah, but isn't it kind of like this?" And you're like, "No, that's not what it says." We're hoping that there's a little extra room. And you're like, "Listen, there's a way. You're welcome. You're invited. Just come in the door." But these are the rules to be in there. So it is kind of like...

• 3:01:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, I wouldn't say that it's rules. But I do get your sense.

• 3:01:34Speaker 05

  I understand like...

• 3:01:34Speaker 06

  Stop putting words in my mouth there.

• 3:01:35Speaker 05

  No, no, this is so interesting. It's like...

• 3:01:38Speaker 06

  No, no, I get you. And I think, I think it is possible.

• 3:01:40Speaker 05

  If you nod and agree to me saying rules, there's gonna be a video of some... I understand the pressure you're under.

• 3:01:45Speaker 06

  Are you seeing people make response videos?

• 3:01:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. But you're... So like, I am delicate with that, but like, I'm just throwing out the words that like, fit my narrow-minded version of...

• 3:01:53Speaker 06

  I get you. It's very narrow-minded.

• 3:01:54Speaker 05

  Very. So narrow. So narrow. Though I accept everybody.

• 3:01:57Speaker 06

  No, no, I get what you're saying. And I think like, once again, I'm not saying that people of all worldly perspectives cannot do good things, cannot be good people,

• 3:02:06Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 3:02:06Speaker 06

  cannot actually articulate what would be like, even if it's superficial fruit. I think that's good, and I would implore everybody, right, of whatever, atheist, Hindu, Buddhist, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, even the Scientologists, even the Scientologists, to do good things, right? Like, I want people to do that, because I think it's just better for humanity.

• 3:02:28Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 3:02:29Speaker 06

  Ultimately, though, I want everybody to confess Jesus Christ as Lord. But, on a superficial level, I think, just for the sake of human flourishing, for what is good for society, I want to implore people to do good things. And I think that the foundation for that is actually a Judeo-Christian one that comes from the scripture, because I believe that everybody's created in the image of God. And everybody is intrinsically worth in their value. Nobody's worth more than anybody else.

• 3:02:59Speaker 05

  Agreed. Agreed to that. Now, I know you have to get on a flight to go back to Canada. No, I want you to be here for like, two more hours and like, talk. But you, you have to be a good parent. That's the thing. You're being responsible.

• 3:03:10Speaker 06

  My son has a soccer game that I gotta get to in Toronto.

• 3:03:12Speaker 05

  I love this. I think this is great. Okay, so we let you get out of here. Last question, and then you go. And then, we should order him a car right now, just so it's waiting downstairs.

• 3:03:24Speaker 05

  Jesus.

• 3:03:26Speaker 06

  Heard of him.

• 3:03:26Speaker 05

  Father.

• 3:03:27Speaker 06

  Read the book.

• 3:03:27Speaker 05

  Son. Holy Ghost.

• 3:03:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:03:30Speaker 05

  He is God.

• 3:03:32Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 3:03:33Speaker 05

  I think that a lot of time there are people go, "Okay, isn't he the Son of God?" He is the Son of God. He gave, God gave his one and only true Son, but like he also gave Himself. So, why is the language, why is the language His Son? Why is he given as His Son? And why does that discrepancy kind of exist? And at what point in time in like, um, Christian historical record?

• 3:03:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:03:55Speaker 05

  Are they all synergized?

• 3:03:58Speaker 06

  Summarize 2,000 years of Trinitarian theology before the Uber comes.

• 3:04:01Speaker 05

  10 seconds.

• 3:04:02Speaker 06

  Got it. No, it's a good question, because I think what you see in the Biblical New Testament, and the early Christians are wrestling through this, because we have the benefit of standing 2,000 years down the road, and they've hammered out the language we use today.

• 3:04:13Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 3:04:13Speaker 06

  So, they're wrestling through this. The Father is called Yahweh God, the Spirit is called Yahweh God, and Jesus is called Yahweh God. There's only one Yahweh. How do we figure this out? So, what they do is eventually they come up with this language of being and person. Being describes what you are, person describes who you are. This chair has being, right? It's what philosophers call ontological status, right? But it doesn't have personhood. I didn't ask its permission to sit on it.

• 3:04:41Speaker 05

  Right.

• 3:04:41Speaker 06

  But it does exist.

• 3:04:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:04:44Speaker 06

  Being is what you are. So, God is Yahweh. And we see this in the sense that Jesus tells His disciples to go baptize in the name on a man Greek. It's a singular. And then He says, "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." So, He says the singular name, but then He describes three persons. And so, this is the question the early church is wrestling through, and they say, "Okay, Jesus is given the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds, and the seat of God." It's an acronym, HANDS. The Spirit is given the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds, and the seat of God. And the Father is given the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds, and the seat of God. There's only one God. How do we understand this? Now, the ancient Jews actually already had a concept of this in that they weren't unitarian fully.

• 3:05:29Speaker 06

  They understood that God is complex within His unity, and that God can rule and reign in heaven, and yet, the Ark of the Covenant could still have God's presence. And we even see examples when, before Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham is met by three individuals, two that are identified as angels, and one that is identified as Yahweh God. The angels go off to Sodom and Gomorrah to find Lot and his family. Abraham dialogues with Yahweh. Eventually Abraham leaves, and then in chapter 19, Genesis 19, it has this really interesting passage where it says that Yahweh on earth reigns fire and brimstone from Yahweh in heaven. Now, you only have one Yahweh, so what's going on there? Well, we would say, within like, a Christian framework, this is the pre-incarnate Christ, okay?

• 3:06:13Speaker 06

  He is not, you know, in fleshed in who Jesus is, but this is the complex unity, and the Jews understand this, and even early on in rabbinical Judaism, there's a concept of the shekinah glory, which is the presence above the ark, that God is ruling and reigning in heaven, and yet, there's also this idea that kind of gets fleshed out in Kabbalism, of the shevrot, which are like, the presence and spirit of God all throughout the earth. So, in that sense, ancient Judaism, sometimes it's called the two powers in heaven, I don't love that kind of articulation, but in academia, that's what it's called, that God is ruling and reigning in heaven and still has a presence on earth, that God is complex within his unity, only one God, but there's something else going on there that maybe we don't fully understand, but then is teased out in its fullness in the New Testament,

• 3:06:58Speaker 06

  with the son, which is a title of familiarity, it's not like a birth son. But the father and the son, those are kinship terms. But they have existed, like I said before, in a set of living, loving relationships. It has always been three. And they have existed eternally as three. The spirit is teased out a little bit in the Old Testament, you have these kind of like, these Easter eggs of Jesus throughout. The burning bush, right, it says that the messenger of God spoke from the bush. And so you have these sort of things. The early Christians are wrestling through these things and coming up with some good ideas, some bad ideas, in order to formulate the language of this. Eventually, they come up with this idea, one being in three persons.

• 3:07:42Speaker 06

  Being describes what you are, persons describe who you are.

• 3:07:47Speaker 05

  Got it, got it. So, yeah, yeah, so your form, one, three, three forms, that was really good. All right, get back to Canada. Dude, thank you so much for taking the time, Wes. Thank you, buddy. You guys are great. Fascinating guy, you're awesome. So glad it worked out. I'll see you in hell, buddy.

• 3:08:05Speaker 00

  Please, hello there. Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 3:08:37Speaker 03

  Honey, that flu keeping you up? Did you take Nyquil Intense Flu?

• 3:08:41Mark Gagnon?

  Nah, I got this. Mmm, okay, I don't got this.

• 3:08:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, you need Nyquil Intense Flu. Undo your flu with Nyquil Intense Flu. Nyquil Intense Flu provides powerful relief of your flu symptoms so you can sleep. You do got this. Nyquil Intense Flu, the nighttime sniffling, aching, aching fever best sleep with a flu medicine. Uses directed, keep out of reach of children.