Is the KJV Crap?

This week we're taking something beloved and ruining it! Ok, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but we're definitely going to ruffle some feathers. The King James Version of the Bible is treasured for its poetic, often florid language. Many even believe it to be the most accurate, truest version available in English. Those people are wrong. Or at least, we'll show you why that's a problematic stance. Then, when is God not actually God? Buckle up, because we're letting linguistic nerdom take us on a fascinating journey. There are instances in the old Greek manuscripts where the word for God isn't presented in the same way as others. Could something as simple as the lack of a definite article ("the") actually change what the biblical authors were talking about entirely? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  This is an anti-vaxxer. This is a COVID denier who prophesied thousands of years prior to the arrival of COVID-19 that this was all going to happen.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  This is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Things are good, having a good time. You and I, we just recorded the after-party for this year's, or for this, this week's episode, and over on Patreon, if you want to, if you want to get it. And we were talking about golf and talking about snowboarding, and now I kind of want to be outside, and I want to be hanging out in, in the world. But no, we're gonna bring you a great show. So that, that is what we're gonna do. And today, we're gonna do a, we're gonna start off with a twisted scripture.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  And we're gonna talk about, this, this was one of our patrons' suggestions, actually, a few weeks ago. We're gonna talk about things, that pesky KJV, the King James Version, and things that are maybe unique to that, and that it might not have gotten entirely correct. We're gonna talk about it, unicorns.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  Problems.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't worry about it. We'll get, we'll get to all of it. And then, in the second half of the show, we're gonna be heading over to, we're, we're gonna go to Philo, we're gonna get to Origin. It's, it's going to be one of history's mysteries. We're gonna be talking about,

• 3:33Speaker 01

  what is, what are we talking about?

• 3:34Speaker 00

  We're gonna talk about why certain authors like to use the word "for God", but without the definite article, and they meant something specific by it.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  I like it. Well, let's, let's leave it mysterious like that. And we'll start the show with Twisted Scripture.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  The scripture that got twisted, don't get it twisted, is the KJV.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the whole Bible.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  The Bible, but a specific version. Well, we'll get, we'll get to why that specific version is, is its own form of twisted. It's, there are still lots of people out there who believe that it is the only English version that anyone should be looking at for anything. It is the inspired and true word of God, every bit of it, inherent in every way. Amen.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  Yes, the, the degree of KJV onlyism out there is, puts Poe's law to the test, time after time after time. Cause I'm like, you cannot, cannot possibly be serious. For instance, folks who pastors who will insist that they will use the King James Version to correct the Greek. And so, and I'm like, no, that's, no, you can't be serious. But yeah.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  I, you know what? It takes a bold move to, to correct source material with the, after, with the thing that came after.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. With the target translation. Yeah. But yeah, there, there's a large degree of that. But the King James Version, while it remains, it is one of the most popular translations. I think it's still maybe the best selling translation out there. It is not the most read translation out there. So it is kind of more of an icon than an actual translation that people like to read. Cause.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  It's a slog. I think the NIV might be the most read translation out there, but it is a, it is an influential translation, so much so that's, Robert Alter recently published his own translation of the Hebrew Bible, and along with it, he published somewhat of a companion volume called The Art of Bible Translation.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  And he talked about how all Bible translations into English these days operate in the shadow of the King James Version, and so you might as well, you need to lean into that, otherwise you're just spitting into the wind.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Now, now, we've been saying the phrase "King James Version",

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  But can I, can I correct us a little bit?

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Because when it first was released, it was, "The Holy Bible, containing the Old Testament and the New, newly translated out of the original tongues and with former translations diligently compared and revised by His Majesty's special commandment."

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  That was, that was the original title. Why don't we go back to that?

• 6:53Speaker 00

  It's a little too wordy.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Instead of the KJV, it's T-H-B-C-O-T-A-T-N-N-T, okay.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and it's also not entirely accurate, because, I mean, the degree to which it is a, a new translation is, is very small. It is a conservative revision of the Bishop's Bible, specifically 1602 edition of the Bishop's Bible. In fact, the, they got several copies of the Bishop's Bible and sent them to the translators, and they literally scratched words out and wrote the replacements in the margins.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  And, and then they were collected, and they had folks who were the editors who would basically just transcribe the resulting cobbled-together translation. So, and, and there are, there are scholars who have estimated the, the New Testament of the King James Version, and, and like, we can see how close it is to the Bishop's Bible. It's incredibly close to the Bishop's Bible, but it's even incredibly close to Tyndall's translation of the New Testament, which is several versions removed from the Bishop's Bible. They, they estimated 84% of the New Testament in the King James Version is word for word, Tyndall's translation.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. I did not realize that.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  And about

• 8:19Speaker 01

  This is, this is why it is the KJV and not the KJT.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Uh, I mean, the, the, the titles are, are pretty, there's not a, a really strict set of rules for titles, but some people call it the KJB.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Uh, the King James Bible.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Where, and that way you just sidestep the claim that it's its own translation, but

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  But yeah, it's, it's really just a revision of the, of the bishop's Bible. And so a lot of the things that we're going to talk about today as, as squirrely translations have actually existed for like a century, uh, before the King James Version was, was ever translated. So it's not like the King James Version introduced all of these things, but, but certainly it perpetuated and, um, and in the history since the publication of the King James Bible, it has been responsible for, um, making sure those things remain influential.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Become, become cemented into the tradition or whatever.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. In fact, the King James Version has a lot to do with, with the language that we use because we're, English was moving away from the King James Version until the first and second Great Awakenings, when suddenly it was like, bring back the King James Version. And then a lot of words that had fallen out of use suddenly popped back into use only because of the influence of the King James Version. So like the word warfare.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  That, we only use that word because the King James Version. Yeah. And, and there's a, there's scholarship that looks at a list of words that, uh, were no longer used until the second Great Awakening and in the 19th century. And, and suddenly people started using these words again, and they're still used to this day. But we, and we got a lot of different examples of, of problematic, uh, passages in here because while it was based on, this revision was based on the best available scholarship of the day for the most part.

• 10:15Speaker 00

  The scholarship has advanced significantly. Our resources have advanced.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  I would hope so.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Yes. And probably the biggest thing is we have a lot more manuscripts that are available to us today. The science slash art of textual criticism has advanced significantly and we can make much more informed decisions about what readings are most likely earlier, particularly because we have access to a lot more New Testament manuscripts. We have access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, all that kind of stuff. So some of the things we'll talk about have to do with translations. Some of the things have to do with manuscripts and what sources are being used.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  So for instance, one of the first things, one of the biggest things, one of the most influential things is something known as the comma Johaneum. Are you familiar with that phrase?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  The, I'm familiar with the Oxford comma.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Okay. No, this is a different one.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  This is a different comma.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Also known as the Johanein comma.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  And comma here just means clause.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  And so it is 1 John 5, verses 7 and 8. And this, these two verses read, "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one." And so this is a central Trinitarian proof text.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  The only problem is it's not in any early Greek manuscripts. It's something that pops up in Latin manuscripts. And so the King James Version, the source text that the translators went to when they were like, "Why did the bishop's Bible translate it this way?" They would go back to a source text for the Greek New Testament. And the source text they went back to was the, what became known as the Textus Receptus, which is a version of the Greek New Testament that was originally cobbled together at the beginning of the 16th century by Desiderius Erasmus.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  And he, when he first started this project, he went to his library in Switzerland and was like, "Give me all your Greek New Testament manuscripts." And they were like, "We got six of them." And then they added a seventh later on, but it was like two manuscripts that represented the majority of the New Testament and then the other four to five represented smaller portions. And he basically just took them and collated them and said, okay, I like this reading over here. I like this reading over here. And in the, between the second and the third edition, some people started asking him why he didn't include this verse.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  This is a clause that crosses two verses. And there's another part of one of the verses that's not a part of this. But they said, where's that phrase? And he was like, it's not in any of the Greek manuscripts. And he got leaned on by people who had a lot of power and influence. And he basically said, look, I'm not going to include this unless I have a Greek manuscript that has it because it's not in any of the Greek manuscripts. And lo and behold, somebody shows up with a Greek manuscript that has it.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  I have it under my pillow. So.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  And, and quite literally, it's dated to more or less within a couple of years of when it showed up at Erasmus's doorstep. And scholars who have looked at it have said, yeah, it looks like somebody just translated the Latin back into Greek.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  While in, while transcribing this manuscript. So, but he said, okay, fine. I'll include it in the third edition. So the third edition of his Texas receptus, which was really called the Novum Instrumentum, a new instrument. The third edition has the comma Johannaeum. And it just so happens that the addition that the King James translators relied on for their revision was the third edition.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  So the King James version, of course, included the Johannae in comma. And that's one of the things that was stricken. Once we started doing more text critical work in the 1700s and then more earnestly in the 1800s. So.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  All you scholars and your, and how you're trying to deceive everyone by taking scriptures out of the books.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that's, oh gosh. And there's about, we've talked about this before, I think the. There are about 16 verses in the New Testament that are commonly just omitted, just deleted from contemporary translations of the Bible. And it sends some people into conniptions.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're like, and the reality is it's a more accurate book. It's a more accurate New Testament without it. So somebody added it to it. I want to talk about another one that's relevant to the use of Erasmus's Textus Receptus.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  And this comes from the Book of Revelation.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Revelation 2219. And when Erasmus went and asked for all those manuscripts, what he got omitted the last chapter or so of the Book of Revelation. He did not have a manuscript that included the end of the Book of Revelation. So what he did was he took the Latin and he just translated the Latin back into Greek and just slapped that on the end of his, the end of his product.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  So it's, it's, it's in Greek in the Textus Receptus, but it is Greek that was translated from a Latin manuscript. And part of the, the Revelation 2219 in the King James Version, it talks about somebody's name, the people's names being in the Book of Life, which in Latin would be Libro. And so the Erasmus's Textus Receptus has Book of Life. "All fine and good, except for the fact that the Latin is wrong." Or at least the, somebody was wrong in transmission because the Latin probably said Ligno, which meant tree.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Because the Greek manuscripts, the Greek manuscripts all say tree of life.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  So, so Revelation 2219 in the King James Version refers to the Book of Life, but it should refer to the tree of life, having your name written in the tree of life.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Who writes in trees? I mean, I guess people do.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  Revelation talks a little bit about this, about this tree that grows alongside the river. But yeah, an interesting little variation that we see based on the fact that Erasmus was like, where did the last chapter go? I'll just translate it from Latin. That looks like the word book.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  So wait, the Texas receptus that he was creating was a Latin, was in Latin, right?

• 17:30Speaker 00

  No, he was creating a Greek edition of the New Testament. He was, he was basically-

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. So he's, so he's taking original Greek sources and just cobbling together a Greek version?

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Okay, I get it now.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  This would be called an eclectic edition.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Eclectic, meaning it's, it's cobbled together from a bunch of different manuscripts. The alternative would be a diplomatic edition. That's where you're just basing it on a single manuscript.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  So, most critical editions of the Hebrew Bible, they're based on the Leningrad Codex. They're diplomatic editions. Most critical editions of the New Testament are based on a bunch of different manuscripts. They're eclectic editions. But you can't have the opposite. You can have a New Testament manuscript that's based on Codex Sinaiticus or something like that. That would be a single manuscript. That'd be a diplomatic edition. And, and there's a, an Oxford Hebrew Bible project that's trying to put together an eclectic edition of the Hebrew Bible, where they're incorporating Dead Sea Scroll readings and Septuagint readings and things like that. So, so yes, he was, he was generating a, a Greek edition of the New Testament. It was the first widely available Greek edition of the New Testament.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Cause up until him, if you wanted the Greek New Testament, you had to go find a manuscript. And most of the manuscripts that were, the early manuscripts didn't cover the whole New Testament. And so, his, his addition of the Greek New Testament is what it made, is what made it possible for Martin Luther to translate the New Testament from Greek into German. Cause before that, they were using the Latin.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  And this kind of caused this sea change where everybody was like, all right, we're leaving the Latin behind. We're going back to the Greek.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  So, it was a big deal.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. I get it now. I, I had- I was just, I had translation on my mind. And so I was thinking that he was translating to something, but I just hadn't.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Anyway, now that I understand what we're talking about, let's, let's continue going on with, with KJV and ways that it might've gotten a few things a little wonky doodle.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Wait, let's talk unicorns, because there's something just delightful about, about Bible. Frankly, I don't want to give this one up. I want there to be unicorns in the Bible. You're about to tell me that I can't have my unicorns and I'm about to be sad, but let's talk about where they come from and what, what, what it's, what it's trying to translate.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  So Dan, you've heard me talk ad nauseam about the fact that we've got construction going on at the house. We are-

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  I've heard the construction.

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  Yeah, you heard the construction too. We're, we're finishing our basement. We're actually adding on to the house. We're, we're doing some stuff in the backyard. And I was thinking the other day about how nice it was to be able to do this because we, I wanted to get a new car and I wanted to do these, these improvements to the house, but we had to pay off our old car and that took actual planning, which you know, I hate. And so I really had to shift my thinking quite a bit when it came to my finances and we had to set dates and we had to create a budget and it was so satisfying to actually make a plan.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  And then even though it took some discipline and there were some bumps in the road, we actually succeeded and were able to pay off a car, got a brand new car. And it feels so relieving to know that if we actually set these goals and plan for them and stick to them, it goes from, oh, this will never end, actually feeling like you have control over stuff. And that has made a huge difference to me and to my family.

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• 22:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the King James version has, um, nine occurrences. I think six occurrences in the singular unicorn, three occurrences of the plural unicorns. And when we look in the,

• 23:10Speaker 00

  the first place we can, we can go is the Septuagint, uh, because. That's the tradition that resulted in, that's one of the traditions that the, that the King James translators referred to. In fact, when we go all the way back to, in fact, I pulled up Tyndall's Pentateuch, because William Tyndall translated more than the New Testament. He also translated the entire Pentateuch, which was published in 1530. But in Deuteronomy 3317, we have a reference to this where it says, "His horns as the horns of an unicorn." And, you know, unicorn has a Y instead of an I and an E on the end and

• 23:52Speaker 00

  all that kind of stuff. But, so the, the use of unicorn goes all the way back to, to Tyndall in English, and it's actually used in, something related is used in the, in the Vulgate. I think they use rhinoceros. In the, let me just pull up the Vulgate real quick to, to make sure. But the Latin would be translating the Septuagint's monochados. Is it monochados or monochados? Yeah, it's monochados, which means one horn.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  And so, the Septuagint is probably the foundation of this misunderstanding. I think once you get into the, the Latin Vulgate, you get the, this was probably Jerome's attempt to try to understand the Hebrew word by appealing to the Greek, because the Hebrew has ra'am. And that is kind of an unusual term. For a long time, people weren't exactly sure what it was. Most scholars today would say it is a now extinct kind of ox called an oryx.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  But when you go, but they didn't know this anciently. I'm looking in the, yeah, rhinoceros is what the Vulgate has in, in Deuteronomy 3317. So, the, it sounds like the, the Vulgate is like, "A one horn? What's that? Well, we got these things called rhinoceroses, rhinoceri." Maybe that's what's going on. So, the, the Vulgate is using that. The Greek is probably basing this translation on...

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Reports from Persia, from people who are exploring, and legends from even further east into, you know, like the Indus Valley or something like that. Because there's an idea that in Persia, they knew about this animal that had one long horn. Not quite a unicorn, but some single horned animal. And deeper into the Indus Valley into India, there were reports coming out of this creature that had a long horn that was, you know, its horn had healing properties and stuff like that. And that's where the mythical creature probably comes from.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  And so this is like 5th, 4th century BCE explorers writing in Greek are talking about these mythical creatures. And I think the sub-tuitigen translator either was trying to reflect that idea or was just trying to reflect the idea of a rhinoceros.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  So when we get into English, they're like, what? They don't really know what's... Either they don't know what's going on or unicorn originally had a broader semantic range and could include a rhinoceros.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  But very quickly, the idea was that this is a, this mythical creature. When in reality, the Hebrew ra'am would have just referred to this particular kind of ox. And one of the reasons, one of the confusing reasons, one of the reasons we know it is not a one horned animal is because Deuteronomy 33:17 has, it talks about the plural horns of the ra'am in Hebrew.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Okay, well, that's a problem.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  The animal is singular, the horns are plural.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  You can use a singular word for an animal to speak collectively about multiple animals. Like, we talked about that in Exodus, where the plague of frogs. Just mentions a frog.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Like a frog.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Yes. So there's like this Kaiju frog going

• 28:01Speaker 00

  crawling out of the, out of the Nile. And also the word for bird. Uh, every bird of this guy, all the birds, uh, it's just oafus in the singular.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  And so maybe that's what's going on. But when the King James Version translated Deuteronomy 33 17, it, um, it kind of fiddled with that a little bit. And it talks about the horns of unicorns in the plural. So, um, they didn't want, quite want to abandon the notion that this word referred to a, a single horned animal. Whether, whether it was understood as natural or, or mythological.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  But like the, the way that it talks about these animals in the Bible, it doesn't, it's, it's not, it doesn't seem like it's referring to a mythical creature with magical abilities. It just seems like it's referring to an animal that the people reading it would understand, would know.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Right?

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Just like if we, if we wrote about a bear, no, you know, no one would think, oh, it's mythical or whatever. They would just, that's, that, that's a thing that exists and we all know what a bear is.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and certainly the, some of these animals would have been better well-known than, than others. Cause you know, I think, I think you've got plenty of examples of, of different regions, even in the United States, but especially around the world where some, some people might know about a certain animal. And, and people who don't live very far away from them might be like, what's that?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Um, like when I, the, the first time I went to, uh, Israel, Palestine, I was in, I forget, the ruins of, of an ancient city and I heard this, this high pitched squeak, almost like a yell. And I was like, what is that? And, um, somebody was like, oh, it's a hyrax. And I was like, and what pray tell is a hyrax?

• 29:53Speaker 00

  And they were like, oh, it's kind of a, it's kind of a rodent that, that hides out in, in rocky areas. And then I was like looking at a pile of, of, uh, basalt. Rocks and then this little rodent poked its head out and went and yelled at me and I was like, oh, that's a hyrax.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I heavily encourage everyone to look up hyrax is because they're, I wouldn't say cute. They look mad. They all look pretty mad.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  They do. Yeah. And they sound mad. Like they, they sound like they're like, get out of here.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Hey, what are you doing?

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  So I had no idea what a hyrax was until I started getting shouted at by one.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  And I had to have some knowledge dropped on me. But, but yeah. So, so I'm, you know, if, if somebody, you know, I tell this story and, and 2000 years from now, somebody reads a transcript and they have, and they've, and you know, the knowledge of the hyrax has been lost because maybe it's extinct or something like that. Then yeah, they might be like, hyrax, that kind of sounds like the Toyota Hilux. So it was probably an animal that looked a lot like a car. Or I don't know.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, any number of things, but sure. If you're, if you're trying to translate a word that you don't have a, a translation for, you, you kind of go with whatever you got.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and in the King James Version, they're using a lot of traditions that, you know, are found in the, the translations that precede them. And some of them are, are kind of silly.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Uh, one of the ones that I wanted to jump to, we don't, we're, we don't have a lot of time, but I wanted to jump to how the KJV handles, uh, the word, how it translates a bunch of different words all to the word hell. And doesn't, and doesn't bother to distinguish any of them.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this is, so you got three different words. Well, one in Hebrew, shol is translated hell in the King James Version.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  And, and this is just based on the assumption that's, you know, the assumption of univocality. Well, we're, we're talking about the realm of the dead and it's not particularly happy. That must mean hell.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  And the reality is that they had, they did not have a concept of hell in the Hebrew Bible. Everybody went to the same place, good, bad.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Nor, nor heaven, just, just.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  Shaul. Yeah, Shaul, which is just the realm of the dead. And it was a, it was a hazy, murky, not very exciting existence, and they didn't know an awful lot about it. So, so right off the bat, yeah, that's, that's a mistranslation in the King James Version. And then you've got a few different words that are used in the New Testament. The main two are Hades and Gehenna. It's really Gehenna in, in Greek transliteration, but those are the two that are most commonly translated hell. And then you've got one occurrence of the word Tartarus. And in Greek, Gehenna is, is a Greek Jewish term. It

• 32:53Speaker 00

  comes from Gehenna, from the valley of the son of Hinnom. And this is this valley that, that comes around the, the south end of Jerusalem. And this is associated with child sacrifice in the pre-exilic period, the Tophet, which is where the pre-exilic kings were supposed to have offered their children as sacrifice, make, make them pass through the fire, that, that, all that stuff. That's supposed to be on the edge of the valley of Hinnom. And in Greco-Roman period Jewish tradition, that location becomes associated with the bad place, just because it is, there's fire, there's wickedness, there's killing, that is the bad place. And so that becomes kind of an

• 33:37Speaker 00

  eschatological location of divine punishment. And so in the New Testament, that's Gehenna. Hades is just, is largely borrowed from, from Greek mythology. And Tartarus, in Greek mythology, is one of the two places you can go within Hades. Hades is kind of a more generic realm of the dead. And for certain groups, if you've been good, you go to the fields of Elysium. That, that is, you know, in Gladiator, that's, that's what he says, "You are in Elysium."

• 34:12Speaker 00

  And then the other place is Tartarus. That's if you've been bad. And you don't wanna, you don't wanna end up in Tartarus. But in borrowing that concept into the New Testament,

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Hades kind of has more of a negative tone. So it's, it's kind of conceptually merging with the idea of Gehenna. But, but Tartarus is, I think it's, it's used in one of the letters of Peter. And that's more directly referring to the lake of fire, kind of bad part of, of Hades.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  It'd be, I'm trying to imagine what Christianity today would look like. If those three words slash four words were each given a different translation. Or we're, you know what I mean? We're separated out as four distinct concepts. I think that's a, that's a big deal difference.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, you can, you can look in Mormonism for their degrees of glory. If you, if you really wanted to try to.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Sure, man.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Um, but no, it's, although it's not quite the hierarchy that Mormonism presents. But, uh, but yeah, I, I think it would be fascinating if, if those different concepts were allowed to stay different. But that's kind of, that's kind of the pattern is, is everything gets kind of lumped together. You have the good side and the bad side. And, you know, all of the bad entities from the Hebrew Bible get just consolidated in, in Satan. Whereas all the good, all the supernatural mediator figures from the Hebrew Bible get consolidated into Jesus.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  And all of the different concepts of postmortem divine punishment get consolidated into hell. Whereas the idea of postmortem good stuff gets consolidated into heaven. There's only one concept. And, and I, yeah, I think that's an outgrowth of the fact that everybody's presupposing it all has to be pointed in the same direction.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  But yeah, I think it would be an interesting thought experiment. Somebody will have to make a movie one day about Christianity that did not presuppose univocality.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. That would be, that would be interesting.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  It would be a mess.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  It would be a mess. And I don't think, and I think that, you know, to some extent, these consolidations kind of have to happen. Or at least like some.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, for any kind of unity, for any kind of consistency.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  You have to converge on some sort of understanding. Um, the last, there's also the, the way the KJV talked about the word.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Uh, kashaf. I don't know how to say that, but a sorcerer, diviner, or as in the KJV, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, which-

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Exodus 2218, right?

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, um, it's, should be 17 in the, in the Hebrew. Yeah. So, um, macha shefa is the, is the word in, um, in Hebrew. But it's based on, it's, it's a noun form based on the verbal roots. Uh, kashaf to practice sorcery. Yeah. And this is, this is wit, like, a lot of people say, oh, King James was, was anti-witch. And so he either told them to write this in, or, or made them change it to witch, or something like that. And, um-

• 37:30Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth for King James. So obviously he had a witch thing.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's, it's just not true because it's in the bishop's Bible. It's in the Geneva Bible. It's in the Great Bible. It's in the Matthews Bible. It's in the Coverdale Bible. It's in the Tyndall translation. Like it is thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Every single place it occurs in English up to and including the King James Version. But yeah, in, in Hebrew, it's, it actually doesn't address the law to you in the second person. It just says macha shefa lo tchaye, which would be a, a witch shall not live. So the verb is actually third feminine singular.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  But is witch the right, I guess the problem that I have with the word witch in this case is that, uh, it's gendered.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's a feminine noun in the Hebrew.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  Now, interestingly enough, the ancient Greek translation not only changed it to masculine, but changed it to plural.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  And they have farmacus.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  Which is based on the word pharmakon or pharmakos, which is could be magician, could be sorcerer, but fundamentally it refers to someone who, who mixes up potions.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Thou shalt not suffer a pharmacist to live.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. I hear what you're saying. You know, this is, this is an anti-vaxxer. This is a, a COVID denier who prophesied thousands of years prior to the arrival of COVID-19, that, that this was all going to happen and that Fauci, because you know, the, the original Greek could be rendered Fauci if you, you just gotta, cause it starts with an F.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  You just gotta change, you gotta, you know, Eli the, the Ro and the Mu. And then you gotta, um, kind of take the, uh, the Kappa and render it more of a chuh. So anyway, uh, yeah, for, for some weird reason, the, the Greek decided to just fiddle with it and make it's, uh, and, and pharmakos can refer to potions for good or potions for bad. So you see the usage of the word in reference to people who are using it to heal. Uh, but you more commonly see it as in reference to people who are using these potions for, for ill. And so, um, the pharmakia became kind of a, a bad word in, in early Christianity,

• 40:06Speaker 00

  which, you know, gave, gives rise now to all kinds of ridiculous conspiracy theories that I have to see on TikTok day after day after day.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  All right, well, that's all the time we have for our twisted scripture for today. The, I mean, you know, KJV still has some of the best, some of the prettiest language of any of the translations.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, there, there are some renderings that you can't get away from. You just gotta, just gotta lean into that, uh, King James English.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you know, it's, it was the time of Shakespeare. They say Shakespeare may have written some of it, but he probably did.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Oh gosh.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Come on, what is it Psalm 46 or something?

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Oh gosh.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  There's a whole thing. Anyway, uh, look into it. Shakespeare, Psalm 46, Shakespeare, it's all in there. Forty-six in, forty-six in. All right, uh, we'll leave it at that. So we'll move on to history's mysteries.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  So guide me in, where, what are we doing? What are we talking about? Where are we here?

• 41:13Speaker 00

  We're, we're talking about a weird thing that a lot of folks have observed in some of the early Jewish and Christian discussions about God and the use of the Greek word theos, because we know this, this word means God and ostensibly, early Jewish and Christian authors are all monotheists, and so there can only be one God. But we've got this weird thing where sometimes the word God might seem to be referring to somebody else. And in some places, some of these authors write the word God without the definite article. Now, if you don't know Biblical Greek, even personal names, most of the time, you include

• 41:57Speaker 00

  the definite article. So when you see in, in your English translation, "And Jesus said to them," in the Greek, it would be "And the Jesus said to them." The definite article is being used most of the time. Now, there are certain syntactical circumstances where you actually don't use the definite article. But in some Greek texts, we have theos being used without the definite article in other instances where you would normally expect it. And a lot of folks who think that, that the Trinity is in the Bible are happy to imagine that this is still referring to the God of Israel. It's just identifying Jesus as the God of Israel, because obviously, that's what the

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Trinity is, baby. That's, that's what the Bible is saying. But we've got a, we got a handful of very interesting commentary from people from before and after the Gospel of John, which is where this is most debated. Okay. Who actually directly address what they're doing. And I want to start with Philo. Philo of Alexandria was born at the end of the first century BCE, died around 50-ish, 50, 60 CE, so was alive during the life of Jesus. And he wrote a lot of texts, way too much, but he-

• 43:20Speaker 01

  He was Jewish, right?

• 43:21Speaker 00

  Uh, he, yes, he was an early Jewish philosopher. So, um, he, he was incorporating a lot of Stoic and Middle Platonic philosophy into Judaism, kind of, um, it's a little bit syncretistic, but basically trying to, to show that Judaism fits within a Greek philosophical worldview. But, uh, he's, he talks a lot about the logos and the, and this is translated word most of the time in English translations, the word of God, for instance, in Greek is logos, the, and, um, uh, and when he's, uh, when he's talking about the logos, he's largely borrowing this framework from Greco-Roman philosophy, because starting with Plato,

• 44:05Speaker 00

  but also including Stoicism, they, they had this concept of the logos as God's rationality. And it could be the rationality, uh, that was inside God's head. So like you have an idea that's inside your head, but then when you, once you speak it, it is expressed and it is now outside of you and it is separate from you. And so the logos can be, can be both things, but there's a part where-

• 44:32Speaker 01

  When, when you say that it's like rationality, then it makes sense to me that logos would be the root word of our logic.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, that's exactly right. So, um, we have Philo in a text called On Dreams. Like I said, he wrote about too many things, but he, he's, he's examining a lot of, a lot of different ways that, that God is, is influencing dreams and stuff like that. But there's one part where he's talking about Genesis 31, 13, and this is where God, well, it says that it's the angel of the Lord appears to Jacob. And then in verse 13 says, "I am the God of Bethel," where you anointed the altar and all that kind of stuff. And Philo is quoting the Greek translation, which doesn't say that.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  It says, "I am the God that anointed you, or that appeared to you in the place of God." Because Bethel means house of God. And so the Greek translators just thought, oh, this is a sentence, not a name. And so Philo's like, huh, this is weird. Let's consider whether there are two gods. And now I'm quoting from On Dreams, Book One, section, starting in section 228. "For we read, 'I am the God that appeared to thee not in my place, but in the place of God, as though it were another's.'" What are we to say then? "He that is truly

• 46:03Speaker 00

  God is one, but those that are improperly so-called are more than one. Accordingly, the Holy Word, in the present instance, has indicated him who is truly God by means of the articles, saying, 'I am Thee God,' definite article, Thee, while it omits the article when mentioning him who is improperly so-called, saying, 'Who appeared to thee in the place not of Thee God, but simply of God.'" Here it gives the title of God to his chief logos, his chief word, "not from any superstitious nicety in applying names, but with one aim before him, to use words to express facts." And so what Philo is basically saying is that

• 46:46Speaker 00

  you have one entity that is truly, in essence, God. And then you have other entities that can just be referred to as God without actually being God. And when the scriptures are referring to those entities as God, even though they're not God, it omits the definite article.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  So they're not Thee God. They're not Thee God. They're just God. And that's somehow a lower place in the...

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, and a way to think of it is to understand God here, the theos in the qualitative sense.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  So it would be, it would be kind of like, you know, another word for God in English coming through different routes is deity.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  And you could say, there's the deity, and then there's deity.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  And so, so and so is not the deity, so and so is just deity. And so it kind of means divine.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  And so, and Philo talks about this elsewhere, there's a, there's a part where he's talking about passage in Genesis where he's wondering why God tells somebody to

• 47:59Speaker 00

  to come up to God, I think it is, and he says, why not come up to me, or something like that? And he says that it's not proper to to refer to this entity as, as the God, because this is the second God. God's chief logos, God's word. So Philo explicitly refers to the word of God as a second God.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  And so when, when this is being written less than a century prior to the Gospel of John, and the Gospel of John seems to be relying an awful lot on very similar philosophical frameworks. But then we get to this really interesting discussion in Justin Martyr, and Justin Martyr is...

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Well, we should mention the part of the Gospel of John that

• 48:49Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  That we're, that we're sort of talking about, which is John 1:1, right?

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Well, John 1:1 is the main one, but there are a few places where you have theos being used without the definite article, where we might expect the definite article if it's referring to the God of Israel. But yes, John 1:1 says, "In the beginning was the word, and the word was prostonteon," which means with God, or toward God, or next to God. And then it says, "ke theos inologos," and theos was the word. And that's traditionally translated, "and the word was God," which would identify the word as the very God of Israel. But there's no definite article there. And in this situation, the syntactical relationship

• 49:34Speaker 00

  indicates that the word theos is not being used to identify a specific god, but is used in the qualitative sense to mean deity or divine. And so the author could be appealing to something very close to what what Philo is saying.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  And you're saying that the author of the Gospel of John came after Philo. The Gospel was written after, so could have been aware of Philo's writing?

• 50:00Speaker 00

  I think almost certainly aware of Philo's writing because there's because the the logos theology that we find in John is resonates quite a lot with what the logos theology that we find in Philo.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so when the author of John excludes that definite article, it's likely an intentional thing that's informed by Philo's ideas of that, how that definite article operates.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  In this particular instance, the we wouldn't necessarily expect the definite article. So it's not definitive there.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  But I think what the author is doing is it's using the the word God with this understanding that there can be the God and then there can be entities that are improperly so-called or people who carry the label without being God.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  So you could say, and the word was with God and the word was divine, or the word was also deity in some way, but but not conflate them as the same.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  Right, it's not it's not equating them. And there's another interesting occurrence in John 10, where a lot of people will point out that the Jesus's Jewish opponents understood that he was identifying as the very God of Israel when he says, I and the Father are one. And they take up rocks to stone him. And in verse 33, and Jesus is like, for which of my good works are you stoning me? And they say, we're not stoning you for your good works. We're stoning you because you being human make yourself God. Now, if you look at an English translation, that's capital G God. It makes it sound like they're saying you're claiming to be the God of Israel.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  But I don't think that's what's going on because in the Greek, there should be a definite article there, and there's not.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  And so I think, and there are a lot of later manuscripts that add the definite article because they're like, huh, why doesn't have a definite, it should have a definite article, put a definite article in there. But without the article, if we keep Philo's statement in mind, the author of John could be representing the Jewish foes of Jesus as understanding Jesus to be claiming to be not necessarily the God of Israel, but at least divine.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  Much like the logos. And I think there's some parallelism going on here too, because the word anthropos, which means human, also does not have a definite article. And so, I mean, just the symmetry of the accusation is you are human, and that's a qualitative statement, and you're making yourself divine, also a qualitative statement. So it would be, it would be more parallel that way. And Jesus's response is, nah, uh, look at Psalm 82, where the scripture says, you are gods, talking to humans. It's very clearly not saying you are the God of Israel, just that you're, you're divinities, you're gods.

• 53:10Speaker 00

  And, and so Jesus's defense makes no sense, if we understand this passage, to be talking about the accusation that Jesus is claiming to be the very God of Israel.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  And so there are a handful of instances in the Gospel of John where we have this use of theos without the definite article that, in light of Philo's statement, probably indicates an intentional reference to the logos as divine, not as the very God of Israel.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  All right.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  And then, and then you might say, well, that was so much later than Philo, John's not doing that. But we find very similar statements.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  Or discussions in even later authors, as late as the 3rd century CE. But I want to, I want to stop first in Justin Martyr, who's writing around 150 CE. So, right around the dead center of the 2nd century CE. And Justin is actually talking to, uh, this is a text called Dialogue with Trifo. And it's, it's this dialectic back and forth between Justin and a Jewish thinker. And Justin is just trying to prove Christianity true from the Jewish scriptures. But he says in this, uh, in this one section, "I shall attempt to prove my assertion, namely that there exists and is mentioned in scripture,

• 54:40Speaker 00

  another God and Lord under the Creator of all things, who is also called an angel." And we have multiple references to Jesus as the logos, the angel, and another God. And a little bit down, he says, "Then, if I could not prove to you from the scriptures that one of these three," and he's talking about Genesis 18, where the three entities appeared to Abraham, "if I could not prove to you from the scriptures that one of these three is God, and yet is termed an angel, because as stated above, he delivered the messages of God, the Creator of all, to whomsoever God desires," and on and on and on.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  So, he's talking about how there's a being that is not God that is referred to as God.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:29Speaker 00

  Then he says, "Let us return to the scriptures, and I shall try to convince you that he who is said to have appeared to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses is called God." Now, all these times Jesus has been referred to as God, Justin Martyr has omitted the definite article.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  And, and he says, "He who is said to have appeared to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, and is called God, is distinct from God, the Creator." Distinct, that is, in number, but not in mind. And the word in Greek, gnome, which is translated here, mind, is like will. Intent. It doesn't mean, it doesn't mean substance or essence. It just means in, in intent or in will. So Justin Martyr is doing the same thing that Philo explains. Using the word God without the definite article to refer to the word of God, to the logos whom Justin understands to be Jesus.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  And then I, I think one of the most illuminating references comes from Origin of Alexandria. So this is a writer, a theologian and all, um, who's in Alexandria in the early third century CE. And is talking about John 1:1. And he says, um, John has used the articles in one place and omitted them in another very precisely. And not as though he did not understand the precision of the Greek language. In the case of the word, he adds the article "the", but in the case of the noun "God", he inserts it in one place and omits it in another.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  For he adds the article when the noun "God" stands for the uncreated cause of the universe, but he omits it when the word is referred to as "God". And as "the God" and "God" differ in these places, so perhaps "the word" and "word" differ. And he goes on to talk about, for like three pages, about what it means for God and the word to be referred to as "the God" versus just "God" and "the word" versus just "word". So even as late as the thirds, this is like 220, 230 CE. This is almost 200 years after Philo is writing.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  We have multiple authors who are, who are either mimicking what Philo was talking about or are quite explicitly addressing what John is talking about as reflecting Philo's idea that this is, there's a distinction to be made here between "hotheos", "the God", and just "theos", "God".

• 58:20Speaker 01

  I guess one of the questions that that, that that origin quote brings up for me is...

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Was the author of the Gospel of John a good writer? Like, was he a careful and good writer? Because if so, then yeah, it stands to reason that these would be conscious choices that this writer is making.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  If they are, you know, expert in the language, then it makes sense to say that these were conscious decisions.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, the author of the Gospel of John is generally treated as a competent writer. Certainly not the most flowery prose that has ever posed, but is definitely not a clumsy or an uncareful writer. Now, in terms of editing, that's another story, as we've talked about with Hugo Mendes. But in terms of the Greek, yeah, I think the author is considered competent. And I want to read one more portion from Origen.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  He says, "The God, therefore, is the true God. The others are gods formed according to Him as images of the prototype." But again, the archetypal image of the many images is the Word, with the God who was in the beginning. By being with the God, He always continues to be God, without the definite article. So very clearly, Origen is, has either noticed what Philo is doing and noticed that John is doing the same thing, or has just noticed this pattern in John, independent of Philo,

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  and is arriving at a very similar conclusion. I happen to think he probably is aware of Philo and is saying, hey, that's a framework for understanding what the author of the Gospel of John is doing. But Origen was also probably the quintessential proto-Trinitarian who thought that Jesus was God. So I think what's happening is this is a discussion about this vestige.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  Of the way earlier authors are talking about the word as distinct from God and and origin is noticing it, even though he's already developing a far more sophisticated trinitarian philosophy, even though I think he was a bit of a subordinationist and thought that the word and Jesus was less than, even if there are some scholars who argue that he was no subordinationist and was one of the first true trinitarians, but that remains to be seen, in my opinion.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Well, and it points out that, you know, as we discuss the Trinity and whatever, and we've talked about the Trinity idea before, it was a later innovation. It was not like, it developed over a long time after all of this was written, after, after all of the,

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  The, the books of the New Testament were written.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. And even after Justin Martyr, because I think he's, he says multiple times, the word is another God.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  So yeah, you don't have the, no, no, it's very God from very God, quite yet.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Interesting. There you go. I, you know, I like it when we do a little bit of, a little bit of grammatical geek outery. I enjoy those, those moments that I think that's a lot of fun.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  I think so too.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  If you, so, okay, I want to hear the, the DMV, the Dan McClellan translation of John 1:1. How would you, how would you do it?

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  So for an academic audience, I would say, and the word was deity, but I, that would require translating the, oh, says deity in the other places as well. And the word was with the deity and the word was deity. I think that would be most precise, but deity is a, is a pretty cumbersome word for a lot of people. So for the general public, I would translate it divine.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  Okay. Okay. So, and the word was with God and the word was divine.

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Okay. Interesting. Well, there you have it, friends. If you would like to become a part of making this show happen every week, every episode, you can go to our Patreon over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Sign up there, give us a little bit of money, you get access to an early and ad-free version of every episode, you can get access to the after-party with bonus content every week, and you can make our hearts swell with joy, and that's always nice. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. Thanks to JJ for being our producer, and we'll talk to you all next time.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

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