Let's Get Weird!

Most parents think their kids are pretty great. That makes sense. But if your son is the messianic savior of the world, the bragging rights are kind of through the roof. And that's what we get in Hebrews 1. The claim here is that God told the prophets about Jesus, and now all those awesome prophesies have come true. And Hebrews 1 seems to be bringing receipts. It quotes from all over the Hebrew Bible to point to Jesus being the begotten son and to say that angels will worship him. The question is: is that what those passages actually meant? Were they really pointing to Jesus? Then, we're taking a look at one of the weirder ancient Christian texts. It's called The Shepherd of Hermas, and for quite a while in the ancient world, it was considered scripture. So what's going on with this text? Was it a real contender to be included in the canon, or did it never stand a chance? ---- For access to an early, ad-free version of every episode of Data Over Dogma, exclusive content, and the opportunity to support our work, please consider becoming a monthly patron at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on the various social media places: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/data_over_dogma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Have you ordered Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Bible Says So⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ yet??? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:40Speaker 01

  I will say, it reads a little differently than a lot of the other texts. I mean, it starts out with a story about seeing a girl naked, and moves on from there.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  You could just label it "Let's Get Weird."

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  And 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

  It's a beautiful day. It's a fun life. We're, we're out here combating, and I feel fine.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Well, that's, that's, what more can you ask for?

• 2:23Speaker 01

  What more can you ask for?

• 2:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  We've got a fun show coming up today. In the latter half of the show, we're going to be talking about, we're gonna do an is it canon? And no, it decidedly is not. You've probably never heard of the Shepherd of Hermes, but, or Hermes, I think is how it's pronounced if it's on a bag.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  But first, we're gonna actually do a, it's a chapter and verse. We're just gonna go straight for the first chapter of Hebrews.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  It means a bunch of things. It has implications. I read it and I was, I'll be honest, I'm not 100% sure what direction we're going in this conversation. So I'm excited to learn about that.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  So I think we should just dive right into chapter and verse.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  So here we are in Hebrews, chapter one. It's the first chapter. And we should start by saying, or I'm gonna start by asking you,

• 3:32Speaker 01

  do we know who wrote this? What, Hebrews?

• 3:34Speaker 00

  We do not. No, there, there have been a variety of propositions. None of them are taken particularly seriously. There, there are folks out there who think Paul, the apostle, wrote Hebrews.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  He didn't. That's not really something to be taken seriously.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  This is not a Pauline epistle?

• 3:56Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, no. And some other names that have been thrown out there. Apollos is, is an early Christian.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  That some people thought. Priscilla or Aquila. This is a couple that's, that's mentioned in the New Testament.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Basically, if there's somebody who sounds like they fit the bill and has been mentioned in the New Testament, somebody out there has probably suggested they are the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. But no, we don't really have any idea who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  And what Hebrews, which Hebrews are we talking about here?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Like, all of the epistles are to, like, I'm used to epistles going to the people of Corinth, you know what I mean? Or like a city or a place, like, I don't even know who the intended Hebrews are in this case.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Well, here, the idea is it's being written to probably Jewish folks, Jewish Christians. It is, a lot of the passages that are being interpreted here are being interpreted in kind of a rabbinic-y style. So, but the point is to say that the Christian gospel and Jesus supersede or are greater than what is the Jewish tradition that is being inherited.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, that's actually clear once you read it. So that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So, so, yeah, it's kind of a letter to people who haven't caught on yet to the fact that Jesus is awesome. You better, you better get with it.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  And it starts with, sort of, it almost feels, I will say this, now that, since we're thinking about it in those terms, it feels defensive. You know what I mean? It feels, it feels like it's like, no, uh, but wait, is how it starts.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And it may be, it may be attempting to push back against a Judaizing movement, the idea that followers of Jesus still have to be, you know, fully engaged in the law of Moses and have to be following all these rules, which is something that, you know, we probably see in the Gospel of Matthew. Some folks think we see it in the, the letter of James. But this is probably coming the last three decades of the first century CE, so somewhere between like, Seventy and a hundred CE, so it's not the last text that's being written,

• 6:36Speaker 00

  but it's fairly late in the tradition and whether or not this is what kind of moves the needle the most towards a separation between Judaism and Christianity. Now, I don't know if there's a strong case to make for that, but it wouldn't be particularly surprising. But yeah, it's trying to convince folks that Jesus is the Messiah. This is the one we've been waiting for. This is the one that has been prophesied about. If you're on the fence regarding the identity of Jesus, yeah, Jesus, everything points to Jesus and Jesus is the man, so.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. It starts out by sort of declaring that God had this son and that a son is better than angels. Son, Trump, like we're building a hierarchy here.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  And angels are below, like it's God, and now we're slotting in Jesus above angels.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, and this is interesting because there's, there are all kinds of ways that this speaks to some of what's going on in this time period and even after. Because you have in this time period, no doubt, but definitely in the centuries after in late antiquity, you have angels as kind of intercessors for people to God. You have all kinds of curses and blessings, and you have bowls with text on them. And we're invoking the names of all these angels. Greco-Roman period Judaism saw this explosion of contemplation of names and missions and personalities and hierarchies associated with angels.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  And so they become kind of the mediators between heaven and earth.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember first Enoch going crazy about the angels.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, awful lot about angels. And the idea here seems to be that. No, we've got, we've got something better than that. And I was, I was looking at the Greek and, and I was kind of surprised by some of the, the alliteration here because Hebrews 1:1, the first verse, it has, how many words in it? Five, 10, 12 total words, if even including definite articles. And 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of them begin with the letter P. So there's a, there's a lot of alliteration. You've got polymeros, polytropos, palae, patrasen, profites. You, you've, it is a very kind of, uh, there's definitely a prose thing going on here

• 9:13Speaker 00

  that doesn't come through in translation. But, but yeah, you have, "Long ago, God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets. But in these last days, he has spoken to us by a son whom he appointed heir of all things through whom he created the worlds." And, and so it's like, yeah, we used to do things with prophets. By the way, angels ain't no thing. And, um, the, you know, I, you imagine that we would go into talking about why Jesus is better than the prophets, but no, we go into

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  Why Jesus is better than angels.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  It does quickly pivot off of the prophets.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  It, it, it does in verse 3, it, it's all about his glory. It says he, this is in reference to Jesus. "He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs."

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, and this is interesting because there is a tradition of, of, um, a, a head angel who is endowed with the divine name.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Um, you know, this pops up later in rabbinic literature, uh, with Metatron. Metatron is the Adonai Katone, or the lesser Adonai, whose name is the same as his masters. And, um, you have in San, I think it's Sanhedrin 38B, where a certain heretic comes to Ravidit and says, "Hey, in Exodus 24, Adonai says, 'Come up to Adonai.' Why doesn't Adonai say, 'Come up to me'?" And Ravidit says, "Oh, you, you silly heretic." The Adonai in the passage is not the actual Adonai, that's Metatron. Because, and then quotes Exodus 23 21, "My name is in him. Therefore, this angel Metatron carries around the divine name,

• 11:10Speaker 00

  and so can be referred to by the divine name." And we have something similar going on here, because it seems to me that, you know, you have in the hymn in Philippians 2, you have in the Gospel of John, you have in a number of places, this idea that Jesus has been given the divine name.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  And so, in my opinion, that's kind of riffing on the name-bearing angel tradition, and is kind of borrowing from it. And here, the author seems to be saying, "Angels? Nah. Jesus has a better name given to him than these silly angels." And so, it's almost kind of appropriating that that claim and saying, "No, the angels don't have the name, it's Jesus who has the name." And then you get verses 5 through 14, which I think are going to be the meat of our discussion here.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Where it's basically, this segment is labeled in the NRSVUE, "The Son is superior to angels."

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  And we basically just get a bunch of quotations of passages from the Hebrew Bible about how Jesus is better than the angels.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  And can I just say, when I first read this, I didn't know where these quotations were from. I had to look it up, but I assumed that they were New Testament quotations, because they all sound, and they're all made to sound like, they are about Jesus specifically.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  And then when I went and looked them up, I'm like, "Oh, oh no, these aren't originally about Jesus, they're just being leveraged."

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  "In a different way," and it's a very confusing device to me.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Well, and this is how these passages would have worked in Greco-Roman period Judaism, which was very, and this is even coming after, I think you could probably say Greco-Roman period Judaism is over around 70 CE. That's where the temple is destroyed. And this is coming after that. But in this time period, they're, they're reading things very messianically, and particularly in the Septuagint. And so, anything that seems to have a kind of squishy, unknown referent, where we're not sure who this is, or we might be sure who this is. We're going to talk about one verse where if you look up the original, it says, "This is who I'm talking about."

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  And it's not the Messiah.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  But the, things are being reread messianically. And so, I think that's what the author is doing here. According to the tradition that they have inherited, these passages get read messianically, even though that's not what they were originally doing.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. I mean, the first thing that we find is, in verse five, it says, "For to which of the angels did God ever say, 'You are my son; today I have begotten you.' And I think I could be forgiven for assuming that that was a New Testament reference."

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Where is that? What is, what is "You are my son; today I have begotten you"?

• 14:12Speaker 00

  This is from Psalm 2.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  And it's verse 7, which says, if we go look at the Psalm in the NRSVUE, it says, "I will tell the decree of the Lord, or of Adonai. He said to me, 'You are my son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.'" And this is talking to the Davidic king. And so, the idea really is that the king is the one who is kind of adopted into divinity.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  It might be an enthronement idea, that on the ceremony of the king's enthronement is the- The event of the adoption of the king by God. There's a wonderful book written by John Collins and Adela Collins called King and Messiah as Son of God, which reviews how the king and the Messiah could be conceptualized as the Son of God. And so Psalm 2 is a part of this, it plays into it.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  But if you're reading this messianically, the Davidic king is long gone. There's no hope of really any return. And so the tradition gets renegotiated. And we're not looking for a human king. We're actually looking for a Messiah who is coming in the Davidic line. And, you know, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, you see two different kinds of messiahs. You see the Messiah Ben David, the political, kingly Messiah, and then the Messiah Ben Yosef, the priestly Messiah. And so Jesus is kind of combining the two, because later on in Hebrews, you're going to talk about how Jesus is the priest after the order

• 16:12Speaker 00

  of Melchizedek. But here, we're appealing to rhetoric that has to do with the king from Psalm 2:7.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. I'm still, it's so interesting. I'm still sort of hung up on this, you know, this Psalm talking about, "You are my son. Today I have begotten you." And then later, all of the Jesus stuff being like, "My only begotten son."

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  It, if you're not reading carefully, it's, yeah, I don't know.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  It's just interesting, because the way that the New Testament talks about these phrases or uses these phrases, it's pretending that these phrases have never been used before.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, or at least have not been used in other ways.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And you have, the whole Son of God thing is also somewhat Greco-Roman, because you have, like, the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, Mark 1:1, the good news or the gospel, the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, and then whether or not the Son of God. Line is there is a text critical thing, but we have, we have inscriptions, the pre-Enne inscription, for instance, talks about the good news of the coming into the world of the God Augustus, who is, who is also a son of God. And this predates the Gospel of

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Mark by almost a century. And so, yeah, there, it's kind of dovetailing the Jewish idea of a king as son of God with a more Greco-Roman idea of an emperor or a king as son of God, and, and kind of treating that idea as encapsulating both of these by elevating the son of God over both of them. So, so yeah, it's a renegotiation for sure. And then I think that, go ahead.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  I was just gonna say presumably within the Psalm, there's no divinity imparted as the son of God.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  That's, that's an open question. I think there were a lot of scholars who would say that there is a sense in which the king is divine. Now, now, not the God of Israel, it's, it's not a trinitarian notion of divinity, but that there could be a sense in which the God, the, the king is divine. Certainly, the king was, was understood to be in some sense divine in the nations around Israel. And as we're gonna see, the king gets called God in another Psalm, so.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. Well, let's, let's keep moving then.

• 18:55Speaker 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, 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.

• 19:44Speaker 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.

• 20:11Speaker 01

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• 22:12Speaker 01

  What are we on? Six, verse six?

• 22:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  And again, when he, when he brings the firstborn into the world, he says, "Let all God's angels worship him." Of the angels, he says, "He makes his angels winds and his servants flames of fire." Where are these from?

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Well, the, so first we have, "Let all God's angels worship him," which is an artifact of the Septuagint's translation of a passage from probably Deuteronomy 3243. Now, if you look up Deuteronomy 3243 in a, in a Bible today, it's not going to say anything about this. But based on the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scroll fragment, we know that the Hebrew originally said, "Worship him all gods." And this, and this actually is something that we find in Psalm 97:7. It says the exact same thing, "Worship him all gods."

• 23:17Speaker 00

  And I think that Psalm 97:7 is quoting this original version of Deuteronomy 3243. But when we go into the Septuagint, we have two different versions of the one statement. None of them exactly match. But it has, "Do obeisance to him, all sons of God." And then rejoice all the nations with his people. And then it says, "And strengthen him, all the angels of God." And

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so we got gods, which then get reinterpreted as either sons of God or angels of God. And then in Hebrews, they decide to go with the angels and say, let all God's angels worship Him. So the son is greater than the angels, because the angels have to worship the son.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Of course, that's only if you're looking in the Septuagint. If you're looking in the Hebrew, it's just Elohim.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  And the, the worship Him is not directed at the Messiah. In Deuteronomy 3243, it's directed at Adonai, the, the God of Israel. So.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  This is where it got interesting, because for me, because this chapter repeatedly kind of conflates Jesus with God, or like continually like kind of, but also speaks about Jesus in very separate terms. So I can understand, like this, this is the first time I've read something and just been like, I can't, like if I were in an argument, if I were imagining an argument between a Trinitarian and a non-Trinitarian, they could both make strong cases from just this chapter, it feels like to me.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And, and there, there are an awful lot of people who, who think of this chapter as like one of the most, one of the highest Christologies in, in the whole New Testament. But I mean, it is problematic, because if we go back to the Hebrew Bible, it's clearly not talking about any mediator, any son, or anything like that. It's, it's just the, the song of Moses telling all the other gods of the nations to worship Adonai.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  And when you are reading it in the Septuagint translation, that's kind of lost. And so the, the author of Hebrews doesn't think that it's talking about that. The author of Hebrews thinks it's God telling the angels to worship the son. And that's just not what's going on. And then the, um, the next verse is, uh, of the angels, he says, "He makes his angels winds and his servants flames of fire." And this is, uh, this is Psalm 104, which in, uh, translated from the Hebrew, it says, "You make the winds your messengers." And the Hebrew there is Malachav, um, which is actually his messengers.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  "Fire and flame your ministers." So what? How this is relevant to the question of the sun's relationship to the angels is meh.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Well, it goes on. So it says, of the angels, he says, he makes the angels winds and his servants flames of fire. But of the sun, he says, and then here's another quote, "Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, and your scepter of righteousness, the scepter of your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness. Therefore, God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions. And I was lost. I will admit, I read that and I was like, how are, how is that making a point? I don't know what the point is that's being made here.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  Well, I think the, the point is that this is God talking to Jesus in the second person. And so when it says, "Your throne, O God," this is the Father calling Jesus God.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  So this is.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Yeah, all right.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, cuz all of these are about what God's saying. Verse five, did God ever say? And again, when he brings, he says, of the angels, he says, but of the sun, he says, so it's comparing. You know, he makes his angels winds and his servants flames of fire, big whoop. Of the sun, he says, he calls him God.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  And your throne is forever and ever, and the scepter of righteousness is the scepter of your kingdom.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Again, we're in the Psalms. We're in Psalm 45 here. And, and here is where you've got to go back to the beginning of Psalm 45. This is a ode for a royal wedding. And the first verse says, "My heart overflows with a goodly theme. I address my verses to the king."

• 28:08Speaker 00

  My tongue is like the pen of a ready scribe. And then we have in the second person, the psalmist addressing the Davidic king. And it starts in verse two, "You are the most handsome of men." And in the Hebrew, this is benedam. This is the children of humanity. This is, "You are the most handsome human."

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  So this is not talking about any divine Messiah. "Graces poured upon your lips, therefore God has blessed you forever. Gird your sword on your thigh, O mighty one, in your glory and majesty. In your majesty, ride on victoriously for the cause of truth and to defend the right. Let your right hand teach you dread deeds. Your arrows are sharp in the heart of the king's enemies. The peoples fall under you. Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever." And so here, the psalmist is addressing the king and in the vocative case, calls the king God. "O God."

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  And so it's just Elohim. And this is not to say that the king is the very God of Israel, but to recognize the divine nature of the king because of his position. This is a relational deity, not necessarily. And you know, you have this elsewhere. You have this in Exodus 7:1, where God tells Moses, "I will make you a god to Pharaoh." And you have other examples of it, even in John, chapter 10, when the people accuse Jesus of blaspheming because even though he's a human, he makes himself divine. Jesus says, "Hey, your own scriptures say humans can be gods." Look at Psalm 82, where it says, "You are gods.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  If the humans to whom the word of God came can be called gods, you can't get on my case for saying I'm the son of God." So you have examples of humans being referred to using divine terms, which is what's going on here. And then in verse seven, "You love righteousness and hate wickedness. Therefore, God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions." And there are ways to reinterpret this, like "Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever." You could say, Your divine throne, your throne is of God and it will endure forever and ever. And then you've got therefore God, your God. You know, that could be apposition.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Therefore, the guy up there, God, that is to say, your God.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Or it could be using the vocative again and saying therefore you God, the God of you, that God up there, the other God has anointed you.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  You are the subordinate God to another God, sort of thing. By the way, I should just clarify one phrase that I didn't necessarily understand. You said this is to a Davidic king. Does that mean just a king in the line of David?

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the idea in the Psalms here is that this is, this is talking about a king in the line of David. This, this would have been written well after David was alive. But the idea is that David's, because David's rule is, you know, divinely appointed and, and approved and everything like that. Everyone who's coming in that line is, is a part of the same thing, which is why it doesn't explicitly name it as only David, but probably any king who's operating within that line. Or if it's written in the exilic period, or at least after the Davidic line was broken, it could be just kind of fantasizing about a Davidic line.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  But yeah, so, so when it says of the son, he says, your throne, oh God, is forever and ever. That's a reinterpretation.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  And the, the passage did not refer to the king as the very God of Israel. And so we don't really need to read the author's quotation of the Septuagint's version of this as identifying Jesus as the very God of Israel either. There are other ways to understand what it means to call a human God, Elohim or a Theos. And, and those other ways make more sense of what's going on here. Because, you know, you would, I mean, the, the author doesn't have to go through all these quotations. If, if the author is saying, well, Jesus is God. You don't need to be like, well, God said Jesus was better than the angels. You, you can just say, well, Jesus is God.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Obviously, Jesus is better than the angels. Because God created the angels and the angels are all subordinate to him. This is about God talking about a separate being.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it does seem like this is, yeah, the argument here is not Jesus is God. The argument is Jesus is below God, but above all the other sort of heavenly beings.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Or divine beings.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  It goes on, let's see.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  I mean, it basically goes on from there. The next quote is, it says, "In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth and the heavens." This one kind of took me for, threw me for a loop.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  So, so this is again, this is the, the author of Hebrews saying of, saying that this is something that God said of the Son.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  So he says, basically, God said of the Son, "In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth and the heavens are, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain. They will all wear out like clothing, like a cloak. You will roll them up and like clothing, they will be changed, but you are the same and your years will never end." So is this saying somehow that Jesus created the earth?

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Cause that's kind of what I'm reading. What I'm reading is that God is saying of the Son that, and, and God is calling, at least according to the author of Hebrews, God is calling Jesus Lord and saying, "You founded the earth and the heavens are the work of your hands."

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is, and this is from Psalm 102. I'll, I'll just read what we've got here where, starting in verse 24, says, "Oh my God, I say, do not take me away at the midpoint of my life. Who, you whose years endure throughout all generations. Long ago you laid the foundation of the earth and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you endure. They will all wear out like a garment. You change them like clothing and they pass away, but you are the same and your years have no end." And.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  So this is a psalmist speaking to Adonai himself.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Yes, in, in the Psalms, this is definitely the Psalm of speaking to God. Now let me see if the, the word for Lord there is. Because in Hebrews, it says, "In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth." And Psalm 102 doesn't... Okay, so in the ancient Greek translation, it includes "Kiri-ei," it includes "Lord." That's not in the Hebrew.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  It just says, "Long ago, you laid the foundation of the earth." Where is that?

• 35:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. "Luthanaim," in the before times, "the earth you established." So we have "Kiri-ei," which is the vocative of "Lord." And so this is not a substitution for the tetragrammaton. This is just saying "Lord" in the secular sense, which the psalmist seems to be treating as a reference to Jesus and not as a reference to the very God of Israel. And let me see if...

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Psalm 1... I said, "My God..." Okay, so...

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it looks like the Septuagint. So in the Hebrew, it says, "Oh, my God, I say, do not take me away at the midpoint of my life." And in Hebrew, that is "Omar Eli." And "Eli" means "my God." But if you don't have the vowels right there, you could understand that to be saying, "He said to me." Like, the consonants there are identical. "He said to me" versus "my God, I say," or something like that. And I'm looking at the Septuagint of Psalm 101:25,

• 37:06Speaker 00

  and it looks like it says...

• 37:12Speaker 00

  "He answered him in the ways, tell me the paucity of my days, do not take me away at the midpoint of my days." Verse 25. Yeah, it doesn't mention God in the, in the ancient Greek. And so we, in fact, it does have the "me", which suggests that the Greek translator has misunderstood "elie", to mean, "to me", or something like that. So, God has been removed from the original Psalm, and we're reinterpreting this as a reference to somebody else,

• 37:53Speaker 00

  who, yeah, was, founded the earth and the heavens are the work of your hands. So it sounds like that's talking about, the, the author of Hebrews understands that to be talking about Jesus.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  I mean, just the language of it is surprising to me. To he, like, it, it, what's surprising to me is that the author of Hebrews sees that language and believes that that is God talking? Like, that is not the, the way that God talks about anybody else. That is very clearly the kind of language that other people use to talk about their God.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And when you're, when you're leveraging the scriptures, though, they become kind of this, just amorphous source of rhetoric. And you can, and you can make it be whatever you need it to be. You know, ripped from its context, it sounds an awful lot like it could be talking about the sun. When you go actually read what's going on there, that's not the case. And then verse 13, "And to which of the angels has he ever said, 'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet'?" And now we're, we're going back to the Psalms, specifically Psalm 110, the most quoted Hebrew Bible passage in the entire New Testament.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  But this is God speaking to David. Only because you have, in the Greek translation, it's the Kyrios saying, "To my Kyrios." And so if you understand Kyrios to be a substitution for the Tetragrammaton, then it's kind of squishy. Which one of these is God? Which one is not? But yeah, this is understood as God speaking to Jesus as Lord, or the Messiah as Lord. The reality is that the "my Lord" in Hebrew is kind of just a secular way to refer to the King.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  The psalmist is saying, "God spoke to my Lord," meaning the King, and said, "Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet."

• 40:08Speaker 00

  And then in the Hebrew, it goes on, "The Lord sends out from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your foes. Your people will offer themselves willingly on the day you lead your forces on the holy mountains. From the womb of the morning, like dew, your youth will come to you." And so this is just talking about, again, a Davidic king, and it's just been plucked from its context, divested of that royal context, and shellacked with a more messianic interpretation that allows the author of Hebrews to say, "Yeah, this is talking about the Son."

• 40:42Speaker 01

  You know what's gonna be my favorite part of this segment? Is that people are going to come at us and say, "You're taking it out of context." And this is literally about the author of this work taking a whole bunch of stuff out of context. Like, I guess, taking Bible verses out of context is a time-oddred tradition that even happened in the Bible.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, the tale is old as time. Yeah, and it's not even the New Testament. You can go look in the Hebrew Bible and see the Hebrew Bible taking other Hebrew Bible verses out of context to be renegotiating them.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  But Dan, you're taking the Bible, the Bible taking the Bible out of context. You're taking that out of context.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  Well, and what frequently gets asserted is that, "Well, this is inspired." And so whatever they said it meant, that's right.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Um, even if it's not what was intended in the original context, because they're inspired, they get to make it mean whatever they want. And then verse 14, the final verse of the chapter, "Are not all angels, spirits in the divine service, sent to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?" Which is just making it sound like angels are subservient, angels are no big thing.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  The bellboys of heaven.

• 42:01Speaker 00

  Really? Yes, yes.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  All right. Well, there you, there you have it. Hebrews coming in hot with a bunch of, with, with a sort of legalistic take on, on, on Jesus's divinity by misinterpreting a whole bunch of stuff. All right. Well, that's fascinating. Uh, I'm, I'm interested in that. I think that that's, it's always fun to, to hear, uh, the, you know, the Bible coming in hot.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  With, with, with, uh, Jesus's divinity, um, as misquoted in other parts of the Bible. All right. We're going to move on now to our, is it canon?

• 42:50Speaker 03

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• 43:20Speaker 01

  And the, the book that we're talking about, the shepherd of, of Hermes, of Hermes, of, of, it's a shepherd, H E R M A S.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Um, and, and who, who is, because Hermes, Hermes is not a shepherd himself.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  No.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Uh, who, so Hermes is, uh, apparently, you know, if we're just going to take it at face value, a, a former slave, a slave.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  A person who was sold into slavery.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  And, and in, to, to a woman, is the, is the name of the woman Rhod? Is that, is that what I'm reading correctly?

• 44:07Speaker 00

  You can transliterate it a few different ways, but Rhoda is how I usually see it.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 44:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, let's, let, maybe, maybe we give a little broad 30,000 foot view before.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Fine, fine.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  Cause verse one, we can look at verse one and get an awful lot of data here.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  But Hermes is, is the main character. And then the shepherd of Hermes is a figure that comes in as kind of the spirit guide, the psycho hump, if you will, to kind of lead this, the, the second two thirds.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  The ghost of Christmas past.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Basically, yes, yes. Come in man and know me better.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Is, is what the, the shepherd famously doesn't say. And so, but this is a fascinating text that I think more people should know about because there were an awful lot of people who thought this text was canonical in early Christianity for the first couple of centuries.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  So situated in time, when was this written?

• 45:06Speaker 00

  It was probably written, I think scholars would say, you gotta cast a pretty wide net just because it's, a lot of things are not clear here. But I think some scholars would say the earliest it was written was probably somewhere between 70 to 90 CE and then the latest maybe around 150 CE.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  So, so situated well within the range of other books that are definitely canon.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. There's, there's significant overlap between the, the compositional window for the shepherd of Hermes and several other texts that end up making it into the canon.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  And, and we see folks who, who treat it as inspired scripture. In fact, the Clements of Alexandria in his Stromata says, talks about repeatedly cites the shepherd of Hermes and here talks about how this, some of this stuff was inspiration. He's talking about this, therefore it is in a divine manner that the power which spoke to Hermes by revelation and, and Rhoda, the church, the woman is, is this power he's talking about. By revelation said, the visions and revelations are for the double minded who ponder in their hearts whether these things are or are not. So.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  This is an influential early Christian who says, this is inspired and goes on to quote it a number of times. You have other folks who seem to treat it as inspired scripture. It is included in Codex Sinaiticus.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  Which is one of our earliest, if not our earliest codex that contains more or less the entire New Testament. And it included the Epistle of Barnabas, or the Letter of Barnabas, and then at the very end, the Shepherd of Hermes. And you have others who quote part of the first chapter of the Shepherd of Hermes, which talks about creating things from things that are not, as evidence of creation ex nihilo, although that's not really what it is.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Because when I read it, I was like, oh, that's pretty, that seems pretty clear.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  But it's not what's going on. And we can talk a little bit about what's going on there.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  When we get to that passage. But yeah, it was, it was debated. You have other folks like Tertullian coming in at the, the end of the second century CE who say, nah, this is not really canonical. Origen thought it was inspired, but doesn't include it in his list of New Testament texts. Eusebius treats it as one of those secondary texts. So it almost has kind of an apocryphal status. But by the time you get to the end of the fourth century and the actual firming up of a canon, it gets left out. So it, the, when it comes to the New Testament, the two texts that came the closest to be included, to being included, but were ultimately left out, were the Epistle of Barnabas and the

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Shepherd of Hermes. So this is as close as you get to a New Testament apocryphal text that a lot of folks thought should have been in there.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  I will say, it reads a little differently than a lot of the, the other texts. It's, I mean, it starts out with a story about seeing a girl naked.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  And moves on from there.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  You could, you could just label it, let's get weird, because. It gets really weird and it's divided up into three books. And the first book is usually referred to as the visions. And there are five visions, ranging from like one to seven chapters each. And then the fifth vision is really an introduction of the second book, which is the commandments. And there are 12 commandments. And then the 12th commandment introduces the third book, which is the similitudes. And the, um, the shepherd gets introduced when we move from the visions to the commandments. And the shepherd kind of shows up and is like, you know, the, the lady is clocking out.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  And this is now a night shift, I'm up, so I'm taking over. But, but also I think the name Hermes drops off at that point as well. We don't, we don't hear about Hermes after that. But Hermes is narrating the story and, and, um, we can go to, to verse one of, of the first vision. And, and you mentioned that he was sold into slavery. It starts off, "The one who raised me sold me to a certain Rhoda at Rome." And so we can, we can say a few things about this. The one who raised me, he doesn't say my parents. And, and what's probably going on here is that this Hermes was probably an orphan or left out for exposure or something like that.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  And so they would have initially been raised by somebody who probably would have treated them as an enslaved person.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, yeah, born, it, it sounded, I just assumed that he was born into slavery.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it was probably, um, I, I think most scholars would say, if we had to choose, we would probably say he was orphaned or exposed or something like that. Somebody picked him up and, and said, "Cool, got a kid."

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Free kid.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then, um, if, if they did not use Hermes as slave labor when he was growing up, they sold him as slave labor. And then, and then it goes on to say, "Many years later, I became reacquainted with her and began to love her as a sister." And so many years later makes it sound like she must have either manumitted him or sold him off again. And somehow he got free and then suddenly runs back into her or something. And feels this, um, sisterly love, uh, for, for Rhoda.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Sisterly until one sentence later.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then after some time, so we're skipping ahead a lot. After some time, as she was bathing in the river Tiber, I saw her, gave her my hand and brought her out of the river. Seeing her beauty, I thought in my heart, how happy I would be if I had such a wife, both in regard to beauty and manner. I wanted only this, nothing more. Now, I mentioned to you before we started recording, I have seen nutria swimming around in the Tiber. I would not trust a person coming out of the Tiber River. Certainly wouldn't be like, here, take my hand. I might.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  The Tiber was nicer back then.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  I'm sure it was somewhat nicer, but, but they, they still had, you know, they, they still occasionally threw, you know, dug somebody up and burned their corpse and threw them in the Tiber. Not just kidding. That's from centuries after that. But, um, yeah, it is a, uh, that's a, that's a questionable river in my, in my experience.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Dan does not trust the Tiber.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  But yeah, he's, he's walking along and he's like, what's this? A naked lady? Oh, it's Rhoda, my former master, and then someone I loved in a sisterly manner, um, who suddenly I have a certain kind of feeling for.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  A few feet below my head. Um, anyway, moving on.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, it, the, the, the version that I was, that I've been looking at, is, is slightly different than yours. But yeah, it is interesting because the wording that I see is, uh, I would be, he, he thinks to himself, I would be a happy man if I could but get a wife as handsome and good as she is.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Which seems to me as purely innocuous a thought as a human being can have, seeing a beautiful woman nakedly, uh, emerging from a river. That, that feels like as, as pure of a thought as you can have, uh, or as non-sexual a thought as you can have.

• 53:06Speaker 00

  What, what it makes me think of is, wow, that sure is a pretty lady down there. I wonder if she dates one of the Yankees.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  I don't know that reference.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  You don't know that reference?

• 53:16Speaker 01

  No. Oh, oh, oh, I got it. I, I think. Is it Chris Farley?

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's Chris.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Okay. Okay. Anyway, uh, but.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  It is not an innocuous thought.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  No, it turns out it's a highly problematic thought.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Turns out he is in trouble.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  About this thought.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  And we, we, we obviously don't have time to go through this whole book. It is a very long book. But yeah, he gets, he, he has a, a vision.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Do you want to just quickly explain what the vision is?

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. So he, he gets, he gets sleepy and he's like, you know what? I gotta confess my sins. So he's praying and he has a vision. Heaven opened and I saw that woman upon whom I had set my heart greeting me from heaven with, hello, Hermes. Looking up at her, I said, lady, what are you doing here? But she answered, I was taken up in order to reproach you for your sins before the Lord. I said to her, will you now reproach me? No, she said, but listen to what I am about to say to you. The God who dwells in the heavens and created what is from what is not,

• 54:36Speaker 00

  and increased and multiplied it for the sake of God's holy church is angry with you because you sinned against me.

• 54:46Speaker 00

  So he's like, uh, what are you talking about?

• 54:51Speaker 01

  I've always been real nice to you. What do you mean?

• 54:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then it's laughing, she said to me, the evil desire arose in your heart. Do you not think it is an evil thing? If an evil desire arises in the heart of a just man, it is a sin, a great one. So, so basically he did wrong in jonesing for, um, for her Tiber water drenched form. And she's there, she has been taken up and, um, is, is there to call him to repentance. And he's, uh, yeah, he gets chewed out a little bit and, and we, we have this interesting, then suddenly the lady's really old.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  And now what it is, and here the lady is kind of representative of the body of the church, the church community, and where the sins that have beset the church community have aged the woman. And then later on, she's rejuvenated because there is repentance that is going on. And so there's an awful lot of finger wagging about repentance going on in these visions. The visions are intended to help people feel bad about themselves, but there's also a concern to build the triumphant church and kind of establish the the community of believers and

• 56:18Speaker 00

  distinguish them from the reprobate men of the world. So Hermes is kind of chastised and has to figure out what's going on here and has to be a part of the good ones.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess one of my questions is if the woman is actually a metaphor, if she is the church or whatever, who is Hermes? Presumably also a metaphor?

• 56:46Speaker 00

  I think it's probably just a metaphor for the hearer or the reader.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  Put yourself in Hermes's shoes. Surely you have lusted after a woman you have drawn from the waters of the Tiber. So you can read yourself into Hermes's shoes.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  So yeah, and I think the point of the, and then in the fifth vision, which is taking place a couple, three weeks later, we get the introduction of the angel of repentance, who has come in the guise of a shepherd. And the shepherd might be symbolic of Jesus, but here's something interesting. The word, the name Jesus and the title Christ are never mentioned once anywhere in the entire text.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  But we do have this angel of repentance who is like a shepherd who basically delivers to Hermes the commandments, which which take up the the content of the the second book. And and these commandments are commandments about faith in God, avoiding evil speaking, giving alms in simplicity. You have, basically, we're getting back to the the rules for the church, kind of similar to when we talked about the Didache, where there were a bunch of rules that, you know, the apostle can stay two days, but on the third day, that means he's a bad dude, and you got to get him out of there.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  And he and there's an interesting one that is actually the source of some of the opposition to the canonization of the Shepherd of Hermes, because there there were some early church fathers who treated treated the shepherd as a wicked book, as an adulterous book.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  Because there is instructions for a Christian husband who has divorced his wife because of adultery. If she's committed adultery and he's divorced her, it instructs him to reconcile and forgive her and remarry her if she repents.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  And this is, this is at odds with the ethics of many of the Christians of this time period who said, no, that's that's the end of the story. That's the one, the one thing that merits divorce is adultery. And so to take back an adulterous wife is to advocate for adultery. And so this is one of the the reasons that there were some Christians who condemned the Shepherd of Hermes is because it advocated for forgiving a repentant, formerly adulterous woman. So that comes in one of the commandments.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. The other commandment, like other topics within the commandments are things like honesty and

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Sexual purity and not slandering people, just sort of nice, you know, standard things.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, pretty run of the mill sets of commandments.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  And then we get to these similitudes and there's an interesting one that came up recently. Um, and a video that I did where, uh, somebody was asking about what this, the first similitude means when it says, at one point, uh, it talks about, uh, wealth and what you're supposed to do with wealth. And it says instead of-

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Hoard it like a dragon.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  Like a troll under a bridge.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  You gotta hoard that stuff. Um, well, what the, the, the first similitude says is instead of lands, therefore buy afflicted souls according as each one is able and visit widows and orphans and do not overlook them and spend your wealth and all your preparations which you receive from the Lord upon such lands and houses. Now, the, the question here is what does that mean by afflicted souls?

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  There's an argument that-

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  It's just, it's an especially weird construction from a book that starts out with slavery. Like-

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  A, a book that starts out with, I was sold to someone.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  It feels like a weird metaphor to say, go out and buy souls.

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  Well, and, and the author never says that was a bad thing.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  The author was just like, yeah, the one who raised me sold me and then a little while later, um, you know, she did it for me big time. Um, the, yeah, it's odd. And so there, there is an argument that has been made that, that this is talking about buying enslaved folks to manumit them, which would, which would sound like, uh, condemnation of the practice of buying, selling and owning other human beings and slavery. I don't think that's what's going on here.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's not how I interpreted the idea.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, there are a couple of things that, interpretations that I think would come first. There, because there is no practice known from early Christianity of purchasing enslaved folks, even just enslaved Christians, in order to free them. We, as far as we know, that never happened. There were folks who would go around and pay fines in order to free people from prison.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  Kind of more in the vein of, I was imprisoned and you visited me. Kind of the true religion of James. The idea of buying afflicted souls would mean to pay to free, you know, imprisoned souls. So that's one thing that it could be about. Another thing is that it could be just a poetic way to refer to general charity, because immediately after it says, "Visit widows and orphans."

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  And orphans and widows are kind of your, your standard symbols of the poor and the needy. These were the canaries in the coal mine of social justice. And so the idea may just be, hey, if you've got wealth, instead of buying up land, go spend it on helping the poor and the needy and the widows and the orphans and the foreigners and the oppressed.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, when I read that phrase, that afflicted souls phrase, to my mind, what it meant was you're buying them out of their affliction. You know what I mean? Go pay for them to no longer be afflicted.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  You have the means to help them.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  And, and I think that's probably the best reading, or at least the, the intended sense that's probably sitting closest to the surface. I think the, the idea of imprisoned people paying for them to be freed, that certainly could work here. And, but I think both of those would take precedence over understanding this as condemnation of the practice of slavery or an advocacy for paying to manumit enslaved folks, which if it was done at all, probably would have just been limited to Christians.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  I'm just gonna brag a little bit and say that my ancestor, Henry Ward Beecher, used to buy people out of slavery and freedom, so.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  Very nice.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  That's a, that's a, that's a, that's a Beecher tradition, but doesn't seem to, but probably not a Hermis tradition.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  What, what time period was this?

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  That was, that was right during abolition, right, right before the, this was Henry Ward Beecher, who was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Hare Cabin and stuff. Lot, lot of really cool Beechers right around that area.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, very nice. That's, that's a great heritage.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  And I have family, my, my mom actually wrote a historical fiction book about it. We have family that ran one of the stations on the Underground Railroad.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  So, yes.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  So, we're, we're the cool white guys.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  We need to sign off now.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  And we're done.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  We've ruined everything. All right.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  But, yeah, we've got, we've got 10 similitudes. A lot of them have to do with.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Similitudes are just like parables, right?

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, like, one of them is, the vine is supported by the elm, so is the rich man helper, or helped by the prayer of the poor. So, yeah, there, there are these similitudes that are supposed to do kind of the same things. We, we had a bunch of commandments, a bunch of thou shouts, and now we're, we're giving you a bunch of parables to help you further, to help further kind of cement the idea that you should be a good person. And a lot of it has to do with almsgiving, a lot of it has to do with maintaining the integrity of the, of the Christian community, a lot of it has to do with being just, protecting the, the poor and the innocent from the unjust, and all of that kind of stuff.

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  So, ultimately, it's really advocating for.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  It's a, it's kind of constructing an early Christian communal ethos and ethical system, even though it's going about it in weird ways.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  So.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  This feels, this feels like it was written a little, it feels a little like it was written by John of Patmos's like better adjusted brother or something.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  Still not all there.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Still weird, but like not apocalyptic, just be nice.

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is, but I mean, if you, if you're not familiar with it, it is worth a read.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  It's interesting. Yeah.

• 1:06:47Speaker 00

  Just so you can get a sense, because you know, a lot of times when we reconstruct what early Christianity must have been like, we're really just taking our own experiences and kind of using them as the skeleton for, for trying to understand these things. Read this text and you will understand just how alien early Christianity should be to you. How this is one of the, one of the more popular texts that just barely missed out on being canon. And it is a weird one. So, yeah, it is, it is an alien world.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm guessing you would swap this out for Revelation. If you, if you were going back in time to try to.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  In a heartbeat.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. If, if somebody said to me, if a naked lady came out of the tire, you know, distributing swords, I would, and said, you get to swap out Revelation for one of these books. And I would most likely take The Shepherd of Hermes, depending on what books were available, but, but certainly over Revelation. Yeah.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  Interesting. All right. Well, there you have it, friends.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

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• 1:08:17Speaker 01

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• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

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