Immaculate Apologetics?

Tucker Carlson and Jeremiah Johnston don't know what they're talking about when it comes to history. Johnston recently went on Tucker's show (he still has a show- weird, right?), and claimed, among many other things, that Jesus and his crucifixion are better attested by the evidence than Julius Caesar. It's an odd apologetic, but is it possibly true? Then we'll discuss the immaculate conception, which everybody thinks they understand, but only half of them are right. But even if you correctly understand what that phrase is referring to, is it Biblical? ---- For early access to an 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

  It suddenly occurred to me that when Jesus said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone", good thing Mary wasn't there.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, they could have trotted out his mom.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  She could have chucked a rock and started that woman down a bad path.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Jesus would have had the... Mom!

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Mom, stop it!

• 1:59Speaker 00

  You're embarrassing me.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma Podcast, 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?

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Good. I came back from my travels with no cold.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  No cold.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  And my voice is doing just fine, so I feel like I'm a couple up on you on that front.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  Longtime listeners will probably recognize I've got a little scratchy, a little more baritone voice than normal. I'm in my, yes, I'm approaching my silver fox era, so I gotta have the voice to match.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're gonna have to take up smoking.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, then I can start doing voice work for like the, who's the, I wish I could remember the voice actor who does all the characters from The Simpsons, usually the ones who smoke.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, all right. Well, instead of that, we're gonna do a show today. And I think it's gonna be a really fun one.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  We're gonna give the people their money's worth for once.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  That's right. First off, we're, look, there was a clip that went around, or a series of clips that went around, got a little viral, from Tucker Carlson's show, which, don't go looking for them. Let's not give him any clicks. But we're gonna talk about some claims made by a guy named Jeremiah Johnston, and talk about the apologetic of manuscripts. We're gonna talk about some apologetics. And that'll be a lot of fun. And then, in the second half of the show, for our "What is that?", we're gonna discuss the much misunderstood

• 4:02Speaker 01

  concept of the immaculate conception.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Which I think is, when I learned what was going on there, my mind was blue.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Blew my mind.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  So that'll be fun.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Had no idea that Doug Flutie had any kind of involvement with the Catholic. And that's, that's a sports reference for, for those of you who, who I, for the longest time, when I heard immaculate conception, the, my cognitive repertoire immediately went to immaculate reception.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Which is Boston College Doug Flutie, a pass that won the game for, anyway.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Doug Flutie, who some people know as a football player, but more people know as a, a breakfast cereal tycoon. So, I think, that's, that's, it's, it's a, it's a long and storied legacy. Anyway, let's move on with the show. Let's, let's do our, what is it? Taking issue. That's what it is.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  All right. And what we're taking issue with this week is some statements made by this Jeremiah Johnston guy. Not to be confused with Jeremiah Johnston. Wasn't that the name of a, of a, an old Robert Redford movie way back in the day?

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Sure was. Yeah.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  If you've seen that, that gif of the, the bearded gentleman by a stream who, who glances over and gives you a little nod, that's, that's Jeremiah Johnston. No, this is Jeremiah J. Johnston, who is a scholar of New Testament. But he's, he's made a claim that is related to a distinct claim, but, but his claim is that the crucifixion of Jesus is the best attested fact from the ancient world, bar none. And this is something that-

• 5:52Speaker 01

  That's a big one. That is a-

• 5:54Speaker 03

  That's a big claim. Yeah. And this is-

• 5:56Speaker 01

  He literally said, if I may quote him, he said, if we-

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Quote him.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  If we can't know that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion, based on the historical record, we shouldn't believe anything in history at all.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  That's bold, I'm gonna say. Yeah, yeah. And it is closely related to another claim that the manuscript evidence for the New Testament makes it the best attested document from the ancient world. Basically, that Jesus is the best attested figure from the ancient world. Whether we're talking about his crucifixion at Roman hands, or we're talking about the historical witnesses to his life. The claim is, is repeated that Jesus is the best attested of all time. And this makes- He's the goat- The goat, yes. The goat of attestation.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Goat of attestation. And this makes people who study history for a living just guffaw with reckless abandon. What? How dare you, sir? Because it is, it could not be much further from the truth. Whether we're talking about the crucifixion or the manuscript attestation. I actually want to start with the manuscript attestation, if that's okay with you. Yeah, yeah, I'm happy with it. And some people may have seen this claim going around. There'll be a list of ancient writers, Pliny, Plato, Demosthenes, Herodotus, Caesar, Tacitus, Aristotle, whatever. People will say, oh, they have, you know, there are only 12 copies of their writings.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  Or there might be 100 copies of their writings. And the approximate gap between the composition of their writings and the earliest manuscript is, you know, 500 years, 1,000 years, 1,300 years, something like that. And then they'll say, but the New Testament has 57 or 5800 ancient Greek manuscripts. And then if you take translations, it has over 24,000 ancient manuscripts. And with the, with the earliest coming less than 100 years after original composition. And so what this is supposed to be is evidence that there is something unique,

• 8:25Speaker 03

  something almost supernatural or otherworldly about the preservation and the transmission of the texts of the New Testament as historical witnesses to the life of Jesus Christ.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I, okay, I will say this, taking it on its face, if I am, if I believe, and I don't know whether I, whether I'm meant to believe this or not, but let's just say that there are 5,800 manuscripts of the New Testament, or, you know, or 20,000, or whatever it is, by their reckoning, that's impressive. That's a lot. Like, you know, and if you compare that to a few hundred of the other things, that, that sounds like a big deal.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  But like, number of copies doesn't sound like the same thing as like, historical attestation for something.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Yes, that's, that's the biggest problem with this argument, is the number of copies has zero relevance to the historicity of the stories within the copies. So, there are literally hundreds of millions of copies of Harry Potter in circulation.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  That means nothing about the historicity of the stories within those copies of Harry Potter.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Because we all know that Dumbledore existed, but Hagrid did not. Hagrid was a wholly made up.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  Yes, that's a late interpolation. So, and, and so the, and additionally, the, the length of time between the original composition and the earliest surviving manuscript. Also, it has something to do with our ability to reconstruct the transmission of the manuscript and its state at a period closer to its original composition. And so, having 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts that range from, you know, the early second century CE all the way down to the invention of the printing press, that gives us a lot of data to be able to track the transmission and the growth and change of these manuscripts. And that's

• 10:44Speaker 03

  very, very helpful. But also has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the historicity of the narratives within those manuscripts. It's a completely separate issue. And so, the notion that this makes Jesus the best attested figure from ancient history is profoundly silly. And, um, and another thing to consider is that when we look at the 5800 Greek New Testament manuscripts, the, the second century, people say, oh yeah, the, the earliest copy comes from less than a hundred years after its composition. And that would be a little piece of papyrus called P52, Papyrus 52. It's a, it's a fragment, kind of triangular in shape, about the size of a credit card.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  It's got about 36-ish words total on it, written on the front and on the back. It comes, it preserves a piece of the Gospel of John. It may date to 125-ish CE. It may date to 175 or even 200 CE. But, most scholars would say it's probably in the second century CE. But if we look in the entire second century CE, you can count the total number of fragmentary manuscripts on one hand. Okay. There are four. Okay. It's the third century, you get like, uh, I think 50, 49 or 50 additional manuscripts. Again, mostly, if not entirely, fragmentary manuscripts.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  And then, I, I think it's in the fourth century that, um, we eclipse, I, I think we get another like 48 or 49 manuscripts in the fourth century. And now we're getting our, our codices like Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, which contain the full Septuagint as it was understood by whoever was copying it. The big spike, when you look at a graph that shows the number of manuscripts, the spike starts in the eight hundreds. Oh. And then in the nine hundreds, and then in the one thousands, it shoots way up. So the overwhelming majority of those 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts

• 12:53Speaker 03

  come from 800 years or more after the death of Jesus and the composition of these texts. So those inflated numbers are significantly less relevant when you actually look at when they come from. All they're showing you is that these texts were copied a lot more hundreds of years later.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Well, and that brings up an interesting point because as you've said a number of times on the show, the more something is copied, the more chances there are for scribal errors and interpolations and stuff. So like it occurs to me that having a lot more manuscripts is actually a problem for attestation more than it is a confirmation.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  And for instance, if we go and look at the story of the woman taken in adultery.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  All but like maybe three or four of those manuscripts has, actually no, that's not true for the story of the woman taken in adultery. There are a handful of passages that are omitted from translations of the Bible these days. Story of the woman taken in adultery, it comes from, it's absent from a number of manuscripts. But still, if we go, what about the 5,800? Yeah, well over 5,000 of them. Like 5,750 of them are going to have it.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  But luckily, we have some very early ones that show it's not there.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  That was a later addition.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. When you line them all up and you say, well, we got, we got the earliest one, two, or three don't have this reading. And you know, this could be Matthew 17:21. It could be John 5:4. It could be any one of a number of passages that we now omit from modern translations of the Bible. When you look at all the manuscripts, out of the 5,800, like 5,799 of them have it?

• 15:02Speaker 03

  One doesn't.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  So like if, if we didn't have that one, then yeah, that would be a liability. We would be misled.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Well, and it seems.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  By the 5,799 manuscripts.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  And it seems obvious that, that what that means is that there are passages in all of our manuscripts that were interpolations, later additions.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  That just, we don't have a manuscript early enough to catch it.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Almost, I, I think it is beyond doubt that there are readings in the New Testament that we, we do not have any manuscripts that lacks them. But these readings have been altered or added at some point between the composition of the text and our earliest surviving manuscript witness to that passage.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  And, and that gap is different depending on the text. Cause if we're talking about P52, for those 36 words, that gap may be as small as 25 or 50 years.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  But for the rest of the Gospel of John, the other 99.99% of the Gospel of John, that gap is going to be, you know, add another hundred years on to it for some of those passages. Like the, the gap is, is, uh, can be fairly large for a, a number of passages from the New Testament. And that's a black hole. We don't know what's going on in there. There could be lots of things added and we just do not have the evidence.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  If, if we did not have one of these early witnesses to, uh, you know, the, the absence of this, uh, statement about this kind doesn't come out except through much fasting and prayer in Matthew 1721. If we didn't have an early manuscript that omits that, we might think it was there all along and that one manuscript changes the whole story. And, and who knows how many readings were not there in the original text that were added somewhere in that gap that we don't have witness to. So. There are scholars out there who say, no, we can assume that based on all of the manuscripts that we have available to us now, we can reconstruct every word of the New Testament

• 17:14Speaker 03

  exactly as it fell from the pens of their, of the authors. I think that assumption is profoundly misguided.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it seems, it seems, if nothing else, you know, impossible to verify and just unlikely. It just like knowing what we know about how, and I think we, when we bring a modern sensibility to this question, we, it's easy for my brain at least to mess up and think, well, and you know, I, I'm coming from, at this from a perspective of someone who has lived not only in the world of printed books, you know, the printing press and movable type, but, but computers and like the transmission of data is, is, is pure. You know what I mean? Like if I send you a manuscript over email, you get it exactly.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  And if you forward it on to someone else and they forward it on to someone else, it just transmits perfectly. But when someone has to handwrite it out, every single word gets handwritten by, you know, by a person and then, and you know, that scribe, that person may or may not have an agenda when they're writing it out. It's just, it's a very different means of transmission.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and the fact that these texts are, are spread all around the world is a kind of failsafe against that.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Because it then becomes impossible to introduce a change that can, um, you know, go out and cover up all of the, um, manuscripts already in circulation that don't have that change. But that brings us back to that black hole of the earliest years when change is more likely to happen. So, and there are scholars who think that conjectural emanation. So if we don't have evidence for a change, but we're like, this seems really squirrely. It seems like at some point this was added to the text. There are some scholars who'll be like, you know what? My critical edition, I'm going to take that out because I don't think it was there originally. Or I think it read a different way. That's called a conjectural emanation.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  And there are some scholars who think we ought to be engaging in that, in the practice of using conjectural emanations. There are others who say that's anathema. No, we should never use conjectural emanations. But, long story short, the manuscript, the number of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament that we have and their proximity to the composition of those texts has absolutely zero bearing whatsoever on the historicity of the stories about Jesus. And the history, much less the historicity of the supernatural claims about Jesus. Which brings us to Dr. Jeremiah J. Johnston,

• 20:04Speaker 03

  who made the claim on Tucker Carlson that is the best attested fact from ancient history. I don't know if you picked up on this. This is something that irks me only because I have a graduate degree from the University of Oxford.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  But Dr. Johnston likes to bring up Oxford an awful lot.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  Did you notice this in any of the stuff you looked up?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Uh, I didn't catch it.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Okay, so you will see him spoken of as an Oxford scholar.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  I did catch him saying that he was a scholar and using the phrase "critical scholars", but like, "I like to do what critical scholars do", which I thought was kind of funny. He didn't say, "I'm a critical scholar."

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  I like to simulate what a critical scholar does. He, he has his PhD from a university called Middlesex University in England. And, and part of that included residency at what's called the Oxford Center for Mission Studies.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Which is not an arm of the University of Oxford, but it is located in the city of Oxford. And it has relationships with the Bodleian Library. And there are some scholars that will offer to, to tutor and, and give help to students there. They're, they're basically there to train

• 21:26Speaker 03

  non-Western students to go out and be pastors and, and preachers and stuff like that. But when, when Dr. Johnston talks about his education, he will frequently talk about when he was at Oxford. Or no, no, no, no, no, no, he, in Oxford. When talking about being in Oxford, not at Oxford. Very carefully skirting around a, an explicit claim to have been enrolled at the University of Oxford. But loves to make a big deal out of.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  I too have, have an, that level of Oxfordian education. I toured the campus. I, I went to several places within Oxford. It's a lovely place.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  But I, I, the only reason I bring this up is because it is so on the nose.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  That like even his, uh, his doctoral dissertation was then published as a book. And in the acknowledgements, he never makes it clear that he was not enrolled at the, at the University of Oxford. So it's always, it's always like, what, were you enrolled there or not? And the others, no, he was not enrolled there.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  But we, what we're saying is that he's a very reliable guy. Uh, you can, you can, you can trust what he has to say.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  You can, yeah, you can, you can take his statements to the bank. Uh, he's a big defender of the Shroud of Turin.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Right. And that's what he was talking about mainly on this episode of Tucker Carlson.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now there, there's other stuff that he brings up, but, but the Shroud of Turin is, uh, is his golden goose. This is what he thinks seals the deal on, on the historicity of Jesus's crucifixion at the hands of the Romans. But just to kind of address the claim.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  It is not the best attested event in the ancient world.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  What?

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Not, not by a long shot. Like, we have, we can go and find the archaeological remains of battles that are discussed in texts written by Julius Caesar, or written by people who accompanied Alexander the Great and stuff like that. We have, we have far better attested events from the ancient world. Um, and, and so the notion that the crucifixion is the best attested event is just laughable on the very face of it.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  And even, and I would say even if the Shroud of Turin were somehow authentic, which it is not.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've talked about the-

• 24:00Speaker 03

  We've talked about the Shroud of Turin, okay. So we don't have to get into, uh, uh, all of that stuff again, but, uh, but I, I do want to bring up the fact that I, I find it hilarious that the first time the Shroud of Turin explicitly shows up in any historical documentation is from the bishop who says, "Some people conjured up this fake shroud and tried to pass it off as authentic, but we caught the guy."

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  So like, that, I just find that so hilarious. Uh, with people like, "No, no, no, it's, it's authentic, it's totally authentic."

• 24:40Speaker 00

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

• 24:45Speaker 01

  I've heard the construction.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, you've heard the construction too. Uh, we're, we're finishing our basement, we're actually adding on to the house, we're, we're, um, 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. Um, 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.

• 25:28Speaker 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.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Well, you know, you can try to do that on your own, or you can use a phenomenally useful tool like Monarch to do something like that. Uh, Monarch is set up exactly for that kind of financial planning. They have things like their debt pay down simulator and visualizer to help you track your progress, which I, this is brilliant. I, the, the fact of the matter is that all of these concepts are so ethereal. It's hard to sort of wrap your head around it a lot of the time. And with this visualizer, you can see how that debt is going to go down. You can actually simulate your freedom occurring in front of your very eyes. And I think that is an amazing thing.

• 26:40Speaker 01

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• 27:59Speaker 01

  It's amazing. That kind of stuff is crazy, but he wasn't just claiming that the shroud was his only evidence that Jesus had actually done it. He kept talking about all of these sources that were that were almost contemporary, talking about it. Tacitus and Swettonius and Lucian and these guys. Now surely he must not be lying. Like surely those guys historically did, must have, must have had some sort of good evidence for the resurrection, the crucifixion of resurrection of Jesus.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  So the crucifixion at least, yeah, we have, we have better data for that than than the resurrection where we have zero data. But yeah, we have, we have folks like Josephus, folks like Tacitus and Suetonius and others who are non-Christian authors who, Josephus is the earliest writing in the mid 90s CE. We have two references in, in his works and they're, one of them is longer than the other. The longer one is known as the Testemunum Flavianum, which is where Josephus is like, oh, he was more than a man. And, and it's very clearly it has been doctored by, by Christian writers, probably in the

• 29:23Speaker 03

  fourth or late third centuries CE. Some people think Eusebius, who talks about Josephus's texts, might've been the one to doctorate. I think the majority of scholars still would suggest that. There was a historical core to that that was actually in Josephus's writings, but that they just expanded on it. Some people argue that it was entirely made up, that there was no reference to Jesus whatsoever. There's another reference to James being put to death, and it refers to James as the brother of Jesus who was called Christ.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  That one's a lot more secure, but there are, there are some folks who, who still try to argue that that is an interpolation also. And then we get to attack it.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't wanna, I wanna jump, I wanna stay with Josephus just long enough to mention that in that interview, Johnston did say that Josephus was so close to it, that he would have, quote, this is a quote, Joseph, he said, he would have had friends who were at the trial of Jesus, and he writes about that. Now, when he says he writes about that, and also he, he seemed to be claiming, and I don't know where this comes from, maybe you can enlighten me, he seems to be claiming that there's some really exciting stuff happening with Josephus right now,

• 30:48Speaker 01

  which, how would that work? How would there be new, exciting stuff happening with Josephus?

• 30:55Speaker 03

  There, there's a scholar named Schmidt, and I think, I think the TC Schmidt is a scholar's name, just published a book called Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ, where he makes the claim that the Testemunum Flavianum is entirely authentic.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Now, he does a little, he does a little, how's your father with the text, to try to soften how much of a testimony of Jesus it is, but I think he might be talking about that, that book, which just came out two or three months ago, I think.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  And it's just making the case, hey, what if this is all authentic? And it has not convinced the majority of scholars, and it's not going to convince the majority of scholars. And there's a, there's a wonderful- Uh, group out of University of Iowa, run by my friend Bob Cargill, uh, called Bible and Archaeology. And, uh, they, Jordan Jones is, uh, a recent PhD from that program who is running, uh, that program. But they, I think they just interviewed Schmidt on there and talked about what his argument is. So that, that's probably what's going on there. But no, Josephus was, wasn't born until well after Jesus was dead.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  So, no, he wouldn't have had, he, and he's from the area, he's from Galilee area.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  He was, um, uh, he was a, involved in the, the Jewish revolts, uh, that took place in the sixties. But no, the notion that he had friends that would have been at the trial is pretty silly.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Well, and, and then to say that he wrote, he writes about that. It's, it seems like, I, I mean, I've read the clip, you know, the little, the, the, what? Three sen- two sentences or whatever it is that Josephus writes in the test, in, in the, in the flavianum, whatever? The testimonium flavianum?

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  And, uh, it's not much. And it's definitely not like, hey, my buddy Sam was there. And, uh, here's how the trial looked or whatever. It's, it's just like a quick tossed off thing.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and it just says, yeah, there was this dude and pilot, like if there is an original core, it probably would have said just that there was this guy, Jesus, I'm called in the Christ and, uh, Pilate crucified him. And, and I think it ends by saying, and, and their, their tribe or their group has, has not ceased to exist down to today or something like that.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  So it's the kind of report that you would expect from somebody who lived toward the end of the first century CE and just knew about this group, this movement that, uh, that sprung up after, uh, some guy got crucified. And, and Josephus talks about multiple different. Uh wannabe messias who uh who got cut down by Rome. So it's not unusual at all. But yeah, the the notion that Josephus went and and uh had his buddies fill him in on on how the trial went uh is not supported by anything and anything that Josephus ever wrote. Uh so yeah, I I find that kind of silly as well. But the the other Roman authors, they're they're basically saying, hey, there are these weirdos

• 34:29Speaker 03

  all over the place and their their movements started after this guy got uh executed. They're like, it's it's little more than that. So as as historical attestation, I mean, certainly it suggests that these writers had access to some kind of reporting that was probably independent of what the gospel authors relied on. It was probably something that was uh that was in circulation in the non-Jesus follower uh literary circles and historical circles. So there is evidentiary value as attestation of the historical event of

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Jesus's crucifixion. But to the degree that is it becomes the best attested event uh in ancient history, that's again nonsensical. That's just laughable.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, you know, when we talk about things like, uh, you know, how something is attested, yeah, there are thousands of manuscripts that mention Jesus being uh crucified. They're all, you know, largely they're all produced by the group that wants you to believe it. You know what I mean? By a group that has an an agenda. And then there's, like you said, nothing archaeological that we've ever found, you know, with with with Caesar's or with uh, you know, with with, like you said, Caesar or Alexander the Great, we've got coins with their face on them. We've got other people talking about the wars that they went to. We've got statues.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  We've got, you know, there's just their own writings and other people's writings and, you know, all this, all this stuff. It's it's just. That's how you look at history.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and I don't want anybody to mistake me or us for suggesting that, that there is good reason to doubt the existence of a historical Jesus.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  Because we're definitely not saying that.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  Because, like, when it comes to archaeological, uh, data, there was no direct archaeological attestation of Pontius Pilate, discovered until 1967, I believe.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  When an inscription was uncovered, a fragmentary inscription that mentions Pilate. Prior to that, we had some mentions in Philo and some mentions in Josephus. Because those are the only two people who were writing about this part of the world in the middle of the first century CE. And they did not write about everybody. And so for 99.9999% of the people who lived in Judea or the Galilee in the first century CE, absolutely nothing survives about them. Even wealthy people, even powerful people, even important people.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  And most likely, the historical Jesus lived and died without having become phenomenally popular. And the stories that are recorded in the Gospels are probably traditions that grew and developed after his death.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Well, his ministry was only a few years long.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  Probably one year long.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  It's not enough time to, uh, to get popular. It's enough time to say a bunch of stuff and then, uh, and then, if, if you have devoted followers, that, then they can start transmitting things.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so people say, well, why, we don't have anything from a contemporary. Yeah, we don't have anything from pretty much any contemporary of, of anybody who lived back then. That's not surprising. Well, what about all the stuff he did? Most of the stuff that we think about is, is probably later posthumous traditions that were based on stories that were being passed around. The historical Jesus probably never did anything that noteworthy apart from... Uh, causing a riot in the temple around Passover. And that's probably what caused the Romans to execute him. So even in the New Testament, you know, his following ebbs and flows. Like he gains some and he loses a bunch and a lot of people abandoned him.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Even, even in the New Testament's telling of his life, it says he did all these miracles, but that's not supported by, uh, by anything. And so we should not expect there to be a ton of material, uh, evidence for his life and for his exploits. Uh, I, I think we have precisely what we would expect to have. A few scattered references to this thing that happened, uh, many years ago. And then the traditions that get accumulated in the gospels and in other texts that were written that didn't end up in the New Testament.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think, I, I think that like, just sort of as a, as a sort of closing thought about this, I, again, what, what we encounter when we encounter apologetics is people who run up against something that challenges their, uh, or, or that scares them theologically or, or scares them in a way that they, you know, if, if they have to believe that everything is literally true in the Bible, then they, then they, they bend over backwards to, to bend, to, to, to sort of bend history to their will, rather than just acknowledging what the data show.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  And it's just so much easier if you just encounter the Bible itself and the history on its own terms. And, and just acknowledge that like, you know, it's, it's messy. It's not perfect and that's okay. That doesn't have to shake, uh, that doesn't have to, you know, bring the temple down.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Well, I, I think if the, if the temple is constructed on as rickety and as fragile a foundation as something like inerrancy and inspiration and, you know, vocality and all that, if the foundation is that rickety, then, then I think it frequently does need to be reduced to that zero sum game. It's, it's a hundred percent or it's, or it's zero percent. And I, and I think that's why. We see people retreating to these ridiculous claims that he's the best attested figure in ancient history and his crucifixion is the best attested event in ancient history. And we have so many more thousands of copies of these texts than than any other ancient text. And it has nothing to do with the fact that the movement that circulated those texts took over the Roman Empire. Right.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  And and then didn't really care about those other texts. Um, so like there, there are a bunch of of details of this that that explain why the data are the way they are. But yeah, you kind of have to loosen your grip on things like inerrancy and and inspiration and univocality if you want to be able to engage with that. But because so much of this discourse doesn't go on at the level of critical interrogation and reasoning, because so much of it is really about vibes. Mm hmm. And is really about just, uh, cheerleading. And faith promotion. Yeah. Rather than, rather than actual inquiry.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Like in that interview, uh, with, uh, between Tucker and Jeremiah, like Jeremiah speaks with a lot of conviction. Yeah. And a lot of authority. Oh, yeah. Even though the Oxford part of that authority is illegitimate, he speaks with a lot of authority. And for folks out there who don't have the time, the expertise, the resources or the interest to actually go and drill down to the bedrock of the argument, that's good enough. Yeah. And so that's really all that matters. And and even though Tucker was like, really? Even even Tucker was a little, a little skeptical, like, what does that mean? What? Uh, but, you know, that interview gets the job done for so many people.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  And so if you're an apologist. Time to clock out. We did our job.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  That's, that's your job. Whether, whether it actually does any justice to the data, or whether it actually engages with it at all, your job is to make people feel better about believing. And, um, you know, if, if that works, then, then that works.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I, I don't want to spend more time on this, but it does seem like it does a disservice because it's just like, you know, what, what it means is that people are hanging their hats on, like you say, very rickety information. And that means that their faith will be all that much more easy to rock when they encounter the truth.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  That's tricky.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  This, uh, at SBL, one of, one of the thing, one of the panels that I participated in was for, uh, this book published by the Bible for Normal People called God's Stories, For God's Children, which is a children's storybook Bible.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  And I was responsible for writing, um, a segment that dealt with First Kings 11 and 12, which,

• 43:40Speaker 03

  but one of the points that I made in there was that I wanted to engage the story in all its details, whether, you know, no matter how boring, no matter how controversial, because I wanted to, anyone who read that story and, and actually internalized the story and understood it, the last thing I wanted is for them to grow up and actually go, you know, maybe they studied it at school, or maybe they just find out on the internet, oh, I was lied to.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  And, you know, you, you can talk about milk before meat, and you can talk about, oh, but you, you know, this isn't as, as useful for children, stuff like that. Uh, that's not going to change the fact that somebody in their late teens, early twenties, thirties, forties, whatever, if they're suddenly like, wait a minute, that's not what I was taught. I was very clearly taught this other thing. They're going to feel lied to.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  And I think we owe it to people to give them the truth, uh, to the degree that we have access to it. And, and which is one of the reasons I think these claims, whether it's about the manuscripts, numbers, or, or the shroud, or, or the claims about the, uh, the crucifixion, they have to be called out because that is, they're putting dogma over data.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  And, uh, and that is the opposite of the title of our show.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  So we, we are not allowed to do that. We must object. All right. Well, let's move on to what's that?

• 45:05Speaker 02

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• 45:36Speaker 04

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• 46:05Speaker 03

  There's all this tech shit going on right now. We have facial recognition. We have our Ring cameras giving data to police. We have the Flock safety cameras. We have Amazon Echo and all these devices that are constantly listening to us and using our data for one purpose or another. Hey, we have a national security problem. When a company like Flock turns it into this organized system that law enforcement can access.

• 46:27Speaker 05

  To hear more on why you should rethink every safe camera you drive past, check out episode 1308 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  And this week's What's That is really cool, I think. It is, it's, I don't know if you know this, Dan. I once wrote a play, you know, you mentioned the immaculate reception. Uh huh. I once wrote a play called The Immaculate Abortion, which I think... Is not going to surprise some of our viewers, but... It was a, it was a, it was a comedy. I think, I think it was actually pretty funny. Maybe, you know what? Let's make it a Patreon goal. If we get enough patrons, at some point, we'll, we'll produce that play and see if it's any good. Anyway, uh, but no, what we're talking about is the immaculate conception and, uh, and

• 47:20Speaker 01

  for the longest, for the most of my life, now I did, I wasn't raised Catholic. My understanding is this is a primarily Catholic.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Belief.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  But I wasn't raised Catholic. I had heard of it and just, and I knew that it was to do with Jesus. And I just assumed as so many people do that the, that the conception in question was of him. But it isn't.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  It isn't.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Dun dun dun.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  Yes. The immaculate conception is not about the conception of Jesus. It is about the conception of Mary.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  So that is nuts. Go on, talk to us. What do we got?

• 48:02Speaker 03

  People, people, they'll, they'll be like, oh, well, we're, what are we doing on Christmas? We're celebrating the immaculate conception. No, you're not.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  No, you're not.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  It's, it's a, it's a very widespread misunderstanding and some of it has to do with the fact that yes, it is a uniquely Catholic. Doctrine. Some of it has to do with the fact that people just don't pay an awful lot of attention to the details of, of doctrines like this. But the doctrine of the immaculate conception is the notion that at the instant of Mary's conception, there was a special, uh, exemption that made her conceived without the stain of original sin. So original sin is supposed to be something that is passed on from parents to child, um, unavoidable.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  I think it's a thing that's, that's a segment we need to do.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  Original sin.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  We need to do original sin and, and dive in on that. So

• 48:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Look for that in the future, you guys. Uh, if you want to know a deep dive on that, but yes, okay. Original sin, ever since Adam, it's you, you're born, you're born tainted.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  In some way.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah. And it's a way to kind of say that, uh, the, that Jesus's atonement is necessary for all humans who are ever born because we're all born with this original sin. Uh, in, in the early periods of the church, there were some authors who suggested that children were born innocent and pure.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:34Speaker 03

  Had no sin, but you also

• 49:38Speaker 03

  The lot of you. Yes, there were some passages that suggested that, no, there, uh, children are also born sinful. I just, I want to pause and say that there are some apologists out there who will say things like, uh, none of us deserve anything but hell.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  Which is just so stupid.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  I've seen that a lot.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  It's just an abominable notion that even a one-day-old baby deserves eternal conscious torment.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:09Speaker 03

  Because of their depraved nature that they had absolutely zero choice in. Like, I just find that the most abominable and stupid attempt to, uh, just kind of jerry-rig the need for, uh, for Jesus's atonement. Anyway, there's a passage in the Psalm, Psalm, uh, I think 51:5, uh, that says, "I was, um, uh, dido, dido, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me."

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Uh-oh.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, and so people suggest that means, oh, there's, there's sin involved in, in that whole process. Uh, and then you also have Romans 5, Paul says, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and this way death came to all people because all sinned. Uh, and there, this is the, these are the Lego bricks that are used to construct the doctrine of original sin, which then leads to, well, wait a minute, how did Jesus avoid getting it? Well, and, and, and this is, this is the question I always had. If we can just arbitrarily exempt somebody from it, why didn't we just arbitrarily

• 51:25Speaker 03

  exempt Jesus from it? Why did it have to be all the way back at Mary's conception?

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Well, you said it yourself. The Psalm said that it was the mother. And so, like, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta clean out the mother.

• 51:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  And then, uh, and then you got a, a pure vessel.

• 51:42Speaker 03

  Yes. And, and that's actually, that's actually a big part of the rationale. They, there were, um, theologians who were like, look, oh. Can we really imagine that the one sinless, pure Savior gestated inside of a sinful environment? Even if, even if there was this moment of exemption from, um, from the transmission or the, um, the imputation of original sin? Can we imagine that, that Jesus was swimming around in, in anbiotic fluid of sin? Uh, so there was a desire, uh, to kind of push it back, uh, a ways.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  And it's really in the medieval period that we have folks, um, kind of pushing in this direction. And there was one dude I had never heard of, John Duns Scotus, who, uh, lived in the late 13th century CE. In fact, I think died around like 1305 or, or something like that, 1308 CE. And he's the one who like is thought to have first coherently explained how the idea of an immaculate conception is coherent within, uh, you know, the grand, uh, network of, of doctrines of, of the Catholic faith.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  I'm just gonna stop you right there and clarify something. What you just said is that this is a, like a medieval or, or sort of middle ages idea. We're, so this is, that's pretty far from being a concept that was actually laid out in the Bible.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  That's not even the half of it. That's not even the half of it. It was not formally articulated until 1854.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  What? No. Are you serious?

• 53:32Speaker 03

  I am dead serious.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  So like, so like, like in terms of it being a canonized, uh, uh, sort of blessed by the church doctrine.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  1800s?

• 53:44Speaker 03

  1854, yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Holy crap. I did not see that coming.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  Yes. See, there was this notion that we gotta figure this out. There's something going on here and we're not sure exactly how to articulate this. And some people thought, eh, we don't really need this. Because, you know, if Mary was sinless, was born sinless, never sinned throughout her life, then she had no need of Jesus's redemption.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Okay, that's an interesting problem.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  That's what Thomas Aquinas said. Others raised other issues with why we need to come up with an idea that Mary was conceived free from original sin. And if we're doing that, how are we doing it? And then, you know, you have this guy.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  And every time I see his name, I want to say SCOTUS.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Because he's a member of the Supreme Court of the United States.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  The first time I read an article with that in it, I was like, was this written by AI? This is really... This is just a hallucination, isn't it? But yeah, it becomes gradually more and more accepted between the 14th and 18th centuries. And then it's 1854, the...

• 55:01Speaker 03

  And I'm gonna pronounce this wrong because my Latin's terrible. Inefabilis Deus was the 1854 pronunciation that declared the universal veneration of Mary's purity and all this. And this is what established the Catholic belief that life begins at conception. Because Mary was sinless from conception.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  And so it's the two birds with one stone with that doctrine. So the Immaculate Conception is entangled with the doctrine of personhood at conception.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Don't get an abortion.

• 55:43Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, that's the implication of that particular doctrine.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  But yeah, that's where, how we get from folks like Augustine. And others talking about, well, Mary was, she was just cool, that's all. And or, you know, she had some kind of special exemption and all the way to. And and I'm sure, you know, if we had Michael Pepperd back on here, he'd be rolling his eyes. He'd be like, no, you, you don't know what you're talking about.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  As a Catholic?

• 56:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, as as an expert, as a, as someone who is a scholar and and knows the language, knows the history, knows the the traditions a lot better than than the two of us put together. Uh, but tho- but those are in rough outline. That's that's how we get to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  So are there, other than the, I mean, you listed, what, two scriptures? You listed a Psalm and something else as as sort of the basis for this? Is is that really it? Is it like?

• 56:49Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Cause this doesn't feel like it needs to happen.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  No, it doesn't. It doesn't need to happen until you've figured out a a whole series of other things that need to happen because of what you have decided the scriptures say need to happen. This is, this is building on an edifice that was constructed over almost 2,000 years of of philosophical reasoning about how how to make sense of all of this. And and it's all presupposing univocality and all that kind of stuff. Again, it's all presupposing, um, it's all presupposing inspiration, not inerrancy, as we understand it today, because that's another thing that has really only come up in the last couple hundred years, but as a formal doctrine.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  But but yeah, this is, this is, uh, just chasing down the implications of chasing down the implications of chasing down the implications of, and you know, its implications all the way down to, until you get to the Bible. Uh, and so, yeah, it it is not something that you you don't read the Bible and be like, well. We have to have the Immaculate Conception. You've got to go through a number of other things that you establish as a theological, a philosophical, a dogmatic foundation, and you're just accumulating all of this stuff. And it becomes necessary only at the end of all of that accumulation.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  It also seems to me that it would, that one of the things that would have had an influence on the development of this idea is just, and I only know this from sort of the artistic world, but it's very clear that at some point, Mary becomes almost as venerated, if not more, at some points than Jesus himself. Like, Mary is, it is the beloved figure of, at very least, the art world, which I have to, I have to believe is, has to be a reflection of, of the sort of theological reality of those times.

• 58:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there were, there were a lot of different streams of tradition that are coming together for that. The notion that Mary was the, the mother of God. Theotychos is, is the Greek word, and I can't remember the last time I saw the accent on that word, so I probably accentuated it incorrectly. But yeah, from the, the 5th century CE on, she was understood to be holy, and you get to the 11 and 1200s, and now you start to see a lot of veneration of Mary through architecture and churches and, because like relics became a big deal.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  And Mary becomes a part of that, and Mary becomes somebody who's, who's venerated, and somebody who starts appearing to people all over the place as, as this virgin, as the mother of God, as this supremely holy figure, who in some way, shape, or form seems to have been without sin. Yeah, and- In a tradition where you have a bunch of intermediaries between you and God and between you and Jesus, Mary is one of the main ones. And so there's veneration of Mary and, and, you know, we'll, we'll have to get some, another Catholic scholar on to talk about

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  the difference between veneration and worship. And, and, you know, I don't, I don't know if you've seen on, on Twitter, but my algorithm is shot, shot to crap.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  I failed on Twitter. I'm not on X anymore. I, I left.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  I still call it Twitter. That's, that's how much of a get off my lawn, uh, old man I am. But the, the Protestant hate aimed at, at Catholics for Mary, as well as for just images and things like that, uh, is, is just, it's a sight to behold.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Anyway, it's crazy. It's crazy to me. Uh, I think Mary is an interesting figure. Uh, you know, we mentioned the, uh, we mentioned the, the woman taken in adultery in, in John earlier in the show. It suddenly occurred to me that, uh, when Jesus said, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Good thing Mary wasn't there.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, they could have trotted out his mom.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  She could have chucked a rock and started, started that woman, uh, down a bad path.

• 1:01:31Speaker 03

  Jesus would have, "Mom!"

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  "Mom, stop it. You're embarrassing me."

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. So, uh, in terms of the gospels, in terms of the Bible itself, there is no, is there, uh, anything about Mary being without sin or be, or be, or being, like, is, is there anything like that?

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  No. The closest we get is, uh, and, and this is something a lot of Catholic apologists will appeal to, is at the Annunciation, the, the angel says, hail Mary, full of grace.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  And so that word that is full of grace, some folks will insist that this can only mean someone who is absolutely without anything other than grace or, you know, free from sin. And, and there's just no case to make for that. Um, so, yeah, that, that's the closest they come to an actual argument.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  They are full of crap then. She's full of grace and they're full of crap.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  What's the, what's, oh gosh.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  I just keep thinking of Coach Hines from Mad TV. Hail Mary full of bullets. That's Keegan-Michael Key's character. He's mouthing off to a nun at a basketball game.

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh. Good stuff. They don't make, they don't make sketch comedy like that anymore.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  I don't think they make sketch comedy anymore.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  Not really.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Alrighty, well, I guess we'll leave it at that. It's a fascinating thing. Your 1854 has just blown my noodle. So that, I'm glad that we had one of those moments in the episode. If you have had your noodle blown, I don't, that's not even a saying. But if you have felt like you have gotten something out of this show, or any of our episodes, there are ways that you can support us. You could give us five stars on, on one of the various places. You can like and subscribe over on our YouTube channel. You can become a patron of the show and that's sort of the biggest thing. Because it is our major source of income here.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  If you go over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma, you get to choose what level you want. You can get access to an early and ad free version of every episode. You can get access to the after party, which is bonus weekly content. And, and also just, you know, have a little bit more access to us. Our, our, you know, $10 a month patrons can ask us questions and we're likely to actually respond, which we're not as likely to respond in any other venue. Anyway, thanks so much for all of you for showing up here and we'll talk to you again next week.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Data Over Dogma is a member of the Airwave Media Network. It is a production of Data Over Dogma Media LLC, copyright 2025, all rights reserved.

• 1:04:35Speaker 06

  Hey there, I'm Travis Hoyer, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know and the stories moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industries shaping tomorrow and host the experts, authors, and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing, and of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, "It pays to listen." Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.