Did Jesus Fulfill Prophesy?

The birth of Jesus is obviously one of the most important Christian narratives. Or is it two of the most important Christian Narratives? Either way, one of the great apologetic claims about nativity is that it fulfilled over three hundred prophesies. This week, we're going to look at what Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis says about some of those prophesies, and see if those claims hold up. Then it's roll-play time. Dan B will do his best to take the place of online apologists who challenge Dan M's claims. Will McClellan actually answer their complaints, or will this be an exercise in straw-manning their arguments? You be the judge! ---- 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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• 1:41Speaker 01

  You're saying they couldn't find the cleat? I'm just gonna say, that's delightful.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  Look, they were hiding, they were up under a cleft.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  It's not always easy to find. It's not their fault.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh, it's a good thing my wife doesn't listen to podcasts.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  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?

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Uh, riding high, just, uh, having fun, getting out into the world. Uh, no, not right now. Right now, I'm just sitting.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  From the comfort of your apartment.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Podcast studio. Uh, we're coming, coming to you live from, from Data Over Dogma Studios here in.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  In lovely downtown Salt Lake City.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Salt Lake City, Utah. All right. Uh, I'm fine. How are you, Dan?

• 2:51Speaker 00

  I'm doing all right. I'm getting over, uh, my post-SBL, uh, what do they call them? Concruds?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  The con.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  The con crud, yes. The convention, uh, sickness that, uh, that I pick up, always manage to pick up, usually probably in an airport on the way home from.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  I think they call it conclave, is what they call it.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  They made a movie about that, didn't they?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Um, yeah. And, uh, but yeah, other than that, uh, it's a lovely-ish, very cold day, uh, here, but the sun's out at least, I guess.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. Uh, and you know what I hear?

• 3:27Speaker 00

  What do you hear?

• 3:28Speaker 01

  I hear those sleigh bells jingling, ring ting tingling too. It is, for us now, in this part of the temporal plane, the holiday season.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Others may be listening, you, you listener at home may be catching this a different time of year, but for us right now, it is the holiday season. And so, as is our won't, or want, if people want to get weird about it,

• 3:55Speaker 01

  we're gonna talk about Jebus and his birth.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  It's, it's the time of year where we've got to confront some of that ever-present misinformation. And we've, we've done this many times in the past, talking about things like, uh, why December 25th? Talked about, we've talked about no room at the inn. Uh, we've talked about stuff like that.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Which turns out, there's not even an inn.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  There's no inn to speak of, yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Why would there be room there? It doesn't make any sense. And we may actually, in this episode, I will warn people, we may cover some ground, we may, or touch on some ground that we have hit before. Uh, because it, you know, it's one of those things where,

• 4:39Speaker 01

  I don't know, sometimes you gotta, you gotta hit some things that you already talked about.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  There are only so many passages in the Bible that discuss Jesus's birth, so, so.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  But I think we got some fun angles to talk about. First, we're gonna take issue with, uh, this is mostly just apologetics, we're gonna take issue.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  But, uh, right, like, the whole show's gonna be apologetics. But our first taking issue, we're gonna get on to Ken Ham's website.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  Ken Ham.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  And we're gonna go over to answers in Genesis, and we're gonna see if the birth of Jesus actually fulfilled prophecies from the Hebrew Bible.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  And then in the second half of the show, uh, and it will be an exact half, too. You watch numerically, work it out. I want you guys to make sure that you hold us to this.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  We're gonna do sorry apologetics, or sorry apologetics. Uh, in which we will talk about some of the objections that people have raised, Dan, to your claims on the media of socials.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, because I am out here to ruin Christmas for everybody. And so a lot of apologists have said, no, here's the story, and we're going to talk about, uh, we're gonna talk about those claims.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. All right, well, let's, let's dive in with taking issue.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  And we're taking issue this week with, as we said, Answers in Genesis. There's an article written by one Dr. Tim Chaffee. Earlier, what you guys at home don't know is that Dan immediately dove into, "Where is that doctor from?" Do I need to call out whether that doctor title is deserved or not?

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Whenever, whenever people make a big deal of including doctor on their names as, in their credits for articles and particularly blog posts and stuff like that, it always raises the red flag because there are a lot of folks out there who insist on being called doctor. Like Dr. James White. Like it's hilarious how much people insist on referring to him as Dr. James White. And he does not have a legitimate doctoral degree. So it's always just a red flag of mine, but while it is a theological seminary that awarded this doctorate, it is, as far as I can tell, accredited.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  So I have nothing to say about the credentials of the good doctor, but we will have some things to say about whether or not the birth of Christ fulfilled a bunch of prophecies. Because that's something that related to a claim we hear all the time. "Oh, Jesus fulfilled 300-plus prophecies and you know, the chances of that happening are..."

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Are infinitesimal. Yeah. Well, they're significantly better if you craft the story so that he does fulfill those.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  And that's one of the things that you have to bring up every time people talk about that, because the fulfillment is found in the same book as the prophecy. So it's like Harry Potter fulfilled a lot of prophecies as well. As long as you just keep the scope internal to Harry Potter.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Um, and so.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  It's harder to make Harry Potter fulfill the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible, but I'm sure we could find a few.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  I'm sure we could find a couple, but, but yeah, what we're talking about is somebody writing about Jesus in a way that makes the story fulfill prophecy. And, and one of the reasons that this is the best interpretation of the data is precisely because there's another story about Jesus's birth from another text. And it's different in most of the places where, uh, at least the story in Matthew has Jesus fulfilling prophecy. And we'll talk about that, but to start.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  The, probably the most famous prophecy of the whole nativity comes from the book of Isaiah.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Isaiah. Yeah. We're doing Isaiah seven, 14. Is that the one we're doing right now?

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Right. So this is coming from, uh, probably the second half of the eighth century BCE. And, uh, a lot of whether or not this seems like a prophecy is going to come down to how it's translated.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  And the way, uh, the good doctor, the translation that the good doctor has here is therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Which, by the way, we've mentioned this before, but it, it really blows my mind how willing they are to throw this one out there, like right out the chute, right out the gate. When we know that his name was not called Emmanuel.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  I, that, that like, forget the virgin thing. We're going to get to the virgin thing. I get that, but like, what the heck is going on with the Emmanuel part?

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's, it's not like it was his middle name.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  It was Jesus Emmanuel Christ. No.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  That Mary was like, Jesus Emmanuel Christ, you get down here and clean your room.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, mom, okay. No, it's, yeah, that's, that's so weird to me that they trot that one out, but okay.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  Well, and there's a, and there's a reason for that. Uh, if you look in, because it's quoted in Matthew, uh, one, uh, I think it's, it's in the twenties somewhere.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  One twenty-three.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  It one twenty-three. Okay. Matthew one twenty-three. So I've got, I've got a few different translations in front of me. The King James Version says, "And they shall call his name Emmanuel." Now, if you'll notice in Isaiah 7:14, it doesn't repeat, or it doesn't give us a subject, because it's still being governed by the subject, the virgin.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Shall call his name. So the mom is gonna name him Emmanuel, according to Isaiah 7:14. Once we get to Matthew, it's no longer the mom who's naming him.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  What it says is, "They shall call his name Emmanuel." Which sounds like this unnamed "they" may not be the parents. It may be that the followers of Jesus will refer to him as if he were God among us. So it's kind of a...

• 11:23Speaker 01

  As if. Point of order.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  The author is kind of massaging things a little bit.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  I get that.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  Point of order.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  And yet, it says, "shall call his name," even in Matthew, "his name Emmanuel." It doesn't say, "shall call him..."

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  "The Emmanuel." Shall refer to him by title of Emmanuel. And by the way, no one ever does, right? No one calls him Emmanuel.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Not in the New Testament. But we don't need exactness here, and this is one of the things that apologists will sometimes say. Prophecies are vague, and that just makes them more true. That doesn't, it's not like they're intentionally vague so that they can be shellacked over a variety of different contexts. So I think the way that you can get around people going, "Well, wait a minute. His name's not Emmanuel." I mean, in the same chapter, you say his name's gonna be Jesus, so...

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  So, yeah, this is one of the, one of the fudgy ways to get around the fact that this prophecy doesn't seem to be quite on target. But, but that's a change that is introduced in the way that Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14. But Isaiah 7:14 is being mistranslated here. Well, because it does not say the virgin shall conceive. Most if you go look into the Jewish publication society Tanakh, you go look in the NRS VUE. You go look in a variety of different translations and it will use the words young woman.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Cause the Hebrew is Alma, which, which means young woman of marriageable age. And, and, and it doesn't let you know whether or not it is in the future or in the past. Because it's using um, an adjective, which means pregnant. And so it's just saying Ha Alma is hara. And then you have to provide the to be verb. And so you could technically say, well, I want it to be in the future. And that's what the Septuagint does in the Greek translation.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  But that adjective overwhelmingly is used to refer to either. A current existing pregnancy or an imminent pregnancy.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  So it's, it's usually is pregnant or is right about to be.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Is about to be pregnant.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, and so.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Is currently doing the dirty deed.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, like the pregnancy is in the post uh, to, to, uh, to be brief. Uh, and so, yeah, what this almost certainly is referring to, the overwhelming majority of scholars will agree on this. Is this is a reference to a woman who is pregnant in the time period when the author, who probably is some historical dude named Isaiah from the eighth century BCE. Uh, knew about some woman who was pregnant and was like, look, that woman right there. As she's pregnant and then it goes on to say she will give birth to a son, which is not much of a prophecy. Cause that frequently happens when.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got a 50 50 shot on that one.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and they, and she will call his name Emmanuel. And so the, the, like the prophetic part really comes in the next verse where it says, uh, before. For he is, he shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted. Cause the, the king is wringing his hands over the fact that there's this, this coalition that's forming up in the north and, and Isaiah's like, enhance your calm.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Because this, that, that lady's pregnant. She's gonna have a son, Emmanuel. And you know, before his, uh, you know, whatever euphemism or whatever idiom you want to use today to mean before he, uh, you know, grows up. Uh, the, those, those countries are not going to be countries anymore. So relax. Uh, and that's what the prophecy is doing in Isaiah seven, 14.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  So Matthew is the, the author of the gospel of Matthew has wrenched this out of context now with the help of the Septuagint's translation, because the Septuagint wants it to be relevant to its own time and, and place hundreds of years later. So

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Um, it's, it's already being brought a little closer. And so Matthew has just given it one additional step. And, uh, and it should be noted that this notion that there's a virgin birth is widely agreed to be a, a posthumous secondary accretion to the Jesus tradition. Where you're starting to get, uh, sensitivities to, to the origins of, of Jesus. Like, uh, Paul and, and Mark say nothing about Jesus's origins. Except that Paul says, you know, he was born of a woman, but great.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Uh, happened to most of us.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Really sets him apart there.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, so there, there's nothing significant about his origins until we get to the later gospels where they begin to push the divinity of Jesus's origins further and further back in time. And so the virgin birth probably developed as sensitivities about the, you know, just the nature of, of sexual desire and sexual intercourse is, is leading people to, to want to distance the divine Messiah from, uh, from kind of a natural birth. And, and we talked about the, the immaculate conception.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  That's just, that's just the further teasing out of, of those concerns.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  And so, yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Part of me wondered if it was, if, if the virgin birth. Because I get that there were all of these new sort of sexual mores and a little bit of, you know, conservative ideas of sexual impropriety creeping in or what, you know, in this moment in history, but also could it be that it was just who the author of Matthew was trying to square this idea of the, I think I remember you saying something about the Septuagint having, taking the Hebrew of Isaiah and then making it the word virgin. Is that right?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  So could Matthew just be trying to square it with that prophecy as he's writing it?

• 18:06Speaker 00

  I don't think it is solely a result of the translation of Alma as Parthenos. I think, I think that contributes. I doubt that that is the sole reason. I doubt that the author was just like, look, it says Parthenos, I gotta do something about that. Because, you know, it calls Dinah Parthenos in the Septuagint after she has been violated. So like, and I have a friend named Rodrigo Jesus who wrote a wonderful paper, published, 15, 10, 15, no, 2008, so 17 years ago, entitled, Is the Choice of Parthenos Theologically Motivated in LXX Isaiah 714 or something like that.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  And talks about the fact that that word had some semantic fuzziness to it even back then. And so it may, it may have just been kind of like, eh, it works. And, and so the author of Matthew, I think is probably, it's probably a combination of factors. And then the, the author of the Gospel of Luke, I think is probably just picking up that football and running with it, writing as they are after. And, and the nativity account in Luke, chapters one and two, I think is probably even later than the rest of Luke. I think it's a secondary addition to the Gospel of Luke as well, so.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  It's coming later.

• 19:33Speaker 00

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

• 19:38Speaker 01

  I've heard the construction.

• 19:40Speaker 00

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

• 20:21Speaker 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.

• 20:48Speaker 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. 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. 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.

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• 22:51Speaker 01

  I know you want to move on with this, but I do want to check in with one thing.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  I consulted another scholar about this.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  We talked about this, Dan. We don't.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  One, one, one Dr. Chat GPT. And, and that scholar.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Dude didn't even get his degree.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  He's, no, but he did steal all of y'all's degrees.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  He did. Yeah, that's, that's fair.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  So he, what he, what Chat GPT said was that somehow Matthew taking these older, these prophecies and squirreling around with them was part of a mid Rashid tradition.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Certain, yeah.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  And so I want to know more about that, or if, or if that's just sort of not really a thing. But like, what is a midrash and, and, and how do you clear it up? Is it a cream? What do you?

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Well, midrash comes from darash, uh, which, which means to, to seek. Uh, and so it can, it's, it's, uh, it's an approach to scripture that, that tries to uncover significance and, and meaning that is really, that is relevant to the reader and, and the person engaging the text. And so, um, I think there is a sense in which it is, um, it is certainly engaging in a very dynamic, uh, interpretive hermeneutic, uh, practice that is related to, to midrash. I would, I would hesitate to say that like the authors were like, I'm going to do midrash, uh, on this.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  And, uh, uh, and so I, I don't think that's illegitimate. Um, I, I don't know that if I were, uh, writing about this, that, that that I would choose to focus on that, but, but yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, then you're in, you're in a fight with Dr. Deep GPT. That's all I'm saying.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  I get in fights with Dr. Chat GPT all the time.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, as well you should, as well you should. Don't trust Chat GPT, kid. Straight out the barrel. Get yourself a Dan and then, uh, and then, I mean, I guess what, what Chat GPT said was that the midrash, the reason it said that it was a midrash was that it would, it claimed that it was normal, uh, as a Jewish interpretive technique to, to sort of take older, older scripts and, and twist them and play with them and sort of expound on them and whatever.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  And so, and so to take an old prophecy that doesn't actually apply to this and then just sort of apply it would have been understood, at least at the time, to have been a not, this is the absolute fulfillment of this prophecy, but like, look at this. Echoes to something in the past or something.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think there's truth to that. Obviously, we've already talked about how the Septuagint is fiddling with the rendering itself.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, absolutely, it is following in the footsteps of other Greco-Roman Jewish interpretive practices. In that sense, it's not an outlier.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Now, to the degree I would agree with the notion that, like, everybody knew and it was transparently just, "This is how we play with the text. We're not taking it seriously." I don't know about that. I think that, and, and,

• 26:31Speaker 00

  there's an argument to be had there.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Although it does, I mean, it does sound like, to me, to my untrained ear, it sounds like Matthew is making hard claims.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  It doesn't sound like it's like, "Hey, let's just play with this a little bit and see what we think about it."

• 26:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, have fun with it. And I don't think Dr. Chaffee is suggesting, "This is just their creative exegetical practice."

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  I don't think that's the claim. I think the claim is, "This is absolutely historical, and this is what the prophets were talking about, and this is how Jesus fulfilled all these prophecies, and that's how you can know that Jesus actually resurrected." Like, that seems to be the argument coming from the folks who are appealing to these things today. Now, whether or not the original audience of the Gospel of Matthew would have been like, "Oh, I didn't know that was what that was about." I think that depends on the audience you reconstruct, and so I think that's a little fuzzier, and also not really the point of what we're doing here.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  But, not to say you're going off topic, but just to say I...

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am, I am a little lost in the woods here. So let's, uh, let's, should we get back into some more?

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's, let's do a few more of these. Yeah. Um, I think the, the next one that's, uh, brought up is, oh, you, and you, oh Bethlehem, in the land of Judah are by no means least among the rulers of Judah. For from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people, Israel. That's Matthew 2:6. And this is obviously riffing on Micah 5:2, which, uh, if I can just pull it up here real quick, is a, uh, is a prophecy that says, um, well, it starts in 5:1, doesn't it? It depends on how you divide this up. But you, oh Bethlehem of Ephratah, who are one of the little clans of Judah.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  From you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days. So that's the, that's the messianic prophecy.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  As it was, as it came to be understood by the time of the New Testament from Micah 5. Now, in the original context, this is, uh, probably pre-exilic and the expectation is that there is a, there is an Israelite king, probably from the line of David, uh, who is going to arise and, uh, rule the people and, and lead the people. And, and there are a lot of details about what's going on in there that are still hotly debated by scholars, but nobody thinks this is actually about somebody who's going to be born 700 years later. This is about someone who is supposed to shepherd Israel, uh, prior to the exile and-

• 29:24Speaker 01

  But this, this is why, the reason we're bringing this up is that this is why the, uh, the, the Gospels have Jesus- squirrel this guy into Bethlehem somehow.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Yes. And this is, and this is an interesting point to bring up. Again, Paul and, and the Gospel of Mark say nothing about Bethlehem. In fact, there are only three places where the word Bethlehem ever occurs in all of the New Testament. One is in Matthew's Nativity Account, one is in Luke's Nat-, well, multiple, um, occurrences, but one place is Matthew's Nativity Account, one place is Luke's Nativity Account, and then there's a single verse in the Gospel of John, I think in chapter seven. That references the Messiah being born in Bethlehem. And the, one of the reasons we think, hey, maybe this is just something that was, that was added later

• 30:16Speaker 00

  is because both Matthew and Luke have very different ways of getting Jesus to Bethlehem.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Cause Jesus is Jesus of Nazareth. And so both of them have to get Jesus back to Nazareth. So he can be raised in Nazareth and be of Nazareth. A middle name of, you know, Nazareth, Jesus of here.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  So they have very different ways of doing it. And if you just read Matthew, if you do not have the gospel of Luke, if you just read Matthew, Joseph and Mary are from Bethlehem.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  They live there, yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, and they, then they take off, Herod does his thing and they gotta, they gotta scramble into Egypt as refugees. And then they want to come back after Herod's dead, but Herod's son Archelaus is ruling in Judea. And so they've got to head north. And it says they settle in Nazareth, which is not what you do when you're returning home. It's what you do when you're going to find a new place to live.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  And so the gospel of Luke is entirely different. They live in Nazareth. They're just going down to Bethlehem because of this census thing that is going on that we're going to talk about later.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the, so the, why? And the reason behind this is just that we have to, and for the fulfillment of prophecy's sake, we have to get him to be both from Nazareth and from Bethlehem. Is that correct?

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Yes, it's, he's Jesus of Nazareth. Everybody knows where he came from, but we somehow got to have him born in Bethlehem.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  So, so we have two completely different stories about how Jesus of Nazareth was actually born in Bethlehem.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  And, and that is, and, and scholars think this is probably because after Jesus's death, when stories about, oh, this is the Messiah, he resurrected. Uh, game on, game on, everybody. Uh, people were going, wait a minute, wait a minute, this is Jesus of Nazareth. But the Messiah is supposed to come from Bethlehem. At least last time I checked Micah 5, uh, the Messiah was supposed to come from Bethlehem. And so the story develops, oh. Yeah, nobody, nobody knows about it, but he actually was born in Bethlehem. Um, so, so I think that's probably what's going on there.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  All right.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Which brings up the next prophecy that, that he fulfilled, which is not actually a prophecy.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  What? How dare you?

• 32:48Speaker 00

  So, uh, we, we go down to Matthew two, verse 18, and we have, uh, Herod, uh, the slaughter of the innocents.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  Not a part of Luke, uh, but.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  And that, and that one feels like a pretty strong oversight. That one feels like, ooh, Luke, come on, man. What are you doing?

• 33:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, and the reason all these prophecy fulfillment things are in Matthew is because Matthew was the one who was like, we gotta have him fulfilling all these prophecies, more prophecies, more prophecies. Um, and so.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Well, and he often is like overtly says, and this fulfilled the prophecy of X.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  He was, he was being very overt about the whole thing.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. One of the main rhetorical goals of the gospel of Matthew is to show how thoroughly and comprehensively Jesus fulfilled messianic prophecy from the Hebrew Bible, even if it's not an actual prophecy from the Hebrew Bible.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  So here in Matthew two, 18, we get a quote, "A voice was heard in Ramah weeping in loud lamentation. Rachel weeping for her children, she refused to be comforted because they are no more." And this is from Jeremiah 31, and this is about the exile. It's just a lament.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  And, and this is something that, that happens quite a bit in the gospels where they take something that is lamenting, something that has already happened, and they flip it. And they say, oh, this is about the future. This is about, uh, this thing that just happened. And, uh, and this is, this is about Jesus. And so obviously this is about Herod killing all the innocent people in Bethlehem because Ramah is. Not by Bethlehem. So Bethlehem is like six miles south of Jerusalem. Rama is like six miles north of Jerusalem, so.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Well, someone was that weeping and lamentation was loud. It was a very loud lamentation.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, so probably not that one's not as much of a bullseye as the others also weren't. So.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  It's a slant prophecy.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  And then just a few verses before that, we have because of Herod's slaughtering of the innocents. We have Joseph and Mary grabbing Jesus and running off to Egypt. And then we have out of Egypt, I have called my son, which is another non prophecy. That comes from the book of Hosea, chapter 11, verse, the first. And that is when Israel was a child, I loved him and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me. They kept sacrificing to the balls and offering incense to idols. So this, this is about Israel coming out of Egypt with the Exodus and just not being able to figure out.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Keep those dirty balls out of your mouth.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Keep your balls to yourself, man.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  You don't know where they've been. So, so another, another thing that is not really a prophecy, but is something that the, the author of Matthew, and certainly this is something that you, you see in a lot of biblical hermeneutics and a lot of biblical exegesis. Is just see resonances. Oh, this is just like this thing that happened over there. Boom prophecy roasted. It gets to be a prophecy, even though it was, was never understood that way.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Is your understanding of this one? Because it is confusing why Matthew sent them to Egypt when nobody else talks about him going to Egypt? Or do other people talk about him going to Egypt? I don't know. So like, is it your understanding that Matthew took this Hosea and was just like, I'm a run with that. That I'm just going with it and just threw it into the story? It's so confusing to me. Because you're right, out of Egypt, I called my son.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Is very clearly a reference in Hosea to, you know, to the, the people of Israel.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  I don't, I, it's so weird to me. Why, why, why put him in Egypt?

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Um, I, I think it's part, it, it's a pretty complex constellation of events that, that Matthew has constructed here, but you need to get Jesus, Jesus to Nazareth. Luke has Jesus, uh, or at least Jesus' parents starting in Nazareth. Matthew does not. So how do you get him to Nazareth? Well, if you have him leave.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  You scare, you scare him out of Bethlehem.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. You scare him out of Bethlehem. He comes back, but he can't resettle in Bethlehem.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  You need him in Nazareth. Okay. Well, you have Archelaus ruling in Judea, but guess what? Archelaus was not ruling in Galilee. Okay. We can get Jesus to Galilee. That's how we get him to Nazareth. He's, he's gotta leave, come back when Herod is dead. But then because somebody else took that part of Herod's kingdom, then Herod's direct line is no longer, um, ruling over Galilee. We can have them settle in Nazareth. Okay. Where's he going? Why is he getting out of, of, uh, Bethlehem? Oh, let's get him to Egypt because we've got this passage that says, I have called my son out of Egypt. And let's get him to Egypt because of Herod slaughtering of the innocent. Like it's, it's a very complex,

• 38:07Speaker 00

  procession of events, but it all, it all fits together quite well. It is a, it's a dramatic story that has Jesus get from Bethlehem up to Nazareth and allows Matthew to say, oh, prophecy, oh, prophecy. Guess, guess what? Prophecy.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  Along the way. So.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  And I just had to look it up and remind myself Nazareth is way up north. It's like,

• 38:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  150 kilometers north of Jerusalem and Bethlehem is like right next to Jerusalem.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  It's like six kilometers or miles. I forget which one. Six is the number, though. South, southwest, just barely a little bit west of Jerusalem.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like if you're standing on, in a high point in Jerusalem, you can just make out one of the hilltops of Bethlehem if you're looking south. And you know what to look for.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  So, and then we got an interesting one. That God warned Joseph in a dream not to go back to Judea, so instead he took Mary and Jesus to Nazareth and Galilee, that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene. And what I think is interesting here is, and this is another reason to think that Matthew does not have Joseph and Mary in Nazareth prior to Bethlehem, is if this prophecy is that he would be called a Nazarene, why didn't Matthew say, "So they went home"? Or why, like, he has this decision to go to Nazareth, and that decision is what ultimately fulfills this prophecy,

• 39:50Speaker 00

  which it does not seem to be motivated by any kind of previous connections to this place at all. So, but the problem is, there's no part of the Hebrew Bible that says he would be called a Nazarene.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  So that's a, that's a reference to a prophecy that we have no knowledge of.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Well, and, and the, there are two ways that this has traditionally been answered, and one is more common these days than the other. One is that he would, he would, Nazarene is really supposed to be like Nazarite.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Okay, and those two things, just to, those two things are not even related conceptually. Is that right?

• 40:33Speaker 00

  They are not related conceptually. However, the way they are written in Greek transliteration is very close together.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  So, but- They, like, there's nothing in the Hebrew Bible that says the Messiah would be a Nazarite either.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  And the other thing is that it could be something from Isaiah 11:1, which talks about, "A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots," and Jesse is David's father. So it's Davidic. And it just so happens that the word for "the branch shall grow out of his roots" is "netzer." And so, the, the claim is that Isaiah 11:1 basically says, "The Messiah will be a netzer," or a Nazarene, if, if you like.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  So, it's still squinting at this pretty hard.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  To try to make a connection there. But it, and it might be that Matthew was like, "We gotta have a prophecy here. Come on, let's find something." And they were like, "Netzer?" He's like, "I can work with that, I can work with that. Let's do Nazarene, that sounds like he's from Nazareth."

• 41:53Speaker 01

  It's also possible that there were, you know, that there was just a Nazarene prophecy going around that just wasn't, that we don't have, or whatever.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it could have been something that they were like, "This is the agrafa, the unwritten prophecy." Or it could be something that was in some texts that we just don't have anymore, that, that at that time, the author of the Gospel of Matthew was like, "I can buy that being scripture." So, yeah. So, what we have in Matthew is a series of things that, really apart from just the identification of Nazareth and the identification of Bethlehem, are not in Luke.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Where Matthew is telling the story in their own unique way to have Jesus fulfilling these prophecies. And the data don't support the conclusion that Jesus actually fulfilled these prophecies. The data, I would argue, don't even indicate he was born in Bethlehem. I think most likely, he was probably born in Nazareth. And then that long after he died, people were like, who's gonna stop us from saying he was born in Bethlehem?

• 42:59Speaker 01

  We can say whatever we want.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  You, the president? You know, they were just like, yeah, we can have him born in Bethlehem. And these are ways to tell the stories in ways that make it seem like you're fulfilling prophecies, even when they're not even prophecies to begin with.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's just, make it, throw a few in, why not? Make a few up, it's fine. Oh, my gosh.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  And so I think, I think if you want the fulfillment of prophecy to be evidence of something, you gotta do an awful lot better than this. Because these, like, it's easy to fulfill prophecy when you're the one telling the story. And if your whole goal is to show that Jesus fulfilled prophecy, you're a motivator, you're a, excuse me, you're a motivated crafter of a specific kind of story.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  So, yeah, I just, I just find that a stretch.

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• 45:24Speaker 01

  Other prophecy fulfillment in this article from Answers in Genesis, isn't it, doesn't even merit talking about. I mean, things like Nazareth was looked upon with scorn, which meant that it fulfilled the idea that the Messiah would be despised and rejected of men. Come on. Really? We're gonna stretch that hard?

• 45:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's quite a reach. But, but you know, these, these kinds of articles are not for critical thinkers. They're for people who really wanna believe and just wanna be made to feel like they have good reason to believe. Cause even, even some of the things in here are about, like when, when we get to the, he would be called a Nazarene prophecy. Like they introduce these options and it says, however, there are a few plausible solutions to this dilemma. So what is the argument? The argument is, it's plausible. Here are ways that we can argue that it's plausible. So it's not about what's most likely, it's about, and, and I would say plausible is even a little bit of a stretch.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  It's, it's that tiny little sliver of not impossible that apologetics is concerned to gin up.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Well, if that's where we're gonna go, if we're gonna talk about that, let's do some sorry apologetics and move on to our next segment.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  All right. So, sorry. It's apologetic. We're gonna get to this. You, Dan, sent me a document. Let me pull it up. It's somewhere. Here we go. And these are, give us the setup for what, for what, what this is.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Okay, so I've frequently pointed out that Luke, chapter 1 and 2, 1, contradict the Gospel of Matthew, but 2, contradict themselves. And they, and they contradict the Gospel of Matthew mainly in the fact that, we've talked about some of it. Like, Matthew has Joseph and Mary living in Bethlehem. They have nothing to do with Nazareth until they're coming back from, from their refugee stint and are forced to go up to Galilee in fulfillment of some prophecy that might exist somewhere.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  So, so that's one example. You know, Luke has, Jesus is born in Bethlehem, and they hang out, they're hanging out with family, they go to the temple, they fulfill what's required of them, and then they just mosey on back to Nazareth.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  You do not, do not get the sense that the king is trying to murder the baby in the Gospel of Luke.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  No one's fleeing, or whatever.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. And, you know, and they're like, well, the author just didn't think it was important. It's like, that is pretty profound authorial neglect. To be like, yeah, they went to the temple, this is really important that you know that they filled all this stuff. What about the fact that the king tried to murder him and so they had to flee to another country? No, not important. So...

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Well, let's go through your, your arguments and objections. You, what you've done is you've separated this out into, you've made some argument.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  Yes, we're gonna do some role-playing here.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  And I'm going, I'm going to make the apologetic objection to your, to whatever your claims are, so...

• 48:57Speaker 00

  And feel free to editorialize to your heart's content.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Oh, you know... Oh, I will. You know, I will.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  Glad to hear it. Okay, so we're gonna start with the fact that the Bethlehem story is likely a secondary addition to the Jesus tradition. We've already talked about some of the reasons why.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  But one of them is the fact that it's never even mentioned in the Letters of Paul or in the Gospel of Mark. And again, the word Bethlehem only ever occurs in Matthew's nativity account, Luke's nativity account, and John's reference to the prophecy of the Messiah coming from Bethlehem.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Ah ha. This, my friend, is the fallacy of the argument from silence.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Just because they didn't mention it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  Doesn't mean it didn't happen.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  It just means they were not paying attention to important things.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you know what? I think of all the stuff we're gonna go through, this probably is like the least illegitimate.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  Because there is a degree to which it is an argument from silence.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Now, there is a point that a lot of people will make. An argument from silence is not a fallacy if we should have it, if we should expect to see it, if they should have mentioned it. And I think that that is not necessarily true, at least of the writings of Paul. Because Paul's not really about his temporal life. We have a passing reference to him being born of a woman, but that's serving a more theological point.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Well, and Paul's not even not claiming to have met Jesus.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Whereas these gospel authors, where at least if the authorship attribution were correct, we would be assuming that the authors had actually met and hung out with Jesus.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Yes. Now, now-

• 50:55Speaker 00

  The, like, Mark is supposed to have just been the interpreter for Peter. So he not necessarily knew stuff. Luke is, you know, doing all this investigating. So to a degree, yeah, we would expect them to have hung out with them. So it is true that that's a bit of an argument from silence. Mark, I think you would expect some kind of reference to this. But what's, what's interesting is even just outside of the nativity accounts of both Matthew and Luke, they never refer to Jesus having come from Bethlehem. It's always Jesus of Nazareth. And scholars think that the nativity account in Luke is a secondary addition. And there are even scholars who think the nativity account in Matthew is a secondary addition.

• 51:39Speaker 00

  And the fact that they never, you never have a reference back to anything that happened before Jesus's baptism in any of the Gospels, apart from the nativity accounts themselves, is suggestive that the, his origins were not important to the stories that were in circulation about Jesus. It's, once his ministry begins, that's when Jesus becomes relevant to everybody. And so you've got those nativity accounts, but outside of that, there, there just doesn't seem to be any relevance to Jesus's origins, and certainly no indication about being born in Bethlehem.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  But we've talked about other reasons to think this is a secondary addition as well. So if we're just isolating that one point, I would say, to some degree, touche. And, and would say, but there are a lot of other things that contribute to that conclusion as well. And, and this is one of the conclusions, I think, is, I would say is probable, is most likely, but it's certainly not a slam dunk.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  And I'm, I'm gonna guess we're not gonna get a lot of touches in this.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  I was about to say, that's the last you're gonna hear that from me. So, so relish it.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  All right, next.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  Next, Matthew, and we talked about this in the previous segment, seems to have Joseph and Mary living in Bethlehem and only later settling in Nazareth as a result of their desire not to return to Bethlehem in light of Archelaus's rule in Judea.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Aha, but, says Mr. Apologist coming in, Matthew never says that Joseph and Mary were from Bethlehem, never says that they were from Bethlehem and not Nazareth. He never claims that. They just happen to be there then.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, and this is, this is a pretty common one. And, and this is something you see in a lot of the arguments about contradictions, where, you know, one resurrection story says, "There was an angel." And then another resurrection story says, "There were two angels." And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It said there was one. It didn't say there weren't two.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  To say there's an angel only means there's at least one. Yeah. If, if it says there's an angel, all that means is there was at least one angel. And if it says there were two angels, all that means is that there were at least two. Could have been billions of angels. There could have been angels coming out of the cracks in the rocks. And they only felt it was relevant to mention one or two. And, and, and this is a much weaker point, because as, as we pointed out, the, the narrative states pretty clearly that they are coming back out of Egypt and they're like, "Oh, we can't go back to Bethlehem. I guess we gotta go to Galilee." And the text says that they settle in Galilee, in Nazareth, which is what you say when

• 54:36Speaker 00

  someone is moving somewhere new, not what you say when someone is returning home. If this is where they were originally from, the narrative would be different. This is not the way you describe someone returning home.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Well, and that, that hit home for me when I looked at that map just, just a few minutes ago.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  Oh, and saw how far away they were.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Just because like, that is so much farther away. And they're, you know, they're on donkey back. If there's even a donkey, there's not even a donkey. But like, when you're, yeah, when you're going that far out of your way, you're, uh, yeah, you'd mention that that was home. It does feel like.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, yeah, so I don't think that objection holds any water. I think that's a pretty weak one.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Okay, next.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  Matthew has Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem until they flee to Egypt to escape Herod's killing of the innocents and only returning to settle in Nazareth after Herod's death. Luke 2:39 has them peacefully returning to Nazareth after they fulfill the legal requirements related to Jesus's birth. In other words, Luke does not seem to know that they were literally chased out of the country by the king.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  And then forced to reside in another country before returning to Nazareth.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Right. And here, the objection is the obvious thing.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  It's very similar.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just, well, it doesn't say that, it doesn't preclude the possibility that the slaughter of the innocents happened and they went into Egypt. It just, it just doesn't mention it.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, and this is the same kind of thing as earlier, where you take these incongruities and suggest that, hey, it's just, it's dealer's choice. The author could have said something but just decided not to. But again, in this case, that is-

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Luke thought he was running long. He was like, ah, gosh, you know, one needs to use-

• 56:36Speaker 00

  I just started this story, but-

• 56:37Speaker 01

  One needs to use the editorial mind if you want to craft an interesting story.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and my argument would be that is pretty criminal neglect to leave out that detail.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a pretty, it's a pretty, it's such a strong detail, too. Like, that's juicy.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  But also-

• 57:00Speaker 01

  That's a juicy part of the story.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, big time. And just chronologically, it doesn't seem to work because in Matthew, Herod says, says, "When did the star appear?" And then goes and has everyone two years and under killed, which suggests that this is taking place two years after Jesus's birth? So Jesus is like, maybe almost two years old, if not two years old, when this is happening?

• 57:28Speaker 01

  And still in Bethlehem.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  And still in Bethlehem. So another indication that they lived in Bethlehem-

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  -in Matthew. But in Luke, it says that they, you know, they had to present them at the temple, and when all was fulfilled, they returned to their own city, or their own town, in Nazareth. And then it says- They visited Jerusalem at the Passover every year.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  That does not allow for, one, them to flee to Egypt until Herod dies. It does not allow for them to be persona non grata in Jerusalem for however long. It does not allow them to still be around in two years when Herod is on the lookout. And it also suggests that they were free to come back once a year. And so it just, it just doesn't fit.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  It doesn't fit.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Well, speaking of them coming from Nazareth down to Bethlehem. Why did they do that?

• 58:40Speaker 00

  The mechanism in Luke is this, this notion of a worldwide census. Caesar wanted the world to be taxed. So he, he told everybody they had to go to their own city to be taxed. And the point to make here is that Rome would not have issued a census requiring everyone return to their ancestral hometown to register. Because that one wouldn't be possible for many people would nuke the economy for months.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  And would give the Romans utterly useless information.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  The whole point of the census is who's living and working where? So we can tell the people who are governing that place. This is how much we want from you in taxes. So the notion that you would just go wherever you were from to register is just bafflingly, just asinine, just ahistorical. That would not have happened.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Uh, excuse me, Dr. McClellan, but I do believe that you are-

• 59:44Speaker 00

  If that is your real name.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  If that, if that's from an accredited university, that doctorate of yours. But I do think that if you went to the British Museum and looked up P London 904, the papyrus 904, you would see very clearly that there was a Roman edict that read, Gaius Vibius Maximus, prefect of Egypt, says, "The enrollment by household being at hand, it is necessary to notify all who for any cause whatsoever are outside their gnomes or territories, to return to their domestic hearth or home, that they may accomplish

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  the customary dispensation of enrollment and continue steadfastly in the husbandry that belongs to them."

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  Hmm, yes.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  So, ha ha, they were, wait a minute, I think I see the problem of my own argument.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  Yes, and that would be that this says nothing about ancestral homestead or hometown. It says your hearth. And this is talking about returning home precisely because people traveled, people traveled for work, people traveled for pleasure, and if they're doing a census, they want to know where you live or where your job is.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, where's your hearth? Get to your hearth.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  Get to the hearth. Ali, Ali Oxenfree, we need you, we need you back at your hearth. And this is unrelated to the notion that this census would require Joseph to travel to Bethlehem, and the text says that he went down to Bethlehem because he was of or descended from the house and the lineage of David. It's not saying that's where he lived. It's saying...

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  That's where he descended from ancestrally. He was of that ancestral hometown.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  A point of order. Luke 2:3 says that everyone went to his own city, which suggests hometown rather than ancestral hometown. Boom, you got schooled.

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  Yes, it does say they all went to their own towns to be registered in verse 3. And then it says, Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Dujia to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. So here's the interesting thing, though. When you go all the way down to where it says they went home, which is, I think Luke 2, is it 39? Yes. When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, so this is that stuff in the temple with the baby Jesus and all that. Then they've fulfilled everything that is required of them. They returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth. And the Greek is identical

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  to the Greek of Luke 2:3. In other words, it says everybody in verse 3 went to their own town. According to Luke 2:39, Joseph and Mary's own town, exact same Greek, was Nazareth. So if you're saying that the census only required you to go to your own town,

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  then they left their own town.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Right. And they messed up the census somehow.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  One way or another, they messed it up.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he just misunderstood.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  Pretty big mistake. He's like, ah. Like, I showed up at SBL a day early because I thought I am on a committee at SBL, and I thought our committee meeting was on the Friday, and SBL starts on Saturday. And no, it turns out that there are a lot of meetings that take place on Friday, but my particular meeting had actually been scheduled for Saturday. I showed up a day early for, because I didn't understand. So, um, so yeah, that kind of thing happens. But it's a much bigger mistake for Joseph and Mary.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Too bad Joseph and Mary had to travel that distance while she was pregnant.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's that's rough. She's like, why would we have to go to our ancestral home? I don't know. I don't know. Sweetie, I don't know. I just think that's what it means.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Get me a donkey?

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  Do they have those new electric donkeys?

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  I'd use an e-donkey.

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  Okay, next thing. So we have no record of an empire-wide census from anywhere in ancient Rome, and they would not have conducted a census themselves within Herod's own client kingdom. Herod was a client king, very similar to the way that we have a lot of other countries that kind of do our bidding in the United States, and we have a long history of telling countries to do our bidding.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  We're good at it. What do you want?

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, and and something very similar went on then. And basically, Rome said, hey, this is the tribute that you owe to us, and we don't care how you get it, just pay it. And then Herod would go around and say, give me my money, and charge taxes to people based on the tribute. And obviously, Herod would also, one for me, one for them, one for me, one for them, would charge extra.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  But but Herod was in charge of figuring out how to get the money, and all Rome wanted was, hey, we'd like this much money from you. So, yeah, there's there's no, the notion that there was an empire-wide census that included Herod's client kingdom is not supported by the data.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Except for in Tacitus's Annals, Book Seven, Chapter Forty-One, a tribe known as the...

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Say it right.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Cite.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  Did I, did I, I misspelled that. Yeah, it's actually, the I should be an L. And the, the E should be an I. So try again to say it right.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  I can't. I don't know what you just said. You say it.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  C L I T A E.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Clete?

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, something like that. Um.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  Misspelled.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  That's okay. I should have, I looked up other things. I didn't get around to looking up what that was.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  Uh, anyway, in Tacitus, the, the Clete, uh, were required to give an account of their revenue and submit to a Roman trib-, submit to a Roman tribute, even though, uh, they were subject to a client king named Archelaus.

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  Yes, and this is not the Archelaus that took over rule of Judea after Herod died. This is Archelaus of Cappadocia. Uh, this is a different Archelaus. So, so this is brought up.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  It's my preferred Archelaus, actually.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's a better Archelaus, but, um.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  The best one.

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  Yes, the Arch Archelaus, if you will. Um, and this is brought up a lot. Um, our, our good friend, uh, Inspiring Philosophy quoted a scholar who brought up this passage as evidence that, uh, they would have meddled in the affairs of other client kingdoms, including imposing sensus I, sens I, sensuses, um, upon them. And the problem is, that's not at all what the text says. I'm gonna read from a translation and then correct some of the translation and then explain what's going on here. "At the same time, the Clete, a tribe subject to the Cappadocian Archelaus, retreated to the heights of Mount Taurus, because they were compelled in Roman fashion

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  to render an account of their revenue and submit to tribute. There they defended themselves by means of the nature of the country against the king's unwarlike troops, till Marcus Trebellius, whom Vitellius, the governor of Syria, sent as his lieutenant with 4,000 legionnaires and some picked auxiliaries, surrounded with his lines, two hills occupied by the Barbarians, the lesser of which was named Cadra, the other Dvara." It just goes on like that.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  I stopped paying attention. I don't know what we're doing.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  I, I did too. Um. But in short, it does not say that Rome imposed a census. It says that this tribe that was subject to Archelaus was compelled in Roman fashion to render an account of their revenue. Now, here's the problem. It doesn't say in Roman fashion. The Latin actually says, uh, according to our mode, they were subjected to a census.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  Now, here's the thing. If you go ask a classicist what's going on here, they will, every last one of them, tell you, oh, this means Archelaus imposed a census upon the tribe that was in his own kingdom and did it in the Roman fashion.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  And it didn't work. They objected, they ran off to the hills, and then they were giving Archelaus trouble. And Archelaus had to go, uh, Rome, can you help out here a little bit? And Rome was like, ah, you again? Okay, send, uh, we're gonna send Trebelius, Marcus Trebelius, with a bunch of legionnaires and some auxiliaries to root out the rebels that you evidently can't handle on your own.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  So you're saying they couldn't find the clitae? I'm just gonna say, uh, that's delightful.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  Look, they were hiding, they were up under a cleft.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  It's not always easy to find. It's not their fault.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh, it's a good thing my wife doesn't listen to podcasts.

• 1:09:45Speaker 00

  But I just realized that could have reflected negatively on me. And that was not where I was going.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  I'm just letting it in.

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  That's not where I was going, I promise you. Not where I was going. But that has nothing to do with Rome imposing a census on a client kingdom. That has to do with a client king imposing his own census and trying to do it in the Roman fashion.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  Because when Rome imposes a census, you don't say, "Rome is imposing a census in the Roman fashion."

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  As those Romans are wont to do.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. You just say, "They imposed a census." Because they, of course, they're doing it in the Roman fashion. But no, this was a client king doing it as the Romans did. Like they do on the Discovery Channel. And so, it was, this has nothing to do with that. So yeah, there are apologists who will bring this up, and it is profoundly misguided.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Speaker 00

  And that brings us to the fire.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's get through this last one real quick. We're running long here, but that's okay.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  Now, this could go on forever, but Luke 2:2 claims that the census took place when Corinius, I'm gonna say that name again because I slurred it, Corinius governed in Syria, and that would be a reference to the census overseen by Corinius when he was legate in Syria, starting in 6 CE, after Herod Archelaus deposed, was deposed, excuse me, and Rome took over direct rule of Judea and needed to know how to tax the region.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  So, the objection you've given me involves a word that I...

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  You just say "prote" or "prote."

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Okay. We're not crushing our "prote" here?

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Okay. So, the objection is Luke 2:2 uses the word "prote," which can mean "earlier or before." So the passage should be translated, "This was the registration before Corinius began to govern in Syria." Ah-ha! Suck it!

• 1:11:53Speaker 00

  And the problem here is that "prote," it's actually spelled slightly differently when it's used to mean "earlier or before." Is followed up immediately after by a noun or a participle, or a phrase that is in the genitive case. And that is not what we see in Luke 2:2. So there are scholars who have been like, yeah, this is, while it's not an utterly impossible reading, it is not a plausible reading and is clearly just apologetic in origin. It is just an attempt to sidestep the fact that Luke 2:2 would have to have

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  this census and Jesus's birth dating to 6 CE, which directly contradicts Luke 1, which has it occurring during the reign of Herod the Great or very shortly after his death in 4 BCE, a full decade before Corinius took over rule. So yeah, that objection also does not work. It's not the weakest of all the objections here, but it's far from a plausible objection to the recognition that Corinius had nothing to do with Syria or any census, anywhere near the reign of Herod the Great.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  All right, well, there you go. Sorry apologists. Your sorry apologetics don't seem to be cutting it this time. But next round, they're going to come through with some hardcore stuff.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm sure they will.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  You better be getting down to fight and wait. So that would so that because they're they're coming for you. Friends, thank you so much for tuning in. If you would like to get an ad free version of this show, possibly get it early, you can become one of our patrons over on patreon.com. You go over there, you give us a little bit of your money every month. We appreciate it. It keeps our our families fed. And then you get to be a part of making the show go and you get access to the to the show, to the ad free version of the show. You get you can get access to the after party that we do every week, bonus content where you can ask us questions. It's the best way to actually get us to respond to you.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  If you want a response from us. It may not be timely, but we will respond to you. So head on over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma to do that. We always appreciate our patrons the most. But speaking of appreciating people, we appreciate Roger. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show, and we will talk to you all again next week.

• 1:14:40Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

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