Unforgivable!

Did you know that there is a sin so awful, so egregious, so outrageous that even God would not be able to forgive it? If you answered yes, then we're sorry. That probably means you've been needlessly traumatized. But before we get to that, we're going to introduce you to a book you've almost certainly never heard of. It's a book that didn't make it into the modern biblical canon, but very well could have. And if it had, WHOO DADDY! Things would be different today. This is the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which is the story of a woman so devoted to her faith that she throws herself into a lightning pond full of killer seals. And if you want that sentence to make sense, and get even more awesome than that, you really need to hear this story. Then, it's time for the Dans to get unforgivable. The Bible talks a lot about forgiveness, and the ways one might be forgiven. Sacrifice of an animal, repentance, baptism, grace... all of these are ways that one could be forgiven of their sins. But there's one sin that is specifically called out as being beyond forgiveness. Which is terrifying! So what is it, really? Is it actually unforgivable? Have you committed this sin??? (Spoiler: no, you haven't) ---- 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 00

  Go ahead and have your occasional prophylactic, passionless sex to keep down the urges.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  As the great poet Ned Flanders once said about cornstarch.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 2:02Speaker 00

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

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Uh, chilly with a chance of showers. No, things are fine.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Alrighty. It is chilly, though. That's not a lie.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  It's pretty cold here in this Salt Lake Valley of ours. I am looking forward to what we're going to this week's show. Yeah, we got some interesting stuff coming up.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Agreed.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  The first one I was entirely unfamiliar with. I think a lot of our listeners will be entirely unfamiliar with it. It is a book that could have been in the Bible. Just didn't quite make the cut. So we're going with some apocrypha. We're going with the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  That's the one.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  And I think that's gonna be fascinating. And I promise, if you think that doesn't sound interesting, it's gonna get interesting.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, buckle up for sure. And then, in the second half of the show, we're gonna be doing a what's that? And the that that we're gonna be asking about is the unforgivable sin. It's gonna dun dun.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  So that, yeah. Dave, definitely stick around for that, because you may have committed it. What if you have? Who knows?

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  You won't know until the end of the show. So I vote we just dive in with apocryphilia.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  All right. And this week's Apocryphae, I said it before, it's the Acts of Paul and Thecla. I had never heard of it. You know, I've heard of some of, some of the books that, that never quite made the cut, you know, you, you got your, your Gospel of Thomas, or your,

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Your cut.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Just, just that. I've heard of a few. Mary, Gospel of Mary Magdalene, she's out.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  But I had never heard of an Acts that was, that got the Acts.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Also, cut.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  So, so talk to me about, let's, before we dive into sort of what's in it, talk to me about the history and the, the, what we know of the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  So it's a text that probably comes from somewhere in the second century CE. There's, there's a dude named Tertullian, we've talked about him before on the show around, by the time of about 200 CE, he's talking about this text as a well-meaning, but spurious documents. And it's part of kind of the broader Acts of Paul. There would have been a lot of stories and texts circulating about the further exploits of Paul beyond what we have in the Pauline epistles in the Acts of the Apostles. And some people think maybe this is early second century, mid second century, late second century, we don't, we don't really have a way of knowing. Some people think that some

• 5:14Speaker 00

  of these stories circulated independently about Thecla prior to being worked into the, the manuscript as we have it now. But this is,

• 5:25Speaker 01

  So, so one of the theories is that maybe we already, Thecla was already sort of out in the world and someone just stapled it onto Paul to give it a little more, a little more oomph.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Something like that. Thecla was probably associated with Paul early on in, in the life cycle of, of these traditions, but there might've been just kind of stray stories about Thecla and Paul. But as, as we go through, Paul kind of is, Mostly on the sidelines of the narrative, but there are large chunks where Paul's not in the narrative at all. And so these, these stories could very well have circulated prior to the involvement of Paul. So, um, yeah, who's to say, uh, which of those situations is most accurate? Maybe they're, they're accurate in different ways to different parts of the, the narrative.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  And as we know, like, like, I, I don't know. Was the author of this trying to attribute it to Paul? Or I, I guess not, because it doesn't, but all of, I, I don't know how attribution ends up working, because half the time when a, when a work is attributed to that person, it means that that person is talking about themselves in the third person. And it's so weird and it doesn't make any sense.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  Well, the acts usually are not. They're usually third person narratives.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  The Acts of the Apostles is supposed to have been written by, uh, Luke is the, is the name that we've assigned to it, but it's about Paul and Peter and, uh, and the others. And so, uh, you know, Paul's not around for a lot of what's going on here. So, so it doesn't seem to be a first person narrative, but, um, but yeah, the, this, this genre of the acts is something that, that we see, uh, associated with a variety of different characters where it's just giving a third person narration of their, their exploits.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  I guess I've never asked.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  Spreading the gospel.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  When it says the acts, that just means like the doings, the, the,

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  The things that they did.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  The actual acts of these people. Okay.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Uh, so we've got.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  It's not the battle acts of Paul and Thecla.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  No, no, no. Um, all right. Well, let's dive into the story then, I think, uh, because it is good. And I recommend finding it online and reading it. It's short. It's not, it's not hard to get through.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  What do we, what do we got? They're, they're, they're large verses, like more like paragraphs than verses. And it looks like they're 43, 43 verses in the.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. But do think of those as paragraphs, because it's not, the versification is not the same as what you'll find in, in the Bible.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  So we, we lay our scene. And fair Iconium.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Yes, indeed.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Uh, the southwest corner of, uh, Turkey or Asia Minor. And so Paul is, is headed that way. And we've got, and Paul is, is got some fellow travelers, Dinos and Hermogenes, who are, who end up being kind of, uh, foils to Paul.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  They're like the, the, the, the two evil Disney sidekicks who are like plotting against him while, while walking with him and pretending to, to fawn over him.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And they're, and they get jealous of, of, uh, his attention. But they, uh, they run into a dude named Onosyphorus. Who is-

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Good job on that name. I, I kept having to read it really slowly.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Onosyphorus.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  One.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Two, ah, ah, ah.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  And, uh, and, uh, Onosyphorus finds out what, what Paul looks like and he goes and, and, and I, I think this is so peculiar. Paul is described as a man small in size, ball headed, bandy legged, of noble mean, with eyebrows meeting, rather hook nosed, full of grace. And, um, sometimes he seemed like a man and sometimes he had the face of an angel. And, uh, and Paul is, is nice, sees, uh, Onosyphorus and, and, uh, hail, oh servant of the blessed God and, and is being nice to him. There, there are a lot of these kind of doxological greetings that are going on. Uh, all over the place.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  And, and, uh, Onosyphorus is, is talking to Paul and, and, uh, the two, the two lackeys are like, how dare you not? Greet us. What? Do we not, are we not full of grace? Uh, and he's, and he's kind of like, I do not see God's light in you, but if you're, if you're a good people, then come to my house. We can, we can-

• 10:02Speaker 01

  He does. He's so, it's, is, they're like, hey, what about us? You're supposed to greet us. And he's like, I don't think you look great, but you come. It's cool.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, and, and Paul shows up and just preaches evidently non-stop for days.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  It does give that sense because Thecla then sees him out her window. I guess she's across the street from Onosyphorus and is listening to him preach. And does not leave her window for three days, doesn't eat, doesn't do anything, just sort of huh, out her window.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  As, as, as Paul preaches.

• 10:45Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm thinking of the scene in, um, it's Raiders of the Lost Ark, right? Where the girl in the class blinks and she's got love you or something like that written on her eyelids.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  And he's kind of like, ah.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Only it's the opposite of that because what she's falling in love with, at least in part, is that Paul is preaching absolute virginity.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Sex is bad, marriage sucks, ascetic life is the only life if you really love Jesus.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Yes, and this is, and this is seen as, as a good thing, and, and this is part of one of the, one of like the main thrusts of, of this story is, and this is one of the reasons you, you mentioned that, uh, that the ladies probably liked, uh, this story a lot because it kind of gives them a social identity and a mission that is not tied to their subjugation to a potter familius in a household.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  So it's not you, cause at the time, you know, the best you could hope for is to marry some dude and then, and then basically be tied to his household and, and that is where you draw your, your social identity from, but you're basically just a servant in, in your own house and this gives them an opportunity to be free from, uh, from that patriarchal ball and chain. Uh, and so that is not only what Thecla seems excited about, but also the main threat that is posed to the antagonists of the story because

• 12:23Speaker 00

  the husband gets outraged and even, uh, initially Thecla's, uh, mom is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on here?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Um, and so it's, it represents a threat to the Greco-Roman social order, the, the patriarchal household system.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  If these, uh, if these. Women are deciding they're going to just abandon that goal, that lifestyle and go off and and run around like hippies in the woods. That's, that's a big problem. So

• 12:55Speaker 01

  I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this is actually like this, this anti-sex message is actually pretty close to the, the actual Pauline message.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, certainly the this, we, we see this in 1 Corinthians seven where Paul's like, yeah, it's better to be celibate, but if you can't hang, if you can't hack celibacy, you know, it's, go ahead and get married and, you know, it's better to marry than to burn with, with passion. And that way you can have your occasional, as I like to call it, I, I have some friends who, who get annoyed with my characterization of Paul's sexual ethic this way. I don't think it's inaccurate though. Go ahead and have your occasional prophylactic, passionless sex to keep down the urges.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  As, as the great poet Ned Flanders once said about cornstarch. So, so yeah, this is, and, and I think that's one of the reasons that Paul is, is a central figure in the story is because it is carrying on. It's kind of taking up the banner of Pauline asceticism and, and just carrying it.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Running with it.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, sprinting.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Hard.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  And I, and let's put a pin in that because I think also later on in the story, we're going to get to more stuff where this holds to original Paul, where pseudo, pseudo Paul.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Diverges.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. And in fact, there's even a theory that this, this text may have been a catalyst for some of these pseudo Pauline texts.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  That have Paul saying, some people say it's bad to marry. And, you know, that's maybe, if not this text, it maybe related traditions are circulating, inspiring some people to say, this Paul needs a makeover.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  And, and thus.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  The pastoral epistles.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  It is a theory. I'm not saying.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  So we'll get, we'll get to more of that later on in, in, in the discussion, but yes. So, so you're, as you mentioned, Thecla has a betrothed. She is, she has a, a man.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  Thamiris or Themiris, or I haven't seen it in Greek, so I don't know exactly where the accent is. But I think Thamiris probably sounds better.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Thanos, I think is.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Thanos.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Anyway, he's mad. He, uh, understandably, you don't want, you know, you, you're making wedding plans. You're making plans for the future.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  And then, uh, and then you find out that, that your lady, uh, is enamored of the idea of no sex forever. And that doesn't sound awesome. So he, he, basically he brings her to court. He takes her, he.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Well, what, what I love is that he, he shows up and it's like, hey babe, what's going on here? And she's just off in la la land and like, everybody is, is like breaking down in tears. Uh, they're, they're just inconsolable because she's just like, la la la. Pause celibacy.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  And I, I, I think of, uh, when I think of Thamiris, I picture Prince Valium.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  You're welcome, everybody that just yawned because Dan did that, uh, thing. Uh, all right. So, so he, Prince Valium brings, uh, brings all of the head dudes in, in town.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Oh, I love, I love this line. Um, and he's like, what's, what's wrong babe? What's going on? Why do you sit thus? And what sort of feeling holds you distracted? Come back to your Thamiris and be ashamed.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did read that. I was like, I, what?

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. He's like, well, you got me there.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  And then even even her mom and and oh yeah, we should we should mention because I was like, I wonder what where that name comes from and completely ignored that you said, I think it's a it's a shorter version of her mom's name.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Thecla Thecla's mother's name is.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Theoclia.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Theoclia. And I was like, I think I think those might be the same name. Thecla is just a nickname or a truncated version.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, so so it combines Theos with Kleos, which would be God and then glory or honor or something like that. So the we did it all for the glory of God.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Like a knight in shining armor from a long time ago.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, OK.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Enough of that.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  We don't have time to to fall into the into the Peter Sotera trap.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  So and then and then we get Demas and Hermogenes show up again. And now I guess they've just had it with with their with the can't get no respect. And because they go talk to Thammasus and they say, bring him before.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Or bring Paul before the governor Castellius, because he persuades the multitude to embrace the new teaching of of the Christians, because Paul is is the culprit. What's going on with my baby? Oh, this dude Paul is preaching and she's enamored. And they're like, you should you should totally.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Get him.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Take him to court.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  So he does this, he rises up early in the morning, filled with jealousy and anger, and went over with rulers and officers and a great crowd with batons.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  You you can't have a riot without batons.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  You gotta you gotta you gotta raise up some baton people.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  I like to imagine like at a parade, girls spinning batons.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. You gotta get the retractable one, though, so you can go flink and.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  And and accuses Paul of deceiving the city of the Iconians and especially my betrothed bride, so that she will not have me. And here I'm thinking of the antagonist in Titanic. I was hoping you would come to me last night. And she's not interested because there's this kid who draws naked ladies. And the whole crowd cried, away with the sorcerer for he has misled all our wives. So here's, here's the threat. Paul has taken our ladies away from us with his, his seductive, ascetic celibate lifestyle.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  It is a different form of seduction, surely, than, than we're used to. But yeah, he's the weirdest Pied Piper of them all.

• 19:53Speaker 00

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

• 19:59Speaker 01

  I've heard the construction.

• 20:00Speaker 00

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

• 20:42Speaker 00

  And then even though it took some discipline and there were some bumps in the road, we actually succeeded and we're 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.

• 21:09Speaker 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. 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.

• 21:54Speaker 01

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• 23:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we've got the, the governor is kind of, uh, is kind of of two minds about this. Because, uh, Demas and Hermogenes are like, just say he's a Christian. That's illegal. That's enough. He'll, he'll die. And his governor's like, mm, slow your roll, gentlemen. Uh, and goes to, to question Paul and, and Paul obviously just goes off on, on his, his preaching rant.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  Um, and, and then, uh,

• 23:39Speaker 01

  That short bald, one, uh, unibrowed little dude is compelling. He's a, he's a very compelling speaker.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  But he does get thrown into jail.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Um, and then Thecla.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  But not, not, not having been convicted yet. He was thrown into jail because, uh, because the, the guy, the, the head dude, the governor did not have time yet to fully question him.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so this is like, This is like ICE saying you're going to be pre-imprisoned.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Yes. For the crime of not listening to me. Uh, and Thecla by night, she takes her bracelet. She gives them to the gatekeeper. A little, um, little quid pro quo, gets inside the prison.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  And, uh, gives the jailer a silver mirror and, uh, she's just got like a backpack full of junk.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Full of, full of bribes. Yeah. You gotta, you gotta have everything you got to bribe your way in.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  My bribe out bag that, um, that I have, uh, by the door. And, uh, and she finds Paul just to go sit is at his feet and just hear, uh, those golden words tumbling from his tongue. And, uh, her faith also increased and she kissed his bonds, um, which has reference to his bonds of imprisonment. Uh, and, and then obviously her family and Thammas are, are, can't find her. So they're, uh, they're going through the, the streets. One of the gatekeepers fellow slaves informed them that she had gone out by night. They examined the gatekeeper who said to them, she's gone to the foreigner in the prison. And they went and found her, so to say chained to him by affection.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  By affection. There is so much innuendo in this, uh, moment. She's kissing his zee bonds. She's chained to him by affection.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  But really what we're all about is none of that. We don't,

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  We don't, yeah. No hanky panky here. And they, they run out and they incite the people. Cause if you can't convince your lady friend to stop groveling at the feet of some dude, the best thing to do is to start a riot.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Um, so Paul's gotta be brought before the tribunal. Uh, but Thecla was riveted to the place where Paul had sat whilst in prison, which, which seems odd and, and I'm, I'm wondering if this is kind of a, a pilgrimage-y reference. Cause you know, you, you have those spots in, in different parts of holy lands and places where it's like, this was the spot where Jesus cooked the fish and told Peter, feed my sheep. Um, and you know, you build a church around it. And so maybe like the spot where Paul sat maybe is supposed to be the place that people go to, to visit. And so this story is kind of, um, building a narrative around the pilgrimage to that site.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Maybe that's what's going on here. I don't know, but she seems oddly enamored by the place where he sat.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  So now we, we got big trouble, uh, in little Iconia and, uh, scourges Paul, casts him out of the city, but decides to condemn Thecla to be burned.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, she, she's, uh, naughty.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  And she, and as a lamp-

• 27:04Speaker 01

  And it's not his idea either. It, it is, it is her mom's idea. She's the one that screams out, burn her if she's not gonna marry. She's a bad girl.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, she weighs the same as a duck.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's, it, that, which, that's a moment that I find kind of horrifying, but there you go. Uh, her mom calls for her to get burnt.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and here's the, I, I love this line, burn her who will not marry. In the midst of the theater that all the women who have been taught by this man may be afraid. So, so here we have that threatened patriarchy is, is lashing out in anger. We need to, she needs to be made an example of.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Uh, so we're gonna burn her, which it turns out doesn't work.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Well, interestingly, yeah, they get, they get the logs, they get her up on top, they set it on fire, it is going. And then she, by the way, she makes the sign of the cross as she gets up on top and then, uh, God just dumps a deluge down on them.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Sounds dangerous, like some people are like washed away. And then it puts out the fire.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  It does say that a great fire was blazing, but it did not touch her. And then, or it says, for God, having compassion upon her, made an underground rumbling, and a cloud full of water and hail overshadowed the theater from above. And all its contents were poured out so that many were in danger of death and the fire was put out and Thecla saved. So, so this is one of those Paul's gone and now we've got this, uh, public spectacle.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  That's gonna come up again and again. But the spectacle has everybody gathered around to witness and is, is just jazzed about witnessing this woman being burned. Uh, and God just unleashes a deluge on the, on the fire to put it out. And there, and Paul and, uh, Onesiferus are, are in a tomb somewhere fasting. Uh, and after many days had been spent in fasting, the children said to Paul, we are hungry. Probably not the first time they said it, but this is the first time the narrative is mentioning it.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Because Onesiferus, yeah, you take, you take your whole family and you just leave everything behind. I think that's poor planning.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. And Paul takes his cloak and gives it to a child and says, sell this and buy some loaves and bring them. And while the kids were out trying to find, uh, trying to hawk this, uh, this cloak. He saw Thecla.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  How many breads will you give me for one cloak?

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's only been worn by one weirdo. They see Thecla.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  And said, "Thecla, where are you going?" She said, "I have been saved from the fire and I'm following Paul." And the child said, "Come, I shall take you to him, for he has been mourning for you and praying and fasting six days already." They come to the tomb. Paul is kneeling in prayer. And he's actually praying that God will save her from the fire, that it will not touch her, which is kind of a hint that maybe it was Paul's prayer that actually was the catalyst for the fire not touching Thecla. And we get this very doxological prayer. And Paul Caesar says, "Oh, God, who knows the heart, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, I praise you because you have speedily heard my prayer."

• 30:42Speaker 00

  "And there was great love in the tomb." "As Paul and Onisipheus and the others all rejoiced." So they reunited and it feels so good. And they had five loaves and vegetables and water, which, yeah, nothing better for keeping down the urges.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  And Thecla wants to shave her hair off and follow Paul everywhere he goes. And this was the weird line, I thought, "Times are evil and you are beautiful." And I just was thinking, "The night is young and you're so beautiful."

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does have this very interesting moment where it feels like Thecla is like, "I want to be a man now." Like, it's this very interesting moment where she's like, "I'm gonna shave off my hair. We're gonna call me a man." It's a very trans, interesting

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Coded.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Moment.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, kind of a begonia moment.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  And it was unclear to me, I think, I guess what I read was that Paul says, "No, don't do that. You have to stay a woman."

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, it's a weird thing he says, "I'm afraid lest another temptation come upon you worse than the first and that you do not withstand it, but become mad after men."

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Apparently if you cut your hair, you go boy crazy.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, cuz so Thecla is like, I I've spent three days just staring at you and and then I came and and stared at the place where you sat. And now I've been saved. And Paul's like, mm, your libido has not been adequately defeated. So, um, but and she says, give me the seal in Christ and no temptation shall touch me. And Paul says, be patient, you shall receive the water.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  So the the seal in Christ, is she talking about baptism?

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, that is in in the early Christian movement, the seal was was baptism. That was how you sealed yourself to Christ.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  And and she is going to be baptized later on, and there will be seals involved. So it gets weird, you guys.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  And lions and tigers and bears, yeah.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  We're gonna run long if we're not careful.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Oh, look at that. Okay.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  So let's uh, let's let's plow in because she she goes into another town. Uh, this is the town of Antioch. Yeah, I think Antioch, right?

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Went to Antioch, yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  And Alexander is a as an influential citizen there. He sees her. She doesn't have her haircut, so she's still pretty. And he's like into it and decides to and basically like, kind of starts to molest her there in the street or whatever. And she's like, no, no, no. And finally, he does, he doesn't take the hint. Finally, she tears his clothes and knocks the crown off of his head and humiliates him.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  And he is furious. And so he, uh, he basically takes her to the boys' club and says, hey, let's kill this lady. And everybody's on board with that, but not the women. The women are like, no, no, don't do that. But all the men are like, yeah, let's feed her to the the critters. Let's get her in in with all the wild animals.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, the wild beasts. And and they bring out all these wild beasts and and Thecla is stripped, received a girdle, was thrown into the arena.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  I don't know what that I mean, I don't know what I meant to imagine here. She she's only in a girdle. She's all she's, I don't know.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  I guess they're they're protecting her like the the text makes a point of saying that her nudity, her nakedness was not seen later on.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So so she's probably in something.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  And then, and then you have the, there's some more, um, this interesting gender dynamic where a female lion runs up and sits at her feet and then fights off, uh, the other animals that are coming. There's a bear that runs up, but the lioness kills the bear, tore the bear to pieces, according to the text.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Uh, and then another lion comes up and the lioness engages with that other lion, but then the lioness dies.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Both, well, both lions die. They both die in that process. So she is protected, uh, from bears and lions, but there's, there seem to be more beasts. We don't name what they are.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  But some, but she holds out her hands. She like rebukes them in the name of the Lord or whatever.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  She prays and then she turns around and suddenly there's a large pit full of water.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. She sees, she sees the pond.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  And she's like, oh, great. I'm going to baptize myself.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. And she says, in the name of Jesus Christ, I baptize myself on my last day. Uh, and then when the women in the multitude saw it, they wept and said, do not throw yourself into the water. Even the governor shed tears because the seals were to devour such beauty.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  They had vicious seals. I've never heard of this. I mean, I've heard of the lions. I've heard of the bears, but I've never heard of like, throw them to the seals.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  Yes. The, the.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  The seals of doom.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  Let her death be drowned out by the honking of the seals.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  And there's.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  The last thing she shall hear is.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  But the, the seals, having seen a flash of lightning floated dead on the surface.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  And there was around her a cloud of fire so that neither could the beast touch her, nor could she be seen naked. So she, she baptizes herself, having authority of myself. I baptize myself, um, and.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Then they're like, uh, we got some bulls. Let's, let's try the bulls out. And the governor's like, all right, give it a shot. And then they, they, they bound her by the feet between the bulls and put red hot irons under their genitals so that they, being rendered more furious, might kill her.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  They rushed forward, but the burning flame around her consumed the ropes and she was as if she had not been bound.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Which I, my, my initial thought was just like, well, if she was still burning flames, how did they even get the ropes on her, on her? But they did. They managed it. Uh, but, but she was, she was a hunk, a hunk of burning love and she, those, and yeah, the ropes were gone. So she survived all of the aminals that they threw at her.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  The queen, who looked favorably upon Thecla when she showed up.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like literally adopted her.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  As her own daughter, sort of thing.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Faints and they all say, well, the queen died and the governor's like, pause.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. We've lost a bunch of animals. Uh, the queen's gone. Maybe, maybe we shouldn't be killing this lady.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then Alexander, the, the, uh, um, the dude that, that gets made fun of, or becomes a laughing stock is like, uh, let's, let's stop doing this because we are gonna destroy this city. And if Caesar hears about this, I'm going to be in so much trouble. So the governor calls Thecla over and says, who are you? And what is there about you that not one of the wild beasts touched you? And she says, I'm a servant of the living God. And as to what there is about me, I have believed in the son of God in whom he is well pleased. That is why not one of the beasts touched me, for he alone is the goal

• 38:29Speaker 00

  of salvation and the basis of immortal life. And goes on this, um, this screed about, about why God has protected her. He, he who clothed me when I was naked among the beasts will in the day of judgment clothe me with salvation. The, the governor brings garments to her.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  And then the governor issues an edict. There's a lot of, there are a lot of edicts going on. I release you to the pious Thecla, or I release to you, he releases this edict to the people. I release to you the pious Thecla, the servant of God. And the women shouted aloud and with one voice praised God, so that the whole city was shaken by their voices. So it's mainly, it's the women who are ecstatic about this. And then Trefena is the name of the queen. She's not dead. She comes, she comes to and decides now I believe in the, in the resurrection. She says, come inside and all that is mine, Alshala, signed to you.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  She doesn't add up to half my kingdom.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  That's only, that's only what the men do. The women are just like, eh, we'll talk about it.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  And so Thecla rests for eight days instructing the queen on the word of God, so that many of the maidservants believed and there was great joy in the house.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which means that Thecla, pretty effective preacher.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  She's, she's, she's, at very least in that house, she's doing a good job.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  But she, she, she's law, she wants Paul. She wants to get back to Paul. Back she goes, she finds him in Mirna. And, you know, he's, he's preaching the word. And she goes, hey, guess what? I got baptized. And he does not seem to question it. He's just like, oh, okay. Cause I think by now this is, this, this woman is oozing power. There is like, she's like, you're not going to question anything coming out of this woman. She's, she's like, by the way, I'm baptized now. And like, I didn't need you. I don't need any man. I did it. And, and he's like, awesome. That's great.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  And she's like, and now, and you know, it feels like there's this thing where she's supposed to ask people, ask a man for permission to do whatever she wants to do. And she's like, no. Uh, just so you know, I'm leaving. I'm going back to Iconium.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  And interestingly, and one thing I want to point out is when, when she finds Paul and says, yeah, I've been baptized.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Paul then hears everything that she has to say.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  They go inside and Paul basically sits enraptured while she narrates all this stuff that went on. So yeah, there is, there is quite a role reversal here going on where, where the student has become the master in a sense.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. She is no longer a Padawan learner. She is a full Jedi at this point. And she says, I'm going to Iconium. And Paul says, go and teach the word of God.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Which, that feels like a big deal.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Like, like, basically, she is now a full-on apostle. She is a preacher.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. She is a peer of Paul now. Paul can't tell her what to do. She has her own money. And, and she goes back home. Thamyrus, obviously, is dead. So her, her former beau, doesn't say why, but, but he's dead. And her mother is alive. And remember, her mother is kind of the one who started all this. But she calls her mother and said, Theoclia, my mother, can you believe that the Lord lives in heaven? For if you desire wealth, the Lord will give it to you through me. Or if you desire your child, behold, I am standing beside you. And then we've got the, the briefest of sentences. And having thus testified, she went to Seleucia and enlightened many by the word of God. Then she rested in a glorious sleep.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  So yeah, it was basically like, then she went and did her thing and then she died.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  But, yeah.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  So I, really fascinating, very much a feminist triumph.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  Not, not a longstanding one.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  At least for the time, yeah. The, in the second century, this was, no doubt, this was a very popular text. You know, I, I think we've mentioned it before on the show, when you get to the end of the first century, beginning of the second century, Christianity is like mainly comprised of women and slaves. That's how some, a Roman author characterizes Christianity, a religion or a, a movement of women and slaves.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  And so the, in the second century, no doubt, this would have been a very popular text. But it didn't take too long for the patriarchy then to say, that's cute, deleted. Your, your services are no longer needed here. We're going in another direction. And, and yeah.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it is very in line with sort of the Pauline, like, again, the, the pin that I want to pull out is that Paul in, you know, when Paul greeted Eunia and, and stuff, like, Paul was down for women leaders in the church.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  And it isn't until the pseudo Pauline epistles where we start to get, "A woman shall not preach in the church and must remain quiet," and all of that sort of thing.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, which, which again, maybe that's, that's happening in response to some of these traditions as they, as they exist in the text, as it has been preserved down to us, or maybe other stories. But yeah, you do get a pushback against that and, and also pushing back against the whole celibacy thing, because that's not good for the men, because it's not like they have the option of, of just doing it with each other anymore, because Paul has taken that from them as well. So, um, yeah, they're not going to take matters into their own hands.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Oh, Paul.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  Because that would be also bad. So, yeah, but it's, it's such a fascinating story and, and fantastical events that, that, um, you know, are, are obviously legendary, all these miracles, the whole, all the crowd being like, "Kill the witch! Okay, she's alive, yay!" And, and, uh, everybody changes positions so, so readily.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  But yeah, a fascinating story, and you can find, uh, the, the text of the Acts of Paul and Thecla and, and scholarship on it all over the place. Uh, if you haven't read it before, highly recommend checking it out. Just get an idea of what, what kind of stories were in circulation in the second century CE. This is before the Gospels. It's just probably right around the time that the Gospels were getting named.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  Like, this is very early in the history of Christianity, but, uh, but we got Paul and Thecla,

• 45:31Speaker 00

  um, roaming around, uh, doing their thing, and, uh, it's fun stuff.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Love it. All right. Well, let's move on to our next thing. What's that?

• 45:45Speaker 03

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• 46:14Speaker 04

  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.

• 46:37Speaker 05

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• 46:46Speaker 00

  Hey there, I'm Travis Hohm, 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.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  All right, so what is the unforgivable sin? It's, there's only one of them.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Being a Raiders fan. So.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  That's, that's only slightly forgivable, but there is a thin, thin margin by which it is forgivable.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  It goes not out, but by much fasting and prayer. Yeah, no, we, the unforgivable sin is something that we get in only in the synoptic gospels, interestingly enough.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Yes. The synoptic gospels, because, which, yes, those are.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Because John is his own thing and just really is excited to not be, he's not one of the crowd, that's all I'm saying.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, he, he goes his own way, follows the beat, the beat of a different drummer. And the, the earliest version of this is from the Gospel of Mark, I'm, I'm counting up verses. I think we have about the same number of verses in the little sense unit, the little story in Mark 3, the story goes from verse 20 to verse 30, and then in Matthew 12, the story goes from verse 22 to 32. In Luke, the story's shorter, it's Luke 12, like verse 8 to 12, but it kind of just comes out of nowhere.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  And interestingly, Luke really entirely changes the position of this announcement of the forgivable sin, because it's embedded in a specific rhetorical narrative context in Mark and Matthew that kind of hints at what's going on here. And then Luke's like, nah, I don't like it there, I'm gonna have it over here. Just completely adrift. It's not gonna have anything to do with, with the context.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  It's, it's about sparrows now, leave me alone, I can do what I want.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, do what I want. And the, I think the context is telling, because what we have in Mark 3 is, we have Jesus's family comes out to restrain him, for people were saying he has gone out of his mind, and the scribes who came down from Jerusalem says, "He has Beelzebub, and by the ruler of the demons, he casts out demons." And Beelzebub would be, here, I don't know if we've, we've talked about this before on the podcast, but Beelzebub is the New Testament's version of Beelzebub.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  And Beelzebub is actually the accurate spelling of what the actual name of the deity would have been, Beelzebub is an editorializing.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, I think we, we have talked about this a little bit when we did, when we talked about like Satan and, and these sort of. Are they Satan, are they not Satan entities?

• 50:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so Beelzebub, Lord of Flies.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  Beelze Bull would mean Prince Lord, which was a title that was used of Baal. And he, so they say by the ruler of demons, he casts out demons. And he's like, that doesn't make any sense. How can Satan cast out Satan if a kingdom is divided against itself? That kingdom can't stand.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Which is funny because it's like, you know, if it were Satan and he did say, hey, you know, if you're in tight with Satan and you're like, hey Satan, get these guys out of here and it'll make me look good. Of course Satan would be on, would be in on that.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, you could, you could exploit that a little bit. And, but in verse 27, he says, but no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man. Then indeed the house can be plundered.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  In this case, the strong man is Satan.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  I guess, yeah, that.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  It's a weird metaphor, but, but yes, apparently we're breaking into Satan's house and taking his stuff, but you gotta tie up Satan first.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Because ropes work for subduing the Satan. I almost said the prince of thieves and I was like, nope, that's.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  That's Kevin Costner.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Without an English accent. In verse 28, he says, truly, I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin. And then verse 30 explains, for they had said, he has an unclean spirit. And so I think when we're looking at Mark three, if the question is what is the unforgivable sin, it seems to be maybe calling God's spirit Satan?

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, or like attributing God's good works to Satan.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so it seems like what, what Jesus is saying is the biggest no-no is to attribute to what I'm doing, the inspiration and the influence of Satan. Because it's, you know, that's just not accurate. You know, we've already, we've already talked about the strong man and the house divided against itself. And so I think that's, and this is the earliest account of this that we have. And so it seems like the original setting, the original context for this notion of an unforgivable sin is the fact that what these folks are doing is basically blaspheming the

• 53:01Speaker 00

  work of the Holy Spirit through Jesus, saying what Jesus does is inspired and controlled by Satan. No, it's actually the Holy Spirit. How dare you call the Holy Spirit Satan?

• 53:15Speaker 01

  And I, the Holy Spirit, the whole concept of the Holy Spirit is still very mysterious to me. It's still very confusing to me. And I see why we might want a triune God, because it seems like the Holy Spirit represents God, but isn't God, but is God, and, and all of that sort of thing.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  Well, it is, it is mostly isn't at this point. We don't get the is until later when we're working, we're working on the Trinity and somebody was like, you forgot to incorporate the Holy Spirit. Oh, shoot, we gotta get the Holy Spirit in there, too.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  But in, in this one, it does seem like the Holy Spirit is somehow almost a synecdoche for, for God in general in some way, or for, for the divine or something?

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's the, the, it is the extension of God's agency. The, because in this time period, the

• 54:16Speaker 00

  The kind of anthropology of this time period is that people are made up of an assemblage of parts and spirit is one of those parts and that's kind of the executive function. And just like your spirit can can leave, you know, you've got your dream soul and your spirit departs when you die and hangs around your tomb as long as you're getting fed and having your name pronounced and all that kind of stuff. So your your spirit is an agent that can depart from you. And so God's spirit is kind of the means of God's activity in the world while God's own self is elsewhere. So yeah, the the idea that the spirit is an extension of God's agency is definitely active and had been

• 54:58Speaker 00

  for quite some time. It was just not identified as the very God of Israel itself in this time period. And that's something that comes later.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Okay, uh, let's so let's move on to Matthew.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Because Matthew has a similar but slightly different take on it, or maybe an expansion of the of the concept.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, we have they they bring to him a demon possessed man who was blind and mute, and he cured him so that he could speak and see. And the crowds were amazed, saying, can this be the son of David? But the Pharisees says, the Pharisees say, it is only by Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons, that this man casts out the demons. And he, having perceived their thoughts, said, every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand. We have the Satan cast out Satan thing. And then he says, if I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your own exorcists cast them out? Therefore, they will be your judges.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  And this reminds me of, did you watch any of?

• 56:08Speaker 00

  Now I forget the name of the series. The one about Jesus that's been popular now.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Oh, The Chosen?

• 56:13Speaker 00

  The Chosen. Have you watched any of The Chosen?

• 56:15Speaker 01

  I haven't seen any of it.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  I tried to watch the first episode, and I think it's that first episode where they bring the, first or second episode, they bring the priest in and they're like, hey, this, this lady's nuts. You gotta cast the demons out of her. And, um, and he, it doesn't go as well as he would have liked. But, um, and then he does the strong man's house and plunder his property. Uh, whosoever or whoever is not with me is against me and whoever does not gather with me scatters. Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the spirit will not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the son of man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either in this age or in the age to come.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  So yeah, we got a bit of it. We're adding to it. He's like, and what's more, you can give me a hard time all you want. I can handle it, but.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  I can take it, but the, but the spirit is really sensitive and hates that. Uh, yeah, it is interesting. I, and point of order, it does feel like this is a, that verse is an excellent argument for son of man being distinct from Holy Spirit.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah. A hundred percent.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Like a totally different entity.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  However, uh, yeah, I, I mean, we have roughly the same idea of blaspheme. Speaking, in this case, it says, speaking against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. I, I think we should acknowledge that none of these are tremendously clear in,

• 57:55Speaker 00

  No.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  in what we're talking about. Whoever blaspheme, I mean, looking back at the story that, that, that this erupts from.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  It seems like just, yeah, don't attribute the good works of the Holy Spirit to an evil being is what we're talking about. But yeah, Mark says whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, Matthew says whoever speaks, whoever speaks against, speaks against the Holy Spirit.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  It's still very unclear because it feels like, you know, just accusing God, Jesus of, you know, using Beelzebub as his, as his way of casting out the demons, that doesn't feel like an irredeemable sin to me.

• 58:47Speaker 00

  No, and I think that

• 58:53Speaker 00

  there's a, and I think what's going on here is, is we've got one of these, this, this is a costly signal. This is something that it's like here, we're drawing a line here just arbitrarily. And an example from the Hebrew Bible of, of something that where the punishment doesn't seem to fit the crime. You have the idea in the Hebrew Bible that, you know, a man who picks up sticks on the Sabbath gets executed. It's like harsh, but fair.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Rough. That's rough.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and this is, and this kind of becomes the identity marker. It's like we, in this family, we don't pick up sticks on the Sabbath. And it's like, don't you think that is a little, um, you know, disproportionate? And it's like, doesn't matter. This is the identity marker. And so I think there's a degree to which it's kind of functioning like that. Um, and, and where it's coming from is something that, that scholars have been, uh, talking about for a while. And I don't think we're going to have an answer. But I think that you point out that it is a bit ambiguous. It's not clear, which I think supports the notion that it's not like a specific word or sentence or statement. It's not like, I declare blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. And then it's like, okay, well,

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  you, you done it. You've, you've gone.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Though I have met and heard people say that that's what they believe it to be. And so that, so there are people who believe that if you say the sentence, I defy, or I deny the Holy Spirit, or whatever. You can't get into heaven.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  It's that's locked in now. It's the eternal sin. It's unforgivable. You just did it. It's over for you now.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's been over for me for a while, but.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Which is a good way to get rid of pesky fundamentalists if you if if they're bothering you.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  But but I I think the ambiguity serves interpreting this as as more of kind of a general. We don't speak ill of the Holy Spirit. You can speak ill of Jesus. You can speak ill of God. You can get forgiven for all that. But just not the spirits.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  Which yeah, which is peculiar. Why? Why is suddenly the Spirit so so sensitive about this?

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  And yeah.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  I don't know that we have a good answer.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, the vibe that I get, and this is just, this is not based on any kind of scholarship, obviously, but the vibe that I get is that in this case, the Spirit means God and what and and and so you can. Or or at least the active agent of God, of like God. Yeah. You can't speak against.

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  Cause it doesn't say, because Jesus doesn't say you can speak against the Son of Man, or you can speak against the Father, just not the Spirit. He just identifies the Son of Man as as the one it was okay to blaspheme.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Right, right. And that that's echoed also in Luke 12.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  Okay, let's let's go to Luke.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Let's jump to there where it says, I think I think verse eight's interesting sort of.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Context, he says, and I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man, all the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God. But whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God. He's basically saying, hey, if you're cool with me now, I'll be cool with you. When it counts, and if you're not cool with me.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  Could be understood to conflict with the notion that you can speak any manner of ill against the Son of Man and you'll be forgiven. Here, he's like, no, you deny me, I'm still gonna deny you.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, but then verse 10 gets confusing because it says, and everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. It's very final language.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  But and it doesn't quite fit the context, it feels like.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's all, and, and by the way, we do not have, as we mentioned before, the context of the, the Pharisees claiming that they, or the scribes or whatever, claiming that Jesus' miracle belongs to Beelzebule instead. That's, that's nowhere near here.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the, the likely catalyst for the statement has been divested.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  The, for the author of Luke, anyway, he just wrenches it out of context, but still kind of leads into it with this deny me kind of thing. And then goes on, when they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers and the authorities do not worry about how or what you will answer or what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say. So it's almost like this is supposed to be comforting for the faithful.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Followers of Jesus, because he's saying the Holy Spirit's gonna be there. Oh, by the way, the unforgivable sin is to blaspheme in the Holy Spirit, just in case you didn't already know.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a very strange thing. I went through and like went to many different sort of apologetic websites, trying to get at what they believe this means. What is the unforgivable sin? Because even though it seems to be spelled out, it's wildly unclear.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  And they, they have some creative isochesis that they engage in to try to make it about any, anything that doesn't, that annoys them. They're like, oh, that's the unforgivable sin.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Well, but also they're in, they're in a precarious position, which is that like, you know, they want converts, they want people who aren't believers to join up. But if me having said as an atheist, I don't believe in that guy, or I don't like the whole, you know, I don't believe in the Holy Spirit. I don't care about the Holy Spirit, or you know, any number of things that I could have said, if I then want to join, they don't want me to just be, they don't, that put, they don't want to be in the position of saying, okay, well, we like that you joined, but you're sentenced to eternal hell, no matter what.

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  Now, if you had murdered someone or raped someone, you can be forgiven for that.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they'll get you off the hook entirely on that one.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, but if you have said these words, I'm afraid there's nothing we can do. Yeah, that's, that's pretty ridiculous. And, and anyone who, and when you see apologists out there, they, they'll frequently, if they have an answer, it's usually something specific that has nothing to do with blaspheming the Holy Spirit. It is usually, they're three interpretive steps away, where they're like, it's really about not doing what Trump tells you to do, or something like that. Like, that's ultimately what the unforgivable sin is for, for some of these folks, but.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Well, some of them said things like, this is from Got Questions, we've, we've, we've visited Got Questions before. But they say, "The blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, specific as it was to the Pharisees' situation, cannot be duplicated today. You can't even do it, because their sin was that they, they were in the presence of Jesus, and they still denied it. So, you couldn't do it unless you're in the presence of Jesus, you couldn't even, there's no chance." And, but then they turn around, they have this weird turnaround, a sentence later, and then they say, "The only unpardonable sin today is that of continued

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  unbelief. There is no pardon for a person who dies in his rejection of Christ." Well, you literally just said that we can't duplicate that today.

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  But, but we're gonna, we're gonna arrogate to ourselves the authority to declare what it is. And even though the, the text says you can deny Christ and be forgiven. What we're gonna do is we're gonna flip it.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  And we're gonna say, no, it is denying Christ that is unforgivable. Um, even though.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Even though it was specifically not about Christ, it was about the Holy Spirit, but there you go.

• 1:07:02Speaker 00

  Well, that's, that, that's the, the, uh, the intellectual integrity and rigor that you get from, from God questions.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there, I looked at some other ones. Uh, I looked at what, um, Billy Graham Evangelic Evangelistic Association had to say, and they were weird about it. They just, they, it never.

• 1:07:24Speaker 00

  Like, stop bothering me.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, basically. I, I mean, it's just like, instead of, they, they said, uh, "The sin of the religious leaders, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, was a refusal to accept the witness of the Holy Spirit to who Jesus was and what he had come to do, and then submit their lives to him." It's basically the same thing. It's ba- I mean, most of the sites that I visited craft their decision about what this means into saying, "Don't worry, all the Christians are safe. If you care at all about Jesus, if you're one of us, you're safe. You can't possibly commit this sin."

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Uh, but everybody, but those atheists are probably pretty bad, so no.

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and this is where, uh, and I, and I've talked about this before, where everybody who treats the Bible as authoritative is trying to make it meaningful and useful to them.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  This, it's, it's not clear precisely what's going on here. And so they're like, well, we gotta figure out some way to make it meaningful and useful to us. What are our concerns? Okay, let's leverage it as, as a way to authorize and validate our concerns, even though it probably isn't going to have much at all to do with, with what was actually going on for Mark and Matthew and Luke.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  Or at least the authors of those texts.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. It, so, so there you go. Uh, I, I don't think I've committed an unforgivable sin, uh, in my life. I hope not. But, uh, but that depends on your interpretation of whatever the heck those, uh, those.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Scriptures mean.

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  I still contend it has something to do with the Raiders.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  It's probably that. And you're going to need to do the Broncos fan translation of the New Testament.

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, where are they now? Las Vegas? City of sin?

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, need I say more?

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  The sodomite Raiders. If we're gonna, if we're gonna go with sin cities.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  It's, it's just unwelcoming. Don't worry. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you so much for joining us. If you would like to become a part of making this show go, head on over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma, where you can get early and ad-free access to every episode. You can get access to the after-party, which is bonus content that we do just for our patrons every week. And it's a lot of fun. And you can have that warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing that you helped us keep going, which we really appreciate so much. Thanks so much to Roger Goudy for editing the show. We'll talk to you again next week.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

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