A Trickster God and the Worst Wedding Ever

This week, Christian nationalist Joel Webbin says the quiet part out loud: lie to voters about your theocratic goals until you've got the power to enact them. It's grotesque and profoundly un-American — but is deception, weirdly, the one piece of the playbook that's actually biblical? Then we wrestle with the baffling parable of the wedding banquet, where a king burns a city, fills the hall with strangers, and casts one guest into outer darkness over a missing robe — a story Matthew, Luke, and even the Gospel of Thomas each tell differently, all while pointing the finger at a different villain. Support Data Over Dogma and get every episode early and ad-free, plus exclusive bonus content — become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma Get your Data Over Dogma merch at our online store: https://data-over-dogma-shop.fourthwall.com/ Shop our classic collection before our old store closes: https://datadoverdogma.printful.me Watch every episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dataoverdogma Follow us: Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/dataoverdogmapod TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@data.over.dogma.pod Threads — https://www.threads.com/@dataoverdogmapod X — https://x.com/data_over_dogma Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod Get Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book, The Bible Says So: https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/bible-says-so-9781250347466/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:10Speaker 01

  Just to be on the safe side, you guys, when you get to heaven, poke your head in and see what everybody's wearing and just make sure that you're, that you get it right.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  And ask if they're circumcised.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Look under the robe of a couple, just to see what's going on.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 1:37Speaker 00

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

• 1:49Speaker 01

  I think things are great. How are things with you?

• 1:52Speaker 00

  Uh, nice. I think the, the air is cleared out a little bit. It's, it's, there was a storm that came through the valley yesterday. It missed us. My wife loves a good summer thunderstorm. We actually didn't really catch much of it. It passed just south of us, or just east of us. But, um, yeah, that cleared some stuff out, so doing all right.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Good, good.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  How about you?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Well, I'm looking forward to, to today's show is what I'm doing because

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  We're at first, uh, we're gonna be taking issue with

• 2:28Speaker 01

  The question of can it be okay to lie or practice a deception? If you believe that it is in service of the Lord.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Hmm. Lying for the Lord.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  And if you, if you're like still on the fence as to what, where, what angle we're coming at this from, we're going to be talking about Joel Webbin.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Who is not our favorite person in the world. So we're going to get to that in the first part of the show. Then in the second part of the show, it's, it's a terrible parable.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  It's a parable that I read and couldn't make head or tail.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  It's a head scratcher. Yeah.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  I was, I was like, wait, I know I can figure out what the, what, what the takeaway is supposed to be here. And no, I could not. So Dan's going to help me out with that. Hopefully we'll see. It's a parable of the wedding banquet. So that'll be fun. But first, let's dive in with taking issue.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Okay. So who, Dan, is Joel Webbin?

• 3:42Speaker 00

  So, so Joel Webbin is like your quintessential Christian nationalist. You, you have some soft Christian nationalists. You have some people like, I don't really know what that means.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  But it sounds good. I like my nation and I like being a Christian. So it sounds pretty good to be a Christian nationalist.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  You're a Christian and you love your country, right? No, this, this is, this is hardcore Christian nationalism. This guy is the president and founder of something called Right Response Ministries. And the senior pastor of Covenant Bible Church, which is in Austin, Texas. So you know, it's good.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  And right? It's in the liberal part of Texas, so it must be okay.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  And he has a podcast, obviously. I mean, he's a white man.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  We all have them.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're issued a podcast if you grew up in the suburbs. Hopefully everybody gets that reference as well.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  But he recently made some comments. Recently, this show might be airing like a month from now.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, in 10 years. We'll see.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  It was a bit ago for you, but he was reading a passage out of 2 Kings 23. And he took this passage as authorization to talk about the goals that somebody who is running for office in the great state of Texas should have, at least a Christian who is running for office in the great state of Texas should have, but goes on to warn against making those goals publicly known. And I thought I would start, I thought we could talk about the passage that he read and then get into where they take everything from there and

• 5:27Speaker 00

  talk about why this is, you know, the, his rhetorical goals are kind of in stark contrast to pretty much the whole thing called the New Testament. But as I've frequently pointed out, when Christian nationalists try to validate and authorize their fascism, they have no choice but to go to the Hebrew Bible. And he starts off by reading something from 2 Kings 23, and this is Josiah's reforms. And he reads verses 5 through 9. And this is how it reads in the NRSVUE. He, and he's talking about Josiah, "deposed the idolatrous

• 6:11Speaker 00

  priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places, at the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem, those also who made offerings to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations, and all the hosts of the heavens. He brought out the image of Asherah from the house of the Lord outside Jerusalem to the Wadi Kidron, burned it at the Wadi Kidron, beat it to dust, and threw the dust of it upon the graves of the common people. He broke down the houses of the illicit priests who were in the house of the Lord, where the women did weaving for Asherah. He brought all of the priests out of the towns of Judah and defiled the high places where the priests had made offerings. From Gabe to Birshiba, he broke down the high places of the gates that were at the entrance of the gates of Joshua, the governor of the city, which were on the left at the gate

• 6:56Speaker 00

  of the city. The priests of the high places, however, did not come up to the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem, but ate unleavened bread among their kindred."

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Chapter 22 is when somebody comes to Josiah and says, "Guess what? We found the law of the Lord in the temple." And Josiah goes, "Ooh, is it bad?" And they read it, and it's very bad. Basically, everything you've been doing is actually what we told you not to do. So now you've got to go make amends for all of this. And so, chapter 23 is, you know, killing all the people who are not supposed to be alive, destroying all the idolatrous stuff, and, you know...

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Just taking a pretty cool place and ruining it.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Like, everybody's chill, everybody's worshiping whoever they want to worship and whatever, and then just wrecking that.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  And the idea of men in positions of authority just going out and manhandling the people they don't like, you know, gives Joel and his co-host a semi. So, he likes the cut of the jib of that passage.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I can see why that could sound like a go-ahead for authoritarianism.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  A big thumbs up for dictatorship.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, now, obviously, what's going on here in 2 Kings? One is propaganda. It's not clear that any of this happened. We do think that there were reforms that were implemented by Josiah, but how comprehensive they were, it's not clear whether or not it actually involved any of this kind of stuff. It's not clear. The notion that it was so widespread and involved literally killing people and all that kind of stuff, most scholars would say, "Yeah, it was not that." But, this leads Joel's co-host, who is, his name's Todd, Wesley Todd.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  He says, "If you were to ask me, I absolutely think that the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Texas National Guard, should go through downtown Austin, find churches flying pride flags, depose their ministers, that is, defrock them, and remove them from the pulpit, take the property, and auction it off to faithful churches."

• 9:29Speaker 00

  This is obviously not how the United States of America has ever worked for several reasons.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  There are a couple of documents that are pretty, pretty against that.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  Yes, documents that are formative for our nation.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Pretty important, big deal documents here in these United States.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Yes, and Joel's response is, amen. This is what I believe should happen. Yes, that will not happen in Texas, at least in the next 10 years. Who knows what the Lord does, practically speaking, though we're very far away from that. And then goes into the deception part of all of this. You, if you are a politician running for office, don't say that. We have to live in the real world. Let me pause for a second and make sure that's abundantly clear. When Wesley says, if you are a Texas politician or aspiring, you're campaigning or want to be, don't say that. And what he means by that is, on this particular topic, you've got to hide your power levels.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  You say that the people aren't ready for it, your kids are going to love it, but the adults are not quite ready for that one, and so don't say it. But we're saying, in principle, that is perfectly permissible. That's why we started, right? It's not just a random Bible verse, just to start with the Bible and pretend that we're biblical. No, we start with a Bible verse, a passage that actually pertains, it has relevancy to the topic of today's podcast. And then goes on to say that this idea is, it's not just biblical, it's American. But he says, that kind of purity spiraling will put you

• 11:16Speaker 00

  on the bench. It'll sideline you. It'll function as a liability. So don't run on that and don't talk about that as a politician yet, but that is the goal.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  So

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, one has one hears echoes of Project 2025.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes. Here's here's our manifesto. It's not actually what we want to do, but it is actually what we want to do.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. Donald Trump's saying, I don't even know what that is. Of course, I'm not going to worry about that. I'm not going to do that. And then, and then literally going point by point and and down the list and doing it.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Yes, it is. It's a laugh riot. But I want to take issue, not only with the, hey, we've got to deceive the public so that you can be elected, so that we can achieve the things we are keeping from the electorate. But I want to take issue with the claim that it is biblical and American.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  All right, we're taking issue with a bunch of stuff. I like it.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Yes. So it's biblical. Again, like I said previously, Christian nationalists cannot find support for their arguments in the New Testament. They will weekly appeal to Romans 13. But that Romans 13 is not going to authorize.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  What does Romans 13 say?

• 12:43Speaker 00

  Romans 13 is the one where Paul says that

• 12:49Speaker 00

  political powers are put in place by God. So you can't, you don't want to fight against God. So

• 12:56Speaker 01

  That one only works for them when their guys are in power.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  When you, when you, you know, when Obama was in power, if you said, you know, your subject,

• 13:08Speaker 01

  he must have been put there by God, they they suddenly shrink away from that conversation.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, there's

• 13:16Speaker 00

  it is very, very selective when Romans 13 is authoritative. Always and only when someone is questioning our fascist agenda. And and also, you know, a close look at Romans 13 makes clear that this is situationally emergent rhetoric that Paul is is using. He's writing to folks in Rome, and he expects Jesus to be coming back any minute now. And he's basically saying, hey, pay your taxes. Don't rock the apple cart. And so does it by saying, yeah, so, you know, governments are instituted by God. So, you know, just chill. And obviously, that does not mean that's

• 13:59Speaker 00

  That everybody has to respect and honor and cannot speak out against any government. I mean, our nation only exists because we rejected the government. But anyway, so that's really the only passage that that Christian nationalists can appeal to. Other than that, they've got to go to the Hebrew Bible to try to find advocacy for basically theocracy.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  And when we look in the New Testament, the authors of the New Testament, the people who were putting the words into Jesus's mouth, all pretty clearly did not have any political power and did not have any, I don't know, aspirations to political power, certainly didn't have any prospects for political power. So political power was something that other people did and they were glad to let them have it. They basically just railed against empire. So here's one of the examples where we have inconsistency between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament's regarding, you know, the the limits of political power and its imposition of a government's will on the people.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  The New Testament is a ginnet when it comes to the theocracies that are talked about and endorsed in the Hebrew Bible. So when Joel says, go ahead.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  I was just gonna say that we've talked about the fact that, you know, the New Testament is largely from the perspective of a sort of downtrodden minority.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  You know, a marginalized little group of, of, you know, upstart rapscallions.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Whereas, you know, like Second Kings, Josiah is a king, you know.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  It's royal propaganda.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're coming from at it from the perspective of of the, you know, the, the, an emperor, essentially. Someone who is unquestionable and can order the deaths of people and act with absolute impunity.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Which seems like, first of all, when you that's what you're clinging to, webbin, when, you know, when you're clinging to stories about kings.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  It's hard to feel less American than that. Like the whole, as you pointed out, like the whole point of America was to get away from monarchy, to get away from, you know, non-representative government. And now that's exactly what he's.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  And theocracy.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  It was also, I mean, the, the framers of, of the constitution quite explicitly put in there, no, no religious tests for office. And, and this is what a lot of Christian nationalists also struggle with is the misapprehension that the way some state constitutions were written has anything at all to do with the way the US constitution was written. Cause they'll point out, oh, well, you know, the several of the 13 colonies, their state constitutions had religious tests for office. It's like, yeah, that did not create the United States of America. The creation of the United States of America explicitly and very clearly said, we're not doing that.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  So if you want to say the state of Massachusetts was into that for a few decades before they got rid of it, that's great. That has nothing to do with our nation. And yeah, we were trying to get away from that kind of theocratic rule. The, you know, the, the Puritans who came over here, ironically, they went ahead and implemented it themselves when they came over here to escape being told how to live their Christianity. But by the time of the, the founding of the US, we kind of learned our lesson. And even those states that did have tests for religious tests for office in their constitutions, within 50 years, almost all of them were gone because they also learned their lesson.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  So the notion that it's biblical is, is not clear cut at all. It's biblical if you're ignoring a large chunk of what is supposed to be the more important part of the Bible for somebody who identifies as a Christian. And you kind of negotiate with it in a very specific predetermined selective way.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  And in, and in that sense, anything can be biblical.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  If there's one thing we've learned through the years in this show, it's that you can pretty much support almost any position using the Bible if you really, really want to.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so that doesn't mean anything. An American, no, in absolutely no sense whatsoever. It is 100% precluded by everything that sits at the foundation of the American nation. Now, can you talk about behaviors that suggest certain people are a little more authoritarian, a little more oppressive with their, with their Christian nationalism? Yeah. And usually we got over that stuff pretty quick, or usually those people were defeated in an election or by circumstances or something like that.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  And history does not smile on those people.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  No. It's profoundly stupid to say that, that this is something that is American. You do not go and beat down the doors of a church for flying a pride flag and then confiscate their property and give it to the churches you agree with. That's the kind of thing you did when you had a swastika on your arm. That is not the kind of thing that happens in America. We've fought multiple wars over that. Joel, your side is ophir. So, like, it's not American. Now, does America do lots of bad stuff? Are we currently going through a, you know, our fascism era?

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. But it is also, there's no case to make apart from what we, whatever we feel like doing right now in this moment constitutes what is American. That's a ridiculous argument. But Webbin's not big on, on making arguments. Webbin's big on asserting things on a podcast and then not responding to challenges because he doesn't know the Bible very well at all. And he doesn't know much at all about American history. What he knows is the things to say that will make small men who think small thoughts feel big. Because he is a small man, he does think small thoughts, but he tries to come up with big words so that he can make himself feel big.

• 20:46Speaker 00

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

• 20:52Speaker 01

  I've heard the construction.

• 20:53Speaker 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 because we, I wanted to get a new car and I wanted to do these, these improvements to the house, but we had to pay off our old car and that took actual planning, which you know I hate. And so I really had to shift my thinking quite a bit when it came to my finances. And we had to set dates and we had to create a budget and it was so satisfying to actually

• 21:34Speaker 00

  make a plan. 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.

• 22:02Speaker 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.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  And I think that is an amazing thing. Monarch has other things like. Uh, you can watch your timeline move. You can play out the options. You can choose the fastest way to alleviate your debt. Most apps just tell you what you've spent and how much debt you're in. Not Monarch. Monarch even has an AI assistant that will tell you, help you with anything to do with your finances. You can ask, how much did I spend on travel last summer? Or can I afford the vacation that I want to do? And it'll walk you through it all. It's super easy. It's super useful. I love it.

• 23:19Speaker 00

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• 23:35Speaker 01

  Well, let's explore then, the thing, the one thing that we, that, that, that we sort of pitched at the beginning of the episode, which is this idea of, is it okay? Cause, cause, cause in the end, what he's, what, what he is asking is that people running for office hide their true intentions, deceive the, the people that they're, that they're going to be representing and then, and then have, you know, and then enact this ulterior motive. So I wanted to talk about, you know, the, the most obvious thing biblically about that is that one, that one list of rules that everybody is so keen on, that has that

• 24:19Speaker 01

  thou shalt not bear false witness.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Moment.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  I think, you know, that's pretty obvious, but that it's not the end of the story. If the boy, a lot of people want you to make it the end of the story, but there's plenty of moments in the Bible where people are deceptive.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Including God.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  The big guy. Okay, sure.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, that it is treated as, as. You know, you have an ideal in some societies, the idea of a trickster, somebody who is able to manipulate people to get what they want. There are times and places where that is considered an asset. And you have that in parts of the Hebrew Bible. And, you know, within the history of early Christianity, you have people who imagine that Christians were an underground sect that had to be incredibly secretive. But, yeah, it's peculiar how they kind of compartmentalize the approval of that, the endorsement of that,

• 25:23Speaker 00

  over and against the kind of black and whites prohibitions on precisely that thing. And lying is an interesting one because, yeah, you have God doing it too. I have a friend named John Anderson who published a wonderful book called Jacob and the Divine Trickster. And this is about stories in the Jacob cycle in the book of Genesis, where deception is what allows God to fulfill the ancestral promises. For instance, when Jacob is, wants to leave Laban. Laban has deceived Jacob by giving him the wrong wife.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Yes, I remember this, yes.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so then later on...

• 26:04Speaker 01

  What a great trick. What a fantastic... Ha ha.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  And then Jacob was just like, "Oh, you, you got me. Okay, I'll work for another seven years for the right wife."

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then he uses this bit of sympathetic magic, the sticks with, that he's peeled the bark off of and stuff like that, to try to make it so sheep give birth to certain kinds of patterns and things like that. And basically tricks Laban, deceives Laban, so that when he does leave, he can take with him the best of the flocks and everything like that, and attributes that to God. That God is the one that made this possible.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  And made it so I could do this. And there are... Other examples of of using deception and trickery to to get what somebody wants. And the authors of the Jacob's cycle seem to represent God as not only being okay with it, but even orchestrating it in in multiple examples, which would suggest that, yeah, God is is down with with deception as well when God's purposes are on the line. So.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Well, there's also God's story about when you're gonna die if you eat that fruit.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Genesis 217, which

• 27:26Speaker 00

  which didn't end up coming to pass quite the way God intended, which which I think,

• 27:33Speaker 00

  you know, is related to the fact that in Genesis 6 and in in 1 Samuel 15 and in other passages, God also regrets doing things because God does not know the future in all parts of the Bible. So so sometimes God gets it wrong. And excuse me, sometimes the getting it wrong means God was lying. And like a like a parent will sometimes do like, if I get to three, this is gonna happen. And then you get to three and you're like, just do the thing.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Just do it. Or, yeah, or little spot is now living on a farm upstate.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The little white lies. But, yeah, so so God does that as well. So there's a case to make that deception can be divine, which just goes to show that, you know, the Bible is not perfectly consistent. And many of the values, even where it it asserts values as absolutes, they're negotiable. They're up for debate. And you can find examples of God saying, you know, eh, well, you know, we can get, we can get around this if we have to, we can bend this. We can bend this rule. And and this is what what fascinates me about apologists when when it comes to God lying.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  When you've heard people talk about how God is the the source of morality. Therefore, whatever God does is is right.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  I see it all the time.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Especially as a challenge to atheists. Where it's like, where do you think your morality comes from? Ha, gotcha.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  And and one of the arguments is that when God kills, it is okay. Because it's God doing it and as the source of all morality of God does it, it's okay. And that up to and including killing people or commanding their people to kill other people. When it comes to lying, for some reason, the people are people are a lot more squeamish about that. It's like, no, if God says to kill the child, you gotta kill the child.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  And it's okay because it came from God, but and if God kills, well, God gave life. God can obviously take life. That's God's prerogative. But it's like, okay, well, here it says God lied.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  No, no, no, he wasn't lying. It was it was actually he bent it and actually, no, because they when he said you would die that day. Days meant 40 years in that time.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  A thousand years.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  A thousand years, yeah, whatever.

• 30:11Speaker 00

  But you never see the if God does it, it's right, applied to lying. Why is lying the thing that's just a bridge too far for people? Who lie programmatically when it comes to at least Christian nationalism? Like, I've I've always wanted to find somebody who's thoughtful and who will engage in good faith and be like, why is lying the immoral thing that you just? That's just a bridge too far for your God, even though, you know, sexual assault, rape, murder, all those things, if God does it, it's perfectly fine because God's the source of all of that anyway. Why is lying the thing that is not on your list?

• 30:54Speaker 00

  I've I'm always baffled by that. Because that would be the easiest way out. If I'm like. Yeah, God lies. Yeah, God's allowed to lie because God's the source of all truth.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Nah nah. Yeah. So here's my question then, is Joel Webbin then, if God, you know, can be a trickster God? And if those, if trickster tactics can be permissible in, in service of God's will or God's ideas, then maybe, now I'm wondering, is Joel Webbin, at very least, if he's not correct about what should happen and what is American and all this stuff, is he not at least a little bit maybe

• 31:40Speaker 00

  consistent?

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Correct about, about being okay, about, about trickster tactics?

• 31:45Speaker 00

  If, if the rhetorical goals at which Webbin and, and Todd are aimed were actually biblical and American, then I think you could make a case that, that the Bible, you could negotiate that into the Bible, that being okay.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  Now, obviously, it's not biblical, it's also not American, it's also deeply immoral.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  And, and will prove to be incredibly harmful to a lot of people, including Christian nationalists. And so, in that sense, I would say the, yeah, lying for the Lord there, you're not actually lying for the Lord, you're lying for yourself.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Well, isn't that always how it is? Like, whenever you're declaring, I'm doing this for God, or I'm doing this for a thing, somehow, whatever it is that you're doing, lines up with your own desires and your own ethics and whatever.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  At some point, it's going to come back around to benefiting you directly. Yeah, that's, that's what's really underlying all of this. Yeah. So I, I think you could make a case that, that it's at least consistent. If, if you are negotiating with the text and you decide that this is biblical and you overlook all of the stuff and you acknowledge that's what you're doing, then yeah, the, the text is not going to stop you. And if you want to try to, to make the case that God lies to bring about their purposes and, and this is therefore the purposes of God that we're lying about, yeah, you could, you could make that case. Every other part of the case is profoundly stupid and misguided and wrong, though. And again, immoral and hateful and harmful.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  And not for nothing, also deception, even if it is, even if we could conclude that it's biblically permissible, that's also immoral. Like, it's also immoral to deceive people when you're running for office in order to enact an agenda that you are pretending you're not going to enact. Like, that's also morally impermissible.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  Although it is ongoing all the time.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I'm not claiming they're not doing it.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Right, right, yeah. You know, you put somebody on the Supreme Court and they're like, "Are you going to overturn Roe v. Wade?" And it's like, "I can't, I have no idea." And then the instant they get in office, "Yeah, let's overturn Roe v. Wade."

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, what they say is, "No, that's settled law, and I believe it's settled law," and blah, blah, blah. And then the first chance they get, they're like, "Woo-hoo!"

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So, everybody lies, unfortunately. And I, having run for office twice at the state level, I can see why they do it. And I can sympathize to some degree with the impulse to do it. I adamantly refuse to do it. I refuse to compromise my own principles just because I was told it's the only way to be electable in a place where, you know, I'm down by 50 points. And one of the things I found dispiriting was, yeah, being honest is not electable.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Like, they all expect you to lie. And they want you to lie. And you can't really get far in most markets if you're not willing to promise things you don't intend to keep, and lie about what you intend to do, and lie to people so that you can get their vote. Which, I think is a good sign that we're doing something wrong.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  With the way we have organized these things.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  And the thing that we're doing wrong is called politics. All right, well, I think we could go on and on complaining, but I, I, I love that we came to a conclusion that I was not actually anticipating.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  So that's, that's a lot of fun.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Let's move on. I think, I think it is time to, to move on to a terrible parable.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Okay, so the wedding banquet, or at least it's a wedding banquet in Matthew. In Luke, it's, it's just a dinner. It's a great dinner in Luke.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  I, I don't know. Should I walk us through kind of the basics? Should I read it? I, I feel like.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. Why, why don't we read it, read through it first and then we'll go back and talk about what's going on here.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Are we doing Matthew? Matthew is the crazy one. Luke feels so reasonable after having read the Matthew one.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  Yes, it's good cop, bad cop. Well, actually, yeah, yeah. Let's, let's start with Matthew. We'll talk a little bit about it and then we can talk about Luke and also the version that we find in one of the other gospels that is not in your Bible.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  What? Yeah, you sprung that on me right before. I didn't, I didn't know. I didn't know. All right, I'll dive in and read it. This is from Matthew 22. It says, once more, Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, I love that it says right off the bat that it's a parable. It's not always clear when something's a parable. We've made it clear this, it's explicit this time.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again, he sent other slaves, saying, tell those who have been invited, look, I have prepared my dinner. My oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, "The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet." Those slaves went out into the streets, and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad, so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  But when the king came in to see these guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to them, "Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?" And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, "Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, for many are called, but few are chosen." And that last scripture is very, very popular, and I have heard it a lot, and I never knew that it was attached to a crazy story that makes no

• 39:07Speaker 00

  sense. Yeah. Why don't we talk about some of the ways it doesn't make sense before we talk about the other parables that make more sense that are associated with them? Because we have the story in Luke covers most of the ground covered by Matthew, except for verses 11 through 14. And this is interesting, because a lot of scholars, when they compare things that are found across multiple different gospels, a lot of times you'll find, you'll notice that the language is identical, like a verse, two verses, the whole thing, maybe it's identical, or very, very, very close. When it comes to what's in Luke, it's parallel, but there are

• 39:52Speaker 00

  only three words that are actually identical. Into the streets.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  That's the only, those are the only three words that are actually in the same order, in the same part, uh, between Matthew and Luke. Other than that, it's two different tellings of more or less the same parable until we get to verses 11 through 14, which leads a lot of scholars to say, okay, so whatever parable this was before it was written down in Matthew and written down in Luke, obviously didn't have verses 11 through 14. And it probably wasn't from what, what some scholars reconstruct as Q, which would be a written, uh, source that, uh, was used by Matthew and Luke that was probably not known to Mark.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  That's, uh, is the reason that there's so much in Matthew and Luke that is shared. Uh, it's probably not in Q because it seems more like an oral tradition or something like that. But the, it's really a-

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Now, remind me, uh, the order that the, the, that came in. Matthew predates Luke?

• 41:00Speaker 00

  Probably, yeah. So it probably went Mark, Matthew, Luke, and then John.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  That's where I think most scholars stand right now.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  But, uh, and verses 11 through 14 are where it gets weird because, you know, if the story is, okay, invite all the people, they're not coming. All right. Burn their city to the ground. Uh, let's just invite the strangers off the streets. Okay. Now we got a wedding banquet full of strangers off the street. Fair enough. Like that's, that makes sense.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know about this burning the thing to the ground. We'll get to that.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's at least internally consistent.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  And Lu- Luke doesn't have that part either.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  The burning the city to the ground. No, no.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Burning the city to the ground.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  Luke's a little different.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  But, yeah. I mean, like, if I cut out all the parts that freak me out, it's a nice story about like, you invite the nice fancy people, they don't come. So you got a bunch of food. You give it, you invite all the poor people, which you probably should have invited them before, but that's okay. But you invite them in and, and, and it's, it's an, it's a large table parable. And that's a great parable.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  If it stopped there, if the parable was just like, hey, be cool to all the poor people and be cool to all of the, you know, the people less fortunate than you. That I get. But then there's this guy who forgot his tuxedo.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, it says, when the king came in to see the guest, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe. And he's like, brohim, how did you get in here? And the guy was probably like, I was walking by and somebody told me to come in.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Chilling.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, why would I, why would I have that on me? I don't keep that thing on me.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Sir, this is a Wendy's.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  And then, and yeah, he gets, he goes to hell because of that. He gets thrown into outer darkness. And, and so there are a lot of texturally sensitive scholars are like, okay, 11 through 13 was something that Matthew added, because it doesn't really fit. And then verse 14 is even, is also peculiar, because in the story.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  That's the many are called, few are chosen.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Right, right. In the story, the majority of the people who are called don't come.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  And then of all the people who do come, only one is not chosen. So many are called, few are chosen, is like, that doesn't fit with the story you just told.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  The story you just told is.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  So confusing.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, the story you just told is many are called, some don't come, a small minority of the ones that do come are not chosen. So.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's, it's few are called, then they don't come, and then, then many are called, and then everybody but one guy is chosen. And he's not chosen because he wore the wrong, because, because of fashion reasons.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, because he, yeah.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  But he's, what is the author of Matthew doing here? Probably cobbling together something. And, and Matthew, the author, has, has some messages going on here. But I want to talk now about the, the message of the parable. Because like it makes sense, it's not necessarily a great parable. Because in this parable, obviously, the king is God. And obviously, the wedding banquet for his son is about Jesus. This is the kingdom of heaven. This is basically this eschatological end times. We all survived. It's the final scene in any of your happy ending post-apocalyptic movie.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  Sends out his slaves to call those who have been invited to the wedding banquet. So this is prophets, apostles, things like that. Who are the ones who have been invited? The Jewish people.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:58Speaker 00

  Yes. The Jewish people would not come. I gotta, I gotta, it says, no, everything's ready. We were, we're ready to go. And they're like, eh, gotta go tend to my farm. Eh, gotta go tend to my business. And then some of them, it says, seizes his slaves, mistreated them and killed them. So that would be the prophets who were killed by other Jewish folks. And then the, the early followers of Jesus who were mistreated. Saul, for instance, who became Paul, you know, mistreated and, and had some of them killed. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed their murders and burned their city. This is widely understood to be a reference to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. In other words, yes.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  So, so this is saying, okay, the Jewish people aren't gonna come to my feast for my son. Well, I'm gonna send Rome to destroy Jerusalem.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  This is almost a, a, a taunting. It's almost like a, told you so. You shouldn't have been a jerk to us. That's what happens.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, you see what happens? Look what you made me do.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Okay. Wow.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  And, and then he said to his slaves, the wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. That would be the Jewish people. So problematic, to say the least. Go therefore into the main streets and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet. So this is a reference to. The mission of Christianity to the Gentiles.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  You Jewish people don't want to accept the invitation? We're going to open it up to everybody.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  And we're going to go out and we're going to find anybody we can. The poor, the weak, the orphan, the widow, uh, whatever. We're going to go find everybody.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  The dirty, dirty Gentiles.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, the slaves went out into the streets, which would be the world and gathered all whom they found. And then you have this, uh, both good and bad. So the wedding hall was filled with guests. Now it's like, why, why would you include that? And, um, and there are a number of scholars who have suggested this is probably something that was added to kind of make sense of the fact that there's somebody in there who's, who doesn't belong.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  It does seem a little like, whoa.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, like we're in heaven now and we brought bad people.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Why did you let them in? What's going on?

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Or at, and I love the, uh, in verse 12, friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe? And he was speechless. I can see the guy with like pate, like, whoa. Just wide eyed, kind of looking at him before he's grabbed by both arms and dragged screaming out of the, out of the venue.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Mouthful of chicken. He's like, whoa.

• 47:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Who told me about the dress code? I'm sorry.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  But yeah, I, I think it's likely the author in, in trying to stitch the pre-existing parable to this idea of the one without the, uh, wedding robe, probably had to, uh, sprinkle a little foreshadowing into the parable that was received. The received.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  So is the idea with the wedding robe? Is it, is the idea that I, like, if I'm, if I'm putting on my parable interpretation hat?

• 48:12Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  The best I can come up with is that like, everyone's invited in, but you gotta come correct. Meaning you got, you, you still have to be righteous and you still have to sort of, uh, do all of, you know, do all of the correct things. Or you're still not getting in, even though everyone's invited.

• 48:35Speaker 00

  I, I think this is one of the complexities of, of interpretation because in whatever context, this was initial. Published. It probably would have made sense to the audience if they were the target audience. What was intended by that? Whether it was you have to be baptized. Or maybe it's you have to be circumcised.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  Because Matthew is very much, uh, we're doing all the stuff. You know, uh, anyone who keeps the least of these laws will be the most in the kingdom of heaven. But he who, who breaks the, the least of these will be the least. So maybe it is, uh, somebody who's not following the law of Moses. And, uh, and they're not circumcised or they're not wearing the, uh, the right garment. Or they are, you know, not doing the good works or, or whatever. It depends on how narrowly you can figure out what the target audience was. And, and what precisely might've been in view for the author and for the target audience. I don't think we can say for sure what that is, but, but it's probably some kind of

• 49:45Speaker 00

  costly signal, some kind of display of your fidelity to the group. That there was probably controversy about whether or not, uh, this was still required.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm just going to say, just to be on the safe side, you guys, when you get to heaven, poke your head in and see what everybody's wearing and just make sure that you're, uh, that you get it right. Just in case that it's, that it's more literal.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Then yeah, and, and, uh, ask if they're circumcised.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Look, look under the robe of a couple, just to see what's going on.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  So, so I, I think that's, that's one way to, uh, to interpret what's going on there. But, uh, what do you say? We take a look at some of the other iterations?

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Okay. So let's go to Luke is very, very similar to Matthew. I don't want to read the whole thing. But it's, I, instead of a wedding banquet, which I think the, I think this is good because wedding was a bit of a weird metaphor. Cause Jesus never got married that we know about, and it just seems like a weird thing. It's a big, it's a reason for a big banquet. And I think that's probably what they were going for, but this is just a great.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's not a king. It's just someone.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  It's just a dude throwing a party.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  A dinner party.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  And he says, yeah, send his slave, just one slave.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  Which, which is suggestive of Luke having access to the earlier version of this before Matthew got his grubby hands on it and, and, you know, added all these details.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, Matthew was into embellishment for this.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so one slave goes out to say to those who have been invited, come, everything is ready now.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  And then they all began to make excuses. Oh, gosh, I bought a piece of land. I must go out and see. I bought five yoke of oxen. I'm going to try them out. Please accept my regrets. I've been married and therefore I cannot come. So the slave come back, comes back and goes.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  And in this case, I liked, I liked that they all had what sound like fairly reasonable excuses as opposed to just screw off. I don't want to come.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, and, and here's, and here's where we get one of the messages of this. All of these people have been pre-invited. They already know it's coming.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Oh, that's right.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  And, and yet they made other plans for the time.

• 52:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and, and here's another kind of layer of, of significance to Christians. It's kind of like the, the wise and the unwise virgins because God doesn't tell you when God's coming. You know, neither the hour nor the day, but be on the lookout because one day, at some point, God's slave is going to show up and say, come for everything is ready now. And you got to be sure you haven't gotten married.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  Or, and you know, that's not an excuse. You haven't bought five yoke of oxen. That's not an adequate excuse, but then the, the person gets angry, tells the slave to go back out into the streets and bring in the poor, the disabled, the blind, the lame. And.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, nobody is, first of all, nobody's murdered. So.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're not, we're not making reference to the 70 CE Jerusalem destruction.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  So, yeah.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  So, so they just send them out and just say, bring in some other cool people, whoever you find.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  And it's explicitly the social outcasts.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Right. Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Not just anybody off the street, not just fulano de tal, Joe Schmo, not your Joe six pack or whatever. It's the, the poor, the disabled, the blind, the lame. And the slave said, sir, what you ordered has been done and there is still room. And then he says, "Go into the roads and lanes and compel people to come in so that my house may be filled." So now, yeah.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Don't make them come in.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, at some point salvation is gonna be angels going, "We need more people. Come on."

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Get in here.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  I don't want to. You have to, come on.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  For I-

• 53:37Speaker 01

  I just ate, I'm full.

• 53:39Speaker 00

  That's the rapture, angels showing up and being like, "Uh, take that guy."

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, "You too." "No, I didn't know, dude."

• 53:46Speaker 00

  We're not even Christians, doesn't matter, we need the, we need somebody to fill the seats.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  We're Hindu, leave us alone.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  And then it ends, "For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner."

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  So it sounds almost more like revenge-like, like, "Look who I'm with now."

• 54:02Speaker 01

  There's a little bit of bitterness in the last little line, yeah.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. Now, I think Luke probably gives a more pristine representation of what's going on here, probably a little closer to whatever tradition was in circulation prior to, again, the author of Matthew giving their, getting their grubby little hands on it and, and turning it into this, uh, this revenge fantasy. Where, "Burn the city to the ground." I was gonna quote something from Three Amigos, but I, I thought better of it. There's, there's another version that is recorded, that comes from the Gospel of Thomas.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  And this is-

• 54:43Speaker 01

  This is the one I had no idea about, I'm excited to hear about it.

• 54:46Speaker 00

  So, uh, Gospel of Thomas probably preserves from some stuff that, that might predate the canonical gospels, even though it's also got, uh, a kind of, uh, Gnostic-leaning layer to it as well. But here is, uh, utterance, Logian number 64, however you wanna refer to it. "Jesus said, 'A man had guests, and when he had prepared the dinner, he sent his servants to invite the guests. He went to the first; he said to him, "My master invites you." He said, "I have some money for some merchants; they will come to me in the evening; I will go and give them my orders. I pray to be excused from dinner.'" He went to another. He said to him, "My master has invited you."

• 55:27Speaker 00

  He said to him, "I have bought a house, and they request me for a day. I will not have time." He came to another. He said to him, "My master invites you." He said to him, "My friend is to be married, and I am to arrange a dinner. I shall not be able to come. I pray to be excused from the dinner." He went to another, and he said to him, "My master invites you." He said to him, "I have bought a village. I go to collect the rent. I shall not be able to come. I pray to be excused." The servant came. He said to his master, "Those whom you invited to the dinner have excused themselves." The master said to his servant, "Go out to the roads. Bring those whom you will find, so that they may dine. Tradesmen and merchants shall not enter the place of my father."

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Whoa, okay, that's an interesting exclusion.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we have something that's more basic, which doesn't necessarily mean it's earlier, but it could mean that. Although it does add people. It's not just three excuses given. There are four people with excuses. And they all have to do with trades, the trades, or money, or responsibilities to family, or things like that. And we get a quite explicit, "Tradesmen and merchants shall not enter the place of my father." But also, this indicates that the master is not the father. The master here is Jesus.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, but this is understood by those who understand the Gospel of Thomas to be a little more gnostic, to be kind of anti-capitalist to some degree, given that.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it sounds very Eat the Richie to me.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, which is funny, because you've got to imagine somebody who's like, they've read Luke, they've read Matthew, then they read this. And they're like, the other ones are like, people don't make excuses for not being aware. This one's like, tradesmen and merchants suck. Like, that's a little on the nose, but yeah, that's what we get in the Gospel of Thomas's version of this parable. Again, Nothing about anybody who shows up and starts shoving his face with, stuffing his face with shrimp, no shrimp involved, but stuffing his face with chicken and then being sent to hell.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Being incorrectly clothed.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  Yes, so nothing about that. But yeah, we do have the Gospel of Thomas's own little spin on who exactly this is about. It's not the Jewish folks, it's capitalists.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  It's capitalists.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Which if you ask antisemites now, they would, they would claim that the Jewish folks are the capitalists.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the, that Venn diagram is a, is a perfect circle. Yeah. So, interesting parable found in a few different versions within early Christianity with some, some layers added to it to kind of, you know, point the finger at this group, that group, and the other group. But yeah, a lot of fun to see how it differs from one author to another and how it's kind of deployed to serve their own rhetorical interests and goals.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also how confusing it is. It is, it is a murky, murky, brackish water that we're wading in. And I, I still don't feel like I understand what's really going on, but that's okay. That's, we don't get to understand everything. It's, but it's fun to explore it anyway.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Well, there you go. That's it. If you would like to become a part of making this show happen and exploring more terrible parables, you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and give us a little bit of your hard earned money. Don't be a merchant. Don't be, don't, don't be one of those guys.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  Don't be a tradesperson.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Don't be a tradesperson. Just, just be cool and give us a little bit of your coin. And in return, you can get access to an early and ad free version of every episode. At the right level, you can get access to the after party, which is bonus content every week. And, and you can also get access to that warm, fuzzy feeling that you, that you know you're helping us out. And what, what could be better than that? So thanks so much to Roger Goudy for editing the show. Thanks to Sam for being our right hand man. And thanks to all of you for tuning in. We'll see you again next time.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

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