Noah's Ark: 100% Unconfirmed

The Daily Mail says the resting place of Noah's Ark has been "100% confirmed" on a hillside in Turkey, so we're lacing up our hiking boots to check the radar scans, the fundraising pitch, and what happened the last time someone drilled into this very same formation (spoiler: bedrock). Then, what exactly is a messiah? Long before the word meant one savior at the end of the world, it just meant someone who'd had oil poured on their head, which is how kings, priests, and even a Persian emperor ended up with the title, and why Dr. Dan thinks the whole job description had to be rewritten after Jesus was executed. 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/ 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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 3:07Speaker 00

  From above, you look down on it and if you trace it, you could totally say that's a boat.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Or a Volvo, particularly with the other ridges that are around it.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  Can we start calling the different parts of this archaeological site, the labia menorah and labia majora of Noah's Ark? Cause that makes me very happy.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  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. And we've got our combat boots at the ready, don't we, Dan?

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a misinformation kind of day today. I'm excited. Put on your hiking boots, because we're going to go look for a boat on the top of a mountain. It's an artifacts and fiction. And yeah, it's, it's Noah's Ark. Cause some new, some new facts have come to light, some ins and outs and what have you.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  New information has indeed come to light.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  So yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about that. That'll be fun in the first half of the show. Second half of the show is going to be really cool too, because what is that? We're going to talk about Messiah. And frankly, I think, I think we're all wrong about what a Messiah is. And so it'll be nice to clear that up in some way.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  So that's going to be a really interesting conversation. I'm looking forward to that. But I think we need to just spend no time and dive straight into artifacts and fiction.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  And okay, so let us high ourselves to the mountains of Turkey.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Specifically, now here's, here's the thing. You sent me a bunch of videos from a TikTok channel called, oh, what's it called? It's called something.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  The, oh, Ark Scans.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  Ark Scan, which I thought it was, it said Ark Scam, and I was pretty excited about that. Noah's Ark Scans is the name of the channel. And I was like, oh, Noah's Ark scams. And then I realized that it was an M and not an N or a switch.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  The other way around. Yeah.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  And I was like, okay, that's interesting. And I gotta say, okay, I'm going to open with this, this is the same site that people have been talking about for a minute.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Right?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. This was discovered in, I think, 1959 is when we first had people go there. And since Ron Wyatt declared definitively for all time and eternity that this was Noah's Ark, there have been a number of expeditions out there and attempts to demonstrate that this is in fact Noah's Ark. Because if you squint at it hard enough and ignore everything around it, it kind of reminds you of a boat shape.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Totally. Like from above, you look down on it and if you trace it, this, this little thing that's poking up from the ground, you could totally say that's a boat.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Or a Volvo.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. I mean, if you want to get Georgia O'Keeffe about it, sure.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Particularly with the other ridges that are around it.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  But.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Can we start calling the different parts of this archaeological site, the labia menorah and labia majora of Noah's Ark? Cause that makes me very happy.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Thou sayest it or cessed it, if we're going to pronounce things correctly around here. But yeah, we have had, there are announcements all over social media. If you haven't seen these things, then you either are not on social media or you do a much better job of curating your algorithm than I do.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Let's just be clear, Dan, your algorithm is.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Oh, it's totally screwed.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Totally screwed. Yeah. I was going to use other words. We try not to use those words on this show unless necessary. Yeah. And my algorithm ain't great either, but I think yours is completely off the rails.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  All I do is respond to wackadoos on, on social media. And so my, my algorithm is like, this is what you like? All right, weirdo.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  This guy, this guy's super into wackadoos.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, sick freak. So yeah, I get, I get a lot of that kind of stuff. But the, the announcement from the Daily Mail was, well, first thing is, is there's this crew that's there. They were there in 2019 where they used some ground penetrating radar to conduct some scans of the area.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  That sounds sciency.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  It's, it's science adjacent.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  It's near.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  It can be used for science.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  And it's headed up by this guy named Andrew Jones, who from everything I've been able to discover is a software engineer, but has, has a knack for raising money, asking people for money. And so he, I think he's been going to this site for like 20, more than 20 years.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Wasn't Ron Wyatt a nurse? Is that like?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  He was a, he was an anesthesiologist, a nurse anesthesiologist, I think.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  We, we, boy, this, this kind of work really attracts the, the pros, doesn't it?

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Well, well, yeah, these are non-specialists and that's not at all a knock on any of their, their professions.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  No.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  But they're not archaeologists, they're not scientists. And so it says here, he first visited in 1997. So it's been almost 30 years since Andrew Jones has been going to this site in Turkey that you only go to if you think that's Noah's Ark. So he's, he's been on one side of this issue for nigh on to 30 years. But 2019, he went there, did these scans, put together a slide deck for raising more money. That basically said, look, we found right angles. And then said, we sent this information to a lady and the lady said, I see a tunnel. So there's a tunnel there as well, although we've, we've seen no data that indicate there's a tunnel.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and the lady that he sent it to is unnamed and, and no credentials listed, right?

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Obviously, yeah. And so the idea was, okay, we're going to come back and we're going to drill core samples. And that's where you take a cylindrical drill and you go down and pull up a big core sample. Like kind of if you stick a straw into a very thick slushy or something and then plug the top and you pull out the slushy. And maybe if you've got layers in there, you can see the layers through the straw.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Core sampling, I usually have heard of it in terms of ice, because when they go to like the Arctic or the Antarctic, they can actually get a lot of information about what was in the air hundreds to thousands of years ago.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  Just by taking a core sample, drilling down and yeah, getting a cylinder of what was underneath. It's harder to do on land. It's harder to do when there's rocks involved.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, you need much more specialized equipment and all that kind of stuff. But there, so they've been promoting the fact, oh, we're drilling, we're drilling, we're drilling and.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  And so now, like yesterday, the Daily Mail came out with this headline, Noah's Ark Resting Place, quote, "100% Confirmed," unquote. "After 4,300 years, as astonishing, quote, 'man-made,' unquote, structure is detected, buried deep underground." And when they say "deep underground," they mean like 15 to 20 feet, but that is-

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's not deep.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  That is, yeah, and that is also a ridiculous headline because when you read the article, what they say is, "We can't confirm this is Noah's Ark. We can't confirm yet that this is man-made. We did the scans. We found anomalies that have right angles, and so we're going in to check and we're gonna see." But the Daily Mail decided they wanted to say "100% confirmed," and it's in quotation marks even though no such quotation is found anywhere in the actual reportage.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Okay, right.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  But then Andrew Jones's, I believe, Facebook account, or some account, Noah's Ark Scans, reposted it yesterday, and they added the following, "We are 100% sure that the Daily Mail will come under fire for this headline. But knowing what we know now, we are also 100% sure that they are not going to have to issue a retraction. We will be releasing more information soon. Help us make the evidence of Noah's Ark irrefutable and share it with the world." And then we got a hyperlink, noahsarkscans.com/donate.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  So this is, this is a request for money, even though ostensibly if they have the data to 100% confirm things, they don't need to continue to fundraise.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, publish.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  They just need to publish. And I have been going back and forth with somebody who I don't know is their promotional person or something like that-

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  -on Twitter. And I forgot the name of the person, but she is, she presents herself as their social media guru or something like that. I don't know. But, and the thing that I have been pointing out online is that this is not the first time people have gone in and done core drilling here. It has happened before.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  It happened back in 1987 and 1988. In 1987, an actual geophysicist named John Baumgartner went and conducted scans using ground penetrating radar, found anomalies that were suggestive to him of a human-made object, and very excited because he fully believed this to be Noah's Ark, began core drilling in 1988. And you can go find the report that he released in 1987 where the conclusion says, you know, "Exhort the Turkish government to allow us to conduct core drilling." And then the very next, they got that permission, and then

• 14:14Speaker 01

  they went and they conducted the core drilling, and they found bedrock.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  And they, they conducted four, they drilled four holes, three along the center ridge, the midline of this Noah's vulva, and one a little off to the side, and they found bedrock. In fact, on the, on one end of the ship, they found bedrock exposed to the surface. Like it was bedrock and then air. Like it was just sitting there, bedrock. And so they basically said, "We're done here." And Baumgartner had to, he, he didn't publish

• 15:02Speaker 01

  this because it was, basically, the expedition was a failure. He didn't get what he wanted out of it, had no reason to write this up, submit it to a journal somewhere for peer review and get published. But we have emails from him saying, "Here's what happened. Here's what I found. We dug these four holes to 10 meters and, and 5 meters and 4 meters and blah, blah, blah. And this is what we found." And so, yeah, it's a big nothing burger. And so I, I've been pointing that out. When people are like, "Oh, they discovered the Ark," I've been pointing out, no, this has happened before.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  And we're in the period between the initial report and then the later dejected emails.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  The later silence where they will just skulk away with their tail between their legs and try not to make any hay anymore.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Or try to get more money. What they'll do is they'll pretend like there's still hope.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  And try to get more money.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  And they'll fundraise on precisely the same stuff. "We have the data. We know for sure. It is irrefutable."

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Right. We just haven't-

• 16:06Speaker 01

  "Can't share it with you!" Or if they do share it, what they'll do is they'll leak, or probably not leak, but they'll publicize selective data that has been interpreted already for you. Because a lot of the images that you see of like the, the reds and the blue globules that are, you know, supposed to be imagery from the scans, those are manipulated. Like those are, that's not just the results you get back from the computer. That is where they have gone in and said, "Okay, interpret this this way, interpret this this way." And, and punch up an image based on those guidelines. And so that's interpreted data.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  And so I imagine that what they'll end up doing is there will be a slow trickle of interpreted data that are suggestive of something, where they don't have to, they don't make any firm claims that they can later be shown to have fabricated. But they also will not share anything that will convince anyone who has an inkling of a capacity for critical thought.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, it'll convince a lot of people who are really eager to be convinced. You know what I mean? There's a whole group of people who are motivated to believe this. And I understand that. And as a matter of fact, I, you know, it's because so, so often, especially here in the United States, but elsewhere also, pastors and priests, you know, they build their theology around the idea of an inerrant, absolutely 100% true Bible. And then you have to go back and make everything work. And, you know, as, as this

• 17:55Speaker 00

  show has sort of made it a point to point out every week, you can't. It's, it just doesn't work that way. And if they would just say, "These are stories that are an important part," like the stories are an important part of our history, but the history is not, the, the stories that they tell are not history themselves. And that would make things a lot easier.

• 18:24Speaker 01

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

• 18:30Speaker 00

  I've heard the construction.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've 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. And then even though it took some discipline and there were some bumps

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  in the road, we actually succeeded and were able to pay off a car. I 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.

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• 22:10Speaker 00

  But I do want to take this back to the Bible.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Because one of the first things that I noticed when I watched one of the videos from Noah's Ark scams was that they, you know, the woman standing there. And she's like, I'm here at the site and behind me is Mount Ararat. And here I am. And so, and that got me thinking like, what? And first of all, that mountain was not called Mount Ararat back anciently.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah, no.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  So talk about that a little bit.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Medieval period, I think, is when, um, when that specific peak becomes identified as, as Mount Ararat. But when we go look in the Bible, it doesn't actually say Mount Ararat. It says, "The mountains of Ararat." And anciently, the name Ararat was a designation for an entire region.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  That covered, uh, that swept across, uh, eastern Turkey and northern Syria. And that region was named that, uh, in, at the beginning of the first millennium BCE. So there was, there wasn't even such a place as Ararat. Anywhere near, anywhere within 2,000 years of an ostensible historical Noah.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  Meaning a singular peak.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Well, even just a region.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, and, and the, the region was named after a people group that didn't exist even within 2,000 years of, uh, an ostensible historical Noah. So what happens is the name Ararat is based on the region occupied for, occupied by a people that had only been occupied by that people for a few centuries by the time of the, its designation as Ararat. And the story uses that designation, which is a pretty good chronological indicator of when the story was written.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  It was written when there was a region called Ararat, named after the people that occupied that region in a given time period.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Okay, but devil's advocate here.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  First of all, question. The mountain that is now known as Ararat in Turkey, would that have been considered? Would that have been part of the zone that would have been part of Ararat at the time that the book was written?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  So.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  That's the first thing.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're in, we're in the related area.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  So, and also, even if this was written, you know, it could, you could very easily say, okay, well, this was written well after the fact of Noah's time. But I'm just going to use the current designation of this area to indicate that area, even though I don't know what it was called back then. But it was, but we know that it was in this area of Ararat. You know, like, like if I say that the ancient Pueblo Indians were in the, the, you know, the Arizona or whatever. They wouldn't have called it Arizona, but that's what we would call it. So that's, so that's the designation that you give it.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  So, so like, all of that isn't that big of a problem for me. The problem, what, but there are really big problems. One of which being that when the lady says, uh, you know, behind me is Mount Ararat. And here we are, and Mount Ararat is risen significantly higher than the area where they are. I went back and read the story and this boat stopped on top, on the very tippity top of the, what, what must have been one of the tallest mountains, because it rests there for a while and the water still doesn't go down and still doesn't go down and still doesn't go down. And, you know, the bird can't find an, an olive leaf for, for weeks.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  So to me, that says, this boat was on the tippity top of a mountain. Does that make sense? Am I, am I off on that?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  No, that, that makes perfect sense. And the, and the argument is that over the thousands of years, it has slid down.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  It sailed.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  The, the only problem is, and, and I'd have to pull up that video again, but I think there's a valley in between where the person is standing filming that video and the peak of Mount Ararat, because it did not slide back up.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Another, uh, another hillside.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. It went down one and up another and whatever. But it does seem a little weird. I, I guess if it fell off of the thing or whatever, and then landed perfectly upright on its, in its, in its current resting spot, I don't know.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  The other biblical thing that I like was, I, I suddenly had to like do back of the envelope calculations on.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  Because they, one of the claims that they make is that the length is perfect. It's exactly right for the boat. Now, I looked it up and, you know, the, the boat, as it's described, and by the way, can we just start calling it boat? Cause nobody says ark.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Instead of ark. Ark just means box.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Um, in, in Hebrew.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I, so yes, I let's, I'm going to call it a boat or a ship.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Ship is fine too.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  We got volva too. Volva is an option. It's on the table.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  All are acceptable, not, just not ark. So this, uh, so this boat was, uh, cubits. It was measured in cubits.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  Uh, and we don't actually know what they meant by a cubit. But generally speaking, well, we know like, yeah, the elbow to tip of the finger, right? That's the basic idea.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  So it, it depended on what kind of cubit you're talking about. But yeah, it could be, that was one of the measurements, but it varied by region. And so.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Some, I mean, even it varies by human. Like my cubit may measure very differently to your cubit.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Yes, just like a foot is, uh, you know, your foot may not be exactly one foot.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  So there's, you have the short cubit, which is around 18 inches. And that would give us a length of about 450 feet. Uh, there's the, the longer royal cubit, which, uh, the ark encounter says 20.4 inches is what they, um, provide, which gives you 510 feet. 515 feet is, I think, what the, uh, what they say our durupinar, um, formation measures. And, you know, where are you measuring to? Because like, these are pretty thick ridges. It's like, is it the inside of the ridge, the outside of the ridge, the center of the ridge? Do you have some kind of high point that you're measuring to?

• 29:37Speaker 00

  Go from the clit to the?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Can we use that word on here?

• 29:42Speaker 00

  We just did, baby. We're, we're, we're diving.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Oh gosh. Um, and so, yeah, they, they say it's exactly the, the right dimensions, which is again, okay, but you've got a pretty big, uh, window of.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  It's pretty funny to say exactly the right dimensions when we have no way of getting exact about this. There's just no chance of exactness.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  So it's like, as long as you make all these decisions, the way I think you should make them, then we get close.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Right. But the, the other thing is that we know the width of our boat, our biblical boat also. And that doesn't work at all for their, for, for the, uh, the, the durupinar.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  Formation. It doesn't like, literally the width of the biblical ark. I think if we're using the, the, the royal cubit, it's like 86 feet.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Wide and the durupinar formation is 100 and almost 140 feet.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  That's a pretty big discrepancy.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it expanded without losing any length.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  And also without compromising the, uh, its periphery. Like none of the edges were broken off or anything like that. So how did it do that?

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  And also the, you know, when, when you look at some of the scans that, uh, that Jones provided, they're like, look, we got the, all these right angles. And it's like, okay, these right angles and the, the lines that you're, that you're identifying are not parallel or perpendicular to the center line of this thing. They're at, they're at a bit of an angle, but you want to.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Dan, Noah's never made a boat before. Cut him a break. If his angles are off, you gotta cut him a break on that.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Look, they didn't, they didn't have the laser lines that we use today. They didn't even have a chalk line.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  It was, uh, it was kind of eyeballing it, but they want us to believe that all of these features of its dimensions were compromised. Like it slid out and, you know, fell apart and disintegrated and degraded. And when it was sliding down the glacier and up the other side of the hill, um, you know, it all got all skiwampus. However, it stayed exactly 515 feet long. That's the only thing that did not change.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  By a single inch. So, yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  You know, I, I saw that they were talking about the width and like, they have this idea that it's splayed or that it, you know, it sort of disintegrated and fell apart and, and that's how, and it does, you know, I, I looked into this too. And there is enough verticality to Noah's boat that, you know, if you, if you cut a middle section and then dropped it wide, you could get the width that they, uh, the, the, that formation has.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  But that's not how boats do like boats are joined boat joining the joinery of a boat is super important to how boats work. And also, can we just get into a little bit about how the preservation of wood happens or doesn't happen? Because we're talking, what they're claiming 6,000 plus years ago?

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty damp territory by by all accounts, given that the entire earth just flooded.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just, I like if it were, well, dampness is interesting because if in order for wood to be preserved, one of the best things to do is have it submerged completely, which then blocks all oxygen from getting to it, you know, all airborne oxygen. And then that could actually be helpful in preserving. That's why that, you know, for example, that's why

• 33:46Speaker 00

  with Venice, which is all which is on pillars of wood that are still there hundreds of years later, and the wood's fine because it's on it's submerged. But the second you pull it out of water, it rots instantly. It goes away. It's just, it's just so weird that, and you know, it doesn't petrify the, the, the, the things that have to happen for wood to petrify and turn into rock are definitely not present.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Because it What is it 6,000 ish years, 5,000 ish years, when it should take hundreds to millions, hundreds of thousands, two millions of years for

• 34:33Speaker 00

  Well, not only that, but like, you have to be, it has to have like, very specific mineralization in the water that's flowing over it. And it has to be covered in mud. And it has to be like, there's all of these things that have to happen. This is, and we, and also, it's very

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Well, it can't decay. It's, it's like, it's a entirely distinct process from decaying.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  It is a non decayed

• 34:58Speaker 00

  It's, and it, and it's, so it's, it's a gradual replacement of the wood with minerals. But you can test for that. That's easy to test for. If it were petrified wood, somebody would have done, they've, I guarantee you, they've run tests to say, hey, is this petrified wood? It ain't. So, all they have going for them are these scans, these radar scans, and these, and they're testing these core samples. Do they have anything else?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Right now, the, no, just the core samples. And, and they're arguing that the, well, well, one, they, they claim the radars are able to mute or eliminate any responses from geologic features. Which, which I don't know

• 35:56Speaker 00

  I don't know what that means. I don't know enough about radar to know what that means.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the idea is, oh, if we're getting any responses here, if we're getting any feedback that indicate these anomalies, the anomalies cannot be associated with rock or bedrock, I think is the claim. Now, I looked up the, the guy who's, who's been saying all this, and he does run a company that has been working with the US military to try to develop ground penetrating radar imaging systems that can do that. And there's a report from like, 2002, where the military was like, yeah, they got it wrong a bunch. And, you know, who knows what, he's still working with them. So obviously, he's made progress. So who knows what they're capable

• 36:42Speaker 01

  of doing. But I don't think they're at a point, and people who are, who are at all familiar with geophysics, will know far more than, than you and I put together. But I, I'm not aware, based on what research I was able to cobble together, of technology where you can say, ignore rocks, and it could just do that. I think you still have to fiddle with it and impose interpretive frameworks upon it, upon the results after you've received them in order to try to get rid of any noise that might be the result of rocks and bedrock and things

• 37:22Speaker 01

  like that. But they are also claiming that their drill can't go through rock. But they just said that their drill broke on something hard. And they're like, it's gotta be harder than limestone, because it can go through limestone. It's like limestone's a rock.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  And they're like, maybe it's petrified wood. And it's like, so I'm, I'm a little confused by the claim that it must be petrified wood, because the drill can't go through rock.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  But it can go through other kinds of rocks. I'm, I'm not sure exactly what that's supposed to indicate.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  And here's the thing, we're not going to be inviting a geologist onto the show to refute this, because even if they got some of the results back that they are hoping to get, they still have a whole problem of, the earth never flooded. There's no, like, we, we know that that didn't happen. We have so many more sciences that they have to surmount before we can

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Oh, this, they could discover a boat.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  They could discover a boat. And all this means is that there's a boat.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  There's a boat. You have discovered a boat.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  For all we know, the story of Noah's Ark was inspired by people being like, yeah, there's a boat up on that hill, that's old and rotting away, and we don't know where it came from. And they came up with that story.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Like, just discovering wood there, just even discovering some kind of human made structure, doesn't prove anything. Discovering a freaking boat that's 515 feet long doesn't prove anything. Now, it does change the algebra a little bit. It does become a lot more fascinating. I would be, and, and this is where a lot of people on social media are like, ooh, you're so scared. No, I would be ecstatic. If we discovered a giant boat on this hillside.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  That'd be really cool.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  It would be really cool if it had Noah carved in the side of it. I would be ecstatic. I can't explain how ecstatic I would be. But I live in the world that is outside of my brain, not only the world that is inside of my brain. And I just, that is just not a plausibility for me right now. If that changes based on some data, great. But we've seen this before. We've been here before. This kind of rhetorical presentation of the data where we're selectively giving you only the data that we want to give you, and we're framing

• 40:01Speaker 01

  it in a way so you have to accept our interpretation. And we're not experts. Like, we've seen this before. It has never borne fruit. It has always, absolutely always ended up in slinking away in silence and shame. Or, as we saw with Baumgartner, just being like, I wanted it to be a boat, not a boat.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Not a boat.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  It sucks. Like, that, that's at least a scientist with integrity. What we have is someone who's not a scientist, who is spreading a lot of misinformation, who is allowing a lot of sensationalist claims out there, and is even stoking the fires of this sensationalism, being like, ooh, they're not going to have to retract their statement. I got this special secret, and we're gonna let you know.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Does the Daily Mail even retract anything? I mean, it's kind of a rag, anyway. They don't they won't retract it. Even if it comes out that it was wrong, they wouldn't retract.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so

• 40:57Speaker 00

  All right.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  It's, it's a mess. But there's a, there's a great paper by Lawrence Collins and David Fassold from 1996, in a journal called Journal of Geoscience Education. It is entitled, Bogus Noah's Ark from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geological Structure. This is a good discussion of, of what the scientists did with the, the data they got from these, what was conducted in 1987 and 88. And until something is published in a peer reviewed academic venue, I think that is the, that is standing law, is, is the conclusions of that paper. And the, the

• 41:40Speaker 01

  very first sentence of the conclusion is, evidence from microscopic studies and photo analyses demonstrates that the supposed ark is a completely natural rock formation. It cannot have been Noah's Ark, nor even a manmade model. So I think that's where we are.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  Science, science is lame.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  And Jones is, whatever he finds, is not going to get published in a legitimate, peer reviewed academic publication, because it would be utterly eviscerated.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  Because they're too afraid of the truth, man.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, and, and that just shows that this is not an academic venture. This is not a scientific investigation. This is somebody who thinks he's Indiana Jones.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  So you're saying that I was dumb to give them my money, then?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Well, it depends on how much money you gave them. I think there's, I think you get a little grace period for a few bucks. But

• 42:38Speaker 00

  Well, okay, there you go.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  As long as it didn't come from the show. We have, our LLC has, has an image to maintain.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  So, well, all of my donations come from the show. So that's, you should not have given me access to the bank account. That's all there is to it. Well, that's fun. Don't give them any of your money, please. And we just, there, you know, there are just so many other boats that are much more worthy. Or vulvas, either way, whatever you want to do. All right. Let's move on then, to, what do we call it? What's that? Is that what we called it? Okay, what's that?

• 43:23Speaker 05

  Hey there, I'm Travis Hoyer, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know, and the stories moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industries shaping tomorrow, and host the experts, authors, and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long term perspective on investing, and of course, stocks.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  Okay, Messiah. It's a word that we have, everyone, every Christian grew up hearing this word Messiah. I believe every Jew knows the word Messiah.

• 44:11Speaker 00

  I did not grow up knowing what that word meant really, other than Jesus in, you know, in my world. It is the Messiah. There's a definite article there. It is one guy. And, uh, and that's that. That's the end of that. But I don't think that's correct.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  That's, that's not even the beginning of that.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  If that makes any sense. But the, you, you probably, if you've ever heard somebody say the Messiah, Jesus Christ, or Jesus Christ, the Messiah, um, that is, you know, the, the same appositional phrase, just in different orders, but it's also a little redundant.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  It's like ATM machine.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Or, or the Los Angeles Angels. Or the, yeah, um, but, cause Messiah means anointed one. Meshiach in Hebrew, based on the verb root Mashach. And Christ, Christos in Greek means anointed one. So, uh, a lot of people think Christ is like Jesus's last name. And we, have we ever done, we, okay, I've got an idea for our next segment is going to be, where does Jesus H. Christ come from?

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  But the, but that makes it sound like he's got a first name, a middle initial and a last name.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  And he does. I know for a fact that he does.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  But Christ is not Jesus's last name. Jesus's last name was of Nazareth.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. Josephine. I don't know.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  But, uh, but Christ just means anointed one. So it's really a title, Jesus, the anointed one, or Jesus, the anointed, or something like that. And Messiah is the same. And, and that is where I think a lot of the more fascinating features of, of the concept of the Messiah are to be, is to be found. I just totally lost track of, of number in, in where I was going with that. Didn't know if it was an is or an are, but, uh, because Messiah really just means somebody who got oiled down.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that's, I guess we should start with the idea of anointing. Cause, uh, cause yeah, anointed, you, you said oiled down. What, what do we mean by that? Uh, what, what is an anointing, uh, with oil? Why, why was it done? What, what, what's going on there?

• 46:43Speaker 01

  So, uh, anointing with oil is, is kind of a ritual act. And it, and it's not like somebody is, you know, it's not bronzer or anything like that is being spread all over somebody. Really, usually they're, they're pouring some, usually on somebody's head or something like that. And, and this is to symbolize their authorization or their endowment with some kind of right responsibility mission, something like that. And so in the Hebrew Bible, we see this in association with kings. Somebody would have oil poured on their head as a symbol of their, uh, being authorized to rule as king or something like that.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Priests could, uh, could have, uh, anointings and then prophets as well. Could in, in some sense be anointed. So really it means authorized one, the one who was authorized through this particular ritual act.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  And so you don't have the notion of the Messiah in the Hebrew Bible. You just have the concept of people who have been anointed.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  So, so would you say, so let's say a king, uh, you know, in, in, in the story of David and in Samuel, it talks about, he doesn't kill Saul because Saul is God's anointed.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:10Speaker 00

  King.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  Is he a Messiah then?

• 48:14Speaker 01

  He is a Messiah.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  And in fact, uh, there's an, there's another interesting case where, uh, if, if you believe the author of, uh, Deuteronomy Isaiah, there was a non-Israelite who was God's anointed. In fact, God says, called, refers to this person by name as my anointed one.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Oh, I think I know who it is.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Or his anointed, actually. Yeah.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  I think, I, I never know these ones, but I think I know this.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  You got this one? Okay. What is it?

• 48:48Speaker 00

  Is it Cyrus?

• 48:49Speaker 01

  It is Cyrus.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  Oh, I did it. I did one. Hooray. I feel so good.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  So Isaiah 45, one in the Hebrew, Kamar Adonai, Lim Shicho. And that would be thus says Adonai to his anointed one. And, and, and here's the fun part. You go into the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, and you get, uh, Hutos Legi Kirios, Hothios, To Christomu Kiro. And so this is God saying, To Christomu, my Christ, Cyrus. So, uh, yeah. So in, in the Hebrew, it's his, uh, his anointed one. In the, in the Greek, it has been

• 49:33Speaker 01

  the, the possessive has changed to my. So thus says the Lord God to my Christ, Cyrus. So, uh, you have the Persian emperor identified explicitly as my Christ by God. In the ancient Greek translation of Isaiah, this is the version of Isaiah that would have been used by the earliest Christians.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  So, uh, so we have Cyrus is God's Christ.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  In, uh, in the Hebrew Bible. So, but it doesn't mean Christ in the sense of the last name of the Savior of the earth.

• 50:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  It, it just means my anointed one, the guy I, uh, oiled down or up, whatever, whichever direction.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  For reference. Yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's dealer's choice on that. So where does this idea of messianic prophecy, Messiah, like as a, as a single Savior sort of idea? And is that, are those two different ideas? Savior and Messiah? Did, like, did they just?

• 50:39Speaker 01

  They are different ideas, but yes, they do converge. And really the, what happens is who's, who's the, the big king from ancient Israel, whose line was supposed to, uh, to remain in the throne for all time. And, and this is who Jesus was descended from.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Okay. Which, which king is that?

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Uh, David.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  David, the Davidic line. Right.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  So David is an anointed. And then, uh, you even have in, in, uh, in Psalm two, uh, the king is Adonai's anointed one, where, where God says, this day I have begotten you. You are my son. And so you get a lot of anointed one in relation to the Davidic king, David and any king in David's line. And once you get into the exile and after the exile, there's a lot of this looking forward to the restoration of David's line and this kingship. And this has to do with the restoration of a kingdom. We want our autonomy back. We want our kingdom back.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  We want our anointed ruler back. And so you have prophecies, ideas that, that pop up about somebody who's going to come back and restore the line of David. And this would also be an anointed one, because the king is anointed. And so it gets kind of fuzzy. Once we get into the exilic and the post-exilic period and these expectations about someone restoring the Davidic line, someone becoming the anointed one. And that, that bleeds into the anointed one being whoever is going to restore things. Whoever is going to return things to the way they were.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  That makes a lot of sense. And doesn't it indicate that the idea would be, we want this anointed one to then start another lineage of anointed ones? Like, isn't that what we're talking about? Like, if they want the restoration of the line of David, of the Davidic king.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Wouldn't that indicate that like, it's not just a guy, it's like, a line of people?

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. In, in the earliest periods of the development of this idea, it would basically be, we want things to return to the way they were, and then we're good, then we're just gonna do our thing. And so, yeah, there would be more kings that would come after that. It's when you get into the post-exilic period and into the Greco-Roman period, when you're getting more eschatological expectations, where it's, it's not just, we want things to go back to the way they were, but we want things to wrap up. We, we expect things to come to an end.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  And that's, and that's where the Anointed One takes on more eschatological properties. And that's where, that's where it's one single Anointed One is going to come and, once and for all, destroy the enemy, restore the kingdom, and then whoever's there will just live out a glorious life of, of indeterminate length, but, but there's-

• 53:52Speaker 00

  So we're talking, okay, so like in Isaiah, when it's talking about a branch coming out of the, the, the stump of Jesse-

• 54:01Speaker 01

  The stump of Jesse, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Like, that would be a Davidic line, that would be a line of kings or whatever.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  And then when we get into, where, is it Daniel where the apocalypse, apocalyptic stuff is happening?

• 54:13Speaker 01

  I think we're, we're starting in Ezekiel, but yeah, it becomes more eschatological in Daniel, in First Enoch, in, in a lot of these Greco-Roman period Jewish texts, that's where the expectation is developing that, that we're wrapping things up.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  And that there's gonna be, and this is also where you're seeing a lot more persecution, and the persecution is getting more and more severe, particularly once we get into Antiochus the Fourth Epiphanies, in the 160s BCE, which is the context for a lot of the eschatological parts of Daniel. And so, the, as the persecution and the suffering becomes more and more acute, the eschatological expectations become more and more imminent. And, and yeah, I think you, you have the developing expectation. And mind you, there's a lot of pleureformity. People were expecting different things.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  So it's not just like, everybody was like, yeah, we all agree, this is what we're all expecting now, right? Even you, David? Okay, good, we got David on board. Give this man a harumph. Like, there was a lot of different ideas about the Messiah. In fact, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is, you know, around the same time period, the early period of the, of the transcription and preservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls is happening around the period of, of the composition of the Book of Daniel, you have the idea of two different Messiahs. A Messiah Ben Joseph and a Messiah Ben David. So, a Messiah Ben Joseph would be a priestly Messiah, and the Messiah Ben David, or, or son of David, would be the royal Messiah.

• 55:49Speaker 00

  And in this case, the Joseph in question is not Joseph, father of Jesus, but Joseph and the amazing technicolor dreamcoat.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Precisely, yeah. So, he's, he's going to be fabulous, and, and he's gonna be the one, no, it's, it, it's the priestly idea of, of the Messiah. So, you, you have different ideas that are developing, and I think that's one, one QS. I'm, I'm blanking on, on the full name of, of that fragment, but, but you have different ideas, but one thing to keep in mind is that all of these Messiahs are supposed to restore political autonomy and independence. And this is supposed to be temporal, political, social.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  So that's what everybody's expecting. And, and here's where I think Jesus achieves the biggest pivot, because you, you are getting a little, kind of spiritualization of stuff, where it becomes a lot more symbolic, it becomes a lot more about the afterlife and things like that. I think that the historical Jesus, if he represented himself as the Messiah, and believed he was the Messiah, probably talked about restoring Israel to its, its

• 57:14Speaker 01

  former glory. Probably expected to restore Israel's political autonomy and glory, and then got executed.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  Right, yeah.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  And so, I, I think that the development of the notion of salvation from sin, rather than temporal, physical salvation-

• 57:36Speaker 00

  Rather, rather than salvation from the, the Roman Empire, or whatever?

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz the Savior, the idea of a Savior was always somebody who delivered you from harm. And the harm was always illness, war, something like that.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  It was always temporal, physical, literal, I'm saving you, I'm delivering you from the harm that almost got you.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  Or, or like, from Babylonian exile, or from, yeah.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's oppression, or subjugation, or things like that. And so, I think that probably what happened after Jesus was executed, there was some going back to the drawing board that took place. And I, I think the spark of all of this was reports about Jesus resurrecting, coming back to life, seeing the risen Jesus. And now it was like, what are we gonna do with this? And then we had to go back to the scriptures and find a way to read this new expectation that the Messiah would die and rise into the text, which required

• 58:43Speaker 01

  we reread a bunch of stuff that was never intended messianically, as if it were messianic. Isaiah 53, as far as I can tell, was never messianic. And there have been some arguments from folks about, potentially, this could be messianic. There's a messianic reading preserved in some later rabbinic texts that could have been preserving something from the first century CE.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  Isaiah 53 says what? It's, it's basically-

• 59:09Speaker 01

  That's the suffering servant, "By his stripes we are healed," like a lamb before slaughter is, is silenced, all that kind of stuff. So-

• 59:21Speaker 00

  I mean, that's the one that's quoted in Handel's Messiah.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  So, I feel like, obviously, it is messianic, cuz Handel says so.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  I feel like the rhetorical pivot worked, because then everybody went, duh, the Messiah was never about political independence and restoration, it was always about spiritual deliverance from sin, from death, just the, the concept of death in general and all that stuff. And I, and I think that's what made things, I think that's what helped the gospel gain more purchase, because it was no longer, just you wait and see, we're going to defeat the Romans. Because, you know, you, you look around and be like, we ain't defeated no Romans

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  yet. That, that's a, that's a tough thing to sell. Just like in another segment, we talked about Noah's Ark. There's, there are only so many generations of, we're almost ready to release the data-

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  -that can pass, before people start realizing, there's no data for you to release. But if the claim is now, oh, this is about salvation after death, this is about the salvation of your soul, that's a much easier pill to swallow, that's a much easier bottle of, of snake oil to sell. So, so I think that's probably largely responsible for the attractiveness of the Christian gospel. But the Messiah then becomes a spiritual Savior and Deliverer, an Anointed One. And so, the mission of the Anointed One entirely changes after Jesus is executed, and they have to redraw what, what the, the identity and the mission of

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  the Messiah was. And, and so I, I think that's probably the biggest change. We, it's always changing what the, the understanding of the mission and identity of the Messiah, but I think because they were forced into a position where they had to grapple with a Messiah who failed, who died, they had to come up with a way to make it still work. If they, if they wanted their movement to succeed, and their movement ultimately did succeed, and I think it's precisely because they reinvented what the Messiah was supposed to be. And the developments along the way made that possible.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Because once you have a heavenly, apocalyptic Deliverer as Messiah, that dovetails a lot more easily with, oh, and guess what? They're actually not in charge of our rinky-dink little political situation here on earth. That heavenly, apocalyptic Messiah is now in charge of the gates of hell, and, and, you know, the boundaries of death, and all that kind of stuff. So, the, the stakes get ratcheted up as, as things get worse and worse, but that also makes it easier to pivot towards the greater stakes of this being about salvation eternally, of your soul, against sin and death and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  Now they just need that apocalypse, any day now, any day now.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And that's what we're waiting on. That's, that's the great delay that, that is still associated with that Messiah ship. And so, yeah.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  It's only 2,000 years late. It's fine.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's not without its sticking points, but you know, it's a, it's a much smoother pitch now than

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  than it was previously.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  It's an interesting, like, I'm fascinated by this, by this eschatological pivot that happened in Daniel and those other books, just because, yeah, I, how bleak did it get for those people that it went from, we want our, we just want our country slash kingdom slash sort of our autonomous rule back to, you know what?

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Burn it all down.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  The whole thing's just gonna blow up.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Like, that's, that is a hardcore swap. That's a big switch there.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and it took a couple of centuries and, and I'm sure it wasn't an easy, wasn't an easy sell. But, but yeah, I imagine that.

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  Things got bleak.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And I imagine that fantasizing about watching, watching the enemies burn was, was a big part of what made it attractive. And, and that's where you get the ideas of eternal conscious torment.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Is from, you know, I want to watch Antiochus, the fourth epiphany suffer. I want that suffering to go on and on and on and on. And so I imagine that concepts of hell and eternal conscious torment originated in, how do we make ourselves feel better about the fact that the big baddies that, that ended up killing so many of our people, don't seem to receive their comeuppance in life?

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  And they're doing just fine. They're, they're, they're dining on, on lamb while we're being, while we're suffering. Yeah.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And anybody, you know, you can just say, he poops on a toilet of made of gold. And we can think of, like, there's one person I know a lot of people are thinking of, but that's not the only one. You'll, you'll recall there were toilets made of gold in, in the palaces that were, that were taken over in Ukraine and, and places like that, following a lot of the things that have gone on over there. Like, there are a lot of places in the world where there are bad people who have the blood of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions on their hands. And, and you can sympathize with the people who are under those boots, just fantasizing about what's

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  gonna, what God is gonna do to the people wearing those boots in the afterlife. So, yeah, I think it was bleak. And, and I think that's what's responsible for developing that idea. And then later, we just ran with it. And we were like, this is really useful if we teach our kids.

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  We're gonna tell our kids that they're in danger of that. That's really gonna make sure that they do the dishes and go to freak to bed on time. So, and then they're gonna, they're gonna grow up with all kinds of anxiety. And then we'll drop the rapture on them. And that'll make it even worse. And anytime that we haven't gotten home from work, by the time they're home from school, that's gonna be a core memory, baby.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  That's gonna ruin the rest of their adulthood.

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  Oh, okay. Well, there you go. A Messiah, the Messiah, one of the Messias. There's a lot of different ways to think about messianic.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  And even some universities that, that have that title.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Oh, really? Messiah University?

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  I, I thought there was.

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  Well, I'm just gonna believe you. Nobody look it up. And we're just gonna take Dan.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  It's in Pennsylvania.

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  Oh, okay. I, I want to know who poured oil on it. Oily University, you can look it up if you want to. All right. I find that all very fascinating. If you would like to be one of our Messias, you can, you can save us by becoming a patron of the show. You can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma, where you can get early and ad-free versions of all of our episodes, where, and access to things like patron and member-only lives over on YouTube that we're gonna do. You can get access to all kinds of cool stuff. So, please consider giving us a little bit of your money

• 1:06:54Speaker 00

  if you can. If you can't, five stars is always a nice thing to give us, wherever you listen to the show. That always helps out. And thanks so much for joining us. We'll talk to you again next time.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

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