Atheist Bible Expert On Why God Doesn’t Exist, Wes Huff, & If Jesus Was The Real Messiah

YERRR – Alex O’Connor is back and we’re diving deep into Jesus, the Gospels, and the wild early days of Christianity. Was Jesus actually God? Did he have siblings? What’s up with Mormonism, Gnostic gospels, and Revelations? Alex breaks it all down. All that and more on this week’s episode of FLAGRANT. INDULGE. 0:00 Intro 00:25 Utility of religion 4:35 The Gospels 7:51 John the Baptist was real 14:48 John the Baptist’s role 20:14 Mormonism + Origins 31:29 Joseph Smith Jr. martyrdom 33:48 Expecting the Messiah + Jesus was about the action 35:27 Jesus never claimed to be God 50:36 Was Jesus worshipped? 1:00:57 Revelations is wild + Islam’s interpretation 1:06:31 Oral vs written traditions 1:10:13 The historical context + Speculation 1:12:34 John and Jesus are cousins + Preaching 1:16:41 Why did Christology arise? 1:20:19 Gospel of Judas & Thomas + Gnostics 1:27:00 Jesus had siblings + Miracle worker 1:34:36 Gospel of Thomas ending is wild 1:35:45 Wesley Huff has made blunders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Are you ever shopping online and suddenly a discount that helps you save pops up? It makes your day, sometimes even your week. Want that feeling month after month? Well, new customers who save by switching their home and auto insurance to Progressive, save hundreds. Cue your happy dance. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot, designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And, no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Coca-Cola. For the big, for the small, the short, and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers. For the optimists, pessimists. For long-distance love. For introverts and extroverts. The thinkers and the doers. For old friends and new. Coca-Cola. For everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  As promised, here is part two of our episode with Alex O'Connor. It's a big one. We're gonna talk about Jesus and whether he even claimed to be the Messiah. And maybe it was John the Baptist. We're also gonna talk about Mormons. You guys think they're weird? They might be right. Alex O'Connor's gonna tell us why. And last, and probably least, but the most fun, he's gonna talk shit about our boy Wes Huff. There's some Bible beef going on. Let's see what's happening.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  Religion is my real thing, yeah. That's why I'm specifically asking. So I'm aware that you must've had tons of conversations with people and they've broken down like what they feel their personal benefit from it is. Yeah. Have you, in your studies, like, have you read any stories that warmed your heart, to be cliche, and made you go, "Oh, I understand the societal utility for this." Yeah. And yes, there are things that hurt people. And ostracize people, and that is bad. But is there like a version where you're like, there is a net good for the individual?

• 2:26Speaker 05

  I had a debate the other day with a Christian who tried to kill his dad with a hammer.

• 2:32Speaker 05

  He just like attacked his dad, he caved in his dad's skull with a hammer.

• 2:35Speaker 04

  What?

• 2:36Speaker 05

  Wow. And now he's a Christian and he's totally fine.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  So what was his dad doing?

• 2:42Speaker 05

  I can't remember, but I think, I think so, this guy, he's, he's like a sociopath or a psychopath, one or the other, like he's like an actual sociopath or psychopath. So I don't know if like there was anything particular or if he just did it for, for, you know, good times sake, whatever, but for some reason, he like, he did that. And then he became a Christian and he still is, like, he still like has that, that same brain. But Christianity, as far as I know, this is his understanding is that Christianity has given him like this framework to abide by, so that even though he's a sociopath, he just, he doesn't engage in that kind of stuff anymore. So, so yeah, I mean, those kinds of people exist. There, there are also people who like, I just, I remember distinctly when I was, when I was younger,

• 3:26Speaker 05

  when I first started thinking about religion, the first time I tried to write a book, I, I wanted to open it with this little story, just because it happened fairly recently at the time. I was like a teenager, I'd just moved into a new, new sort of area and we went to our local Catholic church. And it was like Easter Sunday or something and it was, there weren't very many people there. I just remember sitting down and there was this old woman on her own, just sat on this pew. And she just like came up to me and went like, crap, it's like, I hope that you and your family have a, a very, very happy Easter. And I thought, man, that's so, I, I, I don't want her to become an atheist.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:02Speaker 05

  You know what I mean? She's on her own, she's here in church, she's probably here every single week. She's got the, and I don't think she'd become unkind or something, but I just think it would be, it would be soul crushing. And so, so of course.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  So how do you grapple with that?

• 4:16Speaker 05

  By being violently agnostic.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  Agnostic, meaning you don't know? So atheist is like?

• 4:22Speaker 05

  Religion is dumb, there is no God. Well, there is no God. You don't need to think that religion... You can be an atheist who doesn't believe it's true, but still think that it's beneficial. There's societal utility to religion. Got it, got it. So the agnosticism allows you to what? Allows me to not feel a duty in being honest to tell that old lady that I think she's wrong. Because she might not be wrong. She might be totally right, you know? As I like to say, "I will die on this fence." I will happily just say that like, "Look, if you think that God exists because of this reason or that reason," I'll say, "I think that's bullshit and I don't think that works." But I can't say that the conclusion itself is true or false, right? Like, if you think that the Gospels are 100% historically reliable, I'll say, "I think you're wrong. I think that's just not true."

• 5:07Speaker 05

  Right. If you say you think Christianity is true, I'll be like, "Okay, maybe it is, you know? But tell me why you think that and we'll get into the weeds." And does it matter why? It does, because, I mean, well, it doesn't on the level of like, society or whatever. Like, if you're a Christian because your parents were Christian and... Well, what about us being emotivists? Well, emotivism is about ethics. So it's about what you think is right or wrong. Oh, okay. Whereas we're talking here about like, what's just true and false. Oh, I, yeah. Some people, I've tried to apply emotivism to that in the past, but it gets a bit complicated. But, but there's sort of, there's ethical emotivism, which is Got it. just a linguistic claim about what good and bad mean, which is like, expression of emotion.

• 5:50Speaker 05

  And this is just about what you think is true and false, you know? And most of my interest at the moment lies in New Testament studies and digging into the New Testament. And a lot of people just don't know what's in there. They've just got, they've just got no clue. Can you talk to us like, we've never heard a single thing about Christianity? Sure. So the Gospels. So there are four Gospels. Gospels, eugaleon in Greek just means "good news." Okay. So the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. Says the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ. So these are the stories of Jesus Christ. And it's good news. It's just people saying like, good news. I've got some good news to share with you. And there are four gospels in the Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The Mark is probably the earliest, written around 70 AD.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  So 40 years after Jesus died. Yep. And you've got Matthew and Luke, which are written 10, 15 years after that. And John's gospel, which is written 10 to maybe like 10, 15 years after that still. All of that is disputed. You know, dating is a very, very difficult thing to do. And they all tell stories about the things that Jesus said and did. Three of those gospels rely heavily on each other. They're all interconnected. They're called the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. John's gospel is like on its own. It seems to have its own sources, its own. Godfather III. Yeah. Got it. Timeline's a little fuzzy. So what you've actually got is the Bible, but Bible just means like library. So we get like biblio anything, you know, biblio. It's just, it means like book or library or something like that. And so it's a library of books, lots of books. So when somebody says, oh, that's just because the Bible says that.

• 7:19Speaker 05

  The Bible is a collection of texts. So you have to refer to which text is saying. Yeah, but also it means that if you've got four different texts, which all say the same thing, you haven't just got, oh, it's just the Bible that says that. It's like, no, you've got four independent accounts, which all say the same thing. So there's, there's a lot more like evidence of history in the gospels than people give them credit for. So there are some stories that only appear in one of the gospels and none of the others. They might've happened, we don't know. But if you've got stories that are independently attended in every single one of them, especially if you've got other reasons to think that they wouldn't be made up, it's a good reason to think that they're historically true. Now, you said real quick, the synaptic. Synoptic. So synaptic gospels rely on each other. Yep. So does that mean that like one thing could have been written in one and then kind of paraphrasing? Mark's gospel is the shortest and most people think it came first.

• 8:04Speaker 05

  Around 95% or so of Mark's gospel is also in Matthew and Luke, like word for word. And then Matthew and Luke add extra stuff. But do you work off of Marx, for example? I prefer to work off Marx when I'm looking at the historical Jesus, because it's the earliest. Report. The earliest thing in the New Testament is actually Paul's letters. You've heard about like 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and these kinds of things. These are letters that Paul writes to various churches, and these are actually the earliest sources.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  And what year is that?

• 8:32Speaker 05

  Again, it's disputed, but probably around like 50 AD, something like that.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  So 50 years after the death of Christ.

• 8:38Speaker 05

  Twenty years after.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  Sorry, sorry. Right, right, because it's 33. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, got it. So he's like, listen, these things happened. I'm gonna tell you exactly.

• 8:46Speaker 05

  But Paul is not writing a biography of Jesus. Paul is writing letters to churches, telling them like how to organize themselves, what the theology should be, all of this kind of stuff. It's only later that you get these biographies. So you've also got different genres in the New Testament. The Gospels are biographies that tell the life and times of Jesus. Paul is writing letters to people. You've got Revelation, which is this apocalyptic vision that John of Patmos has and then writes all about it. But the Gospels are most interesting to me because you've got these four different accounts, and sometimes they subtly differ from each other. And you figure out what you can learn about these different things. So like, you know who John the Baptist is?

• 9:20Speaker 04

  I've heard the name, but what is he?

• 9:22Speaker 05

  So a lot of people have heard of him but don't know anything about him. John the Baptist baptizes Jesus, and it's at the beginning of all four of the Gospels. This is something that they wouldn't make up. Because if you're, if you're writing a story about Jesus and you're trying to present this man as the son of God, maybe God himself, it makes very little sense for him to be baptized by another known preacher. And so the fact that they all included it means that it must be something that actually happened.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 9:49Speaker 05

  So we have this historical fact about John the Baptist, which is kind of interesting now.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  Because you're saying people at the time would refute it because this is written in a time where John the Baptist could potentially still be alive.

• 9:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it would have still, so it would have been around, but also like they wouldn't have made it up.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  Because why would Jesus?

• 10:03Speaker 05

  If it didn't, if it didn't happen, they wouldn't, they wouldn't like make it up. It's called, sometimes called like the criterion of embarrassment.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:08Speaker 05

  If you include something that's kind of embarrassing or doesn't look good for you.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Right off the entire.

• 10:12Speaker 05

  It's like in Matthew's Gospel at the end of, when Jesus appears to his disciples. Matthew's Gospel says that the 12 disciples saw him and they worshiped, but some of them doubted. Which is like, not something that the author would make up.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  That's even more believable.

• 10:26Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  That's like a, that's really sophisticated storytelling. Like, if I was to lie, I would write that down.

• 10:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's the thing. But you wouldn't, but you wouldn't want people to think, if you're trying to present Jesus as the, as the the Son of God, this is him, you wouldn't make up a story that some of his closest disciples doubted that.

• 10:44Speaker 06

  Entering Jerusalem on a donkey, like having this sort of, I guess, like, low-status entrance. For a Messiah.

• 10:51Speaker 05

  The Gospels do actually want to paint Jesus as like, as like this humble servant. And the, the entering in on the donkey is a, is a callback to an Old Testament prophecy about, like, about riding in on a, on a donkey.

• 11:03Speaker 07

  So that could be made up.

• 11:05Speaker 05

  It could either, you could read that as like, it's either made up to try and fit Jesus within, like,

• 11:11Speaker 04

  The Old Testament.

• 11:12Speaker 05

  The Old Testament, and, and, and it's made up, sorry for that reason. Or you could say that Jesus did actually do it, but that he did it knowing that he was.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  He's, he's doing a callback.

• 11:21Speaker 06

  They're calling him the Son of David.

• 11:23Speaker 05

  But there are also other reasons why people might dispute things. So, for example, riding in to town, into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, and there's people lining the streets, Hosanna in the highest. A lot of people think that if this event actually occurred, Jesus would have just been arrested. Like, in an instant. A lot of people just, are just, are just like, there's no way this could have happened historically, just because Jesus would have been arrested. Like, the Romans would have been like, what on earth is going on here? This man is, like, being worshipped. He needs to be, he needs to be arrested. So there are all kinds of ways you can try and figure out whether these stories actually happened, or whether they didn't. And I find them all extremely interesting. And they can also tell us about the communities at the time. So John's Gospel.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  Sorry, to real quick, about coming back in on a donkey. Isn't that like, the least attention-seeking version of coming back in? Like, if you rolled back in on like, a white horse, then maybe people go, yo, Jesus is back. But if you come back in humbly on the donkey, maybe nobody even noticed.

• 12:10Speaker 07

  But all the celebrations, I think, is what you're saying.

• 12:12Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 12:13Speaker 06

  As he was coming back in.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  But he's coming in, like, people are lining the streets.

• 12:16Speaker 06

  And the fact that it means something to the high priests of Jerusalem.

• 12:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, they'll.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Got it, got it.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 12:21Speaker 06

  And he's doing it on a feast day, I'm, I'm sure.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  So he's making a celebration. This is like the Yankees win the World Series. This is the parade.

• 12:28Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah, this is around the time of the Passover.

• 12:31Speaker 04

  And your observation on that is that that would not be smart, given how much hysteria would cause and it would put him in a particularly...

• 12:39Speaker 05

  But Jesus was no stranger to doing things which aren't smart. Like, he was happy to put himself in danger, but it's more like it probably didn't happen because that's probably when he would have been arrested.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  Got it. And he doesn't get arrested immediately?

• 12:50Speaker 05

  He doesn't get arrested, no.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  Therefore, that might not have happened.

• 12:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's one reason to think that it might not have happened.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  But you were saying something, I think, about Mark, and then we got...

• 12:57Speaker 05

  So John the Baptist is mentioned at the beginning of all of the Gospels, and John's Gospel in particular, it opens by really emphasizing that John the Baptist is not the Messiah. It opens saying, like, "There was a man called John, and he was not himself the light. He was making way for the light." And then people come up to John the Baptist and they say, "Are you the Messiah?" And he says, "No, I'm not the Messiah." And he's saying, and there's this real emphasis, like, the author of John's Gospel is telling us, John the Baptist is not the Messiah. What does that mean? It gives us a clue that there were people at the time of the writing of John's Gospel who thought that John the Baptist was the Messiah. And John the Baptist is a really important figure in Christianity. Jesus, in the Gospels, calls him the greatest man ever born of a woman, is John the Baptist.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  He had to leave a little room for him. That's fire.

• 13:44Speaker 05

  But a lot of Christians say, like, "Oh, well, obviously, Jesus was excluding himself there." And you would say that as a Christian, but for me, I'm reading that, I'm like, "Are you sure about that?" Because I think Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist. I think that's who Jesus historically was. John the Baptist is preaching, all the Gospels say, if you read, like, Mark's Gospel, which is the earliest, let's look at the earliest source, you know, it will say right there in the very earliest source, that John the Baptist is, "in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins." What does that mean? No one really knows. But we know that he's doing some kind of water ritual for people. Of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. That's obviously something that Jesus picks up with the whole forgiveness of sins thing, right? But Christians will say, well, yeah, I mean, he wasn't, he didn't have the authority to forgive people's sins.

• 14:29Speaker 05

  He was just like announcing the forgiveness of sins, like priests would often do this. They would say to people, your sins are forgiven. They're not forgiven. Was John the Baptist a rabbi at the time? He was, he was like a preacher in the wilderness. He was, he was probably the, he was like the son of a priest. Was he religious? Yeah, so he would have been Jewish. So he's, okay, got it. But there's some, like, we don't actually know very much about him is the thing, but we know from, from Luke's gospel, although. When I hear priest, I think Christianity, rabbi. But this is pre-Christianity. That's what I'm saying, so he would be a rabbi or some form of religious scholar. Like a, no, as in the father would have been like a spirit. John the Baptist. John the Baptist would have, yeah, just a, yeah, just a spiritual wanderer. Yeah, a guru, so. A rebel to the synagogue? Yes, so this is, this is what often people think.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Guys, tour dates. This weekend, I'm gonna be in Cincinnati, Ohio, Liberty Township specifically. I'm gonna be there Thursday through Friday at the Funny Bone. Then September 11th through the 13th, I'm gonna be in Donia Beach, Florida. That is far from any who wants to blow up Florida. What kind of person would do such a thing? So it's a safe show to come through, be there. September 25th and 27th, I'm rounding out my Ohio tour in Cleveland. October 5th, Dubai, hurry up and buy those tickets. They're selling out, we might have to move to a bigger venue or figure something out, but right now, we're about to sell out. And then, uh, all those dates and more, akashsingh.com. We got big things getting announced soon, guys, big things. Also, Mark has tour dates. You can suck his dick in Montreal, Toronto, or Detroit.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Those dates respectively are August 22nd, August 23rd, and December 6th. Why is there such a big gap? I don't know. Tour bookers, get your shit together. Comedy clubs, get your shit together. This guy got three open months, what is that? September, October, November, book the man, markgadnonlive.com.

• 16:16Speaker 05

  So John the Baptist is described as wearing camel skin. And eating locusts and honey, and he lives in the wilderness. Like, he's this ascetic outcast. And there are all kinds of reasons why that could be the case. There's a, there's a book by a scholar called John McGrath, who talks about John the Baptist. And he thinks it might have something to do with some conflict with his priestly father and ending up like running out into the wilderness. But John is preaching this, this, this philosophy. And it's just that all of Judea were coming to him. He's this extremely popular Jewish preacher. And people are coming to him and he's baptizing them for their repentance of sins. And then Jesus comes along. And John is saying, there's one coming who's greater than, than I, and I'm not, I'm not worthy to untie his sandal strap. And then Jesus shows up and he's like, oh, here he is. This is the guy.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  And then he baptizes Jesus and the heavens open up and God says, this is my son with whom I'm well pleased. And that's the start of Jesus's ministry. So that's the Christian version that you get in the Gospels. That's going to be history mixed with myth. And in my, in my view, Jesus was a follower of John the Baptist, because all the Gospels report that he was baptized by him, which they wouldn't make up. And you've constantly got these ideas of Jesus saying like, Jesus talks about how the greatest students will one day come to surpass their teachers and. Jesus is talking about this? Jesus is saying this to his, to his disciples. And, and he also at one point says that to his disciples that they will do greater things than, than I, so you will do even greater things than I. Sort of implying that there's some kind of baton to be passed on. Now, Christians will dispute this. They won't like this at all because Jesus is the guy.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  But I'm thinking historically, it seems like anything that Jesus does, which he seems to get from the Father, he is willing to give to his disciples. So in John chapter 20, verses like 21 onwards, Jesus says to his disciples after his resurrection from the dead, as the Father has sent me, I'm sending you. And he breathes on them, says, receive the Holy Spirit. If you go and forgive anyone's sins, they're forgiven. If you do not forgive them, then their sins are retained. So Jesus seems to give the disciples the ability to forgive sins. And he does it by breathing the Spirit on them. At the baptism, John the Baptist, who's preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, baptizes Jesus. And what happens? The Spirit comes into Jesus at the baptism. And so it seems like there is this analog between what's happening to Jesus and what Jesus is then giving to his disciples. It's like vampires.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  Now, yeah, why not? If you speak to a Christian. They're gonna come up and think, "Alex doesn't know what he's talking about, like this is all not..." But like, I understand that that's not the Christian interpretation, but this is how I'm reading these things.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  You're analyzing it from historical record.

• 18:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, but also like even if you're looking at the historical Jesus, this is a particular viewpoint. It's not like a given. This is just my understanding. But it's worth pointing out that this is something that people need to sort of realize there are lots of different views on.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  Even within the Gospels?

• 18:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, because the Gospels are saying all kinds of different stuff and they give us all kinds of different clues into interesting facts about Jesus.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  Can I ask one question about John the Baptist real quick? You said he was popular at the time.

• 19:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, extremely.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  Is there like writings about him specifically? Is there historical account? Like, how popular? Hundreds of people, thousands of people?

• 19:17Speaker 05

  Well, the Gospels say all of Judea was coming to him, which is obviously an exaggeration, but it means like lots and lots of people. Also, when Herod Antipas, king of Judea, like first hears about Jesus, this is again in the Gospels. He hears about this guy Jesus who's going around causing a ruckus and he says, "This is John the Baptist resurrected." Because John the Baptist gets beheaded in the Gospels, by the way. And so, who must John the Baptist have been that when he hears about Jesus, he goes, "Oh, that's another John the Baptist." John the Baptist must have been doing something like crazy stuff, right?

• 19:46Speaker 04

  He must have been a nuisance.

• 19:48Speaker 05

  Are there any texts about John the Baptist? Kind of. There is a Gnostic group called the Mandaeans, who still exist today in small numbers, and they believe that John the Baptist is their last and most important prophet. They think Jesus is a false prophet and John the Baptist is like their central figure. They historically claim to be part of the original following of John the Baptist. Anthropologically, that's probably not the case. Most of them were living in Iraq until the Iraq War, and now their numbers have like completely dwindled.

• 20:18Speaker 05

  These guys have their own literature. You can read it online. It's the Mandaean Book of John. And they retell the story of the baptism. So Jesus comes to John the Baptist and they have a bit of an argument. And John the Baptist doesn't want to baptize Jesus, not because he's unworthy, but because he knows that Jesus is gonna be trouble. He's like, no, and they have an argument about it. And he has a go at him. He starts saying that you've loosened the Sabbath and you've brought disgrace to these people and you've like upset the Jews or like disgraced the Jews or something like this. And they have essentially a bit of a debate. He doesn't want to baptize him. Now, is this a historical source? Like, probably not. But it tells us something that people believe, which is this view of who John the Baptist was and that Jesus was a false preacher.

• 21:02Speaker 05

  And sort of one of his followers gone awry. I find that really interesting, right? Because the most interesting thing for me is- John's a rebel and then the next dude is even more of a rebel. We know that Jesus is definitely a rebel, right? Why wouldn't John the Baptist have apostles or people that would be martyred in that way? Because, so firstly, he did have like followers. He does have disciples. I think Jesus was one of them. But also even in the Gospels, two of Jesus's disciples are sort of poached from John the Baptist. It's John, it's- So two of Jesus's disciples were originally following John? Yeah, and in fact, it's at the baptism that John says, like, this is the man, like, go and follow. And then they go and follow Jesus. Isn't this, I don't want to say it's every religion, but like, isn't the same thing happening kind of with Mormonism where you got, who's the main guy? Joseph Smith.

• 21:46Speaker 05

  Joseph goes, hey, we gotta do this. And then he even dies before they get to Salt Lake City, but the next guy- That's right. Takes it. By the way- Scientology, isn't it? Do you know who the first ever US presidential candidate to be assassinated while running for office was? While running for office? While running for office. It was Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion. He was running for president at the time. While he was traveling out to Salt Lake City. That's right. So they were, they were sort of-

• 22:15Speaker 05

  Mormons might be on to something. There we go, look into it. Mormonism is, is- I don't want to get us distracted. No, it's absolutely fascinating, man, because like, it's such a wacky story. Like, the history of, and because it's relatively recent, it's like 1800s, like, there's more records, like, we know certain things happened. So we know that Joseph Smith claims to receive these golden plates. He's told by the angel Moroni, go and dig up these golden plates. The golden plates exist because in ancient Israel, just before the Babylonian captivity, some Jews, some Israelites were warned. And so they fled and they built boats and they sailed to America. Jersey. And they had entire civilizations. The Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri, by the way. They have an entire civilization. They're like, I'm talking like Lord of the Rings,

• 22:58Speaker 05

  like battles and wars and societies and all this kind of stuff. And then the very last person, the very last, the very last Nephite, I think, I might be getting some of this wrong. I think this is actually the son of Mormon, but Mormon's the one who like puts it all together. So sort of writes down the record of his people on these golden plates and buries them. Because he's the last of his kind. And then Joseph Smith is in upstate New York and God says to him, hey, man, like, go and find these plates. So Joseph Smith has these plates and they're written in something which is called reformed hieroglyphics. So they look a bit like Egyptian hieroglyphics. And Joseph Smith can miraculously translate them. And the way that he does it is not by looking at the plates, puts the plates aside. He takes his hat, he takes a special kind of stone called a seer stone, he puts the seer stone

• 23:41Speaker 05

  in the hat, he puts his head into the hat, and the stone starts glowing and translating what's on the golden plates. And he starts dictating, he starts saying it out loud, someone starts writing it down. Fire. And he's the only one who can see it. He's the only one that can see the translation. There are- He's the only one who can see it glowing. Yeah, yeah. Because he's got his head in the hat, right? Yeah. And you can see that they-

• 24:01Speaker 07

  And then he never showed anyone the golden plates.

• 24:03Speaker 05

  There are, there are something like 11, maybe 13 witnesses to the golden plates.

• 24:07Speaker 07

  Oh, there are.

• 24:07Speaker 05

  Actually, if you read the book of Mormon, it opens with the testimony of the 13 witnesses to the golden plates. Apart from that, nobody saw them. But the funny thing is, it sounds really wacky, but what I love about what Mormons can do is they go to Christians and Christians are like, this is the most ridiculous false prophet, nonsense, whatever. And they're like, oh, really? So how many eyewitness testimony, written accounts do you have to the resurrection? Oh, oh, you've got none. You've just got a few secondhand accounts. Oh, because we've got, we've got 13 eyewitness, signed, like affidavit, like written down testimonies of people who were still alive and were questioned by like the press about it. And like even one of the guys who like, one of the guys who swore that he saw the

• 24:49Speaker 05

  golden plates, later falls out with Joseph Smith, is kicked out of the Mormon church or leave. But he's still like, I saw them. But he still says he saw the place he did the day when he died. I love it. Now, there's some debate about this because one of them sort of says, well, he saw them with his spiritual eyes, which kind of means it might have been a vision. But then there are, he's asked about that and he says, look, gentlemen, look at your hands. As truly as you see your hands, I saw those plates, right? So there's all of this going on, right? So Joseph Smith then like founds this, this religion off the basis of it. And they don't like being called Mormons because Mormon is the name of one of the, I think he's a, I guess he's a prophet, but he's like the guy that collates the book of Mormon. They are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saint. It's like calling Muslims Islamists or something. Yeah, or like calling them a Mohammedian probably is more similar, which is what they used to call Muslims because they sort of misunderstood what they were all about.

• 25:32Speaker 05

  But yeah, they sort of flip and flop about whether it's okay to call them Mormons because it's a bit clunky to say member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saint. But so Joseph Smith, they're sort of, they're setting up communities and they're trying to find somewhere to like set up their community. So they're traveling around the United States. And when they get to Missouri, they cause such a problem in Missouri. There is something called, I think it's called the Missouri Executive Order 45 or something, otherwise known as like the Mormon Extermination Order, which is where the governor of Missouri, based on some inflated reports about what the Mormons were doing, gets so worried and paranoid about them that he issues an order to exterminate Mormons, to drive them out

• 26:16Speaker 05

  of the land by force, which basically means that you could just like kill Mormons. You just like go Mormon hunting because he wanted them gone. They were causing such a problem. Like in the United States, there was a law passed, an executive order, that said, "We're just gonna kill Mormons and drive them out of our land." Kill white people. Which is like... Yeah, that's not shocking for me.

• 26:35Speaker 07

  That's light word, right?

• 26:37Speaker 05

  It's just like... The worst thing America did, you could tell. You wouldn't believe. It's just wild. Don't take us too far away from Jesus. I wanna... Oh, sure. Okay. But yeah, we can definitely get back to Jesus. But Joseph Smith eventually... So part of the, when he decides to run for president, part of his running campaign is that he wants to annex Texas because he wants to make Texas like the land for the Mormon people. So that's part of his, that's part of his thing. And eventually, so you know Mormons are into like polygamy? Yeah. They were. Now, if you're a polygamist, you can't be a Mormon. Like it's anathema to them. In like the 1980s or something, they finally said it's not right. But they got, one of the problems, the reasons they got in so much trouble with the US government

• 27:21Speaker 05

  was because they had multiple wives and that was, that was seen as totally wrong. And so Joseph Smith is now, I can't remember which state he's in when he actually, when he actually dies. I think it might be, it might be Illinois, but I'm not sure about that. I think he dies in Illinois. He dies in Illinois? I think that's right. Missouri's like the third spot they end up, correct? Yeah, they've sort of been all over the place. And I think Illinois is where, is where he gets, is where he gets killed. He just Googled it. And... Yeah, yeah, I mean, maybe, okay, great.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  They're just getting kicked out of places?

• 27:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're getting kicked out.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  They're like the Christian Jews.

• 27:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, seriously, but this is the thing, so Mormons will say, Mormons will point out that they have a history of like persecution and people sort of don't know about this, you know?

• 28:02Speaker 05

  It's quite, it's quite amazing, because I debate Christians quite a lot, and they talk about how amazing it was that Christianity grew from just a small group of people to taking over the Roman Empire. And I'm like, the sociologist Rodney Stark calculated that in the first like two or three hundred years, I think, after the birth of Christianity, the growth rate that they experienced is exactly the same as the Mormon church. And then, and then people say, yeah, but they were being persecuted by the Roman Empire. I'm like, have you heard of the Missouri Extermination?

• 28:27Speaker 03

  Probably get back to the show.

• 28:28Speaker 05

  There is a, there is a newspaper in Illinois that criticizes Joseph Smith for his polygamous practices. I think at this point, Joseph Smith is the governor of some kind of province of Illinois. And so he decides to like shut down the newspaper, because he doesn't like the criticism, so he like bans it. Then there's like a riot, because he's like suppressed this newspaper. Then Joseph Smith institutes martial law because of the riots, and then he flees. And then I think the governor of Illinois says, okay, Joseph Smith, you've got to come back, you're going to face trial, we'll keep your, you keep, you keep you fine, but just, just, you've got to come back. So Joseph Smith goes back, he gets put in prison, and then this big angry mob descend on the prison, and they break into the prison.

• 29:12Speaker 05

  They shoot his brother in the face, his brother says, I'm a dead man, and then he dies. And then Joseph Smith tries to escape out of a window, they shoot him, he falls out of the window onto the floor, and they shoot him dead again. So he dies in what is essentially a prison shootout. And for the Mormons, this is a site of religious martyrdom. So you can now go to that, that, that prison, it's now owned by the Latter Day Saints. And it's a site that they go to as the martyr, as the point of martyrdom for their, for their prophet. There it is, it's the house. So Joseph Smith was, was killed.

• 29:42Speaker 05

  Falling out of that window, there's a, there's a, wow, there he is.

• 29:46Speaker 06

  That's wild.

• 29:47Speaker 05

  Big mob show up and, and kill him. So Joseph Smith becomes like a martyr and that's that. And then there's your typical religious like succession crisis. Who's going to take over? I think there's a point where like, I think it's Brigham Young, who's, who's giving a speech saying, I should be the leader and like multiple people report seeing him like transfigure into the likeness of Joseph Smith. There's all kinds of wacky stuff going on, right? And um, yeah, like it's, it sounds kind of insane, but is that any more insane than some of the Christian stories that we, that we hear?

• 30:13Speaker 06

  But it was farther ago.

• 30:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And so we have this feeling. So it's better. Yeah, of course. People sort of go like, oh, but that's ridiculous. As if, as if God would appear to someone in upstate New York. That's ridiculous. It's like, well, that's how it sounded like God being born in Nazareth. Yeah.

• 30:29Speaker 05

  Like people are saying in the gospels, like, is this not Joseph's son? Is this not the guy from Nazareth? Does anything good come from Nazareth? They're saying the same thing. They're talking about it like it's Staten Island. Yeah, they, they actually are. Yeah. Seriously though, that's, that's, that's what's going on.

• 30:42Speaker 04

  Why is, did Nazareth have a reputation of just not producing?

• 30:45Speaker 05

  It was just like, it was just like a nowhere town.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  It's like a fentanyl town.

• 30:47Speaker 05

  Like the Jews are expecting a Messiah and the Messiah, like there are different views on what the Messiah was going to be or, but the, the sort of general line on this is that they were expecting people because they're, at the time they're being persecuted by Rome. So they're, they are awaiting the Messiah.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  To liberate them from.

• 31:02Speaker 05

  It will come and liberate. So they're expecting like this military leader who's going to lead them into battle against Rome and they're going to win.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  And they got a hippie.

• 31:08Speaker 05

  They got a hippie. Exactly. So that.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  Was he really a hippie or is that kind of the way that?

• 31:12Speaker 05

  Depends what you mean by a hippie. Like he, he was, he was pretty like, he wasn't just like a sort of, yeah, peace and love, man.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  Kind of badass a little bit.

• 31:17Speaker 05

  He said some pretty serious stuff and did some serious things. I mean, the obvious example.

• 31:20Speaker 06

  Political revolutionary.

• 31:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, flipping the table, right?

• 31:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, flipping, flipping the tables. He goes into the temple and he, in John's gospel, he makes a cord. He like put, put some, put some cords together and like, and like turns it into a whip and goes around like, like. Like with a whip, driving people out of the temple. Because they're trading on in his, in his father's house. He also says some pretty serious stuff. He says like, if anybody does not hate their mother and their father and their brother and sister, they cannot be my disciple. If anyone does not hate them? Yeah, because hatred can kind of mean in this context, like preference. Like it's used elsewhere. You prefer them. Yeah, so it's one of these slightly mystifying passages. But a lot of it has to do with like how these words are understood and used at the time. So it means something. So to say that you hate someone can mean that like comparatively you prefer me.

• 32:07Speaker 05

  So he's saying that you have to put me above your friends and family, which is very sort of culty. But the problem with cults is that they're wrong. That's the problem with the cult is that they're not actually true. If the cult is true, then that probably is what you should do, right? Yeah. So, yeah, Jesus is, is, is a complicated figure who, who does all kinds of different stuff. But his, his main message is one of love. You make the claim in the Jubilee video that he, that Christ doesn't claim to ever be the, be God. That's what I think. And that's controversial too. Amongst Christians, if you say Jesus never even claims to be God, even in the Gospels, they'll look at you like you've said a triangle has four sides. In biblical scholarship, this has been a very mainstream opinion for the past few hundred years. And why do you believe that? Because there's no instance in the Gospels where I think Jesus is claiming to be God.

• 32:50Speaker 05

  Christians think that they have examples, but I think that all of them don't actually apply. What are your examples and what are theirs? So I, there are constantly examples of Jesus seeming to separate himself from the Father, where he says like, the Father is greater than I am and stuff like this. And people like rattle these off. The problem is devoid of any context, it's difficult to know what they even mean. So Christians will point to verses like when Jesus says in John, chapter 10, he says, the Father and I are one. And when his disciple Philip asks him, when do we get to see the Father? He says to Philip, anyone who's seen me has seen the Father. And Christians point to that and they say, see, he's claiming to be God. But you've just got to keep reading. He says to Philip, anyone who's seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, show us the Father?

• 33:34Speaker 05

  Don't you know that the Father is in me and I'm in the Father? Interesting. Skip to John chapter 17, where Jesus is praying for his disciples, and then for all of his Christian believers. And he prays, he's praying to the Father, and he says, "I hope that they will all, one day, be in us, just as I am in you and you are in me. I hope that they will be in us, and we'll all sort of be one together." "I hope." Yeah, like he prays, like that, yeah, like he's sort of praying for that to happen in the future, right? So whatever relationship Jesus has with the Father there, and being in Him and Him and in Him, it's something that he at least wants the disciples to want they achieve. So if that's Jesus claiming to be identical to Yahweh, the God Yahweh, then he must think that that's something that's available to the disciples. To the rest of us, yeah.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  That doesn't make sense. So we've got to reinterpret that first. Okay, like, there are, there are, this is in John's Gospel as well, like, and the interesting thing is that most of these important Christological claims only appear in John's Gospel. And John's is the latest. John's is the latest. Which you said has potential... Yeah, so there's already reason to think it's less historically reliable because it's latest, but also the fact that Jesus is making these claims in front of all of his disciples. And if, in John's Gospel, he makes explicit claims to be God, like in John chapter eight, he says to his Jewish opponents, "Before Abraham was, I am." And "I am" is supposed to be like a callback to the name of God in the Old Testament, and he's claimed to be pre-existent because he exists before Abraham. A lot of Christians say this is claiming to

• 34:59Speaker 05

  be God. And the first question that you should ask is, okay, if Jesus actually said this, and that did actually, did actually mean that by it, did the other Gospel authors just not think it was an important detail? If Jesus, like, said in the full view of his opponents and his disciples, "I am God." Yeah, you'd think it'd be in every single Gospel. And people say to me, "Well, I think that the other Gospel authors were sort of focusing on different things." So they just neglected to mention the point where Jesus said, "I am God." So I don't think he historically said this, but I also don't think that means what Christians think it means, for some quite interesting, techie reasons. But why? So, there are two elements of the "I am" statement here, like in John, John chapter eight. Jesus is speaking to his Jewish opponents, and they say, and he's talking about eternal life. And they say, "Well, our Father Abraham, he died." Are you saying you're greater than him?

• 35:45Speaker 05

  And he says, Jesus says, Abraham rejoiced to see my day. And, and the Jews say, you're not even 80 years old and, and Abraham has seen you, you've seen Abraham. And he goes, truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am. At which point they pick up stones to stone him to death. So the Christians say they knew he was committing blasphemy, they knew he was claiming to be God, that's why they tried to stone him to death. There are a few interesting things that need to be pulled out of this, right? The New Testament is written in Greek. So what Jesus actually says there is before Abraham was, ego Amy, which means I am. That is also a phrase that can just mean like, it's me. It's a very normal phrase that is used in, in Greek. So in the next chapter, Jesus heals a blind man. The blind man runs into town and they say, isn't this the man who was born blind?

• 36:31Speaker 05

  And the man says, ego Amy, it's me. Yeah. So sometimes it can mean that, but in this context, it's a little bit weird because he uses it in the present tense. He says, before Abraham was, I am, or it's me, or something like that. People think that what's going on here. Ebonics. In the old. Ebonics, no, no, he's just going, I'm him. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In, um, I actually kind of think that's basically what is going on, actually. Like, like uneducated. I think, no, no, I mean, like when, when, you know, that sort of like, I'm him kind of thing. I think, I think some of the like son of man statements kind of approximates. Okay, okay. But whatever. In the Old Testament, in the book of Exodus, which is written in Hebrew.

• 37:11Speaker 05

  Moses is talking to God and God says to, and God like is, is speaking to him through the burning bush and all this kind of stuff. And Moses says, when I go back to my people, who shall I tell them sent me? Like, what's your name? And God says, Esha, Asha, Esha, I am that I am, or I am who I am. So go and tell them that I am has sent you. Esha, Asha, Esha, go and tell them that Esha has sent you. And so when Jesus says, before Abraham was, I am. He is invoking the name that God gave himself in Exodus, which is I am. So that, that's the line, that's why they think that's the case. I'm suspicious of this for a few reasons. Firstly, it can also just be a normal statement. So let's figure out what, which one's going on here.

• 37:55Speaker 05

  The Old Testament is written in Hebrew mostly. And this passage, Esha, Asha, Esha.

• 38:01Speaker 05

  Means something like "I am that I am." But the New Testament's written in Greek, so the people who wrote the New Testament were using a Greek translation of the Old Testament, right? Oh, got it. Because they're writing in Greek. They're not consuming the Hebrew, they're consuming the Greek. And it's well-known, we have good evidence, that the New Testament authors are using a translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. So we know that that is their Old Testament. So, "Aesha, Asha, Ayesha" translates to, in Greek... "Ego Amy ho on." "Ho on" is... So, so this is where it gets really interesting. This is wild. In the Greek version, if you read the Septuagint, God doesn't say the same thing twice.

• 38:46Speaker 05

  So in Hebrew, he says, "Ayesha, Asha, Ayesha, I am that I am," says the same thing twice. And then he says, "Go and tell them that I am has sent you." So he says it three times. In the Greek version, he says, you know, "What shall I call them?" And God says in response, "Ego Amy ho on," which means something like "I am the one who is." "I am," "Ego Amy," "the one who is," "ho on." So "go and tell them ho on has sent you." "I is." It doesn't say, "go and tell them ego Amy has sent you." It says, "go and tell them ho on has sent you." So if... So the version that the New Testament authors were using, I think, if they were trying to invoke this passage, they would have had him say something like "ho on." But he just said "Ego Amy." So in the Greek Septuagint, when God says this to Moses,

• 39:31Speaker 05

  the function of the phrase "Ego Amy" is just introducing yourself. He was saying, "I am the one who is." It's like saying, "I am Alex." "My name is Alex," and the "I am" bit there is just me introducing like the phrase. So I think in the Greek version, "Ego Amy ho on, go and tell them that ho on has sent you." And so when Jesus says, "Before Abraham was, ego Amy," it's not obvious to me that he's making a callback to the... Because firstly, I don't think Jesus said these words. I think that it's an invention of John's gospel, and we know that John was using the Septuagint. And so I don't think that that adds up. But there is still a mystery there. Why does Jesus say that he existed before Abraham? And why does he speak in the present tense? Why does he say "I am"? Why doesn't he say, "Before Abraham existed, I did"? Why does he say "I am"? What... Oh, sorry, do you have an answer for this? I've got some speculation.

• 40:16Speaker 05

  Please, tell me. So I think that what might be going on here is... Is an allusion to the fact that Jesus as the redemptive solution to mankind's problems was was was planned by God from the very beginning of time. So in the book of Revelation, there's a reference to the Lamb who was slain from the beginning of time, speaking about Jesus. Jesus was not slain at the beginning of time. So why does it say he was slain from the beginning of time? What it's clearly getting at is that from the very beginning of time, God knew. It was destined that he was slain. So I think that Jesus is doing something similar here in saying, before Abraham was, I am. Before Abraham was, this plan, the thing that I embody is here. And there's

• 40:59Speaker 05

  some really interesting like indications that that might be what's going on because there's a there's a first century text called the Apocalypse of Abraham, which is a Jewish text. It's not in any Christian canons, but it was a Jewish text that existed and you can read it online today. And it tells the story of Abraham. And importantly, this isn't canon, but it does tell us what some people believe. It tells us what some stories that people were familiar with. This was written around the same time as the Gospels, probably around 78, 70 to 180. And it tells the story of Abraham. And Abraham hears the voice of God, and he leaves his home, and he's terrified, and he hits the floor. And then an angel appears to him. And God says to the angel who's called Yahiel, who has the name of God in him, which again, you know, Yahiel, Yah and L, like same root as like Yahweh

• 41:44Speaker 05

  and Elohim. So he's got the name of God in him too. And he says to Abraham, like, get up. And Abraham gets up, and he's terrified. And the angel says to him, rejoice and be glad, because I'm like promising for you that someone who will like the generations that will spring from you will like bring some kind of redemption or something like this. He basically says, be rejoice, be glad and rejoice, because like redemption is coming, salvation is coming, and from your generations. So interesting then, that in John chapter 8, the context of this divine claim is Abraham. Jesus is talking about Abraham, and what does he say to them?

• 42:27Speaker 05

  He says, Abraham rejoiced to see my day. And they get confused. So like, you're not even 80 years old. How have you seen Abraham? And he says, before Abraham was, I am. I think what he might be getting at there is saying Abraham rejoiced to see my day in the sense that Abraham was promised, like he's the patriarch of the Jewish faith, and he was promised what I am now bringing to fulfill. Before Abraham was, I am. I think that's what's going on. Now, to be clear. And Christians give pushback on this? Of course. Yeah, Christians will listen to this, and they'll be like, that is complete and utter nonsense. Jesus is very clearly invoking the I am statement. That like, it's so clunky that he would word it like that. He's very, and why would they pick up stones to stone him for death if they didn't think he was committing blasphemy? That doesn't make any sense.

• 43:10Speaker 05

  The key point I want to point out is that the thing about the Jewish Offices upheld, no? The thing about the Jewish opponents is that they're constantly misunderstanding Jesus. And so people put a lot of weight on the idea that they stoned him to death, and they accused him of blasphemy. And it's like, yeah, but throughout the Gospels, they're constantly getting him wrong. You think in this instance, they suddenly were absolutely correct in their interpretation of what Jesus was saying? I don't think so. In fact, there's one point in the Gospels, it's the only time this happens where Jesus is explicitly accused of claiming to be God. It happens. They say, you're claiming to be God. And Jesus downplays it. It's, it's, yeah, semi, semi complicated in that there's a, there's a Psalm in the Old Testament. This is Psalm

• 43:51Speaker 05

  82, which opens by saying that Yahweh presides among the council of the gods. Elohim, gods. It's a bit weird. Like, how is Yahweh the only God, like, residing over a council of gods? That doesn't make any sense. And then later in the Psalm, it says, I have said that you are gods. You shall be sons of the Most High. So in the Psalm, what's clearly happening here is the word gods here, and some translation puts in scare quotes. The word gods here doesn't mean God as in like Yahweh. It means God as in like, a divine member of this, this council, right? And God clarifies in, the Psalm is clarifies in Psalm 82, he says, I shall call you gods.

• 44:35Speaker 05

  You shall be called gods, sons of the Most High. So clarifying that what I mean is that you are not the Most High, you are sons of the Most High, right? Okay, park that. And bear in mind that most Jews are familiar with Jewish scripture, right? Jesus is talking to his Jewish opponents. And this time, he says, "I and the Father are one." Because they're asking about his identity. They say, "If you're the Messiah, tell us plainly." And he says, "I and the Father are one." And the Jewish opponents say to him, they pick up stones again. They go to stone him to death. And he goes like, "I'm just telling you the works of my Father. What are you stoning me for? For which of, I've been telling you things of my Father. For which of those do you stone me?" And they say, "We're not stoning you for any good works.

• 45:18Speaker 05

  We're stoning you because you, a mere human, claim to be God." So they accuse him. Here it is, the most dramatic, most important moment of the Gospels for Christology. "You're claiming to be God." What does Jesus say? Does he go, "Yeah, you're right"? No, he says to them, "Have you not read your scriptures? Have you not, is it not written that you shall become gods, or you shall be called gods?" So he quotes the Psalm that I've just mentioned, which expressly calls non-gods, like non-Yahweh beings gods. And when asked about his identity, he chooses to quote that Psalm. And he says to them, "Is it not written, 'You shall be called gods'?" If God was willing to give those people that title, and the scripture can't be set aside,

• 46:02Speaker 05

  then why wouldn't he give that title to me? He then says, "So why are you then accusing me of blasphemy for claiming to be the son of God?" So he clarifies. They say, "You're claiming to be God." And he says, "Have you not read your scriptures? This is just a title that was given to the divine council. If he'd give it to them, why wouldn't he give it to me? Why are you accusing me of blasphemy for claiming to be the son of God? Because they're the sons of the Most High." And so, the one point where Jesus is explicitly accused of claiming to be God. In my view.

• 46:33Speaker 04

  He goes, I'm not.

• 46:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  Is that what you're saying?

• 46:36Speaker 05

  I think, I think he's saying he's not. So Christians, again, will interpret this and say like, okay, he's answering in a very clever way, which sort of doesn't deny his divinity.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  Saying we all are.

• 46:44Speaker 05

  But, but no, well, they, they don't want to say he's, that we're all divine. They want to say that he is, he is claiming to be God here, but he's doing it. And so he's probably answering in this way because he's being intentionally unclear, because it's not his time to die yet, whatever. I read this as him denying, like, that he's identical to the.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  I, I see their argument too. I think it's a really clever argument because he's basically going, you can't say that I'm blaspheming if I am upholding scripture. Right? So you, if you're going to kill me for that, and you're going to uphold your law.

• 47:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 04

  Point out in the book where I'm blaspheming.

• 47:14Speaker 05

  And the, and the key thing to notice is that like, in this case, they pick up stones to stone him. And he goes like, why are you accusing me of blasphemy? I'm not doing what you think I'm doing. And so when it comes to.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  Oh, got it, got it, got it, got it.

• 47:23Speaker 05

  And it comes to John, chapter eight, and Christians often say, well, why would they, why would they like throw stones at him and try to kill him if he wasn't claiming to be God? It's like, well, because somewhere else in the gospels, they tried to stone him for claiming to be God, and they were wrong. So I don't, I don't think that they got it right, you know?

• 47:37Speaker 04

  And what about the worship of Christ? Like the people at the time worshiping him?

• 47:40Speaker 05

  This is another big thing, like worship. Worship is something that's only given to God. In fact, when, when in the, in the gospels of Luke and Matthew, Jesus is in the desert being tempted by, by Satan. And Satan says, if you just bow down and worship me, I will give you all of this land. And Jesus says, worship God and serve him only. And yet, throughout the gospels, Jesus is worshipped and he accepts worship. So he must be God, right?

• 48:06Speaker 05

  Few things to note.

• 48:08Speaker 05

  First, how many times in, well, actually, the first important thing to note is what the word worship means. It's difficult to define even in English, but in Greek, there are two words that are typically translated as worship in, in the New Testament. One is proskeneo, and one is latruo. Proskeneo just means to sort of bow down or prostrate yourself before a higher authority. Latruo tends to refer to like cultic religious worship of the kind that you might give to God.

• 48:38Speaker 05

  In no instance is La Truwa worship given to Jesus in the Gospels. There is arguably an ambiguous case in Revelation. We can get into that, but it's not a historical source anyway. And also, it's not clear if Jesus is actually being worshipped there. But in the Gospels, not once does La Truwa worship occur, being given to Jesus. So we're just left with Proscaneo worship. Now, Proscaneo, like I say, just means to bow down or prostrate yourself before somebody else. So if only God is supposed to accept worship. And let's look again at that Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint. Remember I mentioned it earlier? Throughout the Septuagint, the word Proscaneo comes up all the time.

• 49:21Speaker 05

  Lot worships two angels. Jacob worships Esau. The whole assembly of Israel worshiped King David, Proscaneo, King David. Like this, throughout the Gospels, throughout the Old Testament, there are tons of instances of Proscaneo worship being given to other people. So it's a different type of... In the New Testament, Jesus tells a parable. The unmerciful servant who comes back to his master and he Proscaneos before him. He just falls at his feet. And so in some instances, it is just translated as falling down at someone's feet, because that is what Proscaneo literally means, right? And so, Proscaneo as occurring to Jesus doesn't mean it's worship of the kind

• 50:07Speaker 05

  that we would say is only due to God. It's just literally bowing down in front of somebody. Another thing to notice, this is really important. How many times does Jesus accept worship in Luke's Gospel? Zero. It doesn't happen once. The word only shows up three times. Twice in the temptation in the desert, and then once after Jesus ascends, his disciples worship him. But that's after he's gone, so he can't say anything about it. And crucially, that is a verse, that particular verse of them worshiping him, is contested in our manuscript tradition. There are some manuscripts we have that don't have that verse. Mark's Gospel, the earliest Gospel, how many times does Jesus accept worship? Twice, happens twice. Okay, so it does happen twice. But one of those is a demon, legion, who, if you read most translations,

• 50:50Speaker 05

  he sees Jesus and the man runs at Jesus and throws himself down at his feet. And it doesn't say he worshipped him. Some translations will say that, but usually it's like he fell down at his feet, because that's what it means. The only other instance of proskeneo in the Gospel, in the Gospel of Mark, is Jesus being worshipped when he's being mocked by the Roman soldiers. Oh, so they're pretending. They put a crown of thorns on his head and then they worship him. Why? Because he's the king of the Jews. Because kings are people that you worship, you bow down before them. So they're making fun of him. They're like, oh, king of the Jews, king of the Jews. It's not something, they don't, you know, they don't think he's God. They think he's claiming to be the king of the Jews and they're making fun of him. So even in Mark's Gospel, in Mark's Gospel, the earliest Gospel, there are only two instances of proskeneo. One of them is a demon and one of them is sarcastic.

• 51:35Speaker 05

  In John's Gospel, there's only one instance of Jesus accepting worship. This is after the blind man who I mentioned earlier, he's healed. Sorry, no, this is the, this is the deaf and mute man, I think. And Jesus finds him again and he says, Lord, I believe, and he worships him. First thing to note is, again, this can just mean bowing down in front of somebody, but also that particular verse, the verse where it says he worshipped him, is not in our earliest manuscripts, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaticus, Codex Washingtonianus. It's not in there, it's not in the early manuscripts, implying that it's something that was added into the Gospels after the fact.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  It's like what Florida's doing with textbooks.

• 52:12Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. It's kind of interesting, right?

• 52:15Speaker 03

  Sorry, I have a question. This won't jibe with the proskeneo stuff that you were saying, but when you said God said, you are also God, to the group of people. Have you read the autobiography of a yogi?

• 52:25Speaker 05

  No.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  It's a Hindu guy who is, becomes a yogi and he says essentially, yogi is a man who achieves godlike, not status, but God is within you and you've realized it, you've reached that place. He says Jesus is a yogi, Mohammed is a yogi. These guys are people who have achieved that and they would have a following and they would have. And it kind of proves that we can all do this thing.

• 52:45Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Does that jibe with what I'm hearing from you?

• 52:48Speaker 05

  That jibes very heavily with what I think Jesus is doing. Christians will deny that interpretation because they think Jesus is the guy. He's like a very unique kind of person, God himself in the flesh. I'm much more in line with this, that Jesus is is somebody who is essentially the idyllic example of what a faithful person should be. And there are lots of reasons why I think that. But I do think it's important on the proskeneo point. I'll I'll wrap that up just because I know I banged on about worship. But it's important because remember how we started where I pointed out that in Luke and Matthew, Jesus is speaking to Satan. And Satan says, worship me. And Jesus says, worship God and serve him only. Why does Jesus say that if worship is something you can give to other people? This is where I think this is something I think is really interesting. If your interpretation is Jesus is saying there that you should only offer proskeneo worship

• 53:33Speaker 05

  to God himself, then all of those people that I've just mentioned sinned, you know, Lot sinned, Jacob sinned, the whole assembly of Israel sinned when they bowed down towards David. So that can't be it. So what's going on there? Well, notice how that's how that's phrased. And he's quoting Deuteronomy, chapter six, which actually doesn't say the same thing. It's kind of weird. But Jesus says, worship God and serve him only. He doesn't say only worship God. He says worship God and serve him. Let's look at the Greek. The word proskeneo, worship God, and then serve him only. So the word only is affixed to the word serve, not worship.

• 54:16Speaker 05

  Can you guess what the word in Greek for serve is there that's translated into serve? Latruo. Which is the other. Which is the other one, which is the cultic religious worship that's usually only given to God or some kind of divine figure at the very least. So even in the language of the gospels, there is a division in the idea of worship. So it seems in that instance, my interpretation is Jesus is saying worship God because he is a higher authority. And he's he's rejecting Satan's worship. He's saying, I'm not going to bow down to you because you're not a higher authority over me. And it's written, I like worship God. Also, that's not written. It's really weird. He's quoting Deuteronomy six, five, but Deuteronomy six, five says something like fear God and serve him only. It doesn't say worship.

• 54:57Speaker 05

  Which is an interesting implication if he's rendered the word fear as worship. It can't mean the kind of worship that we're talking about, right? And Jesus says, so it's a bit mystifying to some people. Well, why did Jesus say that to Satan in the desert? The reason is because he's saying you should worship God, but you serve him only. Because if you think that Jesus was saying that you should only offer proskeneo worship to God, then all of these people sin, including, by the way, people that Jesus mentions himself. Jesus himself tells the parable of the unmerciful servant who proskeneo worships, proskeneo worships before his master. In the book of Revelation, Jesus promises to his faithful believers that all of the other evil nations will one day proskeneo before them. Jesus says, all of these people will worship you. That's out of the mouth of Jesus in the book of Revelation.

• 55:39Speaker 05

  So it cannot be that proskeneo worship is something that's only due to God. So in the book of Matthew, there are lots of instances of Jesus being worshipped. Mark, Luke, and John are totally unconcerned with worship. Matthew, it happens a lot. But I think you need to understand the context, which is that worshiping someone in the sense of proskeneo is something that people just did to a higher authority, someone who was of a higher status than you, like, I don't know, maybe being the Messiah. You know, like, so it's no mystery to me, in other words, that Jesus would be worshipped in the sense of proskeneo. Today, when we say the word worship, we mean something a bit different. Also, here's an interesting question. Riddle me this. If proskeneo worship is the kind of worship that's given to God and only God,

• 56:22Speaker 05

  then why is it that after Jesus ascends into heaven, nobody offers proskeneo worship anymore? They offer him Latru. They don't, there's no, there's no instance of like, like, there's the word proskeneo shows up, but Jesus is not given proskeneo worship. Like, in the book of Acts, for example, the disciples are going around and they're not, they're not going around offering proskeneo to Jesus up in heaven. Why? Why not? In my view, it's because proskeneo is just a physical action. It describes a physical behavior of bowing down and prostrating before someone who's of a higher authority. If someone's not there, you can't do it. If it were to mean like cultic religious worship to God, then they would keep doing it after he ascended into heaven, but they don't. And there are instances, so Christians will dispute this again because they'll say like, in the book of Acts, somebody bows down before Peter, they proskeneo before Peter the apostle.

• 57:07Speaker 05

  And Peter says, get up, because I'm just a human like you. And they say, see, so Peter's saying that you don't worship other humans, you only worship God. But I don't think that's what Peter was saying. I think he was saying, get up. He says, I am also just a man, as in, I'm the same status as you. Like, I'm not your authority. Worship God, he's our authority.

• 57:26Speaker 07

  The other type of worship for someone.

• 57:29Speaker 05

  Latruo.

• 57:29Speaker 07

  Yeah. How many times is that mentioned in the New Testament?

• 57:32Speaker 05

  It's mentioned a few times.

• 57:34Speaker 07

  And in referring to?

• 57:36Speaker 05

  So the most interesting case for me is Revelation. So Revelation is a wacky, wacky book. And so I want to clarify by saying that even if Revelation just said, Jesus is God, I wouldn't trust it as a historical source. It does seem to present Jesus as a very exalted being, probably God himself. Like, at one point, Jesus seems to claim to be the Alpha and the Omega, which is the title of God. One instance, it's not entirely clear who's speaking, but in another instance, it's like Jesus saying, I am the Alpha and the Omega. That's something only God says. It seems like he's claiming to be God in the book of Revelation, which is a vision that a guy called John has on an island called Patmos. And there is an instance, there are two instances of Latruo in Revelation, where it's a bit unclear. What happens is you've got the Lamb

• 58:16Speaker 05

  who sort of sits on or in the center of or nearby the throne. So there's the throne of God, and there's this throne of the Lamb. And it's not entirely clear what the organizational structure is. So there's like the throne of God, and then the Lamb is like either on the throne or in the middle of the throne. And then it says that Latruo worship was given to him.

• 58:36Speaker 05

  So the only two times it occurs is when we're talking about the almighty God, the Father, and Jesus. And they're sort of together in a very ambiguous sense. And then it always uses the singular pronoun of him. It never says them. It always says him. So those instances of Latruo, I think it's defensible that the person actually being worshiped there is God, the Father, is the almighty God. But it does seem a little bit weird that Jesus or the Lamb is like on the throne or near the throne. So maybe Jesus is being given Latruo there, but it seems weird that it would say. That they worshipped him rather than they worshipped them. You've got God and the Son, and they worshipped him.

• 59:16Speaker 06

  But never in the four Gospels was...

• 59:18Speaker 05

  Never in the Gospels is a literal worship given to Jesus.

• 59:20Speaker 04

  This idea of Jesus being...

• 59:22Speaker 05

  Not once. Isn't that fun?

• 59:23Speaker 06

  That is.

• 59:23Speaker 05

  Isn't that cool? It does not happen at all. The key text here, by the way, is "Did the early Christians worship Jesus?" by James Dunn.

• 59:28Speaker 03

  It's fun for you. Look at Mark's face. He's having a...

• 59:33Speaker 04

  Is this interpretation that you have of Jesus similar to the Muslim interpretation of Jesus?

• 59:40Speaker 05

  It is in the sense of not thinking he claimed to be God. So yeah, this is an interesting thing. Muslims don't believe that Jesus died on a cross. They don't believe that he was God. They don't believe he claimed to be God. They believe he was a prophet. And so they take a lot of the same lines I do here, but of course, they're motivated for different reasons. I'm just interested in the historical figure of Jesus. But yeah, a lot of these arguments, like if you... And the annoying thing is that a lot of the time, this debate only seems to happen in the context of Christians versus Muslims, because atheists don't care. "Oh, Jesus said, 'I and the Father are one.'" Whatever, man. Who cares? I'm gonna go in at lunch. But I'm interested. But it means that like when Christians are debating with Muslims, so for example, when Jesus says, "I am the Alpha and the Omega,

• 1:00:21Speaker 05

  I'm the first and the last," you know, a Christian could say, "But in the Quran, that's a title that God gives to himself." You know, in the Quran...

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  So they're using scripture to justify...

• 1:00:30Speaker 05

  One of the names of God in the Quran is Al-Hak, which means "the truth." "I am the truth." And Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life."

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:00:39Speaker 05

  And so if your God says that the truth is one of his titles, here's Jesus claiming to be God. So they have these kinds of debates. That doesn't do anything for me.

• 1:00:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:00:47Speaker 05

  So when Muslims are on the offensive on this point, they will use some of the same arguments. They will point out that, like, firstly, they'll be suspicious of John's historicity. They'll point out that when he says, "I and the Father are one," he seems to be saying that we can all be one altogether. All of this kind of stuff.

• 1:01:02Speaker 06

  Is it possible that the early language of Christ had different, like, oral tradition that then, when it was translated into Greek, some of those things got lost?

• 1:01:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, so that's really important, too, is that Jesus spoke Aramaic. So this is something I always find incredibly interesting when people are really hanging on every word that Jesus said. Okay, you guys are listening very carefully to what I'm saying, right? You paying attention?

• 1:01:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Speaker 05

  Can any of you...

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:01:25Speaker 05

  ...recite?

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:01:28Speaker 05

  Excluding this one, the last sentence that I just said. Just tell me the last sentence.

• 1:01:32Speaker 04

  I'm still trying to pronounce Latrune.

• 1:01:36Speaker 04

  Depression medication.

• 1:01:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay, wow, so-

• 1:01:40Speaker 04

  Side effects include visions of God.

• 1:01:43Speaker 05

  So, okay, wow, yes, yes, yes, so obviously there's gonna be some- You can't remember- Yeah. The words that I said to you 20 seconds ago, but I'm expected to believe that the New Testament authors who were writing at best decades after the death of Jesus could remember his exact words and write them down accurately in a language that he wasn't speaking?

• 1:02:02Speaker 05

  In a language that he wasn't speaking is interesting. Now, what's important to note there, though, is that like if I said something really particular, like if I was talking to you, if I were talking to you and then I suddenly said, um, you know, "I'm a, I'm a famous songwriter" or something, that might stick in your memory such that in, in, in like a month or two, you could remember that I said that because it was important. So if Jesus said before Abraham was "I am", that's the kind of thing that people could remember. This is my body. Exactly. But like the "I am" thing, like, "Oh, well, he was quoting, he was quoting the Old Testament." Okay, so we've got a Greek rendition, well, actually, when we say it in English, we're, we're using an English translation of a Greek text quoting an Aramaic-speaking man allegedly quoting a Hebrew scripture. Yeah. There are a lot of chains of transmission that we have to investigate and see, and see what's-

• 1:02:47Speaker 05

  And I might have misunderstood you, but 40 years later, at the earliest, I don't- Is when it's written down. If I'm quoting something you said last week, I don't know. Some people think that John's Gospel is earlier, so John's Gospel tends to be dated to 90 to 180 AD. Some people date it earlier because there's one verse in John's Gospel, John, chapter 5. It, it, it opens up by saying, "Now, there is a pool by the sheep's gate", and it says, "At this pool, this is what happened." But John says there is a pool. "The temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD", and so if John's writing his Gospel, and this isn't like Jesus- He's writing it in real time. He says, he says, "Now, there is a sheep's gate near the pool.

• 1:03:30Speaker 05

  If that sheep's gate had been destroyed, then why would he have written it like that?" So some people, for that reason, put John pre-70. Kind of interesting, but the, the important thing to note is that it's all speculative, but at the very least, yeah, we're talking, that's why I say at best, you know, decades after. Some, some scholars- Why did they wait decades after to write it? That's a good question. I mean, why were the Gospels written in the first place, right? Like, Jesus is going around saying his stuff and he's got disciples and stuff and there are different philosophies on this. One is that- Some people think that Mark's Gospel, which is the first one, was written in order to deal with the destruction of the temple. The temple is the most important site for Jews, even today, right? But the temple at the time, like, part of being a Jew involved, like, practices that

• 1:04:14Speaker 05

  you have to do at the temple. So for them, this is like God's house. This is where it happens. And so when that temple is destroyed, how, what do you do?

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23Speaker 05

  Like, how are you going to interpret this? And in many respects, Jesus is presenting himself as the new temple. You know? And so some people think that Mark's Gospel is written as a sort of way to respond to the, to the temple's destruction, because he talks about temple being, being destroyed a fair bit.

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  Going back, you know, what is it, 60 years? What was happening at the time that allowed John the Baptist to rise in popularity? Like, what was happening culturally? Is there any conversation about that? Why, like, forgiveness could have been so important?

• 1:04:57Speaker 05

  Well, forgiveness has always been important in religious traditions, but it's seen as the prerogative of God.

• 1:05:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:02Speaker 05

  And so it's unlikely that, the Christians won't think that John the Baptist was actually forgiving sins. They will, they will think that he was, like, announcing the forgiveness of sins, or helping people participate in a ritual whereby God would forgive them.

• 1:05:14Speaker 04

  Like, but why was this so popular then? Were there other people throughout history at that time that were also implementing this? Like, what was the societal utility that rose, that made him rise to superstardom? As you said, everybody from Judea is going there.

• 1:05:28Speaker 05

  We don't, we don't know, because we don't have a lot of details about John the Baptist in particular, but we.

• 1:05:32Speaker 04

  He's fascinating, from what you're telling me right now.

• 1:05:34Speaker 05

  He's my favorite character.

• 1:05:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, why is there so, I mean, obviously, you're right next to the J-Man, so it's going to be tough to live in that shadow, but like, to me, you start something that seems to be a break-off from Judaism. I don't know how many other of these religions are existing at the time, but he seems to be the one that's the most popular. And then his descendant becomes, or his disciple becomes God. So like, what is happening with him?

• 1:05:59Speaker 05

  I'm fascinated by him. And the thing is, we just don't have very much information at all, because the Gospels are so dense, and there is so much in them, you'd be amazed at some of the things that you can, you can pull out and things that people are still noticing today that they have noticed before about the Gospels. And yet, for some of our most famous figures, like John the Baptist or like Mary Magdalene, these people are like hardly mentioned. We have like no information about them. We don't know where they get their names. We don't know why she's called Mary Magdalene. Was there a place called Magdalene? Maybe. There's a place called Magdalene like in Israel, but it's unclear whether there's a connection there. Judas Iscariot. Why is he called Judas Iscariot? No one knows. There are theories about this. It could be because he was a member of a particular sect that used to murder Roman officials with a dagger and the word for dagger is something like ikarii or something. And there was a group of people

• 1:06:41Speaker 05

  called the ikarii. And maybe Iscariot kind of sounds like that.

• 1:06:46Speaker 04

  This is very terrific.

• 1:06:47Speaker 05

  It's not speculative. No one knows. John the Baptist is someone that we just don't have that much information about.

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  John the Baptist was residing in the woods around Nazareth?

• 1:06:53Speaker 05

  In the wilderness, yeah.

• 1:06:54Speaker 04

  But around Nazareth?

• 1:06:55Speaker 05

  Around like Jerusalem, I think.

• 1:06:57Speaker 04

  So then how does Jesus even come to meet?

• 1:07:00Speaker 05

  Sorry, no, he would be, yeah, I don't, I don't.

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  Where's that connection?

• 1:07:03Speaker 05

  I don't know whereabouts. I don't know whereabouts. He's probably not Jerusalem.

• 1:07:05Speaker 08

  They're cousins.

• 1:07:06Speaker 04

  Oh, they're related?

• 1:07:07Speaker 08

  By six months.

• 1:07:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, so.

• 1:07:09Speaker 08

  John the Baptist is six months older than Jesus.

• 1:07:10Speaker 04

  Oh, so we know each other their whole life. And he's watching this guy come up and he's like, hey, this.

• 1:07:15Speaker 05

  So, so they, yeah, but then again, like the, so the, the story is in Luke's Gospel. So you know the, the birth story of, of Jesus, born in the manger and all this kind of stuff?

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Speaker 05

  That's only in two of the Gospels. It's only in Matthew and it's in Luke. And they tell slightly different stories with emphasis on different things. Luke's Gospel opens with the birth of, or the pregnancy resulting in John the Baptist.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  Wait, what do you mean resulting in John the Baptist?

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  So like his parents.

• 1:07:42Speaker 08

  His parents.

• 1:07:43Speaker 05

  So the priest.

• 1:07:44Speaker 04

  Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. So John is born.

• 1:07:46Speaker 05

  So John, John, before he's born, like there's the pregnancy and it's like a miraculous pregnancy.

• 1:07:52Speaker 04

  For John the Baptist as well?

• 1:07:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, in the sense that like, I think Elizabeth was not supposed to be able to like conceive.

• 1:07:59Speaker 08

  You should love this guy. He also wrote a special about.

• 1:08:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is my guy. He did IVF.

• 1:08:03Speaker 05

  Okay. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:05Speaker 04

  So she wasn't supposed to conceive. It was very difficult to conceive. And then she conceives and here's John the Baptist.

• 1:08:10Speaker 05

  And it's all sort of, but the, the thing to note is, and so, and this is. Yeah, they're cousins because then Mary is pregnant with Jesus and then Mary meets Elizabeth and John the Baptist does a backflip in his mother's womb when she approaches Mary, who's pregnant with Jesus, and John the Baptist does a little backflip. It's kind of wacky, man. But the thing is, these birth narratives, in my view, are basically completely mythological. I don't think there's any history in them. So I'm not sure if Jesus was actually related to John the Baptist. I certainly don't think that there was the backflip in the womb.

• 1:08:49Speaker 07

  But we can place them in the same city, at least. Like, there's a reason why they connect.

• 1:08:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, they clearly historically were actually like, like I say, I think Jesus is a follower of John the Baptist because like, John is in the wilderness of Israel, and Jesus comes and gets baptized by John the Baptist. I mean, Jesus is sort of all over the place in his childhood. Like, he's, there's like a census, and so he has to like, travel, and then he has to go here, and has to go there, and then he goes to Egypt because he's scared that Herod's gonna kill him.

• 1:09:19Speaker 07

  Yeah. How old and before Jesus started claiming to be like that dude?

• 1:09:24Speaker 05

  Well, depends which gospel you read, because there is an indication that Jesus was like, teaching in the temple when he was a teenager. So there's one story in the Gospels of like, I think his family are like, going back from Jerusalem. I can't remember all the details. It might have been the Passover or something, and they're all leaving and they're going home. And then they suddenly realize that Jesus isn't with them. So they go back and they find him like, in the temple, like, arguing and talking, yeah, literally. But he's arguing and talking with the like, Jewish teachers. And they're all like, this kid knows so much. Like, this is incredible. And he's like, impressing everybody with his, with his skills and with his knowledge. Outside of that, the so-called missing years of Jesus. There's like, no record of what, he just shows up when he's like, 30.

• 1:10:09Speaker 07

  I thought he was just like, Jesus for 33 years and then all of a sudden he becomes Jesus.

• 1:10:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. So this is where you get conspiracy theories, where Jesus traveled to India. That's where he got his. We're just like, we're always there.

• 1:10:21Speaker 05

  Unbelievable, how right.

• 1:10:22Speaker 07

  The source.

• 1:10:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, it makes sense to think like. Like, oh, well, he was preaching kind of-

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  He's the first appropriator.

• 1:10:28Speaker 05

  All of this. Yeah. Like, where's he getting these ideas? He's always getting them from like the east and we don't know what Jesus was doing. I mean, the reason why I think we have the missing years of Jesus is because there was no reason to write about this Jesus figure until he started his ministry. The birth narratives were made up later and tacked on, as often happened with biographies of important figures. There were like mythological origin stories, the miraculous birth of Alexander the Great or whatever.

• 1:10:55Speaker 05

  So I think we just didn't have any records of this guy because he was a nobody until he showed up.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  He was an eat, pray, love dude. It was the first eat, pray, love, this long-haired white guy.

• 1:11:03Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:11:03Speaker 03

  Went to India, ate good food, got spiritual. It's exactly what happened.

• 1:11:07Speaker 05

  That's right. So I think he basically just show up and start doing that.

• 1:11:13Speaker 06

  And if he was so clear that he wasn't divine, why did Christology come after his death?

• 1:11:18Speaker 05

  That is a hell of a question. And in fact, Brant Petre's recent, it's called Jesus and Divine Christology, which is an attempt to show that Jesus did claim to be God. And he opens up with what he calls the paradox of how most scholars think that Jesus didn't make divine claims. But most scholars believe in what's called an early high Christology. So early on, people had a high Christology. They believed that Jesus was God. So why is it that if he didn't make any claims to be God himself, why is it that so soon afterwards, people started believing that he was God?

• 1:11:47Speaker 06

  John the Baptist was also martyred.

• 1:11:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, he was.

• 1:11:50Speaker 06

  Around the same time.

• 1:11:51Speaker 05

  He was. And why do these beliefs develop around Jesus? That's a historical question. And obviously, I don't know like the answer to it, but I think it's clear to me to see how like myths can develop over time. But this is where it gets a little bit speculative, from my view, because Brant Petre's view is that, well, the logical answer to this is that he was making divine claims. There are so many ways that you could interpret what's happened here. Firstly, I'm not sure exactly when it is that people start believing this. So remember I said that Paul's letters are our earliest New Testament source? A lot of people read Paul's letters and they say Paul is clearly presenting Jesus as God. And if that's the case, then you're looking like 50 AD, already got the belief that Jesus is God.

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  I'm not so sure. Other people look at Paul and see him as not so, so obviously like high Christology in the way that people want him to be. He might be more of like a mystic. Some people think he's more of like a visionary. There's a lot of theories about what's going on in Paul. So it depends on what you think of Paul as to how early this actually develops.

• 1:12:53Speaker 05

  And yeah, like it's, it's probably within decades, certainly like a hundred years or so that people start talking about Jesus as God. But then the nature of Jesus is also not entirely clear. You know, some people are like, well, was he, was he God and he just appeared to be a human? Was he sort of half God, half man? Did he become God at the baptism? Was he God as soon as he was born? Did he exist beforehand? Did he come down to earth and into somebody? Or did he begin to exist in Jesus? Like, and none of this really gets sorted out until they start getting Christian councils together to decide on orthodoxy. And so you've got the Council of Nicene and 325, which a lot of people think is where they developed the Christian canon. That's not the case, but they did develop the view on Jesus's relationship to the Father, which was quite important.

• 1:13:38Speaker 05

  So they just define it. 325, that's when they lock it in. They have a big discussion, yeah, and they bring all the bishops together. The Trinity comes from that discussion as well. They bring all the bishops together and specifically, I think, like the relationship of the son to the father. And the idea that, so you get what's called the Nicene Creed, which Christians will recite today, which, which basically lays out, you know, we believe in one God, we believe in the Father, we believe that, you know, Jesus is eternally begotten of the Father, all of this kind of stuff. They just lay it out, the relationship of the Trinity, that kind of stuff.

• 1:14:06Speaker 05

  But the question is, well, why is it that in the early church, people started believing that Jesus was God? Regardless of when this finally got solidified, how does this get off the, off the rails? An important thing to note is that not everybody thought that. There were like all kinds of different Christian views. So I'm really big on the Gnostic Christian history because I find it really interesting. And that like, so Elaine Pagels writes a book in 1975 called the, or the 1970s, I can't remember when, called The Gnostic Gospels. And her big thing is saying, there is this idea that in the early Christian church, Jesus dies, all of the, like, Peter is the first Pope and you develop all of these churches and they all basically agree. And then, and then there are a few disputes, so they iron them out and that's Christianity. And she's like, no, there are communities of people who believe the most wacky and incredible things about Jesus fairly early on.

• 1:14:49Speaker 05

  Like, if you've ever read the Gospel of Judas, it is a complete trip. It is a complete and utter trip, and it does present Jesus as like in the form of a human, but not really a human. He's God. He's sent from the realms of Barbelo. And he comes down to free people from their material prisons and bring them back up into the plethora to be there with all of the, all of the proper divine beings. Totally wacky, different view of Jesus. And we know that this text existed prior to 180 AD. We know that for a fact.

• 1:15:20Speaker 06

  In that same text, doesn't he claim that Judas will supersede all the disciples because he is doing the will of the father?

• 1:15:27Speaker 05

  So when the gospel of Judas was first discovered, it seemed like Judas was the hero. Because

• 1:15:35Speaker 05

  this is discovered in like the 1970s. We know that this text exists, but it's been lost for, for thousands of years. But there's a guy called Irenaeus who in 180 writes against heresies. And he's like condemning all these different heresies. And he talks about this gospel of Judas. So we knew it existed, but we didn't have it. And in the 1970s, it's discovered. People are trying to sell it. It goes back and forth. It goes all over the place. It spends about 16 years in a safety deposit box in New York City, which almost destroys it. Finally, it gets bought by National Geographic and they bring in some experts. Bart Ehrman is one of them who I've had on my show. And to like, find out if this is really the gospel of Judas. So they're looking at this text. And they're reading it and it opens up by saying that

• 1:16:19Speaker 05

  it tells a story that the disciples are praying over their food. They're performing a eucharist. Jesus walks in and sees them praying over their food. And he laughs at them.

• 1:16:29Speaker 05

  And they say, why are you, why are you laughing at us? We're, we're doing what's right. And Jesus says, yeah, you're worshiping your God by doing that.

• 1:16:38Speaker 05

  You're worshiping your God by doing that. And they're like, and they start getting angry. They're like, what? And then he's basically saying, you don't understand any of this. And he says to them, if any one of you is clever enough and stand up and face me. And guess who stands up? It's Judas. Judas comes up to him and says, I know who you are.

• 1:16:56Speaker 05

  I know that you've come from the realm of Barbello, and I'm not fit to utter the name of the one who sent you.

• 1:17:02Speaker 05

  And then Jesus sort of explains the history of the cosmos to Judas, explains how the world was created, explains how there is an ineffable, invisible spirit who emanates divine beings. And one of those divine beings falls out of the plethora of divine beings and creates the material world. And the material world is the product of like an evil or incompetent, demiurgic god called Beelzebowl, which is like wacky, wacky stuff. And you can imagine when they read this, when they first discovered this, that they're just like, holy moly, this is absolutely insane. This is gonna like change everything. But the big thing is Judas is the one who gets up. Like you say, Judas gets up and says, I know who you are. So a lot of people read this and thought, wow, this retells the story. Judas is the hero. That's kind of disputed because later in the text,

• 1:17:47Speaker 05

  Jesus seems to say to Judas that you also are not worthy of like entering into this house. Like Judas is the best of the disciples and he's sort of understanding it, but he's still not like the hero of the story. He's still not actually going to like be one of the generation that get back to the plethora. So it's kind of unclear what the treatment of Judas is in that gospel. But the way it ends is the authorities show up and Judas hands Jesus over to them. And that's it, that's where it ends. It's incredible, it's incredible gospel. And we know that it's written in the second century at the latest. So Christians will look at this and they'll say, well, look, I mean, the difference between something being written in like 70 AD and like 150 AD is like massive.

• 1:18:31Speaker 05

  Because you're talking about eyewitness testimony versus like, you know, 100 years later. It's like the difference between writing about Tupac like now versus like 100 years from now or something. Yeah, without any internet. Totally, exactly, like totally different, right? So what it does tell us is that there existed communities who had completely different views of what Jesus was about. That's why the Council of Niceo is important, right? Yeah, but it. They need to organize all these different opinions. Even within like Orthodox Christianity, there were disputes about the nature of Jesus. And that's what's ironed out. But there are just communities that just have like completely, completely different views. Yeah. And these Gnostics, the reason they're called Gnostics is because it comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge. And in Orthodox Christianity, the way that people are saved is through the sacrifice of Jesus. That's how you're saved, because Jesus dies for you. For Gnostics, it's not about what Jesus did,

• 1:19:16Speaker 05

  it's about having the right knowledge. He brings the correct knowledge, and if you have the right knowledge, that's what will save you. So some of these Gospels don't even mention the crucifixion. It's like not important. It's not in the Gospel of Judas. It's not in the Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Thomas is a sayings gospel though, so maybe that's not fair. But it's just got like weird and wacky stuff in it. The Gospel of Thomas is discovered in Nakamadi. The biggest treasure trove of Gospels was discovered in 1945 in the desert in Egypt, where this farmer, this teenage farmer is digging in the desert, and he accidentally hits upon a jar. And he's scared to open it at first, because he thinks it's got a gin in it, you know, like a demon. And eventually, they open it, it's got all this ancient papyrus, and he takes it home, and his mother's using some of it to like feed the fire. And then

• 1:19:59Speaker 05

  they discovered that it's this treasure trove of ancient documents. But that story is wacky, man, because the way they tell it at first is like, "Oh yeah, we were out there digging for some materials, and then we found this jar." And then the teenager is like, they go and they find him, some researcher wants to find him, and he mentions that there was like a corpse. And then the older brother of the farmer was like, "No, no, no, there was no corpse." It's like, what's going on? And it seems like what might have been happening is a grave robbing. And they kind of didn't want to, and they've obviously discovered all this stuff, and they want to sell it, so they've come up with this story. So it's actually kind of unclear how it was discovered. So the leading theory was, the reason these are buried in the desert is because in like the 4th century, Athanasius defines the 27

• 1:20:43Speaker 05

  books of the New Testament, and says, "All the other books are heretical, so they get buried in the desert." And that was the theory, and that's what he discovered. But that changed into some people now thinking that it was normal to bury people with important like things to them, so like with papyrus or documents. So somebody was probably just buried, who had an extensive collection of Gnostic literature, and they were buried with it. There was a grave robbing, and they found this thing, and they're like, "Oh shit, it's worth some money." So they started trying to sell it. So this text, this collection of texts includes loads of important Gnostic literature, including the Gospel of Thomas, which is probably the most famous. It's a so-called sayings gospel, so just a list of sayings of Jesus. It says, "These are the secret teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, which Judas Didymus Thomas wrote

• 1:21:23Speaker 05

  down." And some of it is similar to what we find in the New Testament Canon, but some of it is incredibly weird. Don't some people claim that Thomas was Jesus's twin? Yes. So the word "Didymus" means twin. And in the New Testament Canon...

• 1:21:41Speaker 05

  Jesus had, well, Jesus had, Jesus had brothers. We know that Jesus had brothers. And it's, it's kind of, it's actually a point of contention because like It's disputed. Yeah. Half brothers, right? Have you heard of the perpetual virginity of Mary? No. So there's a dispute whether, obviously, the virgin Mary is, has a virgin birth of Jesus, but did she then remain a virgin? And Catholics say, yes, she did. And a lot of Protestants say, no, she didn't. And part of the reason for that is because Jesus is described as having brothers. It could mean, it could be that brother was just like a, a name that was given to them. It wasn't like a literal brother. Or maybe there were other sons of Joseph or something like this. But the most natural interpretation to me is that he did actually just have brothers, especially because for me, remember, I think that the birth narratives are invented.

• 1:22:24Speaker 05

  So I think the people who originally write the stories, they're not, they're not concerned with the virgin birth. They don't even know it exists. I don't think the virgin birth happened for many reasons. One of which is that like, at one point in Mark's gospel, Jesus is performing an exorcism and his family come out, his family come out and they say that they think he's lost his mind. They're like, what's going, what's he doing? Has he lost his mind? Because they don't understand. I'm like, if you've got this whole thing with like an angel coming down to you and telling you what's going to happen and you should call him Emmanuel and you have a virgin miraculous birth and then like, you, and then later on, you just like, what? You just forget all of that and you're like, oh, what's he doing? Oh, he's lost his mind, you know? It doesn't seem to line up for me. So I don't think the virgin birth happened at all, of course. There's also some dispute over the translation. I mean, the, it says that there's an Old Testament prophecy that says a virgin shall conceive.

• 1:23:07Speaker 05

  The Hebrew word there is, is Alma, which can just mean a young woman of marriageable age. But again, Greek New Testament, so the Greek Septuagint translates the word as Parthenos, which means virgin specifically. So some people think that the New Testament authors were reading a Greek version. When the prophecy only said young woman, they read virgin, so they came up with the virgin. That's disputed as well. Who knows? But yeah, so Jesus has brothers and

• 1:23:32Speaker 05

  Thomas isn't described as Jesus's brother, but he's called the twin. So even in the canonical literature, it's Thomas, also known as Didymus. And Thomas itself, the word, the name Thomas means twin. It's like a development of an Aramaic word which means twin. I think like Tomar or something means twin. So in the Aramaic language, his name's Thomas, which means twin. But the Gospels take a lot of effort, like translating it into the Greek. Given that Thomas already is a word that means twin, that's where the name comes from. The New Testament authors write down Thomas also called Didymus. So in the Greek language, Didymus means twin. So when the Greek authors are writing it, they're like, he was called Thomas, which means Didymus. So it's important to the Greek authors to tell the reader that his name, that he was called the twin.

• 1:24:17Speaker 05

  Right? That's important to them. So why? Why is he called the twin? Nobody knows. Some people think it could be a nickname because he looked like Jesus. And so they called him the twin. Some people think he might have been the twin brother of Jesus. Orthodox Christians will dispute that because that really puts a nail in the coffin for the virgin birth. Because if Jesus is born of a virgin and Thomas is his twin, then Thomas is also born of a virgin birth. Ooh, and then who's that guy? However, there is an apocryphal, it's called the Acts of Thomas, which is another apocryphal gospel, which again, not canon, probably completely ahistorical, but this is where Thomas travels to India. Because Thomas is historically, traditionally, the person who brings Christianity to India. And if you go to India today-

• 1:24:58Speaker 06

  He goes there to trick them.

• 1:25:00Speaker 05

  Yeah. If you go to India today, you will find like, really devout groups of Thomacites, who really revere Thomas as an important guy, because he's the guy that brings Christianity to India. And the Acts of Thomas is one book that recounts this. But at one point, I think they're at a wedding and somebody confuses Thomas for Jesus. They get them mixed up because they look so similar. Well, at us. So that either-

• 1:25:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, all these, all these Judeans look the same to me. Yeah. That was the word I was looking for. They, they, they either mix them up because they are actually twins and that's why they look similar, or maybe they just happen to look similar and that's where he got the nickname. But for some reason, Thomas is called the twin. And so, again, in the Gospel of Thomas, it's Judas, Didymus, Thomas. So Judas is obviously some other name that he's somehow got attached to him. And then Didymus, Thomas, so twin, twin, which is a little bit weird. Some people are a bit speculative, a bit suspicious of the fact that it says that it words it like that, but I think twin could be a nickname, it could mean that he's his twin, whatever. But Thomas is allegedly the one who writes down all of these sayings of Jesus. And most scholars date this to the second century, so it's, you know, probably not actually

• 1:26:09Speaker 05

  written by Thomas. Some, some scholars kind of think it's earlier, but that's a bit controversial. Again, Christians are gonna watch this and they're gonna be like, it's definitely late. Like, there's no way, it's ridiculous to suggest that it's early, but like, you know, man, like, think what you wanna think. There's got some weird stuff in there.

• 1:26:22Speaker 07

  How do you explain the miracles, like water to wine and making a blind man see and all that stuff?

• 1:26:27Speaker 05

  So, yeah, that's a bit weird. The water to wine only happens in John's Gospel. It's the first miracle that Jesus performs, and he doesn't want to at first. Mary, his mother, comes up to him and is like,

• 1:26:36Speaker 07

  Get the party started.

• 1:26:38Speaker 05

  And she's like, we've run out of wine. And he says to a woman, what has this got to do with me? Which sounds a bit clunky in the English, it sounds kind of rude, but it means something like, saying like, you know, like darling, or also, she's like, you know, what's this got to do with me? Like, my time hasn't come yet. And she's basically like, please, Jesus, come on, we're out of wine. He's like, fine. So he goes and turns the water into wine. Um, yeah, I don't know. I mean, we, whether or not you think he performed miracles, especially healing and exorcism, it is like beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was known for doing that.

• 1:27:06Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:07Speaker 05

  He was known as a healer.

• 1:27:09Speaker 07

  Brought Lazarus back to life.

• 1:27:11Speaker 05

  As a miracle worker, yeah. He was known well for doing that. I don't know about Lazarus in particular, because Lazarus, the raising of Lazarus only happens in John's Gospel. Also, by the way, one of my favorite indications that Jesus isn't God, because he prays before he raises Lazarus from the dead. He, uh, just before he raises Lazarus from the dead, he looks up to the sky and he says, Father, thank you for having heard me. And you know what he says? He says, I know that you always hear me, but right now I'm saying this for the benefit of everybody watching, so they will know that you have sent me. It doesn't mean he's not God, right? No, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't mean that he's not God, but what it means is that it implies. So a lot of people say that when Jesus performs miracles of his own authority, that shows that he's got. Because, you know, Old Testament prophets like Elijah and Elisha raised people from the dead, but they prayed to God first.

• 1:27:55Speaker 05

  They say like, God, you know, raised this person from the dead, but Jesus did it of his own accord. But Jesus, before he raises Lazarus, praised to God and doesn't just say like, oh, I'm praying to you first, but says, I know you always hear me, but right now I'm saying it for the sake of everybody else. Implying that in instances where it seems like he's acting of his own accord, he is still praying to God. He's just not doing so publicly because he says in, in John's gospel before he raises Lazarus, I know you always hear me, but I'm saying it right now. So they'll know that you've sent me, which is kind of interesting. And that would jog with the, I mean, she has, you have sent me, not necessarily, but the yogi. Yeah. So there's constantly like, Father has sent. That's a yogi's perform miracles is kind of. Yeah. And so. You were a Hindu, dude. It's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like Christians don't like, aren't aware that Jesus was constantly saying that the Father has sent him.

• 1:28:39Speaker 05

  They, they have their interpretation of that, but I think a lot of it lines up and then converges on the idea that Jesus didn't claim to be God in this sense. Whether he performed those miracles is like, kind of out of my purview, like maybe miracles happen. I mean, I, I probably don't think they did, but he definitely had a reputation for doing something. Something extraordinary was going on with this guy who was walking around and doing stuff.

• 1:28:59Speaker 05

  And all of these traditions develop around him. People want to write about him and then people start writing all of these gospels and stuff. But people have different ideas about what Jesus did. The gospel of Thomas, which again, I should clarify is not canonical. Most Christians think it's like got no connection to history, but it says some weird stuff in there. Like at the very end, the, the last saying in the sayings gospel of the gospel of Thomas is the most famous. Where one of his, I think it's Simon Peter says to Jesus, you know, Mary Magdalene should depart from us because she's a woman and women can't inherit eternal life. They're not worthy of life. Now, from what you know of Jesus, what would you expect him to say? What are you talking about? Everybody's worthy of it. What he says is, I will draw her to me to make her a man so that she will inherit eternal life. For any woman who makes herself into a man will inherit eternal life.

• 1:29:44Speaker 05

  Now, could that be a translation? It could. People say this. This is like, this is like the earliest indication of transgender, you know, man into woman.

• 1:29:56Speaker 04

  But is that like his way of communicating to a bunch of dudes that don't think women are, that they should be, and he has to find a way to communicate this so they can understand?

• 1:30:04Speaker 06

  I've heard that the translation of the word man in that sentence is like courage, or like bravery.

• 1:30:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think a lot of that is going on, especially because so much less work has been done on the, on the, the thing about these Gnostic gospels, like the Gospel of Thomas-

• 1:30:16Speaker 04

  We're gonna get Wesley Huff in here, dude. We're gonna Wesley Huff here. He's gonna refute all this shit.

• 1:30:20Speaker 05

  He will try. I, I, I've seen a lot of Wes's work. I, I like him. Seems like a really nice guy. I think he's made some, some blunders in various areas that are really important. And I've, I've made as much, I've made as much known. There are some that I've spoken about and some that I haven't. I did a podcast yesterday where I spoke in detail about this massive blunder that Wes Huff made. I think it was like a year or so ago, which kind of brought someone I know into a bit of disrepute, unfortunately. And he just made this like really, really big blunder. But I don't like just like throwing stuff like that out there because it sounds like you're just sort of taking a jab or whatever. But I've always been happy to speak to Wes. I think it'd be, I wouldn't want to debate him because I think you'd lose a lot of the interesting bits because you'd be too like prideful and

• 1:31:04Speaker 05

  defensive because you're like, I'm gonna defend my view. I'd love to have a conversation with him though. But yeah, I think he's, I think he's made some, made some mistakes.

• 1:31:10Speaker 04

  But you are admitting on air that you would not debate Wesley Huff.

• 1:31:13Speaker 05

  No, I mean, I would.

• 1:31:14Speaker 04

  But you're saying the conversation might be more fruitful.

• 1:31:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, it would be, it would be, it would be way better.

• 1:31:22Speaker 04

  I mean, that'd be cool to listen to both of you. I would love to hear his perspective on it. It's so, so difficult to be in our position because I know zero. So anything you say to me is gospel.

• 1:31:33Speaker 05

  So Wes Huff thinks that Mark, Mark's gospel presents Jesus as God in every single chapter.

• 1:31:38Speaker 04

  Got it. And you guys dispute that.

• 1:31:39Speaker 05

  He's got a video. Well, I don't, I don't have so much of a problem with saying that the gospels present Jesus as God. I just don't think Jesus claimed it for himself.

• 1:31:45Speaker 04

  Got it.

• 1:31:46Speaker 05

  So Wes relies in Mark, chapter two, on the fact that Jesus forgives sins and says that this is quite an important moment. It's a story, have you heard of when the, when the-

• 1:31:57Speaker 04

  Whereas John the Baptist doesn't forgive him, he says the Father forgives.

• 1:31:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, that would probably be the interpretation, right? And, but it's like, the thing that I think is that people often just miss- Important corollaries of what they're saying. So like in short, Jesus forgives someone's sins in Mark, chapter two. And the Jewish opponents accuse him of blasphemy. They do it in their hearts. They say like, this man is blaspheming. Who can forgive sins but God alone? And the man's paralyzed. And Jesus says, why are you thinking these things? Which is easier to say? Your sins are forgiven or get up and walk? So that you know that the son of man has the authority to forgive sins. I say to you, get up and walk. And the man gets up and he walks off. So Jesus is saying like, if you don't think I can forgive sins, watch me do this much harder thing and then you'll know that I have the authority to forgive sins.

• 1:32:44Speaker 04

  How stubborn are Jews to see that and be like, nah, he's not the one?

• 1:32:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 1:32:48Speaker 04

  That is, we don't talk enough about the Jewish faith.

• 1:32:51Speaker 05

  But that is, that is.

• 1:32:51Speaker 04

  Imagine how much faith you have to have in your religion. You see a guy who's paralyzed. The dude goes, yo, check it, I'm God, watch, get up, walk.

• 1:32:58Speaker 05

  That is the message.

• 1:32:59Speaker 04

  And they still go, this guy's crazy.

• 1:33:00Speaker 05

  That is the message of the gospels. And as the gospels go on, they get more anti-Jewish. And especially in John's gospel, you have like, Jesus is describing at least his Jewish opponents and possibly the Jewish people as like, he says, they're like, we only have one father and our father is Abraham or our father is God. And he's like, no, your father is the devil.

• 1:33:17Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 1:33:18Speaker 05

  He says, your father is the devil, you know? And so a lot of like Christian antisemitism has come, has come from this idea that, that the idea that the Jews are responsible for the death of Christ also develops throughout the gospels.

• 1:33:27Speaker 04

  Was there any like conversation back in the day? There's got to be some Jews writing to each other where they're like, this guy might be on to something like, he turned a water into wine.

• 1:33:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, those are called, those are called the gospels.

• 1:33:44Speaker 04

  Okay, fair enough, fair enough.

• 1:33:46Speaker 05

  It's true.

• 1:33:46Speaker 04

  Dude, we could talk about this forever, man. I would, we'd love to have you back on next time you're in town. Maybe talk some more. Maybe we get Wes on and have another little conversation. I would love you guys to talk. Sometimes I do think things are lost in debate.

• 1:33:57Speaker 05

  If you manage to get the two of us in a room together, that really would be miraculous.

• 1:34:00Speaker 04

  That would be cool, but it would be miraculous. Anyway, Alex O'Connor, everybody.