The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2252 - Wesley Huff

00:00:00.000 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day Wes, very nice to meet you Joe, pleasure.

00:00:14.000 So, I, like many people, was introduced to you because of the debate that you had with Billy Carson.

00:00:21.000 You know, it's one of those things where it's very unfortunate when people get caught with their pants down.

00:00:29.000 I'm not an expert in many things, but the things that I am an expert on, you could wake me up at 4 o'clock in the morning and ask me about those things, and I'd go, oh yeah, no, this is what it is.

00:00:40.000 I know, you know, like martial arts or comedy, I could tell you, I could give you an expert version of reality.

00:00:50.000 It seems like he does not have that.

00:00:54.000 And he is a wonderful talker, and it's a lot of fun.

00:00:58.000 I like watching his videos.

00:00:59.000 I love all that ancient history stuff, and even the most ridiculous tinfoil hat aspects of ancient...

00:01:06.000 It's fun.

00:01:06.000 It's entertainment.

00:01:07.000 But I know that there's a different...

00:01:09.000 Like, Andrew Schultz and I had a discussion about this. 0.96

00:01:11.000 Like, he said when he had Billy on the podcast, he said, we're not gonna fucking research anything. 0.81

00:01:15.000 We're not gonna search anything.

00:01:16.000 We're not gonna do anything.

00:01:17.000 We'll just let him talk, because it's fun.

00:01:18.000 Yeah.

00:01:19.000 Andrew's awesome.

00:01:21.000 But...

00:01:21.000 When he was on with you, it was quite apparent that you are an actual expert in the Bible and in many religious texts and that he didn't necessarily have the facts straight.

00:01:35.000 What was the fallout of all of that?

00:01:38.000 Well, it's interesting you say the expert thing because I literally was asked to do it 24 hours beforehand.

00:01:43.000 So I had like the least amount of preparation going into it and I was okay with that.

00:01:50.000 Because I'd listen to Billy Carson.

00:01:53.000 Well, and I'd listen to the stuff he'd said.

00:01:54.000 So I knew enough about the ways that he'd articulated things about the ancient Near East and the Bible and Christianity to know enough that his level is pretty surface.

00:02:06.000 But the fallout was that not only did he not want us to release the conversation, but then he started throwing out cease and desist letters.

00:02:15.000 And then he started, you know...

00:02:18.000 Trying to sue people.

00:02:20.000 So, I mean, I was never worried because I'm a Canadian.

00:02:23.000 And anybody who's tried to sue internationally knows that...

00:02:29.000 Good luck.

00:02:30.000 Yeah, right.

00:02:30.000 Yeah.

00:02:31.000 As far as I understand it, he would have had to file a claim in a Canadian court that would have been reviewed to have legal precedence.

00:02:41.000 He'd have to prove that he could win.

00:02:43.000 What was his argument?

00:02:46.000 Apart from the fact that he was embarrassed that he lost?

00:02:49.000 Well, yeah, that's not really an argument, right?

00:02:51.000 We've all been there. 0.95

00:02:53.000 You're hungover, thinking about all the dumb stuff you did last night and wondering if anybody remembers.

00:02:57.000 Unfortunately, someone does remember everything you do online and they've got receipts. 0.78

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00:04:26.000 Well, the cease and desist letter, yeah.

00:04:28.000 The cease and desist letter said...

00:04:29.000 I don't want you to use my name or my face in anything going forward and anything you've used up until this point you need to remove.

00:04:38.000 And I was given 24 hours notice to do this.

00:04:41.000 But if you're a public figure, he's clearly a public figure.

00:04:45.000 Is that even...

00:04:46.000 Can you actually say...

00:04:47.000 No.

00:04:47.000 No, no, you can't do it.

00:04:48.000 So what was the...

00:04:49.000 Does he have a lawyer that wrote the cease and desist?

00:04:52.000 Is he a lawyer?

00:04:53.000 No.

00:04:54.000 So he actually...

00:04:55.000 It's interesting because he...

00:04:56.000 Mark Menard, who was the guy who hosted this interaction, he sent Mark a handwritten one.

00:05:03.000 And then he eventually gave Mark an official one from his lawyer.

00:05:07.000 So I actually was sent one by his lawyer, which I, you know, screenshotted, posted publicly online and said, I'm going to ignore this.

00:05:15.000 And then, but he'd sent Mark, who was the podcast host.

00:05:20.000 As far as I'm aware, numerous cease and desist.

00:05:23.000 And Anton, who was the media manager, he'd sent a number of cease and desist.

00:05:28.000 It's unfortunate.

00:05:30.000 It is unfortunate.

00:05:31.000 When you get caught with your pants down, you're supposed to say, I got caught with my pants down.

00:05:35.000 That's what you're supposed to do.

00:05:37.000 Especially if you're public.

00:05:39.000 It's very clear that you're incorrect.

00:05:42.000 Well, the irony of this situation is if he just kind of left it, it probably wouldn't have made...

00:05:48.000 Anywhere close to the splash that it's made.

00:05:51.000 And we told him that.

00:05:52.000 We said, like, hey, Barbra Streisand effect is going to happen. 0.99

00:05:55.000 Like, you're a big enough personality that if I make a video and say, like, hey, I had this conversation, didn't go well for Billy, and Billy doesn't want it released, that's going to start to gain traction sooner or later.

00:06:09.000 Yeah.

00:06:10.000 It's, you know, the problem is to really...

00:06:16.000 Delve into these subjects.

00:06:18.000 It takes a tremendous amount of research.

00:06:21.000 Years and years and years of research.

00:06:24.000 You really have to know what you're talking about.

00:06:26.000 Most of us don't.

00:06:28.000 Well, especially with languages.

00:06:29.000 Yes.

00:06:30.000 Like, we didn't get into it.

00:06:31.000 I hoped to have, in our initial conversation, kind of pressed him a little bit more on the more overt things he'd said about, like, Greek and Hebrew and Sumerian.

00:06:40.000 because I've studied a number of ancient languages.

00:06:43.000 And when you study the languages, you realize the complexities of these things.

00:06:48.000 And so when someone hasn't, and they're making statements that are obviously indicative of someone who hasn't studied them, it's super apparent.

00:06:58.000 And so I think it's one thing to be making claims about, say like, Christian history or the Bible.

00:07:03.000 But when you start to get into, like, linguistics and philology, it gets messy.

00:07:07.000 And if you don't know what you're talking about, it gets really apparent really fast.

00:07:11.000 So the gentleman who brought the two of you together, what was his goal?

00:07:15.000 Like, what was he trying to do?

00:07:16.000 And how did he approach you?

00:07:18.000 Yeah, so he's friends—or I should say was friends.

00:07:21.000 He was friends with Billy.

00:07:22.000 They live in the same neighborhood.

00:07:23.000 Oh, boy.

00:07:24.000 So it's actually become really—it's become— Pretty rough for him.

00:07:29.000 So he released a video yesterday, which I think people should go and check out, where he kind of gives his perspective.

00:07:35.000 He's been friends with Billy for years.

00:07:37.000 He was at Billy's wedding.

00:07:39.000 Billy had 15 people at his wedding.

00:07:41.000 Mark was one of them.

00:07:43.000 And they live in this community in Florida.

00:07:46.000 Their sons are friends.

00:07:48.000 Their wives would hang out.

00:07:50.000 And Mark told me, he's like, I've been hearing Billy say, You know, he wants to debate.

00:07:58.000 Nobody will debate him for years.

00:08:00.000 And so as far as I think Mark was concerned, he was giving Billy the opportunity that Billy had told a lot of people he wanted.

00:08:08.000 And so he, you know, this was set up in that Mark and Billy have been talking.

00:08:14.000 They've been on each other's podcasts in the past, and they've been friends, but more like business colleagues.

00:08:20.000 Like Mark has come out and said, I hadn't really gone into.

00:08:24.000 The stuff he'd said about Christianity or ancient religions or whatever that much.

00:08:29.000 Mark is a Christian.

00:08:30.000 He has like a public profession of faith.

00:08:32.000 And him and Billy had talked about the fact that they wanted to talk about like faith stuff and some of their differences.

00:08:40.000 And that Mark was kind of prepping for this and his media manager Anton had sent him some of my stuff and said like, Wes has done some stuff on some things that Billy has talked about.

00:08:53.000 You know, maybe you should look up some of the stuff, you know, read into it.

00:08:57.000 And Mark, very last minute, was like, well, I feel inadequate.

00:09:03.000 Do you think I could just ask Wes?

00:09:05.000 And so he DM'd me on Instagram and just kind of laid this out like, hey, I'm going to have Billy in my studio in 24 hours.

00:09:12.000 I can tell him you're coming.

00:09:13.000 I can tell him who you are.

00:09:14.000 I can, like, give him your background.

00:09:16.000 But would you be willing to come?

00:09:18.000 And so that's what I did.

00:09:20.000 And so that's how it got set up.

00:09:22.000 So, correct me if I'm wrong, but was Billy aware that this was going to be a debate, or did he think it was going to be just a discussion?

00:09:30.000 Like, what did he think it was going to be?

00:09:32.000 No, he'd been given all of the prerequisites.

00:09:35.000 Like, he knew we were going to go over some of his stuff that he'd said about Christianity, that I was going to come in, who I was, what my name was, some of my background, and that...

00:09:47.000 Part of the conversation was going to be me kind of asking him some clarifying questions and rebutting some of the things that he said.

00:09:56.000 So you didn't watch the three-hour live stream that he did, did you?

00:09:59.000 I watched chunks of it.

00:10:00.000 Okay.

00:10:01.000 I watched a little bit.

00:10:02.000 I'm like, oof.

00:10:03.000 And then I shut it off.

00:10:04.000 Then I watched a little bit more.

00:10:05.000 Oof.

00:10:05.000 Yeah.

00:10:06.000 So unfortunately, Billy there says he had no idea going in.

00:10:11.000 And I mean, as Mark said in his video that he released yesterday, I mean, that's...

00:10:15.000 Apparently false.

00:10:16.000 He knew what it was going to be, who was going to be involved, and even some of the things that we would be talking about.

00:10:25.000 Okay.

00:10:26.000 And he also was claiming that it wasn't a debate, that he had been involved in debates before, and that he would prepare for debates, but this is something he didn't prepare.

00:10:35.000 But again, it's like, if you ask me about things that I know about, you can wake me up.

00:10:41.000 Yeah.

00:10:41.000 Out of a full sleep and give me a couple seconds.

00:10:44.000 I'll go, okay, this is what it is.

00:10:47.000 Yeah.

00:10:48.000 If you know, you know.

00:10:49.000 And it wasn't a debate in one sense.

00:10:51.000 Like, it wasn't.

00:10:52.000 Like, we didn't do, you know, opening statements and cross-examination and rebuttal.

00:10:57.000 Right.

00:10:57.000 It really was a conversation.

00:10:58.000 Right.

00:10:59.000 And it only kind of turned into a debate in the sense that Billy, I think, got caught out.

00:11:07.000 And so the things that were talked about.

00:11:10.000 Kind of showed that You know, that he needed to go on the offense.

00:11:14.000 Yes.

00:11:15.000 Yeah.

00:11:15.000 Well, again, it's all very unfortunate.

00:11:18.000 But the good part of it is I was introduced to you and your work.

00:11:22.000 There you go.

00:11:23.000 Very, very extensive and very fascinating.

00:11:26.000 And the videos that you sent me on Instagram, I watched both of those today as well.

00:11:30.000 So really, really interesting stuff.

00:11:33.000 and your knowledge of the history of the biblical texts and Codex Sinaiticus and all these different things.

00:11:41.000 Very, very fascinating stuff.

00:11:43.000 So let's just get into your background.

00:11:46.000 Like how did you get started in your research and how did you get into this?

00:11:51.000 Yeah, so I grew up in a Christian home.

00:11:54.000 My parents were missionaries.

00:11:55.000 So I was born in Pakistan and spent a portion of my childhood in the Middle East with my parents working in Amman, Jordan.

00:12:02.000 And then we came back from the Middle East when I was pretty young.

00:12:08.000 And so I grew up in this very like diverse home in the sense that my mom was a missionary kid who grew up in India.

00:12:15.000 And so we had a lot of like worldview kind of perspectives represented in our home.

00:12:22.000 Like I often say we had the Bhagavad Gita and the Book of Mormon and the Quran on the shelf.

00:12:26.000 Oh, wow.

00:12:27.000 Yeah.

00:12:27.000 And I think, you know, that always, although my parents were never overt with this kind of stuff, they always had the perspective that, you know, we're Christians.

00:12:35.000 We believe that this worldly perspective is true.

00:12:38.000 But, hey, this stuff isn't scary.

00:12:40.000 This stuff isn't, you know, off limits.

00:12:42.000 You know, we can investigate these things.

00:12:44.000 And they never said that outright, but I always felt this kind of attitude of that kind of perspective.

00:12:51.000 And, you know, having been exposed in majority Muslim contexts and seeing that kind of stuff, and my mom having like a pretty...

00:13:02.000 Good knowledge growing up in India of things like Hinduism and Sikhism and that.

00:13:07.000 And I don't know how much of the kind of testimony stuff you watched of mine, but just before my 12th birthday, I actually was diagnosed with a neurological condition that left me paralyzed from the waist down.

00:13:19.000 Yeah, I did see all that.

00:13:20.000 Yeah.

00:13:20.000 So that's a condition that's called acute transverse myelitis, which I often say is a word you can forget as soon as you hear it.

00:13:28.000 It's a complicated one.

00:13:29.000 But what happened was that I had the flu and my body's immune system attacked the nerve endings at the base of my spinal cord and caused swelling and cut off the communication between my brain and my legs.

00:13:41.000 Instantaneously, right?

00:13:42.000 Yeah, basically.

00:13:43.000 I'd gone down for a nap.

00:13:44.000 I was camping out in the bathroom floor for flu reasons.

00:13:48.000 And when I woke up, about 30 minutes later, I couldn't feel my legs.

00:13:53.000 And so, yeah, that's the acute part of the acute transverse.

00:13:57.000 Myelitis was that it was basically instantaneous.

00:14:00.000 And that's what made the diagnosis as severe as it was.

00:14:06.000 Like, they said there's a 30% chance.

00:14:08.000 It was like a small percentage of probability that I would recover, but a much higher percentage that there would be a lot of either complete paralysis for the rest of my life or some kind of issues.

00:14:26.000 With walking.

00:14:27.000 It's related to diseases like multiple sclerosis in that it's neurological and it affects that kind of thing.

00:14:36.000 And one month from the day that I woke up and couldn't feel my legs, I woke up on a Saturday morning, got out of bed, walked over to my wheelchair and sat down.

00:14:45.000 One month?

00:14:45.000 One month, yeah.

00:14:46.000 January 8th to February 8th, exactly.

00:14:49.000 Very fortunate.

00:14:50.000 You're telling me.

00:14:51.000 Yeah.

00:14:52.000 Yeah.

00:14:52.000 What treatment did they give you?

00:14:54.000 So initially they gave me steroids to reduce the swelling.

00:15:00.000 So I spent 11 days in the hospital being overseen by pediatric neurologists and specialists in this because it's a very rare condition.

00:15:12.000 And so they were studying me and they gave me steroids and they did some other tests.

00:15:20.000 But really...

00:15:21.000 There was no true kind of treatment in that.

00:15:25.000 So I was doing physiotherapy.

00:15:27.000 I would be pulled out of gym class in school.

00:15:30.000 But it was a little bit of a joke.

00:15:33.000 Like, can you move your legs?

00:15:35.000 Could you move anything?

00:15:38.000 No, nothing.

00:15:39.000 Could you feel anything?

00:15:40.000 No.

00:15:41.000 No, in fact, when I was in the hospital, I'd wake up and there'd be pinpricks in my legs because they'd be testing where the reactions were and they'd have used a syringe.

00:15:51.000 And so I'd wake up and there'd be these tiny little pinpricks in my legs because they'd been testing while I was asleep to see what the kind of, you know, whether it was registering neurologically with anything.

00:16:02.000 But I couldn't feel anything.

00:16:03.000 I was fully a paraplegic.

00:16:06.000 Yeah, but going back to that, like, so I've...

00:16:09.000 I experienced this, what I consider to be a true supernatural experience in that I walked into the hospital to the doctors that had overseen me and they were the first ones that used the word miracle.

00:16:24.000 They said, we really don't have any type of medical explanation.

00:16:27.000 And mainly because there was no atrophy.

00:16:31.000 Because of the cutoff of the communication, my muscles in those 30 days were fine.

00:16:37.000 And just a short amount of time.

00:16:40.000 But they said there should be something, and we're picking up nothing.

00:16:43.000 That's crazy.

00:16:45.000 Because I've broken limbs before and had them in casts, and just in the six weeks that you have a cast on, you have massive atrophy.

00:16:53.000 Yeah.

00:16:54.000 Yeah, so that was the kind of predication for them using the word miracle.

00:16:59.000 And so that's kind of, it marks this...

00:17:02.000 What I do consider to be this supernatural something happened.

00:17:08.000 Did you feel like that was a calling that led you to a very specific mindset after that?

00:17:15.000 It's an interesting way of putting it.

00:17:17.000 I mean, as much as you could at 12 years old.

00:17:21.000 But it must have had a significant impact on your psyche and your perceptions.

00:17:27.000 Yeah, well, it definitely led to things like later in life, I got very involved in athletics and in track and field.

00:17:33.000 And part of that was feeling a conviction that I knew what it was like to not be able to wake up and walk out of the room.

00:17:40.000 Right.

00:17:40.000 And so taking that pretty seriously and competing competitively well into university, because even though I wasn't the most naturally talented individual on the team, I felt like a motivation to be able to, okay, I don't want to waste this. okay, I don't want to waste this.

00:17:59.000 Right.

00:17:59.000 Yeah.

00:18:00.000 Right.

00:18:00.000 And then later on, in terms of your original question, the difference in that was that I realized, okay, there's something out there.

00:18:09.000 Something happened that I can't totally explain on naturalistic terms.

00:18:14.000 But how do we go from that to saying, okay, well, then this worldview is correct.

00:18:21.000 And so despite, you know, being raised in a Christian home, I felt like my parents telling me what was true is not the worst reason to believe it, but it's also not the best. 0.98

00:18:35.000 And so as a teenager, I did a lot of kind of soul searching.

00:18:39.000 And like I said, you know, I was able to do that.

00:18:41.000 To a certain level of degree because of the openness within my household, where I did.

00:18:47.000 I pulled the Koran off the shelf and I read it, you know, front to back, just trying to figure out, okay, what's going on here?

00:18:52.000 What's all this about?

00:18:54.000 And it was through that period of, like, searching and it wasn't a crisis of faith.

00:18:59.000 That would be an over-exaggerated term.

00:19:03.000 But it was kind of...

00:19:04.000 An inspiration of faith, perhaps.

00:19:05.000 Maybe.

00:19:06.000 Yeah.

00:19:07.000 Digging through.

00:19:08.000 Okay, well...

00:19:08.000 What do these guys believe?

00:19:10.000 What does this perspective hold?

00:19:12.000 And that was about a period of about a year and a half.

00:19:16.000 And at the end of that, I did truly feel that, okay, well, I think in the ways that I, in my limited ability as a teenager to investigate these things, I think that Christianity is true. 0.95

00:19:31.000 But it wasn't until I went to university where...

00:19:36.000 I was engaging with people of other faith perspectives in Toronto at York University where I was talking to Muslims and Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and atheists, you know, from the gamut.

00:19:49.000 And I was having these conversations and I was expressing kind of my perspective on what I believed.

00:19:55.000 And they would say things like, well, that sounds great, Wes, but, you know, that's all the Bible.

00:20:01.000 You can't trust that.

00:20:05.000 Do Mormons say that to you?

00:20:06.000 Well, yes.

00:20:07.000 Because that's kind of crazy.

00:20:08.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:20:09.000 Well, in the sense that, so... 0.96

00:20:11.000 The Mormon was the craziest one. 1.00

00:20:12.000 Yeah. 0.96

00:20:12.000 Because we know who wrote it. 0.96

00:20:14.000 Yeah.

00:20:15.000 And he's a shady dude.

00:20:16.000 He is a shady dude.

00:20:18.000 Well, no, they did in the sense that the Book of Mormon trumps the Bible.

00:20:24.000 So they would believe, I think it's the 10th article of the Mormon Church, is that they believe the Bible insofar as it is translated.

00:20:29.000 And so they have this perspective that...

00:20:33.000 There's been things that have been affected.

00:20:35.000 I mean, Joseph Smith made his own translation of the Bible, and it's rough.

00:20:39.000 And when he was 14. Well, I think it was later on that he made the Joseph Smith translation, but I don't even know if the official LDS Church ascribes to the Joseph Smith translation, because I think they even see, like, ugh, this is...

00:20:52.000 We know what the Greek and the Hebrew looks like, and this is not even...

00:20:55.000 Yeah.

00:20:56.000 Well, he was, you know, a legitimate con man.

00:21:00.000 Yeah, which is fascinating.

00:21:03.000 People have such a deep search for meaning and truth that if you are confident, which is what a con man is, a confidence man, if you are really good at expressing yourself and really show confidence in your convictions, you can persuade a lot of people.

00:21:24.000 Confidence is not competency.

00:21:26.000 Yes.

00:21:26.000 And unfortunately, those things get confused a lot.

00:21:29.000 It covers up for competency sometimes.

00:21:31.000 Yeah.

00:21:32.000 In religion and politics and like all sorts of things, right?

00:21:36.000 And everything.

00:21:36.000 Yeah.

00:21:37.000 And everything.

00:21:37.000 I mean, I think it's, I think because people want to, like, it's very difficult to be an expert in a subject.

00:21:44.000 And I think people want to believe that they are and they don't want to do the work.

00:21:51.000 Right.

00:21:52.000 Yeah.

00:21:53.000 Yeah.

00:21:54.000 Well, I mean, I think that's why, you know, experts themselves feel a lot of inadequacy is because they study a subject and realize, like, I'm never going to get to the bottom of this hole.

00:22:04.000 Right.

00:22:05.000 So, unfortunately.

00:22:07.000 Most subjects are very, very nuanced and very deep.

00:22:10.000 Yeah.

00:22:11.000 Especially when you're talking about ancient religion.

00:22:14.000 Yeah.

00:22:14.000 I mean, you're talking about things that were a oral tradition for a long time before they're even written down.

00:22:23.000 It's a long, long trudge to get to the bottom of things.

00:22:29.000 Yeah.

00:22:29.000 And part of the whole, like, what I was trying to get Billy in that conversation that I had with him to get to the bottom of partly was a question of methodology.

00:22:40.000 Like, I think he got frustrated at me at one point because I kept asking, you know, what are the criteria that you're using when you're looking at...

00:22:49.000 one source versus another source and coming up with a conclusion.

00:22:54.000 Because in historiography, it's the inference to the best explanation.

00:23:00.000 And so there are different ways that you go about that, different methodologies.

00:23:04.000 And historians very rarely disagree on the data and evidence.

00:23:12.000 It's the conclusions that you draw from that.

00:23:14.000 But then there are some things that are just out and out false.

00:23:19.000 And I don't think Billy totally knew what I was talking about.

00:23:22.000 But it's those criteria that we look at when we look at something that does come from like an oral tradition and eventually gets written down and becomes a literary text.

00:23:34.000 And then you analyze...

00:23:36.000 That on the basis of it being a literary text.

00:23:38.000 This is sort of the problem with being self-taught rather than conventionally, academically trained.

00:23:45.000 Definitely.

00:23:46.000 Where you're trained in very specific disciplines and you're taught to understand the foundation before you understand how to put a window in.

00:23:57.000 There's a lot of things that you have to know from the base, from the beginning.

00:24:01.000 Like, do you have a water line?

00:24:03.000 Do you have power?

00:24:05.000 A lot of stuff.

00:24:06.000 There's a lot of things going on when you're trying to construct an expertise in something, especially something that is so complicated.

00:24:15.000 And one of the things that I've gotten out of – I've probably watched probably 20 hours of your stuff over the last couple of weeks.

00:24:26.000 You've spent a lot of time on this.

00:24:28.000 This is not a casual, cursory examination of these texts and of religion.

00:24:35.000 This is a long, long journey.

00:24:38.000 That's what's particularly exceptional and really interesting to me.

00:24:42.000 Because I'm always fascinated by people that have really gone down the road.

00:24:46.000 Like, really, really, really gone down the road.

00:24:48.000 Because you don't meet a whole lot of them.

00:24:51.000 You know, I know a lot of Christians that can quote you some You know, some versions of the New Testament, you know, some Psalms, some...

00:24:59.000 But the real, the go all the way to the back, way, way, way, way, way.

00:25:06.000 And that's what you've done that's very interesting.

00:25:09.000 So this is like, how old are you?

00:25:11.000 I'm 33. Which is very young for someone who has the depth of knowledge that you have.

00:25:18.000 So you've been doing this essentially from that miraculous moment.

00:25:24.000 That ignited this spark, even though you came from a missionary background, and then from then on.

00:25:29.000 So for the past 11 years, 12 years, or 20 years, 30 years, your whole life, essentially, it's all been this.

00:25:38.000 Yeah, to a certain degree.

00:25:39.000 I mean, I went to university with full intention of going into the police force.

00:25:43.000 I did my undergraduate studies, and then I kind of mapped out this plan that I was going to...

00:25:50.000 Become a police detective.

00:25:52.000 And that was my goal.

00:25:54.000 And I think I realized...

00:25:56.000 Why not?

00:25:57.000 Because you like getting to the bottom of things?

00:25:58.000 It could be.

00:25:59.000 Because you do.

00:26:00.000 Yeah, well...

00:26:01.000 Someone who spends 21 years getting to the bottom of a religion, you'd probably be pretty good at cracking cases. 0.77

00:26:07.000 I hope so.

00:26:09.000 I think that might have been part of it.

00:26:10.000 I also...

00:26:11.000 There was an aspect of when I was in high school where they were like, you've got to figure out what you're doing.

00:26:16.000 You're going to be homeless and you're going to die.

00:26:17.000 Yeah, I remember that part.

00:26:18.000 I felt that, like, the pressure.

00:26:19.000 Oh, that was terrifying moment in life.

00:26:21.000 Man, I always tell people when they're in high school, like, you can chill out.

00:26:24.000 Like, it's going to be okay.

00:26:25.000 I don't think so.

00:26:26.000 You don't think so?

00:26:27.000 I wonder if it's different now.

00:26:28.000 I think you should have a certain amount of desperation.

00:26:31.000 Because I think that it ignites the fire within you to do something.

00:26:34.000 There's probably something to that.

00:26:36.000 Yeah.

00:26:36.000 The people that I know that have been too pampered and taken care of and didn't have a fear of everything going completely sideways.

00:26:45.000 They never really get the momentum that's necessary to accomplish things in life.

00:26:50.000 Yeah, there's probably something to that.

00:26:52.000 I mean, desperation.

00:26:53.000 A little desperation and fear I think is good for you.

00:26:55.000 Yeah.

00:26:56.000 Everybody wants to be comfortable.

00:26:57.000 I don't think that's necessarily a good path.

00:27:01.000 I mean, I think you should have perspective and you should enjoy your life as a young person and have those moments.

00:27:07.000 But you should also realize you've got work to do.

00:27:09.000 Well, and stress is good.

00:27:11.000 Stress creates perseverance and creates patterns that allow you to succeed.

00:27:16.000 I mean, this is like Athletics 101, right?

00:27:19.000 I think that's very important.

00:27:20.000 You've got to push yourself.

00:27:21.000 And I think actually part of that also led in, like, I'm a big believer in athletic discipline needs to go hand-in-hand.

00:27:29.000 I mean, I know you are too.

00:27:30.000 It needs to go hand-in-hand with any other type of, like, whether it's an intellectual endeavor or, like, because...

00:27:37.000 It trains you to be able to go into places that are uncomfortable.

00:27:42.000 And that uncomfortability allows you to then become stronger.

00:27:48.000 You know, realize where your inadequacies are.

00:27:50.000 And especially when you're with people who are better than you.

00:27:53.000 I mean, when I was running at York University, there were two guys on our team who...

00:27:58.000 Because I was okay individually, but I ran for the relay team.

00:28:04.000 I was a sprinter.

00:28:06.000 And one of the guys was part of the, they medaled, when Canada medaled at Worlds, he was part of that relay team.

00:28:14.000 And then my other training partner, Busy, who, he ended up competing in Tokyo for Canada.

00:28:21.000 And when you're beside someone who is like just a genetic freak, you're like, oh, okay.

00:28:26.000 Like, that's different, right?

00:28:28.000 And it both pushes you, but it also reveals your limitations.

00:28:33.000 Where that doesn't inhibit you, like, you shouldn't, that shouldn't discourage you to go up to that line of being able to push yourself.

00:28:41.000 But at the exact same time, it creates a realism.

00:28:45.000 That, like, I'm never gonna, I can train as much as I want to, I'm not gonna run like that, right?

00:28:52.000 And so, yeah, but going back to what you were asking, like, I think there was part of that in wanting to go into the police force.

00:29:00.000 But then realizing, like around my third year of university, that my passions and motivations were very, very different.

00:29:09.000 And that I didn't know how to go about that or where the proper place to do that was.

00:29:16.000 But I knew that I needed to lean into that to some degree.

00:29:20.000 Particularly with the Bible.

00:29:21.000 Because I was claiming that this Bible...

00:29:26.000 Talks about this guy, Jesus, and I'm a Christian.

00:29:30.000 So I have a friend, Andy Bannister, he's out in the UK, and he says, if you take Christ out of Christian, all you're left with is Ian.

00:29:37.000 And Ian's a great guy, who's not going to save you from your sins.

00:29:40.000 And so, like, if I'm wrong about the Bible, those people who push back on me, right, those skeptics of various worldviews, if the things they were saying about the Bible were true, then it did actually legitimately undermine.

00:29:56.000 What I believed.

00:29:57.000 And so I needed to take that seriously.

00:29:58.000 I had an obligation to actually investigate those things as far as I could.

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00:31:20.000 What is the oldest version of the Bible or the stories in the Bible?

00:31:23.000 Is it the Dead Sea Scrolls or are there older versions?

00:31:26.000 The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest of the Old Testament.

00:31:29.000 So when they were discovered, I mean, so they were discovered in 1946 to 1957. And at that point during their discovery, they pushed back a lot of our previous oldest manuscripts a thousand years, which was a big deal.

00:31:46.000 How old are they?

00:31:47.000 They're anywhere between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century BC. So it's kind of tricky because the Dead Sea Scrolls are, they're like a library that we refer to.

00:31:59.000 So it's approximately 970 documents, but it's distributed out between 10,000 and 11,000 fragments.

00:32:10.000 So there's a lot going on there, right?

00:32:12.000 And some of these, I mean, are so fragmentary that you look at them and it's like confetti.

00:32:19.000 Because they're, I mean, 3,000 years old, but not quite that.

00:32:22.000 They're like 2,000 plus years old, right?

00:32:24.000 Animal skins too, right?

00:32:25.000 Well, all sorts of things.

00:32:26.000 Animal skins, papyri, and then some of them are actually done on copper.

00:32:31.000 Really?

00:32:31.000 They're like inscribed in copper.

00:32:32.000 Oh, wow.

00:32:33.000 Yeah, one of the coolest ones.

00:32:34.000 Actually, this relates because I know you're a Marco Allegro guy.

00:32:37.000 The first...

00:32:38.000 Time I was introduced to Marco Allegro was not his Sacred Mushroom on the Cross stuff, but he published a book on what's called the Copper Scroll, because part of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments is this inscribed document on copper, which is an ancient treasure map.

00:32:51.000 Can you see it online?

00:32:53.000 Yeah, Jamie, pull up the...

00:32:54.000 Hey! 0.99

00:32:55.000 There it is.

00:32:55.000 Wow!

00:32:56.000 Yeah.

00:32:56.000 So it's in Hebrew, and it is wild.

00:33:00.000 So it has these sites where it says buried treasure.

00:33:05.000 Whoa.

00:33:05.000 Does it say what the treasure is?

00:33:12.000 You know what?

00:33:12.000 Off the top of my head, I don't know.

00:33:16.000 Look how crazy that language is. 0.97

00:33:17.000 I know, right?

00:33:19.000 And so...

00:33:20.000 But the Dead Sea Scroll, so it's like stuff like this.

00:33:23.000 It's papyri, it's animal skins, and it's a number of different languages.

00:33:28.000 So the vast majority of it is in Hebrew, but there's also a lot in Aramaic and then Greek and in Nabataean.

00:33:35.000 So it's like an umbrella term to just describe a whole bunch of literature.

00:33:43.000 So a lot of it is biblical because it was written by this group out in the desert called the Essenes who lived at Qumran.

00:33:50.000 But then other stuff of it is just, you know, it's just Jewish literature of various stripes that were hidden in caves all around the Dead Sea.

00:34:01.000 So the scrolls, as it were, aren't all biblical.

00:34:05.000 Some of them is just a counting of the times.

00:34:09.000 Yeah.

00:34:09.000 Oh, Jamie, look it up.

00:34:10.000 65 tons of gold and 26 tons of silver.

00:34:13.000 65 tons!

00:34:15.000 That's a lot.

00:34:16.000 That's a lot!

00:34:17.000 How many Cuban links can you make out of that?

00:34:20.000 You can see why someone would try to track that down.

00:34:22.000 Boy.

00:34:23.000 Yeah.

00:34:24.000 Wow.

00:34:24.000 And you know, when we're talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, you have ones like the Great Isaiah Scroll, which is fully complete.

00:34:31.000 It's a copy of the Book of Isaiah, and it's a full, complete scroll.

00:34:35.000 But then other ones are so fragmentary that we think they're written in Hebrew, but we can't actually tell.

00:34:41.000 Oh, wow.

00:34:42.000 Because no one's willing to like...

00:34:44.000 And this is true for a lot of stuff.

00:34:46.000 So, like, the largest grouping of papyri literature in the world is the Oxyrhynchus Collection, which we get a good portion of our oldest manuscripts of the New Testament from.

00:34:58.000 But if you go to Oxford and you look at the Oxyrhynchus Collection, and you pull out that drawer, it's like a jigsaw puzzle.

00:35:09.000 And you're like...

00:35:10.000 Right.

00:35:11.000 Like, most of it is untranslated, untranscribed, because the amount of man-hours that it would just take to even put it together, never mind, then go to the effort of transcribing and translating it, most people are not willing to do that.

00:35:27.000 And if you're missing chunks, how do you even make that puzzle connect?

00:35:31.000 Well, that's part of...

00:35:33.000 So, part of my area of specialty in research is in regards to that.

00:35:39.000 So I study paratextual features.

00:35:42.000 We're really going to get nerdy today.

00:35:44.000 Let's get nerdy. 0.94

00:35:45.000 So you look at the features of the manuscripts, not necessarily the words, but things like the spaces between the words, the development of punctuation, indentation or outdentation.

00:35:57.000 And I look at the margins, and I try to, based on the average size of manuscripts in and around that time, and also the average spacing of words and...

00:36:09.000 The margins on top, bottom, and the side recreate what the manuscript could have possibly looked like.

00:36:15.000 Whoa.

00:36:16.000 Yeah.

00:36:16.000 So when you say the book of Isaiah is intact, how similar is it to the book of Isaiah that's in the Bible?

00:36:23.000 So that one is fascinating.

00:36:25.000 So this isn't true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but when we discovered the Great Isaiah Scroll...

00:36:30.000 Previous to that, the earliest copy of Isaiah that we had was in the Masoretic text, which is in the Middle Ages.

00:36:37.000 Whoa.

00:36:38.000 Yeah, so it was literally a thousand years.

00:36:39.000 We literally pushed back our understanding of Isaiah a thousand years.

00:36:43.000 And the thing that really shocked scholars, like I said, this isn't true for all the Dead Sea Scrolls, but one of the things that shocked them about Isaiah was that it was word for word identical to the Masoretic text.

00:36:53.000 Word for word?

00:36:54.000 Word for word.

00:36:55.000 Wow.

00:36:56.000 Is that it right there?

00:36:56.000 Is that papyrus?

00:37:01.000 Yes.

00:37:02.000 No, I think that one is vellum.

00:37:04.000 What is vellum?

00:37:04.000 I should be more specific.

00:37:07.000 Parchment is animal skin.

00:37:10.000 Vellum can be used synonymously with the term parchment.

00:37:15.000 Technically, parchment is...

00:37:17.000 Like, baby animal skin, like calves or lambs.

00:37:21.000 But this is the Great Isaiah Scroll.

00:37:23.000 And you can see, like, they stitch together the parchment because it's so long.

00:37:29.000 God, it's so beautiful.

00:37:31.000 The way they wrote back then was so beautiful.

00:37:33.000 I mean, maybe it's because I can't read it.

00:37:34.000 It's so fat.

00:37:35.000 Maybe if I saw English, I would think that's beautiful, too.

00:37:38.000 Yeah.

00:37:38.000 Especially script.

00:37:39.000 Like, cursive.

00:37:40.000 Cursive is very beautiful.

00:37:41.000 But that is so fascinating because the...

00:37:44.000 I mean, obviously, coming from a point of ignorance, the letters look so similar.

00:37:49.000 This is what I always got about cuneiform.

00:37:52.000 When I look at that, I'm like, it's just one particular sort of character that's this way and that way and up and down.

00:38:01.000 Oh, cuneiform is wild.

00:38:03.000 Weird.

00:38:03.000 It's really, really tricky.

00:38:05.000 And that's the thing when, like, if you're studying ancient languages and you start to study Greek, like, Greek?

00:38:13.000 The Greek alphabet is similar enough that you're like, okay, alpha looks like an A, right?

00:38:18.000 Delta looks like a D. So you can figure it out.

00:38:20.000 And so it tricks you because you start off and you're like, oh, this is phobios, fear.

00:38:26.000 I know what a phobia is.

00:38:28.000 And you get this false sense of encouragement. 0.86

00:38:30.000 And then the further you go down the rabbit hole, you're like, oh, I'm screwed.

00:38:34.000 But Hebrew is completely the opposite because... 0.85

00:38:38.000 The writing system is so different.

00:38:41.000 The learning curve is hard at the beginning, and then you're like, everything is just three letters with a suffix added to it.

00:38:48.000 And so it feels like, whereas the opposite is true with Greek.

00:38:51.000 Greek, you're like, ah, I get this. 0.99

00:38:53.000 And then when you really go down the rabbit hole, you're like, oh, crap. 0.91

00:38:56.000 None of the things that I learned about that are supposed to be standard.

00:39:01.000 All of them have exceptions.

00:39:02.000 Wow.

00:39:03.000 But, yeah, cuneiform is a wild one.

00:39:05.000 Do you know who Rick Strassman is?

00:39:06.000 No.

00:39:07.000 He's a scholar, and he did a lot of work, early work, FDA-approved work on psychedelics.

00:39:15.000 And he spent 16 years teaching himself to read ancient Hebrew.

00:39:20.000 Nice.

00:39:21.000 Yeah, because he wanted to really understand the Bible from the original source of ancient Hebrew and to understand it in context.

00:39:28.000 Because ancient Hebrew, the way the words are structured, is so different than English and that something must be lost in translation.

00:39:34.000 So he spent 16 years teaching himself how to read ancient Hebrew.

00:39:40.000 That is such dedication.

00:39:42.000 16 years.

00:39:44.000 That's a long time.

00:39:44.000 That seems too long.

00:39:45.000 Well, you're self-taught.

00:39:47.000 I mean, he's doing it himself.

00:39:48.000 Yeah.

00:39:48.000 Self-teaching.

00:39:50.000 Yeah.

00:39:50.000 I self-taught myself Greek at first, and then when I started learning it formally, I realized how much you miss when you self-teach yourself.

00:39:58.000 Oh, I'm sure.

00:39:59.000 Well, how many people can teach you ancient Hebrew?

00:40:00.000 How many courses are available?

00:40:01.000 Oh, you can take it at any graduate college.

00:40:03.000 Yeah?

00:40:04.000 Yeah.

00:40:04.000 And is it—it's not something that we know what it sounded like, correct?

00:40:09.000 Yeah.

00:40:09.000 I mean, this is the big debate with ancient languages.

00:40:12.000 Right.

00:40:12.000 Like, same thing with— Yeah, arguably we don't know how any of this was pronounced.

00:40:17.000 I mean, modern Greek speakers get really mad at me when I say that because they're like, of course we know how it's pronounced. 1.00

00:40:22.000 It's pronounced like we pronounce it, right?

00:40:23.000 And on all my videos where I'm like sight translating Greek manuscripts, there's so many comments of modern Greek speakers getting mad at how I'm pronouncing things.

00:40:34.000 But realistically, yeah, we don't really know how most of the things...

00:40:39.000 Are pronounced with anything.

00:40:42.000 But isn't that very bizarre when you're translated?

00:40:45.000 Like, if you go back to, like, say, the Epic of Gilgamesh, we don't even know what the words sounded like.

00:40:51.000 Yeah.

00:40:52.000 We kind of know what they represent, and then we do a literal translation of what they represent.

00:40:56.000 But if you've never heard, no one can speak ancient Sumerian.

00:41:01.000 Yeah.

00:41:01.000 Well, Sumerian's a wild one because it's a language isolate.

00:41:06.000 What does that mean?

00:41:08.000 So, Hebrew is an Afro-Semitic language.

00:41:12.000 So, Hebrew is related to all of these other languages like Aramaic and Akkadian, but language isolates have no adjacent comparisons.

00:41:25.000 So, because I tried to teach myself Sumerian.

00:41:29.000 And I failed.

00:41:30.000 And I just gave up.

00:41:31.000 Because I couldn't do it.

00:41:32.000 Because I had nothing to really compare it to.

00:41:34.000 So Sumeriologists are very like, they're a field of their own. 1.00

00:41:39.000 Because I learned a little bit of Akkadian because I had studied Semitic languages.

00:41:44.000 And there's enough crossover between things like Hebrew and Aramaic and Akkadian.

00:41:50.000 But Sumerian, you have nothing to compare it to.

00:41:54.000 What did it eventually become?

00:41:56.000 It just died.

00:41:57.000 It just died?

00:41:57.000 It just died.

00:41:58.000 How?

00:41:59.000 Do we know?

00:41:59.000 I mean, the Sumerians lost to the Assyrians and the Assyrians got taken over by the Babylonians.

00:42:05.000 I mean, it's just the course of history where things happen.

00:42:10.000 But there are a number of ancient languages that are language isolates, like Linear Elamite.

00:42:16.000 We had no idea what linear Elamite even said until 2021. Well, I never even heard it until five seconds ago. 0.51

00:42:23.000 I know.

00:42:23.000 There you go.

00:42:24.000 Jamie, if you pull up, if you look up, what's it called?

00:42:28.000 There's a cup, a silver cup.

00:42:30.000 It'll come up if you Google image linear Elamite, because you think cuneiform looks wild.

00:42:35.000 Linear Elamite is completely different.

00:42:38.000 Then that, too.

00:42:39.000 And there's a silver cup, which we had no idea what it said.

00:42:43.000 And then a bunch of researchers, ancient Near Eastern researchers, developed.

00:42:48.000 So, in the corner there, that one on...

00:42:53.000 Far left corner?

00:42:54.000 Oh, no, no.

00:42:54.000 Here.

00:42:54.000 Now it's moved because he clicked it.

00:42:56.000 That one.

00:42:56.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:42:56.000 Click that.

00:42:57.000 So, that's linear Elamite. 0.90

00:42:59.000 Whoa.

00:43:00.000 And so, that's in and around the same time that languages like Sumerian.

00:43:04.000 So, there's this...

00:43:05.000 Very interesting kind of, if we're talking about a story in the Bible like the Tower of Babel, where it says that God confused their languages and everybody started speaking different languages, you have these languages that just pop up and out of nowhere and have no relation to one another.

00:43:24.000 So Akkadian starts to adopt certain words in Sumerian, but they're still Sumerian words.

00:43:32.000 It's like pizza.

00:43:33.000 Is Italian, right?

00:43:34.000 Or like kayak is Inuit.

00:43:38.000 But when you're looking at the words that carry over, it's not because there's a relationship between Akkadian and Sumerian.

00:43:47.000 It's because you have these cultures that live side by side.

00:43:49.000 And eventually, Akkadian starts to adopt these things.

00:43:53.000 But Sumerian is... 0.95

00:43:55.000 So that's why when I see people like Billy Carson talk about being able to read Sumerian...

00:44:01.000 I'm like, dude, I read ancient languages and I can't...

00:44:04.000 I've tried and I can't make heads or tails of Sumerian.

00:44:07.000 So...

00:44:08.000 That's a tell.

00:44:10.000 Unfortunately, it kind of gives away.

00:44:12.000 Listen, I like Billy.

00:44:13.000 He was a nice guy.

00:44:14.000 I really enjoy talking to him.

00:44:15.000 I really do.

00:44:16.000 I think his videos are fun.

00:44:18.000 But I also think truth is important.

00:44:20.000 I have no problem with him as an individual.

00:44:22.000 He just needs to course correct.

00:44:24.000 Yeah.

00:44:24.000 Yeah, course correct and recognize what you know and what you don't know.

00:44:29.000 You're not doing...

00:44:30.000 People a service, especially people like myself that aren't educated in this.

00:44:35.000 We turn to others who claim to have a vast knowledge of this to help me out.

00:44:41.000 Tell me what's going on when I sit down and talk to you.

00:44:44.000 Tell me what's going on. 0.98

00:44:45.000 And if you don't really know, you're fucking over a lot of people, unfortunately, for yourself. 0.96

00:44:53.000 How do you say it again? 0.98

00:44:56.000 Linear Elamite.

00:44:58.000 Can you put that back up again, Jamie?

00:45:02.000 Can you show me that image that you showed me before?

00:45:05.000 Actually, see if you can find the cup.

00:45:07.000 That's pretty dope right there.

00:45:08.000 If you scroll, there should be a cup.

00:45:09.000 I think it's called the dashed.

00:45:11.000 Is that it?

00:45:12.000 In the lower corner?

00:45:13.000 No.

00:45:13.000 Is that the cup?

00:45:14.000 Yeah, if you look up cup.

00:45:16.000 Yeah, that guy.

00:45:17.000 So see that inscription at the top beside the face?

00:45:19.000 Yeah.

00:45:20.000 So that's the one.

00:45:21.000 So it goes around the top of the cup, and they crack that.

00:45:24.000 Look at that dude's honker.

00:45:25.000 That's a big nose, isn't it?

00:45:26.000 That's a hell of a nose.

00:45:27.000 Yeah, he can smell that linear Elamite. 0.98

00:45:29.000 And so when...

00:45:31.000 So actually, interestingly enough, if you pull back, Jamie, that's my...

00:45:36.000 So there's an infographic that I made that just popped up.

00:45:39.000 So if you click that guy, that's the one I made.

00:45:42.000 Why is it coming up like that?

00:45:43.000 Someone else reposted it.

00:45:45.000 Oh, okay.

00:45:46.000 So is it just bad resolution, is that what you're saying?

00:45:49.000 Oh, there it is.

00:45:50.000 Oh, no, it's mine.

00:45:51.000 So, actually, here, I'll be self-serving.

00:45:54.000 If you go to wesleyhuff.com...

00:45:55.000 That is so...

00:45:56.000 Can we just look at that for a second?

00:45:57.000 That is so cool.

00:45:59.000 And how old is this?

00:46:02.000 Four...

00:46:02.000 I mean, 20th century BC. Wow.

00:46:06.000 Yeah.

00:46:07.000 So, 4,000 plus years ago.

00:46:09.000 Yeah.

00:46:09.000 So, if you go, Jamie, to wesleyhuff.com and then click my infographics tab at the top...

00:46:15.000 So, I started making these things for the graduate students I was teaching.

00:46:19.000 And, yeah, so if you go down, there should be an archaeology section.

00:46:23.000 And in the archaeology section, I have that one on, I'm blanking on what it's called.

00:46:30.000 I make ones for manuscripts, too.

00:46:31.000 What a great website you've got.

00:46:32.000 Oh, thank you.

00:46:33.000 I appreciate that.

00:46:34.000 This is awesome.

00:46:34.000 It's so detailed.

00:46:35.000 Yeah, so there's a linear Elamite one. 0.97

00:46:38.000 What a fucking phenomenal resource this is. 0.98

00:46:40.000 Right there. 0.99

00:46:40.000 Oh, there it is. 0.99

00:46:41.000 Yeah, Marv Dash.

00:46:42.000 That's what it's called.

00:46:42.000 So yeah, you see this.

00:46:43.000 So I have Sumerian, linear Elamite, Akkadian, and Paleo-Hebrew there at the bottom, the comparisons.

00:46:48.000 And these are languages that operated, like, alongside one another, but are almost completely foreign to one another.

00:46:59.000 So there is crossover between Akkadian and Paleo-Hebrew.

00:47:03.000 So that's interesting.

00:47:04.000 Sumerian, when I'm thinking of cuneiform, I'm not thinking of that, right?

00:47:09.000 That looks different than some of the clay scrolls, the imprintations that they make with a clay wheel.

00:47:19.000 Yeah, well, it's all done with the stylus.

00:47:22.000 So it's like a little wedge stylus.

00:47:24.000 So there are different variations of it.

00:47:27.000 Ultimately, it's done with the stylus.

00:47:29.000 The thing that's interesting, like you're probably thinking more of what that later Akkadian looks like, right?

00:47:34.000 Where it's like the wedges?

00:47:35.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:47:36.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:47:36.000 So Akkadian basically borrowed the writing system.

00:47:42.000 And it had development over time, but it was very close.

00:47:45.000 So when they conquered them, did they have their own writing system initially and just incorporated Sumerian writing to theirs?

00:47:52.000 That's a good question.

00:47:52.000 I don't know the answer to that one.

00:47:54.000 God, I'd like to know.

00:47:55.000 I know, right?

00:47:57.000 It's so long ago, but not, you know?

00:47:59.000 Yeah.

00:48:00.000 I mean, it's so long ago in terms of a human life.

00:48:02.000 Yeah.

00:48:03.000 But it's not that long when you think, like, we went from 4,000 years ago to that, to large language models.

00:48:09.000 Yeah, that's pretty crazy.

00:48:10.000 Yeah, quantum computing.

00:48:11.000 Yeah.

00:48:11.000 Well, even if you look at the, I mean, language systems develop.

00:48:14.000 Paleo-Hebrew turns into... 0.68

00:48:19.000 Mm-hmm.

00:48:23.000 there's like a development within the language and then modern Hebrew adopts the Hebrew in the Dead Sea Scrolls but modern Hebrew has it has vowels where that were developed in the Middle Ages mmm to to figure out how to pronounce it because basically ancient Hebrew doesn't have a vowel system in its writing that's overly comprehensive

00:48:49.000 And so in the Middle Ages, when you have these groups of Jews who are copying these Hebrew scriptures, who aren't speaking it as much as they're reading it, you got to figure out how to pronounce it. 0.98

00:49:03.000 Because vowels make a difference.

00:49:04.000 But if you took all the vowels out of English, if you were a natural English reader, you could probably figure out.

00:49:11.000 What was what, if you're looking at the page.

00:49:14.000 And so in the Middle Ages, the Masoretic scribes come up with these vowel pointing systems.

00:49:19.000 And that's what you see when you look at a Hebrew Bible today, is you see these vowels.

00:49:25.000 And sometimes the introduction or removal of the vowel is significant in the changing of the words.

00:49:34.000 It's also interesting.

00:49:35.000 You know, we're kind of seeing language change, written language, while right now in this current era, because we've kind of abandoned cursive.

00:49:47.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:49:48.000 So if people in the future go to read ancient scripts of human beings that lived in the 20th century, they'll be like, what is this shit? 0.99

00:49:58.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:49:58.000 And then, you know, there wasn't a lot of it. 0.99

00:50:00.000 Like, there's no cursive on the internet.

00:50:02.000 I mean, there's cursive on the internet, but I mean, no websites are written in cursive.

00:50:05.000 Yeah, it's all printed.

00:50:06.000 It's all printed.

00:50:06.000 Yeah.

00:50:07.000 And so they've essentially, in school, stopped teaching.

00:50:10.000 Most classes don't teach cursive.

00:50:12.000 Like, we all learned cursive as children.

00:50:15.000 It was the way you could write things quicker.

00:50:17.000 Yeah.

00:50:17.000 And then once printing and typewriters and computers became ubiquitous, like, it's gone.

00:50:22.000 Yeah.

00:50:23.000 And everybody's just texting.

00:50:24.000 Yeah.

00:50:24.000 Well, let's hope people in the future are still able to read the Declaration of Independence.

00:50:29.000 Right.

00:50:29.000 Because that's what it was written in, right?

00:50:31.000 Stuff like that.

00:50:31.000 That's really interesting, right?

00:50:33.000 Because if you were not taught that and then you went to read that and you said, this is English, like, what are you talking about?

00:50:39.000 Like, I recognize a few of these letters, but it's so vastly different than the printed text.

00:50:45.000 Yeah.

00:50:46.000 Language models are wild. 1.00

00:50:48.000 Wild?

00:50:48.000 Yeah.

00:50:49.000 The whole thing is wild that people figured out how to associate sounds with little symbols and then they did completely different shit in Korea, completely different shit in Russia. 0.99

00:50:58.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:50:59.000 It's so fascinating.

00:51:02.000 And then you have to have these experts who can translate these things, and you're dependent upon them forever, which that was what Lutheranism was all about, right?

00:51:11.000 Like Martin Luther wanted to have phonetic translations of the Bible, and there was a lot of resistance to that, because the people that knew how to read Latin were like, hey, hey, slow down.

00:51:19.000 Yeah, partly.

00:51:20.000 I mean, there were proto-reformers before Luther, like Wycliffe.

00:51:24.000 So John Wycliffe and William Tyndale both translated the Bible.

00:51:30.000 Parts of the Bible into English, and they predated.

00:51:32.000 I mean, and they weren't very popular for it either.

00:51:34.000 I mean, Wycliffe was declared a heretic, and then his body was exhumed and burned because of the work that he did.

00:51:43.000 Burned him after he was already dead.

00:51:45.000 Yeah, well, Tyndale's line was that he wanted, I believe it was Tyndale. 0.60

00:51:50.000 It was either Wycliffe or Tyndale.

00:51:51.000 My friends who are specialists in this are going to get mad at me for this.

00:51:56.000 But one of those two guys...

00:51:58.000 Said that they wanted the plowboy to be able to read the Bible and know it as well as the priests.

00:52:03.000 And so that was their motivation, is that their public education for literacy in these areas was largely because they just wanted people to read the Bible.

00:52:14.000 But that was a big motivation behind Luther, was he's like, I'm going to translate this thing to German.

00:52:19.000 Because part of his kicking off of what we call the Protestant Reformation was that he read the Bible in Greek.

00:52:28.000 Because there was a guy named Desiderius Erasmus who was a, they called them humanists, but it means something different than now.

00:52:36.000 Humanists were like scholars who were trying to figure out the entirety of human knowledge up until that point.

00:52:43.000 Wow.

00:52:44.000 Like Renaissance men kind of, right? 0.91

00:52:45.000 So Desiderius Erasmus is like one of the last Renaissance men.

00:52:48.000 But he was compiling, and he produced the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament.

00:52:54.000 And so he comes out with this printed edition of the Greek New Testament, and Luther gets his hands on it.

00:53:00.000 And so he's reading that, and he notices that in Matthew's gospel, the word that's in the Latin is penitentium agate, do penance.

00:53:11.000 In Greek is metanoite, which is repentance.

00:53:14.000 And the church was using this as like, you need to do penance.

00:53:17.000 You need to, you know, do all of this stuff to show that you're sorry.

00:53:22.000 And part of that was, you know, paying the church.

00:53:24.000 And Luther reads this, and he goes, hey, guys, this means something different.

00:53:29.000 This means repentance.

00:53:30.000 It means changing your mind.

00:53:32.000 It doesn't mean, like, to actually do things.

00:53:34.000 And so part of his motivation is, like, the Latin isn't reflecting, at least at the point that Latin had developed in that day.

00:53:45.000 Like, maybe when Jerome translates the Latin Vulgate back in the 4th century.

00:53:51.000 And it's called the Vulgate because Vulgata means, like, regular.

00:53:56.000 Like, you think of vulgar.

00:53:57.000 It's just the regular people language.

00:53:59.000 Part of the reason was that in the fourth century, very few people were reading Greek.

00:54:04.000 They were reading Latin.

00:54:06.000 And so they're like, hey, Jerome, you need to produce a Bible in Latin because nobody can read the Bible anymore.

00:54:11.000 And so he produces the Latin Vulgate.

00:54:13.000 And ironically, by the time you get to Luther, a thousand years later, no one can read Latin.

00:54:19.000 And they're all using the Vulgate.

00:54:21.000 Wow, that is fascinating.

00:54:25.000 Wow.

00:54:26.000 And even Erasmus was, so he dedicates his first few additions to the Pope because he knows that the Pope is going to get wind that he's producing Greek New Testaments and the Church is using the Latin and he's risking his life.

00:54:41.000 So if he dedicates it to the Pope, maybe the Pope will take it easy on him.

00:54:45.000 Did it work?

00:54:46.000 Yeah, it did.

00:54:47.000 Nice.

00:54:48.000 A little flattery.

00:54:48.000 Yeah.

00:54:49.000 See, it goes a long way.

00:54:50.000 Well, that's part of the problem, right, is that you're dealing with these priests.

00:54:53.000 You're dealing with human beings.

00:54:55.000 And when human beings are the sole purveyors of truth, that becomes a problem.

00:55:01.000 It's power.

00:55:01.000 It's too much power.

00:55:03.000 Most people suck at power.

00:55:04.000 It just makes them drunk with it, and they abuse it. 0.99

00:55:09.000 And you see that in many, many religions.

00:55:12.000 You see that in...

00:55:14.000 Cults, you know, for instance, is the best example of it. 0.98

00:55:17.000 Because, you know, like when you know the person who created this thing and you know this person is fucking insane and you have a bunch of people that follow them. 0.95

00:55:26.000 They're just looking out for your best interest, Jeff.

00:55:28.000 Yeah.

00:55:28.000 Right?

00:55:28.000 They just want to make sure you're doing the right thing.

00:55:32.000 Did you see Wild Wild Country?

00:55:33.000 Oh, yes. 0.99

00:55:34.000 It's fucking awesome. 0.98

00:55:35.000 Unfortunately. 0.99

00:55:36.000 It's so good.

00:55:37.000 Oh, man.

00:55:37.000 It's so crazy.

00:55:38.000 I mean, I'm so glad I wasn't there and a part of it.

00:55:43.000 They all look good in the beginning.

00:55:45.000 That's what's really wild.

00:55:47.000 All these cult documentaries, all these exposés, in the beginning, like, these people have it made.

00:55:52.000 They're all eating together, and they have community, and they're praying together, and they seem wonderfully happy.

00:55:58.000 One of the ways my wife and I bond, we have very different tastes in movies, but there's enough crossover that our guilty pleasure is cult documentaries.

00:56:06.000 I love them.

00:56:07.000 They're so interesting.

00:56:09.000 I love them because there's something about people absolutely believing things that's so appealing to me.

00:56:14.000 I don't know why that is.

00:56:15.000 I like watching Islamic scholars speak with full confidence that their version of truth is truth.

00:56:24.000 I'm just interested in that mindset.

00:56:27.000 I think it's like a very deeply cut groove in the human psyche that people can fall into.

00:56:35.000 And when there's a cult, it's like, God, it's so obvious.

00:56:40.000 Like, there's the guy.

00:56:41.000 That's the guy.

00:56:42.000 Here's a good example.

00:56:43.000 There's a documentary called Holy Hell.

00:56:45.000 Oh, yeah, of course.

00:56:46.000 And you know that?

00:56:47.000 Yeah.

00:56:47.000 I bought the building.

00:56:49.000 That holy hell was like the actual theater that this guy had built.

00:56:56.000 It's a beautiful theater that he had his followers built so he can dance in front of them.

00:57:00.000 That was going to be the Comedy Mothership, the first version of it.

00:57:03.000 That's crazy.

00:57:04.000 So I was under contract for that building.

00:57:06.000 It fell apart.

00:57:07.000 Thank baby Jesus. 0.83

00:57:09.000 Thank somebody.

00:57:10.000 Thank Allah.

00:57:11.000 Thank somebody.

00:57:12.000 And then we found this new place on 6th Street.

00:57:16.000 Documentary is so fascinating because you can see this guy who is a gay porn star and a hypnotist take a bunch of really lost people and send them down this crazy road and then eventually it all falls apart. 0.91

00:57:33.000 You know what's interesting about that is I have less of a problem with the objective truth claims and more of a problem with them saying, but don't look into it.

00:57:41.000 Like, don't test it.

00:57:42.000 Like, what I say goes, and you're not allowed to explore it.

00:57:47.000 Like, talking about the Mormon church, they recently did this thing where they're like, you don't need to go on the internet, and you don't need to...

00:57:53.000 Don't watch the Book of Mormon.

00:57:55.000 Yeah, guys, I don't think you realize what you're sounding like when you come across in that way.

00:58:00.000 Mormons are the nicest cult members. 1.00

00:58:02.000 They're the nicest people.

00:58:04.000 They really are so nice.

00:58:05.000 I love them.

00:58:07.000 I mean, Mormons that I've met have been so friendly.

00:58:10.000 They're so family-oriented.

00:58:11.000 It's true.

00:58:12.000 I mean, it's really easy to think, these are great people.

00:58:16.000 I'll join them.

00:58:17.000 Well, you know why they're family-oriented, right?

00:58:19.000 Why?

00:58:19.000 It's because in what Joseph Smith wrote, there's an idea that...

00:58:25.000 Everybody's soul pre-exists.

00:58:27.000 And you were born as a spirit child in a previous life.

00:58:30.000 And the reason you need to have children is you need to bring those people's souls into existence.

00:58:36.000 And so there's like, because you have a heavenly father and a heavenly mother and you're all children of God in the actual like physical sense and that the pursuit is exaltation.

00:58:47.000 Exaltation where you will be a God on your own planet if you've done everything right.

00:58:52.000 You get your own planet, which is pretty dope.

00:58:53.000 You get your own planet.

00:58:54.000 And this is so Joseph Smith in the King's Fall at Funeral Discourse.

00:59:00.000 This is what he wrote.

00:59:01.000 This is where he formulated this idea where God, the Father, has a body as tangible as ours of flesh and blood.

00:59:10.000 And that he lived on another planet.

00:59:13.000 And he was circled around the star called Kolob.

00:59:17.000 And that if you do everything right, you will also be the God on your own planet.

00:59:24.000 And so you got to encourage people to have kids because you're pulling those spirit babies out of the spiritual realm. 0.62

00:59:29.000 But you're right.

00:59:30.000 They are.

00:59:30.000 They're incredibly nice people.

00:59:32.000 The nicest.

00:59:33.000 The nicest.

00:59:33.000 Yeah, it's a really great cult.

00:59:35.000 You know?

00:59:36.000 I mean...

00:59:37.000 Or religion, whatever.

00:59:39.000 I mean, I used to have a joke in my act that a cult is fake and it's made by one guy.

00:59:47.000 That guy invented it.

00:59:49.000 In a religion, that guy's dead.

00:59:52.000 Hmm.

00:59:55.000 There might be something to that.

00:59:56.000 Yeah, and some for sure.

00:59:58.000 But the question to me is always, what were they originally trying to do?

01:00:05.000 Right.

01:00:05.000 What was it based on?

01:00:07.000 In the beginning there was light.

01:00:09.000 What is all of that?

01:00:11.000 What are those stories?

01:00:13.000 And when you take these stories and you are telling them for so long, that's why the book of Isaiah, what you were telling me, is so fascinating.

01:00:20.000 That a thousand years later, you have the exact translation of this.

01:00:25.000 At a time where most people were illiterate.

01:00:28.000 Oh yeah, definitely.

01:00:29.000 I mean, it's only really been recently that we have the levels of literacy that we have today.

01:00:35.000 I mean, this is part of the reason why you have these long spans of time between, like, when people live and then the ancient biographies that start to pop up about them.

01:00:42.000 It's because most people are just illiterate.

01:00:45.000 But imagine how crazy that is, that something in a time where there's no printed press and something that had been passed on for so long as an oral tradition is exact word for word.

01:00:58.000 It's pretty wild.

01:00:59.000 You're finding a cave in Qumran.

01:01:02.000 And then the same thing you get in the English translation of the Bible today.

01:01:06.000 That's nuts.

01:01:07.000 I mean, up until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament manuscripts predated the Old Testament manuscripts by a long shot.

01:01:14.000 Really?

01:01:15.000 Yeah.

01:01:16.000 Because the Christians were... 1.00

01:01:19.000 The Christians were less discerning in their proliferation of written documents. 0.99

01:01:24.000 So the Jews had this whole system where you had to be a trained scribe, and they were very, very careful with the procedures that you went through.

01:01:31.000 Whereas the Christians were like, we want to get this thing out as fast as we can, as often as we can. 1.00

01:01:38.000 Which had a lot of benefits in that their goal was proselytization.

01:01:46.000 And evangelism, and that worked.

01:01:48.000 But the downside of it was that you get really messy copies, where you have copies all over the place, but human error gets involved with spelling differences and additions, deletions, mostly for completely understandable reasons.

01:02:04.000 But we actually have manuscripts where we know the person copied it, and they didn't know how to read it, because they make mistakes that you wouldn't make if you...

01:02:12.000 We knew how to copy.

01:02:13.000 There's this really great example of a guy who copies, I believe it's the genealogy of Matthew.

01:02:18.000 And he's looking at a manuscript that has two columns.

01:02:25.000 And he's copying it from left to right, and he's copying it like this, whereas it's like the column you go down and then the next column.

01:02:33.000 So in the genealogy of Jesus, he's got all the wrong people begetting all the wrong people.

01:02:37.000 And you're like, you wouldn't do this if you knew how to read, because God is in the middle of the genealogy.

01:02:43.000 So like that kind of thing.

01:02:45.000 That is a real problem.

01:02:46.000 That is a real problem.

01:02:47.000 But ironically...

01:02:49.000 With the Christian manuscripts, because we have so many, it's actually because of the mistakes that we're able to trace the text back with a high degree of confidence.

01:02:58.000 Because if you have copies that are floating around North Africa and places like Egypt, and then you have copies in Syria, and you have copies out into Asia and into Europe and the British Isles, when mistakes pop up, they're geographically located.

01:03:13.000 And because you have so many, you can compare and contrast them and figure out, okay, well, this obviously happened here at this time, and you can pinpoint those things.

01:03:23.000 So this is a field called textual criticism.

01:03:26.000 And we do this with all ancient documents.

01:03:29.000 Like, the Bible is a more kind of fleshed-out field of textual criticism because we have so many manuscripts.

01:03:42.000 You know, Marcus Aurelius.

01:03:44.000 We even do it with Shakespeare, with the different copies.

01:03:46.000 Because if you only have one copy, you have to trust that the person who copied that got it right.

01:03:51.000 Right.

01:03:52.000 Yeah.

01:03:52.000 Which is the issue that we have for Beowulf.

01:03:56.000 We only have one copy of Beowulf.

01:03:59.000 And so, we don't know what it looked like prior to that.

01:04:02.000 So we just kind of accept that, okay, this is Beowulf.

01:04:06.000 Like, there's no way to compare and contrast the tradition of the manuscripts of Beowulf.

01:04:12.000 God, when you're saying this about taking copied versions of it and comparing errors and going back, you're talking about so much time.

01:04:21.000 Yeah.

01:04:22.000 So much research.

01:04:24.000 It's legwork.

01:04:25.000 So much legwork.

01:04:27.000 Yeah.

01:04:28.000 And fortunately, in the modern era, we get computers involved.

01:04:32.000 And that...

01:04:33.000 Cuts out a lot of the, like, just manpower.

01:04:36.000 I would like to see AI get to the bottom of all this.

01:04:38.000 Well, there's an interesting, so in Germany, at the Center for the Study of New Testament Research in Münster, there actually, it's called CBGM, the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method.

01:04:51.000 And it's tracing, not manuscripts, but readings within manuscripts, and finding the relationships between the different ones by, like, computer models.

01:05:01.000 And so they are actually getting...

01:05:02.000 This is actually the way that like modern era textual criticism is being done is with these language models that operate on tracing readings and how certain readings are related to one another, which has allowed us to do things like look at 4th century manuscripts and actually see that their readings come hundreds of years earlier in other manuscripts that we have in collections.

01:05:29.000 So one of the...

01:05:31.000 The clearest examples of this is there's a manuscript in the 4th century called Codex Vaticanus, because it happens to be in the Vatican right now.

01:05:37.000 And there is a manuscript from the 2nd century which has the exact same scribal conventions that Codex Vaticanus does in particular readings.

01:05:48.000 And so we know for a fact that the scribes who created Vaticanus did not have, I think it's P75, which is a papyrus 75, but they had some sort of collection of manuscripts that were similar.

01:06:01.000 And so we can have confidence that the readings, although they're fourth century in particular areas of Codex Vaticanus, are actually second century in their origination.

01:06:11.000 And a large part of this is because of these like models that the computers got involved in.

01:06:15.000 Wow, that is so fascinating.

01:06:18.000 Now, when they're going over things like ancient Sumerian and they're reading things like the Epic of Gilgamesh, like if we can't study...

01:06:27.000 We don't know how to make those words.

01:06:32.000 We don't know what they sounded like.

01:06:34.000 How are they translating it into an English version?

01:06:41.000 One of the things that's been compared quite a bit is the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah and the Ark.

01:06:47.000 The Great Flood.

01:06:49.000 There seems to be some parallels.

01:06:51.000 How close is it?

01:06:54.000 In some ways, it's very close, and in other ways, it's not.

01:06:57.000 So that's the story of Upnupishtim, which is kind of a side story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh realizes his mortality, and he's trying to find eternal life.

01:07:07.000 And there's this guy, Upnupishtim, who he runs into, who tells him this story of the gods gifted him with eternal life because he saved all the animals on a boat.

01:07:17.000 And so there are actually parallels between that and, say, the Genesis 6 Noah Ark story.

01:07:23.000 In, like, making a big boat, putting all the animals on it, and then they get off and they make a sacrifice to, in his case, the gods and the Bible God.

01:07:31.000 And I think what you're looking at there is probably a cultural remembrance of something that did take place.

01:07:37.000 And so you have these adjacent cultures who, they're existing within this framework of the ancient Near East, and you're seeing these kind of parallel echoes of things that actually did happen.

01:07:47.000 So there are definite parallels, but I think...

01:07:51.000 Sometimes people look at those and they overplay that.

01:07:54.000 So one of the examples I often give is Advil and arsenic both come in pill form and have an A on the bottle.

01:08:00.000 But it's not the similarities that matter in that case, it's the differences.

01:08:05.000 And so if you look at the differences, there are significant differences in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Upanupishtim story and the Genesis 6 story.

01:08:15.000 If for no other reason than...

01:08:17.000 The Noah Ark story is a very small part of the Book of Genesis.

01:08:21.000 And the story of Up-Napishnum in the Epic of Gilgamesh is a little bit more stretched out.

01:08:28.000 It has more to do with the theme of what Gilgamesh is doing in his epic.

01:08:33.000 But there are obviously parallels between that because these are both ancient Near Eastern stories and they're products of their day.

01:08:40.000 In the same way that I think you see parallels between some of the New Testament gospels and other ancient Greco-Roman biography in that these are products of ancient history.

01:08:55.000 And so they're going to look like other ancient historical writings that kind of parallel around that.

01:09:01.000 Does that make sense?

01:09:02.000 No, it does make sense.

01:09:04.000 It's just when you're talking about the oldest of old stories, it's always so interesting to wonder, like, when what was...

01:09:16.000 When they're taking these oral traditions, like Socrates is famous for saying that he didn't believe that you should write things.

01:09:23.000 Yeah.

01:09:24.000 Make people lazy.

01:09:25.000 Right.

01:09:25.000 You need to learn how to remember things.

01:09:27.000 You need to exercise your memory.

01:09:29.000 Which is so fascinating when you think that there must have been people that were in charge of memorizing these oral traditions.

01:09:37.000 Yeah.

01:09:38.000 And when you're talking about, particularly if you're talking about the Old Testament, The series of writings, like, these are long stories that someone had to remember and pass on to generations.

01:09:51.000 So the thing with me was always like, well, what was the origin of all this?

01:09:56.000 Like, what was the first version of it?

01:09:58.000 And where the hell did it come from?

01:09:59.000 And what was it?

01:10:00.000 What was going on?

01:10:01.000 Where these people felt like in this time of incredibly difficult survival, right?

01:10:07.000 You're essentially...

01:10:09.000 You're hunter-gatherers, right?

01:10:11.000 We're talking about thousands of years ago.

01:10:14.000 And these people took great time and made great effort to preserve these stories.

01:10:21.000 And then there's always human error, right?

01:10:24.000 There's human error, as you were saying, with transcription and trying to decipher things and writing things down where you don't really speak the language.

01:10:31.000 You've got to wonder, like, how much did we lose?

01:10:35.000 In this oral tradition, like what was the original story and what were they trying to convey?

01:10:41.000 Yeah.

01:10:41.000 And I think that there's an aspect of like a message that's trying to be communicated.

01:10:46.000 I mean, we are modern people of the Enlightenment.

01:10:51.000 So we almost have a perspective where we want something to be very like exhaustive that.

01:11:00.000 Ancient writers didn't have those same sort of conventions.

01:11:04.000 So they're going to capitalize on certain ideas and concepts for the purpose of when someone tells you a story, you don't memorize everything.

01:11:14.000 You go to university, you write notes, right?

01:11:17.000 The people who are writing everything the professor is saying word for word, probably not the people who are going to remember what the professor says as well as the people who write down the main things.

01:11:27.000 And when you write down the main things, the main points, without all of the other stuff that kind of is just icing, then you get the main idea more.

01:11:38.000 Ancient writers talk about this.

01:11:40.000 So there's a guy named Quintilian who exists in the first century BC. And there's this series of writings that we call Progymnasmata, which are basically like, how do you do good writing?

01:11:57.000 He's training people, maybe even individuals like Plutarch, who is one of the best known ancient biographers, and saying, like, it's just as important what you don't say as to what you do say.

01:12:10.000 Because you don't want to, A, writing in the ancient world is expensive, really expensive, and B, you want to make sure that your audience is actually getting...

01:12:23.000 The message that you want to convey.

01:12:25.000 And so this is something that when you read like German scholars, biblical scholars of the 19th and 20th century, or even prior to that, like 18th, 19th century, they look at the Gospels and they're like, this isn't biography.

01:12:44.000 It's not capitalizing on Jesus' childhood.

01:12:47.000 And we all know that good biographies tell about your childhood and psychologize and these sorts of things.

01:12:53.000 Whereas if you look at some of these ancient writers who are talking about how you should write biography, they say, if there's nothing in their childhood that's that significant, don't write it.

01:13:04.000 It's going to distract from...

01:13:06.000 Like if there is something, say like Jesus' birth, or Luke tells a story when he's...

01:13:11.000 12 of Jesus when he goes with Mary and Joseph and, you know, Mary and Joseph lose the son of God and they start going home without him and they're like, where's Jesus?

01:13:20.000 And they got to go back to Jerusalem. 0.72

01:13:21.000 That's a significant story.

01:13:23.000 And so it appears that Luke includes it because there's a significant reason to include that.

01:13:28.000 But they wouldn't have had any problem with leaving out large...

01:13:33.000 I think what's also what's important is we have to try, as difficult as it might be, to put our minds in the context of people who lived in a time where most people were illiterate.

01:13:53.000 And you're telling these parables, you're telling these stories as an oral tradition.

01:14:00.000 And that they have a different mindset in terms of the distribution of information.

01:14:05.000 Totally.

01:14:05.000 And what the significance of these things are.

01:14:07.000 Yeah.

01:14:08.000 Yeah.

01:14:09.000 These are documents, well, in terms of the Bible, like as someone who identifies as a Christian, I would say that these are, the Bible is written for you, but it wasn't written to you.

01:14:20.000 It had a completely different original audience.

01:14:22.000 But you should do your best at figuring out who it was written to and how that made a difference to them.

01:14:28.000 Because then the application is going to come out even clearer for you.

01:14:33.000 And that should be ultimately, you know, the goal of everyone who's looking at ancient documents.

01:14:38.000 Who was the original audience?

01:14:39.000 How would they have understood it?

01:14:41.000 Because you can read all sorts of things because of your modern conventions into what someone is talking about in the ancient world and completely bypass what they're actually trying to convey in their intention.

01:14:55.000 Yeah, and again, it's almost impossible to put your mind completely into the context of these people that were living then.

01:15:02.000 It's almost impossible to imagine the way they viewed the world and the way they communicated.

01:15:09.000 And when you're dealing with really old stuff like the Sumerian text, and then people have translations of it, which can be fantastical, like the Zacharias Hitchin stuff.

01:15:20.000 It's like you have to be a scholar in ancient Sumerian and understand the origins of language.

01:15:29.000 And then still, there's massive debate.

01:15:33.000 There's a whole website called SitchinIsWrong.com.

01:15:36.000 Yeah.

01:15:36.000 But he's the most fun.

01:15:38.000 He's fun.

01:15:39.000 I'm not convinced he could read Sumerian either.

01:15:41.000 Really?

01:15:42.000 Yeah. 0.95

01:15:42.000 I think he was bullshitting. 0.95

01:15:43.000 I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt.

01:15:46.000 He takes so many liberties with the stuff he's commenting on that I have a hard time.

01:15:53.000 Getting my head around.

01:15:55.000 So if he couldn't read it, where would he be getting his translations?

01:16:00.000 From actual translations.

01:16:01.000 Okay, so he would take these translations and then make his own assumptions and his own interpretation?

01:16:09.000 Is that what it is?

01:16:10.000 Yeah, I think to a certain degree.

01:16:12.000 I mean, even something like Nibiru is not a Sumerian word.

01:16:15.000 It's an Akkadian word.

01:16:16.000 But he makes a big deal about it being related to Sumerian.

01:16:20.000 It is a word that appears within Akkadian.

01:16:24.000 And Akkadian is what time period?

01:16:26.000 Akkadian is just after. 1.00

01:16:27.000 So it exists kind of in a crossover where Sumerian predates Akkadian, but Akkadian develops alongside.

01:16:33.000 And then, you know, as cultures like the Assyrians come into power and kind of subvert the Sumerians. 1.00

01:16:41.000 So oldest Sumerian writing is what?

01:16:45.000 What's the oldest timeline?

01:16:48.000 5,000?

01:16:49.000 6,000?

01:16:50.000 Yeah, around that.

01:16:50.000 I think like 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.

01:16:53.000 Okay.

01:16:54.000 And then Akkadian is when?

01:16:56.000 There's some overlap, but it develops into a language just after the rise.

01:17:03.000 And Akkadian develops into...

01:17:04.000 It has stages.

01:17:07.000 And then you have...

01:17:11.000 Babylonian, Proto-Babylonian, Persian, Old Persian, Elamite.

01:17:16.000 There's no writing at all at Gobekli Tepe, correct?

01:17:19.000 It's all just iconography.

01:17:22.000 Yeah, or at least that we figured out that looks like writing.

01:17:26.000 I'm really hoping to go to Gobekli Tepe.

01:17:30.000 What's your take on this whole reluctance to further excavate?

01:17:34.000 And how they have such a small amount of the site.

01:17:38.000 It's only 5% that's been uncovered.

01:17:40.000 But through LIDAR, they're aware there's a bunch more.

01:17:44.000 Yeah.

01:17:45.000 I mean, I'm not an archaeologist.

01:17:47.000 I have friends who are archaeologists.

01:17:49.000 And I think it's...

01:17:51.000 Archaeology is tricky because so much of archaeology is dependent on governments and institutions and funding.

01:17:58.000 Getting mad at archaeologists for not excavating is kind of like getting mad at construction workers for not fixing your potholes.

01:18:04.000 Where it's like, yeah, they're kind of doing the last stage.

01:18:09.000 So, yeah, I mean, I think there's certainly incentive by the Turkish government to want to capitalize on that being a tourist destination.

01:18:20.000 You really need to safeguard archaeological excavations because otherwise it's being compromised and like pillaging and stuff like that.

01:18:34.000 It happens.

01:18:34.000 I mean, when I was in Egypt two summers ago and you go to the Valley of the Kings, they've got security cameras up everywhere because...

01:18:42.000 There are tombs there that we still haven't discovered.

01:18:45.000 And so they're like, we don't want people digging around in here looking for...

01:18:49.000 Well, they've lost so much over their history.

01:18:51.000 Oh, we've only discovered 1% of ancient Egypt.

01:18:54.000 That's so nuts.

01:18:55.000 1%.

01:18:56.000 Isn't that crazy?

01:18:58.000 That is the nuttiest part of all of history is Egypt to me. 1.00

01:19:01.000 I still have not been.

01:19:03.000 You gotta go.

01:19:04.000 I know.

01:19:04.000 You gotta go.

01:19:05.000 I almost went in December.

01:19:06.000 I just couldn't find the time.

01:19:07.000 I'm just too damn busy.

01:19:08.000 I will, though.

01:19:10.000 I definitely will.

01:19:11.000 But it is, to me, the nuttiest time in history because good luck explaining the Great Pyramid.

01:19:17.000 Good luck.

01:19:17.000 And it's such a big time frame.

01:19:20.000 Like, there's a thousand years between the pyramids being built and Tutankhamen and the Valley of the Kings.

01:19:26.000 A thousand years.

01:19:27.000 Yeah.

01:19:28.000 Nuts.

01:19:29.000 It's so crazy.

01:19:30.000 Egypt is one of the wildest places you'll ever go. 1.00

01:19:32.000 Well, it just doesn't make sense.

01:19:34.000 It's like, how?

01:19:35.000 What were you guys using?

01:19:37.000 What were you doing?

01:19:38.000 How'd you do it?

01:19:38.000 How'd you measure it?

01:19:39.000 How'd you figure it out?

01:19:40.000 Yeah.

01:19:40.000 You've been to Greece, right?

01:19:41.000 Yes.

01:19:41.000 Have you been to Jordan?

01:19:42.000 No.

01:19:43.000 Oh, you got to go see Petra.

01:19:44.000 Yeah.

01:19:44.000 Petra's phenomenal.

01:19:46.000 Jordan was, I mean, Greece rather was fantastic.

01:19:49.000 They're all crazy.

01:19:50.000 God, it's just like when you're just there in the presence of these things and just trying to put your brain back thousands of years and imagine what society was like back then.

01:20:01.000 It's crazy.

01:20:02.000 It's crazy.

01:20:04.000 Egypt was crazy because Egypt is like Greece in that you have, like, you can go to the Pantheon and you see that kind of stuff, right?

01:20:12.000 But you go to Egypt and there's 4,000-year-old paint on the walls.

01:20:19.000 And you're like, what?

01:20:21.000 I can't get paint to stay on my wall for 10 years.

01:20:24.000 And it's almost exclusively because of the climate.

01:20:27.000 And it got buried in sand.

01:20:28.000 But it's so wild.

01:20:30.000 So wild.

01:20:33.000 Egypt has been discovered.

01:20:35.000 What do you really mean by that?

01:20:37.000 Of the percentage of what we know that happened in Egyptian history, 1% has been excavated in terms of what we can actually pull out of the ground and look at artifacts.

01:20:48.000 So there's whole eras of pharaohs that we don't know where they're buried.

01:20:53.000 Even when Tutankhamun was discovered, he was kind of a footnote in the pharaohs that we knew about at that time.

01:21:01.000 And we didn't know he...

01:21:02.000 He was, you know, as extravagant, as rich, as, you know, until we discovered his actual tomb.

01:21:09.000 A lot of people at that time didn't even think it was, he was worth looking into because we have these lists of pharaohs and the thing with the pharaohs is that they're always trying to, the next pharaoh is always trying to prove that he's the better one.

01:21:23.000 And this is why you go to Egypt and you find statues of Ramses everywhere.

01:21:28.000 And part of it was because Ramses, I think it was Ramses II, Was he commissioned so many statues of himself because he's like, oh, I'm the best.

01:21:37.000 I'm the greatest.

01:21:37.000 And what they actually, they couldn't keep up with the commissioning and they started actually rubbing off the names of previous pharaohs on statues and just putting Ramses on it.

01:21:46.000 Really?

01:21:47.000 Because he was just, so you go like from the top of Egypt to the bottom of Egypt and you're going to find statues of Ramses.

01:21:53.000 He wanted to leave his mark.

01:21:54.000 He wanted to leave, and he did, right?

01:21:55.000 Like it worked.

01:21:56.000 We're talking about it now in 2024. I know.

01:21:59.000 Yeah, that is nuts.

01:22:00.000 So when you go there and you're in the presence of these things and you try to put yourself back into that time period, have you ever tried to think, what was the motivation to make something as great as the Pyramid of Giza, the Great Pyramid?

01:22:18.000 People definitely want to make their mark, right?

01:22:20.000 Right, but that's a mark that just doesn't even make sense.

01:22:24.000 There's something to that.

01:22:25.000 I mean, if you think you're a god and you have this whole kind of worldview perspective and theology that you need to make something and bear yourself with all this crap because that's going to make a difference in your afterlife, then you're going to go big rather than going home, right?

01:22:48.000 The perceptions of people in the ancient world are just so different.

01:22:53.000 We got it so good right now.

01:22:55.000 Oh yeah.

01:22:55.000 Like longevity, health, food is just on a completely different scale.

01:23:03.000 And so the conventions of needing to make sure that, especially if you're like the richest guy around, that you tick off all the boxes.

01:23:15.000 Because you know you're going to die, and you're probably going to die sooner than you want to, sooner rather than later.

01:23:22.000 And you have this whole perception of, well, you know, if I bury myself with all this stuff and maybe even some of the people, we're just going to kill them and include them too, because they're going to help me out. 0.58

01:23:35.000 That's going to help me out in the afterlife. 0.97

01:23:36.000 You need slaves in the afterlife if you're a pharaoh. 0.84

01:23:37.000 Yeah, of course you do.

01:23:38.000 You can't just go by yourself.

01:23:40.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:23:40.000 That's ridiculous. 0.99

01:23:41.000 Yeah. 0.89

01:23:42.000 So Khufu's Pyramid.

01:23:45.000 What's the timeline that he was even in power?

01:23:48.000 I don't know.

01:23:49.000 I'm not an Egyptologist or an archaeologist necessarily, but he was, I think that was, what, like 4,000 years ago?

01:23:58.000 We only really have a tiny little statue of him.

01:24:00.000 We don't actually have that much about him.

01:24:03.000 I guess he was busy making a pyramid.

01:24:05.000 So they say, right?

01:24:07.000 So they say.

01:24:08.000 Billy thinks different.

01:24:09.000 Well, a lot of people think different.

01:24:11.000 That's what's interesting about it.

01:24:14.000 The archaeological argument that Dr. Robert Schock makes about the water erosion in the Temple of the Sphinx.

01:24:23.000 That's a fascinating argument because it does appear like that's water erosion.

01:24:27.000 And that would put the timeline way, way back.

01:24:30.000 Yeah, I think even just looking at the Sphinx, you can tell that no matter what your perspective is, you should entertain the idea at minimum that the head was built later.

01:24:39.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:24:40.000 Because it doesn't fit the body.

01:24:42.000 It has much less erosion.

01:24:44.000 But you could also attribute that to the different densities of the stone.

01:24:48.000 Like, that's one of the things about these layers of limestone.

01:24:51.000 It's like some of them are much more porous and some they erode easier.

01:24:54.000 Yeah.

01:24:55.000 You do see that.

01:24:56.000 Yeah.

01:24:56.000 You know, and I think they're doing a terrible disservice by covering the Sphinx with, like, new stones.

01:25:02.000 And, you know, they redid the paws and they're doing all that.

01:25:05.000 Like, my God.

01:25:07.000 People, like, leave it alone.

01:25:09.000 Like, leave it the way it is.

01:25:10.000 Yeah, it's this tricky balance between...

01:25:12.000 Restoration and recreation.

01:25:14.000 Yeah.

01:25:15.000 Because they're in a recreation stage.

01:25:17.000 Yeah.

01:25:17.000 And it was obviously, they're doing it with smaller stones, and it, like, looks different.

01:25:22.000 It's not the same thing.

01:25:24.000 It's not what it initially was.

01:25:25.000 It was carved from one piece of stone.

01:25:27.000 Have you seen some of the restoration stuff that Saddam Hussein did? 0.99

01:25:30.000 No.

01:25:30.000 In Iraq?

01:25:31.000 No.

01:25:31.000 Jamie, you gotta pull up the ziggurat at Ur.

01:25:33.000 Oh, no.

01:25:35.000 So... 0.56

01:25:35.000 Saddam Hussein was a bit of a nut job, but he believed, as far as I understand it, that he was the recreation of Nebuchadnezzar. 0.56

01:25:42.000 So he did all of this restorative work in Iraq on things like the walls of Babylon.

01:25:51.000 And in Ur, he rebuilt the ziggurat.

01:25:54.000 So if you look at that picture over there, this is 1932 and 2022. That's what he did.

01:25:59.000 Is he basically tried to rebuild this entire thing.

01:26:03.000 Wow.

01:26:04.000 And it's amazing.

01:26:05.000 I am trying hard to get to Iraq.

01:26:08.000 Because I want to see this thing.

01:26:10.000 Don't die.

01:26:13.000 Don't go over there.

01:26:14.000 So that's actually...

01:26:15.000 So, I'm sorry, but this is the modern version with the small bricks.

01:26:20.000 The original version, was it all carved from one piece?

01:26:24.000 No, it would have been clay bricks.

01:26:25.000 So, these were clay bricks.

01:26:27.000 So, what do we...

01:26:28.000 Jamie, can you go back to the 1930 image, please, so we can see what it looked like?

01:26:33.000 God, I would rather just have that.

01:26:35.000 Hmm.

01:26:36.000 You know?

01:26:36.000 I mean, I want to see what it looked like.

01:26:39.000 And what it looks like all these years later.

01:26:41.000 I don't want to see a recreation.

01:26:43.000 Which is very similar to what they've done to the Sphinx.

01:26:46.000 Yeah, the Sphinx.

01:26:47.000 Even when I was in Egypt, they were doing some work in like...

01:26:51.000 Jamie, can you go to the...

01:26:55.000 Rehabilitation of the Sphinx or whatever they would call it.

01:26:57.000 Yeah, they just clicked on like the ruins of it.

01:26:59.000 Yeah.

01:27:00.000 Back to the 30s or 40s or something.

01:27:02.000 Well, the restoration part is the interesting part.

01:27:05.000 Like you could see the restoration.

01:27:06.000 If you go to just Google restoration of the Sphinx, pause.

01:27:10.000 Well, they're talking about putting encasing stones on the pyramid.

01:27:14.000 Yeah, I've heard that too.

01:27:15.000 God, don't do that.

01:27:16.000 I don't think they should do that either.

01:27:17.000 No, you shouldn't do anything.

01:27:19.000 I mean, obviously they took the original casing stones off, but that's also history.

01:27:24.000 So now you can see the new pause.

01:27:28.000 Well, that seems like the difference between buried and unburied.

01:27:32.000 So even when Napoleon came upon it, like right there, isn't that restored?

01:27:37.000 Yeah, because there was much more erosion.

01:27:40.000 Napoleon came upon it, it was buried, right?

01:27:42.000 I think so.

01:27:43.000 I think that was the case.

01:27:44.000 Over time, because you're dealing with these crazy sandstorms, over time everything gets kind of buried.

01:27:50.000 Oh, so much of it is...

01:27:51.000 Under sand for so long.

01:27:53.000 Like the temple of, the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut was mostly under sand for a long, long time.

01:28:00.000 Wow.

01:28:01.000 Before they like uncovered it.

01:28:03.000 And fortunately, like the aridness of Egypt preserves things like crazy. 0.93

01:28:10.000 Yeah, see that's what the paws look like.

01:28:12.000 Right.

01:28:12.000 That's a disaster.

01:28:13.000 Yeah. 0.69

01:28:13.000 That's so gross. 0.69

01:28:14.000 Yeah.

01:28:19.000 If you do take that timeline, the Robert Shock timeline, and you say, okay, so you're talking about thousands of years of rainfall, you have to go back to when there was rainfall in the Nile Valley, so now you're back like 9,000 years.

01:28:32.000 One of the more interesting things about hieroglyphs and the interpretations of it is that the ancient hieroglyphs, well, the ancient versions of pharaohs, rather, like when they go back...

01:28:43.000 You know, past the established dates of 2500 BC and before that, you get to like 30,000 years ago.

01:28:50.000 And then they say that these are myth.

01:28:52.000 These are not, this is not representative of an actual history.

01:28:56.000 This is some sort of a mythical history.

01:28:58.000 Yeah, numbers are tricky in ancient languages because...

01:29:04.000 It's not entirely clear whether numbers are meant to be representational.

01:29:07.000 Is that like why they said that Noah lived 600 years old?

01:29:11.000 Yeah, that's part of it.

01:29:13.000 I mean, you have that and you have the Sumerian king lists, which have...

01:29:16.000 People living hundreds and thousands of years, too.

01:29:19.000 And, I mean, there are some interesting academic articles on, like, the probability of the numbers that come up in those.

01:29:28.000 Because we have a base 10 counting system because we count our fingers.

01:29:33.000 Ancient Near Eastern cultures like the Babylonians, the Akkadians, the Assyrians, they had a base 12 counting system because they would count each hinge.

01:29:41.000 Or what do you call these?

01:29:42.000 Like spaces?

01:29:43.000 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. There's different joints of the finger.

01:29:47.000 Yeah, the joints.

01:29:48.000 That's the word I was looking for.

01:29:49.000 And so that's why we have 360 degrees in a circle, 365 days in a year.

01:29:54.000 Like this comes from the Mesopotamian counting conventions.

01:29:59.000 And you look at some of these lists and they're operational and all divisible by like 12 and 60. And you're like, what's going on here?

01:30:09.000 So not all of them, but enough of them where it's statistically impossible.

01:30:13.000 And I don't totally know what to make of those things because you do have the genealogies, I believe it's Genesis chapter 4 and Genesis chapter 11, where they're all divisible by these types of numbers that were very common in the ancient Near East.

01:30:28.000 They're not random.

01:30:30.000 Whereas if we look at the genealogies later in like Chronicles and Kings of the ages of the Israelite kings, they're random.

01:30:38.000 And so it's just like, what do we do with that?

01:30:42.000 Because numbers are also far more representational, which is why we see numbers like 12 and 40 and 7 come up in the Bible, but also other ancient Near Eastern literature.

01:30:54.000 Like there are certain numbers in Egyptian society that also were seen as like perfect numbers or like numbers that you wanted to incorporate.

01:31:08.000 What's the earliest interpretation of calendars?

01:31:13.000 Like, what is the earliest where they did decide what a year was?

01:31:19.000 I have no idea.

01:31:20.000 Because you gotta imagine, you know, the average lifespan wasn't so good back then.

01:31:25.000 A lot of people got infected, died of war, famine, all these things.

01:31:30.000 It would take...

01:31:31.000 Quite a long time for people to figure out what a year was.

01:31:35.000 Right.

01:31:36.000 We're going thousands and thousands of years ago.

01:31:39.000 We have to establish, like, okay, a day is, let's put this stick in the ground.

01:31:44.000 When the shadow is here, this is where we start.

01:31:46.000 Yeah.

01:31:47.000 When the shadow goes all the way around like that, okay, maybe we can, like, mark these off, okay, now we've got a sundial.

01:31:53.000 And there are different timekeeping conventions, depending on society.

01:31:56.000 Like, ancient Jews had a different timekeeping convention than ancient Romans.

01:32:01.000 So that's why you see, like, in Genesis chapter 1, it talks about there being evening and there being morning.

01:32:05.000 It's because, well, Jews today, right? 1.00

01:32:07.000 You start the Sabbath on sundown the day before, right?

01:32:11.000 So that's why.

01:32:12.000 It's because there's different cycles.

01:32:16.000 And so we go on a 24-hour time system.

01:32:20.000 But ancient Jews had a different convention of that.

01:32:22.000 Ancient Romans had a different convention of that.

01:32:24.000 Ancient Mesopotamian cultures had...

01:32:26.000 Their own kind of conventions about these things.

01:32:29.000 And calendars were all over the place.

01:32:32.000 You know, when you get to the Julian calendar and they're like, we gotta standardize this thing because everybody's operating on a different, you know, the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar.

01:32:43.000 Ancient timekeeping is very inexact and very messy.

01:32:48.000 And so you kind of got to take certain things with a grain of salt in terms of that.

01:32:52.000 Yeah, ancient calendars.

01:32:54.000 I don't even know.

01:32:54.000 I know that actually, talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the group in Qumran, they were a sectarian group of Jews who believed that the Jews in Jerusalem had basically capitulated and were not holy enough.

01:33:10.000 And part of their reasoning is that they believe they have a perfect calendar.

01:33:14.000 And so they use a different calendar that doesn't have to do things like incorporate an extra month every certain number of years because their thing is not perfect.

01:33:25.000 And part of their reasoning as to why they're like the chosen is that they have a timekeeping system that they say is perfect.

01:33:35.000 Many cultures used a 13-month calendar, right?

01:33:39.000 Like what was the logic behind that?

01:33:41.000 Does that work?

01:33:42.000 I don't know. 0.95

01:33:43.000 The idea was 13 months, 28 days each month, and you wouldn't have to have leap years and all that shit. 0.74

01:33:48.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.82

01:33:50.000 Okay, there it is.

01:33:52.000 World oldest calendar.

01:33:53.000 12,000 years old.

01:33:54.000 Yeah, that's wild.

01:33:55.000 So it is on Gobekli Tepe.

01:33:58.000 Oh, the ancient carvings of the sun, moon, and various constellations sits on a pillar.

01:34:02.000 Gobekli Tepe.

01:34:03.000 12,000 years old.

01:34:04.000 Researchers believe ancient people use a so-called lunisolar calendar to mark the changing of the seasons.

01:34:10.000 Right.

01:34:11.000 Interesting.

01:34:11.000 So it was at least representative of the fact that we know when the days start getting shorter, it starts getting colder, and then it warms up again, the days start getting longer.

01:34:24.000 This is why solstices are so key in most of human history.

01:34:28.000 Right.

01:34:28.000 It's because you've got to figure out what's a marker point.

01:34:32.000 Right.

01:34:33.000 Which is one of the things that's so fascinating about some of the constructions of the pyramid, where on the summer solstice, these pillars line up so perfectly that the light shines straight down these hallways and illuminates everything.

01:34:46.000 Right.

01:34:46.000 How did you guys nail that?

01:34:48.000 Yeah, I mean, just because they're ancient doesn't mean they're stupid. 0.99

01:34:50.000 Well, they're just brilliant. 0.97

01:34:52.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:34:52.000 They weren't just stupid. 1.00

01:34:54.000 They were fucking brilliant. 1.00

01:34:55.000 That's what's, I mean, weren't just ancient. 0.96

01:34:58.000 It's just so weird that people were so vastly more intelligent, at least in terms of their ability to build things, than anyone else anywhere around there.

01:35:10.000 That's what's so weird about Egypt to me.

01:35:12.000 It's like there's amazing pieces of ...

01:35:15.000 Even ancient Greece is incredible, but I can kind of believe you did it.

01:35:20.000 When you deal with 2,300,000 stones in the Great Pyramid, and some of them ...

01:35:25.000 50 tons, 60 tons.

01:35:27.000 That's pretty crazy.

01:35:28.000 From 500 miles away.

01:35:29.000 Like, what did you do?

01:35:30.000 How the hell did you do it?

01:35:32.000 I mean, there have been a lot of things that have been lost.

01:35:34.000 We still, as far as I'm aware, don't know how the Romans made their concrete.

01:35:38.000 That Roman concrete is like this thing that survives.

01:35:42.000 They were able to make domes out of it.

01:35:44.000 Well, you know about terra preta in the Amazon.

01:35:47.000 Do you know about that?

01:35:48.000 No.

01:35:49.000 Terra Preta is their particular rich soil that is man-made soil.

01:35:55.000 Oh, yes, I did know.

01:35:56.000 I do know about that.

01:35:57.000 It's a combination of charcoal and bacteria.

01:36:00.000 Yeah.

01:36:00.000 It's incredible.

01:36:01.000 Yeah.

01:36:01.000 And it's unbelievably fertile in terms of your ability to grow food on it.

01:36:06.000 And they made it, and we don't know how they did it.

01:36:08.000 Yeah.

01:36:09.000 And it's man-made stuff.

01:36:10.000 Yeah.

01:36:11.000 Which is so bananas.

01:36:12.000 It's like a giant chunk of this stuff.

01:36:15.000 That is all over the Amazon was made by people specifically to encourage the growth of plants.

01:36:22.000 I mean, this is why history gets me so excited.

01:36:25.000 Oh, it's so amazing.

01:36:26.000 And it's so interesting, too.

01:36:29.000 I was watching something on YouTube yesterday about the mine culture and the Aztecs.

01:36:35.000 I went on a deep dive when I started getting ready for this.

01:36:40.000 When you think about how many people existed back then, and then Europeans come and everybody dies. 1.00

01:36:48.000 Everybody dies of disease.

01:36:50.000 And it's like, how many people died?

01:36:51.000 Like millions?

01:36:52.000 Millions of people died here?

01:36:54.000 Millions of people died there? 1.00

01:36:54.000 Like, holy shit! 1.00

01:36:56.000 And you go through the story of the collapse of the Mayan civilization, the collapse of the Aztec civilization. 0.99

01:37:03.000 It counts that these priests had of visiting.

01:37:09.000 These Aztec markets and how incredible they were.

01:37:13.000 These people from Rome who had come to visit the Mayans.

01:37:16.000 They're like, this is unbelievable.

01:37:17.000 Or the Aztecs, rather.

01:37:18.000 This is unbelievable how sophisticated they are.

01:37:21.000 And then...

01:37:23.000 Gone.

01:37:23.000 Everybody's dead!

01:37:24.000 Donezo.

01:37:25.000 You just gotta go, wow!

01:37:27.000 How many times has this happened in history?

01:37:29.000 Yeah.

01:37:30.000 Where people have visited places and brought their cooties and killed off a giant swath of the population. 0.96

01:37:35.000 And one of the things that they're discovering now in the Amazon, which is so fascinating, is through use of LIDAR. You know, they're discovering, like, oh my god, this is, like, all populated.

01:37:43.000 Yeah.

01:37:43.000 This whole thing was populated.

01:37:44.000 Yeah, that's crazy.

01:37:45.000 Yeah.

01:37:46.000 The ground-penetrating radar stuff.

01:37:47.000 And the trees and all the rainforest is mostly from man-made agriculture.

01:37:52.000 Yeah, that's why.

01:37:52.000 Wild.

01:37:53.000 Nuts! 0.70

01:37:53.000 Wild. 0.70

01:37:54.000 And this is all recent, that they're figuring this out.

01:37:56.000 Yeah.

01:37:57.000 Which is also so fascinating about history, is that it is a constant and never-ending search.

01:38:04.000 Yeah.

01:38:04.000 And that even today, with as much information as we have, you can pick up your phone and ask them, you know, when was Nero born?

01:38:10.000 It'll tell you.

01:38:11.000 Like, instantaneously, we still don't have answers to a lot of really fascinating questions, like the Olmecs, or all these other civilizations.

01:38:20.000 Like, who?

01:38:21.000 Where?

01:38:21.000 Where did they come from?

01:38:21.000 Where'd they come from?

01:38:22.000 Why'd they look like this?

01:38:23.000 Why'd they make these big stone heads?

01:38:25.000 Stone heads, you know? 0.94

01:38:27.000 Or Stonehenge.

01:38:27.000 It's another one.

01:38:28.000 Like, Jesus, what is this?

01:38:30.000 There's so many versions of that all over the world, and it just...

01:38:34.000 The search for our origins is one of the most human endeavors.

01:38:42.000 One of the most...

01:38:44.000 Because to know that we are particularly unique.

01:38:47.000 We're so different.

01:38:48.000 We stand out from every other animal on this planet.

01:38:51.000 And there's this crazy wild war of biology where life is just eating life all around us.

01:38:59.000 And we just got to some crazy place that far beyond any other creature that's on this planet.

01:39:06.000 And we did it in a bunch of different ways.

01:39:08.000 We did it in a bunch of different ways all over the place with different scribbles and different...

01:39:12.000 Icons and different gods and different things and We're all wondering like which one where where did it start?

01:39:21.000 What was the origin of all this?

01:39:23.000 Like what?

01:39:24.000 What was the need to write these things down?

01:39:27.000 What purpose did it serve to have these myths and legends and stories?

01:39:31.000 Like was it just to keep society together or was it to retell a very important story?

01:39:37.000 That was a very unique thing that happened at the dawn of time And that's why you see, I mean, the literary...

01:39:46.000 The literary comparison of ancient Near Eastern origin stories is like a really interesting thing to do.

01:39:53.000 Because when you look at something like the Enuma Elish, which was the Babylonian creation story, and then you look at something like Genesis chapter 1, there are obvious crossovers with, like I said before, these ancient Near Eastern conventions.

01:40:04.000 But then you can see that the author of Genesis is making these points that are actually rebutting something like the origin stories of the surrounding cultures that largely believe that Matter is like eternal and the gods come out of the created world and that there's this narrative of the battle that takes place where some gods fight against other gods and the world around us that we see and like human beings are the end result of this battle.

01:40:34.000 And so they would read this on every Babylonian New Year and one of the main themes was basically that like it's all chance.

01:40:42.000 It's all a random mistake.

01:40:44.000 You were created without purpose and intention because Tiamat gets destroyed. 0.98

01:40:50.000 And she's the god that, you know, you come from.

01:40:53.000 And then you read Genesis chapter 1 and it says, in the beginning God creates the heavens and the earth.

01:40:58.000 And he makes it good.

01:41:00.000 And there's this idea that, like, that's counter-cultural in the idea that the Babylonians did not think that the world was good.

01:41:08.000 Like at every, at the end of every refrain, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good, and then it's very good at the end.

01:41:15.000 And that humanity in particular is created in the image of God.

01:41:19.000 Like that's a very, not just like kings, which a lot of ancient Near Eastern cultures believed that kings were created in the image of God, but that humanity in general is created in the image of God.

01:41:29.000 And this idea of the Imago Dei, that you're, that's why you're different.

01:41:34.000 Like why are you different from all the animals?

01:41:36.000 Because you're given something.

01:41:37.000 That exemplifies a unique quality.

01:41:42.000 And then the ancient Near Eastern cultures that believe that, you know, the planets are gods and that the sea is a god.

01:41:53.000 Genesis chapter 1 looks at that and it kind of subverts the expectations of the day in getting to this ultimate question of why are we here?

01:42:01.000 What are we supposed to do while we're here?

01:42:03.000 And how do we get out of here?

01:42:05.000 And it says that, no, there's purpose, there's meaning, there's intention. 0.99

01:42:08.000 And actually, a lot of the things that you worship, it's pretty stupid because God created them. 0.96

01:42:14.000 What is the original origin story, or the earliest, I should say, origin story? 0.97

01:42:19.000 Of?

01:42:20.000 Of humanity.

01:42:22.000 I don't know.

01:42:23.000 Would it be the Mesopotamians?

01:42:24.000 Would it be the Sumerians? 0.98

01:42:25.000 Like, who had the one that's the oldest?

01:42:29.000 I mean, the Enuma leash is pretty old.

01:42:32.000 There are a number of different, like, variations.

01:42:34.000 The problem is that we're largely relying on, like, our complete copies are coming in languages like Akkadian, where the ones in Sumerian are very fragmentary.

01:42:44.000 So, like, even the Epic of Gilgamesh, the copy that we have that kind of is the final.

01:42:49.000 If you go and you read a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's going to be the one in Akkadian from the Library of Ashurbanipal.

01:42:57.000 But the earlier versions in Sumerian don't even have the flood story in them.

01:43:00.000 And they're more pieced together.

01:43:04.000 And we actually do have another flood story in the Atrasis, which appears to have been influenced, the Epic of Gilgamesh story is influenced by the Atrasis.

01:43:16.000 In terms of, like, written language, I guess it's the Enuma Elish.

01:43:21.000 I wouldn't actually know what, like, the oldest, oldest one is.

01:43:25.000 But you get a lot of these origin stories, and they have these themes.

01:43:29.000 We see it in the Bible, too.

01:43:31.000 The ancient Near Eastern cultures were very preoccupied with chaos and order.

01:43:37.000 And so it's all about kind of...

01:43:41.000 Creating order out of the chaos of the world.

01:43:44.000 And that's where I think you do see the parallels.

01:43:46.000 Well, that's the establishment of society, right?

01:43:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:43:49.000 And establishing chaos and certain things being representational of chaos within the created order, like the Bible included, but a lot of other ancient cultures saw things like the ocean.

01:44:03.000 As the embodiment of unpredictability and chaos.

01:44:08.000 And so that's why you have...

01:44:10.000 Sea monsters are this very common depiction.

01:44:14.000 The Leviathan in Job, which is this sea monster.

01:44:20.000 And it's representational in a way of – because it appears actually in Babylonian literature too, the Leviathan.

01:44:26.000 Really?

01:44:27.000 Yeah.

01:44:27.000 And it's encompassing chaos in the world.

01:44:31.000 And the point of God bringing it up to Job in the book of Job is like, God has the ability to tame this thing.

01:44:38.000 And even in the book of Revelation, at the end of the Bible, it says that in the new heavens and new earth, there will be no sea.

01:44:44.000 And it's not because, you know...

01:44:47.000 I had a friend who is Australian, and we were kind of working through translating sections of Revelation, and he's like, hold on, there will be no sea.

01:44:55.000 He's like, I'm Australian, I love the sea.

01:44:58.000 But the point of that, though, is not necessarily that the body of water is not going to exist.

01:45:04.000 It's that the ocean, the sea, is so unpredictable.

01:45:09.000 You go out there and storms can come out of nowhere, and you die.

01:45:15.000 And so there are these motifs that are representational in the ancient world, and we see a lot of those in these creation stories.

01:45:22.000 So would it be that the dangers of the sea would no longer exist?

01:45:27.000 Yeah.

01:45:28.000 Oh, yeah.

01:45:28.000 So the sea kind of working as an analogy of that which is unpredictable.

01:45:35.000 And actually, there's a lot of concepts of the realm of the dead being in the sea that we see throughout this literature.

01:45:44.000 If you read the book of Jonah, There's this kind of stylistic, which you miss when you read it in the English, but it's very apparent in the Hebrew, where Noah keeps going down.

01:45:53.000 He goes down from his town to the dock, and then he goes down into the boat, and then he goes down into the inside of the boat, and then the storm happens, and then they throw him overboard down into the sea and down into the fish, and eventually the fish takes him down into the depths of the sea, and when...

01:46:13.000 Jonah prays, he says, I cry out from the depths of Sheol, which is the realm of the dead. 0.84

01:46:19.000 So there is actually a form of Jewish interpretation where it argues that Jonah actually died and was resurrected when he was spit up by the fish.

01:46:28.000 And it could be, because in the Gospels, Jesus says, the people are following him and they keep asking him for miracles.

01:46:36.000 Because they're like, we saw you do miracles, do more miracles for us.

01:46:39.000 Come on, do a trick.

01:46:40.000 Do a trick, Jesus.

01:46:41.000 And Jesus says, the only miracle you're going to get is the sign of Jonah.

01:46:45.000 That just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, I will be in the belly of the earth three days and three nights.

01:46:50.000 You know, prediction of his own death and resurrection.

01:46:52.000 But there is an argument within rabbinical literature that when Jonah says that he's crying out from the depths of Sheol, it's because he's actually dead.

01:47:03.000 And that's one interpretation.

01:47:04.000 But another interpretation could just be that he saw and understood as a person of his day the depths of the ocean as where the dead people ended up anyways.

01:47:14.000 Like your soul goes down into the chaos and the disorder of Sheol, which is the realm of the dead. 0.99

01:47:21.000 Is that where they disposed of bodies?

01:47:23.000 In the ocean?

01:47:24.000 Yeah.

01:47:24.000 No.

01:47:25.000 No?

01:47:25.000 No.

01:47:25.000 Vikings did, right?

01:47:27.000 Didn't they like light boats on fire and push them out there?

01:47:29.000 Yeah.

01:47:30.000 Yeah.

01:47:30.000 But it wasn't a common practice amongst other civilizations.

01:47:33.000 Not that I know of.

01:47:35.000 I mean, Jews would definitely, I mean, really ancient Jewish conventions of burial, you would just bury someone in the earth. 0.99

01:47:43.000 And then by the time you got to Jesus' day, you had like family tombs and stuff.

01:47:47.000 Well, there was an ancient...

01:47:50.000 Hominid that's not human and one of the things that they were so fascinated about was that they buried their dead and that they did so in a cave.

01:48:00.000 Do you remember that Jamie?

01:48:01.000 Do you remember who was discussing that with us?

01:48:04.000 It was they did not think that this version of ancient primate was capable of these things and then they seem to have confirmation Through these very extensive cave systems, there was at least one area where they would put their dead.

01:48:26.000 Yeah.

01:48:28.000 And it was a difficult path to get to this, too.

01:48:31.000 Hmm.

01:48:31.000 This is a very small hominid, and I think people have tried to make their way through it, and it's really hard.

01:48:37.000 Like, some of these caves, you're, like, basically crawling on your stomach, which is fucking terrifying, because people have died that way.

01:48:44.000 Are you claustrophobic? 0.88

01:48:45.000 No, I'm not claustrophobic.

01:48:46.000 It's normal stuff.

01:48:47.000 You just don't want to crawl in a cave?

01:48:48.000 I don't want to crawl in the middle of the earth into something that's, like, 11 inches high.

01:48:52.000 Yeah.

01:48:53.000 Squirming slowly.

01:48:54.000 That's what they're doing.

01:48:55.000 Yeah.

01:48:55.000 Your body barely fits in there.

01:48:57.000 And a guy died recently.

01:48:59.000 Primer rescue, I think.

01:49:01.000 Oh, it was Brian.

01:49:02.000 Yes.

01:49:02.000 That's right.

01:49:03.000 I'll pull it up.

01:49:04.000 Dentaleti Chamber.

01:49:06.000 Yeah.

01:49:06.000 So they've founded this ancient hominid, which, you know, didn't really look like us.

01:49:13.000 Yeah.

01:49:14.000 Was burying their dead.

01:49:15.000 Yeah.

01:49:16.000 I mean, burial conventions change over time.

01:49:19.000 The ways that they're burying, like, in the ancient Israelite days are very different in the conventions than when you get to Jesus.

01:49:28.000 Karen, it's archaeologists uncover evidence of intentional burial cave engravings by early human ancestor. 0.94

01:49:34.000 What did that sucker look like? 0.97

01:49:38.000 So the Dinaldi chamber, what is the type of homo nalidi, right? 1.00

01:49:44.000 Homo nalidi.

01:49:45.000 Google that, see what they look like.

01:49:47.000 Homo nalidi.

01:49:48.000 What we think they look like, right?

01:49:51.000 Whoa.

01:49:52.000 That's crazy.

01:49:55.000 That's crazy.

01:49:57.000 So, as a Christian, what do you think about all this stuff?

01:50:01.000 Like, what do you think about ancient hominids, Australopithecus, Neanderthals?

01:50:06.000 Like, what was God up to with all this?

01:50:09.000 Yeah, I mean, I'm not a scientist, so I gotta stay in my lane.

01:50:14.000 I ultimately would be an advocate for intelligent design, where I would say that God purposefully created humanity in a way You had Stephen Meyer on, right?

01:50:29.000 Yes.

01:50:29.000 Yeah.

01:50:29.000 So, I mean, he's one of those guys who talks about kind of the issues that he sees with evolution.

01:50:37.000 And I think I have some of those issues, too.

01:50:40.000 My friend Jonathan McClatchy is a biologist, and he does some really great presentations on the ways that he sees kind of the intricacies of Neo-Doranian evolution is not quite explaining some of what's going on with things like the fossil record and some of the gaps that we have in there.

01:50:58.000 When you talk about early hominids, I mean, ultimately, I think that there are aspects of the fact that there are ancient cultures, which, I mean, humanity obviously looks very different today than it did, you know, if we're going tens of thousands of years ago.

01:51:12.000 Right.

01:51:12.000 And so I think that there's a different kind of convention and understanding.

01:51:16.000 But ultimately, I would ascribe to there being an original Adam and Eve, and that those are our like, if you want to call them like our first parents kind of thing.

01:51:27.000 But there are other Christians who I would disagree with, but I think have interesting articulations of that in terms of theistic evolution. 0.83

01:51:36.000 I disagree with them, but it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility to find explanations.

01:51:41.000 I don't think the Bible is trying to explain how people came into existence in the same way that maybe we want it to.

01:51:51.000 And a lot of people read the origin stories in Genesis as a scientific textbook.

01:51:58.000 And I think ultimately that misses the point of what Genesis is trying to say.

01:52:02.000 This goes back to what we were talking about with like, how did the original audience understood this?

01:52:06.000 When they read Genesis chapter 1, are they looking at that as an exact prescription of what God did?

01:52:15.000 I mean, in some ways, maybe.

01:52:17.000 But in other ways, they could see that as this counter-apologetic to the other ancient Near Eastern stories, like I explained.

01:52:24.000 So I just think we need to be careful when we're looking at, or even counting up the genealogies and coming up with how old the earth is.

01:52:34.000 I think that might be missing the forest for the trees in what we're actually looking at when we look at ancient documents and how we're trying to interpret them.

01:52:44.000 But it is a big question.

01:52:46.000 Well, the question of evolution is a fascinating one, right?

01:52:50.000 Because there's obviously something happening, particularly with us, if we really are related to homo ledaldi, naliti, or there's something clearly is happening. 0.96

01:53:03.000 This is like process of change.

01:53:05.000 And if we don't completely understand all the factors in that process of change, we might miss out.

01:53:12.000 The equation might be incomplete.

01:53:16.000 I mean, we know a lot now about evolution that we did not know before, but like all sciences, new data comes in and you have to recalibrate things.

01:53:26.000 Have you been paying attention to this new discussion about dark matter and dark energy?

01:53:33.000 No.

01:53:34.000 The new discussion is that it might not be a correct theory and that what it might be is that time moves differently.

01:53:45.000 In the voids between galaxies.

01:53:48.000 And this is a new theory.

01:53:50.000 And, you know, like new enough and discussed enough among people that really understand it that it's getting to me.

01:53:57.000 Right?

01:53:57.000 So I'm reading it.

01:53:58.000 So, see if you can find that.

01:54:01.000 Yeah, it's very...

01:54:02.000 It's a very complex and nuanced conversation, but most of the universe is dark energy, right?

01:54:09.000 It's a giant percentage of the universe is dark energy and dark matter, and we don't really know what that stuff is.

01:54:13.000 And so this is proposing that there's an additional possible theory that might explain it better.

01:54:22.000 I mean, that area of science is...

01:54:25.000 Crazy.

01:54:26.000 Nuts. 0.99

01:54:27.000 Crazy.

01:54:27.000 And then you have the James Webb telescope that's giving us even more data than ever before.

01:54:31.000 And you have to look at all of it and go, wait, why are those things here?

01:54:34.000 How are they there so long ago?

01:54:35.000 Like, what are these red things at the beginning of time? 0.97

01:54:38.000 Like, what the fuck is all this? 0.99

01:54:39.000 The universe is bonkers. 1.00

01:54:40.000 Nuts.

01:54:41.000 Yeah.

01:54:41.000 And I mean, I think we get that in history, too, whereas we have these kind of what we think are established conventions and all of a sudden we discover something and it completely overthrows the ideas that we have.

01:54:51.000 Like Clovis first.

01:54:52.000 Yeah.

01:54:52.000 Or go back to Tepe.

01:54:54.000 Yeah.

01:54:54.000 Or actually.

01:54:54.000 Good segue.

01:54:55.000 That's the best one, right?

01:54:56.000 Yeah.

01:54:57.000 I made something for you.

01:54:58.000 Ooh.

01:55:01.000 So...

01:55:01.000 I make papyri facsimiles.

01:55:05.000 Oh, my description is a little bit wonky here.

01:55:08.000 I didn't fix that.

01:55:09.000 So you were talking about, like, what is our oldest...

01:55:12.000 So this guy is P52, John Ryland's 457. So that's a genuine Egyptian papyri that I made.

01:55:20.000 I cut it out for you.

01:55:21.000 And then I transcribed the text on that manuscript.

01:55:25.000 So when we're talking about what is potentially our oldest evidence for the New Testament, this manuscript that most likely comes from Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, is the one that usually is...

01:55:37.000 Universally accepted as our oldest one.

01:55:40.000 And that contains John 18, where Jesus is on trial before Pilate.

01:55:45.000 And yeah, so that's the one.

01:55:47.000 It's in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England.

01:55:49.000 So this is a copy of that exactly?

01:55:51.000 This is exactly what it looks like?

01:55:52.000 Yeah, so I cut that out on the papyri with a scalpel, and then I transcribed the text on.

01:55:59.000 You did a great job, dude.

01:56:01.000 You nerded out.

01:56:02.000 I know.

01:56:03.000 For real nerded out.

01:56:04.000 This is a real nerding out of...

01:56:06.000 So that's someone else's facsimile, which is not as good as the one I made.

01:56:10.000 It's not as good.

01:56:10.000 Yours is better.

01:56:11.000 And where Jesus is on trial before Pilate, and Jesus says, everyone who is following the truth follows me.

01:56:22.000 And on the back has the words of Pilate saying, what is truth?

01:56:28.000 But so part of my research—so the reason I bring this up is because before this was discovered by C.H. Roberts in the 1940s, the convention was, because of a guy named C.H. Bauer, that the Gospel of John was second century.

01:56:44.000 And so he had this—he was a student of Hegel.

01:56:47.000 Have you ever heard of Hegelian dialectic?

01:56:49.000 So you have like a thesis, synthesis, and antithesis?

01:56:53.000 Yes.

01:56:53.000 So Hegel— He had this philosophical theory, and his student, Bauer, takes that and he incorporates this into history, and he says, you know, the earliest gospel, Mark, has this very Jewish Jesus, and then the later gospels have a very, like, the last of what are called the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

01:57:17.000 Luke has a very kind of more divine Jesus.

01:57:19.000 And so he says, based on this, John is the last, last written one.

01:57:22.000 And it combines these two where you get a very human and a very divine Jesus together.

01:57:26.000 And so based on this, he says that John has to be second century.

01:57:29.000 Well, we discover this guy.

01:57:31.000 C.H. Roberts is, you know, literally going through these piles of manuscripts in these drawers that are being like stashed away.

01:57:37.000 And he finds this guy and he sees that it's written on both sides, which is almost exclusively a Christian convention.

01:57:43.000 Because in the ancient world, they used scrolls.

01:57:45.000 And the Christians, for reasons we're not entirely clear on, they start to make codices, books.

01:57:52.000 And so they write on both sides.

01:57:54.000 And so he says, okay, this is written on both sides.

01:57:55.000 It's probably a Christian manuscript.

01:57:58.000 So he sends it off to the leading paleographers, or guys who date manuscripts.

01:58:03.000 And they all say, this is the beginning of the second century.

01:58:09.000 And so there's still debate about the dating of this, but the unanimous consensus is that it's comfortably second century, potentially the beginning of the second century, which means that this is found in Egypt.

01:58:22.000 John is probably writing his gospel in Ephesus.

01:58:24.000 So it has to be written by John, spread around, find his way to Egypt, be copied, and then end up in this manuscript, which means that at minimum, you've already pushed the gospel of John back into the first century comfortably, and potentially even like most likely into the lifetime of the eyewitnesses of these and potentially even like most likely into the lifetime of the And so all of the literature up until that point from the scholarly consensus about the dating of the gospel of John gets totally rewritten.

01:58:52.000 Wow.

01:58:52.000 And it's because of that guy.

01:58:54.000 And because of my academic work where I was telling you like in paratextual features, you When we look at these tiny manuscripts and you figure out, okay, well, what does that look like on the page?

01:59:06.000 I also made you.

01:59:10.000 So this is, I use two different variations of papyri.

01:59:13.000 Whoa.

01:59:14.000 So you have there where P52 would have been on the page and based on the, it's called codicological conventions, the spacings of the words.

01:59:26.000 And the way that the size of the margin that we can see, where it would have been on the page and how big the page would have actually been.

01:59:34.000 So this is like a reconstruction, and then I filled in the rest of the text in the same sort of style, stylistic hand of the scribes at that time, what that page would have looked like.

01:59:46.000 So this would have come from what would have been essentially like a pocket copy of the Gospel of John.

01:59:55.000 That's unbelievable.

01:59:58.000 Wow.

01:59:59.000 That's so fascinating.

02:00:02.000 So this is the kind of work that I do in terms of trying to figure out, okay, you have these fragments.

02:00:06.000 How big would have this codex actually been?

02:00:09.000 How big would have the document been?

02:00:11.000 And then you compare and you contrast them to, say, non-Christian literature.

02:00:18.000 Like Thucydides or Tacitus or Pliny or Cicero or Cassiodio, those kind of guys.

02:00:24.000 And look at the differences between how these documents would have been put together and written in their day.

02:00:30.000 God, so beautiful.

02:00:33.000 It's just so bizarre to imagine these people writing this stuff down so, so long ago.

02:00:41.000 You know what's wild is when you actually get the chance, which I have a number of times to actually handle.

02:00:46.000 Ooh.

02:00:46.000 The original documents.

02:00:47.000 Oh, my God.

02:00:48.000 Do you wear rubber gloves?

02:00:49.000 No.

02:00:49.000 You know why?

02:00:50.000 Is that we used to do that, but actually the oils in your hands are more abrasive than latex or even cloth.

02:00:58.000 The oils are more abrasive?

02:00:59.000 No, sorry.

02:00:59.000 I said that wrong.

02:01:00.000 They're less abrasive.

02:01:01.000 So it used to be that you always had to handle things with gloves, and nowadays we don't do that anymore.

02:01:07.000 Ooh.

02:01:08.000 That's wild.

02:01:09.000 So you're touching it with your actual fingers.

02:01:11.000 Yeah.

02:01:11.000 That's got to feel bizarre.

02:01:12.000 I was at the, two summers ago, I was at the University of Pennsylvania.

02:01:19.000 And I was looking at a manuscript called P1 or P-Oxy-2, 1.2.

02:01:26.000 And it's a beginning of the third century copy of...

02:01:29.000 The first page of Matthew's Gospel.

02:01:32.000 And when I requested access to it, they told me that the last person to request it was when Pope John Paul II came and visited the States, and they pulled it out for him.

02:01:42.000 So on the, like, you know the library when you used to, like, have to punch your name, write your name on the cards?

02:01:48.000 Yeah.

02:01:48.000 If there was a card, yeah, that guy.

02:01:50.000 So I made a facsimile of that one, too.

02:01:53.000 And that one is the, that's the genealogy of Jesus from Matthew's Gospel.

02:01:57.000 Wow.

02:01:59.000 Actually, you know what, Jamie, if you go up to the search bar and put CSNTM, those letters, CSNTM.org.

02:02:07.000 So this is the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

02:02:18.000 So if you click Digital Manuscript Collection.

02:02:22.000 So they go around the world, and they try to digitize all the existing New Testament manuscripts to preserve them.

02:02:30.000 And so you can actually, you see there on the side, you can click, well, I want to look at a papyri, and you can go the different conventions of, you know, the date or the time.

02:02:41.000 And so you could read the translation and then go and look at the original source of it.

02:02:46.000 Yeah, so ideally you always want to go look at the original, but because of organizations like CSNTM, which is actually in Dallas, people like me don't have to go to Europe where a lot of these manuscripts are housed.

02:02:59.000 We can look at them and because these are such high grade that you can figure these things out.

02:03:07.000 So actually, a guy I know, Elijah Hickson, he used that and he actually figured out that there was a prominent manuscript, P50, which is a forgery.

02:03:20.000 And so he used that based on like looking at the digital.

02:03:24.000 Yeah, he filled in the gaps within the rips and saw that the words didn't match up when you fill in the gaps.

02:03:30.000 And so when he's transcribing the text, he's like, wait a minute, I don't think that word fits in there.

02:03:34.000 And based on that, he's like, yeah, that's a forgery because someone has written the text in after that piece of papyri, which is...

02:03:44.000 These forgeries are almost always a genuine piece of ancient papyri.

02:03:48.000 Someone gets it from like the black market antiquities.

02:03:51.000 Oh, and then just writes on it afterwards.

02:03:53.000 Yeah, right there.

02:03:54.000 So P50. So if you fill in these holes, they're called lacunas.

02:03:59.000 The words, a lot of the words don't fit.

02:04:02.000 So someone's come along and they've like written, done a really good job because it fooled scholars.

02:04:09.000 And they've written in the text, but not quite good enough.

02:04:14.000 To figure out that not all of the words fit in the gaps that you presented.

02:04:20.000 What is your take on the Voynich manuscript?

02:04:22.000 I have no idea what to think of the Voynich manuscript.

02:04:25.000 But it's Middle Ages.

02:04:26.000 Yeah.

02:04:27.000 It's just a weird one.

02:04:28.000 It's a really weird one.

02:04:29.000 Yeah.

02:04:29.000 Yeah, because people have been trying to crack that code forever.

02:04:32.000 What is this?

02:04:33.000 Is it just gibberish?

02:04:34.000 Is it just fake words?

02:04:36.000 Yeah.

02:04:37.000 I mean, that's...

02:04:38.000 Why so much time and effort put into making this...

02:04:42.000 Fake book?

02:04:43.000 Yeah. 0.95

02:04:43.000 Was it a crazy schizophrenic person who made their own language? 0.95

02:04:46.000 I don't know. 0.93

02:04:46.000 They must have been a rich schizophrenic person. 0.93

02:04:48.000 Well, didn't J.R.R. Tolkien, didn't he create an entire language for Lord of the Rings?

02:04:52.000 So a lot of the languages, because he was a linguist, a lot of the languages are based on existing languages.

02:04:58.000 Okay, so he just combined them together to form his own version of it?

02:05:02.000 Yeah, like Elvish and Dwarvish.

02:05:04.000 They're all based on ancient Norse or Old English.

02:05:08.000 So he would take...

02:05:11.000 I mean, if there's anyone who's the best at world building, you can learn Elvish.

02:05:19.000 It's a real language.

02:05:20.000 Because he developed the language.

02:05:23.000 That's so crazy.

02:05:24.000 That is crazy.

02:05:26.000 The dedication.

02:05:26.000 That's so bananas.

02:05:28.000 I mean, he was a genius.

02:05:29.000 Guys like him and even Lewis, they were friends.

02:05:33.000 C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien.

02:05:35.000 Really?

02:05:35.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:05:35.000 Tolkien played a big part in...

02:05:39.000 In Lewis's conversion, because Tolkien was Catholic.

02:05:42.000 And I think Lewis was Irish, and so he couldn't quite become a Catholic, but he became a Protestant Anglican.

02:05:50.000 But yeah, they were, the Inkling Society, they would meet in Oxford at the, oh, what's the pub called?

02:05:56.000 People are going to listen to this and get mad at me, because there's something in Childs.

02:06:01.000 One of those UK pubs that's been around for a thousand years?

02:06:04.000 Yeah, right.

02:06:05.000 And they would meet and talk.

02:06:07.000 They were called the Inkling Society.

02:06:08.000 Wow.

02:06:10.000 Eagle and Child.

02:06:12.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:06:12.000 Wow.

02:06:13.000 Yeah, it's funny when you read how Tolkien really didn't like Lewis's stuff because he said it was way too straightforward.

02:06:27.000 He's like, you got a Jesus lion?

02:06:29.000 Good one.

02:06:32.000 You're not beating around the bush on anything when you've got a literal Jesus who's sacrificed?

02:06:37.000 Come on.

02:06:38.000 Rises from the dead?

02:06:39.000 What are you doing here?

02:06:42.000 That would have been an interesting conversation to be a fly on the wall.

02:06:45.000 Yeah.

02:06:45.000 Tolkien breaking down Lewis's...

02:06:47.000 Yeah.

02:06:50.000 That would be fascinating.

02:06:51.000 Apparently the guy who wrote Dune sent a copy to Tolkien before he published it.

02:06:56.000 Really?

02:06:57.000 And Tolkien didn't like it.

02:06:58.000 Wow.

02:06:59.000 He sent it back and said, like, I got nothing good to say, so I'm going to say nothing at all.

02:07:02.000 Wow.

02:07:03.000 Isn't that crazy?

02:07:03.000 That is crazy.

02:07:04.000 Well, he was wrong.

02:07:06.000 Even geniuses.

02:07:07.000 Well, I mean, some geniuses are just, like, so in their own head.

02:07:11.000 Different strokes.

02:07:12.000 Yeah.

02:07:12.000 And that's part of the problem.

02:07:15.000 But it's also what makes them so great in the first place that they have this, like, singular vision and dedication so much so that they're writing.

02:07:21.000 An elvish language and combining words for it.

02:07:24.000 Yeah.

02:07:25.000 Yeah.

02:07:25.000 Jamie, did you find that thing about the dark matter?

02:07:29.000 Did you find what I was asking about?

02:07:31.000 I stopped because I found a video and I saw some people explaining it and it didn't...

02:07:37.000 It started saying that it was almost like they started off with a theory and that's how they do things and then...

02:07:42.000 They start working through the theory until someone has a better theory.

02:07:46.000 There's such a giant problem today in that if you just post some fantastical claim in a headline, like the theory of dark matter has been debunked, and then you get clicks.

02:07:58.000 And so you can kind of get away with doing that now.

02:08:02.000 I felt like this explained like I'm five on Reddit at a pretty top comment or one percenter.

02:08:07.000 So dark energy is a problem.

02:08:09.000 Modern cosmology has most problems in science.

02:08:11.000 You start with a model.

02:08:12.000 You go out and make measurements.

02:08:13.000 You find your measurements don't fit your model.

02:08:14.000 This is a problem.

02:08:16.000 When this happens, scientists go off and try to come up with new theories.

02:08:20.000 I think that meant no models.

02:08:22.000 I think they meant new models.

02:08:23.000 New models which do fit the new data.

02:08:25.000 In the case of things like dark energy, we get hundreds if not thousands of new theories.

02:08:30.000 ACDM is the current...

02:08:31.000 Best model of cosmology.

02:08:33.000 The CDM stands for cold dark matter.

02:08:35.000 It's a model that includes certain theories to explain dark matter.

02:08:39.000 And the lambda A is a cosmological constant.

02:08:45.000 That's the Greek word lambda.

02:08:46.000 Or the Greek letter.

02:08:47.000 Yeah.

02:08:48.000 Which is used to model dark energy.

02:08:51.000 Note that this mathematical model doesn't explain what dark matter or dark energy are.

02:08:56.000 It just incorporates them to make the maths work.

02:08:59.000 So this is a long...

02:09:00.000 I don't know if this is exactly what they were saying about...

02:09:04.000 It was like a much more...

02:09:06.000 Of a synopsis.

02:09:07.000 But what they were saying was that it might be that time moves differently in between galaxies.

02:09:14.000 See if you could Google that.

02:09:16.000 Physics and cosmology are just wild.

02:09:18.000 Well, it's just so insane because we're so separate from it because of light pollution that the most majestic thing that you could ever see, we gave up so that we could drive at night.

02:09:29.000 It's really weird.

02:09:30.000 It's really weird because when you go to a place, you know, I've talked about it a bunch of times, but I'll say it again.

02:09:35.000 I went to the Keck Observatory many years ago, and we got there on a perfect time where the moon was not out at all, and the sky was insane.

02:09:46.000 It was like you were in the cockpit of a spaceship, and, you know, it was just like you were in a giant glass cockpit, which is essentially...

02:09:53.000 We are kind of in an organic spaceship hurling through the universe, so it should look like that.

02:09:57.000 But it just doesn't because of the fact that we're constantly inundated by light pollution.

02:10:03.000 And I think the ancient societies and ancient cultures didn't have that.

02:10:07.000 And because they didn't have that, I think they had a much more humble view of our place in the universe.

02:10:14.000 Because you're just presented with something that's absolutely impossible.

02:10:18.000 Impossible to imagine.

02:10:20.000 We definitely lose our sense of awe.

02:10:22.000 When we can't see kind of ourselves in the grand scheme of the universe.

02:10:27.000 Yeah.

02:10:28.000 And you're right.

02:10:28.000 When you go somewhere where there's no light pollution, you look up at the sky, it's like...

02:10:31.000 Even not at somewhere like the Keck Observatory, where you can get a crazy view of it.

02:10:37.000 Yeah.

02:10:37.000 When you just go out in the country and look up and you're like...

02:10:41.000 That's the Milky Way.

02:10:42.000 You can see the Milky Way.

02:10:43.000 Dark energy debunked by lumpy universe expansion.

02:10:47.000 Yeah, this is the one.

02:10:49.000 Learn how the existence of dark energy is being challenged due to new evidence that the expanding universe is actually lumpy.

02:10:55.000 So what they mean by lumpy is this way they're talking about how time moves differently.

02:10:59.000 See if it has a synopsis of it.

02:11:02.000 It's like a rethinking article I found that gets into explaining what dark energy is and then there's probably a paragraph at the bottom that's just what you're looking for.

02:11:10.000 What is the timescape model?

02:11:11.000 This is it.

02:11:12.000 So the timescape model rejects the idea that dark energy is the driving force of universe expansion.

02:11:17.000 Improved analysis of type LA, LA supernovae, has suggested that the acceleration based on light curves seen in 1998 was a case of misidentification.

02:11:29.000 The timescape model amends this by considering differences of time in void and matter-dense areas.

02:11:37.000 The model suggests that time moves much slower in matter-dense areas, like the Milky Way galaxies, than in voids.

02:11:43.000 With more time passing in voids, increased expansion takes place, making it seem like expansion is accelerating as the voids increasingly spread through the universe.

02:11:53.000 Dark energy, therefore, is not needed to explain the expansion of the universe, according to the researchers. 0.97

02:11:59.000 Who fucking knows? 0.94

02:12:01.000 It's too much. 0.99

02:12:02.000 It's too much like, what are you even saying?

02:12:04.000 How crazy is this?

02:12:06.000 You know, like, one of the more controversial aspects of the James Webb Telescope was this theory that perhaps the universe was quite a bit older than 13 point whatever billion years.

02:12:15.000 Right.

02:12:16.000 And they were trying to push it back to 22 based on the existence of galaxies.

02:12:20.000 And people are pushing back against that, and there's a lot of debate about that, but the bottom line is all of it is too many numbers for your brain to even register.

02:12:29.000 Yeah.

02:12:31.000 However many billions of years ago, there was nothing.

02:12:34.000 And then all of a sudden there was something.

02:12:36.000 And Terence McKenna had a great line that said that science requires one miracle.

02:12:44.000 The Big Bang.

02:12:45.000 It requires a miracle.

02:12:47.000 Well, I always say that when people ask me about the miracles in the Bible.

02:12:50.000 And I say, well, if the first miracle happened, if everything, nothing became everything.

02:12:56.000 Right.

02:12:57.000 Then, you know, Jesus turning water into wine.

02:12:59.000 That's an easy one.

02:13:00.000 Well, yeah.

02:13:01.000 That's a party trick.

02:13:02.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:13:02.000 It really is nothing compared to the birth of the universe, but we're convinced at the creation of the universe, and we're very skeptical at other miracles.

02:13:11.000 Yeah.

02:13:12.000 It's very odd.

02:13:13.000 Yeah, I mean, I think there's an inconsistency there, and you do see when the Big Bang is first hypothesized that there are individuals who are uncomfortable with that sounding like in the beginning.

02:13:25.000 Because before that, the idea was that the universe was eternal.

02:13:28.000 And if you propose a point in time where everything starts to exist, well, that for – and you see some of these people are pushing back on it.

02:13:35.000 They say things like, well, that sounds too religious.

02:13:38.000 That sounds like a beginning point in time.

02:13:41.000 And at that point, if there's a big bang, you have to figure out, okay, well, what's the big banger?

02:13:45.000 And I mean, that's ultimately, it's a metaphysical religious question.

02:13:52.000 How did that thing get kicked off?

02:13:54.000 Brian Cox was explaining to us that there was an actual environment that existed pre the Big Bang.

02:13:59.000 Don't they call it the environment?

02:14:01.000 Is that what the term of it is?

02:14:03.000 Is this like Lawrence Krauss having a definition for nothing?

02:14:07.000 I don't know.

02:14:07.000 It's not nothing?

02:14:08.000 I don't know.

02:14:09.000 It was just like, what are you even saying?

02:14:13.000 And then there's Sir Roger Penrose who thinks there's a series of these things that happen.

02:14:18.000 And then it's just this constant birth of universes and death of universes and birth of new universes.

02:14:24.000 It's like Big Bang, expansion, heat death, contraction, Big Bang.

02:14:31.000 But we're almost like, that's too much.

02:14:34.000 I can kind of wrap my head around 14 billion years.

02:14:37.000 I can't wrap my head around eternity.

02:14:39.000 In theology, it's often described as the difference between understanding and comprehension, which my wife tells me are synonyms, and that's nonsense.

02:14:47.000 But the idea is like...

02:14:49.000 You can understand eternity is a long point in time.

02:14:53.000 Right.

02:14:53.000 You can't comprehend it.

02:14:54.000 It's like numbers.

02:14:55.000 Yeah.

02:14:55.000 You can't, you can understand how many zeros are in 14 billion years.

02:14:59.000 How much water's in the ocean.

02:15:01.000 Right.

02:15:02.000 I can comprehend, like, it's like, that's a lot of water.

02:15:04.000 Yeah.

02:15:04.000 But when you start talking about, like, tens of thousands of gallons, I'm like...

02:15:07.000 Lost me.

02:15:08.000 Yeah, I don't really know what that looks like.

02:15:10.000 I kind of do.

02:15:11.000 My brain's not set up for that.

02:15:12.000 Yeah.

02:15:13.000 Which is part of the weird thing about people is that our brain is clearly set up differently than every other creature that exists.

02:15:21.000 You know, and if you have, if evolution is the only thing that created us, it's just evolution. 0.87

02:15:27.000 How the fuck did we get so far ahead of everybody else? 0.93

02:15:31.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:15:32.000 I mean, not even just, and we're the doughiest, like weakest, softest.

02:15:37.000 But also the smartest.

02:15:39.000 Like, we gave up that.

02:15:40.000 That was the trade-off.

02:15:41.000 And somehow or another, by evolving into this particular form, we figured out a way to uniquely change the environment in ways that no other creature has even come close to.

02:15:52.000 It's interesting to me that...

02:15:55.000 There are certain things that we think of in terms of unexplained phenomena that we'll accept because we have some sort of a scientific definition of what this unexplained phenomena is.

02:16:05.000 Like the Big Bang.

02:16:07.000 And you can say that there's theories.

02:16:08.000 It's not completely unexplained.

02:16:10.000 You kind of get it, but you kind of don't.

02:16:12.000 Something that's smaller than the head of a pin that becomes the entire universe that we say is... 0.98

02:16:17.000 Pretty fucking crazy. 0.99

02:16:18.000 Yeah. 0.98

02:16:19.000 You know, and just to say that that just happened and you don't, you don't really, I know you don't want to say you don't know, but you really don't know.

02:16:25.000 There's no way you can know.

02:16:26.000 It's not really possible to know.

02:16:28.000 There's no, like, working theory where you can convince me.

02:16:32.000 That the whole universe gets compressed into something smaller than the head of a pen and then instantaneously becomes everything that you see.

02:16:40.000 Well, I think that's why you see natural materialism being woefully inadequate, to really explain the ultimate worldview questions that we have.

02:16:48.000 Just the universe itself, right?

02:16:50.000 We don't know enough.

02:16:52.000 Maybe we one day will.

02:16:54.000 Maybe these sentient AI systems that we're going to create with quantum computers are going to be able to figure things out in a way that we can't.

02:17:01.000 But at the end of the day, you have one miracle.

02:17:04.000 You have the Big Bang.

02:17:05.000 All of science agrees this happened.

02:17:08.000 That is so much crazier than anything that any religion is proposing. 0.94

02:17:12.000 But it's so interesting to me that we're – because, well, we say we have echoes of the Big Bang.

02:17:18.000 There's radio echoes.

02:17:19.000 Yeah.

02:17:20.000 Yeah, but also if a miracle did take place, like let's assume that there is actually a higher power that – Occasionally interacts with human beings.

02:17:30.000 And if a miracle did take place and you were there, you don't have a camera.

02:17:34.000 You don't have a cell phone.

02:17:36.000 You don't have a pen.

02:17:37.000 You can't write things down.

02:17:39.000 Maybe you can't even read.

02:17:40.000 And you have this thing that happens to you.

02:17:43.000 And this thing...

02:17:44.000 It changes the course of human history.

02:17:46.000 It changes the direction, the ideology that these people subscribe to, and the moral and ethical structure that they live their life by.

02:17:55.000 It changes untold billions of human beings from that point on.

02:18:00.000 Pretty fascinating. 0.98

02:18:01.000 That in itself, even if this is just a revelation without a divine interaction, that's a fucking miracle. 0.96

02:18:09.000 It's a miracle that it was created at all. 0.98

02:18:11.000 The whole idea that Christianity... 0.99

02:18:13.000 When you're saying that the book of...

02:18:16.000 Was it the book of Isaiah?

02:18:17.000 Yeah.

02:18:18.000 That the same book is exactly the same as...

02:18:22.000 That's a miracle.

02:18:23.000 Yeah. 0.98

02:18:23.000 That's pretty fucking crazy. 0.98

02:18:24.000 Yeah, that is crazy. 0.99

02:18:25.000 If you just imagine the sheer number of illiterate people, the sheer number of...

02:18:30.000 Days that have to go by where people are telling the story exactly the same and that it's entrusted in the hands of these very few people that are so dedicated to it that they get the exact words right a thousand years later.

02:18:44.000 Pretty bananas.

02:18:45.000 Well, I mean, that is kind of the crazy thing about Christianity where you have this Jewish itinerant guy who's walking around for a century Roman-occupied Judea. 0.99

02:18:57.000 He's making some...

02:18:58.000 Pretty audacious claims.

02:18:59.000 Claims to be God himself.

02:19:00.000 And then he predicts his own death and resurrection.

02:19:02.000 And then his disciples, they think it's over.

02:19:07.000 They're like, he's dead.

02:19:09.000 We're done.

02:19:10.000 And then they go from 11 scared men, because Judas commits suicide, scared men in an upper room to completely overhauling the Roman world in only a couple hundred years because of this claim that they say They saw Jesus resurrected. 0.65

02:19:28.000 Like, there's something different that goes on there.

02:19:31.000 That they're like, this is a miracle, right?

02:19:34.000 Dead people don't usually rise from the dead.

02:19:36.000 So, what is your personal belief when it comes to the resurrection?

02:19:41.000 What do you think?

02:19:43.000 Do you have a belief or do you just try to interpret the text and try to see what is the message?

02:19:51.000 Well, I think, so...

02:19:52.000 As a historian, I do think it is a historical question.

02:19:55.000 You have a guy who objectively lived, he objectively died, and then individuals close to his inner circle claim that they see him not dead.

02:20:06.000 Right.

02:20:07.000 Again.

02:20:07.000 This is a highly unusual activity.

02:20:09.000 Highly unusual.

02:20:11.000 Right.

02:20:11.000 So, but it's hard when you're dealing with illiterate populations, you're dealing with thousands of years of time, you're dealing with an oral tradition.

02:20:22.000 And then you have us sitting here talking about it in 2024, trying to figure it at the end of 2024, trying to figure this out, literally the end.

02:20:33.000 Yeah.

02:20:33.000 Last couple of days.

02:20:34.000 It's very difficult for anybody who thinks of themselves as an intelligent person who's secular to even entertain the possibility that someone died and come back to life.

02:20:48.000 And I get that.

02:20:49.000 But we've already talked about the fact that we don't think that the only thing that exists is matter in motion.

02:20:53.000 We as in you and I, right?

02:20:54.000 Like, we believe that there's something else going on in this world that's a little bit crazy.

02:20:59.000 There's something else.

02:21:00.000 And that to, I think, exclude that, I think exclude something that you're kind of putting blinders on.

02:21:08.000 Yeah.

02:21:08.000 Four.

02:21:09.000 And you do have, I mean, you're right in terms of all of these ancient conventions and the ways that things were spread around.

02:21:15.000 But the Gospels are written in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses.

02:21:18.000 And they're written in this period of time where you have groups of individuals who could have fact-checked those things.

02:21:25.000 How do you fact-check someone coming back from the dead?

02:21:28.000 Well, if you...

02:21:29.000 How many people saw his body, right?

02:21:31.000 Well, Paul says that 400 people saw him all at once.

02:21:33.000 400 people saw the crucifixion?

02:21:35.000 No, saw the resurrected Jesus.

02:21:38.000 Yeah, 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says that Jesus appeared to the disciples, and then he appeared to 400 people all at once.

02:21:46.000 I mean, if we read the Gospel of Luke and Acts, so same author wrote these both documents, he says that Jesus was walking around teaching them for 40 days after he was resurrected from the dead.

02:22:00.000 And so...

02:22:01.000 These are written within a time period when you have people who would have seen Jesus' ministry, who were there, say, at something like the feeding of the 5,000, who could have been able to verify or debunk some of these things that are being said.

02:22:17.000 And you go from a bunch of scared guys who, because Jesus wasn't the only messianic figure who arose and claimed to be the Messiah.

02:22:28.000 There were a number of...

02:22:30.000 Individuals both prior to and after Jesus.

02:22:32.000 But they die and the movement dies with them.

02:22:35.000 Do you think it's possible that he didn't die?

02:22:38.000 And do you think it's possible that they thought he was dead?

02:22:41.000 Because that does happen.

02:22:43.000 There was actually a case very recently where a guy was about to be harvested for organs.

02:22:50.000 They thought he was dead and this guy started moving again and came back to life.

02:22:57.000 It's a very, very bizarre case because his family had been told that he was going to be harvested for organs.

02:23:04.000 They were preparing for that.

02:23:06.000 Yeah.

02:23:07.000 This guy comes back.

02:23:08.000 Yeah.

02:23:08.000 I mean, we know a lot about Roman crucifixion.

02:23:10.000 Pretty brutal.

02:23:11.000 And we know that they did their job well.

02:23:14.000 Yeah.

02:23:15.000 And so, in fact, if you look at, say, very skeptical biblical scholars, like non-believing... 0.75

02:23:22.000 Atheist, agnostic, Christian scholars, they will say if we can know anything about Jesus, like they'll cast a doubt on a lot of the things that we read about in the Gospels in terms of the actual historical Jesus of Nazareth, they'll say one thing we can be sure of is that he died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.

02:23:37.000 Because we have not just multiple detested documents that we refer to as the New Testament, but Roman and Greek and Jewish writers refer to that claim afterwards and talk about the fact that You have this guy.

02:23:51.000 And it's mocked within earliest Christianity.

02:23:54.000 So one of our earliest, in fact, not one of, the earliest depiction of Jesus on the cross is called the Alexa Menos Grafito.

02:24:02.000 And it's probably from the end of the first century.

02:24:05.000 And it depicts an individual with their arms raised in an act of worship, worshiping a man with a donkey's head who's being crucified.

02:24:16.000 And right beside it, it says, Alexa Menos worships his god in Greek.

02:24:20.000 And it's mocking, right?

02:24:22.000 Because crucifixion was for the lowest of the low.

02:24:24.000 It was for, like, slaves.

02:24:26.000 In fact, if you were a Roman citizen, you were banned from being crucified.

02:24:30.000 Who was it that got crucified upside down?

02:24:32.000 Peter.

02:24:34.000 Was it because, like, regular crucifixion wasn't good enough for him?

02:24:37.000 Or he didn't deserve it because Christ had gone through it?

02:24:40.000 Well, so the story is that they say, we're going to crucify you, and he says, it's, like, too big of an honor to die like my Lord, and they say, well, we can fix that.

02:24:46.000 Oh, Jesus. 0.99

02:24:48.000 Shut your mouth, buddy. 0.99

02:24:49.000 Listen, the Romans were pretty brutal. 1.00

02:24:53.000 Oh, yeah, man.

02:24:53.000 But this is why we know, like, we have...

02:24:55.000 It's interesting.

02:24:56.000 We know a lot about crucifixion, but crucifixion was seen as so disgusting.

02:25:01.000 I believe it was Cicero who said that, like, the word crucifixion shouldn't even be on a Roman man's lips.

02:25:07.000 I mean, the word excruciating, ex is off of in Latin, and cruce, off the cross.

02:25:15.000 So that's where we get that word, is because this was designed to humiliate, and it was designed to be as painful as possible.

02:25:22.000 There was actually a really good article done by JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, which was done by a number of, I think it was in the 70s, early 80s.

02:25:32.000 It was done by a group of biblical scholars and then medical professionals.

02:25:37.000 And so they looked at the conventions of what we do know about Roman crucifixion, and then they looked at the descriptions in the gospel to try to figure out, okay, if we could diagnose how Jesus died, how would he have died?

02:25:49.000 And so they basically came up with this idea that he probably asphyxiated to death.

02:25:54.000 You kind of drown in your own blood.

02:25:58.000 But the chances of Jesus surviving the crucifixion, I think, are narrow to none.

02:26:06.000 And the chance of him appearing three days later, completely fine.

02:26:13.000 I mean, you don't...

02:26:14.000 If the first thing you do, if you survive a crucifixion and then you go and you find your disciples, the first thing you say is not, you know, peace be with you.

02:26:22.000 It's, get me to a hospital.

02:26:24.000 Right?

02:26:25.000 Do they have them back then?

02:26:26.000 No, not really.

02:26:27.000 Are we entirely certain of their measurement of days?

02:26:32.000 So this is an interesting question because of the differences between when the Gospel of John says Jesus died compared to the synoptics, because John appears to be using the Roman convention of counting time, and the other Gospels, when they describe the timing, appear and the other Gospels, when they describe the timing, appear to be using the Jewish ones.

02:26:52.000 And actually, if you correlate between the two, they match up pretty well.

02:26:59.000 So, the thing is, with Jews, any part of a day was considered a day. 0.97

02:27:05.000 So three days and three nights becomes almost an idiom for any part of that day is the day.

02:27:11.000 So if Jesus, and because they count evening and morning, evening to morning is the day, it's very possible that it wasn't like how we would think of three 24-hour days, especially if he dies on Friday and wakes up on Sunday.

02:27:28.000 So that would actually make it less time than more time.

02:27:31.000 Yeah.

02:27:32.000 So it's not like he had recovery time.

02:27:34.000 Oh, no, he did not recover.

02:27:36.000 That's what I'm saying.

02:27:37.000 It's not like it was three days.

02:27:38.000 It was actually three months.

02:27:39.000 Oh, no, no, no.

02:27:41.000 So then 400 people saw him afterwards.

02:27:45.000 That's the claim that Paul makes.

02:27:47.000 Paul makes this claim.

02:27:48.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:27:49.000 And how many different people have some sort of a recollection or a writing or something that's a tribute to them of being witness to his resurrection?

02:28:02.000 Peter, Paul, Jude, James, and Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

02:28:06.000 The thing with Matthew, Mark, and Luke is that Matthew and Luke, or Matthew and John, are attributed to direct disciples of Jesus.

02:28:15.000 Luke and Mark are not.

02:28:16.000 So they are not eyewitnesses within the Jesus community.

02:28:20.000 In fact, Luke prefaces his gospel by saying that.

02:28:23.000 He's right up front about this.

02:28:24.000 He's like, hey, I'm not an eyewitness.

02:28:25.000 Don't confuse me with an eyewitness.

02:28:27.000 But he actually uses conventional writing.

02:28:35.000 What's the term I'm looking for?

02:28:36.000 He uses writing conventions of the day that would fit within regular biography that was written within the Roman world.

02:28:44.000 So you have a guy named Quintilian who is basically...

02:28:48.000 I mentioned him before.

02:28:51.000 He's teaching people how to write.

02:28:52.000 And he says that if you're going to write biography...

02:28:55.000 You need to be interviewing eyewitnesses and you can't be too far away from the event to be able to write these things.

02:29:06.000 And Josephus, who are all these very prominent ancient biographers and writers of history, have a lot of crossover in the way they describe how you should write history with the words that Luke uses at the beginning of his Gospel, where he says, I'm interviewing eyewitnesses and I'm writing up an orderly account.

02:29:22.000 And so he's saying, you know, I'm going to use these methods that are expected as good history of my day.

02:29:29.000 I'm not an eyewitness, so I'm going to try to find the people who are eyewitnesses, and I'm going to try to encapsulate this within a document that communicates what is being written.

02:29:41.000 So we have an account of the resurrection.

02:29:43.000 Do we have an account of the denial of the resurrection?

02:29:46.000 Is there an historical record of him just dying and this like a refutal or rebuttal rather to what they're saying?

02:29:55.000 No, the only ones from the ancient world that deny his resurrection are groups that come on afterwards that sometimes are described as Gnostics.

02:30:06.000 And they're not necessarily just denying it for the reasons we might think they were.

02:30:11.000 They're denying it because they have incorporated ideas of pagan philosophy, where they believe that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad.

02:30:20.000 So if Jesus was crucified, he—so let me back up.

02:30:24.000 If Jesus is God, he cannot have a physical body.

02:30:27.000 So they deny that he actually had a physicality to him.

02:30:30.000 This is sometimes called docetism because docene in Greek means to seem.

02:30:35.000 So these groups that we describe as the docetics, they are denying that Jesus had a physical body.

02:30:42.000 He only seemed to have a physical body.

02:30:44.000 And they wrote documents later on.

02:30:47.000 So the Gospel of Peter, which comes around in, you know, second, third, fourth centuries, is being written and it has Jesus kind of chilling on the cross because he's not really physical because he's divine and physical entities.

02:31:02.000 We don't actually get like a concrete denial of his resurrection in that way until you get things like the Gospel of Barnabas in the Middle Ages, which is actually the document that Billy brought up to me in the conversation we had, is the evidence that Jesus was never crucified, the Gospel of Barnabas.

02:31:21.000 Well, the Gospel of Barnabas is 15th century.

02:31:23.000 It paraphrases Dante's Inferno.

02:31:25.000 It's not an ancient document.

02:31:30.000 Nobody really had that big of a problem with these kind of supernatural claims.

02:31:36.000 The more of the kind of skepticism was why you would worship a crucified individual to begin with.

02:31:43.000 So they were less surprised that he was resurrected.

02:31:47.000 Or that you would worship a crucified, like, teacher.

02:31:56.000 Because it's so humiliating to be crucified.

02:31:59.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:32:00.000 And that, like, a god would let himself go through this?

02:32:04.000 Right.

02:32:04.000 Like, what are you talking about?

02:32:06.000 In fact, the ancient world didn't really have a problem with supernatural events.

02:32:12.000 There is an ancient writer who mocks Christianity, and he particularly mocks Christianity in saying that, of course, Jesus did miracles, because Jesus had a childhood in Egypt.

02:32:23.000 And he goes, all those Egyptians are magicians anyways. 1.00

02:32:26.000 So he just learned the magic when he was a child.

02:32:28.000 So he actually confirms, incidentally, two things.

02:32:33.000 That the narrative in the Gospels where it says that the Holy Family fled to Egypt during the reign of Herod.

02:32:40.000 He corroborates that he actually thinks that happened and that Jesus did miracles.

02:32:44.000 He just attributes the miracles to Jesus being a traveling magician anyways.

02:32:48.000 And anybody who lived in Egypt knows some magic.

02:32:51.000 That is what's really fascinating, that the mindset of the people that lived back then was that whatever was going on in Egypt was so crazy that they had to be magicians.

02:33:00.000 Yeah.

02:33:01.000 Yeah, but everybody believed in supernatural events.

02:33:04.000 Like, there's no such thing as...

02:33:06.000 Like a secular work in the ancient world.

02:33:09.000 Even Plutarch, who's one of the most famous biographers in the ancient world, he wrote 90 biographies, of which 60 still survive today.

02:33:16.000 He was a priest of Apollo.

02:33:18.000 So like, he's already assuming that the gods exist, that crazy things are going to happen in the world.

02:33:25.000 And so they didn't have a problem with people.

02:33:30.000 Doing miracles or crazy things happening or...

02:33:34.000 Well, that's also why it's so interesting trying to put your mind into the context of people that live back then when you try to interpret what these stories were all about because they did believe in things that weren't real.

02:33:47.000 So when they talk about this thing that we're supposed to believe is real, when you have all this evidence that they believe things that aren't true, it's interesting, right?

02:33:57.000 Because like...

02:33:58.000 You're now saying, yeah, but this one really was true.

02:34:01.000 Right.

02:34:02.000 Well, there's so many different things that they thought of and believed that weren't true.

02:34:06.000 Yeah.

02:34:06.000 So this, historiographically, is...

02:34:09.000 So when we do history, it's an inference to the best explanation.

02:34:13.000 And so there are probabilities of things that have happened in history where we can say, okay, there's a higher probability of event A happening and a lower probability of event B happening.

02:34:22.000 So the example I often give is like Jonah being swallowed by the fish.

02:34:27.000 That's low probabilistically.

02:34:29.000 Not that it didn't happen, but that, like, as a historian, we gotta, like, say, well, there's no independent cross-reference sources.

02:34:36.000 You don't have multiple attestation for this particular event.

02:34:40.000 The interesting thing about Jesus is that we have more evidence from different writings in the ancient world than we probably should have for someone of his stature.

02:34:56.000 We have Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John, these four biographies.

02:35:01.000 There's really only one other person in and around that time that can claim to have that much kind of independent testimony of their life, and it's the Roman Emperor Tiberius.

02:35:13.000 So he also has four biographers.

02:35:15.000 He has Cassio Dio, Suetonius Tacitus, and Vilius Paterculus.

02:35:22.000 And so the Roman Emperor, who's the most...

02:35:25.000 Famous, most powerful person at the time has a similar amount of historiographical evidence biographically for the events of his lifetime that Jesus does.

02:35:37.000 What is the interpretation of Jesus from non-Jesus followers at the time?

02:35:44.000 What did they think he was or who he was?

02:35:47.000 He was a crucified traveling rabbi. 0.88

02:35:49.000 Yeah, I mean, you have individuals like Josephus mentions him, end of the first century, beginning of the second century.

02:35:57.000 He was a Jewish Roman writer.

02:36:01.000 Tacitus mentions him, who also wrote about the emperor.

02:36:05.000 And, you know, you have a number of these individuals, Cassius or Suetonius.

02:36:09.000 But what they're doing mostly is describing what the followers of Christianity are saying about him.

02:36:16.000 So you do have to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt in that they're not saying things that they believe happened.

02:36:21.000 They're talking about things that Christians believe happened.

02:36:27.000 And Christians are this very unusual group because they're monotheistic in a world that does not believe in monotheism. 0.54

02:36:35.000 And Jews are monotheistic in that time as well.

02:36:39.000 But there was this idea that your religion could be tied to your ethnicity, and that was okay. 1.00

02:36:44.000 Like the Jews believe in one God and that's weird, but they're Jews. 0.97

02:36:49.000 Whereas the Christians start to convert people who are of all different ethnic backgrounds.

02:36:55.000 And so they're like, well, what the heck is going on here?

02:36:57.000 Because why are you saying...

02:37:00.000 So the earliest criticisms of Christianity were actually that it was atheistic.

02:37:04.000 Ah being the negative participle and theos meaning God, right?

02:37:09.000 Because the ancient world was polytheistic.

02:37:11.000 But more than that, it was what's sometimes referred to as henotheism in that it's not that they believe in many gods.

02:37:18.000 It's that they believe in many gods and your gods could be my gods, right?

02:37:23.000 Jupiter could be Zeus.

02:37:25.000 Just the same god by a different name.

02:37:27.000 And your cities could have gods, right?

02:37:30.000 Osiris and Ra can live in Egypt.

02:37:32.000 And Zeus and Athena can live here.

02:37:35.000 And that doesn't compromise anything.

02:37:37.000 But then the Christians are coming around and they're saying, actually, no, none of those gods exist. 0.85

02:37:42.000 If they exist, then they're demons.

02:37:44.000 But they don't actually exist.

02:37:47.000 And this was a big point of persecution within early Christianity.

02:37:51.000 Is that...

02:37:52.000 A lot of physical events were tied to supernatural events.

02:37:55.000 So there's an ancient historian who has this line where he says, if the Nile River is too high in Egypt or the Tiber River is too low in Rome, the cry will ring out the Christians to the lions.

02:38:10.000 Because if you have, say, a famine in Athens and they're going, okay, what's the reason for the famine?

02:38:17.000 Well, Athena's mad because there's a bunch of... 0.90

02:38:21.000 People running around saying she doesn't exist.

02:38:23.000 Okay, well, let's deal with them.

02:38:25.000 Let's get rid of them, and that'll solve our issue. 0.87

02:38:30.000 So Christians were this very oddball group. 1.00

02:38:33.000 Kind of crazy that it wound up taking over the area.

02:38:36.000 Well, that's part of, I think, the argument of, well, how do you explain that?

02:38:40.000 How do you explain it going...

02:38:43.000 From 11 scared disciples in an upper room to being willing to go out and die for the proclamation that you believe that Jesus rose from the dead and you saw him and you touched him and you ate with him.

02:38:57.000 And, you know, he wasn't a ghost.

02:38:58.000 You actually ate fish with the resurrected Jesus.

02:39:01.000 How does Constantine fit into this?

02:39:04.000 Like, what is Constantine's education in Christianity?

02:39:07.000 Yeah, so Constantine is a pagan.

02:39:09.000 Up until a point in time when he converts.

02:39:14.000 Who educates him?

02:39:16.000 Good question.

02:39:16.000 I don't know in terms of his education.

02:39:19.000 I know he does have some crossover with some prominent Christians later on.

02:39:24.000 He's a sun worshiper.

02:39:26.000 But right before...

02:39:30.000 Right before Constantine, you had a guy named Diocletian, who was the emperor, who basically had the goal of wiping out Christianity entirely.

02:39:39.000 And so the worst point of persecution was under the Diocletian rule.

02:39:44.000 He actually made it so that if you had to go into the equivalent of your town hall, and you had to take a pinch of incense and offer it onto the altar of Caesar, him, Right?

02:40:00.000 The king.

02:40:01.000 And say, Caesar is Lord.

02:40:05.000 And part of this was that they knew that Christians say, Jesus is Lord.

02:40:12.000 And Christians wouldn't do that. 1.00

02:40:14.000 So here's how you outed them.

02:40:15.000 And if you didn't do this, so if you did do it, you were given this piece of paper.

02:40:20.000 It's called a libelus.

02:40:21.000 And a libelus allowed you to buy and sell.

02:40:24.000 If you didn't do it, you didn't get a libelus, which meant that you were not allowed to buy and sell.

02:40:29.000 Wow.

02:40:29.000 And so you have this incredible era of persecution where Christians are being like killed and Christian literature in particular is being destroyed because they're hunting it out.

02:40:40.000 So Constantine comes after this and he knows that this is bad for Roman society.

02:40:47.000 And so him and Licinius get together.

02:40:50.000 They're both ruling the Roman Empire at the time.

02:40:54.000 And in 313, they...

02:40:56.000 Put out this edict of tolerance, which includes Christianity. 1.00

02:41:01.000 So it's called the Edict of Milan, and it decriminalizes Christianity. 0.90

02:41:05.000 So it's no longer illegal to be a Christian.

02:41:07.000 What was their motivation?

02:41:09.000 I think they just felt like in order to establish peace within the empire, you need to make sure that people aren't fearing you constantly to that degree.

02:41:22.000 And so...

02:41:24.000 It wasn't just Christianity that benefited from the Edict of Milan.

02:41:27.000 A number of religious minority groups were benefited from this particular event.

02:41:36.000 But this happens.

02:41:39.000 Between 313 and 325, Constantine converts.

02:41:44.000 And so he becomes friendly to Christians.

02:41:48.000 He also commissions.

02:41:52.000 Books of the Bible to be written.

02:41:54.000 And so this is where we first get our understanding.

02:41:57.000 Like when we think of a Bible, we think of it as like in a single bound volume.

02:42:02.000 Like because we have the 66 books of the Bible and, you know, has a nice cover on the page or on the front.

02:42:08.000 But in the ancient world, those existed independently.

02:42:12.000 So like P52, like that would be a separate copy of the Gospel of John.

02:42:16.000 And that's what it would...

02:42:18.000 Well, Constantine, as like a peace offering, commissions all of these documents to be brought together and published in one book.

02:42:28.000 And so we actually have what we think are some of these documents.

02:42:33.000 So when I was talking with Billy Carson, he brought up the Sinai Bible, Codex Sinaiticus.

02:42:39.000 Codex Sinaiticus is probably one of these Documents that Constantine commissioned.

02:42:45.000 Because it's one of our earliest examples of a cover-to-cover Genesis to Revelation copy of the Bible.

02:42:51.000 And it comes from the 4th century.

02:42:54.000 And based on both its dating and based on the fact that this would have been incredibly expensive to make.

02:43:02.000 Like it took 360 sheep just to put together.

02:43:06.000 Which would have been the equivalent of like, I don't know, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars today.

02:43:12.000 The reason why we're pretty sure that documents like Codex Anaticus, Codex Vaticanus, potentially even Codex Alexandrinus or Codex Washingtonianus are documents that could have been part of this commissioning is just because they're such giant projects.

02:43:33.000 Very few people would have had the ability to produce something like this other than an emperor.

02:43:41.000 And so we actually have some of these documents that survive today.

02:43:46.000 Are there any books that were decided?

02:43:50.000 And how did they pick the order that these stories are in the Bible?

02:43:54.000 And are there any books that were excluded?

02:43:57.000 Yes.

02:43:57.000 Where there's debate on it?

02:43:58.000 Yeah.

02:43:58.000 Great question.

02:43:59.000 So this is the issue of what's sometimes called the canon of Scripture.

02:44:03.000 Right.

02:44:03.000 So very early on when you have Christians having these conversations, The four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, there's unanimous agreement about those.

02:44:15.000 Particularly, and that's not to say that there aren't other Gospels that pop up.

02:44:20.000 It's that you have this chain of custody that goes back to the earliest Jesus community.

02:44:25.000 Jesus has disciples, and there's a group of individuals who we call the apostolic fathers who are the disciples of Jesus' disciples.

02:44:32.000 And so they comment on the books that the disciples of Jesus or that people within the community of the disciples of Jesus wrote.

02:44:40.000 And so we actually have a very close connection to the time.

02:44:43.000 And we see early on that you have guys like...

02:44:50.000 Ignatius of Antioch, arguing that there are only four Gospels in the second century, and there couldn't be any more than four.

02:44:56.000 Or Theophilus of Antioch makes the similar argument, and they name Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

02:45:01.000 Now, Ignatius of Antioch also talks about other Gospels, but he specifically highlights the fact that the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Truth, Gospel of the Hebrews, Gospel of these ones that we kind of hear about, Mary, Judas, that the reason we know that they're not associated with The names that are attached to them is because they're being written in times when those people were dead.

02:45:24.000 And they have these rings of pagan philosophy that are incorporated into them, which is completely foreign to first century Judaism.

02:45:33.000 So Jesus would not have.

02:45:35.000 So in the Gospel of James, Jesus is worshipping a goddess named Sophia.

02:45:40.000 It's like, okay, well, no first century Jew is going to do that. 1.00

02:45:44.000 That's obviously paganism.

02:45:45.000 And so we have these early conversations.

02:45:49.000 But when Christians are thinking about, well, what is and isn't Scripture, the earliest Christians are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah.

02:45:58.000 And the Jews had this idea that the promises of God are followed up by the writings, the documents that establish those.

02:46:10.000 So the word that's often used is covenant.

02:46:12.000 Right?

02:46:12.000 God makes a covenant with people, and that's always followed up by written text.

02:46:16.000 So this is why sometimes, well, in the case of Moses, it's literally inscribed on a tablet, right?

02:46:21.000 And in the prophets, sometimes you get this command, write this on a scroll, inscribe this on a tablet.

02:46:27.000 And that the Jewish scriptures in Jesus' day were seen as a story in search of a conclusion.

02:46:38.000 Because they were looking for this figure, this Mashiach, the Messiah, who would come and fulfill things like the reign of David.

02:46:47.000 So they're talking about these things.

02:46:49.000 They're actually expecting them to happen.

02:46:52.000 And so the story in search of a conclusion in the Christian understanding is that Jesus is that individual.

02:47:00.000 He comes and he does things like he says at the Last Supper, right before his crucifixion, that he's establishing a new covenant in his blood.

02:47:08.000 And so the earliest Christians, mostly who are Jews, who believe in Jesus as the Messiah, they see, okay, there's a new covenant, which is actually promised in Jeremiah 31, 31, when God says that he's going to make a new covenant and inscribe the law on people's hearts.

02:47:24.000 That covenant has come.

02:47:26.000 Okay, the promises have come.

02:47:27.000 So the earliest Christians very organically say, okay, where's the writing? 0.75

02:47:32.000 Because we expect this to happen.

02:47:35.000 Promises are followed up by writings.

02:47:36.000 And so they start to have these conversations of what are the writings and where can we find them?

02:47:43.000 And so very early on, because the New Testament has 27 books in it, very early on, 24 of the 27 are unanimously accepted.

02:47:53.000 So by the time you get to the middle of the second century, we have lists in documents like there's a document called the Meritorium Fragment.

02:48:01.000 Which there's debate on its dating, but it's probably like mid to late second century.

02:48:06.000 And it includes 24 of the 27. And it gives reasoning why.

02:48:12.000 Now, the other books that are in our New Testament that aren't in that 24 are ones that were discussed because the earliest Christians were trying to figure out, okay, can we tie this to either an apostle or someone who knew an apostle?

02:48:28.000 Because we have a lot of books.

02:48:30.000 Flying around with the names of John and Peter on them.

02:48:35.000 So you have the Acts of Peter, and you have the Revelation of Peter, and you have the Gospels of Peter, and you have...

02:48:41.000 So how do we do our due diligence to try to tie this back?

02:48:45.000 So there's two letters of Peter, 1 and 2 Peter, in the New Testament.

02:48:50.000 And the early Christians are like, we've got to make sure we can tie these to Peter.

02:48:54.000 Or the book of Jude and the book of James, which are ascribed to the brothers of Jesus.

02:49:00.000 They were like, can we really say that those are written by those people?

02:49:05.000 And so there are some books that the dust kind of takes time to settle on within the whole 27 canon because these groups are debating and discussing, you know, well, why do we have these ones and not other ones?

02:49:25.000 And so there are various canon lists.

02:49:29.000 That come up throughout the ancient world where some people are hypothesizing, well, maybe, you know, this book is part of it or maybe this book is part of it.

02:49:36.000 But it's this ongoing conversation of people.

02:49:39.000 And by basically the end of the second century, we have more or less unanimous agreement of the 27 books being those that encapsulate scripture that can be tied to either someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus.

02:49:53.000 And so these books that were not included, are any of them interesting?

02:49:58.000 Those are all interesting.

02:49:59.000 But does any of it seem like it belongs in the New Testament?

02:50:04.000 Well, so part of the problem with some of these other books is they appear to be almost completely reliant on the other books.

02:50:11.000 So you do have, and some of them have an agenda to them.

02:50:16.000 So like the Docetic Gospel of Peter seems to be uncomfortable with the fact that the biblical gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, have women being the first witnesses to the empty tomb.

02:50:27.000 Because in the ancient world, women were not seen as good eyewitnesses.

02:50:31.000 So you almost have this apologetic trying to solve that problem by having all the right people be witness to the resurrection.

02:50:38.000 So you have all the Roman and Jewish officials camping out in front of the tomb, which also gives away the fact that no Jewish priest on the eve of Passover is going to be camping out in front of a dead body.

02:50:52.000 Like they didn't do that.

02:50:53.000 So it betrays that the author of the Gospel of Peter has no understanding of purity ritual rites within first century Second Temple Judaism, but is also clearly trying to remedy this embarrassing fact.

02:51:09.000 Wow.

02:51:10.000 That's what's so interesting about trying to interpret this stuff.

02:51:14.000 You have to think about it in the terms of the culture of the times.

02:51:18.000 Yeah.

02:51:19.000 And one of the...

02:51:20.000 Most interesting ways that we figure out, okay, how can we tie, say, the Gospel of Matthew to the first century in Judea, is studies that have been done on name frequency.

02:51:33.000 So this is called onomastic congruence, where we look at the most popular names within a particular geographical area, and we compare it to how names are differentiated.

02:51:46.000 So the name Joe...

02:51:50.000 It's pretty common.

02:51:51.000 So when you have a room and there's more than one Joe, you differentiate.

02:51:57.000 Okay?

02:51:57.000 That's Joe Rogan.

02:51:58.000 Or, you know, that's MMA Joe.

02:52:00.000 You know, we figure out a way to do it.

02:52:02.000 And that's called a disambiguator.

02:52:04.000 And we see this in the New Testament.

02:52:06.000 I mean, you have lots of Peters.

02:52:08.000 Right?

02:52:08.000 You have Simon Peter.

02:52:10.000 You have Peter the Canaanite. 0.71

02:52:14.000 You have, you know, or...

02:52:18.000 Or James, the son of Zebedee. 0.52

02:52:19.000 Or you have lots of Marys.

02:52:21.000 So you have these disambiguities.

02:52:22.000 You even have lots of Jesuses, which is why Jesus is often described as the Lord Jesus or Jesus of Nazareth, because Yehoshua is a common Jewish name.

02:52:33.000 And so we can look at the popularity of names written in documents and actually pinpoint some of these documents to particular times and particular places.

02:52:41.000 In fact, Jamie, are you able to, if you go on Apologetics Canada, Our YouTube page.

02:52:48.000 So the first episode of the Can I Trust the Bible series we did, we made an animation about this where we looked at the data and then we actually compared it to one of these other Gospels, the Gospel of Judas.

02:53:00.000 And so in the first episode of Can I Trust the Bible in the right books, partway through, it's near the end, the last animation, if you can find it, we had a guy put this together for us where we...

02:53:15.000 Looked at the studies, and there have been some really recent ones by a guy named Luke Vanderway, who published this in, I believe it was at Cambridge.

02:53:26.000 No, no, no.

02:53:27.000 Birmingham University, he did his PhD on it, and he narrowed the gap within all of these literary bodies that talk about names, and were able to pinpoint and actually show.

02:53:39.000 Yeah, so if you go to...

02:53:42.000 Yeah, right here.

02:53:45.000 A series of scholarly studies has shown that, though Jews were located in many places across the Roman Empire, people's names often tended to be geographically located.

02:53:56.000 By observing literary and archaeological artifacts, a list of common names can be clearly identified.

02:54:01.000 By narrowing down the most popular names in places that Jesus lived, traveled, and ministered, and by comparing these to the list from the studies, An interesting correlation can be seen.

02:54:13.000 Just as we see today with popular names, a qualifier or nickname is often used.

02:54:19.000 For example, notice that when Matthew lists the disciples in his gospel, certain names have a qualifier or nickname and others do not.

02:54:28.000 Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector, James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus.

02:54:43.000 As we would expect, the most popular names are those that have an added description.

02:54:49.000 When we compare the most popular names in Judea and Galilee during the first century with names we see listed in key places in the biblical gospels, we find that all the names with qualifiers match with what we'd assume if they were actually written in the time and place they claim to be narrating.

02:55:07.000 In contrast...

02:55:09.000 The Gospel of Judas only has two names that would fit, Jesus and Judas, but contains a host of other characters whose names match not with 1st century Judea or Galilee, like the biblical gospels, but with names that were popular in Egypt during the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

02:55:26.000 Consider how difficult it would be for someone living outside of the locations and times that these events took place to get the right names with the right qualifiers.

02:55:35.000 We have four biblical gospels, with four different authors, and yet each gets this test of naming frequency and attribution right every time.

02:55:45.000 A test and standard that the non-biblical gospels simply do not pass.

02:55:52.000 That's interesting.

02:55:53.000 That is so interesting.

02:55:55.000 Isn't it?

02:55:56.000 God, that's so interesting.

02:55:57.000 It totally makes sense, too.

02:56:00.000 Yeah, so it's the levels of methodology that we can use to find internal accuracy.

02:56:05.000 If we really want to figure out, okay, where was this written?

02:56:08.000 And is it coming from early eyewitness testimony?

02:56:10.000 We look at something like the biblical gospels, and they fit the bill for something that's written in first century Judea.

02:56:16.000 But if we look at something like the other gospels, they're doing things like the Gospel of Judas does, where...

02:56:22.000 Other characters are coming up with names that are almost either non-existent or very unpopular in places like Judea and Galilee, but are popular in 3rd and 4th century Egypt.

02:56:34.000 So what can we then conclude from that?

02:56:36.000 Well, this is being written in 3rd or 4th century Egypt.

02:56:39.000 Right.

02:56:40.000 Yeah.

02:56:40.000 Wow.

02:56:42.000 That's really amazing.

02:56:44.000 It's such a complex and fascinating subject.

02:56:48.000 It really is.

02:56:49.000 And I think it's because of the barrier to entry.

02:56:53.000 It's so high.

02:56:55.000 There's so much to learn.

02:56:56.000 There's so much to dig.

02:56:57.000 Most people barely scratch the surface of this stuff.

02:57:00.000 And it takes someone like you to really kind of...

02:57:03.000 Because it's like real easy to lean into the fun stuff.

02:57:07.000 It's real easy to lean into the Anunnaki stuff. 1.00

02:57:10.000 But the actual real shit that we know is 100%. 0.96

02:57:15.000 The accounts of people that lived back then, that to me is as fascinating, if not more, than even We Were Made by Aliens. 0.98

02:57:24.000 All of it is bizarre.

02:57:26.000 And the fact that we're still going over these texts...

02:57:31.000 Thousands of years later is also fascinating.

02:57:34.000 Yeah.

02:57:35.000 And lots of this stuff, like the onomastic congruence is something that has really only been studied to the level that it has within the last like 50 years.

02:57:43.000 Wow.

02:57:43.000 So we're constantly discovering ways that we can use different types of methodological analysis to figure out the historical validity of something.

02:57:52.000 So this is, we call it verisimilitude, which is historians are looking for What can show us the appearance, likelihood, and probability of something being true?

02:58:03.000 And so sometimes documents out themselves as being unreliable and not true because they inadvertently include these clues.

02:58:14.000 So the Gospel of Barnabas, which I mentioned before, which Billy Carson has brought up as an evidence that he sees as denying the crucifixion, it talks about Jesus getting in a boat and traveling to Nazareth.

02:58:25.000 But Nazareth is landlocked.

02:58:28.000 So, that person clearly did not know anything about the geography of, like, first century Israel, because you're not getting in a boat to go to Nazareth, right?

02:58:39.000 So, but if you're writing, you know, I mean, in the case of the Gospel of Barnabas, you're talking about, like, a thousand plus years later.

02:58:47.000 But if you've never been there, and you don't understand, it's like, have you ever seen middle-aged paintings of lions?

02:58:54.000 Yes.

02:58:55.000 Yeah.

02:58:56.000 They had no idea what they were.

02:58:57.000 Well, we brought that up the other day because I was in Ravello.

02:59:01.000 Okay.

02:59:01.000 And there's a church, an ancient church in Ravello, and it has a depiction of the whale.

02:59:07.000 Right.

02:59:08.000 And the whale doesn't look anything like a whale.

02:59:09.000 Like, it has wings.

02:59:11.000 Yeah.

02:59:11.000 It looks like a lion's head.

02:59:12.000 It's so weird.

02:59:13.000 Yeah.

02:59:14.000 Well, a lot of the Middle Ages, throughout the Middle Ages.

02:59:16.000 There it is.

02:59:16.000 Yeah, that's crazy.

02:59:17.000 I mean, it looks like a dragon.

02:59:18.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:59:19.000 Crazy. 0.63

02:59:20.000 And lions look a lot like dogs. 0.70

02:59:22.000 Yeah.

02:59:22.000 Because they're like, what's your frame of reference?

02:59:25.000 Right, right, right.

02:59:26.000 And also you're getting someone describing it to an artist.

02:59:29.000 Yeah.

02:59:29.000 You probably can't paint it.

02:59:30.000 Yeah.

02:59:30.000 So you have to describe it.

02:59:31.000 Yeah, it's like, yeah, yeah, that's what it looks like.

02:59:33.000 Yeah, yeah, tertiary, secondary.

02:59:35.000 So, and a lot of these writings kind of out themselves as that, literarily, within the things that they...

02:59:44.000 Choose to include.

02:59:45.000 Names are a small example, but geography or distances between places.

02:59:50.000 The biblical gospel is described going up to Jerusalem.

02:59:54.000 And we can kind of read that and not think anything about it.

02:59:57.000 But Jerusalem, on the elevation of sea level, you do go up to it.

03:00:02.000 And so it's like these small clues that we as historians are looking for, or on the parable of the Good Samaritan, it's going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.

03:00:11.000 And you literally, you go down like an elevation in sea level to go to Jericho.

03:00:18.000 Or the story of Zacchaeus, who's the guy who climbs a tree to see Jesus.

03:00:22.000 He's a wee little man.

03:00:24.000 He's short.

03:00:27.000 And he can't see over the crowd, and he hears this miracle worker, Jesus is coming, so he climbs a sycamore tree.

03:00:32.000 And the Gospels specifically say he climbs a sycamore tree.

03:00:36.000 Well, this can be like a detail we can pass over, but we know, based on kind of the acidity of the soils, that sycamore trees only grow in those areas in that, you know, time frame.

03:00:51.000 So we can look and see, okay, well, Luke, whoever Luke is getting this from, He's adding this detail.

03:00:58.000 Maybe he's not even aware of the significance of it.

03:01:01.000 But whoever he's getting this from has been there because they actually know what tree would have been growing there and tell him that Zacchaeus climbs a sycamore tree.

03:01:12.000 And so it's like fauna and flora and distance between locations, things that actually other ancient writers get wrong sometimes.

03:01:20.000 Have you ever had a debate with a snarky atheist? 1.00

03:01:24.000 Yeah.

03:01:24.000 I think that would be fun.

03:01:26.000 A formal debate?

03:01:28.000 No, not even a formal debate.

03:01:29.000 I think it would be a fascinating conversation because I'm sure...

03:01:32.000 Well, atheists, they vary just like Christians vary. 1.00

03:01:37.000 But the worst versions of them are essentially believers in the religion of atheism.

03:01:42.000 Right.

03:01:43.000 They worship the concept of there being no God.

03:01:46.000 This is it.

03:01:47.000 When you die, nothing happens.

03:01:49.000 Yeah.

03:01:50.000 That to me is always so arrogant.

03:01:52.000 Just the fact that you exist at all is so bizarre and so spectacular.

03:01:57.000 The idea that you know for sure that when the lights shut out that that's a wrap, because there's no evidence of the contrary.

03:02:05.000 Well, okay.

03:02:06.000 Kind of assuming your conclusion there.

03:02:08.000 Absence of evidence is not evidence.

03:02:10.000 Especially when you're talking about something that's as bizarre as death.

03:02:14.000 And especially when you have people that have near-death experiences that are radically similar.

03:02:19.000 Those are really weird.

03:02:21.000 They're really weird how many similarities people have in these near-death experiences from accidents and all sorts of things that people come back from where their heart stops beating.

03:02:31.000 They see themselves above their body.

03:02:33.000 There's a lot of weirdness to it.

03:02:35.000 That makes you... 0.96

03:02:36.000 I just think it's a little silly. 0.92

03:02:39.000 Because how could you know what you don't know?

03:02:41.000 You cannot know what you don't know.

03:02:43.000 And the problem is that there's a cachet, that there's a social credit amongst academics in particular that's ascribed to a person who is atheist.

03:02:58.000 A person who is...

03:03:00.000 He's brilliant.

03:03:01.000 He's not silly.

03:03:02.000 He doesn't believe in myths.

03:03:03.000 He doesn't...

03:03:05.000 I get it.

03:03:06.000 I get why there's social pressure in that regard.

03:03:09.000 I get it.

03:03:10.000 But to not look at the universe itself, just this creation engine of planets and stellar nurseries.

03:03:20.000 Right.

03:03:21.000 The bizarreness of the epicness of it all, and to not wonder if maybe you have a very narrow perception of what this whole thing is all about.

03:03:30.000 Yeah.

03:03:31.000 Deny the virgin birth, but not the virgin birth of the universe.

03:03:33.000 Yeah.

03:03:34.000 Well, all of it.

03:03:35.000 Like, everything.

03:03:37.000 Just the big...

03:03:40.000 There's so many more impressive miracles than any of the things that people think of in the body.

03:03:45.000 It's just they're so weird in our day and age that we're not willing to like...

03:03:51.000 We want to think that things are very clean and easy to measure, and they often are not.

03:04:00.000 And, you know, I think...

03:04:02.000 Most of what it means to be a human being in a meaningful way is not measurable.

03:04:09.000 Most of it.

03:04:10.000 Love and friendship and community.

03:04:12.000 These things are not very measurable.

03:04:14.000 They're very strange.

03:04:16.000 You know, the bond that people have with their family and their loved ones and it's very strange.

03:04:22.000 Yeah.

03:04:23.000 That love.

03:04:24.000 Whatever love is, whatever good is, it's a very real thing.

03:04:29.000 And it seems to not exist, certainly not in the volume in other animals that exist in us.

03:04:34.000 There's obviously nurturing in other animals.

03:04:37.000 They nurture their loved ones.

03:04:38.000 But their perception of life and death and all of it is very different than ours.

03:04:43.000 So it leads me to why?

03:04:45.000 Why?

03:04:46.000 Why is our...

03:04:49.000 Version of life so much more rich and complicated than any other being that exists and why do we have this insatiable desire to learn and know more?

03:05:01.000 Yeah.

03:05:01.000 What is it?

03:05:02.000 Why does this...

03:05:03.000 You know, however many, three pounds of gray matter in my brain.

03:05:06.000 Why is that able to plummet the intricacies of the universe? 0.98

03:05:10.000 Right.

03:05:11.000 Right?

03:05:12.000 Like, and I think that that's ultimately the questions that we should be asking in terms of you matter more than you are matter.

03:05:20.000 There's something going on.

03:05:21.000 There's something going on with all of us.

03:05:23.000 Yeah.

03:05:23.000 We kind of know it and we don't know it.

03:05:25.000 You know, but it's just...

03:05:27.000 You can't measure it, and you can't put it on a scale, and so people don't like that.

03:05:31.000 They don't like that. 0.93

03:05:32.000 It makes them feel dumb to believe in that. 0.99

03:05:34.000 It makes them feel dumb to even speculate, you know? 0.99

03:05:38.000 To even just say, what do you think happens when you die?

03:05:40.000 Like, even that conversation is like, people don't like that.

03:05:43.000 Nothing.

03:05:44.000 It goes dark, and that's it.

03:05:45.000 It's over.

03:05:46.000 That's it. 1.00

03:05:46.000 You die. 1.00

03:05:47.000 Like, how the fuck do you know? 1.00

03:05:49.000 Have you died? 1.00

03:05:49.000 Like, you don't know. 1.00

03:05:52.000 In all of this, what do you think of Jesus in terms of your own journeying and trying to find answers to ultimate questions?

03:06:01.000 What do you think of the historical person of Jesus?

03:06:04.000 Well, it certainly seems like there's a lot of people that believe that there was this very exceptional human being that existed.

03:06:12.000 So the question is, what does that mean?

03:06:15.000 Does it mean he was the son of God?

03:06:17.000 Does it mean he was just some...

03:06:19.000 Completely unique human being that had this vision of humanity and this way of educating people and spreading this ideology that would ultimately change the way human beings interact with each other forever.

03:06:39.000 So is He the Son of God?

03:06:42.000 Well, are we all?

03:06:43.000 That's another question.

03:06:44.000 Do we all have that inside of us?

03:06:46.000 Do we all have that ability to change everything around us, inside of us?

03:06:50.000 Do we all have that unique connection to the divine?

03:06:54.000 And is He a representation of the best version of that?

03:06:57.000 Or was He an actual person that was the Son of God?

03:07:02.000 And is it important?

03:07:03.000 I don't know.

03:07:04.000 I mean, what does it mean?

03:07:07.000 Just the fact that it's a question to ponder is a miracle in itself, in a way.

03:07:14.000 Just the fact that there's this concept of this person that died for our sins as the Son of God, but you have to believe in a bunch of stuff to go that way.

03:07:25.000 Just the concept of that is interesting to people, because what it can do to people is offer them...

03:07:34.000 A very unique way to change the way they feel about the world itself.

03:07:42.000 And if you do follow that, I know a lot of Christians, or hardcore Christians, or some of the nicest people you'll ever meet in your life.

03:07:50.000 So it does work.

03:07:52.000 Right?

03:07:53.000 Like, if you do live like a Christian, and you do follow the principles of Christ, you will have a richer, more love-filled life.

03:08:01.000 So it is true.

03:08:02.000 Right?

03:08:04.000 But you have to submit to this concept that this guy was the child of God who came down to earth, let himself be crucified, came back from the dead, explained a bunch of stuff for people, and then said, all right, see you when I come back.

03:08:19.000 And you don't know how you can wrap your head around that particular claim? 0.99

03:08:23.000 And if he came back, here's the thing, if he came back, who the fuck would believe him today? 0.93

03:08:26.000 With all the fake news and all the CGI and AI, like, imagine, that would be the... 0.95

03:08:33.000 Most bizarre thing of all time.

03:08:36.000 If we get to a point where artificial reality is indiscernible from regular reality and Jesus chooses to come back at that moment, boy, that's the ultimate test of faith.

03:08:50.000 Right?

03:08:50.000 When it's impossible to discern.

03:08:52.000 If we really reach a point where virtual reality is indistinguishable from regular reality, which we're probably a hundred years away from that or something.

03:09:02.000 Maybe not even that.

03:09:04.000 Yeah, I don't know.

03:09:04.000 I mean, that's probably why Jesus came in the first century and not the 21st century.

03:09:08.000 But imagine?

03:09:10.000 Imagine if that's the big catch.

03:09:13.000 Like, Jesus does return, but when he returns, we're just so confused.

03:09:19.000 We can't even tell.

03:09:21.000 Yeah.

03:09:21.000 Or maybe that's how he returns in the first place.

03:09:23.000 Maybe he returns through AI. Yeah.

03:09:25.000 Maybe that's the portal to Jesus.

03:09:27.000 I don't know anything about that. 0.80

03:09:29.000 Yeah, I mean- That scares the shit out of me.

03:09:31.000 I really appreciate- I mean, guys that you're friends with, right?

03:09:33.000 Like the Jordan Petersons and the Douglas Murrays of the world, or the Tom Hollands, not the Spider-Man actor, the historian, who talk about this stuff.

03:09:41.000 I think I really like the way that Jordan Peterson articulates it, but I think he misses the forest for the trees.

03:09:47.000 How so?

03:09:48.000 In that he sees Jesus as an archetype, and I don't think actually even Jesus gives you the opportunity to see him as the archetype.

03:09:56.000 Because I have this love-hate relationship with all of Peterson's stuff, because he seems to get so much right where he walks up to the line, but he doesn't want to cross over.

03:10:06.000 And is the crossover, you think, connected to a life in academia?

03:10:10.000 No.

03:10:11.000 What do you think it is?

03:10:12.000 I wonder, and I'd love to talk to him about this, like, how do you remedy this issue that—because he seems to think that the concept of Jesus, as an example— Is more important than the actual flesh and blood, first century itinerant Jewish preacher who was crucified and rose from the dead physically, which is the claim of the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament.

03:10:39.000 That that's an example for us to look on and live by.

03:10:44.000 But I actually think that Jesus condemns moralism.

03:10:50.000 And ultimately what I see Peterson doing is looking at Jesus as a moral example.

03:10:56.000 And if Jesus is nothing but a moral example, then you can save yourself and you don't actually need a savior.

03:11:01.000 And so I think actually Jesus would have critiqued that because Jesus was very against moralism.

03:11:06.000 And how do you define Jesus being against moralism?

03:11:11.000 Like, what do you mean by that exactly?

03:11:13.000 Well, Jesus looks at the religiosity of his day with particular groups like the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who are these other, like... 0.72

03:11:20.000 These other groups of Jews during his day.

03:11:22.000 So we talked about the Essenes, who actually aren't mentioned in the Bible, but there are other groups like the Pharisees, who are like lay scholars, and the Sadducees, who are professional priest scholars.

03:11:33.000 And he's constantly critiquing the fact that they have this hypocritical religiosity to them, where they're doing things like tithing their mint leaves, like to make sure that they get all of...

03:11:48.000 This is where we get the idea of the letter of the law versus the intention of the law.

03:11:52.000 Like, Jesus critiques them for that because he says, you're trying to do everything right and you're missing the point.

03:12:00.000 So, one of the things he says is, like, if your donkey falls in a ravine on the Sabbath, do you pull it out?

03:12:09.000 Or does that work?

03:12:11.000 Like, what's the point of the Sabbath?

03:12:12.000 Is it to not do any work?

03:12:14.000 Like, is it to make sure that you're not working too hard because you might be breaking the Sabbath?

03:12:19.000 Or like, what is the point?

03:12:20.000 He says, like, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

03:12:24.000 And that there's this intention.

03:12:25.000 This is the whole Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter 5, is he keeps saying, you have heard it said, but I say, and he refers to the Mosaic law.

03:12:35.000 And it looks like he's critiquing the Mosaic law, but he's not actually.

03:12:39.000 He's getting back to the intention of the law.

03:12:41.000 So when he says, you know, you have heard it said, do not commit murder.

03:12:45.000 But I say to you, anybody who harbors a hate for their brother in their heart has already committed murder.

03:12:52.000 And what he's getting to is like, what's the intention?

03:12:56.000 What's the meaning of the law that God gives to you?

03:13:00.000 Because the law is like a mirror.

03:13:02.000 It shows you how dirty you are.

03:13:04.000 But his critique is he's like, you guys are trying to clean yourself with a mirror. 1.00

03:13:08.000 That's stupid. 1.00

03:13:09.000 If anything, it's going to make you more messy. 1.00

03:13:11.000 Like, get in the shower.

03:13:13.000 The law is not what cleans you.

03:13:15.000 The law is what reveals that you're dirty.

03:13:18.000 And so in that sense, I think, you know, if Jesus is a moral example, it actually misses what I think Jesus actually said about what his purpose was, in that you can't do enough to actually live up to the standard that God holds you to.

03:13:37.000 And so if you keep striving, you're actually going to wear yourself out and be exhausted.

03:13:41.000 Like atheists. 1.00

03:13:44.000 I didn't say you did, Joe. 0.99

03:13:45.000 A lot of them go crazy.

03:13:47.000 They go crazy when they get older.

03:13:50.000 Yeah.

03:13:51.000 Listen, Wes, this is such an awesome conversation, and I'm sad that it went down the way it went down with you and Billy, but the good...

03:14:00.000 The thing out of it is that a lot of people became aware of your work, and it's such exhaustive work.

03:14:06.000 It's really amazing what you've done.

03:14:08.000 Thank you so much for these gifts.

03:14:09.000 We will find a great place for them on the wall here.

03:14:12.000 And let's do it again.

03:14:13.000 And I would love to do it with you and someone who disagrees, too.

03:14:17.000 I think it would be a fascinating conversation.

03:14:19.000 Yeah, that'd be great.

03:14:20.000 Yeah, I think it would be really cool.

03:14:21.000 This has been a pleasure.

03:14:22.000 My pleasure.

03:14:22.000 Thank you very much.

03:14:23.000 Oh, tell everybody how to find you, how to find all of the different...

03:14:27.000 You have two different YouTube channels.

03:14:29.000 You have your own.

03:14:31.000 Yeah, so I work for a national not-for-profit in Canada that is an organization.

03:14:37.000 We want people to have an intellectually robust and a biblically grounded and a...

03:14:44.000 Faith.

03:14:44.000 We want people to know what they believe and why they believe it.

03:14:47.000 And so we produce materials like we played that clip from Can I Trust the Bible?

03:14:52.000 That's a series that's ongoing.

03:14:53.000 You know, I'm going to be traveling in 2025 to produce more of that content to try to, you know, get this stuff that's all up here out into people so that they can be able to access it.

03:15:04.000 Do you have two of them that are on?

03:15:06.000 Well, there's more, but there's the two Can I Trust the Bible versions.

03:15:10.000 One and two.

03:15:10.000 I watch both of those.

03:15:11.000 Yeah, awesome.

03:15:12.000 Yeah, so yeah, Wesley Huff.

03:15:13.000 WesleyHealth.com is my website.

03:15:15.000 ApologeticsCanada.com is where, you know, if you want to see where I'm speaking or what we're up to, I'm part of a team that does a lot of this stuff.

03:15:23.000 So those are the two places.

03:15:25.000 All my social media handles can be found on WesleyHealth.com.

03:15:28.000 All right.

03:15:28.000 Beautiful.

03:15:28.000 Awesome.

03:15:29.000 Thank you very much.

03:15:29.000 Appreciate it.

03:15:30.000 Thank you.

03:15:30.000 Thank you, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - January 07, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2252 - Wesley Huff

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