Birth - Youth - Baptism ｜ The Gospels
Episode Stats
Summary
Join me for Episode 1 of a new revolutionary but tradition-grounded series on The Gospels, a new exploration of the texts that sit at the base of our culture. In this episode, I'll be joined by some of the same stellar intellectual scientists, authors, and philosophers who journeyed through Exodus and the Cities of the Foundation of the West series, along with some exceptionally insightful newcomers.
Transcript
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Hello everybody. I want to share an announcement concerning some of my recent work exploring the
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biblical texts that sit at the foundation of our culture. All of this initially exploded on the
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public front with the Genesis lectures I recorded in 2017. That was followed some years later by
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the four-part documentary series I recorded with Daily Wire Plus on the foundations of the West,
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examining the contributions of Rome, Jerusalem, and Athens. That in turn expanded into our very
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successful seminar on Exodus and then most recently on the Gospels. All of those, 17 for the former
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Exodus and 10 for the latter, the Gospels, are now available exclusively on Daily Wire Plus.
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Joining me for the Gospel Seminar were many of the same stellar intellectual scientists,
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authors, and philosophers who journeyed through Exodus and the cities of the foundations of the
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West series, along with some exceptionally insightful newcomers. We wrestled through the stories told
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by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, examining their historical, existential, and literary significance,
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deriving from those texts as well a wealth of deep and immediately applicable practical knowledge.
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Today, you're joining me for episode one of this new revolutionary but tradition-grounded series.
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The episode stands on its own, but also serves as an introduction to the whole series of 10
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available at dailywire.com. Consider a subscription there, granting you access not only to the Gospel
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Seminar in its totality, but to Exodus, Foundations of the West, and to the many specials I've recorded
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for the Daily Wire Plus, addressing marriage, success, vision, masculinity, and mental health,
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among other topics. Thank you very much for your time and attention, and for your continued support
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of my work and of Daily Wire Plus. I look forward to your thoughts on the Gospels. Onward and upward.
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The Exodus story is arguably the central narrative in the Old Testament.
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Now, there are many profound narratives in the Old Testament, some which are equivalent depth, but there's none that have that combination of depth, narrative integrity, and detailed length.
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And so, and Moses is a great prophet who establishes the law.
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He's a central figure, and Christ plays the same role in the New Testament.
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And his passion story has the same delineation of narrative detail combined with profound depth.
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And so, it's very useful to understand the Exodus story, and to understand the Gospel story, and to know both of them in relationship to one another.
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So, that's the purpose of the investigation, is to bring people to the story, including ourselves, and to further our understanding of the text upon which, for better or worse, the West is founded.
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Welcome to the Gospel Seminars, and welcome to all the panelists, all of you who were here before for the Exodus Seminar, and those of you who have newly joined us.
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There's a lot of buzz in the world at large about the state of Western civilization, and the dependence, or lack thereof, of that civilization on the fundamental stories from which it emerged, historically and conceptually.
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And it's a wonderful time to be investigating that, and so, we've all come together to take all of you who are watching and listening through that, and to learn as much as we possibly can, simultaneously.
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I'll have everybody go around the table and introduce themselves, tell who they are, and also why they're here, and why they think this is both interesting and necessary for themselves personally,
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and then perhaps also at the broader cultural level.
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So, Bishop Barron, thank you very much for coming today.
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I'm the Bishop of the Winona Rochester Diocese, which is basically southern Minnesota.
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I'm also the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, which is an evangelical outreach.
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So, I'm here, you know, as a believing Christian, as an evangelist, and I think there's saving power in these great texts.
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But I'm also here as someone interested in the cultural impact right now of the scriptures.
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I think it's fascinating, you played a role in this, that there's been a revival of interest in the Bible.
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And a lot of my ministry is directed toward the nuns, the N-O-N-E-S, those who have no religion.
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So, I'm eager to hear everyone's perspective, and I'm here partially to, you know, try to unlock some of the power of this text for those who have been alienated from religion for different reasons.
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I mean, Exodus, I felt a lot like I was at a table with chess grandmasters, which was really cool to see everybody's engagement and finding these jewels that had different interpretations.
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And everybody, you know, except for Peugeot, who never says anything fascinating.
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And I'd like to say that, you know, a shallow gaze might indicate that there's a lot of similarity among us.
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And one of the things that I thought was really compelling during Exodus was there's an enormous amount of differences and that the text was really a welcome into the best of inquiry and hospitality.
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Part of why I'm here is that I think that intellect alone can't grasp the speed and complexity of the change that is upon us now and unconscious projection.
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And I think that we're seeing the world burn down in some ways to fundamentals.
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We have wars breaking out at the birthplace of original sin.
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We're trying to redefine what it means to be a man, male versus female.
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And I think when we have that level of definitional collapse, we need to go back to forms of thinking and forms of meaning that are different, whether that is sacred, symbolic, spiritual, mythological or religious.
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And going back to the source means we started with Exodus.
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You know, we've a lot of us have been going back to or come from Plato and understanding of Plato and all sources, all stories are not necessarily equal.
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And the Bible, this text to me, is a story, and the Gospels in particular, they're like a story with maximal pressure applied.
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It's like, you know, carbon turned to a diamond where it is fractal and pure.
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The amount of pressure generationally, historically, and spiritually on the story has condensed it into something that is impossible.
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And in some ways, the Gospels are, I think, well, in many ways, in many different ways, a perfect narrative.
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And it sets the conditions in a lot of ways for the most peace, thriving, and freedom of differences of nearly any other story.
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And so why I'm here in some ways is I think what we, in the spirit that we're all here, is this is an invitation of sorts to what is a sacred text, to those who might be intellectually reluctant or even have intellectual shame about engaging with a story in a book like this.
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And a lot of people might be familiar with this sort of light shown through Shakespeare or blasting in the Ode to Joy or in the words of MLK, these sort of safer reflections for the Enlightenment or secular mind.
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And this, of course, is the rock on which Western civilization is built.
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And I think we're here not just to take it seriously, but to apply our serious attention, which means radical openness and also radical judgment in holding this up as a story against which other stories should be compared if we're borrowing back to what a foundational narrative should be.
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I'm an associate professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge.
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James, wonderful to be with you all again and to be with new people, too.
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Look, I think we're all agreed that there is something badly wrong at the heart of our culture.
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I think if you said 15 years ago at the high noon of the new atheism that we'd be gathering around the table talking about these sacred texts, talking about Exodus, that it would have the impact that it has had.
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And what I think this series will have, too, I'd have thought you were mad.
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There's an emerging coalition of intellectuals, public intellectuals, Jordan at the forefront, John, too, who maybe are not card-carrying Christians, but who recognize the power of Christianity.
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And are beginning to realize that we've been, we can't keep running on empty, that it may be the case that we're cutting off Western culture is cutting off the branch that it's been sitting on.
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And we're getting, we're starting to get worried about this.
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And so I think what we're going to be looking at now, what we're going to be trying to do in a small way, is to look for the taproot, to explore the taproot of Western culture, which is the gospel.
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It's not just the gospels, it's the gospel message.
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And it was an offensive superstition for the Romans.
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And I think that is still true today very much in our culture.
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We've become very used to it as something which is just part of the furniture.
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It's now expressed very often in the language of the therapeutic.
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We've moved from sin to syndrome, as one theologian has put it.
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So I hope what we can do here is to reflect on the scandalous nature of the gospel message,
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to reflect on why it seems like folly, why it seems so offensive.
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And with that, to try and inject new life into Western culture and to learn from the pages of the gospels,
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to learn from the figure of Jesus, his teaching, to wrestle with who he claimed to be.
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I'm an associate professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto.
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I do a lot of work on the nature of meaning, meaning in life,
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and how that relates to transformative experience,
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about how it's often carried in non-propositional kinds of knowing.
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And, of course, these are topics that overlap deeply with people's religious lives and the religious practice.
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And I'm interested in how we can, I'm going to use this word, realize this text as sacred again.
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Because the second hat I'm wearing is, I believe there's a meaning crisis.
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And I believe that there's an advent of the sacred happening right now in response to the meaning crisis.
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I feel deeply vocationally called to be in service to this.
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And so I want to get into a relationship with this figure that recaptures how Jesus is strange,
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not in a pejorative sense, but the way I have found Socrates, another one of my heroes,
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to be profoundly strange in a way that has been deeply transformative for me.
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And so I'm hoping that in this, that I can take a role.
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I guess the closest name you could put to me is I'm sort of a Zen Neoplatonist.
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But I, nevertheless, I want to listen very deeply.
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I'm Dennis Prager, and it's a joy to be back with you.
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I went to yeshiva until I was 18, 19 years of age,
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taught Jewish religion at City University of New York, written books on it.
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I have a five-volume commentary on the Torah, four volumes of which are completed.
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but I'm falling in love with it for other reasons.
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So I'm here for a number of reasons, one of which is to learn.
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And I want, I've always found that I learn best from those who believe in the text that we're studying.
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I had a Buddhist teacher in England when I studied in England,
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I'm also here because, though I, I'm not a Christian,
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And I ask people all the time, name me one ideology that has supplanted Christianity that has done good for humanity.
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There is a quote attributed to G.K. Chesterton, though it's not verifiable that he actually said it, but it's brilliant.
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When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing.
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And as I point out on my radio show each day, I probably say this once a week,
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Not all secular people say that, but only secular people say that.
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We have entered a post-Christian or really post-Judeo-Christian world of the absurd.
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I see Christianity as a divinely ordained vehicle to bring the world to the Torah.
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So I have a very pro-Christian, Jewish, Jewish-based view.
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But Christians are human and human nature is awful, or at least not particularly good.
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But when done properly, and I think America and Britain have been particularly good,
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I'm well aware I wrote a book on anti-Semitism.
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And I pray that Christians come forth now and speak out against a raging anti-Semitism
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that I did not think I would see in my lifetime.
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But nevertheless, this Jew, this Westerner, is very frightened of a post-Christian society.
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My name is Douglas Headley, and I teach the philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge.
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And I have a particular interest in Christian Platonism, and particularly what one might call the Neoplatonic version of that strand of thought.
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And from this perspective of my work in the history of philosophy, I've always been struck by the extent of theology as a crucial, no pun intended, backdrop to Western thought.
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And yet philosophers are often either oblivious to this or consciously ignore it.
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Now, the gospel narrative is absolutely central to this Western intellectual tradition.
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And yet this gospel tradition, this gospel narrative is, as a couple of people have already mentioned,
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both astonishing in its claims and very profoundly familiar, almost too familiar in a sense.
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Now, you were referred to the death of Christianity.
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But nevertheless, it is the case that Christianity has been through a fiery furnace in terms of the Enlightenment critique of its central claims.
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Now, I think from a philosophical point of view, from a theological point of view, we do have to take those criticisms seriously and consider the questions of meaning and truth.
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That having been said, there is, I think, a profound hunger for these philosophical and theological questions that we find expressed, I find personally, in an inexpressibly beautiful manner in the gospels.
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And so, I'm very much looking forward to the forthcoming discussions.
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I'm the founding president of Ralston College, a new university in Savannah, Georgia.
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I grew up in a Christian home reading the Bible, really in a daily basis.
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And so, these stories, you might say, were maybe the most important frame through which I understood or came to understand, so far as I came to understand it, the world, especially my relations with my family, my younger siblings, nature, the community at large, beauty.
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It was only later when I went to university that I learned that these stories and the stories of the Judeo-Christian traditions, both in their synthesis with the Greek intellectual tradition, really produced Western civilization.
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That is fundamentally the synthesis that drives the whole unfolding of the West.
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First, my deepest conviction is that human beings matter, that they are made in the image of what is most real and fundamental.
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And yet, I think it's plainly the case that the dominant ideological positions in our own time are woefully, painfully, desperately inadequate, whether that's reductivist materialism or certain kinds of existential immediacy or the hyper-politicization and activism of everything all the time.
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You know, the nihilism, you know, the nihilism, you know, the nihilism, that there is nothing but power.
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These are psychologically, morally, theologically destructive in every sense.
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And so it seems to me there's nothing more important than our rediscovering modes of understanding what the human being is, what we are, and how we can recover our relation to what is most fundamental and real, which we could call, let's say, God.
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So I'm hoping that this text in its, all of its power will come alive for us and we'll make some headway in that.
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I am a liturgical artist, a writer, but mostly I would say I'm someone who loves patterns and loves to show the beauty of the world, the beauty of art, the beauty of stories, the beauty of images.
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It really is the place where these patterns come together.
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And I often say that, but it's rare that I have the chance to sometimes show it, to be able to point it out so that people can see to what extent the story of Jesus brings all the stories together.
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But because we're coming in the shadow of our Exodus seminar, that's the way that I'm going to approach all of this, which is what I'm hoping to do is to constantly help people see that the realities we perceived in Exodus, right?
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This fractal mountain of the world and how the world comes together, some of the puzzles that were presented in Exodus and are presented in Genesis actually are brought together into this story.
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So that is my hope is to hopefully help people that are watching and everybody here see just how precious and beautiful this story is.
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And the fact that it has become the cornerstone of Western civilization is not an accident of history, but it is through the very nature of the character of Christ, but also his story.
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So whether the challenge in a way is pretty simple to state easily, it's that we're trying to cover all four Gospels and really just a few hours.
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We're talking about perhaps the most influential, the most powerful, the most difficult, the most radically unexpected words and stories of all time.
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And, you know, we're trying to cover it quickly and, you know, we're trying to cover it quickly and the temptation, if I can put it that way, will be to schematize so we can kind of make sense of it.
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And I think the challenge will be to sit with it in a way that what is most powerful and transformative in these unexpected words can speak to our own hearts and hopefully to the hearts of those who are listening.
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So I think part of the reason that we're in a crucial moment is because the Enlightenment doctrines that have savaged Christianity have also now turned upon themselves.
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And partly conceptually, but also scientifically, one of the things I've come to understand as a practicing research psychologist is that we see the world through a story.
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A description of the structure through which someone sees the world is a story.
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And we have to see the world through a story because we have to direct our attention.
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And I think that's been revealed on the scientific side as incontrovertible.
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I've interviewed many top cognitive scientists pushing on this issue.
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And the best of the best of them now understand that even our perceptions of objects are micro-narratives.
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We can't derive the world from a simple list of facts.
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But if there's no story, there's no point and there's no aim and there's no way of organizing intention and action.
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And in that chaos, there's nothing but despair.
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And I think that's also evident, say, neuropsychologically, neurophysiologically.
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Well, the big candidates that have emerged since Nietzsche announced the death of God is the story of power and the story of sex.
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But power is the most dismal of stories, except for perhaps the story of hedonism.
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These two great stories, power and sex, they lead to catastrophic ends.
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They drive us either towards a remarkably unproductive and bitter hedonism that cannot sustain itself psychologically or socially.
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And then on the power side, well, if everything's about power, then that claim to me is no different than the claim that, like, the spirit of Lucifer rules the world.
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All right, so there's no basis for marriage that isn't power.
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There's no basis for friendship that isn't power.
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There's no description of human society that isn't power.
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And not only is that a stunningly hellish and dismal story, I think there's absolutely no evidence that it's true and plenty of evidence that it's not.
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The religious question, the monotheistic question, could be conceptualized as what could unite even power in sex and something higher and harmonious psychologically and societally.
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And I think that's what the biblical corpus is about.
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And I've come to realize, to understand, not just to believe, but also to understand that it has something to do with sacrifice.
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To mature is to sacrifice the immediate delights of power in the present for the long-term psychologically and the communal broadly.
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And there's a spirit that underlies that movement towards integration and community.
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And that spirit is the spirit of progressive sacrifice.
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And the gospel story is the culmination of the sacrificial story.
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But I now don't understand how it cannot be true because the converging evidence that something like the spirit of divine sacrifice animates the world, I think that's, I think we're there.
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Now, what I hope to accomplish in this seminar is to further my understanding of that because the story upon which our culture is based, the gospel story, let's say, is deeply mysterious and dramatically peculiar and hallucinogenic.
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It's a trip, and it's not understandable from the purely rational perspective, yet it seems to be right, and I don't know what that means.
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If you understand that the gospels call to you to bear the weight of tragedy and malevolence on your shoulders along with the divine spirit that guides you, there is nothing more terrifying and no greater field of opportunity than that.
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And so we've got our work cut out for us, gentlemen.
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This is one peculiar time and one peculiar text, and I sure hope we're up to the task.
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Could I maybe suggest, in some ways, the climax of the New Testament revelation is the claim that God is love.
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If power and hedonism are absolute values, then we're in serious trouble.
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And what's love but to will the good of the other?
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So the sacrificial narrative of the cross fits under that heading as well.
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But if the ultimate reality is love, then we can find a place for all these subordinate values.
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If we get rid of love as a supreme value, then we have the serious problem of power unleashed or hedonism for its own sake.
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So I think that's the trajectory toward which the entire New Testament is going, that God's name is being in the Old Testament.
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And Christian theology recognizes that as a supremely high name of God.
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But higher still is the claim that God is love.
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You know, if God is love in his own most nature, there must be lover, beloved, and love shared.
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So I might suggest that's where the New Testament is going, is love is the supreme value, the supreme reality.
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Well, it's a hard thing to, what would you say, to come to terms with when that's the claim,
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but the arc of the narrative of Christ is the worst possible death for the least possibly deserving person
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and the full encounter with malevolence, right?
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So I thought I'd start if you gentlemen are in accordance with John 1 to 4.
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And because it's one of the most peculiar paragraphs, let's say, in the Gospel account,
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we could talk about it for 10 hours, which we won't.
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But it'll set us up to start to investigate the metaphysical foundations of the text
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One other thing I'd like to point out to people, perhaps, before we get going from a conceptual
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perspective, is that Dr. Headley, for example, pointed to the philosophical as part of the
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understructure of the cultural and made the claim that perhaps underneath that is the theological.
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It's a nice description of the pattern of conceptualization itself.
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It appears as though philosophy is nested inside drama.
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And if philosophy emerges from the story, and then our other cultural concepts emerge from
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philosophy, you can see kind of an inverted pyramid with something at the foundation.
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And at the base of that foundation is something like sacrifice in love.
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And that's the claim that's being made in the Christian context.
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Now, John opens up with an allusion to that whole set of claims, because John does this
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extremely strange parallel by making the radical and improbable claim that Christ, the Christ
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of the Bible, who was born in a particular time and in a particular place, a no-account place
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in the middle of nowhere, in an equally nondescript time in some ways, is equivalent to the spirit
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that gave rise to the cosmos at the beginning of time and has always existed.
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It's an unbelievably radical way of starting a book.
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All things were made through Him, and God created nothing except through Him.
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The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
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And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of truth and kindness.
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We have beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten Son of the Father.
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And from the abundance of Jesus' grace, we have all received blessing upon blessing.
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But the only Son who was closest to the Father's heart has made Him known to us.
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So, I structured this seminar in relationship to a book called The Single Gospel.
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And he describes it as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John consolidated into a single narrative.
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Um, that's not an approach without its pitfalls.
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He compresses and retranslates many of the verses.
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So, I'm sure there'll be something in that to offend everyone who's listening.
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For me, it allowed me to enter the single narrative of the Gospels relatively rapidly,
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and to make sure that we had the appropriate narrative through line.
00:35:13.540
Yeah, well, the first thing I think it's important to see is that it is definitely referring back to Genesis 1.
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It's basically giving us a type of account of Genesis 1, which is God spoke the world into being.
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It's joining it with the Greek idea of logos, which is huge.
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But what I'd like to just propose is that what we'll see when we look at the narrative of Jesus
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is that what's described right there at the beginning,
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which is that the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness does not recognize it.
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But just this idea of the light moving down into the darkness is the whole structure of the life of Jesus.
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You'll see that happening all through his life, which is it explains everything that he does
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is that he moves from this mysterious meaning, this source of being,
00:36:02.200
and then he moves out into death, into disease, into the margin, into all the things that don't fit.
00:36:08.540
He basically fills the world with himself, but the world does not recognize him.
00:36:13.180
And so that's the first thing that I would say is that as we read the rest of all the other scripture,
00:36:19.080
because people will tell us that, you know, John is the weird gospel.
00:36:25.020
But I think this pattern here is the actual pattern of the life of Jesus that you see all through the story.
00:36:31.500
And in some ways, what the story of Jesus and how he does that nonstop and in every single way that you even haven't thought of
00:36:41.040
is going to be the proof of this, that it's like, do you know what that looks like for the light to move down into the darkness?
00:36:49.400
And Christ will show that through his miracles, through his teaching, through his crucifixion, all through the story.
00:36:57.980
Can somebody explain to me, because I admit I've wrestled with this as long as I've studied Christianity.
00:37:08.520
I've never fully understood that, especially if it harkens back to Genesis.
00:37:15.940
Please understand, this is truly a question from ignorance.
00:37:20.920
Is the word when God said, let there be light, is that the word that's being referred to?
00:37:27.960
So the idea is to say, I think this is ultimately the Christian understanding, is to say that the God speaking is not created.
00:37:40.340
When God speaks, it's not something else than him.
00:37:44.940
It is in some ways separate from him, but also God.
00:37:49.060
This is coming to love that Bishop Barron was going to talk about, that God speaking is his own being that is speaking into the world.
00:37:59.080
And you would understand this in the Genesis context, is that there's an insistence on something like the primacy of the process that extracts the order that's good out of potential and chaos.
00:38:11.460
And that's the word, and the Christian insistence is that Christ embodies the pattern of loving sacrifice that characterizes that word.
00:38:22.060
And so that idea is something like the foundation of existence itself is the spirit of loving sacrifice.
00:38:31.180
It's the same thing as the word that extracts the order that's good out of potential at the beginning of time.
00:38:38.540
And one way of understanding that more prosaically, I would say, is that imagine the order that you establish in your family.
00:38:48.320
If that little microcosm of the walled garden, your family, to the degree that you embody the spirit of loving sacrifice as a father,
00:38:58.960
then you'll create out of the potential that's your family relationships, the order that's good.
00:39:04.280
And it's sacrifice because, well, that's what you do on behalf of your children, right?
00:39:13.100
You certainly put them first before your whims.
00:39:17.640
You put what's best for them before their whims too.
00:39:21.580
And so there's an upward aim in that, and all that upward aim is sacrificial.
00:39:25.140
And then, well, then we get to the issue of what constitutes the ultimate sacrifice,
00:39:29.660
which is partly what's explored in the gospel accounts.
00:39:31.840
It's obviously explored in Abraham because Abraham is called upon to make an ultimate sacrifice.
00:39:36.300
But this is an extension in a different direction.
00:39:40.280
One thing I would say in response to your question is the logos being talked about here is the interior word of the father.
00:39:46.560
So the word of creation is more of a word that goes out.
00:39:49.500
But within the Godhead itself, there's an interior word.
00:39:52.260
The father has an imago of himself that we call the son.
00:39:55.580
The father and son fall in love with each other.
00:39:59.960
So we would see from the beginning, this very text, there's a Trinitarian overtone.
00:40:04.560
But it's the word that in a way precedes the word of creation.
00:40:14.200
There are two words here that are very difficult to translate into English.
00:40:20.480
And one, of course, is logos, which can mean, obviously, word, proposition, meaning, story.
00:40:29.480
I mean, the resonance of that word is very rich.
00:40:33.480
But also the word that's translated as beginning, the achê, because in the Greek philosophical tradition, that word is used for God.
00:40:45.480
So, and there are reasons why this should be the case.
00:40:50.340
But the achê is a term which has a very powerful theological meaning within the Greek philosophical tradition.
00:41:08.000
So one way of looking at this is to say, well, in the source there was the word, i.e., to say the Trinitarian reading, although that sounds like an absurd Christian interjection of a much later period, you could see that as making perfect sense with just these initial words.
00:41:28.460
Yeah, I want to pick up on the fact that there's actually, I call them the four L's about God.
00:41:36.800
There's love, agape, there's logos, there's light and life.
00:41:41.400
And these are all the identity claims that are somehow circling.
00:41:45.060
And I'd like to propose we slow down a little bit because the familiarity of those terms to us, I think, is masking something more profound going on here.
00:41:52.820
And if we think about all of these, they're pointing, well, to me, they're pointing to something very radical here.
00:42:02.860
They're asking us to get out of a normal way in which we think about reality in terms of stable, substantial, independently existing objects.
00:42:11.960
All of these are inherently relational realities.
00:42:15.200
And think about how profound that is to say that ultimate reality is inherently, ultimately relational and that, therefore, a relationship to it has to be primordially a relational.
00:42:26.560
And this is very, very hard for our way of thinking because we have got into the mode, and for all kinds of historical reasons we don't need, of thinking of, you know, of that what there really is are individual things.
00:42:46.120
And then that gives us a dualism because the mind has the patterns, the world.
00:42:50.200
And there's something going on here in this language.
00:42:53.880
And I want to slow down a little bit and get at, right, these terms are very familiar.
00:43:00.660
And I think that's, I understand why they're there, but their familiarity is actually in some sense problematic.
00:43:08.000
Because I think they're, it's easy, like, these are all nouns.
00:43:12.960
And it's easy to think we're talking about four things.
00:43:21.420
And all four of them, I feel they're playing off against each other.
00:43:24.900
The relation between them is as important as any one of them.
00:43:28.280
And all of them are playing off against each other and trying to call us into a new way of trying to relate to ultimate reality.
00:43:35.540
And so, like, when I try and, because Jesus makes these claims, too.
00:43:39.400
He talks about, I'm the light of the world, abundant life, like, you know, all of this.
00:43:45.400
And this, this to me, if I, if I could hear these words again, I could get to a place where I think the idea of, could have more real relevance to me.
00:44:12.820
Like, we've just begun, but I hope this, you know, this discourse isn't too hard, but I hope we understand it.
00:44:21.680
I hope you get what I'm, like, try and say anything, right?
00:44:27.960
It is part of the fundamental grammar of our cognition.
00:44:31.660
These are metaphors that are trying to transcend themselves, and they're trying to point.
00:44:35.540
And I'd, I'd like to also, I mean, I, I'd like to try and make sure we're, we're not only paying attention to the text, we're paying attention to what is the mental framing that's, I'm trying to use a very, that we're bringing to this text.
00:44:47.800
I want this text to challenge me, and I, I assume that's what everybody is doing here.
00:44:51.700
And so what, what, what is our stance, our orientation towards it, such that we can, we, we can be appropriate to it, so we can really listen to it very deeply?
00:45:01.900
It seems to me that what John, John is establishing a radically, extending a radically non-materialist axiom.
00:45:10.700
He's, he's, he's trying to identify what the core phenomenon of being is, and it's, in this story, it's not material, it's being itself.
00:45:22.020
It's, it's very fundamentally associated, I think, with what modern people would call consciousness, which is a complete opaque mystery in and of itself, right?
00:45:31.040
John is attempting to characterize the spirit of being itself, and he's, he's making a claim.
00:45:36.840
The claim is, the claim is, it's embodied in Christ, it's the same as the divine principle that generated order at the beginning of time.
00:45:45.260
It's apprehensible, it's foundational, and, and it's also the full expression, fullest expression, this isn't directly in this text, but it emerges.
00:45:54.560
It's the fullest expression of the tradition that's made manifest in the Old Testament.
00:45:58.700
It emerges out of our primordial stories and announces itself as the principle of being itself.
00:46:04.120
And it seems to me irrefutable that the principle of sacrifice is the basis of sophisticated psychological integrity and community.
00:46:25.660
But for sure, the light, the life, and the word, they are things that make other things exist, in the sense that light is that which makes things seen, life is that which makes things move, and word is meaning that makes things happen.
00:46:41.440
And so you can see that the analogies that John is putting together are there to say, like, if you don't understand what the word logos is, then light will bring you a little further.
00:46:51.720
And if you don't know what light is, you know, then life will bring you a little further.
00:46:54.760
And like you said, it's not that one of those is actually describing anything, it's that all of them playing with each other are pointing you to the mystery of the notion that there are invisible movers that make things move or make things happen, make things exist.
00:47:13.640
But what I'm saying is, like, think about what we're saying here.
00:47:16.540
Imagine going into a room of physicists and saying ultimate reality is love, light, logos, life, right?
00:47:24.040
They're going to look at you and they'll either, well, that's very nice.
00:47:27.140
It's a platitude, and they don't really believe it, right?
00:47:33.880
But these things are not, they're not out there metaphors.
00:47:38.860
You can't do science without these principles of intelligibility, right?
00:47:47.240
And so I'm trying to wake us back up to, it's, John's not making a scientific claim.
00:47:56.180
But he's not saying something that's irrelevant to the scientific worldview.
00:48:14.100
And, no, this, like, imagine proposing that relationality is that from which things emerge
00:48:23.960
rather than things are that from which relations emerge.
00:48:31.300
And you're very close to Yosef Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI.
00:48:34.460
He said, Trinitarian doctrine turned upside down the classical view.
00:48:37.800
It said, substance is primordial, relationship is accidental.
00:48:40.720
Just the opposite, ultimate reality is a relationship, hence the importance of, in the beginning
00:48:49.980
Aquinas says this, that a creature is, he says, quidam relatio.
00:48:58.240
If it's coming into being every moment from nothing, the creature is a relationship.
00:49:07.120
Because it's not somewhat substance against substance, but all of us are, whether we like
00:49:11.820
it or not, connected to each other through God.
00:49:14.080
So I think that's really absolutely right intuition.
00:49:19.320
I think it dovetails, too, within space and time.
00:49:24.720
You said that the word for beginning is God, right?
00:49:28.900
And so this goes into, John, you know, the discussion of, well, what is a cup, right?
00:49:38.480
And the end of it is also what it's intended to be.
00:49:43.800
In God was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
00:49:49.160
That temporally, this is that same fractal thing that's also being expanded across time
00:49:53.660
and space, that the meaning is embedded in the object as it exists, what its use is and
00:50:00.240
I think that's a connection back to some of your thinking.
00:50:03.000
The other interesting aspect about that passage as well is that what we read as in the beginning
00:50:11.340
is using another very important word in Greek philosophy.
00:50:16.780
And that word is the ache, which means beginning, which means source, principle.
00:50:34.100
So in ancient Greek and the philosophical tradition, the word God is not, so theos or theos is not
00:50:51.200
So the fact that we start off this prologue with these terms which resonate with profound
00:51:01.440
metaphysical questions is, I think, of profound significance.
00:51:09.160
You made a comment about this, James, it was you, about this being a metascientific claim.
00:51:14.960
And so I want to add a couple of things to that.
00:51:17.300
So I watched Richard Dawkins yesterday talk about his existence as a cultural Christian.
00:51:22.640
And he's also, he's not just a cultural Christian ethically, he's a cultural Christian scientifically,
00:51:28.280
because the scientific program itself, which is a very particular sort of program,
00:51:34.120
and only emerged in the context of a Judeo-Christian society, and that wasn't accidental.
00:51:39.820
It makes a bunch, it is predicated on a variety of metascientific claims.
00:51:44.780
One is that the logos characterizes the cosmos, which means it's intelligible.
00:51:50.060
Also, that that intelligibility is good, because otherwise a scientist studying the intelligibility
00:51:56.860
of the cosmos could be a terribly destructive force, which is, of course, something that
00:52:00.900
we're afraid of, and is also true if the aim of the scientist isn't proper, right?
00:52:06.120
And that it is possible for us to exist in a relationship with the cosmos such that its
00:52:13.260
intelligibility will reveal itself to us if we participate in that investigation, both in
00:52:19.660
the spirit of truth, which is core to the scientific enterprise, but also in relationship to our
00:52:25.300
upward aim. Because scientists don't ever have to say we're conducting this research to further
00:52:32.120
the good. That's just axiomatic. But the reason it's axiomatic is because it's nested in this
00:52:37.140
underlying ethos. I mean, you can easily imagine a science that serves totalitarian claims. I don't
00:52:42.700
think it would last long as a science, because it would eat itself. But we've certainly seen
00:52:47.280
that enterprise perverted in directions that take it away from what it is and what it has to be
00:52:53.480
nested in in order to be genuine science and to serve psyche and society.
00:52:58.500
The most incomprehensible fact of the universe is its comprehensibility. That's the Einsteinian
00:53:05.740
The other thing you need is that the world is not God. So the world has to be intelligible for
00:53:09.660
science to go off the ground. But also, it can't be God. If it's God, you're going to worship it,
00:53:13.160
or you'll keep it at a distance. If it's not God, you know you can experiment, you're going to
00:53:16.820
analyze, and so on. And both those are contained here. It's radically intelligible, and it's not
00:53:21.280
God. It's been made by God. I think those two things have got to be in place for the sciences
00:53:26.580
Right, right. That's an interesting point, the idea that you can't be scientific if you worship nature.
00:53:31.900
We're actually seeing that played out in the academy now, because as the academy decolonizes,
00:53:37.060
there are claims by the decolonizers that the scientific enterprise itself violates the sacred.
00:53:42.960
Right. Well, this is what's so interesting. From the 19th century onwards, up until relatively
00:53:47.840
recently, maybe 10 years ago, the standard discussion on campuses that you would see
00:53:52.640
a Christian union put on would be religion and science. How are they compatible? How do
00:53:57.060
you reconcile the two? When it's quite clear that the paradigm now, it's really the hard-boiled
00:54:03.540
secularist, or the hyper-progressive, who is struggling to reconcile the constructive view
00:54:10.420
of reality to the discovered intelligibility of the natural world. So we've seen a huge
00:54:18.740
change here. And I think it unsettles the old materialist paradigm. I think it's, and I think
00:54:25.800
even, I defer to John here, but if you talk to really cutting-edge physicists, they'll be
00:54:31.020
the first to say that matter is a lot more complicated and mysterious than it used to be. And we're starting
00:54:37.740
to see now that structure, that relationality, the mapping of relationality through structure has a lot
00:54:44.200
more heuristic power within the hard sciences than the old sticks and balls physics that you used to learn
00:54:50.400
I just came from such a conference around, in Milger, Chris work, and there were physicists there. And what
00:54:55.600
the science is, at the bottom, you're getting pure relationality, right? And at the top, with
00:54:59.840
relativity, you have pure relationality. And then the scientists are driven by this thing that they can't
00:55:05.240
justify scientifically. But somehow, the two theories have to be integrated. They have to be
00:55:09.700
one. And they've been struggling with this for like 50 years. I think part of the problem is
00:55:13.320
they're still bound in a kind of substance metaphysics, even though they're wrestling with
00:55:18.020
this more of a neoplatonic understanding of reality.
00:55:23.020
Well, we see also this unconscious porting over of nature worship, that nature's elevated. It's the
00:55:28.440
Rousseauian ideal, where nature is elevated above man, right? So it gets out of place if you don't
00:55:35.080
have that separation necessarily. And it's almost this porting over of a notion of original sin that
00:55:40.600
elevates it, that we have in some way that makes us inferior to the thing to be worshipped. If it's
00:55:45.740
not differentiated from God, then we worship nature and hold it higher than us.
00:55:49.240
And this, I think, is like the first moving into this crazy proposition, which is that this fellow
00:55:57.240
Jesus of Nazareth, that's where it all comes together. But at least at the outset, what we
00:56:02.080
can perceive is that this union, the place where this comes together is in man, right? Even if we
00:56:08.580
don't come to the person of Jesus yet, we can understand that if we, the capacity, the consciousness,
00:56:15.720
human consciousness in the world that we know is the locus through which all these vectors
00:56:23.400
Yeah, well, that's what I wanted to say. I mean, I'm not making any trespass on the doctrine of
00:56:28.680
the incarnation. But what I was trying to say, look, these things are incarnated in us. They are not
00:56:33.600
just things we're referring to out in the world. We understand, we live, like it's almost like what
00:56:40.460
Paul says in Acts. In these, we live and move and have our being. We are participating in them.
00:56:45.260
But right here, it says, right, right in the text, it says, but as many as received him,
00:56:49.460
to them gave he the power to become sons of God. Right? And so, like, we'll see how this plays
00:56:56.020
out in the story. But, you know, that this is already hinted at, right? That this is our
00:57:01.200
role, that this is the role that humans play are to become sons of God, to become the place
00:57:06.120
where this, you know, the invisible, all of the invisible pattern, love, relationality, all
00:57:11.440
that come together into this anchor that mediates. So, are you saying that the microcosm, macrocosm
00:57:19.300
structure is both significant anthropologically and in terms of the theology of the incarnation?
00:57:28.640
Of course. Of course. If you had to pick any kind of being in which these patterns of intelligibility
00:57:33.280
could be united, just as a purely secular matter, what kind of being are you going to
00:57:40.640
Again, this is, this is a, this is a cutting-edge scientific idea, right? The idea that there's
00:57:46.640
a deep continuity between how life works and how mind works, and we can talk about whatever spirit
00:57:53.060
is. How spirit, this, like, this, this is what people are now talking about. They're taking it
00:57:57.320
seriously. Right? And, and, and, and they should. Because we've, we've hit this, we've hit this,
00:58:02.860
we've hit this wall in our ontology in which science is making a picture of everything except the
00:58:08.420
scientist, the living scientist who does science. That, that, that person doesn't fit in that
00:58:12.800
ontology. That's a whole, right? And we have to, we have to invert our, our epistemology and our
00:58:17.680
ontology so that we can be proper places. We can find a proper home within that again. And, and I'm
00:58:23.680
trying to, as a non-Christian, I'm trying to see how this text can be relevant to that challenge.
00:58:32.100
I'm skeptical, not in the modern sense. I'm skeptical in the ancient sense. Skeptical means inquirer.
00:58:38.420
I'm Socratic. I'm open. I want to learn and hear. There's an opportunity here because of the
00:58:44.720
diversity of voices. I have a sense of responsibility as a challenge to speak on behalf of the nuns,
00:58:51.940
the N-O-N-E-S's. Many people who are aware, because they come to my work, they're aware that there's
00:58:58.620
something profoundly wrong. There's a meeting crisis going on. But they do not find an open sense of
00:59:06.220
home. Not that anybody's rejecting them, but they just don't see the established institutions
00:59:12.340
of the legacy religions, the axial religions, as viable for them.
00:59:17.100
Okay. So I'm going to move us now to, to the first biographical detail, let's say,
00:59:22.320
out of the realm of high metaphysics and to the story of Zechariah. And so this is the announcement
00:59:28.620
of the impending birth of John the Baptist. And this is really where Christ's story starts on the
00:59:36.380
biographical side. It doesn't start with Christ himself in the Gospels. It starts with John the
00:59:41.380
Baptist, who's an interesting and complicated figure, assimilated by Jesus himself to Elijah,
00:59:49.100
who is the prophet of conscience, I would say, above all. And also, by the way, the figure in the Old
00:59:55.320
Testament, who brings the worship of nature to a halt. And so I'm, so I'm going to read this. This
01:00:01.460
is the annunciation to Zechariah. One day, this is John the Baptist's father. One day when Zechariah's
01:00:09.500
group was on duty and he was serving as a priest before God, he was chosen by...
01:00:15.320
Luke 1, 5 to 25. I'm hoping that's where it is. I'm using this, the single Gospels, by the way,
01:00:24.860
So it's important to know that when Jordan is reading the Gospel text, he's not actually
01:00:29.040
reading from a Gospel, but it's a kind of compilation of different Gospels. So sometimes
01:00:33.240
it starts in one Gospel and then it cuts to another. And so for people that know the Gospels
01:00:37.940
really well, this might be a very frustrating experience. I know even for us at the table,
01:00:42.600
it is a little bit of a frustrating experience. We, I think most of the people that are Christian
01:00:47.480
around the table would have liked us to either pick one Gospel or, you know, follow a Gospel
01:00:52.360
and then supplement with another. But Jordan is really adamant on going to the, the single
01:00:56.160
Gospel. And so, you know, I mean, in the end, what's important is we do get through the story
01:01:01.620
of Jesus and, you know, we get through the major events and the major teaching of Jesus.
01:01:05.580
But even at the table, if, I don't know if the camera picks it up, but sometimes we're
01:01:09.460
bewildered because we don't know, we're like flipping through the Bible and we don't know
01:01:13.400
where we are, you know. And so, so yes, that's important to understand because even for the
01:01:17.500
viewer, while you're watching it, you'll have a little bit of that experience yourself.
01:01:22.240
One day when Zechariah's group was on duty and he was serving as a priest before God,
01:01:26.920
he was chosen by lot, but randomly, according to the custom among the priests to enter the
01:01:31.800
temple of the Lord and burn incense. At the time for this burning, all the assembled worshipers
01:01:36.660
were praying outside. Then an angel of the Lord appeared to Zechariah standing on the
01:01:41.660
right-hand side of the incense altar. Zechariah was shaken when he saw the angel and fear fell
01:01:46.440
upon him. But the angel said, do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard and
01:01:51.680
your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you shall call his name John and you shall
01:01:56.080
have joy and gladness and many will rejoice that he was born for he will be great in the
01:02:01.280
eyes of the Lord and he shall drink neither wine nor strong drink and he will be filled with
01:02:06.580
the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb and he will turn many of the children of
01:02:11.440
Israel back to the Lord their God. He will go as a forerunner before the Lord in the spirit
01:02:17.680
and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of fathers to the children and the disobedient to the wisdom
01:02:23.500
of the righteous and to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. So Elijah calls the Israelites
01:02:29.440
back to conscience. John the Baptist is the forerunner and the announcer of Christ. This is the
01:02:35.440
announcement of his conception and birth. And so what do we make of John the Baptist? Why is it
01:02:43.700
necessary? Greg, maybe you can start us off here. Why do you think it's necessary in the narrative
01:02:48.660
flow of things for there to be an unroller of the red carpet, let's say, for someone to make the way
01:02:55.600
ready? It's almost like the association with conscience. The conscience is what has to lead the
01:03:01.860
way first to prepare the people to receive Jesus. Because if he, if he just arrives without there
01:03:09.380
being, look, so first of all, I mean, in a dramatic sense, right, every introduction for dramatic effect,
01:03:16.700
and I know that we're talking about this on different levels, but for the theatrical,
01:03:20.220
the introduction of a character is always key. I mean, you think about in Casablanca, the number of
01:03:25.580
times that Rick has mentioned before his back is turned in a chair and you see the cigarette smoke and
01:03:30.100
turns around dramatically. And I'm not implying this is merely dramatically. You want to set the stage
01:03:36.000
for the arrival of a major character. And I think you have a culture in which the stage must be set
01:03:40.980
before his arrival. Okay. So you're making two points. One is that one's a psychological point or a
01:03:47.600
theological point, which is that it, it might be that it's conscience that alerts us when our sacrifices
01:03:55.060
are insufficient or something like that. It's conscious that conscience that alerts us to the
01:04:00.200
necessity for a higher form of sacrifice than what we're currently performing. And so conscience
01:04:04.600
is continually the forerunner of the sacred. But then there's a dramatic level here too, where
01:04:10.920
you need to prepare the ground for the introduction of a major character. Yeah. And we do this all the
01:04:15.940
time dramatically. You have an opening act for a concert. You have somebody before, yeah, you have
01:04:22.200
an overture. You have, if there's a late night show, they'll have somebody warm up the crowd as a
01:04:27.160
comedian, right? You, you have to set the stage. You have to show how bad this situation is too,
01:04:32.080
before you, the hero comes in. And that's one of the things that John the Baptist does. He says,
01:04:35.960
you know, it's like the ax is at the root of the tree, folks. This is it. Things are dire,
01:04:40.040
everything, you know, you need to repent because the fire is coming, you know? And so everything is in a very
01:04:44.820
dire state, you know, before the, the, the main character comes into. It's worth making the point
01:04:50.360
that, I mean, Luke is seen as effective, a Greek, a Greek physician, I mean, a Greek mindset. Uh, he,
01:04:57.360
he refers back to the Old Testament a little bit less often, say, certainly than Matthew. But it's,
01:05:03.600
it's worth saying that the reference to Elijah is, seems to be a fulfillment of the last two verses of
01:05:09.420
our Old Testament, as it were, in Malachi, which, this is Malachi 4, 5,
01:05:14.960
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the
01:05:19.440
Lord, and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to
01:05:22.800
the fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. So it's a clear, the sense is that he's,
01:05:29.760
he's fulfilling that John is fulfilling something, that he's preparing the way for, um,
01:05:36.700
a sequence of events that is going to be a fulfillment of what is hindered at in Malachi
01:05:44.180
and the Old Testament. And the precursor to Elijah in certain regards is Enoch,
01:05:48.740
right before the flood. Yeah. The other thing I was thinking is that there's these different sides,
01:05:53.500
this we're discussing of what Jesus is, and he's also is a man, because if he's not a man,
01:05:58.140
then the story doesn't make sense. And so it comes along to say, why is Jesus baptized? That's a very
01:06:04.940
unusual question. But if there's not a human being who predates him with some moral authority,
01:06:10.100
who represents the voice of conscience, then he can't be baptized as a man. He just comes down
01:06:14.680
with a full glory and righteousness and fear of God. Well, that touches on something,
01:06:21.040
Peugeot, maybe you can speak to this. There's a very deep mystery there because the story of Christ
01:06:26.840
doesn't really get going apart from some description of birth and youth, which we'll cover
01:06:31.920
until the baptism. And so that question immediately arises, well, if Christ is the Son of God from
01:06:37.900
birth, why the necessity of the baptism? What does the baptism represent? Why is John a Baptist?
01:06:45.520
What does it mean for him to be a Baptist? And what does baptism signify? Now, there's a lot of work
01:06:51.620
on the anthropology of religion that's focused on this issue. And it's very frequently the case
01:06:56.160
across cultures, anthropologically distributed, that men in particular must undergo a initiation
01:07:04.180
ceremony, which generally bears some symbolic relationship to the modern, to the Judeo-Christian
01:07:10.920
concept of baptism before they can adopt their full individuality. And it's often associated with
01:07:17.000
something like a passage or re-immersion into the sacred waters or into the chaos. And it's a
01:07:22.980
dissolution into chaos and then a restructuring, right? That's the, that's the, that would be the
01:07:30.360
Well, so Elijah, so there, in Elijah's, Elijah, in St. John's story, there are many things that are
01:07:36.920
going on. I think the best way to understand is that he's there to kind of end the world. So you
01:07:43.480
imagine there's, Christ is the new beginning, is a new world, new creation. And then he's there to end
01:07:49.700
that world and then a new beginning will come. And, you know, in the story of Elijah, it's the crossing
01:07:54.920
of the Jordan. That's where that happens, right? Elijah crosses the Jordan, then he's taken up, you
01:08:00.160
know, and then Elisha receives the spirit of Elijah. And that is also the crossing of the Red Sea. It's the
01:08:06.380
crossing of the Jordan when they enter into Jericho. There's all these images of the crossing of the
01:08:10.700
water that's going down, this undoing of the world. It's the flood itself. Enoch goes up before the flood,
01:08:15.660
this undoing of the world before the new world is born. And so in St. John, you see that happening.
01:08:21.720
You see it also in his annunciation, which is that it's a recapitulation of all the women of the Old
01:08:28.720
Testament, of the barren women. So you have these old women that haven't had children, right? This
01:08:34.960
kind of fallen world that God has to nonetheless give grace to, so to perpetuate it, even though it's
01:08:40.940
fallen and it's broken, that's the end of the world. And the annunciation to Elizabeth, to
01:08:47.120
Zachariah and Elizabeth, and the annunciation to Mary are like the end of the beginning.
01:08:51.820
She is, Mary is the virgin waters. She's the, and the spirit of God descends on her like in Genesis
01:08:58.460
1, where the spirit is above the waters. So you can see that it's all of this relationship between
01:09:04.700
the baptism, between the birth, the annunciation to Mary, the annunciation to Elizabeth are showing the
01:09:10.140
end of a world and the beginning of a, of a new world that is happening. And it's layered,
01:09:14.480
like it's layered in all these different versions.
01:09:15.900
Can I just add something to that? Because that's, I think the right framework. And I'd add the temple
01:09:19.860
perspective of the very fact he's introduced as the son of a temple priest, his mother's from a
01:09:24.500
priestly clan. So the question is, why isn't John the Baptist in the temple? And part of my thing is
01:09:29.560
he's, there's a really pronouncing of judgment on the temple. He's proposing a kind of new temple
01:09:35.440
out in the, uh, in the desert, a new washing. There are people seeking forgiveness of sins,
01:09:41.500
not in the temple, but from him. And so, and then his announcement in the gospel of John,
01:09:46.000
when Jesus comes is behold the lamb of God. Uh, when I talked to, so he's a radical,
01:09:51.280
is he doing the same thing? Do you think with the temple that Moses is doing after the Israelites
01:09:57.660
leave God with the golden calf and he sets up the tabernacle outside the center of the community?
01:10:03.260
Is it, is that associated with, with Jonathan's claim that John the Baptist is signifying the
01:10:08.980
end of the old world? Part of the messianic expectation was the renewal of the temple,
01:10:13.260
right? So part, he would gather the nations. He would, he was reign as Lord and he would renew
01:10:17.600
the temple. So I think it's the beginning of a temple renewal program. And then when Jesus comes,
01:10:22.700
he goes, well, here's the lamb of God. Here's the one who's meant to be sacrificed in the true
01:10:26.760
temple. Then of course, Jesus picks that up with, you know, I will tear this place down in three
01:10:30.740
days, rebuild it, referring to the temple of his body. So I think that's the liminal thing too.
01:10:35.660
He's a, he's the end of the old temple, the beginning of the new.
01:10:38.020
And if you look at John 1 14, it says, and the word became flesh and tabernacled amongst
01:10:44.140
the word, the word, the word is the verb from skene, which is the tabernacle, which is the word
01:10:51.060
that the Greek translators of the old Testament used of the tabernacle. And the movement, the movement
01:10:56.800
to, right, to the desert, to the river Jordan is a movement from the strictures of law and
01:11:03.220
architecture and ritual, right? It's, it's all a movement out to take it out.
01:11:08.820
But he's also, I mean, John, like from a, from a Christian interpretation, John is also telling
01:11:14.300
people Jerusalem is going to be destroyed. Like he's saying, get ready, this is over. And
01:11:18.400
so when, when Jesus, when Joshua crosses the Jordan this time, it's not Jericho that's going
01:11:22.900
to be destroyed. It is Jerusalem that it's going to be destroyed. Like the imagery is
01:11:28.360
Moving away from ritual. I mean, John's engaging in a ritual baptism. What like, what do you
01:11:33.900
Oh, I mean, from the conventional ones in the temple. Why is he not in the temple? Why
01:11:37.520
is he in the desert? Why is he committing, you know, baptism? His movement is out from the
01:11:43.080
convention. Like you were asking, why isn't he in the temple given his background? So he's
01:11:47.280
moving out into nature and into. Is it a radical archaism? No, what I'm asking, I mean, I mean.
01:11:55.300
The old ritual, perhaps I should say. Yeah, it's a new. It's a new ritual. There's a new
01:11:59.600
ritual. Like that's an astonishing thing to me. Like if I wanted to, hey, you know what
01:12:04.380
I've done? I've set up a new ritual. Who's like, that's just like, that's just a powerful
01:12:09.520
Well, but it's not a new ritual. It's a recapitulation of the Red Sea, of the cross from the Jordan,
01:12:15.280
of Elisha's sending for healing in the Jordan. Like it's, it's not, it's not like he's making
01:12:20.820
it up with his own, basically taking all of this and recapitulating it.
01:12:24.100
But that's the same thing of the entire story. That's where it's fractal. That's what Jesus
01:12:27.440
does for, you know, Exodus, for Genesis. I mean, what we're seeing is everything is a
01:12:32.340
relation and a fulfillment of the previous rituals.
01:12:35.100
But it is new and it's a baptism for the, for the forgiveness of sins. Like I don't see
01:12:39.760
that anywhere else. Can I ask this question for Christians? What does that mean to you to
01:12:44.180
have somebody proposing a ritual that's, is supposed to give the forgiveness of sins
01:12:52.200
So what happens, the way I understand the baptismal event, let's say, if we can jump
01:12:57.740
to that momentarily, is that it recapitulates the time at the beginning of time. You have
01:13:05.060
the water, which is the tohu vabohu, right? I would say that's the deep pool of possibility.
01:13:11.200
And you have the spirit descend that sets on the water. And that's a recapitulation of
01:13:16.740
the initial state. You can think about that as a neurophysiological transformation writ large,
01:13:22.680
right? It's the dissolution of the old personality, the re-instantiation of the, of the process that
01:13:29.360
brings order out of chaos and the generation of a new order. And so, and it's new in the sense
01:13:35.920
that you said, but it's very, very archaic. The baptismal idea is unbelievably old, right?
01:13:40.380
That initiatory idea, tens of thousands of years old, insanely old.
01:13:48.260
I wasn't talking about the baptism by John of Jesus, I think, and even the ritual baptism.
01:13:53.380
I appreciate what you're saying about its psycho-spiritual capacities for transformation. I'm
01:13:58.560
trying to, like, this seems to be an, I'm not denying the continuity, but there's an innovation
01:14:03.660
here. And then I'm, I'm, I'm asking a question for looking sort of from the outside. This
01:14:09.260
seems problematic. How, how is this the forgiveness of sins?
01:14:13.520
The crossing of the Red Sea is already a forgiveness of sins because the Egyptians remain in the
01:14:18.360
water, right? The, the, the image is already there, right? When did Israelites cross the
01:14:24.180
Red Sea? The Egyptians remain in the water and the Israelites are, come out at the end.
01:14:32.500
Why was that forgiveness of sin? I didn't follow that.
01:14:35.060
So if you, if you understand sin as transgression, as a thing that doesn't fit, as the thing that
01:14:40.180
isn't towards the purpose, if we get away from just the simple moral, this is good, this
01:14:44.600
is bad. If we understand that what sin is, is that which is not aimed towards the purpose.
01:14:49.760
So you have things that step out of the purpose. That is what the drowning of the Egyptian is
01:14:59.100
No, they're not forgiven. No, no. But the people who pass through are.
01:15:04.740
They're saved, but they're not forgiven. I don't, I never understood the Jews on the
01:15:10.000
other side of the sea being forgiven for anything because that's not what's said. It's, they,
01:15:16.860
they were just saved from the death of the Egyptian army.
01:15:20.420
Well, my sense is that, that, that they're comparatively forgiven because the, the Israelites
01:15:28.400
and the Egyptians both have to face the chaos of the Red Sea, but the Egyptians are so tyrannical
01:15:35.040
and so bent beyond redemption that, that flood of chaos destroys them. Now that doesn't mean
01:15:42.920
the Israelites are finally saved, but they're, they at least managed to pass through the chaos
01:15:48.020
alive. And so there's an, that, and what they established themselves as a new people on the
01:15:56.920
opposite shore, right? There's a, there is a new beginning there and that doesn't necessarily
01:16:03.160
signify, signify that they've been washed clean by the, by the chaotic Red Sea. But it does mean that
01:16:10.980
the tyranny that held them back as being demolished by the chaos.
01:16:14.840
Well, they'd been washed clean of the Egyptian.
01:16:18.600
And if you view them as one organism in a way, and also to be saved is the same thing as to be
01:16:26.480
Yeah. I mean, I'm not, I can't find the verse that says that John intended by baptism,
01:16:32.040
the efficacious sort of salvation of people who are being baptized. And he says at various points,
01:16:39.180
he says, he actually draws a distinction. So Matthew says, this is what 311, I indeed baptize
01:16:45.880
you with water unto repentance. I mean, you're repenting and there's an external mark of your
01:16:50.900
having repented. I take it to mean I baptize you, but the he that coming after me is mightier than I
01:16:57.400
whose shoes I'm not worthy to untie. Then in John, this is in, let's have a look. This is at the
01:17:03.460
beginning of the opening chapter. He, you know, he says, why are you, he's asked, why are you
01:17:08.200
baptizing if you're not the Christ? And he says, well, I'm baptizing you with water, but there's
01:17:14.280
somebody standing among you who, who you don't know. So it's a kind of proleptic.
01:17:18.280
This is the apocalyptic eschatological context and one might say mood, isn't it? So maybe this
01:17:26.280
fits in with your setting the scene. Yeah. And this is a period when we know that there were these
01:17:31.920
various groups emerging in this Jewish context. It's a symbolic prefiguring of...
01:17:44.300
Well, we do. There are psychological investigations that show, for example,
01:17:48.340
that if people take a bath or a shower, they feel, they declare themselves more morally pure.
01:17:53.360
That's what women do after they're raped. It's a very powerful imagery.
01:17:58.800
Right. And it's a, it's a removal of contamination, but it's not, it's not as profound a removal as
01:18:04.520
could conceivably be imagined. So, okay. So now for the Christians again, why does Christ require a
01:18:14.000
Can I try to answer John's question about baptism? I think it draws a lot of the themes together.
01:18:18.340
Our sins are forgiven in the cross of Jesus. They're forgiven in that great act. And when the
01:18:25.100
soldier pierces aside, out comes blood and water. And the church fathers read that as the blood of
01:18:29.460
the Eucharist, but the water of baptism. And they further linked it to Ezekiel's great prophecy that,
01:18:35.260
you know, the shaking of the Lord had left the temple and it'll come back someday. And when it does,
01:18:41.080
that's when water flows forth from its side for the renewal of the world and of the human heart and
01:18:45.900
all that. And I think that's how they read it is, is from the side of the renewed temple.
01:18:50.500
So when John the Baptist, this priestly figure says, behold, there's the lamb of God. There's
01:18:55.880
the one who be sacrificed and whose very body is the new temple. That's what the baptismal water
01:19:02.360
symbolizes is the water coming from the redemptive act of Christ on the cross. I bring all those
01:19:08.640
themes together. So is it, is the baptism, the baptism seems to precipitate two events. One is
01:19:16.280
the sojourn in the desert and one is the onset of the ministry. So what, what's your reading? And
01:19:21.180
Bishop Barron, I'd like to hear your... Well, in Matthew, it's amazing because in Matthew, you really
01:19:26.020
have this, this repetition of Exodus, you know, so, uh, I mean, we'll get to it when we, when we talk
01:19:32.080
about it, but Christ, uh, is chased into Egypt, you know, to flee his brother. And then he comes
01:19:38.860
back. When he comes back, he crosses the sea, he's baptized. Then he goes to be tempted into
01:19:45.360
the desert. And then he goes up the mountain to give the new law. He, that's where he does
01:19:49.580
the sermon of the Mount. And so that is really, the Christians really understand the baptism
01:19:53.660
as this 40 days in the wilderness, 40 years in the wilderness.
01:19:56.880
And so when you see, when you see Christ going in the water, it's a repetition of Genesis one. It's
01:20:01.240
so clear. He goes down into the water. And then it says, when he comes up, the spirit came down
01:20:07.120
upon him as a dove. It's not just that Genesis one, it's also the end of the flood. It's the
01:20:12.480
Genesis one. It's the end of the flood. It's the, it's Joshua, you know, it's the Israelites going to
01:20:17.700
the Sinai. It's all of these images of water crossing that are in the old Testament are
01:20:21.780
recapitulated into this, this image of regeneration, which is the beginning of a,
01:20:27.140
of a new world. But you could say that that's ritually what it is for us. That is that when
01:20:32.500
we go into the water, we come out new. It's the, it is, it is a new birth, a new beginning. Like
01:20:38.440
it's being born again, all of that, all of that imagery. But Christ says that he's, he's doing it
01:20:46.040
He's doing it for us. He's doing it to show us what is real about himself. Like when that's
01:20:51.860
the scandal of it. So from the beginning, and even scholars say recognize that the fact that
01:20:56.540
it's in the gospels, it's scandalous. Why would Jesus, the son of God have to seek a baptism
01:21:00.960
of repentance? So the fact that it's there means that, boy, this really happened. You know,
01:21:05.200
it's one of the stronger arguments, but to Jonathan's point, how do you read that from
01:21:09.200
the human side? I mean, is Christ as a man, does Christ as a man, he obviously
01:21:15.700
matures. He matures from infant onward. Does Christ as a man reveal his relationship with
01:21:24.100
God more and more deeply as he progresses, even to himself?
01:21:27.560
He's the icon of the invisible God. Now what's going on inside his own psychology, his own
01:21:31.740
human psychology is a famously, you know, controverted issue. He grows in wisdom and
01:21:36.040
understanding. So the gospel says that, that's right.
01:21:38.200
So I think that's really fine to say that in his human nature, to use more technical language,
01:21:41.940
sure. He grows. Um, well in his, and he does go into the desert and encounter Satan and begin his
01:21:48.820
ministry as a constant, well, in his human nature, after the baptism essentially. And I think that's
01:21:53.460
part of the baptism is the identification with the sinner. So he stands shoulder to shoulder with
01:21:59.060
sinners in the muddy waters of the Jordan. And anyone walking by would say, oh, there's another
01:22:02.240
one of those sinners, but that's anticipating the cross becomes sin on the cross. And that also
01:22:07.420
explains the question of why do we need John the Baptist? Because we need a human being to stand
01:22:13.020
in. If, if Jesus is standing in for sinners that he doesn't need, but to show us the path,
01:22:18.480
you need another human being with enough authority to baptize him, right?
01:22:23.420
All the Christians at the table correctly are making clear the references to the Old Testament,
01:22:30.240
specifically the Pentateuch, the Torah. So I have a question, which is sort of outside of the
01:22:36.400
province of the Bible study, but it's always puzzled me. And maybe you in particular might
01:22:42.280
it, because you expressed the fact that you were, uh, an evangelist for your, for the faith.
01:22:48.660
I never understood why so many Christian groups will only hand out the New Testament
01:22:56.740
Big mistake. Yeah. Oh, I agree. I mean, one of the earliest fights the church had was against
01:23:02.400
a Marcion. That's right. So the Marcionite heresy that tried to divide the New Testament from the
01:23:06.620
Old and the church by a very deep and correct instinct led by St. Irenaeus said, no, you cannot
01:23:13.000
understand Jesus apart from the Old Testament. So that's a very bad instinct to say, just read
01:23:18.400
the gospel. You'll be fine. You can't, you won't get the gospel apart from the Old Testament.
01:23:22.660
What's interesting is, is, is that Marcion not only repudiated the Old Testament, he cut the four
01:23:27.400
gospels down to one. That many parts of the New, right. Which was the one he found most sympathetic
01:23:31.880
and free of, uh, kind of Hebrew, the fingerprints of the Old Testament. But we still fight it today.
01:23:37.640
We still, when people say, oh, the God of the Old Testament, cruel and violent and all that,
01:23:41.400
I love the God of the New Testament. That's a neo-Marcionism. And the church has got to stand
01:23:45.500
against that just as clearly today. Huge problem. No, I'm glad this is on record. Yes, yes.
01:23:50.880
No, no, no. I think it's very important. Okay. So another very strange occurrence happens. So
01:23:55.740
after the annunciation to, um, to John's father and mother, we have the annunciation to Mary.
01:24:02.880
And, uh, I'll read that because it's worth going into, I would say.
01:24:06.560
In the sixth month of Elizabeth's term, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee
01:24:10.700
called Nazareth, a nowhere town, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph of the
01:24:16.320
lineage of David. This maiden's name was Mary. Gabriel came to her and said, Hail, O favored
01:24:21.600
one, the Lord is with thee. Mary was greatly troubled at these words and wondered what this
01:24:28.040
greeting might mean. But the angel said to her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor
01:24:32.020
with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call
01:24:36.940
his name Jesus. He will be great. He will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God
01:24:42.220
will give to him the throne of his father, David, and he will rule over the house of
01:24:46.180
Jacob forever and his kingdom will have no end. Mary said to the angel, How can this be
01:24:51.980
since I have never known a man? And the angel replied, The Holy Spirit will come upon you
01:24:58.100
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be
01:25:02.800
holy and he will be called the Son of God. And Mary agrees to that. Behold, I am the handmaid
01:25:09.320
of the Lord. Okay, so I want to unpack a couple of things in that from a psychological perspective,
01:25:14.760
and then I'll let the people who are more biblically oriented take it from there. So
01:25:19.100
the first thing I would, I've got two things to say on that front. The image of mother and
01:25:27.660
child is an ancient image. It predates Christianity. And the reason for that is that, well, any culture
01:25:35.660
that doesn't hold the image of mother and infant sacred is done because that's the very image of
01:25:41.680
love, maternal love, life, reproduction, continuity, sacrifice, all of that. And so I think it's either
01:25:50.660
Mary and the infant or the whore of Babylon. I think those are the directions for women fundamentally.
01:25:57.080
And so, so there's that from the psychological perspective is that the, the sacrificial relationship
01:26:04.560
of mother to infant is core. It's fundamental. Then the next issue is possibly that the very
01:26:12.900
definition of feminine, of female biologically isn't chromosomal difference. Chromosomal difference
01:26:18.780
is a reflection of a more fundamental difference. What female means biologically is that sex which
01:26:24.560
contributes more to the reproductive process. And so right from fractally, right from the
01:26:31.200
level of sperm and egg upward, the bulk of the reproductive responsibility, especially in
01:26:37.220
its initial phases, is clearly feminine. And so it is as if, at least as if, it's mother
01:26:44.080
and God producing child with the father donating a trifle, a trifle to the process. Now in Mary's
01:26:53.380
case, that's obviously taken to the ultimate degree. But at minimum, it reflects this underlying
01:26:58.580
biological reality. It's also the case that Mary, embodying as she does the spirit of motherhood,
01:27:07.300
says yes to the fact of the child. Now we don't know what Mary's informed of by the angel with regard
01:27:15.100
to the destiny of her child, which is a very brutal and great destiny. But that's the destiny of all
01:27:20.760
children, right? Is that, and part of the reason we have a birth crisis in the modern world is because
01:27:25.960
women now look at the world, A, they're unwilling to make the sacrifice, and B, they think, who would
01:27:32.940
dare to bring a child into a world such as this? And the answer is, well, we've always brought children
01:27:38.980
into a world of death and malevolence. And there isn't a deeper reflection of fundamental faith in the
01:27:48.260
goodness of being and becoming than the decision a woman takes to throw herself wholeheartedly and
01:27:54.420
without reservation into the relationship with her infant. And that's all, as far as I can tell,
01:28:00.180
that's all packed into this story and more. So that's what I have to say.
01:28:05.000
And we're going to get to the, when she meets Simeon in the temple, then we get the fullness of what
01:28:10.720
you're saying, where Simeon tells her, you know, a sword will also pierce your heart. Like, you are
01:28:16.320
moving towards sacrifice of your own. It's not only your son that will be sacrificed, but you will
01:28:21.280
also... As she brings the presence of the God of Israel back into the temple, fulfilling Ezekiel.
01:28:27.660
In your read of this, this is typical when we read something and then all of a sudden,
01:28:34.440
after so many times of reading it, something pops up. Yeah. So I'm sure I may be wrong, but
01:28:41.560
the angel describing to Mary whom she will give birth to does not describe him as God.
01:28:49.500
Correct? As a divine being. He will be great and he'll be called the descendant of David. He's the new...
01:28:58.980
So, is that not interesting or worthy of note that this, that Jesus, if indeed is God incarnate,
01:29:10.280
that that would not be stated by, in the description of him by the angel to Mary?
01:29:18.180
Do you think that's, it seems to me, arguably, that that's implicit in two parts. Son of the Most High,
01:29:25.000
say three parts. Son of the Most High, kingdom will have no end, and the intermediation of the Holy
01:29:33.000
Spirit. So there's a, there's strong pointers in that direction. And so...
01:29:38.200
But you need the whole trajectory of the gospel fully to see it, but right.
01:29:41.960
There are parallels too. I mean, there's that moment in 2 Samuel where David leaps at the presence of
01:29:46.780
the, leaps back at the presence of the ark. And some scholars think there's a parallelism here with
01:29:51.360
John the Baptist leaping in the womb. That's just sort of the presence of Mary as the ark.
01:29:55.540
Or it's David's dance in the presence of the ark.
01:29:58.840
She's, she's being treated as the ark of the covenant in the story because it says that the,
01:30:03.060
you know, the, the, the, the presence of God will descend upon you. And so this,
01:30:08.360
the image is that she is the waters, right? The Holy Spirit comes down upon her as the waters
01:30:12.480
of creation, but also the presence of God descends upon her as the ark of the covenant. And then that
01:30:18.420
will, I mean, obviously these are, the text is, is going to tease all of these things
01:30:22.820
out, right? It's, it, because these are, these are things that you have always had to remember
01:30:27.000
how crazy what we're saying is. It is crazy to say that, that this man is God. And so the
01:30:32.640
story slowly teases it out as we move towards the...
01:30:35.480
So it was deliberate on the part of the angel to omit that.
01:30:42.300
Because, because so, I think so much of this is, you know, there's so much of the gospel is
01:30:47.280
around doubt. You know, it's like, you know, you go back to with Exodus where Moses says,
01:30:51.580
hang on one minute, Aaron, I'm just going up the mountain and just keep things under control.
01:30:55.740
And then immediately out of sight, it's like, you know, he did his own.
01:31:00.500
And so it's again and again with the gospels is the, all the way through, you know, Peter denying
01:31:05.200
Christ three times. I mean, it's, it's all the way through is the doubt and the disbelief,
01:31:09.400
even in the face of what is. And so I think that these intimations are also a way of,
01:31:13.240
like they, they sort of naturally build suspense from a narrative perspective, but they also
01:31:18.480
are trying to move along at a pace that human comprehension can possibly keep up with.
01:31:23.680
If I could just pick up for a second on something, Dr. Peterson, you were saying about motherhood.
01:31:30.040
It's very interesting here, the pattern that is emerging, you know, the angel, an angel comes
01:31:34.080
to both, both, in both situations to, to prophesy the birth. And in one sense, you know,
01:31:41.160
pregnancy is one of the great examples of fulfillment of nature, right? It's, it's,
01:31:46.640
it's the actualization of the potentiality for, for motherhood. And yet, you know, that fulfillment
01:31:52.220
in both cases is, uh, is a radical self-othering. Both of these sons will, will, will die brutal,
01:31:59.080
brutal deaths. And so I think what's being indicated here already in a very fundamental sense is the,
01:32:05.400
the inherently non-instrumental character of, of, of, of, of love itself. And so that you are fulfilled
01:32:14.060
precisely in the transcending of your own fulfillment. And, you know, when Jesus says that,
01:32:19.640
that my kingdom is not of this world, I mean, it seems to me what, what the scriptures are speaking
01:32:24.600
to us of, to us of already here in the announcement of the angels about the, the pregnancy and birth of
01:32:31.320
the children who will die deaths that are not for themselves is, uh, is the, is the radically,
01:32:39.040
is the radical self-othering that is the nature of self. You might say the realization of the self
01:32:46.860
in the deepest sense. And you see this, that this in Christ at the very end, this is mirrored on the
01:32:51.920
cross where he is going to say as his last act, as you might say, reconstituting that family between,
01:32:58.140
in a sense, between Mary and John. So that the, the ultimate act of self-othering is the principle
01:33:04.320
that is able to bring together some harmony, uh, uh, in us and in what is around us.
01:33:11.960
And I think we're also looking at this tragedy, especially in comparison to, let's say, Abraham
01:33:16.200
and Isaac, where his hand is stayed and he gets to keep his son. But the actual end of the gospels
01:33:21.820
is that the same thing happens with God. He gives his, you know, like in a way,
01:33:28.480
Yeah. He, he, he, it goes all the way through, but then he has his son and Mary's also is reunited
01:33:33.920
And by the way, just on Dennis's point, um, I think actually it's fairly, fairly clear that,
01:33:41.340
um, you know, this is the, the, the power of the, of the highest. Um, and that's, that's a literal,
01:33:51.180
very literal translation. Um, and also that the, the, the, the, this is Hagion, it's, it's the,
01:33:57.580
the, the holy, the holy thing. And then the, who is the, it's, it's the son of God. So I think
01:34:05.200
actually the, the, you just want to Dennis, this is, this is not any human being. This is,
01:34:11.300
Oh, you see it more clearly in the annunciation of Joseph, right in Matthew 1 18. So let's refer
01:34:17.680
to that again. I'll read through that and then we'll go to the birth of Christ. So this is the
01:34:22.160
annunciation after Mary has been betrothed to Joseph, but before they came together, she would
01:34:26.420
be found to be with child by the Holy spirit. And her husband, Joseph being a just man and unwilling
01:34:32.320
to put her to public disgrace, resolved to send her away quietly. But as he considered these things,
01:34:37.800
an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take
01:34:43.860
Mary as your wife for the child within her is conceived of the Holy spirit. She will bear a son.
01:34:49.220
You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to
01:34:54.780
fulfill what the Lord had spoken through the prophet. Behold, the virgin shall conceive, shall bear a
01:34:59.400
son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God is with us. That's a bit clearer.
01:35:05.040
Now, I'm going to speak about that biologically too. And I think the easiest explanation on the
01:35:10.740
biological side is that of paternal uncertainty. And so in any, in any relationship between a man
01:35:17.840
and a woman, there is always until DNA testing became possible, but there's always an element of
01:35:23.820
paternal uncertainty. And one of the, one of the things that a man has to contend with when his wife
01:35:30.460
is pregnant is that paternal uncertainty. And his willingness to act in good faith is, of course,
01:35:37.880
dependent on the integrity of the marriage. But it's that willingness to act in good faith that
01:35:43.160
actually makes for the solidity of the family. That's a terrible place for doubt to emerge.
01:35:47.860
And so at minimum, that's part of what's happening in that story. And so I'll turn,
01:35:55.540
unless anybody has a comment on that, I'll turn to the birth.
01:35:57.760
Well, I just wanted to pick up on what Dennis said though. I mean, I'm a little bit hesitant of
01:36:02.960
going from the title of son of God immediately because son of God is used of other figures,
01:36:07.880
even figures like the kings in, yeah, kings in the Old Testament. And secondly, if this,
01:36:14.420
if this story is so central, why is it absent from Mark and why does Paul never talk about it?
01:36:20.220
That's problematic. I mean, if it's such a central thing that you're claiming it is,
01:36:24.180
Mark doesn't even consider it and Paul never refers to it.
01:36:27.320
People write towards purposes. And so there are different reasons why you would include it and
01:36:33.380
different reasons why you would exclude it. I mean, in the, in the gospels, it says, I think it's
01:36:37.820
at the end of the gospel of John where it says, you know, all the, all the books of the world
01:36:41.300
cannot, cannot be contained the story of Jesus. And so if we, if we ask why is this person used
01:36:47.500
saying this detail and why this other person not saying this detail? Do you mean divine sonship?
01:36:52.180
The claim that Jesus is son of God is? I think in a lot of ways, and we've discussed this a little
01:36:57.180
bit, the uncertainty or the lack of consistency across the stories actually makes them more
01:37:03.980
believable. I agree with you. And so if we were to reconstitute something from historical memory and
01:37:09.380
every detail lines up, I mean, think about like a police investigation, right?
01:37:15.100
Right. A bunch of guys in a heist and they have all the details in place, you're not going to
01:37:18.940
believe them. And so part of this is it's a historical reconstitution and memory works in
01:37:24.400
different ways. Story works in different ways. People are writing the different aims.
01:37:29.860
Yeah. It's a good, it's a good criticism, John, but one of the things that's interesting,
01:37:34.240
because your criticism is if it's so central, why isn't it replicated? And people have
01:37:37.800
addressed that. But interestingly, despite the fact that it's not replicated, it's also become a
01:37:43.440
really fundamental part of the culture of Christianity, right? Because there's nothing
01:37:48.180
in many ways that people know more about Christ's life than the birth, right? And so it does seem to
01:37:55.700
speak to something that's very, very deep, despite the fact that those other gospels also, they say
01:38:01.820
very little about Christ at all until, well, until the ministries start. And so I think
01:38:07.460
it's also carried through, though, inherently in the other gospels, because if Jesus is Jesus, it's not like he has
01:38:13.640
another father, meaning by dint of how the characters move and progress in the other gospels, this is the only
01:38:20.980
conclusion of how the birth could have happened, or else it would be misaligned.
01:38:24.620
I don't know if I agree with that. I mean, he has brothers and sisters, and there's no indication that they're
01:38:32.740
Well, no, the Greek, I think the Greek is adelphos, adelphera. I mean, that can mean, it can mean cousins, and it's thought to
01:38:39.820
mean cousins as well. And he's referred to as the son of Mary, which is very rare and odd that the patronymic
01:38:46.620
shouldn't be used. So I think there's quite a strong case for...
01:38:51.000
Your point is that if Christ is God, then his patrimony is God.
01:38:58.880
And if it's not, the other gospels would have something to say about it. Or everything wouldn't proceed, and
01:39:04.480
everybody around him wouldn't proceed as if that were the case.
01:39:07.360
I mean, we've got to remember that, okay, maybe the divine sonship theme isn't central in Mark, but I think in all the
01:39:14.420
synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, at the moment, both of baptism and transfiguration, you have the divine
01:39:25.640
I'd like to answer my own question, which is classic Jewish way of learning.
01:39:32.120
So it occurs to me, it's actually very real. He's speaking to a Jewish woman, and the whole context
01:39:40.240
is Jewish. The Lord God shall give him unto the throne of his father David. He shall reign over the
01:39:47.700
house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there shall be no end. It is all Jewish references.
01:39:54.160
If he'd have said, if the angel had said to Mary, I want you to know you're giving birth to God,
01:39:59.760
she would have thought it was a hallucination, or she had gone mad.
01:40:03.480
And this made perfect sense to her. And again, the Jewish context is so central, and that's why I
01:40:10.280
raised my point about only giving out the New Testament.
01:40:14.260
So partly what you're referring to there, perhaps, it's in the analog of what we pointed to before,
01:40:21.960
it's like, well, how much can you spring on one person at once?
01:40:26.120
Because you see that, I mean, in the entire rest of the gospel, you'll have Christ saying,
01:40:30.040
okay, don't say this. Don't say this. Don't say this. Wait, this is not, like, nobody's ready
01:40:35.780
for this yet. Wait, wait, wait. And then as things start to become clear, then the message
01:40:42.660
It's tied in some ways, too, with him refusing to perform carnival tricks when asked.
01:40:48.540
Right? I'm not going to show proof, whether it's to Satan, whether it's to others. I'm not
01:40:52.500
going to perform for, like, these things need to progress in their own time.
01:40:57.880
Well, to me, it was so beautiful in that story, many things, but Mary's the new Eve. So another
01:41:02.000
Old Testament reference, where Eve grasps the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I'm going
01:41:06.100
to grab this for myself and make it my own. Mary, the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me
01:41:10.720
according to your word. And that allows the divine to flow through her in this powerful way.
01:41:16.300
So that's the way the church fathers read it. She's the new Eve.
01:41:18.120
She's not putting herself at the center of creation.
01:41:20.500
And the Latin writers, right, the Latin writers love doing the Ave of the angel, you know,
01:41:25.820
Hail Mary reverses the Ava of Eve. And it's just a beautiful motif of how the divine flows.
01:41:36.000
Right. Well, when women in the throes of pregnancy do have to throw themselves over
01:41:41.580
to a process that's really outside of them, right, in a way that men can't understand.
01:41:47.140
I'm going to read the birth of Jesus and the angel's proclamation to the shepherds.
01:41:52.140
Now, the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way.
01:41:55.840
In those days, a decree went out from Caeser Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
01:42:00.020
This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.
01:42:07.460
And Joseph went up from Galilee, out of the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of
01:42:12.880
David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to
01:42:17.740
be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was great with child.
01:42:21.280
And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered.
01:42:23.980
And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid
01:42:27.720
him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
01:42:33.020
In the same region, there were shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their
01:42:38.380
By night, and lo, an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone round
01:42:45.260
But the angel said to them, Be not afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great
01:42:52.400
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.
01:42:58.720
You will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.
01:43:03.480
All right, so there's a variety of things happening there.
01:43:09.080
I'll unpack them briefly, and then we can discuss them.
01:43:11.620
So the first is that Christ is born under the dominion of the state.
01:43:17.640
That's the point of the census and the forced movement of people.
01:43:25.140
Every person, even the saviour of the world, is born into a situation where they have to
01:43:29.940
contend with the background tyranny of the state.
01:43:42.620
Because the Roman state is also degenerating towards a theocracy, right?
01:43:52.260
Right, so he would be on all the coins you'd have...
01:43:56.800
And in the Greek-speaking part of the world, where the Roman imperial cult, the cult of
01:44:00.920
the emperor, was very, very strong, that's the language that would be used.
01:44:04.800
So we have the genuine god being born at a time when there's a false god who's emerged
01:44:19.020
So is that every human baby with the potential to be, to participate in the redemption of
01:44:25.600
Born in a very lowly place, well, that's a biological reality as well, because all human
01:44:40.800
We're born in relationship to nature and even low nature, and that's associated with the
01:44:45.540
So it's the emergence of the highest and the lowest as a counterposition to the false
01:44:52.980
And then that's reiterated to some degree with the proclamation to the shepherds.
01:45:04.520
And the shepherds are an interesting choice, too, because, of course, shepherds, there's a
01:45:08.920
kinship between the shepherd and the prophet all the way through the Old Testament.
01:45:12.560
And that imagery is replicated continually in the New Testament.
01:45:21.740
And they do that independently and responsibly.
01:45:24.280
And so even though they're lowly, they're not, because they're types of something much
01:45:29.420
And even though they are low on the socioeconomic totem pole, the fact that Christ's birth is
01:45:39.060
announced to them is an indication of the universally salvific nature of his birth and mission, right?
01:45:47.200
So that's all happening in those little stories.
01:45:49.720
Shepherds are also counter to city, because they're the opposite of civilization.
01:45:58.440
They don't have all the things, all the tropes of the city.
01:46:04.100
In a way, it's the reversal of the cone, right?
01:46:06.480
If a tree falls in a forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?
01:46:10.020
If the Son of God is born in a manger and there's only shepherds around, is he still the
01:46:18.440
Just about Augustus and whether fragile or endangered state of the child, Augustus is
01:46:27.920
also the emperor in this period of extraordinary stability for the Roman Empire.
01:46:37.760
So it's also a good time for Jesus to be born, because...
01:46:45.380
So I think there's the tyrant element, the false deity, but also it's auspicious.
01:46:53.480
And the second point about his vulnerability, but again, the emphasis on David, right?
01:47:08.300
But the emphasis, again, this is the true successor of David.
01:47:20.700
Augustus is the ending of a civilization-wide civil war.
01:47:24.940
And I think there's an attempt to indicate something like a kairos happening here.
01:47:37.540
I'm not denying the tyranny of the Roman emperor, but, you know, Augustus, many historians consider
01:47:47.140
And if God had to choose any period in history to leave his authenticating signature on the
01:47:54.840
world in a way that would disseminate and distribute that message as quickly as possible, it's hard
01:48:01.860
And so it's like if you introduce it, it's almost like an enzyme.
01:48:07.260
Like, what's the state in which this action can be most fruitful?
01:48:11.300
And so in a time when everything's filled with sin, he sends the flood.
01:48:14.860
In a time when things have a level of stability and there needs to be foundations through which
01:48:22.500
Because in utter chaos, you can't have so cleanly that the temple and the government...
01:48:30.000
So they have to be in place in order to render that judgment.
01:48:32.580
It's hard to imagine the Christian message spreading with the astonishing speed that it does.
01:48:37.260
From, say, the early 30s AD to the point where, well, by 64, there are enough Christians
01:48:43.200
in Rome for Nero to be able to scapegoat the Christians as a distinct group from the Jews.
01:48:53.180
But there is a desire to create a foil, though, I think.
01:48:57.720
You know, because even if we talk about the Pact for Mana, we haven't gotten to the...
01:49:01.180
Right after that, when the angels announce, they say,
01:49:03.160
Glory to God and the highest peace on earth of men of goodwill, right?
01:49:10.580
I think it is creating a foil to the Roman rule, which is, here's the great emperor.
01:49:15.180
Without maybe not necessarily criticizing, but here's the great emperor.
01:49:19.220
But now here's the true emperor that's hidden at the bottom of the world in a cave, in a manger.
01:49:23.500
And that this is, through this, that the true peace will be found.
01:49:32.280
And actually, it's worth pointing out that the word, the Greek word for good news or gospel is evangelion,
01:49:37.720
which is the word that emperors would send out.
01:49:43.900
You would send the evangelion to the, you know, towns and villages that worshipped him.
01:49:49.400
And this was particularly in this part of the world.
01:49:51.040
And this was the good news, the good news of the emperor, of, you know, of Caesar's birthday.
01:49:55.900
There's a clearly, I think, a semi-conscious aping and mimicking of the language of the imperial cult
01:50:03.340
to assert that Jesus is Lord and therefore Caesar isn't.
01:50:08.960
I think it's a formula that in some ways sums up the whole Bible.
01:50:12.040
You know, glory to God in the highest and peace among us.
01:50:16.040
When you give glory to something other than God, then violence breaks out and division breaks out.
01:50:20.300
But if you really give glory to the sumum bonum appropriately, then peace will obtain among us.
01:50:25.640
So the angelic message is that's the whole Bible.
01:50:30.600
And some of that's associated with the glorification of the infant as a center of attention,
01:50:38.660
But it also has to be, like, for it to be the fullness, you also have to have these extremes
01:50:43.120
where the angels appear above, these singing angels, right?
01:50:48.100
And then the lowest aspect of reality being connected together so that you say, oh, this
01:50:52.900
is the fullness of God's revelation, the fullness of God's presence in the world, represented
01:50:57.700
by these two extremes with the angels up above.
01:51:00.760
But what is the Greek again for the, we say host or we say company of angels, but it's
01:51:04.940
like something with army, like stratios or stratios.
01:51:13.660
So Caesar can dominate the world because he's got this big human army.
01:51:19.620
It's an angelic army of these fearsome supernatural realities.
01:51:26.180
So Bishop, I have a question, which I know a lot of people watching this will have, but
01:51:33.560
I agree 100% if we all acknowledge the God of the Bible, it would be a much better world,
01:51:42.580
So how do you explain, because it's a very real question for all of us, not just people
01:51:53.600
who claimed to believe in God who did horrible things, but horrible things to other people
01:52:02.880
The Christian wars in Europe probably precipitated the rejection of religion ultimately.
01:52:17.420
It's in fact, the first book I wrote is called The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism.
01:52:23.460
And one of the nine questions is, if religion, specifically Judaism, is supposed to make people
01:52:30.640
good, how do you account for unethical religious Jews?
01:52:33.980
It's one of the nine questions I asked in my first book.
01:52:37.040
The question of people who believe in God who do bad, I mean, the God of the Bible, that's
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Dennis, let's let that hang and get that back into that when we talk about the Pharisees.
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Okay, I'm not sure they're the best example of bad God.
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Well, but I think the question is specifically addressed in some of the stories of Christ's
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conflict, let's say, with religious authorities per se.
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The idea of saying one thing and doing another, like that's the opposite of the incarnation.
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It's like it's this disjoining of heaven and earth where you have a word and a being that
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You say things, you think something, you say something, and then you do another thing.
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Where Christ is saying, no, heaven and earth have to be united.
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That is what the incarnation is trying to show.
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We'll spend a whole session on that question in some ways.
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Okay, so I'm going to go through the lead up to the baptism here and we'll conclude with
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So what happens in the next few stories, essentially, and I'll compress them, is that Mary and Joseph
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and the people around Christ are presented with evidence of various sorts that something
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So we have, we first of all have the naming and events in the temple when Jesus is presented
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in the temple and there's a prophetess there who describes his eventual destiny and a prophet
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And so he tells Mary that her son is destined to do spectacular things.
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And then after that, we have the gifts of the magi.
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And these are magicians, magi, from the east who have seen, who have analyzed the patterns
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of the stars in heaven because they're astrologers and have determined that an old age has ended
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and that would be the age of the ram and a new age, Pisces, is about to begin.
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And so there's, there's signs in the stars, so to speak, that something new is about to
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be born and the magi come and find Christ and represent and, and regard him as the fulfillment
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This is a, this is a Old Testament parallel with the flight into Egypt and massacre of
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I mean, the interesting thing about the flight into Egypt and the massacre of the innocents
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is, you know, the story of Jesus is always smashing the Old Testament references together,
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bringing them together in a way that is absolutely crazy.
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And so what happens is when Jesus goes to Egypt there, he's doing the flight and return
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That is when Joseph goes to Egypt, he flees his brothers trying to kill him.
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When Moses leaves Egypt with the, with the Israelites, he's fleeing the, the, the Pharaoh
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And so in, in this, in this version, the two come together in one story.
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And there's a third element too, which is also King David fleeing King Saul, who the,
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the true King fleeing the King that is there at this moment.
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So you have this wild image where, you know, the, the Christ goes into Egypt in order to,
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in order to flee the, the, the King in both ways, like fleeing his own brother, but then
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So it's a, it's a, it's hard even to say it because all the images kind of come together,
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It's a difficult, it's a difficult situation because in some ways it has to do with the
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It has to do with the problem of the, of the concentration of a generation into one person.
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Uh, it's a little scandalous to talk about it, but I think that that is part of what
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So the Magi tell Herod that a King will arise and Herod determines to kill all the, all the,
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And so that's, that's equivalent to what happens in Moses' time.
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And also Joseph, like Joseph leaving his brothers that want to kill him into Egypt, but then also
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There's also, I mean, there's, there's extra biblical reference.
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And so, and there's been an ongoing relationship between Israel and Persia and Persia figures
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very, I mean, I, I believe I read somewhere that Cyrus was actually the first, one of the
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first people called Messiah in the old Testament and King of Kings.
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And so there's also that relationship to, and, and, and, you know, and Zoro, Zoroastrianism is,
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you know, is the idea that there is, um, there's a, that the future has an openness to it.
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And we are a moral battleground in which that openness can be decided.
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And I think by having the Magi there, there is a recognition of that.
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So, yeah, but there's also the intimation that's been presented right from the beginning and
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will be continually presented, which is that it is related to the story of Joseph, something
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like the, the stranger will recognize him first.
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Like the, the, that this will move towards the strangers.
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But, but it's, it's the opposite also of the old Testament because the Persians send the
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It's, it's, it's, it's also an inversion, which is trying to say, I think there's something
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happening about the relationship to, uh, in, to the Zoroastrian tradition that's being
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But, and they, they are Magi and that that's like, that's really, really important.
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It's deeply Israelite that Israel has chosen, but not for their own sake, but chosen for
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To your earlier point that, I mean, ultimately that the whole world's come to Torah.
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Well, that's, you find it in the Psalms, you find it in Isaiah.
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From a Christian standpoint, here's the beginning of it, that as Christ comes, the other nations
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Shepherds and foreigners are the people who mark it.
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So, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to close gentlemen with this last story, I think, because this
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sets us up for the baptism and then the flight into the desert, which is where we can start
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So this is this, the, the, the story of the culmination in some ways of Christ's youth.
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The young Jesus confers with the teachers, Luke 2, 40 to 50.
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The child Jesus grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was
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Now, his parents went to Jerusalem every year for the feast of the Passover.
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When Jesus was 12 years old, they took him with them when they went up, according to the
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But after the celebration was over and they were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind
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His parents did not know this, but supposing him to be in their traveling party, they went
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a day's journey and then they looked for him among their kinsfolk and acquaintances.
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When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him.
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After three days, they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening
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And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his responses.
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When his parents saw him, they were astonished.
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And his mother said to him, son, why have you treated us this way?
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Your father and I have been anxiously looking for you.
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And Jesus said to them, why did you need to search for me?
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Did you not know that I must be in my father's house?
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But they did not understand the significance of these words.
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We see the young Jesus first taking his place with the learned men in discussion.
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And that's a prodroma for much of what happens in the remainder of the Gospels.
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We see the fact that he's exceptionally good at it, enough to hold his own even as a 12-year-old
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And that he is also pointing out to his parents, who still don't understand this, that he's
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marked out for a very particular form of destiny.
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And so it's after that that that seriously starts to unfold.
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And that's where we'll pick up when we reconvene.
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And for the Christians, too, it's important because the early church, there was a debate,
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there was actually an early Christian who proposed a single Gospel.
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He said, you know, we have to take these unwieldy texts and merge them into one nice, clean, coherent
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But the church resisted that because, you know, in some ways they knew that the Gospels were
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They were handed down through the apostles, through the apostolic succession.
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And they, in some ways, the variety in the text, it is a witness to the kind of energy,
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you know, like the kind of frenetic desire to get this story down.
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And even the idea that you, in some ways it represents different perspectives on the same
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So Christ is hidden in the four Gospels, right?
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And his life is not simply told in those Gospels.
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We have to understand that he's more than that, but that these Gospels are the right
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And they have a reason why each of them have their own thrust, their own narrative, their