00:00:00.000If you had been at sea in the first century, somewhere near Turkey, running a grain ship from Egypt toward Italy, you might have heard your name called across the water.
00:00:11.040Not a shout from another vessel, a voice, from the empty shore of the island of Paxi, calling for the Egyptian pilot by name, Thammus.
00:00:20.880Three times the call went out, and when he finally answered, the voice gave him a command,
00:00:26.840When you reach Pellodes, announce that the great god Pan is dead.
00:00:53.260and before he even finished, the shore erupted. Not one voice, but many. A great sound of groaning
00:01:01.200and lamentation and astonishment rising from a coastline where no crowd should have been.
00:01:07.560This isn't just a legend that somebody scrawled down centuries later. We have it from Plutarch,
00:01:12.760a Greek historian, a philosopher, and a serving priest of Apollo who says that the story reached
00:01:18.660Rome and that the emperor Tiberius himself summoned Thammus to the palace to ask what it meant.
00:01:25.640That's Tiberius, the emperor who was on the throne at the exact stretch of years when a certain
00:01:31.320Galilean preacher was nailed to a Roman cross outside of Jerusalem. Now, Pan is the only god0.93
00:01:37.880of the Greek world whose death is recorded as an event with a date. It's actually recorded in a
00:01:44.140historical source, and it landed in the reign of the one emperor whose name every Christian already
00:01:50.220knows from the trial narratives. Now hold that thought for a moment. Travel east, because in
00:01:57.860Jerusalem, in roughly the same window, the priests were watching a piece of wool. See, every year on
00:02:05.200the Day of Atonement, a strip of crimson dyed wool was tied to the goat that carried the sins of the
00:02:11.480out into the wilderness. This was the scapegoat of Leviticus. And there was a tradition, an old0.71
00:02:19.780and cherished one, that when Israel's sins were forgiven, the scarlet wool would turn white. It0.71
00:02:27.000was tied straight to the promise in Isaiah, though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white
00:02:33.860as snow. Year after year, the people watched for it, and when it whitened, they would rejoice.
00:02:40.300The Talmud, Israel's own record, not a Christian one, says that during the last 40 years before the temple was destroyed, it stopped.0.97
00:02:50.180The wool stayed red, and it wasn't the only thing that failed.
00:02:55.300The same passage lists four signs that broke altogether.
00:03:00.120The sacred lot for the Lord stopped falling in the high priest's right hand.
00:03:04.860The westernmost lamp of the menorah would no longer stay lit and the great temple doors began swinging open on their own in the middle of the night and the scarlet thread never turned white ever again.