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#2252 – Wesley Huff Podcast Episode Description
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Wesley Huff is a Christian apologist, public speaker, and current Central Canada Director for Apologetics Canada.
www.wesleyhuff.com
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#2252 – Wesley Huff Podcast Episode Top Keywords
#2252 – Wesley Huff Podcast Episode Summary
In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the discussion revolves around the importance of effective communication and the art of writing, drawing insights from ancient practices. A key point highlighted is the significance of focusing on main ideas rather than transcribing everything verbatim, as emphasized by ancient writers like Quintilian. This approach is linked to better retention and understanding, a theme that resonates throughout the conversation.
The episode features a dialogue between Joe Rogan and a guest, who is introduced through a past debate with Bill Karr. The guest, who has a background in Christianity, discusses the nuances of faith and ancient religions, touching on their differences with another individual named Billy. The conversation also delves into the concept of onomastic congruence, which involves studying name frequencies to understand historical contexts, particularly in religious texts like the New Testament.
An actionable insight from the episode is the value of distilling information to its core components for better comprehension and memory retention. This is applicable not only in writing but also in everyday communication and learning.
Recurring themes include the exploration of faith, historical analysis, and the importance of dialogue between differing viewpoints. The episode underscores the value of open discussions and the sharing of diverse perspectives, as well as the impact of thorough research and expertise in understanding complex topics.
Overall, the episode encourages listeners to engage in meaningful conversations, appreciate the depth of historical and religious studies, and apply effective communication strategies in their personal and professional lives.
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#2252 – Wesley Huff Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
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00:01
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.
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00:03
The Joe Rogan experience.
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00:06
Ai meh day. Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Wes, very nice to meet you. Joe, pleasure. So, I, like many people, was introduced to you because of the, debate Yeah. You had with Bill Karr. Quote unquote. You know, it’s one of those things where, it’s very unfortunate when people get caught with their pants down.
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00:27
Mhmm.
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00:27
And I’m not an expert in many things. But the things that I am an expert on, you could wake me up at 4 o’clock in the morning and ask me about those things. And I go, oh, yeah. No. Yeah. This is what it is. Yeah. I know, you know, like arya arts or comedy.
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00:44
I could tell you I could give you an expert version of reality. Uh-huh. It it seems like he does not have that, and he is a wonderful talker and it’s a lot of fun. I like watching his videos. It’s I I love all that ancient history stuff and even the the most ridiculous tinfoil hat aspects of ancient it’s fun.
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01:06
It’s entertainment.
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01:07
But I know that there’s a different like, Andrew Schultz and I had a discussion about this. Like, he said when he had Billy on the podcast, he said, we’re not gonna fucking research anything. We’re not gonna search anything. We’re not gonna do anything. Just let him talk because it’s fun. Yeah. Andrew’s awesome.
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01:20
But when he was on with you, it was quite apparent that you are an actual expert in
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01:27
in
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01:27
the ai Mhmm. And in many religious, texts and that he didn’t necessarily have the facts straight. So what was the fallout of all of that?
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01:38
Well, it’s interesting you say the expert thing because I I literally was asked to do it 24 hours beforehand. So I had, like, the least amount of preparation
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01:47
Right.
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01:47
Going into it, and I I was okay with that because I’d I’d listen I’d listen to Billy Carson. Well and I listened to the stuff he’d said. So I knew enough about the ways that he’d articulated Mhmm. Things about the ancient near east and the bible and Christianity to know enough that he his level is, is pretty surface.
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02:06
But the fallout was that not only did he not want us to release the the conversation, but then he started throwing out cease and desist letters. And then he started, you know, trying to sue people. So, I mean, I was never worried because I’m a Canadian. And anybody who’s tried to sue internationally knows that Good luck. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
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02:31
As far as I understand it, he would have had to file a claim in a Canadian court that would have been reviewed to have legal precedence. Mhmm. That he he he’d have to prove that he could win.
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02:43
What was his argument?
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02:46
Apart from the fact that he was embarrassed that he lost?
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02:49
Well, yeah, that’s well, that’s not really an argument. Right? We’ve all been there. You’re hungover, thinking about all the dumb stuff you did last night and wondering if anybody remembers. Unfortunately, someone does remember everything you do online, and they’ve got receipts.
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03:03
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04:26
Well, the cease and desist letter yeah. The cease and desist letter said, you I don’t want you to use my name or my face in anything going forward. And anything you’ve used up until this point, you need to remove. And I was given 24 hours notice to do this.
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04:41
But if you’re a public figure, he’s clearly a public figure. Is that even can you actually say no?
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04:47
No. No. You can’t do it.
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04:48
So what was the does he have a lawyer that wrote this cease and desist?
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04:52
Is he a lawyer? No. So he actually it’s interesting because he Mark Menard, who was the guy who hosted this interaction, he sent Mark a handwritten one, and then he eventually gave Mark an official one from his lawyer. So I actually was sent one by his lawyer, which I, you know, screenshotted, posted publicly online and said I’m gonna ignore this.
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05:15
And then, but he’d sent Mark, who was the podcast host
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05:19
Mhmm.
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05:20
As as far as I’m aware, numerous cease and desists And Anton, who was the media manager, he’d sent a number of cease and desists.
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05:29
It’s unfortunate. It is unfortunate. You’re when you get caught with your pants down, you’re supposed to sai, I got caught with my pants down.
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05:35
Yeah.
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05:35
That’s what you’re supposed to do.
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05:37
Like,
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05:37
it’s the only especially if you’re public. Like, it’s very clear that you’re incorrect.
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05:42
Well, the irony of this situation is if he just kinda left it, it probably wouldn’t have made anywhere close to the splash No. That it’s made. And we told him that. We said, like, hey. Barbara Streisand effect Yeah. Is going to happen. Yeah.
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05:55
Like, you’re a big enough personality that if I make a video and say, like, hey. I had this conversation, didn’t go well for Billy, and Billy doesn’t want it released. That’s gonna start to gain traction sooner or later.
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06:09
Yeah. It’s you know, the problem is to really delve into these subjects.
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06:17
Mhmm.
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06:17
To to it takes a tremendous amount of research, years years years of research. You really have to know what you’re talking about. Most of us don’t.
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06:27
Well, and especially with languages. Yes. Like, we didn’t get into it. I I hoped to have, in our initial conversation, kinda press him a little bit more on the more overt things he’d said about, like, Greek and Hebrew and Sumerian because I’ve studied a number of ancient languages.
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06:43
And when you study the languages, you realize the complexities of these things. Mhmm. And so when someone hasn’t and they’re making statements that are obviously indicative of someone who hasn’t studied them, it’s it’s super apparent.
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06:57
Right.
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06:58
And so I think it’s one thing to be making claims about, say, like, Christian history or the ai. But when you start to get into, like, linguistics and philology, it gets messy. And if you don’t know what you’re talking about, it gets really apparent really fast.
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07:11
So the gentleman who brought the 2 of you together, what was his goal? Like, what was he trying to do, and how did he approach you?
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07:18
Yeah. So he’s friends or I should say was friends. He was friends with Billy. They live in the same neighborhood.
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07:23
Oh, boy.
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07:24
So it’s actually become really it’s become pretty rough for him. So he released a video yesterday, which I think people should go and check out, where he kinda gives his perspective. He’s been friends with Billy for years. He was at Billy’s wedding. Billy had 15 people at his wedding. Oof. Mark was one of them. And they’re they live in this community in Florida.
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07:45
Their their sons are friends. Their wives would hang out. Oof. And, Mark told me he’s like, I’ve been hearing Billy say, you know, he wants to debate. Nobody will debate him for years.
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07:59
And so as far as I think Mark was concerned, he was giving Billy the opportunity that Billy had told a lot of people he wanted.
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08:08
Right.
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08:09
And so he you know, this was set up, in that Mark and Billy have been talking. They’ve been on each other’s podcasts in the past, and they’ve been friends, but more like business colleagues. Like, Mark has come out and said, I hadn’t really gone into the stuff he’d said about Christianity or ancient religions or whatever that much.
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08:29
Mark is a he’s a Christian. He has, like, a public profession of faith, and he him and Billy had talked about the fact that they wanted to talk about, like, faith stuff and some of their differences.
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08:40
Mhmm.
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08:40
And that, that Mark was kinda prepping for this, and his media manager, Anton, had sent him some of my stuff and said, like, Wes has done some stuff on some things that that Billy has talked about. And, you know, maybe you should look up some some of the stuff, you know, read into it. And Mark, very last minute, was like, well, I’m I feel inadequate.
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09:02
Do you think I could just ask Wes? And so he DM’d me on Instagram and just kinda laid this out, like, hey. I’m gonna have Billy in my studio in 24 hours. I can tell him you’re coming. I can tell him who you are. I can, like, give him your background.
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09:16
But would you be willing to come? And so that’s what I did. And so that’s how it got set up.
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09:21
So, correct me if I’m wrong, but was Billy aware that this was going to be a debate, or did he think it was going to be just a discussion? Like, what did he think it was gonna be?
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09:32
No. He’d been given all of the prerequisites. Like, he knew we’re gonna go over some of his stuff that he’d said about Christianity, that I was gonna come in, who I was, what my name was, some some of my background, and that part of the conversation was going to be me kind of asking him some clarifying questions and and rebutting some of the things that he said.
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09:55
So he you didn’t watch the 3 hour livestream that he did, did you?
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09:59
I watched chunks of it. Okay. I I watched a little bit. I’m ai, oof, and then I shut it off. Then I watched a little bit more. Oof.
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10:05
Yeah. So, unfortunately, Billy there says he had no idea going in. And, I mean, as Mark said in his video that he released yesterday, I mean, that’s apparently false. He knew what it was gonna be, who was gonna be involved, and even some of the things that we would be talking about.
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10:25
Mhmm. Okay. And he also was claiming that it wasn’t a debate, that he had been involved in debates before and that he would prepare for debates, but this is something he didn’t prepare. But again, it’s ai, if you ask me about things that I know about
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10:39
Yeah.
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10:40
You can wake me up Yeah. Out of a full sleep and give me a couple seconds. I’ll go, oh, okay. This is what it is. Yeah. You if you know, you know.
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10:49
And it wasn’t a debate in one sense. Like, it wasn’t. Like, we didn’t do, you know, opening statements and cross examination and rebuttal. Right. It really was a conversation.
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10:58
Right.
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10:59
And, it only kinda turned into a debate in the sense that Billy, I think, got caught out. And so the things that were talked about kinda showed that, you know, that he needed to go on the offense.
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11:14
Yes. Yeah. Well, again, it’s all very unfortunate. But the good part of it is Ai was introduced to you and your work in this There you go. Very, very extensive and very fascinating. And the videos that you sent me on Instagram, I watched both of those today as
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11:29
well. Awesome.
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11:30
So really, really interesting stuff and your knowledge of the history of the biblical texts and the Codex Sinaiticus and all all these different things. Very, very fascinating stuff. Sai let’s just get into your background. Like, how did how did you get started in your research, and how did you how did you get into this?
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11:51
Yeah. So I grew up in a Christian home. I my parents were missionaries. So I was born in Pakistan and spent a portion of my childhood in the Middle East with my parents working in Amman, Jordan. And then, we came back from from the Middle East when I was pretty young. And, so I grew up in this very, like, diverse home in the sense that my mom was, a missionary kid who grew up in India.
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12:15
And so we had a lot of, like, worldview kinda perspectives, represented in our home. Like, I often say we had the Bhagavad Gita and the Book of Mormon and the Quran on the shelf. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I think, you know, that always although my parents were never overt with this kind of stuff, they always had the perspective that, you know, we’re Christians.
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12:35
We believe that this worldly perspective is true. But, hey, this stuff isn’t scary. This stuff isn’t, you know, off limits. You know, we can investigate these things. And they never said that outright, but that I always felt this kind of attitude of that kind of perspective.
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12:51
And, you know, having been exposed in majority Muslim contexts and seeing that kind of stuff and my mom having, like,
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13:00
a a
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a pretty good knowledge growing up in India of things like Hinduism and Sikhism and and that, And, I don’t know how much of of the kind of testimony stuff you watched of ai, but, just before my 12th birthday, I actually was diagnosed with a neurological condition that left me paralyzed from the waistline.
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13:19
Sai did see all that.
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13:20
Yeah. Yeah. So that, so that’s a condition that’s called acute transverse myelitis,
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13:25
which
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13:25
I often say is a forget is a word you can forget as soon as you hear it because it’s a complicated one. But what happened was that I had the flu, and my body’s immune system attacked the nerve endings at the base of my spinal cord and cause swelling and cut off the communication between my brain and my legs.
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13:41
And Instantaneously. Right?
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13:42
Yeah. Basically, I’d I’d gone down for a nap. I was camping out in the bathroom floor, for flu reasons. And, when I woke up about 30 minutes later, I couldn’t feel my legs. And so, yeah, that’s the acute part of the acute transverse myelitis was that it was basically instantaneous. And that’s what made the diagnosis as severe as it was.
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14:06
Like, they said there’s a 30% chance. There’s it was it was ai a small percentage of, probability that I I would recover, but a much higher percentage that there would be a lot of either complete paralysis for the rest of my life or, some kind of, issues with walking. It’s related to, like, diseases like multiple sclerosis in that it’s it’s neurological, and it it it affects that kind of thing.
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14:36
And, 1 month from the day that I I woke up and couldn’t feel my legs, I I woke up on a Saturday morning, got out of bed, walked over to my wheelchair, and sat down. 1 month? 1 month. Yeah. January 8th to February 8th. Exactly.
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14:49
Very fortunate.
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14:50
You’re telling meh.
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14:51
Yeah. Yeah. What treatment do they give you?
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14:54
So they’re, initially, they gave meh, steroids to reduce the the swelling. But, so I spent 11 days in the hospital, being overseen ai, pediatric pediatric neurologists, and specialists in in this because it’s a very rare condition. And so they were studying me, and, they gave me steroids, and they they did some other tests. But, really, there was no true kind of treatment in vatsal.
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15:25
And, so I was doing, physiotherapy. I ai be pulled out of gym class in school, But it’s a little bit of a joke. Like, can can you move your legs? You know, can you Mhmm. Can you it was Could you move anything? No. Nothing.
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15:39
Could you feel anything?
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15:40
No. No. In fact, when I was in the hospital, I’d I’d wake up, and there’d be, pinpricks in my legs because they’d be testing where, like, where the reactions were, and they’d have used a syringe. And so I’d wake up, and there’d be these tiny little pinpricks in my legs because they’d been testing while I was asleep to see what the kind of, you know, whether it was registering neurologically with anything.
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16:02
But I couldn’t feel anything. I was fully a paraplegic. Woah. Yeah. But but going back to that, ai, so I’ve I experienced this, what I consider to be a true supernatural experience, in that I walked into the hospital to the doctors that had overseen me, and they were the first ones that used the word miracle.
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16:24
They said we really don’t have any type of medical explanation, and mainly because there was no, atrophy. Because of the the cutoff of the communication, my muscles in those 30 days were ai. And in a short amount of time, But, they said there should be something, and we’re we’re picking up nothing.
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16:44
That’s crazy because, I’ve broken limbs before and had them in casts. And just in the 6 weeks that you have a cast on
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16:51
Yeah.
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16:52
You have massive atrophy.
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16:53
Yeah. Yeah. So that was the the kind of predication for them using the word miracle. And so that’s kind of it marks this what I do consider to be, like, this supernatural something happened. And but Did
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17:09
you feel like that was, like, a calling that, like, led you to a very specific mindset after that?
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17:15
It’s an interesting way of putting it. I mean, as much as you could at 12 years old.
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17:20
Right. But it must have had a significant impact on your psyche and your perceptions.
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17:27
Yeah. Well, it definitely led to things like, later in life, I got very involved in athletics, in in track and field. And part of that was feeling a conviction that I knew what it was like to Mhmm. Not be able to wake up and walk out of the room.
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17:40
Right.
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And so taking that pretty seriously and and competing competitively well into university, because even though, you know, I wasn’t the most naturally talented individual on the team, I I felt like a motivation to be able to okay. I don’t want to waste this. Right. Yeah. Right.
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18:01
And then later on, in terms of your original question, the the difference in that was that I I realized, okay, there’s something out there. Something happened that I can’t totally explain on naturalistic terms. But how do we how do we go from that to saying, okay. Well, then this worldview is correct.
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18:21
And so despite, you know, being raised in a Christian home, I felt like my parents telling me what was true is not the worst reason to believe it, but it’s also not the best. And so as a teenager, I did a lot of kind of soul searching. And ai I said, you know, I was able to do that, to a certain level of degree because of the openness within my household where I did.
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18:47
I pulled the Quran off the shelf, and I read it, you know, front to back just trying to figure out, okay. What what’s going on here? What’s all this about?
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18:53
Right.
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18:54
And, it was through that period of, like, searching, and it wasn’t a crisis of faith. That’s that would be an over exaggerated term. But it was kind of
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19:04
An inspiration of faith, perhaps?
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19:06
Maybe. Yeah. Digging through. Okay. Well, what do these guys believe?
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19:10
Right.
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19:10
What what is this perspective ai? And, that was about a period of about a year and a half. And at the end of that, I I did truly feel that, okay. Well, I think in the ways that I in my limited ability as a teenager to investigate these things, I think that Christianity is true.
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19:31
But it wasn’t until I went to university where I was engaging with people of other faith perspectives, in Toronto at at York University, where I was talking to Muslims and Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and atheists, you know, from the gamut. Mhmm. And I was having these conversations, and I was expressing kinda my perspective on what I believed.
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19:54
And they would say things like, well, that sounds great, Wes, but, you know, that’s all the Ai. You can’t trust that. And so that’s where I started to take the
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20:05
Did Mormons say that to you? Well, that’s kinda crazy.
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20:08
Yeah. Yeah. Well, in the sense that so, the Mormon was the craziest one
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20:12
because we know who wrote it.
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20:14
You know? Yeah.
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20:15
And he’s a shady dude.
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20:16
He is a shady dude. Well, no, they did in the sense that, the Book of Mormon, trumps the the ai. So they would believe I think it’s the 10th article of the Mormon church is that they believe the bible insofar as it is translated. And so they they have this perspective that there’s been things that have been affected. I mean, Joseph Smith made his own translation of the bible Mhmm. And it’s rough.
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20:39
And when he was 14?
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20:41
Well, I think it was later on that he he made the Joseph Smith translation. But I don’t even know if the official, like, LDS Church ascribes to the Joseph Smith translation ai I think they even see, like, like, this is we know what the Greek and the Hebrew looks ai, and this is not even Yeah.
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20:55
Yeah. Well, he was, you know, legitimate con meh. Mhmm. You know, which is fascinating. That it’s people have such a a deep search for meaning and truth that if you are confident Mhmm. And if which is what a con man is, you know, confidence man. If you are really good at expressing yourself and really, like, you show confidence in your convictions, you
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21:20
can Yeah.
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21:21
You could persuade a lot of people.
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21:23
Yeah. Confidence is not competency. Yes. And, unfortunately, those things get confused a lot.
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21:29
Like Ai. It covers up for competency sometimes.
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21:31
Yeah. Yeah. In in religion, in politics, and, like, all sorts of things.
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21:35
Right? In everything. Yeah. In everything. I mean, I think it’s I think because people want to like, it’s very difficult to be an expert in the subject, and I think people want to believe that they arya, and they don’t wanna do the work. Right. You know?
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21:52
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that’s why, you know, experts themselves feel a lot of inadequacy is because Sure. They study a subject and realize, like, I’m never gonna get to the bottom of this hole. Right. So unfortunately
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22:07
subjects are very, very nuanced and very deep. Yeah. Especially when you’re talking about ancient religion.
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22:14
Yeah.
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22:14
Ai mean, you’re you’re you’re talking about things that were a oral tradition for a long time before they’re even written down. So it’s it’s a long long trudge to get to the the bottom of things.
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22:29
Yeah. And part of the whole, ai, what I was trying to get Billy in that conversation that I had with him to get to the bottom of partly was a question of methodology. Like, I think he got he got frustrated at me at one point because I kept asking, you know, what are the criteria that you’re using when you’re looking at one source versus another source
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22:52
Mhmm.
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22:52
And coming up with a conclusion. Because in historiography, it’s, it’s the inference to the best explanation.
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23:00
Mhmm.
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23:01
And so there are different ways that you go about that, different methodologies, And historians very rarely disagree on the the data and evidence. It’s the conclusions that you draw from that. Right. But then there are some things that are just out and out false. And I don’t think Billy totally knew what I was talking about, but it’s those criteria that we look at when we look at something that does come from, like, an oral tradition and eventually gets written down and and becomes a a literary text.
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23:34
And then you analyze that on the basis of it being a literary text.
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23:38
This is sort of the problem between, with, being self taught rather than conventionally academically trained.
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23:45
Definitely.
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23:46
Where you’re trained in very specific disciplines and you’re taught to understand the foundation before you understand, like, how to put a window in. Yeah. You have there’s a lot of things that you have to know from the base, from the beginning. Like, do you have a water ai? Do you have power?
Speaker: 0
24:04
Ai, there’s a lot of stuff. There’s a lot of things going on when you’re trying to construct an expertise in something, especially something that is so complicated. And one of the things that I’ve gotten out of, pain I’ve I’ve probably watched probably 20 hours of your stuff over the last couple weeks.
Speaker: 0
24:23
And you you’ve spent a lot of time on this. This is not a casual cursory examination of these texts and of religion. This is a this is a long long journey. That’s what’s particularly ex exceptional and really interesting to meh. Because I’m always fascinated by people who that have really gone down the road, like, really really really gone down the road because you don’t meet a whole lot of them, you know.
Speaker: 0
24:51
I know a lot of Christians that can quote you some, you know, some versions of the New Testament, you know, some Psalms, some they but but the real the bay the go all the way to the back, Way way way way way. And that’s that’s what you’ve done that’s very interesting. So this is ai how old are you?
Speaker: 1
25:11
I’m 33.
Speaker: 0
25:12
Which is very young for someone who
Speaker: 1
25:14
has Spring chicken.
Speaker: 0
25:14
The depth of knowledge that you have, you know. So you’ve been doing this essentially from that miraculous moment. You’ve that ignited the spark even though you came from missionary background and then from then on. So for the past 11 years, 12 years or 20 years, 30 years, ai, it’s your whole life essentially. It’s all been this.
Speaker: 1
25:37
Yeah. Ai to a certain degree, I mean, I went to university with full intention of going into the police force. I did, like, my undergraduate studies, and then I kinda mapped out this plan that I was going to become a police detective, and that was my goal. And I think I realized Why not?
Speaker: 0
25:55
Ai not? Because you ai getting to the bottom of things?
Speaker: 1
25:58
It could be.
Speaker: 0
25:59
Because you do. Right? Well, someone who speak 21 years, like, getting to the bottom of a religion, you you know, you’d probably be pretty good at cracking cases.
Speaker: 1
26:07
I hope so. I think that might have been part of it. I also there there was an aspect of when I was in high school where they were ai, you gotta figure out what you’re doing. You’re gonna be homeless, and you’re gonna die. Yeah. Sai remember that part.
Speaker: 0
26:18
I felt that, like, terrifying moment in life.
Speaker: 1
26:21
Man, I always tell people when they’re in high school, like, you can chill out. Like, it’s gonna be okay?
Speaker: 0
26:25
I don’t think so.
Speaker: 1
26:26
You don’t think so? I wonder if it’s different now because I think
Speaker: 0
26:29
you should have a certain amount of desperation. That because I think that it ignites the fire within you to do something.
Speaker: 1
26:34
There’s probably something to that.
Speaker: 0
26:36
Yeah. Yeah. The people that I know that have been too pampered and taken care of and didn’t have a fear of everything going completely sideways, they never really get the momentum that’s necessary to accomplish things in life.
Speaker: 1
26:50
Yeah. There’s probably something to that. I mean Yeah. Desperation. A
Speaker: 0
26:53
little desperation fear, I think, is good for you. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody wants to be comfortable. I don’t think I don’t think that’s necessarily a good path. I mean, I think you should have perspective, and you should enjoy your life as a young person and and and have those but you should also realize you got work to do.
Speaker: 1
27:09
Well, stress is good. Mhmm. Right? Stress creates perseverance sana creates patterns that allow you to succeed. Yes. I mean, this is like athletics 101. Right?
Speaker: 0
27:19
Ai think that’s very important.
Speaker: 1
27:20
You gotta push yourself. And I ai, actually, part of that also meh in. Like, I’m a big believer in athletic discipline needs to go hand in I mean, I know you are too. It needs to go hand in hand with any other type of, like, whether it’s an intellectual endeavor or, like because it trains you to be able to go into places that are uncomfortable.
Speaker: 0
27:42
Yes.
Speaker: 1
27:42
And that uncomfortability allows you to then become stronger. You know, realize where your inadequacies arya. And especially when you’re with people who are better than you I mean, when I was running at York University, there were 2 guys on our team who, because I I I was okay individually, but I ran for the, relay team.
Speaker: 1
28:04
Yes. I was a sprinter. And, one of the guys was part of the, he he they meh when Canada medaled at worlds, he was part of that relay team. And then my other training partner, Busy, who, he ended up competing in Tokyo for Canada. And when you’re ai someone who is, like, just a genetic freak
Speaker: 0
28:25
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
28:25
You’re like, oh, okay. Like, that’s different. Yeah. Right? And and it both pushes you, but it also reveals your limitations where that doesn’t inhibit you. Like, you shouldn’t that shouldn’t discourage you to go up to that line of being able to push yourself.
Speaker: 0
28:41
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
28:41
But at the exact same time, it it creates a realism Mhmm. That, like, I’m never gonna I can train as much as I want to. I’m not gonna run like that. Right? Yeah. And, so yeah. But but going back to what you’re asking, like, I think there was part of that in wanting to go into the police force.
Speaker: 1
29:00
But then realizing, like, around my 3rd year of university that my passions and motivations were very, very different and that I didn’t know how to go about that or where the proper place to do that was, but I knew that I needed to lean into that to some degree, particularly with the ai because I was I was claiming that this bible talks about this ai, Jesus, and I’m a Christian.
Speaker: 1
29:29
So I have a a friend, Andy Bannister. He’s out in the UK, and he says if you take Christ out of Christian, all you’re left with is Ian. And Ian’s a great guy who’s not gonna save you from your sins. And so, like, if if I’m wrong about the bible, those people who push back on me, right, those skeptics of various worldviews, if the things they were saying about the Ai were true, then it did actually legitimately undermine what I believed, and so I needed to take that seriously.
Speaker: 1
29:58
I had an obligation to actually investigate those things as far as I could.
Speaker: 0
30:03
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31:12
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Speaker: 0
31:20
What is the oldest version of the ai or the stories in the bible? Is it the Dead Sea Scrolls, or are there older versions?
Speaker: 1
31:26
The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest of the Old Testament. So when they were discovered I mean, so they were discovered in 1946 to 1957. And at that point during their discovery, they pushed back a lot of our previous, oldest manuscripts a 1000 years, which was a big deal.
Speaker: 0
31:46
How old are they?
Speaker: 1
31:48
They’re anywhere between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century BC. So it’s kinda tricky because the Dead Sea Scrolls are they’re like a library that we refer to. So it’s, approximately 970 documents, but it’s distributed out between, 10,011,000 fragments. So there’s a lot going on there.
Speaker: 3
32:12
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
32:12
Right? So and some of these, I mean, are are so fragmentary that you look at them and it’s like confetti. Mhmm. Because they’re, I mean, 3000 years old, but not quite that. They’re, like, 22,000 plus years old.
Speaker: 0
32:24
Animal skins too. Right?
Speaker: 1
32:25
Yeah. Well, all sorts of things. Animal skins, papyri, and then some of them are actually done on copper. Really? They’re, like, inscribed in copper.
Speaker: 0
32:32
Oh, wow.
Speaker: 1
32:33
Yeah. One of the coolest ones actually, this relates because I know you’re a Marco Allegro guy. The first time I was introduced to Marco Allegro was not his Sacred Mushroom in the Cross stuff, but he published a book on what’s called the Copper Scroll because part of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments are is this inscribed document on copper, which is an ancient treasure map.
Speaker: 0
32:51
Can you see it? Yeah. Ai?
Speaker: 1
32:53
Yeah. Jamie, pull up the hey. There it is. Wow. Yeah. Sai it’s in Hebrew, and it is wild. So it it has these sites where it says buried treasure is found. And there have been a number of guys who have tried to, like, look for it. And, so Does it say what the treasure is? You know what? Off the top of my head, I don’t know. But Look how crazy that language is. Ai know.
Speaker: 1
33:18
Right? And so but but the Dead Sea Scrolls so it’s ai stuff like this. It’s papyri. It’s animal skins, and it’s, a number of different languages. So the vast majority of it is Hebrew, but there’s also a lot in Aramaic and then, Greek and in Nabataean.
Speaker: 1
33:35
Sai it’s ai, it’s like an umbrella term to just describe a whole bunch of literature. So a lot of it is biblical because it was written by this group out in the desert called the Essenes who lived at Qumran. So but then other stuff of it is just, you know, it’s just Jewish literature of various stripes that is, is were hidden in caves all around the Dead Sea.
Speaker: 0
34:02
So the scrolls, as it were, aren’t all biblical. Some of them is just, accounting of the times.
Speaker: 1
34:09
Yeah. Oh, Jamie, look at that. ai tons of gold and 26 tons of silver. ai tons.
Speaker: 0
34:15
That’s a lot. That’s a lot. How many Cuban links can you make out of that?
Speaker: 1
34:20
You can see why someone would try to track that down. Boy. Yeah. Wow. And and, you know, when it when we’re talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, like, you have ones like the great Isaiah scroll, which is fully complete. Like, it’s a it’s a copy of the book of Isaiah, and it’s a full complete scroll.
Speaker: 1
34:35
But then other ones are so fragmentary that we we think they’re written in Hebrew, but we can’t actually tell
Speaker: 0
34:41
Oh, wow.
Speaker: 1
34:42
Because no one’s willing to, like, piece these. And this is true for a lot of stuff. So, like, the largest grouping of of papyri literature in the world is the Oxyrhynchus collection, which we get a a good portion of our oldest manuscripts of the New Testament from. But if you go to Oxford and you look at the ox or the, Oxyrhynchus collection, you pull out that drawer, it just it’s it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
35:09
And you’re like Right. Like, most of it is is untranslated, untranscribed ai the amount of man hours that it would just take to even put it together, never mind, then go to the effort of transcribing and translating it. Most people are not willing to do that. And if you’re missing chunks, how do you even make that puzzle connect?
Speaker: 1
35:31
Well, that’s part of so part of my area area of, ai in research is in regards to that. Mhmm. Is so I study paratextual features. We’re we’re really gonna get nerdy today.
Speaker: 0
35:44
Let’s get nerdy.
Speaker: 1
35:45
Where so you look at the features of the manuscripts, not necessarily the words, but things like the spaces between the words, the development of punctuation, indentation or outdentation. And I look at the margins, and I try to, based on the average size of manuscripts in and around that time and also the average spacing of words and, the margins on top, bottom, and the side, recreate what the manuscript could have possibly looked like.
Speaker: 0
36:15
Woah. Yeah. So when you say the book of Isaiah is intact, how similar is it to the book of Isaiah that’s in the ai?
Speaker: 1
36:23
So that one is fascinating. So this isn’t true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But when we discovered the great Isaiah scroll, previous to that, the earliest copy of Isaiah that we had was, in the Masoretic text, which is in the middle ages.
Speaker: 0
36:37
Woah.
Speaker: 1
36:38
Yeah. So it was literally a 1000 years. We literally pushed back our understanding of Isaiah a 1000 years. And the thing that really shocked scholars like I said, this isn’t true for all the Dead Sea Scrolls, but one of the things that shocked them about Isaiah was that it was word for word identical to the Masoretic text.
Speaker: 0
36:53
Word for word?
Speaker: 1
36:54
Word for word. Wow. Yeah. Is that So this is the great Isaiah scroll. So if you go to Israel and
Speaker: 0
36:58
you go that papyrus?
Speaker: 1
37:01
Meh. No. I think that one is vellum.
Speaker: 0
37:04
What is vellum?
Speaker: 1
37:05
So, so I should be more specific. So parchment is animal skin. Vellum can be used, synonymously with the term parchment. Technically, parchment is is ai baby animal skin, like calves or lambs, but this is the the great Isaiah scroll, and you can see, like, that they stitch together, the parchment because it’s it’s Wow.
Speaker: 1
37:28
It’s so long.
Speaker: 0
37:29
God, it’s so beautiful. The way they wrote back then was so beautiful. I mean, maybe it’s because I can’t read it. That it’s so fat. Maybe if I saw English, I would think that’s beautiful too. Yeah. Especially script. Like, cursive. Cursive is very beautiful.
Speaker: 0
37:41
But that is so fascinating because the I mean, obviously, coming from a point of ignorance, the letters look so similar. Mhmm. Like, so many of this is the the what I always got about cuneiform. When I look at that, I’m like, it’s just one particular sort of character Yeah.
Speaker: 0
37:58
That’s this way and that way and up and down and
Speaker: 1
38:01
Oh, cuneiform is wild. Weird. It’s really, really tricky. And that’s the thing when, ai, if you’re studying Asian languages and you you start to study Greek, like, Greek the Greek alphabet is similar enough that you’re ai, okay. Alpha looks like an a. Right? Delta looks like a d. So you can figure it out.
Speaker: 1
38:21
And so it tricks you because you start off and you’re like, oh, this is phobias, fear. I know what a phobia is. And you get this false sense of, like, encouragement.
Speaker: 0
38:31
And
Speaker: 1
38:31
then, you know, the further you go down the rabbit hole, you’re like, oh, I’m screwed. So, but Hebrew is completely the opposite because the, like, writing system is so different. The learning curve is hard at the beginning, and then you’re ai, everything is just three letters with a suffix added to it.
Speaker: 0
38:48
And
Speaker: 1
38:48
so it feels like whereas the opposite is true with with Greek. Greek, you’re like, I get this. And then when you really go down the rabbit hole, you’re like, oh, crap. None of the things that I learned about that are supposed to be standard, all of them have exceptions. Wow. But, yeah, cuneiform is a wild one.
Speaker: 0
39:05
Do you know Rick Strassman is?
Speaker: 1
39:06
No.
Speaker: 0
39:07
He’s, he’s a scholar, and he did a lot of, work, early work, FDA approved work on psychedelics. And he spent 16 years teaching himself to read ancient Hebrew.
Speaker: 1
39:20
Nice.
Speaker: 0
39:21
Yeah. So because he wanted to really understand the ai from the original source of ancient Hebrew and to understand it in context. It was because ancient Hebrew, the way the words are structured is so different than English and that Yeah. That something must be lost in translation.
Speaker: 0
39:34
So he spent 16 years
Speaker: 1
39:37
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
39:37
Teaching himself Wow. How to read ancient Hebrews. Yeah. That is so that is such dedication. 16 years.
Speaker: 1
39:43
It’s a long time. That seems too long.
Speaker: 0
39:45
Well, you’re self taught.
Speaker: 1
39:47
I mean, he’s
Speaker: 0
39:47
doing it himself.
Speaker: 1
39:48
Yeah. Self teaching. Yeah. I I I self taught myself Greek at first, and then when I started learning it formally, I realized how much you miss when you self teach yourself.
Speaker: 0
39:58
Sure. Well, how many people can teach you ancient Hebrew? How many courses are available?
Speaker: 1
40:01
Oh, you can take it at any graduate college. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
40:03
Yeah. And is it, it’s not something that we know what what it sound like. Correct?
Speaker: 1
40:09
Yeah. I mean, this is the big debate with ancient languages.
Speaker: 0
40:12
Right.
Speaker: 1
40:12
Like, same thing with yeah. Arguably, we don’t know how any of this was pronounced. Right. I mean, modern Greek speakers get really mad at me when I say that because they’re like, of course, we know how it’s pronounced. It’s pronounced like we pronounce it. Right? Mhmm. And and on all my videos where I’m, like, tran site translating Greek manuscripts, All of like, there’s so many comments of of modern Greek speakers getting mad at how I’m pronouncing things.
Speaker: 0
40:34
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
40:34
But realistically, yeah, we don’t we we don’t really know how most of the things are pronounced with anything.
Speaker: 0
40:41
But isn’t that very bizarre when you translate like, if you go back to, like, say, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Uh-huh. You don’t we don’t even know what the words sounded like.
Speaker: 1
40:51
Yeah. We
Speaker: 0
40:52
kinda know what they represent, and then we do a literal translation of what they represent. But if you’ve never heard, no one can speak ancient Sumerian.
Speaker: 1
41:01
Yeah. Well, Sumerians are wild one
Speaker: 0
41:04
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
41:04
Because it’s a language isolate. What does that mean? So, so Hebrew is a is an Afro, Semitic language. So Hebrew is related to all of these other languages ai Aramaic and Acadian. But language isolates have no adjacent comparisons.
Speaker: 0
41:25
Woah.
Speaker: 1
41:25
So because I tried to teach myself Sumerian, and I failed, and I just gave up because I couldn’t do it because I had nothing to really compare it to.
Speaker: 0
41:34
Right.
Speaker: 1
41:34
So Meh are very, like they’re a field of their own because I learned a little bit of Acadian because I had studied Semitic languages, and there’s enough crossover Mhmm. Between things like Hebrew and Aramaic and Acadian. But Sumerian, you have nothing to compare it to.
Speaker: 0
41:53
And so What did it eventually become? It just died.
Speaker: 1
41:56
Ai just died. It just died.
Speaker: 0
41:58
How? Do we know?
Speaker: 1
42:00
I mean, the Sumerians lost to the Assyrians, and the Assyrians got taken over by the Babylonians. I mean, it’s just the the, you know, the course of history where things happen. But there are a number of ancient languages that are anguish language ai, like, Linear Elamite. We had no idea what Linear Elamite even said until 2021.
Speaker: 0
42:21
Oh, well, I never even heard it until 5 seconds ago.
Speaker: 1
42:23
I know. There you go. Jamie, if you pull up, if you look up, what’s it called? There’s a cup, a silver cup. It’ll come up if you if you Google image linear elamite, because you think cuneiform looks wild. Linear elamite is completely different than that too. And, there’s a silver cup, which we had no idea what it said, and then a bunch of researchers, ancient, near eastern researchers, developed well, so let’s oh, in in the corner there, that one on
Speaker: 0
42:53
Far left corner?
Speaker: 1
42:54
Oh, no. No. Here. Now it’s moved because it clicked it. That one. Yeah. Yeah. Click that. So that’s Linear Elamite. Woah. And so that’s in and around the same time that languages like Sumerian. So there’s this very interesting kind of if we’re talking about the story in the ai like the the Tyler of Babel, where it says that God confused their languages and everybody started speaking different languages, you have these languages that just pop up and out of nowhere and have no relation to one another.
Speaker: 1
43:24
So Acadian starts to adopt certain words in Sumerian, but they’re still Sumerian where it’s like pizza is Italian. Right. Right? Or like kayak Mhmm. Is Inuit. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
43:38
But when you’re looking at the words that carry over, it’s not because they’re there’s a relationship between Acadian and Sumerian. It’s because you have these cultures that live side by bryden. And eventually Mhmm. Acadian starts to adopt Right. These things.
Speaker: 1
43:53
But Sumerian is so that’s why when I see people like Billy Carson talk about being able to read Sumerian, I’m ai, dude, I read ancient languages, and I can’t I’ve tried, and I can’t make heads or tails of Sumerian. Sai That’s a tell. Unfortunately Unfortunately. Gives away.
Speaker: 0
44:12
Listen, I like Billy. He was a nice guy. I really enjoyed talking to him. I I really do. I think his videos are fun, but I also think truth is important.
Speaker: 1
44:20
I have no problem with him as an individual.
Speaker: 0
44:22
He just needs to course correct.
Speaker: 1
44:24
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
44:24
Yeah. Course correct and and recognize what you know and what you don’t know. And that you’re not doing people a service, especially people like myself that aren’t educated in this. Like, we we turn to others who claim to have a vast knowledge of this to help me out. Tell me what’s going on.
Speaker: 0
44:42
When I sit down and talk to you, tell me what’s going on. And if you don’t really know, you kinda you’re fucking over a lot of people, unfortunately Yeah. For yourself. Yeah. This this, how do you say it again? Lineal Linear? Linear.
Speaker: 1
44:57
Elamite.
Speaker: 0
44:57
Elamite. Can you put that back up again, Jamie? So this was, in can you show me that that image that you’d showed me before?
Speaker: 1
45:05
Actually, see if you can find the cup. That’s pretty dope right now.
Speaker: 0
45:07
If you scroll,
Speaker: 1
45:08
there’s a there should be a I think it’s called the dashed.
Speaker: 0
45:11
Is that it? In the lower corner? No. It’s not the cup?
Speaker: 1
45:13
No. If you guys it’s got yeah. If you look up cup yeah. That that guy. Oh. So so see that inscription at the top beside the face? Yeah. So that’s the one so it goes around the top of the cup, and they crack that.
Speaker: 0
45:24
Look at that dude’s honker.
Speaker: 1
45:25
It’s that big nose, isn’t it?
Speaker: 0
45:26
That’s a hell of a nose.
Speaker: 1
45:27
Yeah. He can smell that linear ai. And so when so, actually, interestingly enough, if you pull back, Jamie, that’s my that’s my, so there’s an infographic that I made that just popped up. So if you click that guy, that’s the one I made. Mhmm. Why is it coming up like that?
Speaker: 3
45:43
Someone else reposted it.
Speaker: 1
45:45
Oh, okay.
Speaker: 0
45:46
So is it just bad resolution? Is that what you’re saying? Oh, there it is.
Speaker: 1
45:50
Oh, no. It is mine.
Speaker: 0
45:51
Sai so,
Speaker: 1
45:52
actually, here, I’ll be self serving. If you go to wesleyhuff.com
Speaker: 0
45:55
shah is could we just look at that for a second? That is so cool. And how old is this?
Speaker: 1
46:01
4 I mean, 20th century BC.
Speaker: 0
46:06
Wow. Yeah. So 4000 plus years ago.
Speaker: 1
46:09
Yeah. So if you go, jamie, to wesley huff.com and then click my infographics tab at the top so I started making these things for the graduate students I was teaching. And, yeah. So if you go down, there should be, an archaeology section. And in the archaeology section, I have that one on, I’m liking on what what it’s called.
Speaker: 1
46:29
Sai I make ones for manuscripts too.
Speaker: 0
46:31
What a great website you’ve got.
Speaker: 1
46:32
Oh, thank you. Appreciate that.
Speaker: 0
46:33
It’s awesome. It’s it’s so detailed. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
46:36
So there’s a Linear Elamite one.
Speaker: 0
46:37
What a fucking phenomenal resource this is. Right there. Oh,
Speaker: 1
46:40
there it is. Yeah. Marvedash. That’s what it’s called. Sai, yeah. You see this. So I have Sumerian, Linear Elamite, Acadian, and Paleo Hebrew there at the bottom, the comparisons. Mhmm. And these are languages that operated, like, alongside one another Mhmm. But, are almost completely, foreign to one another. So they there is crossover between Acadian and Palu Hebrew.
Speaker: 0
47:03
So that’s interesting. Sumerian, when I’m thinking of cuneiform, I’m not thinking of that. Right? That that looks different than some of, like, the clay scrolls, the where they’ve you know, the the imprintations that they make with a clay wheel.
Speaker: 1
47:19
Yeah. Well, it’s all done, with the stylus. So it’s like a little wedge stylus. So there there are different variations of it, but, ultimately, it’s done with the stylus. The thing that’s interesting like like, you’re probably thinking more of what that later Acadian looks like. Right? Where it’s like the the wedges? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
47:36
Sai so they Akkadian basically borrowed the writing system. And and it had development over time, but it was is very close.
Speaker: 0
47:45
When they conquered them, did they have their own writing system initially and just incorporated Sumerian writing to theirs?
Speaker: 1
47:51
That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer to that one.
Speaker: 0
47:54
But God, I’d like to
Speaker: 1
47:55
know. I know. Right?
Speaker: 0
47:56
I mean, it’s so long ago, but not. You know? Yeah. I mean, it’s so long ago in terms of a human life. Yeah. But it’s not that long when you think, like, we went from 4000 years ago to that to large language models.
Speaker: 1
48:09
Yeah. That’s pretty crazy.
Speaker: 0
48:10
Yeah. Quantum computing.
Speaker: 1
48:11
Yeah. Well, even if you look at the I mean, language systems develop Palu Hebrew turns into what we saw in the Dead Sea Scrolls, whereas Palu Hebrew is a little bit different than what we eventually see in the Dead Sea Scrolls because there’s, like, a development within the language.
Speaker: 1
48:26
And then modern Hebrew adopts the Hebrew in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but modern Hebrew has, it has vowels where that were developed in the Middle Ages Mhmm. To to figure out how to pronounce it. Because, basically, ancient Hebrew doesn’t have a vowel system in its writing that’s overly comprehensive.
Speaker: 1
48:49
And so in the middle ages, when you have, these groups of Jews who are copying these Hebrew scriptures, who aren’t speaking it as much as they’re reading it. You gotta figure out how to pronounce it as because because vowels make a difference. But if if you took all the vowels out of English, if you’re a natural English reader, you could probably figure out what was what if you’re looking at the page.
Speaker: 1
49:13
And so in the middle ages, the Masoretic scribes come up with these vowel pointing systems, and that’s what you see when you, like, look at a Hebrew ai today
Speaker: 0
49:23
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
49:23
As you see these these vowels. And sometimes, like, the introduction or removal of the vowel is significant in the changing of the words.
Speaker: 0
49:32
Mhmm. Mhmm. It’s it’s also interesting. And, you know, we’re kind of seeing language change, written language, while right now in this current era because of the because of the we’ve kind of abandoned cursive.
Speaker: 1
49:48
Yeah. Right?
Speaker: 0
49:48
So if people in the future go to read the ancient scripts of of human beings that lived in the 20th century, they’ll be ai, what is this shit?
Speaker: 1
49:58
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
49:58
And then, you know, there wasn’t a lot of it. Like, there’s no cursive on the Internet. I mean, there’s cursive on the Internet, ai, I mean, no websites are written in cursive or very often released. It’s all printed. Yeah. And so they’ve essentially, in school, stopped teaching. Most classes don’t teach cursive. Like, we all learned cursive as children. It was the way you could write things quicker.
Speaker: 1
50:17
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
50:17
And then once printing and typewriters and computers became ubiquitous, like, it’s gone. Yeah. And everybody’s just texting.
Speaker: 1
50:24
Yeah. Well, let’s hope people in the future are still able to read the Declaration of Independence. Right. Like like because that’s what it was written in. Right? Stuff like that.
Speaker: 0
50:31
That’s really interesting. Right? Because if you did were not taught that and then you went to read that and you said this is English, like, what are you talking about? Like, I recognize a few of these letters.
Speaker: 1
50:41
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
50:41
But it’s so vastly different than the printed text.
Speaker: 1
50:45
Yeah. Language models are wild. Wild? Yeah. The whole
Speaker: 0
50:49
thing is wild that people figured out how to associate sounds with little symbols, and then they did completely different shit in Korea with completely different shit in Russia.
Speaker: 1
50:58
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
50:58
Like, it’s it’s so fascinating. And then you have to have these experts who can translate these things, and you’re dependent upon them forever Mhmm. Which that was what Lutheranism was all about. Right? Like, Martin Luther wanted to have phonetic translations of the Ai, and there was a lot of resistance to that because the people that knew how to read Latin were like, hey.
Speaker: 0
51:18
Hey. Slow down.
Speaker: 1
51:19
Yeah. Partly, I mean, there were proto reformers before Luther.
Speaker: 0
51:22
Were you
Speaker: 1
51:22
guys like like, Wycliffe? So John Wycliffe and, William Tyndale both translated the ai parts of the bible into English, and they predated. I mean, and they weren’t very popular for it either. I mean, Wycliffe was declared a heretic, and then his body was exhumed and burned because Oh.
Speaker: 1
51:40
Of the of of the work that he did.
Speaker: 0
51:42
But yeah. Burned him after he’s already dead.
Speaker: 1
51:44
Yeah. Well, Tyndale’s, Tyndale’s line was that he wanted I believe it was Tyndale. It was either Wycliffe or Tyndale. My friends who are specialists in the specialists in this are gonna get mad at me for this. But, one of those 2 guys said that they wanted the ai boy to be able to read the bible and know it as well as the priests.
Speaker: 1
52:02
And so that’s that was their motivation is that they’re ai, you know, public education for literacy in these areas was largely because they just wanted people to read the Ai. Mhmm. But that was a big motivation behind Luther was he’s like, I’m gonna translate this thing to German.
Speaker: 1
52:18
Because part of his kind of kicking off of the, what we call, the Protestant reformation, was that he read the ai in Speak, because there was a guy named Desiderius Erasmus, who, was a they call them humanists, but they it means something different than now. Humanists were ai scholars who were trying to figure out the entirety of human knowledge up until that point. Wow. Like Renaissance meh kinda. Right?
Speaker: 1
52:45
So Desiderius Erasmus is ai one of the last true Renaissance meh. But he was ai, and he he produced the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament. And so he comes out with this printed edition of the Greek New Testament, and Luther gets its hand his hands on it. And so he’s reading that, and he notices that in Matthew’s gospel, the word that’s in the Latin is do penance. In Greek meh which is repentance.
Speaker: 1
53:13
And the church was using this sai, like, you need to do penance. You need to, you know, do all of this stuff to show that you’re sorry, and part of that was, you know, paying the church. And Luther reads this, and he goes, hey, guys. This means something different. This means repentance. It means changing your mind. It doesn’t mean, like, to actually do things.
Speaker: 1
53:34
And so part of his motivation is, like, the Latin isn’t reflecting at least at the point that Latin had developed in in that day. Like, maybe when Jerome translates the Latin vulgate back in the the 4th century and it’s called the vulgate because means, like, regular. Like, if you think of vulgar. Right?
Speaker: 1
53:58
It’s just a regular people language. Part of the reason was that in the 4th century, very few people were reading Greek. They were reading Latin. Mhmm. And so they’re like, hey, Jerome. You need to produce a Bible in Latin because nobody can read the Bible anymore. And so he produces the Latin Vulgate.
Speaker: 1
54:13
And ai, by the time you get to Luther, a 1000 years later, no one can read Latin,
Speaker: 0
54:19
and they’re all using the Vulgate. Wow. That is fascinating. Wow.
Speaker: 1
54:26
And even Erasmus was, so he dedicates his first few additions to the pope because he knows that the pope is gonna get wind that he’s producing Greek New Testament New Testaments, and the church is using the Latin. And, he he’s risking his risking his life. So if he dedicates it to the pope, maybe the pope will take it easy on him. Did it work? Yeah.
Speaker: 0
54:46
Yeah. It did. Nice. Sai little flattery. Yeah. See?
Speaker: 1
54:49
It goes a long way.
Speaker: 0
54:50
Well, that’s part of the problem, right, is that you’re dealing with these priests. You’re dealing with human beings.
Speaker: 1
54:55
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
54:55
And when human beings are the sole purveyors of truth, they’re the that that becomes a problem. It’s power. It’s too much power. Most people suck at power. They’re just it it just makes them drunk with it, and they abuse it, and you see that in meh, many religions. You see that in cults.
Speaker: 1
55:14
You know,
Speaker: 0
55:15
for instance, is the best example of it. Because, you know, like, when when you know the person who created this thing and you know this person is fucking insane and you have a bunch of people that follow them
Speaker: 1
55:26
They’re just looking out for your best interest, Joe.
Speaker: 0
55:28
Yeah. Right?
Speaker: 1
55:29
They just they just wanna make sure you’re doing the right thing.
Speaker: 0
55:32
Did you see Wild Wild Country?
Speaker: 1
55:33
Oh, yes. It’s fucking awesome. Unfortunately.
Speaker: 0
55:36
It’s so good.
Speaker: 1
55:37
Oh, man.
Speaker: 0
55:37
It’s so crazy. I mean, I’m so glad I I wasn’t there and a part of it, but it, they all look good in the beginning. Mhmm. That’s what’s really wild. All these, cult documentaries, all these exposes in the beginning, like, these people haven’t made. They’re all eating together, and they have community, and they’re praying together, and they seem They’re just seeking enlightenment. Happy. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
55:57
Yeah. One of the ways my wife and I bond, we have very different taste in movies, but we there’s enough crossover that arya, like, our guilty pleasure is cult documentaries.
Speaker: 0
56:06
I love them.
Speaker: 1
56:07
They’re so interesting.
Speaker: 0
56:09
I love them because there’s something about people, like, absolutely believing things that’s so appealing to me. I don’t know why that is. Like, I like watching Islamic scholars speak, you know, with, like, full confidence that their their version of truth is truth. Mhmm. I’m just interested in that mindset.
Speaker: 0
56:26
I just I think it’s a a like a very deeply cut groove in the human psyche that people can fall into. And when some when when there’s a cult, it’s ai, god, it’s so obvious. Like, there’s the guy. That’s the guy like, here’s a good example. There’s a documentary called Holy Hell.
Speaker: 1
56:45
Oh, yeah. Of course.
Speaker: 0
56:46
And you know that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I bought the building that holy hell was, like, the the the actual theater that this guy had built. It’s a beautiful theater that he had his followers built sai he can dance in front of them. That was gonna be the Comedy Mothership, the first version of it.
Speaker: 1
57:03
That’s crazy.
Speaker: 0
57:04
So I was under contract for that building, but it fell apart. Thank thank baby Jesus. Thank you so much. Thank Ai. Thank somebody. And then we found this new place on sixth Street. But that documentary is so fascinating because you you can see this guy who is a gay porn star and a hypnotist
Speaker: 1
57:24
Sai wild.
Speaker: 0
57:25
Take a bunch of really lost people and send them down this crazy road, and then eventually it all falls apart.
Speaker: 1
57:32
And You know what’s interesting about that is I have less of a problem with the objective truth claims and more of a problem with them saying, but don’t look into it. Like, don’t test it. Like, what I say goes, and you’re not allowed to explore it. Like, talking about the Mormon church, they recently did this thing where they’re ai, you don’t need to go on the Internet and you don’t need to.
Speaker: 1
57:53
And it’s ai, guys
Speaker: 0
57:54
the Book of Mormon.
Speaker: 1
57:55
Yeah. Guys, You I don’t think you realize what you’re sounding like when when you come across in that way.
Speaker: 0
58:00
Mormons are the nicest cult members. They’re the nicest people. They really are so nice. I love them. I mean, the Mormons that I’ve met have been so friendly. They’re so family oriented.
Speaker: 1
58:11
It’s true.
Speaker: 0
58:12
There’s some I mean, it’s, like, really easy to, like, think these are great people. I’ll join them.
Speaker: 1
58:17
We know why they’re family oriented. Right? Why? It’s because in in the in what Joseph Smith wrote, there’s an idea that everybody’s soul preexists, and you were born as a spirit child in a previous life. And the reason you need to have children is you need to bring those people’s souls into existence.
Speaker: 1
58:35
Sana so there’s, like because you have a heavenly father and a heavenly mother. And, you’re all children of god in the actual, like, physical sense. And that the pursuit is exaltation where you will be a god on your own planet if you’ve done everything right.
Speaker: 0
58:51
You get your own planet, which is pretty dope.
Speaker: 1
58:53
Planet. And and this is so Joseph Smith in, in the few the King’s Fall at Funeral Discourse, this is what he wrote. This is where he, like, formulated this idea where god, the father, has a body as tangible as ours of flesh and blood, and that he lived on another planet. And he it was, you know, circled around the star called Colab. And that if you do everything right, you will also be the god on on your own planet.
Speaker: 1
59:24
And so you gotta encourage people to have kids because you’re pulling those spirit babies out of the out of the spiritual realm. But you’re right. They are they’re incredibly nice people.
Speaker: 0
59:32
The nicest.
Speaker: 1
59:33
The nicest.
Speaker: 0
59:33
Yeah. It’s it’s a really great cult. You know. I mean or religion. Whatever. I mean, I I used to have a joke in my act that, a cult is is fake and it’s made bryden guy. Mhmm. That guy invented it. In a religion, that guy’s dead.
Speaker: 1
59:55
There might be something to that.
Speaker: 0
59:56
Yeah. And some, for sure. But the the question to me is always, what were they originally trying to do? Right. What was it based on? What in the beginning, there was ai? What what is what is all of that?
Speaker: 1
01:00:11
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:00:11
What what are those stories?
Speaker: 1
01:00:13
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:00:13
And when you take these stories and you are telling them for so long, that’s why the book of Isaiah, what you’re telling meh, is so fascinating vatsal 1000 years later
Speaker: 1
01:00:22
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:00:23
You have the exact translation of this at a time where most people were illiterate.
Speaker: 1
01:00:28
Right? Oh, yeah. Definitely. Yeah. For I mean, it’s only really been recently that we have the levels of literacy that we have today. I mean, this is part of the reason why you have these long spans of time between, like, when people live and then the ancient biographies that start to pop up about them is because most people are just illiterate.
Speaker: 0
01:00:45
But imagine how crazy that is, that something in a time where there’s no printed press
Speaker: 1
01:00:50
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:00:51
And, something that had been passed on for so long as a oral tradition is exact word for word written That’s pretty wild. You find in a cave in Qumran. Yeah. And then the same thing you get in the English translation of the Ai today. That’s nuts.
Speaker: 1
01:01:07
Yeah. I mean, up until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament manuscripts predated the Old Testament manuscripts by a long shot.
Speaker: 3
01:01:15
Really?
Speaker: 1
01:01:15
Yeah. Because, the Christians were the Christians were less discerning in their proliferation of written documents. So the Jews had this whole system where you had to be a trained scribe, and they were very, very careful with the procedures that you went through. Whereas the Christians were like, we wanna get this thing out as fast as we can as, you know, often as we can, which had a lot of benefits in that.
Speaker: 1
01:01:40
Like, their goal was a ai proselytization and evangelism, and that worked. But the downside of it was that you get really messy copies
Speaker: 0
01:01:52
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:01:52
Where you have copies all over the place, but, human error gets involved with, like, spelling differences and, you know, additions, deletions, mostly for completely, like, understandable reasons. But we actually have manuscripts where we know the person copied it, and they didn’t know how to read it because they make mistakes that you wouldn’t make if you knew how to copy.
Speaker: 1
01:02:13
There’s this really great example of a guy who copies I believe it’s the genealogy of Matthew. And he, he’s looking at a manuscript that has, 2 columns, and he’s copying it from left to ai, and he’s copying it like this, whereas it’s like the column you go down and then the next column.
Speaker: 1
01:02:32
So in the genealogy of Jesus, he’s got all the wrong people begetting all the wrong people. Oh. And you’re like, you wouldn’t you wouldn’t do this if you knew how to Right. Read because god is in the middle of the genealogy. Sai, like, that kind of thing.
Speaker: 0
01:02:45
That is a real problem.
Speaker: 1
01:02:46
That is a real problem. But, ironically, the with the the Christian manuscripts, because we have so many, it’s actually because of the mistakes that we’re able to trace the text back with a high degree of confidence.
Speaker: 0
01:02:58
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:02:59
Because if you have copies that are floating around, you know, North Africa in places like Egypt, and then you have copies in Syria, and you have copies out into Asia and into Europe and the British Isles, when mistakes pop up, they’re geographically located. And because you have so many, you can compare and contrast them and figure out, okay.
Speaker: 1
01:03:16
Well, this obviously happened here at this time, and you can pinpoint point those things. So this is a field called textual criticism where you and they we do this with all ancient documents. Like, the bible is a a a more kind of, fleshed out, field of textual criticism because we have so many manuscripts.
Speaker: 1
01:03:41
But we do it with, you know, Marcus Aurelius. We even do it with Shakespeare, with the different copies. Because if you only have one copy, you have to trust that the person who copied that got it right.
Speaker: 0
01:03:51
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:03:52
Yeah. Which is the issue that we have for, the, Beowulf. We only have one copy of Beowulf. And so we don’t know what it looked like prior to that. Sai we just kinda accept that, okay, this is Beowulf. Like, there’s no way to compare and contrast
Speaker: 0
01:04:09
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:04:09
The the tradition of the manuscripts of Beowulf.
Speaker: 0
01:04:12
God, when you’re saying this about taking copied versions of it and comparing errors and going back and, like, you’re talking about so much ai. Yeah. So much research.
Speaker: 1
01:04:24
It’s legwork. So much legwork. Yeah. And, fortunately, like, in the modern era, we get computers involved, and that cuts out a lot of the, like, just manpower.
Speaker: 0
01:04:36
I would like to see AI get to the bottom of all this.
Speaker: 1
01:04:38
Well, there’s an interesting so in Germany, at the the Center For the Study of of, New Testament Research, in Munster, they’re actually it’s called CBGM, the coherence based genealogical method. And it’s tracing not manuscripts, but readings within manuscripts and finding the relationships between the different ones by, like, computer models.
Speaker: 2
01:05:01
Wow.
Speaker: 1
01:05:01
And so they are actually meh so this is actually the way that, like, modern era textual criticism is being done is with these these language models that operate on tracing readings and how certain readings are related to one another, which has allowed us to do things like look at 4th century manuscripts and actually see that their readings come 100 of years earlier in other manuscripts that we have in collections. Sai one of the the clearest examples of this is there’s a manuscript in the 4th century called Codex Vaticanus because it happens to be in the Vatican right now.
Speaker: 1
01:05:37
And, there is a a manuscript from the 2nd century which has the exact same scribal conventions that Codex Vaticanus does in particular readings. And so we know for a fact that the scribes who created Vaticanus did not have I think it’s p ai, which is a papyrus 75. But they had some sort of collection of manuscripts that were similar, And so we can have confidence that the readings, although they’re 4th century, in particular areas of Codex Vaticanus, are actually 2nd century in their origination.
Speaker: 1
01:06:11
And a a large part of this is because of these, like, models that the computers got involved in.
Speaker: 0
01:06:16
Wow. That is so fascinating. Now, when they’re going over things like ancient Sumerian and they’re reading things like the Epic of Gilgamesh
Speaker: 3
01:06:25
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:06:25
Like, if we can’t say we we don’t how know how to make those words. We don’t know what they sounded like. How arya they translating it into an English version? Like, when you like, one of the things that’s been compared quite a bit is the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah and the arya. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:06:48
The great flood. Yeah. There seems to be some parallels.
Speaker: 1
01:06:51
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:06:52
Like, how close is it?
Speaker: 1
01:06:55
In some ways, it’s very close, and in other ways, it’s not. So that’s the story of Upanishadim, which is kind of a side story in the Epic of Gilgamesh where, Gilgamesh is he realizes his mortality, and he’s trying to find eternal life. And there’s this guy, Upanishadim, who he runs into, who tells him the story of the gods gifted him with eternal life because he saved all the animals on a boat.
Speaker: 1
01:07:17
And so there are actually parallels between that and, say, the Genesis 6 Noah Arya story, in, like, making a big boat, putting all the animals on it, and then they get off and they make a sacrifice to, in his case, the gods in in the ai, god. And I think what you’re looking at there is probably a cultural remembrance of something that did take place.
Speaker: 1
01:07:37
And so you have these adjacent cultures who they’re existing within this framework of the ancient near east, and you’re seeing these kind of parallel echoes of things that actually did happen. So there are definite parallels, but I think sometimes people look at those and they overplay that.
Speaker: 1
01:07:54
So the one of the examples I often give is Advil and arsenic both come in pill form and have an a on the bottle. But it’s not the the similarities that matter in that case. It’s the differences. And so if you look at the differences, there are significant differences in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Upanishad story and the Genesis 6 story.
Speaker: 1
01:08:15
If for another reason, then the Noah Arya story is is a very small part of the book of Genesis. And the the story of Upanishad in the epic of Gilgamesh is a little bit more stretched out. It has more to do with the theme of what Gilgamesh is doing in his epic. So but there are obviously parallels between that because these are both ancient Near Eastern stories Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:08:39
And they’re products of their day in the in the same way that I think you see parallels between some of the New Testament gospels and other ancient Greco Roman ai. In that, you know, these are products of ancient history, and so they’re gonna look like other ancient historical writings that kinda parallel around that. Does that make sense?
Speaker: 0
01:09:02
No. It does make sense. It’s just when you’re talking about the oldest of old stories, it’s always so interesting to wonder, like, when what was like, when they’re taking these oral traditions, like ai Socrates is famous for saying that he didn’t believe that you should write things.
Speaker: 1
01:09:23
Yeah. Right? Make people lazy. Right.
Speaker: 0
01:09:25
It make you lazy. You need to learn how to remember things. You need to exercise your memory, which is so fascinating when you think that there must have been people that were in charge of memorizing these oral traditions. Yeah. And when you’re talking about particularly, if you’re talking about the old testament, the the series of writings, like, these are long stories
Speaker: 1
01:09:47
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:09:47
That someone had to remember and pass on to generations. So the thing with me was always, like, well, what was the origin of all this? Like, what was the first version of it? And where the hell did it come from? And what was it? What was going on where these people felt like in this time of incredibly difficult ai?
Speaker: 1
01:10:06
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:10:07
Right? You’re essentially you’re hunter gatherers. Right? We’re talking about 1000 of years ago. And these people took great time and made great effort to preserve these stories.
Speaker: 1
01:10:20
Uh-huh.
Speaker: 0
01:10:22
And then there’s always human error. Right? There’s human error, as you were saying, with transcription and trying to decipher things and writing things down where you don’t really speak the language. Mhmm. You gotta wonder, like, how much did we lose in this oral tradition? Like, what was the original story? And what were they trying to convey?
Speaker: 1
01:10:41
Yeah. And I think that there’s an aspect of, like, a message that’s trying to be communicated. I mean, we are modern, people of the enlightenment. So we almost have a perspective where we want something to be very, like, exhaustive that ancient writers didn’t have those same sort of conventions. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:11:04
Or sai they’re going to capitalize on certain ideas and concepts for the purpose of when someone tells you a story, you don’t memorize everything.
Speaker: 0
01:11:13
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:11:14
You mem this is you go to university. You write notes. Right? The people who are writing everything the professor is saying word for word, probably not the people who are gonna remember what the professor says as well as the people who write down the main things. And when you write down the main things, the main points without all of the other stuff that kinda is is just, it’s icing, then you get the main idea more ancient writers talk about this.
Speaker: 1
01:11:40
So there’s a guy named, Quintilian who exists in the 1st century BC, and, there’s this this series of writings that we call, progymnasmada, which are basically, like, how do you do good writing? So he’s training people, maybe even individuals like Plutarch, who is one of the best known ancient biographers, and saying, like, it’s just as important what you don’t say as to what you do sai.
Speaker: 1
01:12:10
Mhmm. Because you don’t want to, a, writing in the ancient world is expensive, really expensive, and, b, you wanna make sure that your audience is actually getting the message that you want to convey. Mhmm. And so, this is something that when you read, like, German scholars, biblical scholars of the 19th 20th century, or even prior to that, like 18, 19th century, they look at the gospels and they’re like, this isn’t biography because
Speaker: 0
01:12:44
it’s
Speaker: 1
01:12:45
it’s not capitalizing on Jesus’ childhood. And we all know that good biographies tell about your childhood and psychologize and these sorts of things. Whereas if you look at some of these ancient writers who are talking about how you should write biography, they sai, if there’s nothing in their childhood that’s that significant, don’t write it.
Speaker: 1
01:13:03
Mhmm. It’s gonna distract from like, if there is something, say, like, Jesus’ birth or Luke tells a story when he’s 12 of Jesus, when he goes with Mary and Joseph and, you know, Mary and Joseph lose the son of god and they start going home without him, and they’re ai, where’s Jesus?
Speaker: 1
01:13:20
And they gotta go back to Jerusalem. That’s a significant story. And so it appears that Luke includes it because there’s a significant reason to include that. But they wouldn’t have had any problem with leaving out large portions of someone’s life if it didn’t contribute to what the ultimate goal of telling that person’s life sai?
Speaker: 0
01:13:40
I think what’s also what’s important is we have to try, as difficult as it might be, to put our minds in the context of people who lived in a time where most people were illiterate. And Yeah. You’re telling these parables, you’re telling these stories as an oral tradition, and that they have a different mindset in terms of the distribution of information
Speaker: 1
01:14:05
Totally.
Speaker: 0
01:14:05
And what the significance of these things are.
Speaker: 1
01:14:07
Yeah. Yeah. These are documents well, in terms of the Ai, like, as someone who identifies as a Christian, I would say that these are the Bible is written for you, but it wasn’t written to you. It had a completely different original audience.
Speaker: 0
01:14:22
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:14:22
But you should do your best at figuring out who it was written to and how that made a difference to them because then the application is gonna come out even clearer for you. And that should be alt ultimately, you know, the goal of everyone who’s looking at ancient documents. Who was the original audience? How would they have understood it? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:14:41
Because you can read all sorts of things because of your modern conventions into what someone is talking about in the ancient world and completely bypass what they’re actually trying to convey in their intention.
Speaker: 0
01:14:55
Yeah. And, again, it’s almost impossible to put your mind completely into the context of these people that were living then. It’s almost impossible to imagine the way they viewed the world Mhmm. And the way they communicated, you know. And when you’re dealing with, like, really old stuff ai the Sumerian text, and then people have translations of it which can be fantastical, like the Zechariah Hitchin stuff.
Speaker: 0
01:15:20
It’s like you have to be a a scholar in ancient Sumerian and understand the origins of language, and you have to and then still, there’s massive debate. There’s a whole website called sitchandiswrong.com. Yeah. But he’s the most fun.
Speaker: 1
01:15:38
He’s fun. I’m not convinced he could read Sumerian either.
Speaker: 0
01:15:41
Really? Yeah. I think he was bullshitting.
Speaker: 1
01:15:44
I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt. He just he takes so many liberties with the stuff he’s commenting on that I have a hard time getting my head around.
Speaker: 0
01:15:55
So if he couldn’t read it, where would he be getting his translations?
Speaker: 1
01:16:00
From actual translations.
Speaker: 0
01:16:01
Okay. So he would take these translations and then make his own assumptions and his own his own interpretation. Is that what it
Speaker: 1
01:16:10
Yeah. I think to a certain degree, I mean, even something like Nibiru is not a Sumerian word. It’s an Akkadian word.
Speaker: 0
01:16:16
Uh-huh.
Speaker: 1
01:16:17
But he makes a big deal about it being related to Sumerian. And it’s it is a word that appears within Akkadian.
Speaker: 0
01:16:24
And Akkadian is what time period?
Speaker: 1
01:16:26
Akkadian is just after. So it it exists kind of in a crossover where Sumerian predates Akkadian, but Akkadian, develops alongside. And then, you know, as cultures like the Assyrians come into power and kind of subvert the Sumerians.
Speaker: 0
01:16:41
So what so oldest Sumerian writing is what? What’s the oldest time timeline? Ai, 5000? Around
Speaker: 1
01:16:50
that. I think, like, 44 to 5000 years ago.
Speaker: 0
01:16:53
Okay. And then Acadian is when?
Speaker: 1
01:16:56
There’s some overlap, but it’s it develops into a language, like, just after, like, the rise. And Akkadian develops into, like it it has stages. And then you have, like, Babylonian, Proto Babylonian, Persian, Old Persian Mhmm. Elamite as as We don’t have it.
Speaker: 0
01:17:16
There’s no writing at all at the Gobekli Tepe. Correct? It’s all just iconography?
Speaker: 1
01:17:22
Yeah. Or at least that we figured out that that looks like like writing. Yeah. I’m really hoping to go to Gobekli Tepe.
Speaker: 0
01:17:30
What do you what’s your take on this whole reluctance to further excavate and how they have such a small amount of, the site? It’s only 5% that’s been uncovered. But through lidar, they’re aware there’s a a bunch more.
Speaker: 1
01:17:44
Yeah. I mean, I’m not an archaeologist. I have friends who are archaeologists, and I think it’s archaeology is tricky because so much of archaeology is dependent on governments and institutions and funding. Mhmm. That getting mad at archaeologists for not excavating is kinda like getting mad at construction workers for not fixing your potholes.
Speaker: 0
01:18:04
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:18:04
Where it’s ai yeah. Right. Like, they they’re kinda doing the last stage. So yeah. I mean, I think there’s certainly incentive by the Turkish government to wanna capitalize on that being a tourist destination. And you really need to safeguard archaeological excavations because ai, it’s it’s being compromised Right. And, like, pillaging Mhmm. And Sure. And stuff like that. It happens.
Speaker: 1
01:18:34
I mean, when I was Of course. In Egypt 2 summers ago and you go to the Valley of the Kings, they’ve got security cameras up everywhere because there are tombs there that we still haven’t discovered. And so they’re like, we don’t want people digging around in here looking for
Speaker: 0
01:18:49
Well, they’ve lost so much over the history.
Speaker: 1
01:18:51
Oh, we’ve only discovered 1% of ancient Egypt.
Speaker: 0
01:18:54
That’s so nuts.
Speaker: 1
01:18:55
1%. Isn’t that crazy?
Speaker: 0
01:18:58
That is the nuttiest part of all of history is Egypt to me. I I still have not been.
Speaker: 1
01:19:03
You gotta go.
Speaker: 0
01:19:04
I know. I almost went I almost went in December. I just couldn’t find the time. I’m just too damn busy. I will, though. I will I definitely will. But it is the, to me, the nuttiest time in history because, good luck explaining the Great Pyramid. Good luck.
Speaker: 1
01:19:17
And and it’s such a big time frame. Like, there’s a 1000 years between the pyramids being built and, Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings. Yeah. A 1000 years.
Speaker: 0
01:19:27
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:19:28
Nuts. It’s so crazy. Egypt is one of the wildest places you’ll ever go.
Speaker: 0
01:19:32
Well, it just doesn’t make sense. It’s ai, how? What what were you guys using? What were you doing? How’d you do it? How’d you measure it? How’d you figure it out? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:19:40
You’ve been to Greece. Right? Yes. Have you been to Jordan? No. Oh, you gotta go see Petra. Yeah? Petra’s phenomenal.
Speaker: 0
01:19:46
Jordan was I mean, Greece, rather, was fantastic.
Speaker: 1
01:19:49
They’re all crazy.
Speaker: 0
01:19:49
God. It’s just like, when you’re just there in the presence of these things and just trying to put your brain back 1000 of years and imagine what society was like back then.
Speaker: 1
01:20:02
It’s crazy. It’s crazy. Egypt was crazy because Egypt is like Greece in that you have, like you can go to the pantheon and you see that kind of stuff. Right? But, you go to Egypt and and there’s 4000 year old paint on the walls. Yeah. And you’re like, what? I can’t I can’t get paint to sai on my wall for 10 years. Like and it’s it’s almost exclusively because of the climate, and it got buried in sand.
Speaker: 1
01:20:28
But it’s so wild. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:20:30
So wild. When you say that 1% of ancient Egypt has been discovered, what do you really mean by that?
Speaker: 1
01:20:37
Of the percentage of what we know that happened in in Egyptian history, 1% has been excavated in terms of what we can actually pull out of the ground and look at artifacts. So there’s whole eras of pharaohs that we just we don’t know where they’re buried. We like, even when Tutankhamun was discovered, he was kind of a footnote in the pharaohs that we knew about at that ai.
Speaker: 1
01:21:00
And we didn’t know he he was, you know, as extravagant, as rich as, you know, until we discovered his actual tomb. Mhmm. A lot of people at that time didn’t even think it was he was worth looking into because we have these lists of pharaohs. And the thing with the pharaohs is that they’re always trying to the next pharaoh is always trying to prove that he’s the better one.
Speaker: 1
01:21:23
And this is why you go to Egypt and you find statues of Ram everywhere. And part of it was because Ramses I think it was Ramses the saloni, was he commissioned so many statues of himself because he’s like, oh, I’m the best. I’m the greatest. And what they actually they couldn’t keep up with the commissioning, and they started actually rubbing off the names of previous pharaohs on statues and just putting Ai on it.
Speaker: 1
01:21:46
Really? Wow. He was just so you go, like, the from the top of Egypt to the bottom of Egypt, and you’re gonna find statues of Ramses.
Speaker: 0
01:21:53
He wanted to leave his mark.
Speaker: 1
01:21:54
He wanted to leave and he did. Right? Like, it worked.
Speaker: 0
01:21:56
We’re talking about it now in
Speaker: 1
01:21:58
2024. I know.
Speaker: 0
01:21:59
Yeah. That is nuts. So when you go there and you’re in the presence of these things and you try to put yourself back into that time period, like, what do you have you ever tried to think like, what what was the motivation to make something as great as the the Pyramid of Giza, the Great Pyramid?
Speaker: 1
01:22:18
People definitely wanna make their mark. Right?
Speaker: 0
01:22:20
Oh, but that’s a mark that just doesn’t even make sense.
Speaker: 1
01:22:24
There’s something to that. I mean, if you think you’re a god Right. And and you have this whole kind of worldview perspective of and theology that, you know, you need to make something that, and any and bury yourself with all this crap because that’s gonna make a difference in your afterlife Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:22:41
Then you’re gonna go big rather than going home. Right? So, the perceptions of people in the ancient world are just so different. We got it so good right now.
Speaker: 0
01:22:55
Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:22:55
Like longevity, health Mhmm. Food. Mhmm. It’s just on a completely different scale. And so the the conventions of needing to make sure vatsal, especially if you’re, like, the richest guy around, that you tick off all the boxes because you know you’re gonna die, and you’re probably gonna die sooner than you want to, sooner rather than later.
Speaker: 1
01:23:22
And you have this whole perception of, well, you know, if I bury myself with all this stuff and maybe even some of the people, we’re just gonna kill them and include them too, because they’re gonna help me out. That’s gonna help me out in the afterlife.
Speaker: 0
01:23:36
You need slaves in the afterlife, if you’re fair.
Speaker: 1
01:23:37
Yeah. Of course, you do.
Speaker: 0
01:23:38
I know. Ai? Yeah. That’s ridiculous. Yeah. So, Khufu’s pyramid, what what’s the ai that he was even in power?
Speaker: 1
01:23:48
I don’t know. I’m I’m not an Egyptologist or an archaeologist necessarily, but he was I think that was a what? Like, 4000 years ago? We only really have a tiny little statue of him. That’s awesome. Of that much about him. I guess he’s busy making a pyramid. So they say. Right?
Speaker: 0
01:24:07
So they say.
Speaker: 1
01:24:08
Nobody thinks different, but, Well,
Speaker: 0
01:24:09
a lot of people think different, you know. That’s what’s interesting about it is, the, like, the archaeological argument that, like, doctor Robert Shah makes about the water erosion in the Temple of the Sphinx. Yeah. That’s a fascinating argument because it does appear ai that’s water erosion, and that would put the ai way, way back.
Speaker: 1
01:24:30
Yeah. I think even just looking at the Sphinx, you can tell that no matter what your perspective is, you you should entertain the idea at minimum that the head was built tyler. Yeah. For sure. Because it doesn’t fit the body.
Speaker: 0
01:24:42
It has much less erosion. But you could also attribute that to the different densities of the saloni. Like, that’s one of the things about these layers of limestone. It’s like some of them are much more porous and some, they erode easier.
Speaker: 1
01:24:54
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:24:55
You do see that. Yeah. You know, and I think they’re doing a terrible disservice by covering the Sphinx with, like, new stones and, you know, they redid the pause and they’re doing all that, like, my god, people. Like, leave it alone. Like, leave it the way it is.
Speaker: 1
01:25:10
Yeah. It’s this tricky balance between
Speaker: 0
01:25:13
Restoration and recreation. Yeah. Because they’re in a recreation stage.
Speaker: 1
01:25:17
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:25:17
And it was obviously they’re doing it with smaller stones, and it, like, looks different. It’s not the same thing. It’s not what it initially was. It was carved from one piece of stone.
Speaker: 1
01:25:27
Have you seen some of the restoration stuff that Saddam Hussein did No. In Iraq? No. Jamie, you gotta pull up the ziguradded.
Speaker: 0
01:25:33
Oh, no.
Speaker: 1
01:25:34
So Saddam Hussein was a bit of a nut job, but he believed as this is as far as I understand it, that he was the recreation of Nebuchadnezzar.
Speaker: 0
01:25:42
Oh,
Speaker: 1
01:25:42
boy. So he did all of this restorative work in, in Iraq on things like the walls of Babylon. And in Ur, he rebuilt the ziggurat. Wow. So if you look at that picture over there that says 1932 and 2022, that’s what he did, is he basically tried to rebuild this entire thing. Wow.
Speaker: 1
01:26:03
And it’s amazing. I ram trying hard to get to Iraq because I wanna I wanna see this thing. Interestingly enough Yeah. Don’t die, dude.
Speaker: 0
01:26:13
Don’t go over there.
Speaker: 1
01:26:14
So that’s actually early.
Speaker: 0
01:26:15
So I’m sorry. But that sai this is the this is the modern version with the small bricks. The original version, was it all carved from 1 piece?
Speaker: 1
01:26:24
No. It would have been clay bricks.
Speaker: 0
01:26:25
So these were clay bricks. So what do we the can you Jamie, can you go back to the ai image, please, so So we could see what it looked like. God, I would rather just have that. You know? I mean, I wanna see what it looked like and what it looks like all these years later. I don’t wanna see a recreation, which is very similar to what they’ve done to the Sphinx.
Speaker: 1
01:26:46
Yeah. The Sphinx even when I was in Egypt, they’re they were doing some work in, like,
Speaker: 0
01:26:52
can you, Jamie, can you go to the the rehabilitation of the Sphinx or whatever they were called?
Speaker: 3
01:26:57
Yeah. Ai just clicked on, like, the ruins of it. I was gonna go back to thirties or forties or something.
Speaker: 0
01:27:02
Well, the restoration part is the interesting part. Like, you could see the restoration. If you go to just just Google restoration of the Sphinx Paws.
Speaker: 1
01:27:10
Well, they’re they’re talking about putting encasing stones on the pyramid.
Speaker: 0
01:27:14
Yeah. I’ve heard that too. God, don’t do that.
Speaker: 1
01:27:16
I don’t think they should do that.
Speaker: 0
01:27:18
No. You shouldn’t do anything. I mean, obviously, they they took the original casing stones off, but that’s also history.
Speaker: 1
01:27:25
Sai Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:27:25
Now you sai see, like, the new paws. Well, that’s that seems like the difference between, buried and unburied. Yeah. So, like, even when Napoleon came upon like, right there. Like, isn’t that restored?
Speaker: 1
01:27:37
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:27:38
Yeah. Because it was there was much more erosion than what Napoleon came upon it. It was buried. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:27:42
I think so.
Speaker: 0
01:27:43
Yeah. Ai
Speaker: 1
01:27:43
think that was the case.
Speaker: 0
01:27:44
Like, over ai, because you’re dealing with these crazy sandstorms, over time, everything gets kinda buried.
Speaker: 1
01:27:50
Oh, so much of it is under sand for so long. Like, the temple of, the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut was mostly under sand for a long, long time Wow. Before they, like, uncovered it. And fortunately, like, the the the aridness of Egypt preserves things like crazy.
Speaker: 0
01:28:10
Yeah. Sai, that’s what the pause look like now. That’s a that’s a disaster. Yeah. That’s so gross. Yeah. When you know, if you do take that timeline, the Robert Shah timeline, and you say, okay, this so you’re talking about 1,000 of years of rainfall, You have to go back to when there was rainfall in the Nile Valley, so now you’re back ai 9000 years.
Speaker: 0
01:28:31
Like, one of the more interesting thing about hieroglyphs and the interpretations of it is that the ancient hieroglyphs that well, the ancient, versions of pharaohs rather.
Speaker: 1
01:28:41
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:28:41
Like, when they go back, you know, past the established dates of 25 100 BC and before that, you get to, like, 30000 years ago. And then they say that these are meh. Mhmm. These are not this is not representative of an actual history. This is some sort of a mythical history.
Speaker: 1
01:28:59
Yeah. Numbers are tricky in ancient languages because it’s not entirely clear whether numbers are meant to be representational. Or
Speaker: 0
01:29:08
ai, why they said that Noah ai 600 years old Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:29:11
That’s that’s part of it. I mean, you have that. You have the Sumerian kingless, which have people living 1000 of year 100 and 1000 of years too. And, I mean, there are some interesting academic articles on, like, the probability of the numbers that come up in those. Because we have a we have a base meh counting system because we count our fingers.
Speaker: 0
01:29:32
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:29:33
Ancient near eastern cultures like the Babylonians, the Acadians, the Assyrians, they had a base 12 counting system because they would count each, hinge or whatever you call these, like spaces 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
Speaker: 0
01:29:46
The different joints of the finger.
Speaker: 1
01:29:47
Yeah. The joints. That’s the word I was looking for. Yeah. And so that’s why we have 360 degrees in a circle, 365 days in a year. Like, this comes from the Mesopotamian counting conventions. And you look at some of these lists, and they’re operational and and all divisible by, like, 12 60.
Speaker: 1
01:30:07
And you’re like, what’s going on here? So not all of them, but enough of them where it’s statistically impossible. And I don’t totally know what to make of those things because you do have the genealogies. I believe it’s Genesis chapter 4 and Genesis chapter 11, where they’re all divisible by these types of numbers that were very common in the ancient Near East.
Speaker: 1
01:30:28
They’re not random. Whereas if we look at the the genealogies later in, like, Chronicles and Kings of the the ages of the Israelite kings, they’re random. And so I it’s just ai, what do we do with that? Right. Because numbers are also far more representational, which is why we see numbers like 12 and 40 and 7 come up in the ai, but also other ancient near eastern literature.
Speaker: 1
01:30:54
Like, there are certain numbers in Egyptian society that also were seen as, like, perfect numbers or, like, numbers that you wanted to incorporate. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:31:06
So The what is what’s the earliest, interpretation of calendars? Like, what is what is the earliest where they did decide what a year was?
Speaker: 1
01:31:19
I have no idea.
Speaker: 0
01:31:20
Because you gotta imagine, if you’re you know, the average ai wasn’t so good back then.
Speaker: 1
01:31:25
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:31:25
A lot of people got infected, died of war, famine, all these things. It would take quite a long time for people to figure out what a year was. Right.
Speaker: 1
01:31:35
If you
Speaker: 0
01:31:35
have no you’re you did I mean, we’re going 1,000 and 1,000 years ago. We have to establish, like, okay. A day is let’s put this stick in the ground. When the shadow is here, this is where we start. Yeah. When the shadow goes all the way around like ai, okay. Now maybe we can, like, mark these off.
Speaker: 0
01:31:51
Okay. Now we’ve got a sundial.
Speaker: 1
01:31:53
And there are different timekeeping conventions depending on society. Like, ancient Jews had a different timekeeping convention than ancient Romans. And so that’s why you see, like, in Genesis chapter 1, it talks about there being evening and there being morning. Mhmm. Is because well, Jews today. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:32:07
You start the Sabbath on sundown the day before. Right? Sai that’s why it’s because there’s there’s different ai, and so we go on a 24 hour time system. But ancient Jews had a different convention of that. Ancient Romans had a different convention of that.
Speaker: 1
01:32:24
Ancient, you know, Mesopotamian cultures had their own kind of conventions about these things. And calendars were all over the place. Mhmm. In in you know, when you get to the Julian calendar and they’re ai, we gotta we gotta standardize this thing because everybody’s operating on a different you know, the Julian calendar and then the Gregorian calendar.
Speaker: 1
01:32:41
Ancient timekeeping is very inexact and very meh. And so you kinda gotta take certain things with a grain of salt Right. In terms of that. But, yeah, ancient ai. I don’t even know. I know that the actually, the talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Speaker: 1
01:32:57
The group in Qumran who were ai a they were a sectarian group of Jews who believed that the Jews in Jerusalem had basically capitulated and were not holy enough. And part of their reasoning is that they believe they have a perfect calendar. And so they use a different calendar that doesn’t have to do things like incorporate an extra month every certain number of years because, you know, their their thing is not perfect.
Speaker: 1
01:33:24
And, part of their reasoning as to why they’re, like, The Chosen is that they have a timekeeping system that they say is perfect.
Speaker: 0
01:33:35
Many cultures used a a 13 month calendar. Ai? Like, what was the logic behind that? Does that work?
Speaker: 1
01:33:42
I don’t know.
Speaker: 0
01:33:43
The the idea was 13 months, 28 days each month, and you’d we wouldn’t have to have leap years and all that shit.
Speaker: 1
01:33:48
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:33:50
Archaeologist okay. There it is. World oldest calendar, 12000 years old.
Speaker: 1
01:33:54
Yeah. Ai
Speaker: 0
01:33:55
wild. Sai it is on, Gobekli Tepe. Oh, the ancient carvings of the sun, moon, and various constellations sits on a pillar. Gobekli Tepe, 12000 years old. Reacher researchers believe ancient people use a so called loony solar calendar to mark the changing of the seasons.
Speaker: 1
01:34:10
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:34:11
Interesting. So it was at least representative of the fact that we know when the days start getting shorter, it starts getting colder.
Speaker: 1
01:34:19
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:34:19
And then okay. And then and then warms up again. The days start getting longer.
Speaker: 1
01:34:24
This is why solstices are so key in, like, most of human history.
Speaker: 0
01:34:28
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:34:28
It’s because you gotta figure out, like, what’s a marker point.
Speaker: 0
01:34:32
Right. Which is one of the things that’s so fascinating about some of the constructions of the pyramid where on the summer solstice, these pillars line up so perfectly that the light shines straight down these hallways and illuminates everything.
Speaker: 1
01:34:45
So Right.
Speaker: 0
01:34:46
How did you guys nail that?
Speaker: 1
01:34:48
Yeah. I mean, just because they’re ancient doesn’t mean they’re stupid.
Speaker: 0
01:34:50
Well, they’re just brilliant. Yeah. And they weren’t just stupid. They were fucking brilliant. That’s what’s I mean, we’re we’re just ancient. It’s it’s just so weird that people were so vastly more intelligent, at least in in terms of their ability to build things
Speaker: 1
01:35:07
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:35:07
Than anyone else anywhere around there. That’s what’s so weird about Egypt to me. It’s ai there’s amazing pieces of like, even ancient Greece is incredible, but I can kinda believe you did it, You know? Right. When you deal with 2,300,000 stones in the Great Pyramid and some of them, like, 50 tons, 60 tons That’s pretty from from ai miles away.
Speaker: 0
01:35:29
Ai, what did you do?
Speaker: 1
01:35:30
How did
Speaker: 0
01:35:31
how how the hell did you do it?
Speaker: 1
01:35:32
I mean, there have been a lot of things that have been lost. We still, as far as I’m aware, don’t know how the Romans made their concrete. Tuh. That Roman concrete is ai this thing that survives. They were made they were able to make domes out of it. Well, you
Speaker: 0
01:35:44
know about terra preta in the Amazon. Do you know about that? No. Oh, terra preta is their, particular rich soil that is man made soil.
Speaker: 1
01:35:55
Oh, yes. I did know. I do know about that.
Speaker: 0
01:35:56
Combination of charcoal and incredible. Yeah. And it’s unbelievably fertile in terms of your ability to grow food on it. And they made it, and we don’t know how they did it. Yeah. And it’s man made stuff Yeah. Which is so bananas. It’s ai a giant chunk of this stuff that is all over the Amazon was made by people specifically to encourage the growth of plants.
Speaker: 1
01:36:22
I mean, this is why history gets me so excited.
Speaker: 0
01:36:25
Oh, it’s so amazing. And it’s so, it’s so interesting too. I was watching something, on YouTube yesterday about the Mayan culture
Speaker: 1
01:36:33
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:36:34
And, the Aztecs. It was I I went on a deep dive when I started getting into, like, getting ready for this. But when you think about how many people existed back then Mhmm. And then Europeans come and everybody dies. Everybody dies of disease. And it’s ai, how many people died?
Speaker: 0
01:36:51
Like, millions millions of people died here? Millions of people died there? Like, holy shit. And you go through, like, the the the story of the the collapse of the Mayan civilization, the collapse of the Aztec civilization, like Mhmm. The accounts that these, priests had of visiting these, Aztec markets and how incredible they were.
Speaker: 0
01:37:13
These people from Rome who’d come to visit the Ai, they’re like, this is unbelievable, or the Aztecs rather. Like, this is unbelievable how sophisticated they are. And then Gone. Everybody’s dead. Donezo. Just you you just gotta go, wow. How many times has this happened in history Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:37:30
Where people have visited places and brought their cooties and killed off a giant swath of the population. And one of the things that they’re discovering now in the Amazon, which is so fascinating, is through use of Ai. Mhmm. Discovering. Like, oh ai god.
Speaker: 0
01:37:42
This is, like, all populated.
Speaker: 1
01:37:43
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:37:44
This whole thing was populated.
Speaker: 1
01:37:45
Yeah. That’s crazy. No. Ram penetrating radar stuff.
Speaker: 0
01:37:47
And the trees and all the the rainforest is mostly from man made agriculture.
Speaker: 1
01:37:52
Yeah. That’s wild. Nuts. Wild.
Speaker: 0
01:37:54
And this is all recent Yeah. That they’re figuring this out Yeah. Which is also so fascinating about history is that it is a constant and never ending search. Yeah. And that even in today, with as much information as we have, you can pick up your phone and ask them, you know, when was Nero born? It’ll tell you.
Speaker: 0
01:38:11
Like, instantaneously, we still don’t have answers to a lot of really fascinating questions ai the Olmecs or
Speaker: 1
01:38:19
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:38:19
All these other civilizations, ai, who, where, where did they come ram? Why why they look like this? Why ai they make these big stone heads? Stone heads, you know, or stonehenge. It’s another one. Like, Jesus, what is this? Yeah. There’s so many versions of that all over the world, and it just it the search for our origins is one of the most human endeavors.
Speaker: 0
01:38:42
One of the most because to to to know that we are particularly unique.
Speaker: 1
01:38:47
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:38:47
We’re so different. We stand out from every other animal on this planet. And there there’s this crazy ai war of of biology where life is just eating life all around us. And we just got to some crazy place that far beyond any other creature that’s on this planet.
Speaker: 1
01:39:06
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:39:06
And we did in a bunch of different ways. We did in a bunch of different ways all over the place with different scribbles and different icons and different gods and different things. And we’re all wondering, like, which one where where did it start? What was the origin of all this? Like, what what was the need to write these things down?
Speaker: 0
01:39:27
What purpose did it serve to have these myths and legends and stories? Like, was it just to keep society together or was it to retell a very important story that was a very unique thing that happened at the dawn of time?
Speaker: 1
01:39:41
And that’s why you see I mean, the the literary, literary comparison of ancient near eastern origin stories is ai a really interesting thing to do. Because when you look at something like the Enuma Elish, which was the Babylonian creation story, and then you look at something like Genesis chapter 1, there are obvious crossovers with, like I said before, these ancient near eastern conventions.
Speaker: 0
01:40:04
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:40:04
But then you can see that the author of Genesis is making these points that are actually rebutting something like the origin stories of the surrounding cultures that largely believe that matter is, like, eternal, and the gods come out of the created world, and that there’s this narrative of the battle that takes place where, some gods fight against other gods and the world around us that we see and, like, human beings are the end result of this battle. And so they would read this on every Babylonian New Year. And one of the main themes was basically that, like, it’s all chance. It’s all a random mistake.
Speaker: 1
01:40:44
You were created without purpose and intention because Tiamat gets destroyed, and she is the god that, you know, you come from. And then you read Genesis chapter 1, and it says, in the beginning, god creates the heavens and the earth, and he makes it good. And there’s this idea that, like, that’s countercultural in the idea that the Babylonians did not think that the world was good. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:41:07
And that, like, at every at the end of every refrain, it’s it’s good. It’s good. It’s good. It’s good. It’s good. And then it’s very good at the end.
Speaker: 1
01:41:14
And that humanity in particular is created in the image of Ai. Like, that’s a very not not just like kings, which a lot of ancient Near Eastern cultures believed that kings were created in the image of God, but that humanity in general is created the image of God. Mhmm. And this idea of the Imago Dei, that you’re that’s why you’re different. Like, why are you different from all the animals? Right.
Speaker: 1
01:41:36
Because you’re given something that exemplifies of a unique quality. And then the ancient Near Eastern cultures, that believe that, you know, the planets are gods and that they’re the sea is a god. And then at Genesis chapter 1 looks at that, and it kinda subverts the expectations of the day in getting to this ultimate question of why are we here, what are we supposed to do while we’re here, and how do we get out of here?
Speaker: 1
01:42:04
And it says that, no, there’s purpose, there’s meaning, there’s intention. And, actually, a lot of the things you worship, it’s pretty stupid because god created them.
Speaker: 0
01:42:14
What is the original origin story or the the earliest, I should say, origin story? Of? Of humanity.
Speaker: 1
01:42:22
I don’t know.
Speaker: 0
01:42:22
Would it be the Mesopotamians? Would it be the Sumerians? Like, who who had the the the the one that’s the oldest?
Speaker: 1
01:42:29
I mean, the new Melisha is pretty old. There are a number of different, like, variations. The problem is that we’re largely relying on, like, our complete copies are coming in, languages like Akkadian where the ones in Sumerian are very fragmentary. So, like, even the Epic of Gilgamesh, the the copy that we have that kind of is the final if you go and you read a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, it’s gonna be the one from in Akkadian from the library of Ashurbanipal.
Speaker: 1
01:42:56
But the earlier versions in Sumerian don’t even have the flood story in them. Them. And yeah. So and they’re they’re more pieced together. And we actually do have another flood story in the Atrases, which appears to have been influenced. The Epic of Gilgamesh story is influenced by the Atrases.
Speaker: 1
01:43:13
But Ai I in terms of, like, written language, I guess it’s the. I I wouldn’t actually I don’t even actually know what, like, the oldest oldest one is. But you get a lot of these origin stories, and they have these themes. We we see it in the bible too. The ancient near eastern cultures were very preoccupied with chaos and order. And so it’s all about kind of creating order out of the chaos of the world.
Speaker: 1
01:43:44
And that’s where I think you do see the parallels.
Speaker: 0
01:43:46
Well, that’s the establishment of society. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:43:48
Yeah. Yeah. And establishing chaos and certain things being represent representational of chaos within the created order, like a the bible included, but a lot of other other ancient cultures saw things like the ocean as the embodiment of unpredictability and chaos. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:44:08
And
Speaker: 1
01:44:08
and so that’s why you have, speak monsters are this very common depiction. The the Ai in Job, which is this, you know, sea monster. And it’s representational in a way of because it it appears actually in Babylonian literature too, the Leviathan. Really? Yeah. And it it’s it’s encompassing chaos in the world.
Speaker: 1
01:44:31
And the point of god bringing it up to Job in the book of Job is, like, god has the ability to tame this thing. And even in the book of Revelation at the end of the bible, it says that in the new heavens and new earth, there will be no sea. And it’s not because, you know, the I had a friend who is Australian, and we are kinda working through, translating sections of Revelation. And he’s like, hold on.
Speaker: 1
01:44:54
There will be no sea. Ai like, I’m Australian. I love the sea. And, but but the point of that, though, is not necessarily that, like, the body of water is not gonna exist. It’s that the ocean, the sea is so unpredictable.
Speaker: 1
01:45:08
You go out there and storms, you know, can come out of nowhere and you die. Right. And so there are these, like, motifs that are representational in the ancient world, and we see a lot of those in these creation stories.
Speaker: 0
01:45:23
So would it be that the dangers of the sea would no longer exist?
Speaker: 1
01:45:27
Yeah. Oh, yeah. So the sea kind of working as, an analogy of that which is unpredictable. And, actually, there’s a lot of, concepts of the the realm of the dead being in the sea that we see throughout this literature. If you read the book of Jonah, there’s this kind of stylistic, which you miss when you read it in English, but it’s very apparent in the Hebrew, where Noah keeps going down.
Speaker: 1
01:45:53
He goes down from his town, to the dock, and then he goes down into the boat, and then he goes down into, you know, the the inside of the boat. And then the storm happens, and then they throw him overboard down into the sea and down into the fish. And he eventually the fish takes him down into the depths of the sea.
Speaker: 1
01:46:12
And when Jonah prays, he says, I cry out from the depths of Sheol, which is the realm of the dead. So there is actually a a form of Jewish interpretation where it argues that Jonah actually died and was resurrected when he was spit up by the fish. Mhmm. And it could be because in the gospels, Jesus says all the people are following him, and they keep asking him for miracles.
Speaker: 1
01:46:35
Because they’re like, we saw you do miracles. Do more miracles for us. You know? Come on. Do a trick. Do a trick, Jesus.
Speaker: 0
01:46:40
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:46:41
And Jesus says, the only miracle you’re gonna get is the sign of Jonah. That just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish 3 days 3 nights, I will be in the belly of the earth 3 days 3 ai. You know, prediction of his own death and resurrection. But there is an argument within, rabbinical literature that when Jonah says that he’s crying out from the depths of Sheol, it’s because he’s actually dead. And that’s one interpretation.
Speaker: 1
01:47:04
Mhmm. But another interpretation could just be that he saw and understood, as a person of his day, the depths of the ocean as where the dead people ended up anyways. Mhmm. Like, your soul gets it goes down into the chaos and the disorder of shale, which is the realm of the dead.
Speaker: 0
01:47:21
Is that where they disposed of bodies?
Speaker: 1
01:47:23
In the ocean?
Speaker: 0
01:47:24
Yeah. No. No? No. Vikings did. Right? Didn’t they, like, light boats on fire and push them out there?
Speaker: 1
01:47:29
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:47:30
Yeah. Yeah. But it wasn’t a common practice amongst other civilizations.
Speaker: 1
01:47:34
Not that I know of. I mean, Jews would definitely I mean, really ancient Jewish conventions of burial, you would just bury someone in the earth. And then by the time you got to Jesus’ day, you had, like, family tombs and stuff.
Speaker: 0
01:47:47
Well, there was an an ancient hominid that’s not human. And one of the things that they were so fascinated about was that they buried their dead, and that they did so in a cave. Do you remember that, Jamie? Do you remember who was discussing that with us? It was, they did not think that this, version of, ancient primate was capable of these things.
Speaker: 0
01:48:14
And then, they seem to have confirmation through these, very extensive cave systems that there was at least one area where they would put their dead. Meh. And it was a difficult path to get to this too. Mhmm. I believe this is a very small hominid, and I think people have tried to make their way through it, and it’s really hard.
Speaker: 0
01:48:37
Like, some of these caves are, like, basically crawling on your stomach, which is fucking terrifying because people have died that way.
Speaker: 1
01:48:44
Are you claustrophobic?
Speaker: 0
01:48:45
No. I’m not claustrophobic. I’m just normal stuff.
Speaker: 1
01:48:47
You still wanna crawl in
Speaker: 0
01:48:48
a cave? Crawl in the middle of the earth into something that’s, like, 11 inches high. Yeah. Squirming saloni. It’s that’s what they’re doing. Yeah. Their body barely fits in there. And a guy died recently. Ai, I think. Oh, it was Brian. Yes.
Speaker: 3
01:49:02
Good.
Speaker: 0
01:49:02
That’s right.
Speaker: 3
01:49:03
Then I’ll pull it up. Dentalelet chamber.
Speaker: 0
01:49:06
Yeah. So they’ve founded this ancient hominid, which, you know, didn’t really look like us. Yeah. Was, burying their dead.
Speaker: 1
01:49:15
Yeah. I mean, burial conventions change over time. Mhmm. The ways that they’re burying, like, in the ancient Israelite days are very different in the conventions than when you get to Jesus.
Speaker: 0
01:49:28
Carrie, as archaeologists uncover evidence of intentional burial, cave engravings by early human ancestor. What did that sucker look like? So the Dinaldi chamber, what is the type of homo naledi. Right? Homo naledi. Google that, see what they look like. Homo naledi. What we think they look like. Right?
Speaker: 0
01:49:50
Woah. That’s crazy. That’s crazy. So as a Christian Mhmm. What do you think about all this stuff? Like, what do you think about ancient hominids, Australopithecus, Neanderthals?
Speaker: 0
01:50:06
Like, what do you what was God up to with all this?
Speaker: 1
01:50:09
Yeah. I mean, I’m not a ai. So Right. I gotta stay in my lane. I ultimately would be an advocate for intelligent ai, where I would say that, that god purposefully created humanity in a way do you you have Steven Ai on. Right?
Speaker: 0
01:50:29
Yes.
Speaker: 1
01:50:29
Yeah. So, I mean, he’s one of those guys who talks about ai of the the issues that he sees with Right. Evolution. And I think I have some of those issues too. My friend, Jonathan McClatchy, is a biologist, and he does some really great presentations on the ways that he sees kind of, the intricacies of NeoDorianian evolution is not quite explaining some of what what’s going on with things like the fossil record and some of the gaps that we have in there.
Speaker: 1
01:50:58
When you talk about early hominids, I mean, ultimately, I think that there are aspects of the fact that there are ancient cultures which I mean, humanity obviously looks very different today than it did, you know, if we’re going tens of 1000 of years ago. Right. And so I think that there’s a different ai of convention and understanding.
Speaker: 1
01:51:16
Ai, ultimately, I would ai to there being an original Adam and Eve and that those are our, ai, if you wanna call them, like, our first parents kind of thing. But there are other Christians who I would disagree with, but I think have interesting articulations of that in terms of theistic evolution.
Speaker: 1
01:51:35
I disagree with them, but it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility to find explanations. I don’t think the Bible is trying to explain how people came into existence in the same way that maybe we want it to. And a lot of people read the origin stories in Genesis as a scientific textbook. And I think, ultimately, that misses the point of what Genesis is trying to say.
Speaker: 1
01:52:02
This goes back to what we were talking about with, like, how did the original audience understood this? Right. When they read Genesis chapter 1, do are they looking at that as, an exact prescription of what god did? I mean, in some ways, maybe. But in other ways, the they they could see that as this, like, counter apologetic to the other ancient near eastern stories ai I explained. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:52:25
So I I just think we need to be careful when we’re looking at or even, like, counting up the genealogies and coming up with a you know, how how old the earth is.
Speaker: 0
01:52:34
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:52:35
I think that might be missing the forest for the trees in what we’re actually looking at when we look at ancient documents and how we’re trying to interpret them. But it is a big question.
Speaker: 0
01:52:46
Right? Well, the the question of evolution is a fascinating one. Right? Because there’s obviously something happening, particularly with us, if we really are related to homo una daldi, nolat, noliti, or the there’s there’s something clearly is happening. This is ai process of change. And if we don’t completely understand all the factors in that process of change, we might miss out. The the equation might be incomplete.
Speaker: 0
01:53:14
It’s like there were Ai mean, we know a lot now about evolution that we did not know before. But ai all sciences, new data comes in and you have to recalibrate things. Like Yeah. Have you been paying attention to this this new discussion about dark matter and dark energy.
Speaker: 1
01:53:33
No.
Speaker: 0
01:53:34
The the new discussion is that it might not be a correct theory, and that what it might be is that time moves differently in the voids between galaxies.
Speaker: 1
01:53:48
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:53:49
And this is a a new theory.
Speaker: 1
01:53:50
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:53:51
And, you know, ai, new enough and discussed enough among people that really understand it that it’s getting to me. Right? So I’m reading it.
Speaker: 1
01:53:58
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:53:58
So see if you can find that.
Speaker: 3
01:54:00
It’s got stuff.
Speaker: 0
01:54:01
Yeah. It’s very it’s a very complex and nuanced conversation, but most of the universe is dark energy. Right? It’s a giant percentage of the universe’s dark energy and dark matter, and we don’t really know what that stuff is. And so this is proposing that there’s a an an additional possible theory that might explain it better.
Speaker: 1
01:54:22
I mean, that area of of ai is crazy. Nuts. Crazy.
Speaker: 0
01:54:27
And then you have the James Webb Telescope that’s giving us even more data than ever before, and it’s a and you have to look at all of it and go, wait. Why are those things here? How arya they there so long ago? Like, what are these red things at the beginning of time? Like, what the fuck is all?
Speaker: 1
01:54:39
The universe is bonkers.
Speaker: 0
01:54:40
Nuts.
Speaker: 1
01:54:41
Yeah. And, I mean, I think, we we get that in history too, whereas we have these kind of what we think are established conventions, then all of a sudden we discover something and it, like, completely overthrows the ideas that we have.
Speaker: 0
01:54:51
Like Clovis first.
Speaker: 1
01:54:52
Yeah. Or go back play tepay. Yeah. Or actually, good good segue.
Speaker: 0
01:54:55
That’s the best one. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:54:56
Yeah. I made one I made something for you. Oh. Sai I make papyri facsimiles. Oh, my description is a little bit wonky here. You can fix that. So you were talking about, like, what is our oldest Uh-huh. Manuscript evidence? So this guy is p 52. John Ai 457. Sai that is so that’s a genuine Egyptian papyri that I I made. I cut it out for you, and then I transcribed the text on that manuscript.
Speaker: 1
01:55:25
So when we’re talking about what is potentially our oldest evidence for the New Testament, this manuscript that most likely comes from Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, is the one that usually is universally accepted as our oldest one. And, that contains John 18 where Jesus is on trial before Pilate. And yeah. So that’s the one that’s in the John Ai Library in Manchester, England.
Speaker: 0
01:55:49
So this is a copy of that exactly? This is exactly what it looks like?
Speaker: 1
01:55:52
Yeah. So I I cut that on an out on the papyri, with, with a scalpel, and then I transcribed the text on. You did a great
Speaker: 0
01:55:59
job, dude. And and This is you nerd it out.
Speaker: 1
01:56:02
I know. I’m For real nerding out.
Speaker: 0
01:56:04
Ai is a real nerding out of
Speaker: 1
01:56:06
So that’s actually yeah. So that’s someone else’s facsimile, which is not as good as the one I made you.
Speaker: 0
01:56:10
Good. Yours is better.
Speaker: 1
01:56:11
And where, where Jesus is on trial before Pilate, and Jesus sai, everyone who follows, the true who who is is following the truth follows me. And on the back has the words of Pilate saying, what is truth? Wow. But so part of my research so the reason I bring this up is because before this was discovered by CH Roberts in the 19 forties, the convention was because of a guy named, CH Bauer that the gospel of John was 2nd century.
Speaker: 1
01:56:44
And so he had this he was a student of Hegel. Have you ever heard of Hagee No. Dialectic? So you have, like, a thesis, synthesis, and antithesis? Yes.
Speaker: 1
01:56:53
So so Hegel had this philosophical theory, and his student Bauer takes that, and he incorporates this into history. And he says, you know, the earliest gospel, Mark, has this very, this very Jewish Jesus, and then, the later gospels have a very, ai, the last of what I call the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Speaker: 1
01:57:16
Luke has a very kind of more divine Jesus. And so he says based on this, John is the last last written one, and it combines these 2 where you get a very human and a very divine Jesus together. And so based on this, he says that John has to be 2nd century. Well, we discovered this ai.
Speaker: 1
01:57:31
C h Roberts is, you know, literally going through these piles of manuscripts in these drawers that are being, like, stashed away. And he finds this guy, and he sees that it’s written on both sides, which is almost exclusively a Christian convention. Because in the ancient world, they used scrolls.
Speaker: 1
01:57:45
And the Christians, for reasons we’re not entirely clear on, they start to make codices, books. And so they write on both sides. And so he says, okay. This is written on both sides. It’s probably a Christian manuscript.
Speaker: 1
01:57:57
So he sends it off to the leading, paleographers or guys who date manuscripts, and they all say this is the beginning of the the saloni century. And so there’s still debate about the dating of this, but the unanimous consensus is that it’s comfortably 2nd century 2nd century, potentially the beginning of the 2nd century, which means that this is found in Egypt.
Speaker: 1
01:58:22
John is probably writing his gospel in Ephesus, so it has to be written by John, spread around, find its way to Egypt, be copied, and then end up in this manuscript, which which means that at minimum, you’ve already pushed the gospel of John back into the 1st century comfortably and potentially even, like, most likely into the lifetime of the eyewitnesses of these events.
Speaker: 1
01:58:43
And so all of the literature up until that point from the scholarly consensus about the dating of the gospel of John gets totally rewritten. Wow. And it’s because of that guy and because of my academic work where I was telling you, like, in paratextual features, when we look at these tiny manuscripts and you figure out, okay, well, what does that look like on the page?
Speaker: 1
01:59:05
I also made you so this is I used 2 different variations of papyri. Woah. So you have there where p 52 would have been on the page. And based on the it’s called codicological conventions, the spacings of the words, and the way that the size of the margin that we can see, where it would have been on the page, and how big the page would have actually been.
Speaker: 1
01:59:34
So this is like a a reconstruction, and then I filled in the rest of the text in the same sort of style stylistic hand of the scribes at that time, what that page would have looked like. So this would have come from what would have been essentially a ai, a pocket copy of the gospel of John. Wow.
Speaker: 0
01:59:55
That’s unbelievable. Wow. That’s so fascinating.
Speaker: 1
02:00:02
So this is this is ai work that I do in terms of trying to figure out, okay, you have these fragments. How big would have this codex actually been? How big would have the document been? And then, then you compare and you contrast them to, say, like, non Christian literature, like Thucydides or Tacitus or Pliny or Cicero or, Cassiodio, those kind of guys, and look at the differences between how these documents would have been put together and written in their day.
Speaker: 0
02:00:31
God. Sai beautiful. It’s just so bizarre to imagine these people writing this stuff down sai, so long ago.
Speaker: 1
02:00:41
You know what’s wild is when you actually get the chance, which I have a number of times to actually handle Oh. The original documents.
Speaker: 0
02:00:47
Oh my god.
Speaker: 1
02:00:48
Did you
Speaker: 0
02:00:48
wear rubber gloves?
Speaker: 1
02:00:49
No. You know why? Is that we used to do that, but, actually, the oils in your hands are more abrasive than, latex or even cloth. So
Speaker: 0
02:00:58
The oils are more abrasive?
Speaker: 1
02:00:59
Sorry. I said that wrong. They’re they’re less abrasive. Okay. So it used to be that you always had to handle things with, you know, gloves. And nowadays, we don’t do that anymore.
Speaker: 0
02:01:07
Oh, that’s wild. And Just touching it with your actual fingers. That’s gotta feel bizarre.
Speaker: 1
02:01:12
I was at the, 2 summers ago, I was at the University of Pennsylvania, and, I was looking at a manuscript called, p 1 or p oxy 2 1.2. And it’s a a beginning of the 3rd century copy of the the first page of Matthew’s gospel. And when I requested access to it, they told me that the last person to request it was when, pope John Paul the saloni came and visited the states, and they pulled it out for him.
Speaker: 1
02:01:42
So on the, like you know, in the library when you sai, like, have to punch your name with a regular name on the cards?
Speaker: 0
02:01:48
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:01:48
If there was a card yeah. That guy. So I made a facsimile of that one too. And that one is the that’s the genealogy of Jesus from from Matthew’s gospel. Wow. Actually, you know what you Jamie, if you go up to the search bar and put c s n t m Yeah. Those letters, c sai n t m dot o r g. Okay. So this is the center for the study of New Testament manuscripts.
Speaker: 1
02:02:18
So if you click digital manuscript collection. So they go around the world, and they try to, digitize all the existing New Testament manuscripts to preserve them. Meh. And so you can actually see there on the ai. You can click, well, I wanna look at a papyri, and you can go, the different conventions of, you know, the date, or the time.
Speaker: 0
02:02:41
And so you could read the translation and then go and look at the original source of it?
Speaker: 1
02:02:46
Yeah. So, ideally, you always wanna go look at the original, but because of organizations like CSNTM, which is actually in Dallas, you you people like me don’t have to go to Europe where a lot of these manuscripts are housed. We can look at them. And, because these are such high high grade that you can, figure these things out.
Speaker: 1
02:03:07
So, actually, a guy I know, Elijah Hickson, he used that, and, he actually figured out that there was a a a prominent manuscript p 50, which is a forgery. And so he used that based on, like, looking at the the the Really? Yeah. He filled in the gaps within the rips and saw that the words didn’t match up when you fill in the gaps.
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02:03:30
And so when he’s transcribing the text, he’s like, wait a minute. I don’t think that word fits in there. And based on that, he’s like, yeah. That’s a that’s a forgery because it someone has written the text in after that piece of papyri, which is these forgeries are almost always a genuine piece of ancient papyri.
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02:03:48
Someone gets it from, like, the black market antiquities.
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02:03:51
Oh, and then just writes on it afterwards. Yeah.
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02:03:53
Right there. So p 50. So if you fill in these holes, they’re called lacunas, the words a lot of the words don’t fit. Sai someone’s come saloni, and they’ve, like, written done a a really good job because it fooled scholars. And they’ve written in the text, but not quite good enough to figure out that not all of the words fit in the gaps that you presented.
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02:04:20
What what is your take on the Voynich manuscript?
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02:04:22
I have no idea what to think of the Voynich manuscript, but it’s Middle Ages.
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02:04:26
Yeah.
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02:04:27
It’s just a weird one.
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02:04:28
It’s a really weird one.
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02:04:29
Yeah.
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02:04:30
Yeah. Because people have been trying to crack that code forever. And what is this? Is this just gibberish? Is it just Yeah. Fake words?
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02:04:37
Yeah. I mean, that’s
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02:04:38
And why so much time and effort put into making this fake book?
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02:04:43
Yeah. Is
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02:04:43
this a lawyer a crazy schizophrenic person who made their own language?
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02:04:46
I don’t know. They must have been a rich schizophrenic person.
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02:04:48
But didn’t JRR Tolkien didn’t he create an entire language for Lord of the Rings?
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02:04:52
So a lot of the languages because he was a he was a linguist. Yeah. A lot of the languages are based on existing languages.
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02:04:58
Okay.
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02:04:58
So ai
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02:04:59
just combine them together to form his own version of it?
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02:05:02
Yeah. Ai, Elvish and Dwarvish and Yeah. Like, they’re all based on, like, ancient Norse or old English or so he would, like, take, like, those languages, and he’d actually he had I mean, if there’s anyone who’s the best at world building
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02:05:16
Right.
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02:05:16
Like, he he you can learn Elvish.
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02:05:19
It’s a real language.
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02:05:21
Because he he developed the language.
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02:05:23
That’s so crazy.
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02:05:24
That is crazy.
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02:05:25
That is so the dedication. That’s so bananas.
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02:05:28
I mean, he was a he was a genius. Guys like him and even Lewis, they they were friends. Oh, really? CS Lewis and J. R. Tolkien.
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02:05:35
Really?
Speaker: 1
02:05:35
Yeah. Yeah. Tolkien played a big part in, in, Lewis’ conversion because Tolkien was Catholic. Oh. And, I think I think Lewis was Irish, and so he couldn’t quite become a Catholic, but he became ai Protestant Anglican. But, yeah, they were the Inkling Society. They would meet in Oxford at the, oh, what’s the pub called? People are gonna listen to this and get mad at me because, there’s something in ai.
Speaker: 0
02:06:01
One of those UK pubs that’s been around for a 1000 years?
Speaker: 1
02:06:04
Yeah. Ai. They have They would meet and talk. They’re called the Inkling Society. Wow. Yeah. What is eagle and child? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It’s, it’s funny when when you read, how Tolkien was Tolkien really didn’t like Lewis’s stuff because he said it was it was way too way too, ai, straightforward.
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02:06:27
He’s ai, you got a Jesus ai? Good one. Like, nobody no. You’re not not beating around the bush on anything when you got literal Jesus ai sacrificed? Come on.
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02:06:38
Rises from the dead? What are you doing here? That’s So, yeah. But they were French.
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02:06:43
Conversation to be a fly on the wall. Yeah. Tolkien breaking down Lewis’s yeah. That would be fascinating.
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02:06:51
Apparently, the guy wrote Dune sana a copy to Tolkien before he published it.
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02:06:56
Really?
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02:06:57
And Tolkien didn’t like it. Wow. He sent it back and said, like, I got nothing good to say, so I’m gonna say nothing at all. Wow. Isn’t that crazy?
Speaker: 0
02:07:03
That is crazy. Well, he was wrong. Even geniuses well, I mean, some geniuses are just, like, so in their own head.
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02:07:11
Different strokes.
Speaker: 0
02:07:12
Yeah. And that that that’s part of the problem. I mean, but it’s also what makes them so great in the first place. So they have this ai singular vision and dedication sai much so that they’re writing an elvish language and combining words for it.
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02:07:24
Yeah. Yeah.
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02:07:25
Jamie, did you find that thing about, the, dark matter? Did you find what I was asking about? Well, I
Speaker: 3
02:07:31
thought I’m sorry. I stopped because I found a video, and I saw some people explaining it, and it didn’t it started saying that was almost ai they started off with a theory, and that’s how they do things. And then they start working through the theory until someone has a better theory.
Speaker: 0
02:07:45
The there’s there’s a there’s a such a giant problem today in that if you just post some fantastical claim in a headline Mhmm. Like that the theory of dark matter has been debunked, and then you get clicks. Yeah. And so you can kind of get away with doing that now.
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02:08:02
Ai I felt like this explained ai I’m 5 on Reddit vatsal pretty this top meh or 1 percenter.
Speaker: 0
02:08:07
So dark energy is a problem. Modern cosmology is most problems in science. You start with the model, you go out and make measurements, you find your measurements don’t fit your model, this is a problem. When this happens, scientists go off and try to come up with new theories. I think that’s meant no models. I think they meant new models.
Speaker: 0
02:08:23
New models which do fit the new data. In the case of things like dark energy, we get 100, if not thousands of new theories. ACDM is the current best model of cosmology. The CDM stands for cold dark matter. It’s a model that includes certain theories to explain dark matter, and the lambda, a is a cos cosmological constant.
Speaker: 1
02:08:45
That’s the Greek word, lambda, or the Greek letter.
Speaker: 0
02:08:47
Yeah. Which is used to model dark energy. Note this mathematical model doesn’t explain what dark matter or dark energy are. It just incorporates them to make the maths work. So this is a long Ai don’t know if this is exactly what they were saying about it was ai a much more, of a synopsis, but what they were saying was that it might be that time moves differently in between galaxies.
Speaker: 0
02:09:14
See if you could Google that.
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02:09:16
Physics and cosmology are just wild.
Speaker: 0
02:09:18
Well, it’s just it’s it’s so insane because we’re so separate from it because of light pollution that the most majestic thing that you could ever see, we gave up so that we could drive at night. It’s really weird. It’s really weird because when you go to a place, you know, I’ve talked about it a bunch of times, but I’ll say it again.
Speaker: 0
02:09:35
I went to the Keck Observatory meh years ago, and we got there on a perfect time where the, the moon was not out at all and the sky was insane. It was like you were in the cockpit of a spaceship and, you know, it was just like you were in a giant glass cockpit, which is essentially we are kind of in an organic spaceship hurling through the universe, so it should look like that.
Speaker: 0
02:09:58
Mhmm. But it just doesn’t because of the fact that we’re constantly inundated by light pollution.
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02:10:02
Yeah.
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02:10:03
And I think the ancient societies and ancient cultures didn’t have vatsal. And because they didn’t have that, I think they had a much more humble view of our place in the universe. Because you’re just presented with something that’s absolutely impossible. Impossible to imagine.
Speaker: 1
02:10:19
We definitely lose our sense of awe Yeah. When we can’t see ai of ourselves ai the grand scheme of the universe.
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02:10:27
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:10:28
And you’re right. When you go somewhere where there’s no light pollution, you look up at the ai. It’s like even not at somewhere like the Keck Observatory where you can, like, get a crazy view of it.
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02:10:37
Yeah.
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02:10:37
When you just go out in the country and look up and you’re ai,
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02:10:41
That’s the Milky Way. You can see the Milky Way. Dark energy debunked by lumpy universe expansion. Yeah. This is the one. Learn how the existence of dark energy is being challenged due to new evidence that the expanding universe is actually lumpy. So what they mean by lumpy is this what they’re talking about how time moves differently. Sai if it it’s has a synopsis of it.
Speaker: 3
02:11:02
It’s like a a Retention. Article I found gets into the explaining what dark energy is and then
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02:11:06
Gets into the weeds. Probably a
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02:11:08
paragraph at the bottom that Yeah. Is what you’re looking for.
Speaker: 0
02:11:10
What is the Ai model? This is it. So Timescape model rejects the idea that dark energy is the driving force of universe expansion, improving, analysis of type LA, LA Supernovae, has suggested that the acceleration based on light curves seen in 1998 was a case of misidentification.
Speaker: 0
02:11:29
The Ai model amends this by considering differences of time in void and matter dense areas. The model suggests that time moves much slower in matter dense areas ai the Milky Way Galaxies than in voids. With more time passing in voids, increased expansion takes place, making it seem like expansion is accelerating as the voids increasingly spread through the universe.
Speaker: 0
02:11:53
Dark energy, therefore, is not needed to explain the expansion of the universe according to the researchers. Who fucking knows? It’s too meh. It’s too much, like, what are you even saying? How how crazy is this?
Speaker: 0
02:12:06
You know, like, one more controversial aspects of the James Webb Telescope was this theory that perhaps the universe was quite a bit older than 13 point
Speaker: 1
02:12:14
Right.
Speaker: 0
02:12:14
You know, whatever 1000000000 years. Right. And they were trying to push it back to 22 based on the existence of galaxies that put ai. And people are pushing back against that, and there’s a lot of debate about that. But the the bottom line is all of it is too many numbers for your brain to even register Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:12:29
That, you know, however many billions of years ago, there was nothing.
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02:12:34
Yeah.
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02:12:34
And then also there was something. And Terrence McKenna had a great line that said that, science requires one miracle. The big bang. Yeah. Of course. It requires a miracle. Well, I
Speaker: 1
02:12:47
always say that when people ask me about, you know, the miracles in the ai. And I say, well, you know, if the first miracle happened, if everything you know, nothing became everything
Speaker: 0
02:12:56
Right.
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02:12:57
Then, you know, Jesus turning water into wine
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02:12:59
That’s sai easy one.
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02:13:00
Well yeah. That’s a part of the trick. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:13:02
Exactly. Really is nothing compared to the birth of the universe, but we’re we’re convinced at the creation of the universe, and we’re very skeptical at other miracles.
Speaker: 1
02:13:11
It’s very odd. Yeah. I mean It’s very odd. I think there’s an inconsistency there. And you do see when the big bang is first hypothesized sai there are individuals who are uncomfortable with that sounding like in the beginning. Mhmm. Because before that, the idea was that the universe was eternal. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:13:28
And and if you propose a point in time where everything starts to exist, well, that for and you sai some of these people are pushing back on it. They they they say things like, well, that sounds too religious. Mhmm. That sounds like a beginning point in time. Right.
Speaker: 1
02:13:41
And at that point, if there’s a big bang, you have to figure out, okay. Well, what’s the big banger? Right. And, I mean, that’s ultimately it’s an it’s a it’s it’s a metaphysical religious question. How did that thing get kicked off?
Speaker: 0
02:13:54
Brian Cox was explaining to us that there was an actual environment that existed pre the big bang. Don’t they call it the environment? Is that what the the term of it is?
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02:14:04
Is this ai Lawrence Krauss having a definition for nothing?
Speaker: 0
02:14:07
I don’t know.
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02:14:07
It’s not nothing?
Speaker: 0
02:14:08
I don’t know. Ai I’d it was just ai, what are you even saying? You know, and then there’s sir Roger Penrose who thinks there’s a series of these things that happen. And that it’s just this constant birth of universes and death of universes and birth of new and it’s ai big bang, expansion, heat death Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:14:28
Contraction, big bang, like but we’re almost ai, that’s too much. I don’t wanna I can kinda wrap my head around 14000000000 years. I can’t wrap my head around eternity.
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02:14:39
In in theology, it’s often described as the difference between understanding and comprehension, which my wife tells me are synonyms, and that’s nonsense. But, the idea is, like, you can understand eternity is a long point in time.
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02:14:53
Right. You
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02:14:53
can’t comprehend it.
Speaker: 0
02:14:54
It’s like numbers. Yeah. You can’t you can understand how many zeros are in 14000000000 years.
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02:14:59
How much water is in the ocean? Right. I can comprehend. Like, it’s like, that’s a lot of water. Yeah. But when you start talking about, like, tens of thousands of gallons, I’m like, lost me.
Speaker: 0
02:15:08
Yeah. I don’t really know what that looks like. I kind of do. My brain’s not set up for that. Yeah. Which is part of the the weird thing about people. So our our brain is clearly set up differently than any every other creature that exists. You know, and if you have if if if evolution is the only thing that created us, it’s just evolution.
Speaker: 0
02:15:27
How the fuck did we get so far ahead of everybody else? Yeah. I mean, not even just and we’re the doughiest, like, weakest, softest, but also the smartest. Like, we gave up that. That was the trade off.
Speaker: 0
02:15:41
And somehow or another, by evolving into this particular form, we figured out a way to uniquely, change the environment in ways that no other creature has even come close to. Yeah. And it’s it’s interesting to me that there are certain things that we think of in terms of, like, unexplained phenomena that we’ll accept because we have some sort of a scientific definition of what this unexplained phenomena ai.
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02:16:05
Mhmm. Like the Big Bang.
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02:16:07
I mean
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02:16:07
and you can say that there’s theories. It’s not it’s not completely unexplained. They kind of get it, but you kinda don’t. Something that’s smaller than the head of a meh that becomes the entire universe that we sai is pretty fucking crazy. Yeah. You know, and just to say that that just happened and you don’t you don’t really I know you don’t wanna say you don’t know, but you really don’t know.
Speaker: 0
02:16:25
There’s no way you can know. It’s not really possible to know. There’s no, like, working theory where you can convince me that the whole universe gets compressed into something smaller than the head of a pen and then instantaneously becomes everything that you see.
Speaker: 1
02:16:41
Well, I think that’s why you see natural materialism being woefully inadequate to really explain the ultimate worldview questions that we have.
Speaker: 0
02:16:48
Just the universe itself. Right? Just what we don’t know enough. Maybe we one day will. Maybe these, you know, sentient AI systems that we’re gonna create with quantum computers are gonna be able to figure things out in a way that we can’t. But at the end of the day, you have one miracle.
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02:17:04
You
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02:17:04
have the big bang. Mhmm. All of science agrees this happened. That is so much crazier than anything that any religion is proposing. That it’s so interesting to me that we’re because while we say we have echoes of the big bang, there’s, you know, radio echoes you can Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:17:21
But also, if a miracle did take place like, let’s assume that there is actually a higher power that occasionally interacts with human beings. And if a miracle did take place and you were there, you don’t have a camera, you don’t have a cell phone, you don’t have a pen, You you can’t write things down.
Speaker: 0
02:17:38
Maybe you can’t even read. And you have this thing that happens to you, and this thing changes the course of human history. This thing changes the direction that the ideology that these people subscribe to and the moral and ethical structure Mhmm. They live their life by. It changes untold billions of human beings from that point on. Yeah. Pretty fascinating. Yeah.
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02:18:02
That in itself, even if this is just a revelation without a divine interaction, that’s a fucking miracle.
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02:18:09
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:18:09
It’s a miracle that it was created at all. Like, the whole idea that Christianity when you’re saying that the the book of was it the book of Isaiah? Yeah. That the same book is exactly the same as that’s a miracle. Yeah. That’s pretty fucking crazy.
Speaker: 1
02:18:24
Yeah. That is crazy.
Speaker: 0
02:18:25
If you just imagine the sheer number of illiterate people, the the sheer number of days that have to go by where people are telling the story exactly the sai, and that it’s entrusted in the hands of these very few people that are so dedicated to it that they get the exact words right a 1000 years later, pretty bananas.
Speaker: 1
02:18:45
Well, I mean, that is kind of the the crazy thing about Christianity where you have this Jewish itinerant guy who’s walking around for century Ram occupied Judea. He’s making some pretty audacious claims, claims to be god himself, and then he predicts his own death and resurrection. And then his disciples are they think it’s over.
Speaker: 1
02:19:07
Like, they’re like, he’s dead. We’re done.
Speaker: 3
02:19:10
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:19:11
And then they go from 11, you know, scared men because Judas commit suicide, scared men in an upper room to completely overhauling the Roman world in only a couple 100 years because of this claim that they say they saw Jesus resurrected. Like, there’s something different that goes on there that they’re ai, this is a miracle. Right? Dead people don’t usually rise from the dead.
Speaker: 0
02:19:37
So what is your personal belief when it comes to the resurrection? What do you think hap do you have a belief, or do you just try to interpret the text and try to see what is the message?
Speaker: 1
02:19:51
Well, I think so as a historian, I do think it is a historical question. You have a guy who objectively lived. He objectively ai, and then individuals close to his inner circle claim that they see him not dead Right. Again.
Speaker: 0
02:20:07
This is a highly unusual activity. Highly unusual. Right. So but it’s hard when you’re dealing with illiterate populations. You’re dealing with 1,000 of years of time. You’re dealing with an oral tradition, and then you have us sitting here talking about it Mhmm. In 2024, trying to figure it at the end of 2024.
Speaker: 0
02:20:30
Trying to figure this out. Literally, the end. Yeah. Last couple days. It’s it’s very difficult for anybody who thinks of themselves as an intelligent person who’s secular to even entertain the possibility that someone died and come back to life.
Speaker: 1
02:20:48
And I get vatsal, but we’ve already talked about the fact that we don’t think that the only thing that exists is matter of motion. We as in you and I. Right? Like, we believe that there’s something else going on in this world that’s a little bit crazy. There’s something else. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:21:00
And that to, I think, exclude that, I think, excludes something that that you’re kind of putting blinders on
Speaker: 0
02:21:08
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:21:08
For. And you do have I mean, you’re right in terms of all of the these ancient conventions and the ways that things were spread around and but the gospels are written in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses, and they’re written in this period of time where you have groups of individuals who could have fact checked those things.
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02:21:25
So How do you fact
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02:21:26
check someone coming back from the dead?
Speaker: 1
02:21:28
Well, if you
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02:21:29
How many people saw his body? Right?
Speaker: 1
02:21:31
Well, Paul says that 400 people saw him all at once.
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02:21:33
400 people saw the crucifixion?
Speaker: 1
02:21:35
No. Saw the resurrect resurrected Jesus. Yeah. First Corinthians 15, Paul says that Jesus appeared to the disciples, and then he appeared to 400 people all at once. I mean, if we read the gospel of Luke and the gospel of, or gospel of Luke and Acts, so same author wrote these both documents, He says that Jesus was walking around teaching them for 40 days after he was resurrected from the dead.
Speaker: 1
02:22:00
And so these are written within a time period when you have people who would have seen Jesus’ ministry, who were there, say, at something like the feeding of the ai, who could have been able to verify or, debunk some of these things that are being said. And you go from a bunch of scared guys who because Jesus wasn’t the only Mhmm. Messianic figure who arose and claimed to be the messiah. Right.
Speaker: 1
02:22:28
There were a number of individuals both prior to and after Jesus, but they die and the movement dies with them.
Speaker: 0
02:22:35
Do you think it’s possible that he didn’t die? And do you think it’s possible that they thought he was dead? Because that does happen. There was actually a case very recently where a guy was about to be harvested for organs. The they thought he was dead, and, this guy started moving again and came back to life.
Speaker: 0
02:22:56
It’s very, very bizarre case because, his family had been told that he was going to be harvested for organs. They were Mhmm. Prepare preparing for that. Yeah. This guy comes back.
Speaker: 1
02:23:08
Yeah. I mean, we know a lot about Roman crucifixion. Ai we know that and and we know that they they did their job well.
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02:23:14
Yeah.
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02:23:15
And so, in fact, if you look at, say, very skeptical biblical scholars, like, non believing, atheist, agnostic, Christian scholars, they will say if we can know anything about Jesus, like, they’ll cast it out on a lot of the things that we read about in the gospels in terms of the actual historical Jesus of Nazareth. They’ll say one thing we can be sure of is that he died by crucifixion under Pontius Ai.
Speaker: 1
02:23:37
Because we have not just multiple detested documents that we refer to as the new testament, but Roman and Greek and Jewish writers refer to that claim afterwards and talk about the fact that you have this ai, and it’s mocked within earliest Christianity. Sai one of our earliest in fact, not one of.
Speaker: 1
02:23:57
The earliest depiction of Jesus on the cross is called the, and it’s probably from the the end of the 1st century. And it’s a, it it depicts a an individual with their arms raised in an act of worship, worshiping a man with a donkey’s head who’s being crucified.
Speaker: 0
02:24:16
Wow.
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02:24:16
And right beside it, it says, Meh worships his god in Greek. Woah. And it’s mocking. Right? Because crucifixion was for the lowest of the low. It was for, like, slaves. In fact, if you were a Roman citizen, you were banned from being crucified.
Speaker: 0
02:24:30
Who was it that got crucified upside down?
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02:24:32
Peter.
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02:24:33
Ai? Was it because, like, regular crucifixion wasn’t good enough for him? Or what was he didn’t deserve it because Christ had gone through it?
Speaker: 1
02:24:40
Well, so the story is that they say we’re gonna crucify ai, and he says it’s, like, too big of an honor to die like my lord, and they say, well, we can fix that.
Speaker: 0
02:24:46
Oh, Jesus. Shut your mouth, buddy.
Speaker: 1
02:24:49
Listen. The Romans were pretty brutal. Oh,
Speaker: 0
02:24:53
yeah, man.
Speaker: 1
02:24:53
But this is why we know. Like, we have it’s it’s interesting. We know a lot about crucifixion, but crucifixion was seen as so disgusting. I believe it was Cicero who said that, like, the word crucifixion shouldn’t even be on a Roman man’s lips. I mean, the word excruciating Right.
Speaker: 1
02:25:09
Meh is, off of in Latin and crus, off the cross. So that that’s where we get that word is because this was designed to humiliate, and it was designed to be as painful as possible. There’s actually a really good article done by JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, which was done by a number of, I think it was in the seventies or the early eighties.
Speaker: 1
02:25:32
It was done by a group of, biblical scholars and then medical professionals. And so they looked at the conventions of what we do know about Roman crucifixion, and then they looked at the descriptions in the gospel to try to figure out, okay. If we could diagnose how Jesus died, how would he have died? And so they basically came up with this idea that it’s he probably asphyxiated to death.
Speaker: 1
02:25:53
You you kinda drown in your own blood. Mhmm. But the the chances of Jesus surviving the crucifixion, I think, are are narrow to none. And the chance of him appearing 3 days later, completely fine. I mean, you don’t if the first thing you do if you survive a crucifixion and then you go and you find your disciples, the first thing you say is not, you know, peace be with you.
Speaker: 1
02:26:22
It’s get me to a hospital. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:26:25
Do they have them back then? No. Not at all. Arya we, entirely certain of their measurement of days?
Speaker: 1
02:26:32
So this is an interesting question because of the differences, between when, when the gospel of John says Jesus died compared to the synoptics, because John appears to be using the Roman convention of count counting ai, and, the the other gospels when they ai the the timing appear to be using the Jewish ones. And, actually, if you, if if you correlate between the 2, they match up pretty well.
Speaker: 1
02:26:58
So the thing is with Jews, any part of a day was considered a day. So 3 days 3 nights becomes almost an idiom for any part of that day is the day. So if on if Jesus and because they count evening and morning, evening to morning is the day, it’s very possible that it wasn’t, like, how we would think of 3 24 hour days, especially if he dies on Friday and wakes up on Sunday.
Speaker: 0
02:27:28
So that would actually make it less time than than more ai.
Speaker: 1
02:27:31
Yeah. There
Speaker: 0
02:27:32
So it’s not like he had recovery time.
Speaker: 1
02:27:34
Oh, no. He didn’t
Speaker: 0
02:27:35
have recovery time. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I’m getting. It’s not like it was 3 days. It’s actually 3 months.
Speaker: 1
02:27:39
Oh, no. No. No. Yeah. No. Not like that.
Speaker: 0
02:27:41
Sai the then 400 people saw him afterwards.
Speaker: 1
02:27:45
That’s the claim that that Paul makes.
Speaker: 0
02:27:47
Paul makes his claim.
Speaker: 1
02:27:48
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:27:49
And how many different people, have some sort of a recollection or ai or or something that’s a tribute to them of being witness to his resurrection?
Speaker: 1
02:28:01
We have Peter, Paul, Jude, James, and Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The thing with Matthew, Mark, and Luke is that Matthew and Luke or Matthew and John are attributed to direct disciples of Jesus. Luke and Mark are not. So they are not eyewitnesses within the Jesus community. In fact, Luke prefaces his gospel by saying that. He he’s right up front about this. He’s like, hey.
Speaker: 1
02:28:25
I’m not an eyewitness. Don’t confuse me with an eyewitness. But he he actually uses conventional ai. What’s the term I’m looking for? He uses writing conventions of the day that would fit within regular biography that was written within the Roman world.
Speaker: 1
02:28:44
So you have a guy named Quintilian who, is basically I mentioned him before with the, he ex he’s teaching people how to ai. And he says that if you’re gonna write biography, you need to be interviewing eyewitnesses, and you can’t be too far away from the event to be able to write these things.
Speaker: 1
02:29:01
And, Quintilian, Lucian, and Josephus, who are all these very prominent ancient biographers and writers of history, have a lot of crossover in the way they describe how you should write history with the words that Luke uses at the beginning of his gospel where he says, I’m interviewing eyewitnesses, and I’m writing up an orderly account.
Speaker: 1
02:29:22
And so he’s saying, you know, I’m gonna use these methods that are expected as good history of my day. I’m not an eyewitness, so I’m gonna try to find the people who are eyewitnesses, and I’m going to try to encapsulate this within a document that communicates, what is being written.
Speaker: 0
02:29:41
So we have an account of the resurrection. Do we have an account of the denial of the resurrection? Is there an historical record of him just dying and this ai, a refutable or rebuttal rather to what they’re saying?
Speaker: 1
02:29:56
No. The only ones from the ancient world that deny his resurrection are groups that come on afterwards that sometimes are, sometimes are described as gnostics, and they’re not necessarily just denying it for the reasons we might think they were. They’re denying it because they have incorporated ideas of, pagan philosophy where they believe that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad.
Speaker: 1
02:30:20
So if Jesus was crucified, he if so let me back up. If Jesus is god Mhmm. He cannot have a physical body. So they deny that he actually had a physicality to him. This is sometimes called docetism because in Greek means to seem.
Speaker: 1
02:30:35
So these groups that we describe as the docetics, they are denying that Jesus had a physical body. He only seemed to have a physical body. And they they wrote documents later on. So the gospel of Peter, which comes around in, you know, 2nd, 3rd, 4th centuries, is being written, and it has Jesus kinda chilling on the cross because he’s not really physical because he’s divine, and physical entities don’t have physical bodies.
Speaker: 1
02:31:01
So we don’t actually get, like, a concrete denial of his resurrection in that way until you get things like, the gospel of Barnabas in the middle ages, which is a it’s actually the document that Billy brought up to me in the conversation we had as the evidence that Jesus was never crucified, the gospel of Barnabas.
Speaker: 1
02:31:21
Well, gospel of Barnabas is 15th century. It paraphrases Dante’s Inferno. It’s not an ancient document. So but in the ancient world, nope nobody really had that big of a problem with these kind of supernatural claims. More the more of the ai of skepticism was why you would worship a crucified individual to begin with.
Speaker: 0
02:31:43
Wow. So they were less surprised that he was resurrected or
Speaker: 1
02:31:48
or that you would you would worship a crucified, like, teacher was just seen as silly.
Speaker: 0
02:31:56
Because it’s so humiliating to be
Speaker: 1
02:31:59
Yeah. Yeah. And and that, like, a god would let himself go through this. Right. Like, what what are you what are you talking about? In fact, the ancient world didn’t really have a problem with supernatural events. There is a an ancient writer who mocks Christianity, and he particularly mocks Christianity in saying that, of course, Jesus did miracles because Jesus had a childhood in Egypt.
Speaker: 1
02:32:23
And he goes, all those Egyptians are magicians anyways. So he just learned the magic when he was a child. So he actually confirms, incidentally, two things that the narrative in the gospels where it says that the holy family fled to Egypt during the reign of Herod, He corroborates that he actually thinks that happened and that Jesus did miracles.
Speaker: 1
02:32:44
He just attributes the miracles to Jesus being a a traveling magician anyways. And, you know, anybody who lived in Egypt knows some magic.
Speaker: 0
02:32:51
That is what’s really fascinating, that the mindset of the people that ai back then was that whatever was going on in Egypt was so crazy that they had to be magicians.
Speaker: 1
02:33:00
Yeah. Yeah. But everybody believed in supernatural events. Like, there’s no such thing as, like, a secular work in the ancient world. Even Plutarch, who’s one of the most famous biographers in the ancient world, he wrote 90 biographies of which 60 still ai today. He was a priest of Apollo. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
02:33:18
So, like, he’s already assuming Right. That the gods exist, that crazy things are gonna happen in the world. And, so they they didn’t have a problem with people doing miracles or crazy things happening or
Speaker: 0
02:33:34
Well, that’s all also why it’s so interesting trying to put your mind into the context of people that live back then when you try to interpret what these stories were all about because they did believe in things that weren’t real. So when they talk about this thing that we’re supposed to believe is real, when you have all this evidence that they believe things that aren’t true
Speaker: 1
02:33:55
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:33:56
It’s interesting. Right? Because, like, you’re you’re you’re now saying, yeah, but this one really was true. Right. Well, there’s so many different things that they thought of and believed that weren’t true.
Speaker: 1
02:34:06
Yeah. So this, historiographically, is so when we do history, it’s an inference to the best explanation.
Speaker: 3
02:34:13
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
02:34:13
And so there are probabilities of things that have happened in history where we can say, okay. Okay. There’s a higher probability of event a happening and a lower probability of event b happening. So the example I often give is, like, Jonah being swallowed by the fish. Like, that’s low probabilistically. Not that it didn’t happen, but that, like, as a historian, we gotta, like, say, well, there’s no independent cross reference sources.
Speaker: 1
02:34:36
You don’t have multiple attestation for this particular event. The interesting thing about Jesus is that we have more evidence from different writings in the ancient world than we probably should have for someone of his stature because we have Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John, these four biographies.
Speaker: 1
02:35:00
There’s really only one other person in around that time that can claim to have that much kind of independent testimony of their life, and it’s the Roman emperor Tiberias. So he has he also has 4 biographers. He has Cassiodio, Suetonius Tacitus, and, Velius, Paterculus. And so the Roman emperor, who’s the most famous, most powerful person at the time, has a similar amount of historiographical evidence biographically for his you know, the events of his lifetime that Jesus ai.
Speaker: 0
02:35:37
What what is the interpretation of Jesus from non Jesus followers at the time? Like, what what did they think he was or who he was?
Speaker: 1
02:35:47
He was a crucified traveling rabbi. Yeah. I mean I mean, you have you have so you have individuals like, Josephus mentions him, end of 1st century, beginning of 2nd century. He was a, he was a a Jewish Roman writer. Tacitus mentions him who also wrote, about the emperor. And, you know, you have a number of these individuals, Cassio or or Suetonius, but what they’re doing mostly is describing what their what the followers of Christianity are saying about him.
Speaker: 1
02:36:16
So you do have to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt in that they’re not saying things that they believe happened. They’re sai they’re talking about things that Christians believe happened. And Christians are this very unusual group because they’re monotheistic in a world that does not believe in monotheism.
Speaker: 1
02:36:34
And Jews are monotheistic in that time as well, but there was this idea that your religion could be tied to your ethnicity, and that was okay. Okay. Like, the Jews believe in one god, and that’s weird, but they’re Jews. Whereas the Christians start to convert people who are of all different ethnic backgrounds.
Speaker: 1
02:36:55
And so they’re ai, well, what the heck is going on here? Because why why are you saying so the earliest criticisms of Christianity were actually that it was atheistic, being the negative participle and and theos meaning god. Right? Because the ancient world was polytheistic. Right. But more than that, it was what’s sometimes referred to as henotheism, in that it’s not that they believe in many gods.
Speaker: 1
02:37:18
It’s that they believe in many gods, and your gods could be my gods. Right? Jupiter could be Zeus. Just sai god by ai different name. And your cities could have gods. Right? Osiris and Ra can live in Egypt. And, Zeus and Athena can live here. And that doesn’t compromise anything.
Speaker: 1
02:37:37
But then the Christians are coming around, and they’re saying, actually, no. None of those gods exist. If they exist, then they’re demons, but they don’t actually exist. And this was a a big point of persecution within early Christianity is that a lot of physical events were tied to supernatural events.
Speaker: 1
02:37:55
So, there’s a an ancient historian who has this line where he says, if the Nile River is too high in Egypt or the Tiber River is too low in Rome, the cry will ring out the Christians to the lions. Because if you have a, say, a a famine in Athens, and they’re going, okay. What’s the reason for the famine?
Speaker: 1
02:38:17
Well, Athena’s mad because there’s a bunch of people running around saying she doesn’t exist. Okay. Well, let’s deal with them.
Speaker: 0
02:38:26
Let’s let’s To the lions.
Speaker: 1
02:38:27
Yeah. Let’s get rid of them, and that’ll solve our issue. Wow. So Christians were this very oddball group.
Speaker: 0
02:38:33
Kinda crazy that it wound up taking over the area.
Speaker: 1
02:38:36
Well, that’s part of, I think, the argument of, well, how do you explain that? How do you explain it going from 11 scared disciples in an upper room to being willing to go out and die for the proclamation that you believe that Jesus rose from the dead and you saw him and you touched him and you ate with him and, you know, he wasn’t a ghost.
Speaker: 1
02:38:59
You actually ate fish with the resurrected Jesus.
Speaker: 0
02:39:01
How does, Constantine fit into this? Like, what what is Constantine’s education in Christianity?
Speaker: 1
02:39:07
Yeah. So Constantine is a pagan up until, a point in time when he converts. So Who educates him? Good question. I don’t know in terms of his education. I know he does have some, like, crossover with some prominent Christians later on. He’s a sun worshiper. But right right before right before Constantine, you had a guy named Diocletian, who is the emperor, who basically had the goal of wiping out Christianity entirely.
Speaker: 1
02:39:38
And so he the worst point of persecution was under the Diocletian rule. He actually made it so that if you had to go into, like, the equivalent of your town hall and you had to take a pinch of incense and offer it onto the the, altar of Caesar, him, right, the king, and say, Caesar.
Speaker: 1
02:40:02
Caesar is lord. And part of this was that they knew that Christians say Jesus is lord. And Christians wouldn’t do that. So here’s how you outed them. Oh, wow.
Speaker: 1
02:40:16
Didn’t do this so if you did do it, you were getting this given this piece of paper. It’s called a libelous. And a libelous allowed you to buy and sell. If you didn’t do it, you didn’t get a libelous, which meant that you were not allowed to buy and sell. Wow.
Speaker: 1
02:40:29
And so you have this incredible era of persecution where Christians are are being, like, killed and and Christian literature, in particular, is being destroyed because they’re hunting it out. So Constantine comes after this, and, he knows that this is bad for Roman ai. And so him and Licinius get together.
Speaker: 1
02:40:50
They’re both ruling the the Roman emperor empire at the time. And in 313, they put out this edict of, tolerance, which includes Christianity. So it’s called the Edict of Milan, and it decriminalizes Ai, so it’s no longer illegal to be a Christian. What was their motivation?
Speaker: 1
02:41:08
I think they just felt like in order to establish peace within the empire, you need to make sure that people aren’t fearing you constantly to that degree. And so, it wasn’t just Christianity that benefited from the Edicta Milan. A number of religion, you know, religious, minority groups were benefited from this particular event. But this happens.
Speaker: 1
02:41:39
Between 313325, Constantine converts. And so he becomes friendly to Christians. He also he, he commissions books of the ai to be bryden. And so this is where we first get our understanding. Like, when we think of a bible, we think of it as, like, in a single bound volume.
Speaker: 1
02:42:01
Like, because we have the 66 books of the bible and, you know, it has a nice cover on the page and or on the front. But in the ancient world, those existed independently. So, like, p 52. Like, that would be a separate copy of the gospel of John, and that’s what it would have been understood as scripture. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
02:42:19
While Constantine, as ai a peace offering, commissions all of these documents to be brought together and published in one book. And so we actually have what we think are some of these documents. So the when I was talking with Billy Carson, he brought up the Sinai bryden, Codex Sinaiticus.
Speaker: 1
02:42:39
Codex Sinaiticus is probably one of these documents that Constantine commissioned because it’s one of our earliest examples of a cover to cover genesis to Revelation copy of the bible, and it comes from the 4th century. And based on both its dating and based on the fact that this would have been incredibly expensive to make. Like, it took 360 sheep just to put together Wow.
Speaker: 1
02:43:06
Which would have been the equivalent of, like, I don’t know, tens of 1,000, if not 100 of 1,000 of dollars today. So the reason why we’re pretty sure that documents like Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, potentially even Codex Codex Alexandrinus or Codex Washingtonianus are documents that could have been part of this commissioning is just because they’re such giant, giant projects in you know, very few people would have had the ability to produce something like this other than an emperor.
Speaker: 1
02:43:41
And so we actually have some of these these documents that that ai today.
Speaker: 0
02:43:46
Are there any books that were and and how did they pick the order that these these stories are in the ai? And are there any books that were excluded, like, where there’s debate on it?
Speaker: 1
02:43:58
Yeah. Great question. So this is the issue of what’s sometimes called the canon of scripture. Right. So very early on when you have Christians having these conversations, the 4 gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are you there’s unanimous agreement about those, particularly and that’s not to say that there aren’t other gospels that pop up.
Speaker: 1
02:44:19
It’s that you have this chain of custody that goes back to the earliest Jesus community. Jesus has ai, and there’s a group of individuals who we call the apostolic fathers who are the disciples of Jesus’ disciples. And so they comment on the books that the disciples of Jesus or that people within the community of the disciples of Jesus wrote.
Speaker: 1
02:44:39
And so we actually have a very close connection to the time, and we see early on that you have guys like, Ignatius of Antioch arguing that there are only 4 gospels hidden in the 2nd century, and there couldn’t be any more than 4. Or Theophilus of Antioch makes the similar argument, and they name Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Speaker: 1
02:45:00
Now Ignatius of Antioch also talks about other gospels, but he specifically highlights the fact that the gospel of Thomas, gospel of truth, gospel of the Hebrews, gospel of, you know, these ones that we kinda hear about, Mary, Judas, that the reason we know that they’re not associated with the names that are attached to them is because they’re being written in times when those people were dead, and they have these rings of pagan philosophy that are incorporated into them, which is completely foreign to 1st century Judaism.
Speaker: 1
02:45:33
So Jesus would not have so in the gospel of James, Jesus is worshiping a goddess named Sophia. It’s like, okay. Well, no 1st century Jew is gonna do that. That’s obviously paganism. And so, we have these early conversations.
Speaker: 1
02:45:48
But when Christians are thinking about, well, what is and isn’t scripture, the earliest Christians are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Ai. And the Jews had this idea that the promises of god are followed up by the writings, the the the documents that establish those. So the word that’s often used is covenant. Right? God makes a covenant with people, and that’s always followed up by written text.
Speaker: 1
02:46:15
So this is why sometimes well, in the case of Moses, it’s lit literally inscribed on a tablet. Right? And in the prophets ai, you get this command, write this on a scroll, inscribe this on a tablet. And that the Jewish scriptures in Jesus’ day were seen as a were seen as a story in search of a conclusion because they were looking for this figure, this Moshiach, the messiah, who would come and fulfill things like the the the reign of David.
Speaker: 1
02:46:47
So they they’re talking about these things. They’re actually expecting them to happen. And so the story in search of a conclusion in the Christian understanding is that Jesus is that individual. He comes, and he does things like he says at the last supper right before his crucifixion that he’s establishing a new covenant in his blood.
Speaker: 1
02:47:07
And so the earliest Christians, most mostly who are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah, they see, okay, there’s a new covenant, which is actually promised in, Jeremiah 3131 when God says that he’s gonna make a new covenant and inscribe the law on people’s hearts. That that covenant has come. K. The promises have come. So the earliest Christians very organically say, okay. Where are the where’s the writing?
Speaker: 1
02:47:32
Because we we expect this to happen. Promises are followed up by writings. And so they start to have these conversations of what what are the ai, and where can we find them? And so very early on because the new testament has 27 books in it. Very early on, 24 of the 27 are unanimously accepted.
Speaker: 1
02:47:52
So by the time you get to the middle of the saloni century, we have lists, in documents ai there’s a document called the meritorium fragment, which which there’s debate on its dating, but it’s probably, like, mid to late saloni century, and it includes 24 of the 27. And it gives reasoning why.
Speaker: 1
02:48:12
Now the other books that are in our New Testament that aren’t in that 24, are ones that were discussed because the earliest Christians were trying to figure out, okay, can we can we tie this to either an apostle or someone who knew an apostle? Because we have a lot of books flying around with the names of John and Peter on them.
Speaker: 1
02:48:35
So you have the acts of Peter, and you have the revelation of Peter, and you have the gospels of Peter, and you have so how do we do our due diligence to try to tie this back? So there’s two letters of Peter, 1st and second Peter in the New Testament. And the early Christians are like, we gotta make sure we can tie these to Peter.
Speaker: 1
02:48:53
Or the book of Jude and the book of James, which are ascribed to the the brothers of Jesus, they were like, can we really say that those are written by those people? And so there are some books that the dust kinda takes time to settle on within the whole 27 canon because these groups are debating and discussing, you know, well, why why do we have these ones and not other ones?
Speaker: 0
02:49:24
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:49:26
And so there are various canon lists that come up throughout the ancient world where some people are ai, well, maybe, you know, this book is part of it, or maybe this book is part of it. But it’s this ongoing conversation of people. And and by basically the end of 2nd century, we have more or less unanimous agreement of the 27 books being those that encapsulate scripture that can be tied to either someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew knew Jesus.
Speaker: 0
02:49:53
And so these books that were not included, are any of them interesting? I mean, are They’re all interesting. But is does any of it seem like it belongs in the New Testament?
Speaker: 1
02:50:04
Well so part of the problem with some of these other books is they appear to be almost completely reliant on the other books. So you do have and some of them have an agenda to them. So, like, the docetic gospel of Peter seems to be uncomfortable with the fact that the biblical gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, have women being the first witnesses to the empty tomb.
Speaker: 1
02:50:26
Because in the ancient world, women were not seen as good eyewitnesses. So you almost have this apologetic trying to solve that problem by having all the right people be witness to the resurrection. So you have all the Roman and Jewish officials camping out in front of the tomb, which also gives away the fact that, like, no Jewish priest on the eve of Passover is gonna be camping out in front of a dead body.
Speaker: 1
02:50:52
Like, they just they didn’t do that. So it it betrays that the author of the gospel of Peter has no understanding of purity ritual rights within 1st century saloni temple Judaism. Mhmm. But is also clearly trying to remedy this embarrassing fact.
Speaker: 0
02:51:10
Wow. That’s what’s so interesting about trying to interpret this stuff. So you you have to think about it in the terms of the the culture of the times.
Speaker: 1
02:51:18
Yeah. Yeah. And one of the most interesting ways that we figure out, okay, how can we tie, say, the gospel of Matthew to the 1st century in Judea is, studies that have been done on, name frequency. So this is called onomastic congruence, where we look at the most popular names within a particular geographical area, and we compare it to, how names are differentiated.
Speaker: 1
02:51:46
So the name Joe is pretty common. So when you have a room and there’s more than one Joe, you differentiate. K? That’s Joe Rogan or, you know, that’s MMA Joe. You know, we figure out a way to do it, and that’s called a disambiguator.
Speaker: 1
02:52:03
And we see this in the New Testament when you have lots of Peters. Right? You have you have, Simon Peter. You have, Peter the Canaanian. You have, you know, or or James the son of Zebedee. We have lots of Marys. So you have these disambiguates.
Speaker: 1
02:52:22
You even have lots of Jesuses, which is why Jesus is often described as the lord Jesus or Jesus of Nazareth. Because, Yehoshua is a common Jewish name. And so we can look at the popularity of names written in documents and actually pinpoint some of these documents to particular times and particular places.
Speaker: 1
02:52:41
In fact, Jamie, are you able to if you go on Apologetics Canada, our YouTube page so the first episode of the can I trust the ai series we did, we made an animation about this Mhmm? Where we looked at the data, and then we actually compared it to one of these other gospels, the the gospel of Judas.
Speaker: 1
02:53:00
And, so in the first episode of Can I Trust the Bible in the right books, partway through is near the end? The last animation, if you can find it, we had a guy put this together for us where we looked at the studies, and there have been some really recent ones, by a guy named Luke Vanderway who published this in, Ai believe it was at Cambridge.
Speaker: 1
02:53:26
No. No. No. Birmingham University, he did his PhD on it, and he he narrowed the gap within all of these literary bodies that talk about names. And we’re able to pinpoint and actually show Yeah. So if you go to yeah. Right here. Particular decades that they’re writing.
Speaker: 1
02:53:45
A series of scholarly studies has shown that though Jews were located in many places across the Roman Empire, people’s names often tended to be geographically located. By observing literary and archaeological artifacts, a list of common names can be clearly identified. By narrowing down the most popular names in places that Jesus lived, traveled, and ministered, and by comparing these to the list from the studies, an interesting correlation can be seen.
Speaker: 1
02:54:13
Just as we see today with popular names, a qualifier or nickname is often used. For example, notice that when Matthew lists the disciples in his gospel, certain names have a qualifier or nickname and others do not. Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector, James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him.
Speaker: 1
02:54:44
As we would expect, the most popular names are those that have an added description. When we compare the most popular names in Judea and Galilee during the 1st century with names we see listed in key places in the biblical gospels, we find that all the names with qualifiers match with what we’d assume if they were actually written in the time and place they claim to be narrating.
Speaker: 1
02:55:07
In contrast, the gospel of Judas only has two names that would fit, Jesus and Judas, but contains a host of other characters whose names match not with 1st century Judea or Galilee, like the biblical gospels, but with names that were popular in Egypt during the 2nd 3rd centuries.
Speaker: 1
02:55:25
Consider how difficult it would be for someone living outside of the locations and times that these events took place to get the right names with the right qualifiers. We have 4 biblical gospels with 4 different authors, and yet each gets this test of naming frequency and attribution right every ai.
Speaker: 1
02:55:44
A test and standard that the non biblical gospels simply do not pass. That’s ai. So we can use That is
Speaker: 0
02:55:54
so interesting. Isn’t it? Sai this is That’s so interesting. This is sai it totally makes sense too.
Speaker: 1
02:56:00
Yeah. So it’s the levels of methodology that we can use to find internal accuracy. If we really wanna figure out, okay, where was this bryden, and is it coming from early eyewitness testimony? We look at something like the biblical gospels, and they fit the bill for something that’s written in 1st century Judea.
Speaker: 1
02:56:16
But if we look at something like the other gospels, they’re doing things like the gospel of Judas does, where other characters are coming up with names that are almost either nonexistent or come like, very unpopular in places like Judea and Galilee, but are popular in 3rd 4th century Egypt.
Speaker: 1
02:56:34
So what do we what what can we then conclude from that? Well, this is being written in 3rd or 4th century Egypt.
Speaker: 0
02:56:39
Right. Yeah. Wow. That’s that’s really amazing. It’s such a complex and fascinating subject. It really is. And, I think it’s because of the barrier to entry is so it’s so high. There’s so much to learn. There’s so much to dig dig. Most people barely scratch the surface of this stuff.
Speaker: 1
02:57:00
Right.
Speaker: 0
02:57:00
And it takes someone like you to really kind of because it’s ai real easy to lean into the fun stuff. It’s really easy to lean into the Anunnaki stuff and but the actual real shit that we know is 100% the accounts of people that ai back then.
Speaker: 1
02:57:18
Yeah.
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02:57:18
That that to me is as fascinating, if not more than even We Are Made by Aliens. Like, all of it is bizarre. And the fact that we’re still going over these texts 1000 of years later is also fascinating.
Speaker: 1
02:57:34
Yeah. And lots of this stuff, ai, the onomasto congruence is something that has really only been studied to the level that it has within the last, like, 50 years. Wow. So we’re constantly discovering ways that we can use different types of methodological analysis to figure out the historical validity of something.
Speaker: 1
02:57:51
So this is, we call it verisimilitude, which is historians are looking for what can show us the appearance, likelihood, and probability of something being true. And so sometimes documents out themselves as being unreliable and not true because they inadvertently include these, these clues.
Speaker: 1
02:58:14
Ai, so the gospel of Barnabas, which I mentioned before, which Billy Carson has brought up as an evidence that he sees as denying the crucifixion, it talks about Jesus getting in a boat and traveling to Nazareth, but Nazareth is landlocked. So that person clearly did not know anything about the geography of, like, 1st century Israel
Speaker: 0
02:58:35
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:58:35
Because you’re not getting in a boat to go to Nazareth. Right? So so but if you’re writing, you ai, I mean, in the case of the gospel of Barnabas, you’re talking about, like, a 1000 plus years later. But if you’ve never been there and you don’t understand, it’s like have you ever seen, middle aged paintings of lions? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
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02:58:55
They had no idea what they were.
Speaker: 0
02:58:57
Well, we brought that up the other day because, I was in, Ravello. Okay. And there’s a church, an ancient church in Ravello, and it has, a depiction of the whale. And Right. The whale doesn’t look anything like a whale. They Like, it has wings. It looks like a lion’s head. It’s so weird.
Speaker: 1
02:59:13
Yeah. Well, a lot of the middle ages throughout the middle ages Ages? Yeah. That’s crazy.
Speaker: 0
02:59:17
I mean, it looks like a dragon. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy.
Speaker: 1
02:59:20
And and lions look a lot like dogs. Yeah. Because they’re ai, what’s your frame of reference? Right. Right.
Speaker: 0
02:59:26
Right. Sai And also, you’re getting someone describing it to an artist.
Speaker: 1
02:59:29
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:59:29
You probably can’t paint it. Yeah. Sai you have to describe it. Yeah. It’s like, yeah. Yeah. That’s what it looks like.
Speaker: 1
02:59:33
Yeah. Yeah. Tertiary. Yeah. Secondary. So, and and a lot of these writings kind of out themselves as that, literarily, within the things that they choose to include. Names are a small example, but geography or distances between places, you know, the biblical gospels ai going up to Jerusalem. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
02:59:55
And we can ai of read that and not think anything about it. But Jerusalem, on the elevation of sea level, you do go up to it. And so it’s ai these small clues that we as historians are looking for or on the parable of the good Samaritan is going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.
Speaker: 1
03:00:11
And you literally you go down, like, an elevation in sea level to go to Jericho. Or the the story of Zacchaeus, who’s the guy who climbs a tree to see Jesus. He’s a he’s a wee little man. He’s like a like a he’s he’s he’s short, and he can’t see over the crowd. And he hears this miracle worker Jesus is coming, so he climbs a sycamore tree. And the gospels specifically say he climbs a sycamore tree.
Speaker: 1
03:00:36
Well, this can be ai a detail we can pass over, but we know based on kind of the, acidity of the soils that sycamore trees only grow in those areas in that, you know, time ram. So we can look and see, okay. Well, Luke whoever Luke is getting this from, he’s adding this detail. Maybe he’s not even even aware of the significance of it.
Speaker: 1
03:01:01
But whoever he’s getting this from has been there because they actually know what tree would have been growing there and tell him that Zaccheus climbs a sycamore tree.
Speaker: 0
03:01:12
Mhmm.
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03:01:13
And so it’s ai fauna and flora and distance between locations, things that actually other ancient writers get wrong sometimes.
Speaker: 0
03:01:20
Have you ever had a debate with a snarky atheist? Yeah. I think that would be fun.
Speaker: 1
03:01:25
Like ai like a a formal debate?
Speaker: 0
03:01:28
No. Not even a formal debate. Just to I think it would be a fascinating conversation because I’m sure well, atheists, they vary just like Christians vary. But, the worst versions of them are essentially believers in the religion of atheism.
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03:01:42
Right.
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03:01:43
They they worship the concept of there being no God and this is it. When you die, nothing happens. Yeah. And that to me is always so arrogant. I just just the fact that you exist at all is so bizarre and so spectacular. Mhmm. The idea that you know for sure that when the lights shut out that that’s a wrap, like, because there’s no evidence of the contrary. Well, okay.
Speaker: 1
03:02:06
The the Ai assuming your conclusion there.
Speaker: 0
03:02:08
The absence of evidence is not evidence. It’s especially when you’re talking about something that’s as bizarre as death. Mhmm. And especially when you have people that have near death experiences that are radically similar. Yeah. Those are re really weird. They’re really weird how how many similarities people have in these near death experiences from accidents and all sorts of things that people, you know, come back from where their heart stops beating, they see themselves above their body.
Speaker: 0
03:02:33
There’s a there’s a lot of weirdness to it that makes you I just see it thinks it’s a little silly because how could you know what you don’t know?
Speaker: 1
03:02:41
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
03:02:41
You cannot know what you don’t know. And it the problem is that there’s a cache, that there’s a social credit amongst academics in particular that’s, that’s ascribed to a person who is atheist. Mhmm. A person who is he’s brilliant. He’s not silly. He doesn’t believe in myths. He doesn’t I get it. I get why there’s social pressure in that regard.
Speaker: 0
03:03:09
I get it. But to not look at the universe itself, just the this creation engine of planets and stellar nursery, it’s just of
Speaker: 1
03:03:21
Right.
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03:03:21
The bizarreness of the epicness of it all and then not wonder if maybe you’re you have a very narrow perception
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03:03:28
Right.
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03:03:29
Of what this whole thing is all about.
Speaker: 1
03:03:30
Yeah. Deny the virgin birth, but not the virgin birth of the universe.
Speaker: 0
03:03:33
Yeah. Well, all of it. Like, everything. Just the the the big there there’s so many more impressive miracles than any of the things that people think of in the it’s just there’s they’re so weird in our day and age Mhmm. That we’re not willing to, ai, if we want we we wanna think that things are very clean and easy to measure Mhmm. And they often are not.
Speaker: 0
03:04:00
And, you know, I think most of what it means to be a human being in a in a a meaningful way is not measurable.
Speaker: 1
03:04:09
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
03:04:09
Most of it. Love and friendship and community, these things are not very measurable. They’re very strange. You know, the the the bond that people have with their family and their loved ones and it’s very strange. Yeah. That love connection, whatever love is, whatever good is, it’s a very real thing and it seems to not exist, certainly not in the volume in other animals that exist in us.
Speaker: 0
03:04:34
Mhmm. There’s obviously nurturing in other animals. They nurture their loved ones, but their perception of life and death and all of it is very different than ours. So it leads me to ai? Why? Why is why is our version of life so much more rich and complicated than any other being that exists?
Speaker: 0
03:04:56
And why do we have this insatiable desire to learn and know more? Yeah. What is it?
Speaker: 1
03:05:02
Why does this, you know, however meh, 3 pounds of gray matter in my brain Mhmm. Why is that able to plummet the intricacies of the universe?
Speaker: 0
03:05:10
Right.
Speaker: 1
03:05:11
Right? Like and Sai and I think that that’s that’s ultimately the questions that we should be asking in terms of you matter more than you are matter. There’s something going on there.
Speaker: 0
03:05:21
There’s something going on with all of us. Yeah. We kinda know it. We don’t know it. You know? But it’s just you can’t measure it, and you can’t put it on a scale, and so people don’t like that. Yeah. They don’t like that. It makes them feel dumb to believe in that. It makes them feel dumb to even speculate, you know, to even just say, what do you think happens when you die?
Speaker: 0
03:05:40
Like, even that conversation is, like, people don’t like that. Nothing. You go it goes dark, and that’s it. It’s over. That’s it. You die.
Speaker: 0
03:05:47
Like, how the fuck do you know if you died? Like, you don’t know.
Speaker: 1
03:05:51
So in all of this, what do you think of Jesus? Like, in terms of your own, like, journeying and trying to find answers to ultimate questions. What do you think of the historical person of Jesus?
Speaker: 0
03:06:04
Well, it certainly seems like there’s a lot of people that believe that there was this very exceptional human being that existed. Sai the question is, what does that mean? Does does it mean he was the son of God? Does it mean he was just some completely unique human being that had this vision of humanity and this way of educating people and spreading this ideology that would ultimately change the way human beings interact with each other forever.
Speaker: 0
03:06:38
So what is is is he the son of God? Well, are we all? That’s another question. Right? Or do we all have that inside of us?
Speaker: 0
03:06:46
Do we all have that ability to change everything around us inside of us? Do we all have that unique connection to the divine? And is he a representation of the best version of that, or was he an actual person that was the son of God? And is it important? Yeah.
Speaker: 0
03:07:04
I don’t know. I mean, what does it mean? It it’s the just the fact that it’s a question to ponder is a miracle in itself in a way. Just the fact that there’s this concept of this person that died for our sana, that’s the son of God. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
03:07:21
But you have to buy a bun you have to believe in a bunch of stuff to go that way. Like, just the concept of that is interesting to people because what it can do to people is offer them a very unique way to change the way they feel about the world itself. And if you do follow that, I know a lot of Christians or hardcore Christians who are some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet in your life.
Speaker: 0
03:07:50
So it does work. You’re ai. Like if you do live like a Christian and you do follow the principles of Christ, you will have a richer, more love filled life. Mhmm. So it is true.
Speaker: 0
03:08:02
Right? But you have to submit to this concept that this guy was the child of God who came down to Earth, let himself be crucified, came back from the dead, explained a bunch of stuff for people, and then said, ai. See you when I come back.
Speaker: 1
03:08:19
And you don’t know how how you can wrap your head around ai particular claim?
Speaker: 0
03:08:23
And if he came back here’s the thing. If he came back, who the fuck would believe him today? With all the fake news and all this CGI and AI, like, imagine that would be the most bizarre thing of all time. If we get to a point where artificial reality is indiscernible ram regular reality and Jews Jesus chooses to come back at that moment, boy, that’s the ultimate test of faith, right, when it’s impossible to discern.
Speaker: 0
03:08:52
If we really reach a point where virtual reality is indistinguishable from regular reality, which
Speaker: 1
03:08:59
Right.
Speaker: 0
03:08:59
We’re probably a 100 years away from that or something, like, how maybe not even that.
Speaker: 1
03:09:04
Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, that’s probably why Jesus came in the 1st century and not the 21st century.
Speaker: 0
03:09:09
But imagine imagine if that’s the that’s the big catch. Like, Jesus does return, but when he returns, we’re just so confused that we we can’t even tyler. Yeah. Or maybe that’s how he returns in the 1st place. Maybe he returns through AI. Yeah. Maybe that’s the portal to Jesus. I don’t know anything about that. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
03:09:29
I mean Scares the shit out
Speaker: 1
03:09:30
of ai. I really appreciate I mean, guys that you’re friends with. Right? Like, the Jordan Petersons and the Douglas Murrays of the world or, you know, the Tom Hollands, not the Spider Meh actor, the historian, who talk about this stuff. I think I really like the way that Jordan Peterson articulates it, but I think he misses the force for the trees.
Speaker: 0
03:09:47
How so?
Speaker: 1
03:09:48
In that he sees Jesus as an archetype. Mhmm. And I don’t think actually even Jesus gives you the opportunity to see him as the ai. Because I I both I have this love hate relationship with all of Peterson’s stuff because he’s he seems to get so much right where he walks up to the line, but he doesn’t wanna crossover.
Speaker: 0
03:10:06
And is the crossover, you think, connected to a life in academia? Or No. What do you think it
Speaker: 1
03:10:12
I I wonder, and I’d love to talk to him about this. Like, how do you, remedy this issue that because he seems to think it that the concept of Jesus as an example is more important than the actual flesh and blood, 1st century, itinerant Jewish preacher who was crucified and rose from the dead physically, which is the claim of the gospels and the rest of the New Testament.
Speaker: 1
03:10:39
That that’s that’s an example for us to look on and live by. But I I actually think that Jesus condemns moralism. And, ultimately, what I see Peterson doing is looking at Jesus as a moral example. And if Jesus is nothing but a moral example, then you can save yourself and you don’t actually need a savior.
Speaker: 1
03:11:01
And so I think, actually, Jesus would have critiqued that because Jesus was very against moralism.
Speaker: 0
03:11:06
And how does he how do you define Jesus being against moralism? Like, what do you mean by that exactly?
Speaker: 1
03:11:13
Well, Jesus looks at the religiosity of his day with, like, particular groups like the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who are these other, like, these other groups of Jews during his day. So we talked about the Essenes, actually aren’t mentioned in the ai. But there are other groups like the Pharisees who are, like, lay scholars and the Sadducees who are professional priest scholars.
Speaker: 1
03:11:33
And he’s constantly critiquing the fact that they have this hypocritical religiosity to them where they’re doing things like, tithing their mint leaves, like, to make sure that they get all of this is where we get the idea of the letter of the law versus, the intention of the law.
Speaker: 1
03:11:52
Like, Jesus critiques them for that because he says, you’re trying to do everything right, and you’re missing the point. So one of the things he says is, like, if your donkey falls in a ravine on the Sabbath, do you pull it out, or does that work? Like, what’s the point of the Sabbath? Is it to not do any work?
Speaker: 1
03:12:14
Like, is it to make sure that you’re not working too hard because you might be breaking the Sabbath? Or, like, what is the point? He says, like, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And that there’s this intention. This is the whole Sermon on the Mount.
Speaker: 1
03:12:27
Matthew chapter 5 is he keeps saying, you have heard it said, but I say and he refers to the Mosaic law. And it looks like he’s critiquing the Mosaic law, but he’s not actually. He’s getting back to the intention of the law. So when he he says, you know, you have heard it said, do not commit murder.
Speaker: 1
03:12:45
But I sai to you, anybody who harbors, harbors a hate for their brother in their heart has already committed murder. And and what he’s getting to is, like, what’s the intention? What’s the meaning of the law that god puts gives to you? Because the law is like a mirror. It shows you how dirty you are. But his critique is he’s like, you guys are trying to clean yourself with a mirror. That’s stupid.
Speaker: 1
03:13:09
It’s just gonna if anything, it’s gonna make you more messy. Like, get in the shower. The the law is not what cleans you. The law is what reveals that you’re dirty. And so in that sense, I think, you know, if Jesus is a moral example, it actually misses what I think Jesus actually said about what his purpose was in that you can’t do enough to actually live up to the standard that god holds you to.
Speaker: 1
03:13:37
And so if you keep striving, you’re you’re actually gonna wear yourself out and be exhausted.
Speaker: 0
03:13:41
Like atheists.
Speaker: 1
03:13:44
Ai didn’t say you did, Joe.
Speaker: 0
03:13:45
A lot of them go crazy. They go crazy when they get older. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Listen, Meh. This is such an awesome conversation, and I’m sad that it went down the way it went down with you and Billy, but the good thing out of it is that a lot of people became aware of your work, and, it’s such exhaustive work.
Speaker: 0
03:14:06
It’s it’s really amazing what you’ve done. Thank you so much for these gifts. We will find a great place for them on the wall here. And, thanks for and let’s do it again. And I would love to do it with you and someone who disagrees too. I think it would be a fascinating conversation.
Speaker: 1
03:14:19
Yeah. That’d be great. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
03:14:20
I think it would be really cool.
Speaker: 1
03:14:21
This has been a pleasure.
Speaker: 0
03:14:22
My pleasure. Thank you very much. Oh, tell everybody how to find you, how to find, all of the different you have 2 different YouTube channels. You have your own. Mhmm. And you have this new one with Apologetics Canada.
Speaker: 1
03:14:32
Yeah. So I work for a national not for profit. And in Canada that is, an organization. We want people to have an intellectually robust and a biblically grounded and a a, faith. We sana people to know what they believe and why they believe it. And so, we produce materials. Like, we played that clip from Ram I Trust the Ai? That’s a series that’s ongoing.
Speaker: 1
03:14:53
I you know, I’m gonna be traveling in 2025 to produce more of that content to try to, you know, get this stuff that’s all up here out into people so that they can be able to access it.
Speaker: 0
03:15:04
Do you have 2 of them that are on well, there’s more, but there’s the 2 Ai trust do can I trust the ai versions?
Speaker: 1
03:15:10
1 or 2.
Speaker: 0
03:15:10
I watch both of those.
Speaker: 1
03:15:11
Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So, yeah, wesley huff.com is my website. Apologeticscanada.com is, where you know, if you wanna see where I’m speaking or what we’re up to, I’m part of a team that does a lot of this stuff. So, those are the 2 places. All my social media handles can be found on wesleyhoff.com. Alright. Beautiful.
Speaker: 0
03:15:28
Thanks very much.
Speaker: 1
03:15:29
Appreciate it.
Speaker: 0
03:15:30
Thank you. Thank
Speaker: 1
03:15:36
you, everybody. Bye.
