Divine Men in Antiquity

Divine men in antiquity and so what we're really talking about here this can actually be divine men and women term here in Greek is the is the singular here Divine or uh Divine men but um but in fact what we're going to be talking about is in general the context in the ancient world of how ancient people saw the Divine they saw how God's interacted with people and how people could become gods and so forth how the boundary between the Divine and human Realms was far less it was seen felt to be far less Stark than it is today so after we have been through centuries of monotheism and well into this kind of post-theism largely uh ideas that where people are at in the West yeah the conceptual divide between what do we understand is the Divine this very highly elevated infinite omnipotent God being so far beyond human conception and then Humanity which we all know about finite mortal that has become particularly Stark and indeed as we have learned so much more about the cosmos and we just see how big not just I mean the the universe is so much bigger than anybody in Antiquity ever imagined which they hardly saw past what we think of as a solar system and obviously the Galaxy is is so much bigger than the solar system and the local series of galaxies and then all of the whole observable universe is so much more enormous than that when one is then thinking of a creator that is more enormous than uh than that incomprehensible size that again has elevated The Divide and there's a similar conceptual divide now between our now very well developed understanding of natural causation so the fact that we have robust scientific theories and explanations for why various phenomena happen everything uh you know from weather and lightning and so forth to Continental drifts earthquakes and everything like that in other words we uh understand natural causation in some cases we're getting you know pretty good at predicting it we don't always uh give credit to the meteorologists but they've obviously gotten a lot better and we can than they were when I was a kid and so forth and I feel like you can have a predict what the hurricanes are going to do when there's a lot of more capacity even prediction than there had been so anyway we have a very well-developed understanding of natural causation and we have then because of that we've developed this idea that there are some things that could happen in the physical world that would have Supernatural causes so so if something physically happened you know like something appeared out of nowhere or you caused something to levitate or you were able to just predict the future because you um I guess it could be Visionary but let's say you could telepathically communicate with somebody those are often seen as let's say a physical thing that is Supernatural in other words it's not something that has a natural causation if you know we separate that out conceptually whether or not any such thing exists so in general I would say when a modern literary fictional character uses something like telekinesis or performs a healing so like uh in Star Wars the baby Yoda character grogu is able to do things like you know levitate monsters and ships and things like that and is also able to heal people and so forth these are seen I think in general as Supernatural Powers so he's using the force or whatever which is Magic to some extent even if there's sometimes a pseudo-scientific explanation that's given in a lot of cases people don't like that that has been added to the Star Wars universe but some people maybe do like that in any event by contrast um for us things is like disease lightning the fact that your plants grow being able to conceive children whether you have good luck or bad luck death itself those are all seen as natural things I guess like is not seen as necessarily natural but it'd be seen as statistical right so you're just gonna over time you can't continue to roll double sixes right it'll go away you can't always you know if statistically if you're playing roulette the results will happen that way it's not good good luck or bad luck those are all can be explained through natural causation but in the ancient world all of those things including luck um death itself those are all understood to be the purview of the Gods because there was significantly less understanding of physical causation even among the most educated philosophers and indeed in a lot of these cases the philosophers when they are speculating about natural causation in Antiquity they are more or less just speculating and it's not um some cases sometimes they get a good make a good guess like a Democritus and Adams and so forth but sometimes they get you know guesses that aren't as good like uh Aristotle with how motion works and so forth so lacking alternate explanations as I say most things were descript ascribed to Divine causation directly so if you get struck by lightning or your house gets struck by lightning and burns down you know this is seen to have a pretty direct cause Jupiter Zeus is mad at you Jupiter is in charge of lightning you've done something wrong you need to figure out what that is you might have to go to a a practitioner special practitioner who is going to be able to read the auspices and find out what you did that was wrong and they're going to then explain to you what you have to do to propitiate the Gods in order to get back on Zeus's side because otherwise you don't know what other terrible things are going to happen and so forth this is um these are the kind of ideas and explanations and rituals and that are at the center of the ancient religions what we sometimes call paganism and in those religions there's not simply one all-powerful God they're actually understood to be an enormous host of gods that are very different in their scope and their scale so from extremely powerful all-powerful to um uh Gods that are very very limited so for example for the Romans Jupiter is at the very top of the hierarchy the Divine hierarchy and there is some philosophers who are developing ideas like monism who see there as being let's say one ultimate cause or Source an unmoved mover and and they would you know tentatively name that source or equate that with Jupiter or Zeus while nevertheless maybe being skeptical about all of the myths and so uh philosophers would argue some philosophers would actually argue that these historic or Mythic tales that are told in The Iliad and then he see it and so forth where where Zeus and Jupiter are behaving um so unethically that those actually are um those are not true stories those are made up stories because um again now that philosophy has developed um they would argue that that the gods actually are should be behaving or would be behaving as models of of Ethics as opposed to uh less ethically than we see humans acting and so forth that's like a philosophical reform of religion that is ongoing and again it's also a philosophical idea in terms of of developing sort of monism as a sort of an explanation behind natural philosophy the origins of science uh nevertheless that's not what everybody's thinking other people are much most people are much less concerned with those sorts of things and they're worried about the forces that are much closer at hand to them so beneath the king of the Gods there are very much less lofty gods that are in charge of every like River or spring or for example maybe just are watching over a particular Crossroads Romans even have gods that are specific to their own households the DI panates and so these are Gods you would have in your own little family Shrine um that really I don't think any other families are are focused on the particular gods and they would be invoked for your own sort of domestic family rituals and so forth so in other words there's a whole hierarchy of gods from you know maybe the one God to down to uh you know emanations powerful Cosmic forces death and so forth down to again what is gods that are focusing on your own house people in the Greco-Roman World also believed that the gods interacted with them and so in mythology there's a story when Jupiter and Mercury disguise themselves as humans to visit phrygia and what's now turkey and they go there in order to test the hospitality of the people so as told by Ovid nearly all the locals are so wicked that they refuse Hospitality to this Divine pair in disguise until an old couple named Bacchus and Philemon took them in and thus that couple are saved when the gods you know repay the others people for their wickedness by destroying them all and ultimately Bacchus and Philemon are turned into a set of trees that grow together and so they in turn become almost Divine in their own way and are and are actually the focus of a shrine that exists in avid's day there in uh phrygia so we mentioned this as being part of let's say the Greco-Roman religion paganism but this is also we also have a story that's just like this in uh the Hebrew Bible in Genesis so uh in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah which is often mistold and misinterpreted as being about sexuality and things like that it's again the same kind of a thing God comes disguised as three Angels or three men uh business with Abraham tells Abraham he's going to go destroy the city Abraham actually argues with God how trying to bargained him down how many righteous people could be in the city and the God won't destroy it But ultimately when they go and test the city the city's so wicked and is rejecting you know not offering Hospitality the only household in the in the city that uh uh that proposed that provides hospitality is Abraham's nephew lot and his family and so lot and his family are saved when the rest of the uh city is destroyed for uh failing to provide Hospitality breaking the ancient Hospitality code so in other words the same idea God is describing God is disguising God's self as essentially humans and being mistaken by people as being humans in both Greco-Roman myths and Hebrew myths in Genesis we also have lots and lots of myths in the Greco-Roman world of gods interbreeding with humans it's an actually a major theme I would say in Greco-Roman mythology it's sometimes seen as resulting in a hero who becomes a kind of demi-god-like figure like Hercules uh or just a hero like Aeneas or Achilles and so Hercules is the son of Jupiter and Immortal woman named alkmana um if you're a little Roman statue of Hercules strangling a snake that is sent to attack him I think from from Jupiter's wife Juno because she's so mad about this affair um but in any event he's going to be super powerful and he and he already has a little baby is able to kill the uh Divine snake here that's coming to get him um sometimes as with Hercules the divine child has a fully mortal twin so in this case ithacles so alkmana the mom is I think already pregnant by her husband with ithacles her mortal husband and so the twin that twin is born as a fully regular human being whereas then Zeus sleeps with her and she conceives again and has this semi-divine or demigod twin brother Hercules and also sometimes what happens in stories like these is the demigod is himself later fully deified ascending into the heavens and so um after Hercules has kind of a horrible death he's revived and thrown into the stars and he becomes one of the one of the Gods and the constellations with the heavens and and there's a bunch of other stories like that where um difference heroic figures Ascend and become Divine themselves the same story of interbreeding God's interbreeding with humans we also have a story like that in Genesis we talked about that in our lecture recently on The Book of Enoch or one of the books of Enoch because um because this story is kind of taking place in that antediluvian time period this time period before the flood where the sons of God see the daughters of men find them calmly and they come and interbreed with them and they produce just exactly like here with Hercules they produce the heroes the Giants and the heroes the um these beings like Goliath who were better you know bigger than humans and so forth and are able to do all these things so in the same way that we see this in Greco-Roman mythology it's also in Jewish mythology and Genesis foreign that's also ongoing so it is not simply back in the Mythic past so sometimes when we think about mythology and we think about scriptures we think of that as being all taking place in the long long ago this didn't feel like it was so long ago for ancient peoples um who uh consider them who are continually interacting with uh with these legacies so Julius Caesar very much encouraged the idea that he was descended from Aeneas the Trojan hero the Trojan prince who was himself a son of Venus and a Trojan another Trojan Prince and so later um Caesar's air Augustus commissioned the poet Virgil to write the Aeneid which definitely spells that out and and really sets up kind of the destiny that that these escaping Trojans led by Aeneas the son of Venus our commissioned essentially to found Rome and it'll ultimately lead down to Julius Caesar and Augustus um and so Divine Heritage then is not limited to distant mythology or at the heroic age for example Alexander the Great smother olympius according to his later biographer Plutarch Olympus dreamed that her womb had been struck by a Thunderbolt And this is one of the stories that gave rise to the belief by many belief encouraged by Alexander's propagandists that Zeus was in fact Alexander's true father and not his actual mortal father Philip of Macedon so in other words to show that someone like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar have this Divine spark or themselves kind of semi Divine in life to explain why their uh conquer all over everybody around them and are so so on those are seen by ancient people as they have to have had some kind of um Divinity within them and so that it can often be explained by looking at these kind of Mythology where where there is a you know kind of an a strange conception here like Alexander's mother uh which maybe has something to do with uh you know Zeus and so forth um this is a sign of a divine what a person having something whether they're a Divine man some has some kind of favor of the Gods for some reason and that's how it's one of the ways it's explained deification of Mortals was likewise not limited to heroic demi-gods like Hercules so for example after Julius Caesar was assassinated by the senatorial conspirators his political heirs who um were able to seize Rome and and ultimately defeat those uh those Senator the senatorial party Anthony Mark Anthony and his nephew Octavian they succeeded in having Julius Caesar formally deified by a decree of the Roman senate and so they argued they found signs and they were able to make the case that in fact uh Julius Caesars had ascended into heaven and was now one of the Gods and so then the Roman senate dutifully ratified that position and decreed that he would now be um worshiped as one of the household gods of the Roman Republic itself of Rome thereafter as Julius Caesar's adopted son Octavian who continued to then call himself or style himself he's the son of God he's the son of the Divine Julius Julius Caesar who is a God and after his Reign so again he reigned as Augustus the first emperor first prince prince of the principle Augustus when he died he was himself deedified and then that just becomes an Institutional practice so one of the perks of being Roman Emperor is after you die the Senate dutifully declares that you are a God and so then you are deified into the into the pantheon although not every one of the Emperors ends up having is important occult as some of them do but nevertheless while many ancients would have sincerely believed that past Emperors had become Divine and were living among the gods so they might have seen if you're a soldier you might have seen um Caesar as being helpful to you personally as a soldier in winning battles and he is especially favored also by Fortuna and so maybe Caesar's Caesar as a God the Divine Julius might help you might help intervene with you in your own fortune and so forth nevertheless well some folks believe that others took a more cynical view so for example the philosopher Seneca apparently wrote a satire called the colon cytosis I'm trying to think I'm not going to say epicolocentosis uh DUI Claudia e so in other words this is a this is a play on words for apotheosis which means deification and so again the Emperors are deified the Divine Claudius but this instead is a word that he coined to me the pump pumpkinification so in other words Claudius had been such a adult of an emperor in seneca's view that he wasn't actually even though the Senate declared that he'd become a God he wasn't actually when when he got to Heaven his his Works were judged and he was not in fact honored among the gods and said in the satire is again he's saying that he's pumpkinified as opposed to deified so um there's also um a sense that not only these great uh leaders like Alexander the Great but there's also a sense that um the philosophers themselves you know some of the philosophers like uh yeah some of the philosophers like Seneca are are cynical and they do not or skeptical they don't really think that they had known people like the emperor Claudius they don't really think of them as uh being worthy of being considered gods and so forth nevertheless other philosophers were themselves viewed as um themselves being semi-divine or as Divine men this is this Theos on air this is a a kind of a concept uh that is existing and so one of these uh Divine men um is the very famous pre-socratic philosopher Pythagoras and so Pythagoras who is famous now for the Pythagorean theorem but is one of the um the central early philosophers before Socrates um he was influential enough that he had later followers who wrote hagiographies which is to say biographies that are sort of uh telling what we think of as like a Saint's life telling about the that their Wonder workers able to do a miracle miraculous things and so forth and among the legends that grew up around Pythagoras were ideas like he had just an amazing restraint he was always self-controlled he never laughed he never joked but we also had various kind of Supernatural Powers so he was able to communicate with animals so there's a story where a couple stories one of cases he's arguing with a ball he um he's opposed to eating beans and he's able to convince the bull not to do that and he argues with a bear and he's able to convince the bear to keep its word and so forth he's also communicating with inanimate objects so he walks past a river the river calls out his name and rivers are thought to be Gods so this is an idea here that there's something Divine going on he's also able to use his you know philosophical powers to predict natural disasters and even prophesy about the future people asserted that he was simultaneously in two different places he's observed at exactly the same time in more than one place and there's even stories where he has a magic Arrow as you can use to fly and so forth so in other words he becomes a pretty um amazing superhero kind of character in the stories and pedicles who's another pre-socratic philosopher uh he's best known for originating the classic uh conception of the elements that there's air Earth Fire and Water the four elements so according to Legend he supposedly died throwing himself into Mount Aetna volcano on Sicily in theory because he was kind of proving to you know depending on how there's positive and negative versions of these stories so so he's understood to be kind of a Divine man or Divine man or he's claimed to be and then there are people who respect empedocles who say um he was ascended into heaven on the on the volcanic eruption or so forth um others uh are satiris who are the cynical Skeptics who say um he you know jumped in the volcano he got incinerated and the volcano spit out his sandal to show uh that that that's happened to him and so forth um based maybe on that story and other uh Greek cynic philosopher in the second century peregrinus Proteus he was trying to show people that they should have total contempt and disregard for death uh he went to this great public event the Olympics that are taking place in 165 A.D he built his own funeral pyre gave a funeral oration for himself and um and then lit himself on fire and and and died in the in the um in self-cremation uh which a lot of people ridicule him for that for doing that and other people also felt well that showed a real conviction of his beliefs and indeed some of his disciples uh put up a statue of him in his hometown and within a few years they claimed that that statue then demonstrated essentially Supernatural Powers so we were oracular Powers they were able to essentially see that peregrines had come become kind of a God in doing that and so you can see that there's this idea that there are Divine men there's a lot of people who are both critical of them but there's a lot of people who who find these stories very compelling and claims compelling um another famous one of these is apollonius of Tiana who is a neo-pythagorean philosopher which is to say he's a follower of the ideas of Pythagoras but he doesn't have direct access to Pythagoras and stuff so it's a later development of pythagoreanism um he's from Cappadocia in what's now turkey and I think he provides an example of how the idea of philosopher overlapped with that of wonder worker so um there are some again some of these ancient philosophers are very are very skeptical and they're very uh mental only and and abstract and so forth but others others believe that thou matargy that working wonders and miracles was part of the trade of what they were doing making predictions uh doing things like you know making cures and so forth so Apollonia has continued to have disciples after his death and in the third century a sophist named philosophists wrote a long novelistic life of him where his hero you know goes and visits India and uh and hangs out with all of the Indian philosophers but he's also able to perform lots of Wonders including Healing The Sick exercising demons and even raising somebody who's died from Back To Life so Bart Airman wrote a summary of the life of apollonius where he picked events out of this long um novel life in order to in order to make a comparison and so I'll read how uh Bart Airman summarizes apollonius's life I think you'll immediately see who he's comparing apollonius to so he says even before he was born it was known that he would be someone special a supernatural being informed his mother that the child she was to conceive would not be a mere mortal but would be divine he was born miraculously and he became an unusually precocious young man as an adult he left home and went on an itinerary itinerant preaching Ministry urging his listeners to live not for the material things of this world but for what is spiritual he gathered a number of disciples around him who became convinced that his teachings were divinely inspired in no small part because he was himself divine he proved it to them by doing many miracles by Healing The Sick by casting out demons by raising the Dead but at the end of his life he roused opposition and his enemies delivered him over to the Roman authorities for judgment still after he left this world he returned to meet his followers in order to convince them that he was not really dead but lived on in the Heavenly realm and later some of his followers wrote books about him so I think that um you know from that summary of the life of apollonius you can kind of see who uh Bart Airman is actually very very clearly comparing that to another um uh Divine man from the same exact Century the same first century um just he talks about this in his book how Jesus became God it's a really good book and I recommend it I just recently reread that and it's got lots more detail on all of this than what I'm able to give tonight um so comparing Divine men apollonius and Jesus so this is not something that Bart Airman was the very first person to pick out and and point out actually people have been comparing uh apollonius and Jesus since the late 3rd Century so this has been again and again and again happening all the way down to the present and so actually initially um anti-christian Pagan philosophers use Apollonia the Apollonia story to say that hey Jesus is not such a big deal working all of these different Miracles and any such thing it doesn't prove that he's like the one only son of God because in fact we have the same kind of testimony from apollonius that he's doing all the exact same kind of things and that he did all the same kind of stuff and we don't worship him as the one and only son of God he's just like any other God it's not an important God and so he's essentially a takedown um of Christian claims by saying that uh all of these Wonders that you're using to back up supposed wonders wonders in your stories that you're using to back up Jesus claims in fact we've got the same kind of thing going on with apollonius Christians then wrote counter arguments and they uh compared Jesus and apollonius in order to try to prove that apollonius in fact is not Divine that he was a sorcerer that he was in League with demons and he was using demons and so forth so kind of interestingly I think both the um both the pagans and the Christians here are not um not arguably arguing that the that all of these wonders and things like that didn't happen but they because they just generally assume that uh they don't have explanations for natural causation and they generally assume that all kinds of divine wonderful things are happening at all times but they are ascribing different explanations to them um you know nevertheless then uh you know you all the way down to the present people have compared these two in order to um uh tell all kinds of you know make all kinds of different arguments um specifically generally speaking the kind of arguments you want to make about the historical Jesus and so um these have even been compared in order to um you know argue that there is no historical Jesus or to argue um in any event well there's lots of different arguments that have been made down to the present but I think what I think it should actually be used for what the comparison is especially useful for is to tell us the context of the ancient world that the idea of a Divine man like this is not something that it was any bit unusual that the stories that um the first uh people converted to Christianity uh heard about Jesus doing these things or not something like oh that's that's I've never heard anything like that before this is actually something that they would all have heard all the time and so uh the this understanding is totally within the context of uh the time period that it's from so um that's not I think how Christians often view the historic huge few Jesus let's say when they're reading scripture so Christians reading the gospel accounts in the Bible frequently assume that they're effectively reading a biography or a history of things as they actually happened and they presume that in the text that they are actually encountering the historical Jesus they're reading things that could be kind of charted on a on a map this happened then this happened and this happened where this happened day by day and this is happening on you know such and such a a date on 29 A.D and so forth however this comes from a misunderstanding of what the biblical texts are and where they came from so when a person is reading the gospels they're actually encountering the Jesus Christ of scripture and I put that into plural Jesus Christ of scripture because each different evangelist and indeed all of the different New Testament writers who are not telling an entire gospel story but who are nevertheless usually making christological arguments or claims each of those you're encountering are different for each evangelist whose vision is each one is a little bit different from the other and the picture they paint is a little different from the other and then the different Jesus Christ of scripture tend to get because they're all lumped together into the Canon they tend to get synthesized into a composite picture of the Jesus Christ of scripture that Christians then have a composite picture though that we should again mention is not the historical Jesus it's something quite different so even when there's an awareness that the gospels are not history books some Christians still assume that the Evangelist Mark Matthew Luke and John were the disciples and that therefore they're basing their accounts directly on their act uh experiences with the historical Jesus but as we've seen in all kinds of lectures that we've done on this it's not the case um we've made the point that all four gospels are anonymous it is only over time no they don't Begin by saying things like I Luke the doctor and companion of Paul or something like that do hereby write my account and so forth or I Matthew the Apostle of Jesus uh having been commissioned of Jesus Christ I therefore write this or that none of that is in the text it's there's no indication about that and the the attributions Luke is a character in the book of Acts and so forth or the character known in the New Testament anyway uh but it is there's it's only a later identification with anonymous text that Christians then made and said okay this must have been written by Luke where this must have been written by by Mark or John and so forth so all four gospels are anonymous and when we do our our study of them none of them is by an eyewitness of the historical Jesus or participant in the events that are taking place so if we look back then what we find out is actually the gospels were written by Christians who already believed in the Risen Christ and their belief is based in part of testimonies of disciples who had visions of the Risen Christ and so there was a historical Jesus who was part of a movement Jesus is killed by the Roman authorities just as other leaders of that movement John the Baptist and so forth had been killed just as other his Jesus brother James who is about to um who takes over after him is is later killed as well so in other words all of these leaders are martyred and they're sort of all part of that understanding nevertheless because some of the disciples begin to have visions of the Risen Christ that informs their idea that Jesus was the Messiah in other words the Christ and that converts their movement or changes their movement from being a a Jewish sect that is based on uh on being mendicants on being inclusive of people that are are seen as ritually unclean by wanting them brought into the synagogues and so forth now the central focus of of their um Community becomes their testimony that in fact Christ is alive that Jesus is the Messiah and that he has been resurrected and they have seen visions of of that Christ so while those uh gospels preserve some memories of the historical Jesus so in other words there were some traditions that actually made it disciple to disciple and got translated from Jesus's original Aramaic into the Greek and get into the actual sources of these texts in the Next Generation a much more important direct source for gospel stories is in fact the Hebrew Bible what Christians call the Old Testament and specifically the Greek translation of that the Sip too again and so say after Jesus execution is female and male disciples began having Visionary experiences of him this spread pretty quickly to people who had not known the historical Jesus like it's Paul who identified the Risen Christ sorry the Risen Jesus with Christ the Messiah and he also identified Christ the Messiah with the Incarnation of God's glory so this is a one we're going to talk about the Trinity we're going to understand that when in the monotheism of Judaism the God is unknowable unseeable and and so forth God is not to be named you're not supposed to say the name out loud not to be pictured in imaged or anything like that and so how do you relate to that well you are able to see God's glory in other words God's glory is understood in the Bible or God's wisdom and those are in some sense because those are knowable and seeable to some extent those are seen as a hypothesis a another person of God that is God but is in the sense separate from the Creator so essentially God's glory as described in the Hebrew scriptures that is Christ in Paul's conception so Christian and so therefore now you can Envision and see God because you are able to see God in Christ so Christianity is spread then by mendicant Apostles traveling around in pairs preaching by the spirit so they are praying give us this day our daily bread because they take neither person or script they have to rely on what people that they're preaching to were willing to give them in terms of hospitality they're also commanded not to stay very long in any one town so that they don't become loafers they're supposed to continue to going around and preaching by the spirit which is to say whatever they feel called upon or inspired to talk about preaching by the spirit meant that the early Apostles acted as Prophets who shared those Visionary experiences that they had with the Risen Christ of visions that they might have as part of their testimonies and they might have had a bunch of different Visions so for example some of these Apostles may have had a vision of the Risen Christ transfigured on a Mountaintop so that they could see that Christ was God's glory god in glory and beside him as Moses and Elijah and so forth or they might have had a vision where they're on the Sea of Galilee which is stormy and they're feeling the storm all around them and they see the Risen Christ walking on the water and calming the Seas or they might have had a vision of the Risen Christ where the heavens open up uh Dove descends and God says this is my beloved Son hear him something like that those all could have been or it begun as visions of the Risen Christ rather than anything that anybody remembered happening in the lifetime of the historical Jesus the earliest evangelist to construct a narrative gospel was the author of Mark whose writing right during the first Roman Jewish War when the Romans had besieged Jerusalem and destroyed the temple it's a moment when all of uh the apocalypticism that is actually very common in the early Christian Community and also in the first temple period when you're seeing the temple destroyed we're seeing Jerusalem destroyed God's house God's City and so forth and you believe that a literal end of the world is going to come this does seem to a lot of folks like well this must be when it's happening and certainly the author of Mark came to that conclusion or jumped to that conclusion so the author is from a Jewish Christian Community it doesn't particularly know the geography of Galilee and Judea and and Palestine very well and so people assume that he's therefore not a local listen therefore he must be uh from maybe Syria as opposed to being from the Galileo or Judea area nevertheless his Greek is pretty poor the author of Mark and so Greek seems like a second language so he's probably an Aramaic speaker and so a Jewish Christian Community not not a native Greek speaker so like I say the author of Mark is an apocalypticist definitely believes the end of the world is at hand right when he is writing his text and so he got came up with this idea he's already a believer in Christ that Christ is Lord that Christ is God's glory and so forth and his conquered death and these kinds of things and is the savior at the end times and he believes now this is and times but the author of The Mark comes up with a new idea which is um earlier Christian writers like Paul had not written any narrative really of the life of Jesus just a couple incidents are recounted that things that Paul thought were important and whereas there are there were writers that are preserving Jesus's sayings and things like that those haven't been marked made it doesn't have access to that sayings gospel um there are sayings that have been passed around in Mark's own community and stories and so forth but the author of Mark really has the idea to write his theological message in the form of a narrative gospel that talks about the life of Jesus or actually just a few years of the life of Jesus um who like I say the marketing Community already saw as the Messiah as the Christ so influenced by the ongoing Jewish Roman War the author of Mark developed an understanding that Christ's Second Coming an understanding of Christ's Second Coming that is unique so um like I say he believes in an end of the world he thinks it's going to happen within a year or two so just in the 70s A.D and that what's going to happen is that you know the division from Daniel where uh you will where Daniels predicts that you will see one like the uh the son of man coming into heaven in power and glory and that will be that will be the Risen Christ and that we that would happen and the author of Mark puts into Jesus mouth there are those of you that are alive at this day you know this generation will not not pass away until you see the son of man coming again in power in the in the heavens like that so in other words that prediction was going to literally come to pass and so because um the author of Mark has this very very particular idea um he also decides narratively to Discount all of the visions that everybody's had up until this time of the Risen Christ those Visionary experiences don't really count for anything because Jesus is going to come back in in really for reals in person that'll be the second coming and so since most of the testimonies of the Apostles speaking from the spirit that they were shared they were about Christ they were visions of the Risen Christ these stories were already very well known in the Christian Community and they naturally post-dated the life of the historical Jesus so I'm saying well maybe this vision of the Transfiguration or maybe the vision of Jesus walking on water and so forth but because of his particular take on the apocalypse which he believes is underway the author of Mark takes those visions and instead of saying oh yeah Jesus came back already now Jesus is about to come back because the world is ending let's take those visions that you've heard and let's retroject them let's put them back in the narrative these are these are things that people saw and had happen as Miracles while Jesus was walking around on Earth so this is not conclusively shown but this is speculation that some Scholars that I sort of agree with is how Mark is constructing um this life of Jesus from from narratives that he's his communities inherited and his own peculiar idea that um that he wants to stop the gospel right when the when the women discover the empty tomb and not have any stories of the Risen Christ for the rest of his details you know he has some of these Traditions that his community has preserved he has some of these Traditions that his communities preserved about the Risen Christ that he is reinterpreting into the life of Jesus but then he also has the general testimony that Christians have about Jesus as the Christ which is repeated or it's in its early formulation put in Paul's um letter to the Corinthians which he says that he he passed to them which what he learned from uh from others that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures that he was buried that he was raised and on the third and and he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures and he appeared to cephas and the apostles and then 500 men and women at one time and so forth he's so this idea though what's crucial here is the according to the scriptures part and so because this is already a Central Christian testimony anywhere you don't have an idea if you don't have a detail in Christ's life you don't know anything no but nothing is preserved nobody remembers what the historical Jesus did about that or that hasn't been passed down to you but you do have the scriptures you do have the Old Testament the Hebrew Bible the Septuagint Greek version of the Hebrew Bible so you can look in there and see what anybody said about the Messiah and because you know that Jesus was the Messiah you can know that that is something that Jesus will have done and so you can put that into your narrative because you already know from your testimony that it that it will have been something that happened even if you don't have any independent um information that the historical Jesus did any such thing so like I say our earliest Christian writer Paul preserved very few details of Jesus life but he testified that it was all lived in accordance with the scripture so in writing the First Gospel with a narrative account of Jesus ministry you know whenever those details were lacking then the author of Mark felt at Liberty to look to the Septuagint in order to supply them so here's some examples so Psalms have a character which Scholars call the innocent sufferer and um Christians identified the intimacy sufferer with the Messiah even though it's not a Messianic prediction per se it's under reinterpreted or understood to be that by Christians and so then this provides details for Mark's narrative so we read in Psalm 22 they divide my clothes among themselves and for my clothing they cast lots and then we read in Mark when Jesus is being crucified They Crucified him and divided his clothes among them casting lots to decide what each should take we have from Psalm 22 the innocent suffer asking my God my God why have you forsaken me and Jesus on the cross in the gospel of Mark at three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice which means my God my God why have you forsaken me so throughout his texts the author of Mark supplies details from the Septuagint in order to create narrative story when he doesn't have those details supplied from tradition in his own community so like all apocalyptic literalists the author of Mark was proved wrong it was not the end of the world the world did not literally end in the 70s A.D not the 70s of the 1970s and for some people maybe they think they ended in the 70s but obviously they were still here the prophecy he put into the mouth of Jesus that this generation shall not pass away that became a false property false prophecy because those people all did die and it's an embarrassing prophecy as a result so you know the Criterion there's we talk about the Criterion of embarrassment but essentially this is a thing where it requires then later Christian apologetics and I'll just mention in the in the restoration tradition this is something that they're um they're still speculating about in the 1830s and so Joseph Smith is talking to Sydney Rigdon who's his major scribe on the um Book of Mormon and they are reading this passage and they're wondering well this generation shall not pass away well all those guys died how can that possibly be true and so there's another passage where it says in the Gospel of John about the Beloved disciple um you know what is it to you if he if he uh lit you know remains until I come again and so the speculation that Joseph Smith and Oliver cowdery have is that the Apostle John was the Beloved disciple and that his life has been miraculously extended for 1800 years and he's still alive and that's only done what's done for a couple reasons but for one thing to make this prophecy not false and so that's how we come up with the kind of apologetics you are you want to fit this thing to make something literally true and that's a problem it's not literally true it's a it literally it's false and so anyway you come up with contrived ways of trying to make that true it gets reinterpreted and apologetics so while later Christian writers love the idea of a narrative gospel so they love all the stuff that Mark is doing and generally just having a life now for Jesus for someone who is the focus of their worship as Christ they did not like Mark's text as is and a couple of them at least sought to replace it and so uh in the beginning of the Gospel of Luke the author of Luke says since so many people have attempted this kind of writing but they have done so kind of badly I'm also going to try my hand at this and I'm going to do it right and the goal in an ancient writer in doing that in sucking up a text and using almost all of it is that your expansion or your rewrite will kind of become the new text and that happens a lot and in fact Mark almost does disappear so the manuscript tradition it becomes less less used because the text isn't as valuable since for example almost everything in Mark is found in Matthew Luke like Mark a lot less and so Luke deletes a lot of Mark but most Matthew is much more conservative with text it's so most of everything that's in Mark is is reserved in Matthew and if you have to go through this thing as a scribe and write out the whole thing there's not a lot of utility in copying the text of Mark since you already have every good thing that gets in there and and Matthew's better and so Matthew and Luke those gospels for different Christian communities begin to supplant and replace Mark which is what they wanted to do and not meant they're certainly not meaning the authors of Matthew and Luke are certainly not meaning they're not aware of each other and they're certainly not meaning to have Mark read side by side with them so the authors of both Matthew and Luke were very unsatisfied with the ending of Mark where the women flee the tomb without telling anybody about it because again both the Lucan community and the mathian community they had Traditions that the Risen Christ had already come back and appeared to disciples and indeed this is their understanding of how Christianity was spread so Mark's idea this apocalyptic idea that no no Jesus's Second Coming is something that hasn't happened yet that's not something that they liked so independently they seek to correct Mark I mean other writers actually wrote longer endings to Mark and tried to fix it that way they rewrote the whole thing and they added encounters between disciples and the Risen Christ so for example in Luke Luke creates a story where that's a great story where the Risen Christ appears to a couple disciples who are walking along the road to Emmaus and they don't initially understand that they are walking with Christ so again it's God appearing in a human form that is in Disguise essentially and it's only later in retrospect that they realize wait a second that was the Risen Christ that they were with and so forth and that's only again in Luke so like the author of Mark the authors of Matthew and Luke believed that Christ lived according to the scriptures and they believed that again where details are lacking in their sources which they're using Mark and they're also using this lost sayings gospel that Scholars call they lost or the saying Source the covella in in German the Q source they felt free then to turn to the Septuagint to turn to the Old Testament the Hebrew Bible since again it was their testimony that Christ would have done what the scriptures say the message I would do even if they don't have any info that Jesus actually did that and so um Mark lacks a birth story for Jesus so to create Christian narratives or Christmas narratives the authors of both Matthew and Luke who are working around the same time but independently of one another and not with access to each other's books they both look to the Hebrew Bible to supply details and so they read in the prophet Micah that the Messiah is to be born in Bethlehem and so they both want that to happen but they both create they both know that Jesus is from Nazareth we talked about this in our in our um why is Jesus from Galilee lecture recently and so in Luke the way Luke deals with this is the family is from Nazareth in Galilee but then goes to Bethlehem as a result of a census a degree that goes out from Caesar Augustus that all the world is to be taxed and so forth in Matthew by contrast and then they they go there they don't have a room for an end and everything like that and then they encounter Shepherds who with angels and things like that in Matthew by contrast the family is from Bethlehem which is where the baby is born but then because Magi come and visit King Herod and that freaks King Herod out because these uh foreign astrologers tell him that he who is to be the king of the Jews has been born so uh Herod orders that all of the young children to age of two or older are to be massacred but a angel warns Joseph Jesus's father and the family flees to Egypt in order to get away from the massacre so the massacre of innocent story so this story that I'm suggesting Matthew was creating it only occurs in Matthew there's no additional attestation so we looked at our criteria for historicity and one of them is is there any is there multiple attestation do we have a bunch of different sources that are all confirming this thing um and there's no other attestation for an event and meanwhile as we saw in our lecture on Josephus recently we do have a really long and detailed book about this air era area and this time period from the Jewish Roman collaborator and historian flavius Josephus Josephus has a really negative view of Herod the Great and loves to tell all kinds of caddy anti-harid stories and if Herod had massacred all of these babies that is something that would just play into Josephus view of him it's not the kind of thing that Josephus would conceal so I think historians are kind of universal in agreeing that that there's no no historical basis this is not an event that occurred this is an invention um of the author of Matthew so where does Matthew getting that it's not from an event or it's not from history rather Matthew is using the scriptures as his source and so again he looks in the scriptures and he reads in Jeremiah a voice was heard in Rama wailing and Loud lamentation Rachel weeping for her children she refused to be consoled because they are no more and so he interprets that or he says that that is a a prophecy or that the massacre of the Innocence occurred in fulfillment of that which he calls a prophecy however when we look up the context of that Jeremiah quotation it's interesting to note here that Jeremiah is not predicting a future Massacre of Innocence at the time of the messiah's birth rather The Wailing that he sends for so Rachel Rachel wailing about her children that stand stand in for for Israel and she is Mourning because the Babylonians have taken away the captives into Exiles into captivity and so it's something that is coming taking place not in the distant future in Jesus's time but it's something that Jeremiah is talking about in his own time Jeremiah was alive and saw the destruction of Jerusalem and he himself had to flee into Exile into Egypt so although the author of Matthew does not explicitly cite Exodus as a source unlike Jeremiah um for this massacre of innocent story in that book The Baby Moses is also saved from a similar Massacre that is ordered by the pharaoh of Egypt and for Matthew Jesus living according to scripture meant something much more than just fulfilling explicit prophecies about the Messiah it's also having the whole Old Testament the whole Hebrew Bible serve as an anti-type to Jesus's type typological life so Moses is the anti-type of the great prophet and so his whole life as described in Scripture is lived for as a prediction or as a precursor for typologically for Jesus's life and so in this way sacred story is beginning sacred story and in both cases myth is an old myth is being repurposed as new myth because again none of the Moses is not a historical figure and none of the stories in The Exodus have a historical basis um and again as they're repurposed in Matthew here there have a symbolic or theological purpose but they are not um actual events that happen in history continuing in Matthew to escape herod's Massacre Matthew has Mary Joseph and Jesus flee from Judea where they're from so they're born in Bethlehem that's where they came from originally not from Nazareth and Matthew and Matthew says that they spend time in Egypt they flee Egypt and then afterwards they go to Nazareth at the end Matthew says that this was done to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet out of Egypt I have called my son so this idea that um the Old Testament is essentially the source of all of these details that Matthew is making for Jesus's life are very explicitly called out in the author's understanding that Christ lived according to scriptures but again I just want to point out again that these are not even um actual Messianic prophecy prophecies so the author he's quoting here Hosea it's again the context is not meant to be a Messianic prophecy hosea's quotation in context is when Israel was a child I loved him and out of Egypt I called my son the more I called them the more they went from me they kept sacrificing to the Baals so the sun explicitly that Jose is talking about who's get called out of Egypt isn't this isn't the Messiah in some future time but rather he's lamenting over the whole nation of Israel who are you know not only not solely worshiping Yahweh the way contemporaneously the hosayan party the people who are um are trying to reform the religion so that everybody worshiped Yahweh only they were still worshiping all of the other gods the Baals and so forth and so he's lamenting about that he's lamenting his own context as opposed to predicting some future time and that's how really all authors are constantly focusing on their own time and writing in their own context and so God's son like I say here is the whole people of Israel the author of Matthew though uh is indicating that their understanding of scripture is that it should not be understood literally that scripture has meaning and the literalism of it is is mean is not what's meaningful and the historicity of it is not what matters rather the meaning of it is what matters and we see it again and again because Matthew always uses the text like this non-literalistically and non-historic historically the author of Matthew uses like I say the Hebrew Bible to provide both prophecies about the Messiah and events in his account of Jesus which are said to fulfill the prophecy throughout his gospel like the authors of Mark and Luke the author of sorry the authors of Mark and Matthew the author of Luke has a similarly had a belief that Christ lived according to scripture and is doing the exact same thing which is to say using the Septuagint to create original Jesus stories so here's an example uh found only in Luke the story of the Widow of nane we read in Luke chapter 7 soon afterward he Jesus went to a town called name and his disciples and a large crowd went with him as he approached the Gate of the Town a man who had died was being carried out he was his mother's only son and she was a widow and with her was a large crowd from the town and when the Lord saw her he was moved with compassion for her and said to her do not cry then he came forward and touched the buyer and the bearer stopped and he said young man I say to you rise and the dead man sat up and began to speak and Jesus gave him to his mother Fierce used all of them and they glorified God saying a great prophet has risen Among Us and God has visited his people the word about him spread throughout the whole of Judea and all the surrounding region as a result of this miraculous wonder that has worked so nevertheless this particular story despite the fact that Luke says the author of Luke says that this spread Jesus's reputation everywhere in fact it's not attested in any other source it is found only in Luke our sources do agree that Jesus had a reputation for working wonderful Deeds which included healing and exorcism and there are also multiple stories of Jesus raiding raising the dead so Mark has a story of Jairus daughter being raised from the dead and because Matthew and Luke use Mark as a source they both include that story in their Gospels whereas the most famous person raised from the dead Lazarus that story exists only in the Gospel of John and so it's in a way if these were historical events in a way would be very odd that that they had not multiply attested because it seems like they would be some of the most uh the thing that people would be talking about I mean this widow's son might be wandering around for a while or Lazarus what happens to him afterwards where's the where's the gospel of Lazarus as this great missionary running off to thessalonica or something like that and said I was dead and Jesus brought me back and so forth we don't have any such Stories the story exists only in the individual gospel text so like I say only Luke tells this particular story despite the sensation it should have caused so where is the source of that so First Kings tells the story of the Prophet Elijah again this is a this is a literary account so this is written much later when Elijah would have lived and so it's a literary character who is consequently able to be one of the great miracle workers and divine men uh in the in this in the scripture because it's again once you once you're writing centuries later it's easier to make the Miracles greater so Elijah goes to the town of Zarephath where he lives for a while with a widow and her son again we have a widow and she has only one son and she is able to feed them using a jar of meal and jug of oil that can miraculously remain full so she always goes back to it every day to produce her her dinner and so forth and and it doesn't empty however when her son becomes ill and dies the Widow of Zarephath blames Elijah and then rebukes him she says to Elijah what have you against me o man of God you've come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son but he said to her give me your son he took him from her bosom and he carried him up into the upper chamber where he was lodging and he laid them on his own bed and he cried out to the Lord oh Lord my God have you brought Calamity even upon the Widow with whom I've been staying by killing her son then he stretched himself upon the child three times and cried out to the Lord O Lord my God let this child's life come into him again Lord listened to the voice of Elijah the life of the child came into him again and he revived Elijah took the child and brought him down from the upper chamber into the house and gave him to his mother then Elijah said see your son is alive. ' so the woman said to Elijah now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord is in your mouth and the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth so there's a very similar story with has a very similar result which is it identifies the the prophet as a as a prophet of God and so forth many many scholars have identified this story in First Kings and a few other ones as kind of the source for the story in Luke which is both thematically and structurally similar and there's actually a bunch of verbal echoes in the Greek and so the story in First Kings like I said is literary Mythic and not historic and the author of Luke who as we've seen in our lecture when we were talking about examining the whether the gender of the author of Luke the author of Luke is especially interested in widows and so um this story in Kings might have appealed to them and that inspired them to create their own story uh in Jesus life and so um in doing all of this when it kind of return back to um uh kind of this General picture so like I said I think a lot of times when people look at scriptures with our heightened descent heightened sense of historicity with our understand think kind of thinking of things oh this or that happened and so forth they imagine that they're accessing the historical Jesus when in fact there's four different pictures of the Jesus of scripture that each evangelist is trying to paint in order to give their own theological View and a lot of cases as with Matthew the whole gospel is even being organized so that it's symbolically like its own mini uh its own mini Torah with uh the same number of of sections and so forth in order to try to again just symbolically show that all of these scriptures are are fulfilled in this testimony that the author of Matthew and the author of Matthews Community already have that that Jesus is the Christ and so um those pictures that they're telling are already pre-informed by the history of Christian disciples people who emerged initially out of the the Jesus movement the Jesus John the Baptist the James the brother of Jesus movement and who have uh become they've had visions of the Risen Christ and they've come to decide that Jesus raised is the Christ and that has informed further theology from Paul that is essentially getting us closer and closer to um the later Christian idea of Jesus as God which we're not quite two yet in the early New Testament times the source for their understanding of that because of their testimony that Christ lived according to scriptures is actually the Septuagint Bible and that informs all of the narrative histories the later narrative histories much more than any Traditions about what the historical Jesus would have done and so our access to the historical Jesus really is only through it's not from reading the gospels it's actually through the academic disciplines of History and literary criticism but I also in separating this all out um you know there's a there's a bunch of different things that are going on here in the first place um what I would say is that it shouldn't be therefore actually important to Christians the historical Jesus shouldn't actually be very important to Christians because the idea that should be important to Christians is the idea of the Risen Christ the ideological idea of Christ and God how the idea of Christ points us to God and so forth and the Jesus Christ of scripture are stories of how that is are is used and expressed pointing us to that theological uh view in the life of the church so at the end of the day what the historical Jesus did or did not do I think shouldn't be relevant it shouldn't actually even be relevant even if there if there was a historical Jesus or not historians are agreed outside of a fringe that Jesus the historical Jesus did exist but I think by and large historians I mean I think also all also agree that even historical figures who have the um reputation of being Wonder workers like Jesus or apollonius that is happening because of the context of the era when ancient peoples do not understand causation and so there may well there may well be doing things like exorcisms that doesn't mean that there are literal demons but it can mean that there is a person that is troubled who requires uh who's wrong with a community who is excised or exiled from the community for whom a ritual healing allows them to return to the community or become part of the community are acceptable back into the community again and and all kinds of other ritual healings there's no modern medicine until very recently and so almost anything that is done in terms of ancient medicine is um just as likely to kill you as save you and and that's going to be true for uh philosophical thalmaturgy or through faith healings in the exact kind of way and so it's not the relevance here I would say is not whether the historical Jesus is actually performing let's say Supernatural wonders that's certainly not a historical claim that can be that is a theological claim and I think it's a theological claim that Christians also shouldn't rely on because it implies a theological Universe where you believe physical magic there's no difference between the past and now and and it starts getting you to rely on belief in physical magic now um rather my argument to Christians is rather than worrying about the physical Supernatural physical magic we should worry about spiritual Supernatural the metaphysical the idea of meaning and purpose and so forth in life and how the experience of the religion the tradition of the religion leads us to that understanding as opposed to makes us focusing on on ID magic and other things like that physical Magic so that that's my argument with this and so hopefully in the chorus of all of this we can see why in a much better perspective we can step back and see how these gospel narratives just completely fit uh the context that was common across the Mediterranean so it's the same same understanding of the Divine and divine men and so forth wonderworkers all of these kinds of things are had both inside and outside of these stories which are not particularly but are instead drawn from a very common context and so that is what I wanted to discuss about Divine men in Antiquity and we'll see what kind of questions you guys have thought up uh first of all I want to really thank people for supporting this channel Daryl Scott thank you so much for your support Filippo dinodo thank you very much for your support gotharama Andrew surreali Leon Berg Kelly Higgins thanks all of you for your donation your ability our ability to devote our time and our resources to producing these is because of uh it's listener supported so it's because of uh contributions from viewers like you we so thank you for that um Pat Riley says why did ancient people make up so many stories about the supernatural were they all con men trying to fool simple-minded fellow citizens so no they are not all con men so that is a modern um perspective because we understand kind of causation look there were ancient con men uh there's con men all the time but there is also let's say not understanding of uh there's not the kind of understanding of physical causation that we have so humans understand things by creating narrative and they create myths and narratives to explain anything we anthropomorphize like our cars we do all these kinds of things so people explain things based on how they observe what had happened and so they will create stories um the reason why I suggested to you that let's say Elijah does lots better miracles than Jeremiah is because Jeremiah is a historical prophet and we have his own writings and we have contemporary writings of Jeremiah and so he's not doing things like um getting a big sacrifice of all the Bulls and having a giant Pillar of Fire come out and absorb the whole thing the way Elijah does the reason why that happens with Elijah is Elijah is a literary figure and so uh and so it's much easier to to write about those kinds of things for ancient people things that we think of as mythological when they're further away into the past that's how they understood things like that what happened and it's all of it is pretty universally held and that continues to be the case all through the Middle Ages where a huge percentage of what people are writing about in the Middle Ages is stories of wonderful Miracles that are happening people are still pretty obsessed with that in in modern times in addition to um busily uh working up the theory of uh of gravity and so forth and physics Isaac Newton is busily trying to create a science of of uh interpreting the Apocalypse so that he can predict the end of the world and things like that so people are very people are very interested in all this throughout and and they're not all con men no um so Bob scipione says curious whether the proponents of the apollonius comparison go to the Old Testament to bolster their position as theologians traditionally did for Jesus um so I guess I don't know what you mean Bob so I'm so um apollonius is not predicted by the Old Testament I don't so I don't so I'm not sure what what you would mean by that so theologians do that for Jesus because of the Christian understanding of the importance of the Old Testament the pagans who Revere apollonius uh are they don't they don't believe that the Old Testament is Meaningful so they wouldn't go to it um Darth arama says so Mark is writing a message of Hope to his community that is being destroyed yeah so there is a there's a part of that in apocalyptic system so the the um so yes there's a definitely the he's seeing terrible things happening the fact that uh Jerusalem is destroyed and tens of thousands of people are killed and sold into slavery and so forth that the message of Hope um for the apocalypticus uh is something that has entered into the entered into the religion in Judaism in the second temple period is that all of the suffering in this world is going to be wiped out and then God is going to create a new world that is just and where there's not going to be that kind of suffering and so yeah the message of Hope is you know the the paradise is on the way and so we're seeing all of this Horrors and it's gotten worse and worse and worse and it's and it's always darkest before the dawn and the dawn is coming so yes it was a it's a message of Hope um oh Michelangelo so thank you so much for supporting the channel um Daryl Scott writes what did the Romans think people would experience when they became Gods like Caesar did that's interesting yeah um you know so the I haven't read a story of what Caesar's doing up in heaven I was going through the pumpkinification story of um of Claudius and so claudius's kind of spirit is um this is again it's kind of a cynical writer so whether or not they see it this way they're essentially taken to the court of the Gods and uh I think Caesar is actually there or at least one of the previous Emperors are there and they're talking about um whether or not Claudius has done anything worthy to be in their in their Council and so I think that they are narratively envisioning them let's say in kind of a Heavenly Council hanging around the same way that um an Imperial Court would work you know so I I do think that they may be thinking about the gods as being kind of actively you know where they're entrepromorphized right so they're kind of maybe thinking of them as being sort of actively like uh the Imperial Court and so forth um uh philippo de notices I've heard John say that literal interpretation of the Bible is a modern notion when who did that start or become with or become popular so it becomes really really popular uh with the invention of the printing press when suddenly everybody gets Bibles so before that time period if you were living in England you had to be a pretty serious scholar which means a cleric clerk because you will have had to have learned Latin in order to be illiterate especially and also in order to read the Bible which is which you would access in Latin and so as a result of that you would already be a a scholar you probably would have already you know read uh you might have read some Augustine or other kinds of church fathers who will have explained the levels and the of what the ancient and medieval people understood the scholars understood to be responsible interpretation of scripture so so yes there's a literal reading which is the least important and might might have to be ignored if it's clearly wrong literally and then on top of that there is how you how you what is the allegory here what is the metaphor what is the lesson we're taking away from it and then ultimately how does this story point us to God and so that is the traditional way of interpreting it and it was known and continue to be known by Scholars the problem what happens in Christianity is um that when bibles are suddenly in everybody's uh hands that's when we start to really obsess over um history and we start to learn the difference between just thinking that something happened and actual historicity and so then people read things more and more literally more and more historistic as if it's history and it becomes a worse and worse and a more and more false reading and and so Protestants insisted that scripture was the sole source of authority so they no longer have the other authority authorities of tradition uh the interpretation of the fathers like Augustine and um well an Apostolic succession but anyway they no longer have the this more sophisticated interpretation apparatus at least at the congregation level and finally um there's also atomizes into all these different groups where they don't all have everybody doesn't all go to Harvard Theology and have a Divinity degree instead a church can be run by anybody and and more or less what I'd say happened is that people have a a Sunday school or a kids version of learning the Bible and what the Bible is and then they grow up and they get to be the leader of a church and then and then they spread that idea so that's where I think that came from and it's a mess um so uh related to the previous question Julie uh pazovski says you said um Matthew did not believe scripture was to be read literally why do we um again the inmates of the Sunday school class with a with a children's kind of teaching took over the Asylum they became the leaders of churches and they taught everybody that and that's who the leaders of Evangelical mega churches are today and they are teaching people um things that are false so they're teaching that scripture should be read literally and all this kind of thing Owen uh wall says is there any scholarship on why the author of Luke was especially interested in writing about widows like coming from some particular background or something so um so there he is there's a there's trying to think of a the name of the I'll have to look it up of the name of the of a scholar there's several books that are um the touch on this question of you know like Luke's interest in women's issues and so it's not just about widows although widows appear in Luke I don't know the exact numbers here but like so many more times the word Widow isn't like Luke more than Luke and acts acts is also written by the author of Luke more than the rest of the gospels put together same thing uh there's all this emphasis on women disciples in Luke and acts there's all kinds of things like uh a woman bent over with kind of osteoporosis a woman with an issue and all these kind of things that are um that Luke focuses on and so uh the scholarship or the speculation you can't know uh the speculation on that is that I the author of Luke either um uh has as their Patron the person who is actually the scholar who's writing this or not scholar this is kind of a scholar Luke is well trained and that knows Greek really well and so certainly studied the sub 2 again so the the person the Christian who was writing this has as their Patron a woman who's a widow so that we know from early Christianity both from the Gospel of Luke and also from Paul's writing that um that Christianity spread among wealthy women and they were sometimes the patrons of these ascetic guys the mendicant Apostles and so forth who um you know were wandering around begging and preaching from the spirit so then these wealthy women have uh churches in their in their houses and so forth and her and are also giving alms in order to pay for things and they could have also been the patron that paid for the author of Luke to write their gospel and sometimes you tend to when you have a patron you put the things in that your Patron cares about and so she maybe cared about that another option is there are women disciples there are women writers and so another option is that the author of Luke is a female disciple a female Apostle and so that's why they're interested in women stuff a widow again uh Kelly Higgins says John has obliquely referred to Fringe series and I'm asking if he means Richard carrier who disputes just Jesus's historicity I want to ask John's View of that Fringe and the things they miss so yes I'm referring there to carrier's view I think that I mean all you know the leading Scholars of the uh a historical Jesus like Bart Airman like um John Dominic Crossing all categorize this view as fridge um it's not to say that not having a historical Jesus is a is an impossibility that's not how history works but saying that it's likely is a total misreading of History so we had a whole lecture on on why um why we can say there was a historical Jesus it's called the historical Jesus we know so much more we're so much closer to the historical Jesus because we for example know someone who met the historical Jesus's brother so Paul met the brother of the historical Jesus Paul was the enemy of the brother of the historical Jesus he would have no reason to he met other disciples of the historical Jesus like Peter and he's their enemy there's no reason why he would Elevate those guys and so forth we have you know anyway we we're so much closer we have so much more information about that and you know to the historical Jesus then through all all these other figures like Pythagoras and so forth um and certainly like you know a historical Buddha so there are completely um we're we're pretty close it's not a it's not a thing that's in question so um I would say that Scholars like Airmen and Crossing um more or less don't consider that to be legitimate scholarship um Michelangelo says what was the practice of sainthood from the Catholic Church also inherited from DV and Theo sander does it have other Origins we're gonna have to um I think it is I think it is the same kind of a thing yes I think we're going to do a whole lecture on the uh the emergence of the cult of the Saints and so forth so I think what ends up happening is um there's a whole part of early Christianity where the earliest Christians look one of the reasons they have different ways of understanding why Christ I'm sorry why Jesus was killed why was he executed in this horrible way and and a bunch of them this is later not a popular view but in the early couple centuries a bunch of them saw that as a model for how you are actually expressing like true conviction in other words if you're ready to die for your beliefs and you actually are executed thrown to the Lions or something like that during a Roman persecution or some other time then you're you know sealing your testimony in blood you're you're there you're you're following in the you're taking up the cross and following Jesus so um and so as a result of that there are a bunch of churches where they look back and remember that they have somebody who was a martyr and so and that's um informed you know their Community or that gave kind of spiritual strength to their community and like you say then there is this idea that's totally present at the time uh you know of of this hierarchy where there's and connection between the Divine realm and the and the human realm and so the idea of it is that these Martyrs have also been raised and they're sitting at the at the court of God the same way that I was talking about Caesar doing that and so and so if you then are present where their relics are you can pray you may not be able to get God's attention God's really busy but you can be with the in the presence of these relics you can get the attention of the the Martyr the saint and the saint can intercede on your behalf which is again a ancient and then medieval model and expression of how actual government works you may not have been able to get a petition in front of Caesar or the later uh King of the Franks or something like that but you could maybe talk to a lesser Frankish official who could pass something on and they can ultimately intercede for you and so and so again the the way people imagine things work is because they have in their own environment um a model for how it works we nowadays think of ourselves you know we think of our brains as computers and with software and hardware and all this kind of thing nobody thought of that about brains that way back in the 1800s because they didn't have computers right and so we think of that that way because computers are so big part of our lives so in the same way um the Divine Court in the Pagan times is similar to the Imperial Court and then in Christian times it's also similar to the Imperial Court because the Imperial Court is still similar TTYL says what is your thought on Ancient contemporary magic man like honey the Circle Maker um so I I don't know honey the Circle Maker as well in particular but I would just say that um we just had the we just had an example in that we read in Josephus where uh where Josephus talks about a Jewish holy man a wonder worker who was able to do kind of a Mass Exorcism in front of the Roman troops you know so with lots and lots of witnesses and he also had a um he had a way to prove it and so he had a thing of water and when he cast The Demon out in the name of Solomon or whoever and it came out of the person then the water would Ripple and move that was providing an additional layer of proof according to Josephus and it's making it almost a science according to Josephus and he's putting it into those kind of Greek terms of science um so so the experience that you're going to have with spiritual practitioners I think in antiquity and even into the presence is yeah okay there's a couple there are people who are who are con man of course um but then there are but a lot of cases um spiritual practitioners are also let's say coming out of a small culture tradition where where this is part of their world view to begin with so they already are steeped in Magic and believe in magic and part of the um and part of the way that they are maybe taught in an apprenticeship is that the um the practitioner the the magician or the witch or whoever it is they um they understand that they got to do certain things they've got to do whatever their trick is to make that water move because that that's necessary for people other regular the people who don't have the site or something like that to in order for them to understand what's actually happening and and so like you say okay there are some of them that are con men and so forth that are doing it just for that reason but generally what I would say is that most of these practitioners actually are nevertheless Believers in this world view which is to say they're superstitious but they just know that they've got to do there's certain more parts of it that they're involved in to make the the whole thing work but that doesn't mean that they don't believe it um and so that's kind of my general thinking on on that we have done a whole um I've done a whole lecture on on ritual healing and miracles and I describe that in a lot of length if you've got to go to that one uh Rye the king too says thoughts on Paul's experience with a revelatory Jesus similar to Joseph and Moroni or Muhammad and Gabriel if Paul predates the gospels are the gospels grounded in Paul's theology so so the first question first so Paul's experience is usually called like a road to Damascus experience and we have that we call it that because there is a way that the story is told actually two different ways that the story is told in the book of Acts which is written by Luke um nevertheless there's all kinds of reasons uh in my view to think that the book of Acts uh just like the gospels written by the same person as the Gospel of Luke is is not very historical and in fact is not a great witness to anything that Paul is doing that in fact maybe that the author of of Acts may not know too much more about anything that Paul is doing other than what they know from the writings of Paul that they actually have and so and the same way that they're creating details for the life of Jesus they're also filling in details so they would understand For What Paul's doing the life of Paul in Acts and they have less awareness because they don't necessarily think that Paul is living according to the scriptures um and so so for that what we really have is um so I'm just counting the road to Damascus story which is much more literalistic um not a vision but a visitation and so instead um we just I go back to Paul's testimony that um where he's saying saying essentially that uh uh after after Jesus was executed he appeared to Peter and then he appeared to a bunch of the other disciples and he appeared to uh James Jesus's brother and to a bunch of the women and 50 500 other people at once and so forth in other words that there is a Visionary experience of the Risen Christ appearing and then last of all he appeared to me um uh Paul who uh who he self self depreciates himself because he had been persecuting uh the Christians but now when he had that Visionary experience now he had a testimony of it and that converted him and so and so that's how I would understand Paul's experience I think that that is very similar you know comparing that to to Joseph Smith and Muhammad so um you know so Muhammad again the the experience with the angel Gabriel um this is not a visitation um an angel is spiritual not physical and the idea although described physically in literary accounts um in terms of an actual Prophet that is experiencing this it is uh the uh Angel is a metaphor for um connecting for Spiritual inspiration and Joseph Smith's experience in the Grove is the same so it's later um it's told a bunch of different times and in its final form it's told as a as a visitation of two distinct beings it is in earliest form it is a vision and it's Vision that Joseph Smith has of Christ uh so Christ he's convicted of his sins he's had gone to a Revival he's the Revival preachers because of their theology have told him Hellfire and brimstone you're going to be damned if you don't accept Christ into your life and are born again as a Christian he does what hundreds of people did at these revivals he has that prayer he has a Visionary experience of Christ assuring him that his sins are forgiven him and that's identical to all these born-again experiences completely again within the context so I would say that they're all that's how we understand Visionary experiences um Alexander Santos Anderson says what implications on Christianity come out of seeing parallels between Joseph's story of his trials and rise to pharaoh uh second sepheros viziers his second in command um with the narratives of Jesus passion and exaltation um so yeah how is Joseph rising to be the vizier of the Pharaoh how is that a anti-type of Christ um so I haven't I haven't thought of that as a precursor I mean certainly there are different things in the in the Joseph of Egypt story that um that you know I think are archetypal for Christ's story so here the guy is um cast into a pit by his own Brothers he has all this suffering his clothes are are taken from him they're bloodied and so forth uh he's sold into slavery in a humiliating way so that kind of a a suffering narrative at least is um you know that you could read that as as a Christ story for sure um in terms of then Rising he uses Divine gifts to rise right so he's a a miracle worker because he's able to interpret visions and become the become prophetic again in the in the literary um understanding of of that in Exodus and so um and so then like you say maybe that means at the end he's seated at the you know if the Pharaoh is not God though so anyway you have to you'd have to be figure out how you're going to how you're going to write your um you know uh type anti-type topology interpretation uh Stephanie ceresi says uh did Christians leave the Jewish imperative to Stone anyone whose prophecy did not come true did they leave that behind and is Jesus okay with false prophets uh so so yeah they did not Christians got rid of stoning they don't that's not part of uh Christianity is stoning people um I think that what Christians like to do when you have a false prophecy is two things you reinterpret the prophecy so it's not false so that's the most common thing that everyone loves to do with prophecy or you um you excommunicate the person for bad prophecy or something like that so uh no in terms of is Jesus okay with false prophets and other there's all kinds of things in the text that's are beware of false prophets and predictions and then such and such days that you know false prophets that we're going to emerge and so so no obviously you want to um the the religion has to uh worry about you know about this and this issue and indeed uh within a couple Generations um the Bishops who become the leaders of the the Christian communities they are ultimately able to stamp out um the idea of prophets and apostles so prophets and apostles had been kind of the the central way that um Christianity had been operating including Paul who's who's going around in that model himself and Peter and all those guys but at a certain point as we've seen when we look at you can look back for example in our our lecture on the didica at a certain point uh Bishops who were the sedentary people that are in charge of the community they're not liking these itinerant mendicant guys who are coming and preaching and sure and you know sponging off of their community and sometimes preaching by the spirit to condemn different people maybe condemning the bishop and so they don't at a certain point like that and ultimately they work on getting rid of that from the tradition purging that from the tradition and early on people who have that kind of sensibility are cordoned off into monasteries so if you're going to be that kind of a Visionary of desert father kind of guy who's an ascetic who wants to go around and preach by the spirit maybe you should go live in the desert or maybe in a monastery with somebody around you that in a walled Walling you in so that you aren't bugging my congregation here as the bishop and so uh and so that's what Christians did early on with those guys Michelangelo says um why was Paul so insistent on the idea that Jesus lived according to scripture if he was preaching to gentiles um the coffee so Paul is preaching to Gentiles but he's um he's finding his number one group of converts among a group of Gentiles that are called the God-fearing Gentiles and so these are people who are Greek speaking pagans by birth but there's Jewish communities in all of this these cities and they have come been coming to the synagogues they like listening to um the stories from the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible and so so they already like the scriptures and so and they don't want to but they either aren't allowed to join the community full-time because they aren't ethnically Jewish and or the um strictures of Jewish law in the local synagogue what they're asking for for guys getting circumcised um uh you know giving up having meals with all of your Gentile neighbors and all the other things that required for uh living the law living a kosher and so forth um they they just kind of attend and they believe in the scripture but they don't go through they can't been able to go through the um the actual conversion and that because it's too onerous to be to follow the law well Paul comes and says wait wait a second you don't have to do that law Christ fulfilled all this law because Christ lived according to the scriptures and so forth and so and so that's why um it's uh it's still important it's important also to Paul so Paul loved the scriptures he'd been a Pharisee he says and he um was very focused on it but uh but also in his audience his audience is also interested in that even if uh their background was not Jewish Owen wall says any thoughts on the relationship between believing in a spiritual hierarchy like that in other words a gradual hierarchy going up to God and thinking Some Humans are more Divine than others and being susceptible to magical thinking generally um I mean I think that it's I guess it's hard to say I don't know that it is I don't know if it's um makes you susceptible to Magic thinking generally here's the thing in Antiquity everybody has some kind of magic thinking because they don't understand causation and so we have to kind of take it out of that context and think about it in a present right and so in terms of a a gradual hierarchy of gods and going up to let's say one source of which there are a million Divine emanations you can find that in in Hinduism and so they don't have just they're not strict monotheists but I go to the I've been to the Hindu temple in the suburbs here and the the leader there has said well we are monotheists even though we have a million gods and you wonder well how is that possible and that's because they understand that there's one source of which all of these million are emanations and so and so there's gradations of of gods that are going to get you down there I don't think that that means that they are any more susceptible to Magic thinking though than let's say uh when you go to the mosque and uh also in the suburbs right next to it and and they are strict monotheists um so I think either one could magic thinking can result from either or not uh can techtic says I love this Channel and I'm confused because it is a Christian Channel and the lectures are made with a secular sense is the church or Community part of a Mormon movement um yeah well thanks for asking all of that so yes we um our lectures here are our history Theology and philosophy lectures and so we are approaching them from an academic sense um and you know whether you want to call that secular it's an academic sense which means you can approach it without worrying about any personal religious biases or you everybody has their own biases and we acknowledge those and then we look using academic tools uh the academic disciplines of History philosophy and Theology and so forth and so that's how we make them and for this channel but as you say it's a Christian Channel and if you're interested in the kind of religious Christian part of it every Sunday we have a church service and during the church service then you're going to get the lived Church experience which includes things like um sharing the sacred story as sacred story it includes um personal experiences that people have had and find meaningful in their life is going to include singing hymns together and all that kind of thing and so we definitely do that too but then when we look at our history and we look at our philosophy and so forth we use we use academic tools to do that and then you ask is this church or Community part of a Mormon movement so Community of Christ which is what this church is the denomination that this church is is comes out of the same Latter-day Saint movement which is a restoration branch of Christianity that the Mormon Church comes out of the Mormon church and all of the other the churches split apart when Joseph Smith died in 1844 um and essentially the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved to Utah under the leadership of Brigham Young and that's the Mormon church that everybody's really familiar with there's also smaller Mormon churches out west that still practice polygamy and things like that the church that this is a part of that stayed behind Community of Christ is a Progressive Church that is has kept for example a Nicene trinitarian Theology and it's also made up of the people in the church who were opposed to practices like polygamy and also kind of the secret Temple practices and so forth and so we are a traditional we're a church that comes out of that tradition that also then comes up which comes out of the restoration tradition which then comes out of the Protestant tradition which then comes out of the western Latin Christian tradition which then comes out of the Christian tradition of judeo-christianity and uh but we nevertheless emphasize you know like all of our roots and so our um we're not focused on the recent tradition but rather I would say we have ours are we don't have a Creed we have as our motto truth wherever it's found and that includes valuing our entire inheritance and so um so for example we find all kinds of uh you know wonderful and interesting truths when we're reading Plato or boethius or um maimonides or anything like that so in other words we're able to find uh insights in all of those places and then we also reflect sometimes on our more recent Traditions from protestantism and from the Latter-Day Saint movement so hopefully that makes sense so uh booglies I want to thank you for supporting the channel and I thank everybody for your questions this has been a really one wonderful dialogue once again so we will not have a lecture next week but in two weeks we'll be back

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 26,694

Keywords: community of christ, christianity lecture, christian education, biblicar scholar, judaism, christianity, history of israel, history of judaism, ancient history, history of christianity, early christianity, lost books, scripture, forbidden books, new testament, hebrew bible, middle east, israel, greek philosophy, greek philosophers, historical jesus, holy men, divine men

Id: Y0vhg-Yrjlo

Length: 120min 45sec (7245 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2023