how do you take a 2,000 year old book and my word would be pretend yeah that it's predicting what's happening in the 21st century with American bombs so I went back to the I mean how do you do that you know yeah work but I realized Glenn that if you say okay here's a story about the conflict between good and evil angels and demons God and Satan you can take that as storyline if you like that plot line the contrast Cosmic War you can plug into it any conflict you want I mean it could be a conflict you have with somebody yeah it could be you know a world catastrophe it could be people who are against you in any circumstance so that conflict has actually I started to look that book has served the purpose of War for 2,000 [Music] years hey everybody welcome back to the podcast today we're joined by a repeat guest uh her first on the show of the 250ish episodes we've done uh my conversation with her was one of my favorites Elaine pagels welcome back to the show it's always an honor to talk to you thank you I'm happy to be here Glenn thank you so last time uh you were here we talked about all things Gnostic we jumped into your book uh the Gnostic Gospels a little bit about your story from why religion but today I want to pick your brain about the Book of Revelation a very light topic right very very easy very black and white topic how you treat it that's for sure that's right that topic has been treated every way you can possibly imagine yes I I I I know a very narrow amount but I'm sure there's there's much that I I have not experienced but you wrote a book uh which I highly recommend to our listeners it's called Revelations uh Visions prophecy and politics in the Book of Revelation uh so maybe we could begin really surface level tell us a little bit about your book and particular the title right Revelations it's plural and uh talk to us about like in the book you talk about how the Book of Revelation is not the only revelatory text that was floating around back in the day but it is the only one that actually made it into our new testament so I'm wondering if you could talk to us about about that uh you know the other books that were floating around at the time and why this particular book made it into our Bible Well you put it very well then because many people who only know of one book with that title that ah she knows nothing I mean she doesn't even know it's called revelation rations she already got the title wrong yeah right and but but it's right I mean along with the discovery of secret gospels I later realized wait a minute there's a whole lot of Revelation texts in fact that's really what many of them are and I didn't think much about it uh because I didn't like the Book of Revelation much when I was uh in an Evangelical Church in my high school days it was a test text of fear yeah and it's often functioned to terrify people and it's often used that way yeah but what happened after that is that the president of the United States whose name then was George W Bush started a war with Iraq I was working in Egypt and I thought how do you turn the the entire Arab world against the United States when they really love America they want jeans they want rock and roll how do you do that this is how you do that you start a war and you invade their country right yeah and it seemed to me so blockheaded I didn't realize it was a lot of it was about oil and commerce with Bush's oil companies and his vice president's interest in oil as well um but I knew it was an outrageous thing to do and what made it even worse when all the protests against the war failed and 100,000 you know Iraqis had died and and and Bush came on and said not one American life has been and I thought you know American lives are so much more valuable than every everyone else's of course you what is he talking about um he started a war and 100 thousands people are killed yeah he was using the Book of Revelation as his propaganda there was an operation do you remember it was called Shock and Awe I do remember that yeah well what did it mean that was about that was NATO's term I mean it was it was a the military's term for the for the operation in which American bombs pounded Baghdad yeah and the name comes and I didn't know this at the time but I learned it came from The Book of Revelation really it comes from the chapter in which there are seven angels and each Angel is holding a huge bowl of the wrath of God yeah and a trumpet sounds and the first Angel pours the wrath of God over the Earth and horrible earthquakes happen like the one that just happened right disasters and then the second Angel pours God's Wrath on Earth and more terrible things happen and this goes on through six the six Angel pours the cup of the it's not a cup it's a huge bowl of God's Wrath on the earth and it says there's blinding light and huge noise and people on Earth die cursing God and that is how they got the name for shock and a it is shock to unbelievers but a to those who understand that the American bombs are delivering God's Wrath so so this is a way of justifying an invasion of a sovereign country I mean a country ruled by a terrible man right yeah I do think Saddam Hussein's actions were horrendously evil he was a brutal ruler but it was still the invasion of a country yeah for other reasons than the ones that were claimed but Bush was selling it to his base who understood the secret language is the Book of Revelation saying American bombs are delivering God's Wrath this is divine Justice right yeah on the forces of evil and he called them the axis of Evil and and more than that there are many many clues in the language he used to to to promote that war MH that came out of the Book of Revelation and his Evangelical Brothers and Sisters of the group that believed that this is really the end time and and he's making it happen in the right way yeah so you know look nobody could stop the war at that point but I kept thinking how do you take a 2,000 year old book yeah and my word would be pretend yeah that it's predicting what's happening in the 21st century with American bombs yeah so I went back to I mean how do you do that you know yeah work yeah so I went back to the book and read it carefully and it's still a terrifying book um and as you know it's a book about angels and demons and monsters and and horrible suffering yeah Divine judgment God's Wrath Heaven at the end I mean the huge contrast between good and evil and it's all about the conflict between God's power and evil right and God is going to win but not not until a lot of horrible things Happ lot of blood is shed yeah but I realized Glenn that if you say okay here's a story about the conflict between good and evil Ang angs and demons MH God and Satan you can take that as storyline if you like that plot line the contrast Cosmic War you can plug into it any conflict you want I mean it could be a conflict you have with somebody y it could be you know a world catastrophe it could be people who are against you in any circumstance so that conflict has actually I started to look that book has served the purpose of War for 2,000 years just because what I realized is it uses this kind of dream imagery like dragons and beasts yeah and and and Angels the kind of thing that comes into children's nightmares or anybody's nightmares yeah and and you you know whatever conflict you're in can fit into that yeah and it and that's how it's been used well in the first century the writer was writing about war he was painfully acutely aware that his country had been destroyed by by the Roman army which is just a horrendously effective military machine that trampled everything under its wake you know yeah and so and his people have been destroyed and and the holy city of Jerusalem has been flattened and turned into a Roman GIS and and burned down the temple of God is a wreck and he's writing about that yeah uh out of Agony and hope you know that God will come now and destroy the evildoers pay them back and restore good to the world but the way it's can be used and has been used for 2,000 years is really powerful once you start looking at it yeah the way that I mean I I was brought up in an Evangelical setting and I went to a private Christian school and I can remember in the sixth grade we did a we had Bible class every day and in sixth grade our teacher took us through the Book of Revelation now I'm what like a 11 whatever whatever age I'm in the sixth grade and we're going through this book and we're coming at it from the Left Behind angle and we actually watched in the class the movie a thief in the night we watched that movie as a sixth grader and I was absolutely horrified but I was so scared like I had nightmares about it and I was so scared to tell my parents because I was like well what if my parents don't believe and then they're going to tell me they do believe just to kind of calm me down but then they're going to go to hell it's going to be my fa I had all these horrible nightmares and then in church at the same time the pastor was preaching about Revelation and also about first Thessalonians where Paul talks about being lifted into the air so we're talking about the Rapture things like that at the same time and it was just such a horrifying time but then I got really interested in the Book of Revelation but I only came at it from that angle because that's all that I knew so I had like the end times charted out on my wall when I was like starting college and things like that because that's all that I knew and now I'm finding out I mean maybe that was like 10 years later I started to really realized well Revelation is much more than this like this is not what Revelation really is and so finding out like some of the context that you just spoke of is so interesting to me because there is so much more to this book what many people have been led to believe and I think it's been weaponized in a lot of ways like you said to really hurt people I don't know if it's intentional necessarily but I think a lot of people have been wounded and carry a lot of baggage because of the way they've been spoken to about this book I'm so glad you described your experience because one of my graduate students when I was working on this said he was afraid when his mother wasn't with him that she'd been raptured he was afraid that he was bad he was going to be left and you know and they saw that same movie and you were terrified he was terrified that movie was meant to terrify you yeah right to scare the hell out of you literally yeah so you would pray to Jesus and go to heaven you know yeah and and it that's quite different from the purpose for which it was written but it certainly has that effect yeah it really does now you talk in the book about these other revelatory texts and that's the thing I could probably talk to you about that particular thing for hours because I found it so interesting like the secret revelation of John uh the secret revelation of I think James maybe I I kind of have them wrong but there's a whole I think I numbered like nine of them or 10 of them that you talk about in the book and they all talk about so many different things but maybe if our listeners aren't aware of that those texts even exist could you maybe talk about one of them maybe that jumps out at you and then a little bit in particular about like why a book like that was left out of our Canon and This Book of Revelation was invited in when I believe and I could be wrong but I think the Book of Revelation almost didn't make it in is that correct it almost didn't make the cut you're totally right out of the 27 books now in the New Testament this is is the only one that was intensely disputed uh up until the last minute which is it's practically 400 years after the time of Jesus when the New Testament is put together and there's a finally a a collection that's agreed upon that we still use um yeah I mean that that book I realized as I said it comes out of War yeah and and it has a great deal of anger and wrath and Vengeance in it I mean that writer wants God to utterly destroy and punish and devastate the enemy which is wrome and he and I and many people say well there's so much Vengeance and bloodshed and I mean how could it be a Christian book well it's almost not it's written by somebody before there's what we call Christianity he's a follower of Jesus but he believes that um that Jesus has given him Divine Visions which assure him that even though his beloved Jerusalem has been utterly destroyed God will not allow Injustice to happen forever so Justice will be restored and I thought sort of nice Christians in the suburbs can't really get it the way you could get it if you or I were living in Syria and our neighborhoods had been blown to bits with bombs and our neighbors had been killed and they're homeless and there's no place to get fresh water and I mean when people are living in terrible wartime yeah and we're seeing that now in Ukraine they really want the enemy to be crushed yeah just out of desperate hope of getting out of that situation so that's it's a powerful book Y and for many people it was a book about Hope but it depends if you're if you're on the bottom or the top it for example The People Under The Throne are saying how long Lord how long how long will you wait before you avenge our blood on the people of the earth and during the time of slavery in this country Frederick Douglas and others who advocated the abolition of slavery said those are the souls of the slaves who've been beaten and whipped and killed and tortured in this country and they are asking for justice and God is going to give them justice so if you're on the bottom and you're one of them it can be a message of hope so that in African-American churches The Book of Revelation is about go do it Lord you know take care of the earth bring Justice back make it right make it beautiful again they it start over yeah um but the other books of Revelation are not usually about such a vast subject as really the end time which that one is um what I discovered is that like the secret gospels they something much more personal they're usually like if you if you were having a revelation it means that something is shown to you that is otherwise hidden which is a deep truth and and these are specific to each people as they are to the author of the book of Revelation J Patmos so one of them that I like is called the revelation of zanos and zastrus is a young man he's apparently Jewish and he says well I I didn't understand my life I couldn't get answers to any of the questions that I was asking about what it all means and everything seemed meaningless to me and I went into a depression and I decided to kill myself so I went out in the desert by myself didn't tell anybody I went out and as I was about to steal myself to to do it I heard a voice that said srios have you gone out of your mind and he said he seemed he he saw a kind of luminous cloud uh of light a cloud filled with light which seemed to come over him and he was taken up into it and had a kind of I don't know he doesn't tell us it seems like an ecstatic experience and he said comes out of it and he said well now now I know I love this line now I know that the power in me is greater than all the darkness and he goes out to preach so that's his Revelation it's a way out of depression and suicide once I was talking about the Gnostic Gospels at a bookstore somebody in the line to get a book signed told me a story just like that he he decided to kill himself and something stopped him and he was convinced it was a divine revelation so those other books of Revelation are pretty are different from each other you know yeah they they're quite a spectrum but they're they're often moments of great personal transformation yeah now why is a book like that like not included in the in the Canon like why because I I I I listen to you tell that story and it's such a beautiful story that I feel like could really help people and I feel like people could really find a deeper connection with God and even with Jesus and like in reading something like that like why is something like that excluded and even now like no nobody knows about that I didn't know about that book until I picked up your book and I read it so I'm sure a lot of our listeners don't know of it either but like why is that not a widely known book well that's a really good question um um a very important question and we struggled with it quite a bit I my here's my guess if you write a book like that you say you know something happened when I was having a difficult time and suddenly something came to me and I understood and this is what I saw this is what I heard now you're right this could be very encouraging to people and and I think those kinds of experiences happen to people quite often yeah and other people wish they could have experiences like that but if you're creating a church and you're the head of the church and I say to you well Glenn I had this Revelation and this is what God said to me and you say well I don't know that's not what I think that if PE if anyone's Revelation can be accepted you can't have an authoritative you've got to believe this you see yeah that's why Mystics in Christian tradition were carefully monitored you know yeah and they were checked by the Inquisition because if St John of the Cross or Teresa of Aila Catholic Mystics of the 15th 16th century said anything contrary to the church yeah they would be sent to the Inquisition yeah and they were very careful about what they said yeah because for example the revelation of John you might have noticed this one too it says the disciple John after the death of Jesus he was devastated with grief so he he was about to go Worship in the temple but somebody came up and said oh you're a follower of that fake Messiah you know you've destroyed the traditions of your fathers you you have no business coming to the temple and and John is shocked and he turns away from the temple and he goes out in the desert and he's feeling worse than ever and then he said and then he said I I Heard a Voice and and the voice said and it was Jesus's voice he said and he said to me John John why do You Weep why are you sad I am the one who is with you always I am the father I am the mother and I am the son and it's quite beautiful but since the Catholic church later would say what do you mean mother about father Son and Holy Spirit right and there's no mother anywhere um because the Greek terms well the Greek term for Spirit is a neuter term and in Latin it's a masculine term because since these languages have gender and but in Hebrew Jesus's language Aramaic it's a feminine term so the spirit is seen as a if you're going to put anthropomorphic metaphors you're going to say God is Father you're using a metaphor of a human relationship and saying God is like that he's like a father and God is like a mother the holy spirit is like a mother because if you're speaking Hebrew the language tells you that the spirit is a feminine power and the father is a masculine power yeah but that's not what happened in the history of the church you have Father Son and Holy Spirit um and no feminine power at all so that would be seen by the church later as heretical yeah yeah and that's what you don't want so they don't like these uh these these uh freelance Revelations right right so then is it safe to say that like a lot of these texts and like that you mentioned like I said there's like maybe 10 or so of them that you talk about in the book didn't make it into the larger group of texts in the New Testament because they're encouraging people to maybe look for the truth or look for God in places other than the places the church has deemed to be appropriate because like for instance I'm looking I opened up the book while you were talking you have this one quote from oh the teachings of s sylvenus sylvenus yes sylvenus and it's you have a quote here and it says knock upon yourself as upon a door and walk upon yourself as on a straight road for if you walk on the road you cannot get lost open the door for yourself that you may know the one who is what you open for yourself you will open like that gives me chills but it makes me think of you know Jesus being the door Jesus being the way and you know in in a lot of sense like the I've been taught in my life like the church is the way like you got to follow the way of the church but this encourages you to look within yourself and open up the door yourself and you will discover God in that place and I guess for me like thinking of what I know of the church in my own upbringing that's like a no no we don't want that right that is a no no for most churches yeah and yet they value religious experience and mystical experience but the churches want to keep control of the message right yeah because people can really go off the rails you know I mean they can start feeling megalomaniac you know oh well I'm I'm Divine you know sure sure I'm the voice of God yeah I they can get into some crazy stuff yeah so this there are reasons that the church tries to keep the shape of what they call straight thinking yeah and not and not just say well whatever you find in yourself I mean some people say you know the God told me to kill my family right um well like the god of Abraham we use a Biblical example yeah just for example right um I mean that could be Insanity right it could happen it has happened yeah yeah so that I think is why churches are trying to be careful to curate the message yeah yeah okay so what do we say then about think about like the Book of Revelation even these other these other text like what are ways that people can Steward in particular The Book of Revelation that's what we're talking about like what are ways that people can Steward that text well because I've heard some people say some Scholars historians say that book really has no place in the Pulpit like people shouldn't be preaching on it because it's such a you know it's a book of bad news pretty much and it's a book of blood and War and things like that there's no hope in that book to be found but you talked about Hope before and so wondering like given people who are listening who might be reading the book of Revelation with a group or maybe they are pastors or teachers what are some ways to effectively use this book in a way that honors the text and doesn't manipulate it like we talked about before really good question I think of two things one is it is a book which says um you get what you deserve and evil will not go unpunished yeah that if you do something um if you harm and kill and destroy people something will happen to you there will be retribution for that and if you suffer unjustly because John wrote Because He the people he knew who were followers of Jesus as he was were being put in prison and tortured and their heads cut off or worse I mean there worse ways to die than beheading beheading was a privilege in the Roman Empire um if you weren't a citizen you could be crucified which is you know hanged up for naked for for days yeah to die really slowly or to have the vultures P you know after your flesh while you're while you're alive it's horrible so so um the book is encouragement to act right that's one thing and it's also encouragement to people who suffer the way Christians were suffering and saying don't give up don't despair there will be Justice I mean Jesus was terribly tortured and crucified yeah but he's going to come back and he's going to devastate his enemies and he's going to live on earth God will live with human beings in in you won't need a temple because God will be right here on Earth and the Earth will be renewed and beautiful the way it was in the beginning so there's a lot of wonderful music like um I'm trying to think of of of the spirituals that that on the Book of Revelation uh well I was thinking of Johnny Cash's song when the man comes around that's one yeah but there's that's about justice but and and retribution but many about um 12 tribes in the city hallelu or you know we we're going to walk the streets of gold you know yeah uh and praise God so it's it's given a great deal of Hope to people who have no hope yeah uh and I think that's the appeal it has especially as I say if you're the people who are suffering and not the ones inflicting that I think that's the way I find I find it to be because I've heard like I said I heard a lot of people say like it's not a hopeful book it shouldn't be really preached from the pulpit but when I when I when I peel away all of the baggage that I have from the book that I described earlier with the thief in the night and left behind and I kind of peel all that away I just try to look at the text for what it is like you said earlier it is a scary text because there's a lot of scary language in there it seems like John had too much pizza before bed when he had all these Visions he kind of wrote about all this stuff that was going on but when I when I look at it in the context that you explained of what was going on in the world at the time what these people were enduring and I I pull that into our days whether it's a personal issue or a communal issue or a societal issue like we all have that stuff that makes us feel hopeless and I think that the book can Inspire some sort of Hope in that we do have a God we have a Divine being in the universe that maybe we don't completely understand but that God is active that God is working and can we place our hope in the fact that perhaps down the road whether it's a week a month a year or 10 years from now that there will be some the the things that are going on in our lives causing this hopelessness will in fact be better I feel like that's feel like that's a healthy message from The Book of Revelation well it's certainly meant to be and I was just thinking of the pictures we're seeing from parts of Ukraine when they're bombed out and people the dead in the street and people are being brutally murdered and shot and raped and tortured y um it's in that kind of circumstance I think you have to imagine this book coming out of that kind of yeah terrible War yeah um with terrible Injustice being done yeah and and the vision at the end is a glorious vision of a new Earth in which nobody hurts anybody and nobody has to weep and and those who died are are are brought back alive and joyful yeah yeah I think it's it's now you say that it's like it's not I was taught to read it as it's a prediction of what's going to happen it's a it's a prophecy of what's going to be happening and how the world's going to end but perhaps the picture we can allow the picture to be something that evokes hope inside of us that we hope for a day when there is a new world when there is a new a new way that things are done on the Earth where the war is gone and the things that are happening in Ukraine don't happen anymore like we can let that that picture Inspire us to create a better world around us in this day and In This Moment well I think that's certainly why it was written yeah um and it was about the end of the world but I think you know the conviction that the end of the world was very near is is runs all through the gospel it's always been near says that it says you know uh the kingdom of God is coming soon yeah and within your lifetime within your generation right yeah well now it's been 2,000 years but the but whoever wrote that really felt okay it's been 90 years how do you take a 2,000 year old book yeah and my word would be pretend yeah that it's predicting what what's happening in the 21st century with American bombs yeah so I went back to the I mean how do you do that you know yeah work yeah so I went back to the book and read it carefully and it's still a terrifying book um and as you know it's a book about angels and demons and monsters and and horrible suffering yeah Divine judgment God's Wrath Heaven at the end I mean the huge contrast between good and evil and it's all about the conflict between God's power and evil right and God is going to win but not not until a lot of horrible things happen lot of blood is shed yeah but I realized Glenn that if you say okay here's a story about the conflict between good and evil angels and demons mhm God and Satan you can take that as storyline if you like that plot line the contrast Cosmic War you can plug into it any conflict you want I mean it could be a conflict you have with somebody y it could be you know a world catastrophe it could be people who are against you in any circumstance so that conf has actually I started to look that book has served the purpose of War for 2,000 years 60 years since Jesus died two generations yeah it's got to happen now coming so I think I think that writer certainly felt the urgency and he felt that Jesus had promised that you know when you see these terrible things happen at the end of the Mark's gospel in chapter 3 and you see war and and and armies surrounding Jerusalem and enemies and terrible things happening then you know that the end is coming at the very Gates and the son of man will return in the clouds and and transform the world yeah and so it is about the end time and and I think we do need that kind of hope that yeah otherwise people assume that the world will just end in Despair and yeah Devastation yeah yeah that's so good all right last question for you um we've we've mentioned his name a bunch of times John of Patmos um I growing up I was given I think a lot of our listeners probably some faulty information about John of pmos because I was always under the impression that this was Jesus's disciple you know the disciple John I was told that he same John that wrote the Gospel of John I was also told he wrote first second third John which is a podcast for another day but obviously a lot of maybe misinformation about this particular individual so what do we know of this person this author um if anything at all and does it does does it really matter at the end of the day uh what we know of him and what we don't good questions again that's what the church has taught this is written by the Beloved disciple the one who was next to Jesus at the Last Supper he was uh he wrote the Gospel of John he wrote the three letters called attributed to John well that's Church teaching so this not an accident that you've heard that you heard it well um those arguments ments came up in the second century when there were huge disputes particularly in Egypt what is this book is this genuine prophecy the see the problem is if how do you know something a prophecy is true you don't until after it's fulfilled or not so if the prophet Isaiah says we're going to win the war and we win the war then you put the book in the but if he said the wrong prophecy then you know that it wasn't inspired so John said what does he say he gonna happen he says Jerusalem's going to be surrounded with armies right and um and and Rome is going to be totally destroyed the enemy the the the the Beast is Rome and that Empire is just going to be wiped out by God's Wrath right and J J M will be the the center of the world again and God's King will rule there well that didn't happen instead the Roman Empire became Christian now that's not what John said right so some people said he can't be a real Prophet because it didn't happen yeah but other people then said well so that some people said it was written by a heretic it's a crazy book it doesn't make any sense we don't get it and there was a lot of anger about this book but others said no but you don't understand it has metaphorical meaning um it it can mean something else it can refer to other traumas and troubles and so it was reinterpreted so but to make it sound like it was really it really belonged with the gospels they said well the writer he says his name is John John of Patmos that must be the same John well you know there's a few s he's writing decades after the gospels and except the Gospel of John and there are lots of John's in the world is not just one so but assimilating him with the disciple made the book sound legitimate and so the people who cared about the book and wanted to preserve it and felt it spoke to them because they were living in persecution as Christians they were living through what John was living through Christians being taken to prison and tortured and killed right yeah and and so they felt this was an important book it spoke to their need and their need for hope so they said well it it was really written by the Beloved disciple probably it wasn't we don't know because if you study the literary style of it any people who've done that even in the third Century Egyptian Bishop did that he said I looked at the way it's written written completely different from the gospel of John I mean the same writer doesn't write in these two really different styles so it's only a guess we don't know yeah we don't know who wrote it uh we don't know who wrote the Gospel of John either for sure but all of these uh names are usually added later and some the people who wanted to include it used you know the name of the disciple yeah so it almost like made it more pal palatable I guess like the yeah because it was we have this John he seems like a nice John so we have this other book written by some kind of John so if we say this book was written by the John we already know it almost makes the book more welcoming or feel more welcoming well you know in in in the New Testament there's a a letter called First Peter and second Peter those were written about 30 years after the death of Peter yeah but giving them Peter's name gives them a sense of authority that they probably wouldn't have had if they didn't have Peter's name or the little book of James you know um given the name of the brother of Jesus James who was the leader of Jesus's followers in Jerusalem now it could have been written by someone named James we don't know yeah was it written by the brother of Jesus he he died in the year 62 he was he was lynched in Jerusalem so that book was probably written later but the fact is we don't know there's a lot we don't know yeah now when those decisions were made I think it's important for people cuz I think sometimes the assumption is that there was some sort of deception that was involved like we wanted to we and but I don't think that was the case if I'm hearing it correctly right like it was people were being genuine in putting these names on the books or attaching these names to the books it wasn't so much to deceive people but it was a sense of genuiness to make them feel um to make them feel more I don't know the word like not authoritative but make them give them a different get give them a different sense I guess by attaching those names to them yes trustworthy that's they can trust the books I mean yes I mean that's a very important point you made it wasn't meant to trick you yeah it can be meant to say I'm writing in the spirit of our beloved brother Paul or uh the spirit of Peter yeah and if Peter were here this is what he would say right so it's not fraudulent it's it's a practice in the ancient world to use the names of well-known figures to say that you're identifying with that tradition right it's a different sense than if I if I were to write something and say my name is Elaine pagels and I were to write it and put it out there that would be very different than what they were trying to do because they that you said that was a practice in the ancient days yeah but you could say I'm this is a teaching of the prophet Isaiah because you've been studying Isaiah you've been preaching Isaiah and you feel that your message is really in that Spirit yeah but that's a practice in the ancient world sure it's not it's not considered deceptive at all yeah well we are just about out of time I don't want to keep you too much longer but this has been a lot of fun um as always I always learn from you so thank you for your time and uh thanks for taking time for my friends and our listeners well thank you I I think your questions are so wonderful and they open up the subject in a in a fascinating way thank you yeah thank you and do you want to is there any place you want to direct people to go to online online is there anything out there that you have worked on or are working on that you want people to know about that little book Revelation is in paperback of course and the more recent book is called why religion you've seen that one have you seen yes I love that book it's it's your story right yes that's a book I never thought I would publish because it's so revealing I mean when my students say they read it I thought whoa you know oh boy but but I wrote it because it's true and I thought it's just story of somebody you know I mean we all have stories that are I I love to read people's stories myself yeah well it's a good one writing about the books I'm writing about the the gospels in the New Testament you are along with the secret gospels along with the Jewish critics and the Greeks who couldn't stand the movement and everything else we know about it's sort of a grand soup of what's going on at the time oh excellent excellent when is that when when does that do to hit the hit the public well I don't know is I hope to finish it within a few months and get it out there next year excellent well I'll put the links of what is out there in the show notes and we'll do this again sometime soon good talking to you take [Music] care you done enough birth you done enough birth you done [Music] enough [Music] w [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] [Music] he [Music] a
