(sweeping dramatic music) - Shalom, Torah fans. Since January of 2017, I received several calls
from Nehemia Gordon who was breaking new
ground in Biblical research that I felt needed to
get out to the world, and so, before he left for Israel, he and I got together
for Shabbat Night Live to prerecord a series, which
we released this last fall, And the Gentile Shall Know My Name. I didn't get to watch this series until it actually aired on television, and at the end of this series
I was so moved by this, I wanted to call Nehemia
immediately and say, "Nehemia, I need an update. "When can you come and spend some time, "just come and relax and
be here in Charlotte." And he said, "I'm busy. "I'm on some projects right now "that I can't leave at this point." And so just a couple weeks ago, he gave me a call, which
I will never forget because what happened
during this last year, and what he'd been working on
for the last several months, has really been an historic event in the history of Bible research. And things that have not been known for over a thousand years
have now come to light, and now, ladies and gentlemen, we have Nehemia Gordon back with us. Nehemia, good to have you
here, finally, at last. - It's great to be here, great to be back. Yeah, it really was exciting
when I called you up, and what had happened is
we started about a year ago looking for more Bible manuscripts with the full vowels of the name Jehovah. We started out in 2001, I had two Bible manuscripts. And then, over the years, I found a third, a fourth, and a fifth. And so in a period of about 15 years, I knew about five Bible manuscripts
with the vowels Jehovah. - OK, now there are a lot of people, I believe it's hundreds of
thousands that have joined us since the episodes have aired. And so let's go back and
capture some of these things because there were
things that you laid out in the last series that I
think we need to revisit, but the significance of this as far as the vowels in the name. Can you give us a little
background on that. - In most of the Bible manuscripts, or what we've been told for 200 years is that God's name is Yahweh. And the Jews forgot how
to pronounce the name, and these Christians rediscovered
this pronunciation Yahweh, or I should say they invented, really, this pronunciation Yahweh
about 200 years ago. And when I was studying
this many, many years ago, I said, there's this theory of Yahweh, and I looked up in the
Anchor Bible Dictionary, which is really a respected source, and it said Yahweh is a scholarly guess. And I said, "Guess? "Surely we should be able
to do better than that." And I started to pick apart,
and what are the sources? How do we really know it's Yahweh? And I saw there really was nothing in any Jewish or Hebrew
source that supported that. And so I started to look for sources that would be Jewish sources, and I really didn't even know where to go and kind of stumbled upon some things while I was at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem working on my master's degree. And should I tell this story? It's one I've shared before. - I think you need to because, why this name is significant, it appears how many times in the Hebrew-- - The name appears 6827
times in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament. That means Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei,
God's holy name appears more than Lord, God, which is Adonai, Elohim,
El Shaddai, El Elyon, beautiful titles, right? But if you combine all of those together, they don't even come out to half of the actual personal name of God. And in Exodus 3:15, He says, "This is my name forever." It's usually translated,
"This is my memorial "for generation to generation." Like it's some memorial plaque
and He's dead or something. But if you look at the Hebrew, it actual means, "This is my mention "for generation to generation." So this is what we are
supposed to call Him, by his name Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei
revealed in Exodus 3:15, and the problem was,
for the last 200 years, scholars said, we really
don't know what the name is. And let me back up. Jews have this tradition
of not speaking the name. - OK, that's where it started, so-- - Right, that's where it started. - They don't speak it, and-- - Jews don't speak it. I grew up that, whenever
you see those four letters, 6827 times in your Bible, thousands of times in the
prayer books and other things, you're always to read them as Adonai. Adonai means Lord. This is a tradition that goes
back at least 1800 years, some people claim longer. And because of that, it was
assumed that Jews don't know what the pronunciation is. My prayer... And so we were told these
are the vowels of Adonai. Well, I started studying
Hebrew manuscripts. My prayer was to know,
"What is Your name?" based on Hebrew Jewish sources, that on the day of judgment I could point to that
so if God says to me, "Nehemia, you mispronounced my name. "Why did you do that?" I'll be able to say, "Father in heaven, "who I'm standing before right
now on the day of judgment, "this is how it was
recorded by the scribes "who preserved your word,
and I love your word, "and I believe in your word. "And it was in your very word "that I found your name written there." I couldn't find Yahweh anywhere in any Hebrew or Jewish source. Now on the other hand, I didn't know how to pronounce the name. I was told that the name
is the vowels of Adonai. - OK, so the Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei, you were told, and this is what's taught in
American Christian cemetery, (Nehemia laughs) that Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei, the
vowels are the vowels of Adonai. - Well, and I was taught that at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. - OK. - Not just at Christian seminaries. And this is in the grammars
of Biblical Hebrew. The main grammar of
Biblical Hebrew was written by a German guy named
Gesenius in the 1800s. And to this day, it's the definitive
grammar of Biblical Hebrew. People have modified and improved upon it, but that's the basis of
modern Biblical grammars. And Gesenius established
that the name was Yahweh. What did he base that on? I think we'll get to
that in a future episode. - You're gonna show us the source where that came from, right? - We're gonna actually
get to the source, yeah. But before we get to that, so 17 years ago, I'm sitting
minding my own business, and I have this job at
the Hebrew University, and I'm proofreading the Bible. And as I'm proofing the Bible, I had already seen that
the name Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei doesn't have the vowels of Adonai, which made no sense 'cause
I was told this was a fact. It was common knowledge. It's in Gesenius' the
Biblical Hebrew Grammar. Everyone knows those are
the vowels of Adonai. But I open up the manuscripts, and not only is it not
the vowels of Adonai, but it's missing one of the three vowels. And how do I know it's missing a vowel? Well, there's certain
rules of Hebrew grammar and phonology and pronunciation. If you have those four letters, you have to have at least three vowels or at least vowel symbols. And so there's a vowel
symbol that's missing, and I realized, wait, if I can know what that vowel symbol is, maybe that's the name. And there I am, minding my own business, and I'm proofreading the Bible, and I've got a stack of
photographs of the Aleppo Codex, the most accurate copy of
the Bible in existence. - And this is what the Shrine
of the Book is protecting, the nuclear-proof vault
is to protect this. - The Shrine of the Book
has two pages on display, and the rest of it's in the vault along with the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. But I have photographs, color photographs and I'm
checking every jot and tittle, and all of a sudden I find a
place where one of those vowels that's supposed to be
missing isn't missing. and there's a full set of vowels. And I can read the name
the way it's written 'cause the way it's normally written in most Bible manuscripts, and today I can tell you
'cause I know about than name in over 1000 Bible manuscripts, most Bible manuscripts, about 80% of the Bible
manuscripts we've looked at don't have this missing
vowel, meaning it's missing in those manuscripts. And even those that do have it usually don't have it. In other words, the name 6827 times, Aleppo Codex only has those
full vowels seven times, which means the rest of
the places it's missing. And why is that? 'Cause the scribes don't want
us to pronounce this name. - [Michael] Deliberately missing! - Absolutely. By design, they left out the middle vowel so Jews wouldn't accidentally, you'd come across that word, and you wouldn't
accidentally pronounce it. That was what they were doing. And every once in a
while, they slipped up, and they put in the full vowels. They put in that missing vowel. Why'd they do that? It's kinda like when you're maybe texting, and you're thinking of the
certain word in your head, and you type a word that sounds like that. It happens to me all the time. I write their instead of there, right? Or to, too, and two. So they're writing it, right? And they slip up and they
put in the full vowels. They didn't do it often, right? Seven times out of thousands
of times is not a lot at all. And the Aleppo Codex it's seven times. In the Leningrad Codex,
it's about 50 times. That was the other one I had 17 years ago. Over the years, I amassed more. I've got five manuscripts
a little over a year ago. And then I start to look for more. And I'd shared in The
Gentile Shall Know My Name about how I found 16 rabbis
who said that the name, explicitly said the name was Yehovah. So we were told this myth, it was a myth, that the Jew don't know
how to pronounce the name, and I found out, well,
the Jews think they know how to pronounce the
name at the very least. And no one will talk about this in the scientific literature, in the academic literature. You'll look in the encyclopedias and in the journal articles. They won't say anything about, "Well, "the Jews thought they knew
how to pronounce the name, "but they were wrong,
and here's our reason." They don't even address it 'cause they don't even know about it. So we have 16 rabbis who
say the name is Yehovah, and then I had only
five Bible manuscripts. I felt a little awkward
there, I have only five Bible. I need more Bible manuscripts. My goal, Michael, was to
get to 10 Bible manuscripts, and I thought if I worked
for the rest of my life, I might get to 10. And instead, now I have over 1000, which is, it's a miracle. And I wanna talk about more of that in a future episode, the miracle. But in a way, this brings
me full circle back to something we started
out many years ago. So this is looking at the name Yehovah in the Old Testament in
what I call the Tanakh. That's my Bible. And you came to me with an issue in the New Testament, your
Bible, and asked me a question. And that now can come full circle and teach us also something
about the name in my Bible. Can we go back to that, what
the original problem was? - This is one of the most
significant things in my life. I was living in Jerusalem, and we had a young man that was attending one of the Yeshivas. He was, believe he's the son of a pastor from the United States. As a matter of fact, his father I woke up to the Hebrew roots of the faith. And so now, years later,
his son is coming over and attending a Yeshiva. And week by week, it just
kept on getting more bizarre. And I saw this young man as
he was attempting to follow what Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew. And this was his reasoning
for doing what he was doing, and this is something I brought up to you. Now it says, this is really two days
before the Passover in which Yeshua was crucified. "Then spake Jesus,"
I'm reading King James, "to the multitude." - This is Matthew 23. - "And his disciples." This is Matthew 23, and this is in verse two here. "Then spake Jesus to the
multitude and to his disciples "saying, the scribes and
pharisees sit in Moses' seat. "All, therefore, whatsoever they bid "or command you to observe,
that observe and do." And so he was, in his
heart, wanting to follow what Yeshua, what Jesus said to do. - So this man believed in
Yeshua and he's Jewish, and he's saying, "Hey, "I should actually do
what Yeshua said to do "and obey the pharisees."
- Right. - "'Cause they sit in the
seat of Moses." (laughs) - Right, and so he was up every morning at 4:30 in the morning
davening at the wall. He was doing all these things, and when he would come
over for Shabbat dinner, then he would start bringing up, well, if we eat this first, and this is really encoded in this book, you may be familiar with it.
- Oh, yeah. - A Guide to Blessings. If you eat this first, then
you must say this blessing, but if you eat more of this other thing, (Nehemia laughs)
then you say this blessing. It was just mincing on things that, if Yeshua really said to do this, and I watched the light go
out in this young man's eyes. It's like he got so
confused by these things, and you were raised as a Rabbinic Jew. - Yeah, my father was an Orthodox Rabbi. I was raised as a modern-day pharisee. I mean, this was just common daily life. If you ate an apple, you made a certain
blessing over the apple. Bo're p'ri ha'etz, blessed is
the one who creates the fruit. Beautiful thing, right? Until you realize I want a snack, and now I've gotta start thinking, do I eat this thing first
or that thing first, and which blessing do I make on it. Really, it becomes a major
part of everyday life. So you sit down for a snack, and you've got an apple and
you've got a glass of water. So you make one blessing over the apple, a different blessing over the water, and then you want bread. So now you get up, and you wash your hands
according to a certain ritual, and you make the blessing
over the washing the hands, that God commanded us to wash the hands. And then you sit down
and you make the blessing over the hamotzi lehem min ha'aretz, the blessing over the bread. And now if I had done the bread first, the blessing over the bread
covers all the other foods. So now I've made extra blessings. So now it becomes a strategic question. What do I eat first? And it's ridiculous! And growing up, I remember thinking, "God can't care what I eat first." I don't find this in the Bible. I was looking in the Torah,
in the five books of Moses, and I was saying to my rabbis, "You're spending all day teaching me "which blessings to make
and all kinds of rules "and which shoe to put
on first in the morning, "all kinds of rules and regulations. "That's not in our Torah." And they'd say, "Well,
it's in the oral Torah," that there was this
teachings of the pharisees, these takkanot that I talk about in The Hebrew Yeshua Vs. the Greek Jesus and I ended up writing a book about it. I didn't set out to write a book. I set out to answer your question that you came to me
with, saying how could-- - This is the book that
answers my questions and brilliantly.
- Right, exactly. And it really started out
with you coming to me saying, "Hey, Yeshua seems to be saying, "all, therefore, whatsoever
they bid you observe, "that observe and do. "Sure sounds like he's saying
to obey the pharisees." Yeah, and when I was doing
this research, of course, I didn't actually know
what a Moses's seat is 'cause we don't have those
anymore in modern-day synagogues. So I had a background in archeology. My bachelor's degree was archeology. And people can see here,
this is a Moses's seat at Chorazin in Israel. - [Michael] That's right. - It was actually
discovered in excavations. So they did have it 2000 years ago, and you can read about it in some of the Rabbinical literature. They make references to it, and it turns out, what they would do is, they would stand in the synagogue and read from the scroll of scripture. And you see Yeshua did
that in the Gospel of Luke. - [Michael] That's right. - He read Isaiah Chapter 61. And then after the reading, the rabbi would sit in this chair, and he would say, "Hey, what we just read, "this is what it means, "and you have to accept
my interpretation." And so the one who sits
in the seat of Moses, that is sitting in the seat of authority. That's what it means in
that historical context. Once I found this out,
I said, "Wow, Michael. "This really is a problem." In other words, from a
New Testament perspective. - And lemme give you a
little more background then because, see, I had this question because I saw this man's life change, and it was changing for the
worse in what was going on. And I felt responsible for it. I just felt responsible
for his father and for him, and I was really praying about this. And I said, "There is no
way that Yeshua said this." And I knew I couldn't
talk to any Christians or Christian ministers and say, "There's no way that Yeshua
couldn't have said something that's in the King James'
version of the Bible," because I'd be tarred and
feathered by a group mob. - The other issue is, I think
most Christians will read that and say, "Well, that was
only up to the crucifixion. "Now that's done away with. "We don't actually have
to follow what Jesus said. "It was nailed to the cross."
- Oh, that's right. - And here you had somebody who was Jewish who was saying, "Hey, I
wanna follow the Torah." And instead of following the Torah, he ends up obsessing about, do I eat the apple first
or drink the water first 'cause that depends on
which blessing I say, right? And saying, "Well, Yeshua told
me to follow the pharisees "and obey because they
sit in the seat of Moses, "they've got the chair of authority." In other words, when this
man maybe was a Christian, he didn't have to worry about this because all the law was
nailed to the cross. Now that you're trying
to follow the Torah, well, the pharisees
tell us a lot of things about how to follow the Torah. Do we have to obey them? And it sure sounds like
it from this verse. And so here's what I did, which, to me, was just
like, it made sense, let's see what other manuscripts say 'cause this is what I do. I look at manuscripts. This is what I've been trained to do at the university for decades. At the time, this was many years ago. So I look in the Greek manuscripts. As far as I could tell, at
least from what was documented, all the Greek manuscripts
had the same thing. There wasn't any difference. - I think I said it at the time. Every extinct Greek manuscript says basically the same thing, right, they are. I was lost. I couldn't go any further with
my resources, with my skills. But I knew you to be an honest scholar and that when I ask you questions, if you didn't have the
answers, you would dig. - Yeah, I try to find out. - And you went on a digging expedition that resulted in what we're
gonna be able to share with everyone during this series. But what happened, the initial things? - So, initially, what I found
was, you can see it here. This is a section from the
British Library manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew. - [Michael] What? - [Nehemia] So it turns out (chuckling) there's this Hebrew version
of the Gospel of Matthew that was preserved by Jewish rabbis. - [Michael] That's right. - And here is says, this is section 97. It's divided differently,
but it's the same words. And it says (reading aloud in Hebrew). "The Yeshua spoke to the
people and to his disciples." (reading aloud in Hebrew) "Upon the seat of Moses sit
the pharisees and the sages, "and now all that he says
to you, diligently do." In other words, what's
their claim to authority? That they sit on the seat of Moses; therefore, do what Moses
says, which is so brilliant. And it kinda reminds
you of where they say, "Who should we pay out taxes?" Well, whose face is on that coin? Caesar's, so give it to Caesar, right? What's the name of that chair they sit in? It's the seat of Moses,
so do what he says. Do what Moses says, not what
the people in the chair say, (laughing) which is incredible! What a brilliant answer,
and you'd never guess, I'd never have guessed
this in million years based on what I read in
the King James Version, based on what I'd read in the Greek, and here we find it in Hebrew manuscript. So I'd found this in a Hebrew manuscript. This was published originally
George Howard in 1987, and he knew about nine manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew. Two of his manuscripts
read exactly this way, and I said, "There's gotta
be more manuscripts." So I start digging for more manuscripts. Now, I'm not sure I wanna get
to what I found there first. I think I wanna share something a little, one of the really interesting
things that came up. So as I'm looking at this
Hebrew Matthew, I'm like, "Hey, that was interesting for Michael "in Matthew 23 and Matthew 15. "There might be some other
as interesting things "in this Hebrew Matthew." So I start reading it from the beginning. And look what I find! It's really cool. And this ties into what
we started out with, talking about the name. So here's an image from
Matthew Chapter 1:18-25. If you could read medieval
Hebrew, you can read this. It's an unusual script if
you're not familiar with it. But right over here you have this symbol, which is the symbol hey,
and it appears twice. And this hey over here and over here, what this represents is the name Hashim. Now, remember, this was copied by a rabbi, meaning if you believe what
we're told in ancient sources, it was written by Matthew in Hebrew. We're told that by Papias,
- Right, right. - A church father who died
in the year 130 who tells us that Matthew collected the
words in the Hebrew language, and each translated them as he was able. What happened is, Matthew
wrote this in Hebrew. At some point, it's brought
over into the synagogue. You think, "How did this
get into synagogues?" Well, what happened is, the
Catholic Church came along and started persecuting
Jews who believed in Yeshua. So where are they gonna hide? So they hide among the other Jews, and they bring their
manuscripts with them. Over the centuries, they assimilate, and this, now, is being
copied by a Jewish rabbi. When the Jewish rabbi sees
God's name Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei outside of the Old Testament, it's very rare for him to
ever write Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei. It happens occasionally,
but it's very rare. Normally, instead of
writing Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei, he uses a symbol to represent the name, and that symbol is usually
a hey with a line over it, which is exactly what we see here. So coming back to the name, I'm looking years ago in
the New Testament in Hebrew, and I see the name of the
Father Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei. Well, in the Greek, it doesn't appear. In the Greek, you have
kurios, which is lord, and you have Theos, which is God. But you never have the
actual name Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei, and I'm not even here talking
about the issue of the vowels. Just the tetragrammaton, the personal name of the God of Israel
revealed in Exodus 3:15, appears 6827 times in the
Tanakh, in the Old Testament, appears zero times in the New Testament until we find this
Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, and I say, "Wait, what's
that doing there?" The name was in the
Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, and then everything started to make sense. So there's a Dead Sea
Scroll that was discovered at a place called Nahal Hever, and it's the Septuagint in Greek. It's the Old Testament in Greek. But when it comes to the name
of God, it doesn't say kurios in these earliest copies
of the Septuagint. It says Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei, the
tetragrammaton in Hebrew. So you're reading this document in Greek, and all of a sudden,
you see a Hebrew word. Well, what happened is, as Christians started
to copy the Septuagint, they didn't know how to read
the Hebrew or write the Hebrew, and then it was replaced with Lord, which by that time had
become a Jewish tradition. But originally it seems
from this evidence here, and we'll get into some
other exciting things that I discovered maybe in the second half of this episode if you let me. There's other really exciting things, other New Testament
documents that I came across. - No, no, not yet, not yet.
(Nehemia chuckling) I've been waiting for 18
years because you told me when you found these
other Hebrew manuscripts of these other Gospels, you said, "I can't release it and we
can't say anything about it." And I said, "Don't tell me what they are. "That way I don't know.
(Nehemia giggles) "And so that's the answer
I can give to everyone." I've been waiting 18
years for this, Nehemia! - But now we can release them. (giggles) This is really exciting. - And you've got 'em so the-- - It's really exciting. Anyway, Michael, I wanna
look at something here before we wrap up the first part here. So what made George Howard think that this was an original Hebrew document, not just a translation from Greek? So here we have Matthew Chapter 1, and we can see here what
it says in the Greek, is Chapter 1:21, "she'll
bring forth a Son, "you shall call His name Jesus, "for He will save His
people from their sins." And it's really interesting. I'll ask Christian
groups around the world. I'll say, "Do you know
what the name Jesus means?" And a lot of them will have no idea, and some of them will say,
"Oh, it means salvation," which isn't entirely accurate. It's true, but it's only half true. Now, if you look in the Hebrew
Matthew, what it says is, "you shall call his name Yeshua "for he will save my people
from their iniquities." And the Hebrew word for Yeshua,
or the name there is Yeshua, and the three words in
English, he will save, translate a single word in
Hebrew, this word yoshia. So why is he called Yeshua? Because yoshia, he will save. And that makes perfect sense in Hebrew because the name Yeshua
itself is a contraction of two Hebrew words, and
those two Hebrew words are Yehovah, the name of the
Father, yoshia, he will save. And so some people have
pointed in the New Testament where it talks about, he
comes in his father's name, and his father's name is in him, and that's actually literally true, that the name Yeshua has
in it the name Yehovah. Yehovah yoshia, Yehovah
will save or Yehovah saves. And so, and it gets even more exciting. I don't think I'll have
time to get to it right now. But so this name Yeshua
is itself a shortened form of Yehushua, which is the name Joshua, and there were people in the Old Testament who had this name. Joshua, the son of Nun, was the first man ever to be called Yehushua. His name originally was Hoshe'a, he saves, and Moses decided, you know what? Now that we've been taken out of Egypt, my servant Hoshe'a, I'm
gonna change his name to be more specific about who saves, and he called him Yehushua, Yehovah saves. And then Yehushua, Joshua the son of Nun, in Nehemiah 8:17, my favorite book, the book of Nehemiah 'cause
I wrote it, no. (laughs) In that book, he is then called Yeshua. So there's no question whatsoever, Jesus of Nazareth, in his
day, was known as Yeshua. - And when you go right back to the time when nobody called him Jesus Christ. - They called him Yeshua HaMashiach. - Right, right. - [Announcer] When Bible
scholars discovered a Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew, it changed everything. A Hebrew Gospel written
by a Hebrew disciple had researchers begging the
question, could there be others. - What you're about to see is
what we've been waiting for for centuries to have in our hands. - [Announcer] Michael Root
and Nehemia Gordon detail a literary revelation
never seen in the history of Bible research, Lost
Treasures in the Vatican. - Nehemia's gonna show
us several manuscripts of several different books here, and this will be the first
time that it has ever been seen in the outside world, since these things were
hidden hundreds of years ago. - [Announcer] Get this paradigm-shattering four-episode teaching that
is changing the understanding of the Bible itself. Plus a controversial bonus
episode banned from broadcast. (dramatic music) Lost Treasures in the Vatican, order now. - 18 years ago, when I
called Nehemia Gordon and asked him to come
over to house to help me solve my problem concerning Matthew 23, and as I read it to him, "The scribes and pharisees
sit in Moses' seat; "therefore, whatsoever
they bid you to observe, "that observe and do." And I'd told him that every extinct Greek
text says the same thing. I was out, I had no where to turn on this. But I told him that this
could not be what Yeshua said. And for the next couple a hours, we went through all the
passages in the Gospels where it show Yeshua deliberately and vehemently violating the
manmade rules of the pharisees. And here, at the end of his
life just before the crucifixion he's telling the multitude
and his disciples, everything they tell
you to do and observe, that you must do and observe. Well, I had at that time, and I had notes. I was showing Nehemia my
notes from back before then of the Hebrew manuscript right
here and where it was from. Unfortunately, I couldn't read Hebrew, and especially the way Nehemia can as he delves into these things. Nehemia, tell us more
about the Hebrew Matthew because this is where my
question is what prompted you, and you hadn't heard
about the Hebrew Matthew. - Oh, no. - As a Jewish scholar at the university. - That wasn't something I
really even had any interest in. - Yeah, right, right, this is my problem. - Right, right.
- This is not your problem. I have to do everything
the pharisees say to do. - I'm like, yeah, good
luck with that, Michael. (both laughing) But once I started looking
at this Hebrew Matthew, I'm like, wow, so I started
this looking for something to help you answer your
problem in Matthew 23, and as I mentioned in
the previous segment, I then find the name of God, the God of the Old Testament is there in Matthew Chapter 1 and
other places as well. So I'm actually learning something about my own Jewish history
by looking at this document. That's supposed to be a
Christian book, but it's not. It's a Jewish book. - Well, can you tell us, George Howard was the one that
published the Hebrew Matthew, that version, and that
was what I was reading. But then I was reading
his English translation. - Right, so-- - I find out from you
that he's pulled a Howard. - Yeah, I call it pulling a Howard. So he had on one side of
the page, he had the Hebrew, and I'm just reading the Hebrew. On the other side of the
page, he has the English, and in the English, he doesn't translate what's in the Hebrew. He translates what's in the Greek that's not even on the page. Like, for example, in the
passage of Matthew 23, instead of he says which is
what it says in the Hebrew text. - [Michael] Give the whole
context, the whole line. - So it says, all therefore,
here, lemme read to you. It says, "The scribes and
pharisees sit in Moses' seat: "All therefore whatsoever
they bid you observe, "that observe and do." OK, so the word is
yomar, he says, meaning, "The scribes and pharisees
sit in the seat of Moses; "therefore, do all that he says." - [Michael] Right, he, which is Moses. - And it says it as plain,
it's Moses in the context. How do I know, by the
way, it's not the seat 'cause Hebrew has masculine
and feminine for all nouns, and seat is feminine, so it
would have to be she says 'cause that was one of the arguments of some people saying, no, no, no. The pharisees really do
sit in the seat of Moses. The he there, the singular
is referring to the seat, but it can't be, that would be she says. In any event, so Howard
has yomar, he says, on the right side of the
page, or I forget which side. On the other side of the page, he has in parentheses they say, which is not what it says in the Hebrew. It's what it says in the Greek. So why did he do that? And, presumably, he came
across this and he says, "Well, this doesn't make any sense. "I can't translate the Hebrew." But me, coming from a Jewish
perspective reading this, it made perfect sense, right? So then I realized if Howard missed that, what else did he miss? And I start looking for other things. And one of the things
that I decided to do, and this is just basic for me, right? You have nine manuscripts. There's gotta be more manuscripts. I had access to things
Howard didn't have access to. So I start looking for more manuscripts, and I very quickly find that there's 14 manuscripts
that are known, right? So maybe in Howard's
day, they weren't known, but by the time I was looking
about 18 or 17 years ago when I was looking for
the more manuscripts, there was 14 known, and then I'm like, "Well, there's gotta be more than 14." So then I start digging and picking and end up finding more
and more manuscripts. And at one point, I had
exhausted all of my resources, meaning I'm looking through catalogs and all these old books and pulling up. But really what you
had to do back then is, you would write on a little piece of paper the number of a microfilm, and you'd hand that piece
of paper to the librarian, and he'd come back five, 10 minutes later, and he'd give you a microfilm, and you'd spool it out at look at it and on this analog reader,
very primitive, very difficult, took a huge amount of time
to just get anything done. And I decide, you know what? There's all these microfilms that are listed as miscellaneous. How do I know what's in those? Maybe those have a
segment of Hebrew Matthew, and some of them did! (laughs) And so, I'm pulling these
microfilms, and I might-- - Now this is at Hebrew University. - Well, at the National Library of Israel, which is part of the
Hebrew University library, they have tens of thousands of microfilms. What they did is, they sent people out to libraries around the
world, and they said, "We wanna photograph your manuscript and then make a microfilm
of that so that people in Jerusalem can see the
manuscript that's in Oxford. They can see the manuscript
that's in Russia. They can see the manuscript in New York by just going to one central location. This is before everything went online. So back then, and I'm talking
back then was just a year ago. This was the case, you had to go (laughs). I mean, it's not that long ago. - [Michael] Back in the days of yore. - Back in the ancient days
before everything went online, you had to go to the
National Library of Israel and pull these microfilms and look at them on this analog reader. Now a lot of these things
are online in the last year. But back then, in the ancient
days, you'd be looking, and I'll tell you, most
of the things I looked at had nothing to do with
Hebrew Matthew, right? It wasn't like everything
was a jackpot, right? I pull a microfilm that
said miscellaneous, and I'd find, OK, it's something
with to do with Maimonides. Another one, yeah, that the Mishnah. Another one, that's
some rabbinical treatise on the Kabbalah, right? - And there were thousands
of these to look through. - I mean, I haven't even
looked through everything. I'll tell you the truth, there's
probably more manuscripts. I have not looked through everything, but I looked through more and more and found some interesting things. And one of the things I found was actually after we had done a tour together in 2005 when I found the final two
manuscripts (laughing), and I had heard you teach the same thing, I believe we did 42 venues,
if I'm not mistaken. - [Michael] I think so. - Something like that. - And every night for months.
- Yeah, right. - And we'd, together, taught
about four hours a night, four to five hours.
- Right, well, yeah. - And it was, altogether,
I calculated once, it was 42 venues in 12 weeks. So it was very dense as well. And you didn't do the
same thing every night 'cause I think we were doing
two different teachings that were alternating, but
I heard that over 20 times, the same teaching that you were teaching about the genealogy in Matthew Chapter 1. And of course, this is an age-old problem, Matthew 1 gives the genealogy
of Joseph in one way, and then Luke gives it in a different way. And ancient Christians were
dealing with this problem. I actually did some interesting research and found out that this really
bothered the Christians. They're like, wait a minute. Our claim here is that Yeshua
is the adopted son of Joseph, and we're given Joseph's genealogy, and they don't line up, Matthew and Luke. Anybody who reads it is
gonna see immediately, they're completely different genealogies, both going back to David but
through different routes. And so one of the
solutions that they gave, and really creative. We call this intellectual
acrobatics in Hebrew. We call it (speaks Hebrew). - [Michael] Actually a
Hebrew term for it. (laughs) - (laughs) Well, it
literally means, in Hebrew, it's like when those biplanes
make the eights in the air, like this is what they're doing. It's these intellectual acrobatics to try to figure this out. What they were saying
is, for example, well, Joseph's father was actually married to his uncle's widow. In other words, it was
a Levirate marriage. And so one genealogy is for his uncle, and one is for his
biological father, right? One is for his genealogy
father, which is his uncle, and the other is for
his biological father. OK, but it doesn't say that anywhere. You guys just made that up, right? And if you wanna say that, fine. So you had a different
solution based on the Aramaic, which I heard over 20 times. Can you tell the people about that, what the Aramaic solution is? And then I'll explain
how the Hebrew comes in, which, I mean, I think changes everything. - And this is very important. This is a question that was
posed to me over 20 years ago, first time I came into Jerusalem, and a rabbi handed me a sheet
of paper, which I still have, and it's a $10,000
reward for any Christian who can answer all of these problems or contradictions in the New Testament. And I thought, "This is a coincidence. "I could use $10,000 right now," (laughs) because my room was broken into. I was robbed the night before.
- Oh, no. - But the question, number 10, that was a real stumper. And I went back to one of the rabbis that actually was
involved, a Jewish lawyer-- - What was that question? - that was involved in this. And I said, "It took me an entire week
to answer the first nine. "It took me 17 years to
answer the last one." Show from the Christian Bible that Yeshua is any blood
relative of King David. - [Nehemia] Mm-hmm. Interesting. - They know the problem.
- Interesting. - They know the problem, and yet we have Levirate marriage and all these things
that you just mentioned, they don't qualify, and they
know it doesn't qualify. - That's an interesting thing. You're saying there's another problem from a Jewish perspective, which is that the genealogy in Matthew
and the genealogy in Luke both are presented as
genealogies of Joseph. So even if you can reconcile them with some clever explanation
like the Levirate marriage, they're still no blood relative of Yeshua. - Right, right! Right. - Wow, that's a really
interesting part of that. - And so there's no way with
what we had to answer that except for, in the Aramaic,
it says that Joseph was, first of all, we have Joseph,
who is the son of Yacov, who is the gawra, the mighty man of Mary. And they translated it in King James. It translated into Greek as aner, which is just a man of full age. But it translated as husband of Miriam. And later on, it does say that Joseph, the husband of Miriam in verse 17, but we don't have the 14 generations that Matthew says we have. We only have 13 generations, and if Joseph is the husband of Miriam, and I said that it had to be,
as it is in Aramaic gawra, that has to be translated as father. That's what I said, and you weren't convinced of this at all. - So it's one of those things
where, could you translate, 'cause gawra or gavra means
something like man, right? And man, in the generic sense in Semitic languages means husband. There isn't actually a
word for husband and wife in Semitic languages,
there's man and woman, right? In Hebrew, it's ish and
ishah, man and woman. In Aramaic, it's similar,
it's gabraa and attha. So it does mean man and woman, right? So if you saw the word man
in a context like this, it really would be a stretch to say, "Well, it's a man, and
we're not saying which man, "and we're saying it's the father." That's kind of a stretch to
me, so I wasn't convinced. But I was looking for more
manuscripts of the Hebrew Matthew 'cause I had found, at
that point, I believe 26. And like I said, many of these were you throw something at the
wall to see what sticks. You pull out a microfilm. You spend an hour looking through it. Yeah, it's got nothing to do with Matthew. You move onto the next one,
and you do this day after day. And then you do find stuff! If you put in enough time and effort, you can find stuff that you
wouldn't expect to find. Well, I'm looking through, and there I am looking at this manuscript and it's a single page and it only has the genealogy
from Matthew Chapter 1. And it's a manuscript from Oxford University Bodleian Library, And I'm looking at it, and really what I'm doing is
cataloging what I found, right? When I find one of these sections
of Hebrew Matthew I say... Most of them aren't
complete, so all right. It starts in Chapter 1:1 and
it goes to Chapter 12:2, right? And so I'm cataloging them, I'm saying, "OK, what's the first verse,
what's the last verse?" And as I look at the last verse, I see where it says Yosef, avi Miriyam, Joseph the father of Miriam, meaning what you had speculated as essentially an interpretation
of the Aramaic is said explicitly in the Hebrew
Matthew in this one manuscript, and it's incontrovertibly
saying without any question that here in Matthew is the genealogy of Joseph, the father of Miriam. In other words, Miriam
married a man named Joseph, but also had a father named Joseph. - Right, right.
- That's the solution that you were suggesting
essentially as an interpretation, and in my view it was a
stretch of an interpretation. But here, there's no
interpretation, it's explicit: Joseph, the father of Miriam,
in this Hebrew document. And then, of course, I'm
looking for more manuscripts, and I find a second witness.
- There it is. - And that is a manuscript
that was in the JTS, the Jewish Theological
Seminary in New York. They had a manuscript that
said the exact same thing. Can we show this to the people? - [Michael] Yeah, this is it. - So here, so this is the manuscript, and at the end of the line here it says, Yosef avi Miryam, Joseph
the father of Miriam. Now, when I discovered this years ago, I don't know if I should say this. So I did something I
wasn't supposed to do. Maybe I won't say. I had a photo that I
wasn't supposed to have. (Michael laughs) But it was really low resolution. - [Michael] You gave it to somebody that wasn't supposed to have it. (laughs) - Right, OK, I won't go into details, but basically, it was a
horrible, low-resolution photo. Now, for the first time ever,
as of literally yesterday, 'cause we were sitting down talking about, what are we gonna share with the people, and you said, "Nehemia, you
found the thousand manuscripts "with the name 'cause all
these manuscripts are online. "Is the Joseph, father of
Miriam manuscript on my line?" And I said, "I don't know. I didn't look." So we looked, and it was! (laughing) Now we have a high-resolution. This one is in gray scale. It's much better quality
image than what we had before, and you can clearly
see, if you read Hebrew, it's as clear as day.
- As we print this out, you can see the fibers. - Oh, and the other one is in color. You can actually see wrinkles in the leather that it's written on. And the parchment is unbelievable. Yeah, you see where there were fibers and wrinkles in the leather. It's of that high quality 'cause it's color photographed
from Oxford University. And now what back in the day
(laughs) not that long ago, I had to pull the microfilm
and show you black and white and try to do something with it. Now these are available
at the click of a button to anybody who, at least,
knows how to find it, right? Which, that's not so small thing either. But I love that you're gonna
be doing is sharing this with people on television where
they can see for themselves! Don't believe the Jew from Jerusalem that it's there in the
manuscript, the Hebrew manuscript. You can see it for yourself. I love that we live in
this period of history that we can now get this, I mean, when we hear about this in Danial, talks about how knowledge will increase, and I believe it, Michael,
that we are in this period of knowledge increasing
where we don't have to rely on what it says in the encyclopedia. We can actually go and see the
original text for ourselves, the original sources. That's such a powerful thing. Look, and I've said this
many times, Michael. I was born and raised in Illinois, but in my heart, I'm from Missouri, which is the Show Me State. I wanna see it with my own two eyes, and today, we live in this
period where I can pull this up on the computer and I can
show you where it says it! And you can see the fibers and
the imperfections in the ink, and you can see where... I mean, there's two miracles here. One is that this manuscript survive. The other is that I found it, right? 'Cause this is one of 90,000 manuscripts. This is a single page out
of 90,000 manuscripts. - A single page, and that
is all of the Hebrew Matthew that exists in that paper. - In that manuscript, right.
- In that manuscript. - And you have to
understand what happened is, in the Middle Ages,
Jewish manuscripts were a little different than
Christian manuscripts. Christian manuscripts had official centers where they would be copied. What would happen with
Jewish manuscripts is, you'd have a rich Jew who was
usually a merchant or a doctor and he would go to a scribe
and say, "I wanna study. "Make me a collection of
books that I can study." And so they'd put 10 pages of Maimonides and 20 pages of the Talmud and five pages of the
Hebrew New Testament, right? I mean, that kinda thing happened, right? And in this page, in this instance, he has one page of the
Hebrew New Testament. Why does he have that? Maybe the guy wasn't that
interested in this topic, right? And so the scribe would, he had a bunch of books on his shelf, and he'd pull out the book, and he'd say, "OK, my patron who ordered this manuscript "isn't really interested in
the New Testament so much. "I'm just gonna copy
one page from my source. Put that back on the shelf. Now it's some pages from Maimonides. I mean, that's very typical. So that's why you have
many, many manuscripts in collections of Hebrew
manuscripts around the world in libraries where
it'll say miscellaneous, and God only knows,
literally in some cases, what's in those miscellaneous documents. There could be more. Now, (laughing) can I share
something with the people that I discovered while I was doing this? I just gotta tell them the main part, OK? - [Michael] Oh, OK, OK, OK. (laughs) - So I'm looking for more
manuscripts of Hebrew Matthew. I ultimately find 28. I'm sure there's more out
there, so I keep looking, and I'm pounding away,
pounding away, pounding away. Looking at the microfilms, and I pull out this
microfilm from the Vatican. And as I'm looking
through, I'm saying, "Wow. "This is a really strange
combination of documents." There's a page here
from a children's book. There's another page
from a book on Kabbalah. And they're not from the same scribe. What I was describing before in those miscellaneous
collections is a single scribe. He had a bunch of books on his shelf, and he copied different sections into a manuscript for a patron. Well, this is different. These are loose pages,
usually two to four pages, and it'll be two pages of book in German, a printed book in German. Most of these are Hebrew documents. You can see by the writing style, they're different scribes
from different centuries. And I'm going through, and all of a sudden I find
a page from a Hebrew Gospel, and it's not Matthew. Now let me explain again
what I'm talking about. So there's miscellaneous pages
in this box in the Vatican, and somebody from Jerusalem said, "Hey, I've been sent
here to make photographs "and microfilms of everything
in your collection." - So this is literally like a junk box-- - It's a junk box, it's
literally a junk box. - In the Vatican of manuscripts. They don't know what they are, just a page here and there.
- Well, what happens is, these manuscripts are in
the Vatican for centuries, and a page falls out, and
they find it in the bookshelf, or they find it on the
floor, and they say, (hisses) "Where does this go?" We don't have a computerized
database centuries ago to find out where this page goes. Put it in the junk box, and
this goes on for centuries, where these pages build up. And now there's hundreds
and hundreds of pages in the junk box in the Vatican. And so decades ago, and
Israeli scholar goes there, a photographer, and he takes
photographs and brings it back. He doesn't know what's in the box. He doesn't care what's in the box. His job was to just get
photographs of everything. So he photographed the junk box, and I'm looking through
it around 2001 or so, and I find in the junk box bunch of things that have nothing to do
with what I'm interested in. And all of a sudden, I find a page from a Hebrew gospel, which isn't Matthew. Can I tell the people what it is, or do we have to wait
for a future episode. - We have to wait on that
because I want you to read it. - So you'll let me read it to the people? - Read it, I want you to put
it on the screen and read it-- - OK, I'm excited! - So everyone can see
what was in the junk box at the Vatican and this is-- - So spoiler alert! It's four pages from the
Gospels, and they're not Matthew! I won't say what they are yet.
- OK, all right, all right. - I've been waiting around 17
years to share this publicly. - Right, and I've been
waiting for that long for you to tell me what you've found. - Well, and I told you I found it, but what I didn't wanna
do was create a situation where I didn't actually have... Now these photos are
on the Vatican website, and I have high-resolution color photos. So now we've got it in our hands, right? - It can't disappear. - It can't disappear
from the junk box anymore and end up in somebody's
living room or their garage. And if it does, it doesn't matter. I've got the high-resolution
photographs to show people, and so I'm really excited about this, that you're gonna let me share this. I've been literally
waiting since around 2001 to share this with people. It's really exciting stuff. (giggles) - It was at Albuquerque when
you shared the photograph with me about Yosef avi Miriam. I left there, I said, "Now I go to print with
The Chronological Gospels." - [Nehemia] Oh, wow. - And that's why The
Chronological Gospels because, that's why I say it
took 17 years to answer that one question that the rabbis asked, and so it is printed. I actually have the
photographs of the photograph that you gave me and it's in here, so people can read it on their
own because, see, in this, I contend that I have solved
all the apparent contradictions that are in the English New
Testament, in the Gospels. It took me 38 years to do it.
- Wow. (laughs) - And so, it was a long project, but when you gave me that piece, I knew, this is it. And so now it is available,
the photograph of it, is available in The Chronological Gospels. And even the large print, it's available for everyone to participate
in that discovery. But we're gonna have Nehemia come back. And I want you to now share with us what's in the Vatican junk box, and there's more than
the Gospel of Matthew. You're gonna see some things, and I'm gonna have Nehemia read
it, translate it on the air. And so, I want you to get
your Bibles out, get ready, because you can mark in
your Bibles the accuracy of what is in the Hebrew... I'm not gonna say it.
(Nehemia laughing) Of what is in these other texts. Nehemia, thank you. Thank you for this
beginning of this update. I know, there's just a
volume of information that you have for us, but if you would, close this particular session
with the Aaranic blessing. - For sure. Yehovah (speaking in Hebrew) Father in heaven, please bless all the
people around the world who are watching at this time
when knowledge is increasing. Put your blessing upon all the people who want that knowledge, who
thirst for that knowledge. (speaking in Hebrew) May He give you peace. Amen. - Amen. Well, Shabbat shalom, torah fans. (speaks in Hebrew) Have a good week, and we'll see you back here
next week with Nehemia Gordon as we reveal the other Hebrew Gospels. Shalom, bye-bye. (exciting jazz ensemble music)
