Speaker 1: Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Speaker 3: Wes, very nice to meet you. Joe, pleasure. So, I, like many people, was introduced to you because of the debate you had with Billy Carson. Quote, unquote. You know, it's one of those things where it's very unfortunate when people get caught with their pants down. And I'm not an expert in many things. But the things that I am an expert on, you could wake me up at 4 o'clock in the morning and ask me about those things. And I go, oh yeah, no. Yeah. This is what it is. Yeah. I know, you know, like martial arts or comedy. I could tell you, I could give you an expert version of reality. It seems like he does not have that. And he is a wonderful talker and it's a lot of fun. I like watching his videos. I love all that ancient history stuff and even the most ridiculous tinfoil hat aspects of ancient. It's fun. It's entertainment. But I know that there's a different, like Andrew Schultz and I had a discussion about this. Like he said when he had Billy on the podcast, he said, we're not going to fucking research anything. We're not going to search anything. We're not going to do anything. We'll just let him talk because it's fun. Yeah. Andrew's awesome. But when he was on with you, it was quite apparent that you are an actual expert in the Bible and in many religious texts and that he didn't necessarily have the facts straight. Yeah. What was the fallout of all of that?

Speaker 4: Well, it's interesting you say the expert thing because I literally was asked to do it 24 hours beforehand. So I had like the least amount of preparation going into it. And I was okay with that because I'd listen to Billy Carson. Well, and I listened to the stuff he'd said. So I knew enough about the ways that he'd articulated things about the ancient Near East and the Bible and Christianity to know enough that his level is pretty surface. But the fallout was that not only did he not want us to release the conversation, but then he started throwing out cease and desist letters and then he started trying to sue people. So, I mean, I was never worried because I'm a Canadian and anybody who's tried to sue internationally knows that. Good luck. Yeah, right. As far as I understand it, he would have had to file a claim in a Canadian court that would have been reviewed to have legal precedence that he'd have to prove that he could win.

Speaker 3: What was his argument?

Speaker 4: Apart from the fact that he was embarrassed that he lost?

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Speaker 4: The cease and desist letter, yeah. The cease and desist letter said, I don't want you to use my name or my face in anything going forward. And anything you've used up until this point, you need to remove. And I was given 24 hours notice to do this.

Speaker 3: But if you're a public figure, he's clearly a public figure, is that even – can you actually say – No.

Speaker 4: No, no, you can't do that.

Speaker 3: So, what was the – does he have a lawyer that wrote the cease and desist? Yeah.

Speaker 4: Is he a lawyer? No. It's interesting because he – Mark Menard, who was the guy who hosted this interaction, he sent Mark a handwritten one. And then he eventually gave Mark an official one from his lawyer. So, I actually was sent one by his lawyer, which I, you know, screenshotted, posted publicly online and said, I'm going to ignore this. And then – but he'd sent Mark, who was the podcast host. As far as I'm aware, numerous cease and desists. And Anton, who was the media manager, he'd sent a number of cease and desists.

Speaker 3: It's unfortunate. It is unfortunate. You're – when you get caught with your pants down, you're supposed to say, I got caught with my pants down. Yeah. That's what you're supposed to do. Yeah. Especially if you're public. Like, it's very clear that you're incorrect.

Speaker 4: Well, the irony of this situation is if he just kind of left it, it probably wouldn't have made anywhere close to the splash. No. That it's made. And we told him that. We said like, hey, Barbra Streisand effect is going to happen.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Like, you're a big enough personality that if I make a video and say like, hey, I had this conversation, didn't go well for Billy, and Billy doesn't want it released, that's going to start to gain traction sooner or later.

Speaker 3: Yeah. It's – you know, the problem is to really delve into these subjects. It takes a tremendous amount of research. Years and years and years of research. You really have to know what you're talking about. Most of us don't. Well, especially with languages.

Speaker 4: Yes. Like, we didn't get into it. I hoped to have in our initial conversation kind of pressed him a little bit more on the more overt things he'd said about like Greek and Hebrew and Sumerian because I've studied a number of ancient languages. And when you study the languages, you realize the complexities of these things. And so when someone hasn't and they're making statements that are obviously indicative of someone who hasn't studied them, it's super apparent. Right. And so I think it's one thing to be making claims about, say, like Christian history or the Bible. But when you start to get into like linguistics and philology, it gets messy. And if you don't know what you're talking about, it gets really apparent really fast.

Speaker 3: So the gentleman who brought the two of you together, what was his goal? Like what was he trying to do and how did he approach you?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So he's friends – or I should say was friends. He was friends with Billy. They live in the same neighborhood. Oh, boy. It's become pretty rough for him. So he released a video yesterday, which I think people should go and check out, where he kind of gives his perspective. He's been friends with Billy for years. He was at Billy's wedding. Billy had 15 people at his wedding. Mark was one of them. And they live in this community in Florida. Their sons are friends. Their wives would hang out. And Mark told me – he's like, I've been hearing Billy say, you know, he wants to debate. Nobody will debate him for years. And so as far as I think Mark was concerned, he was giving Billy the opportunity that Billy had told a lot of people he wanted. Right. And so he – you know, this was set up in that Mark and Billy have been talking. They've been on each other's podcasts in the past, and they've been friends, but more like business colleagues. Like Mark has come out and said, I hadn't really gone into the stuff he'd said about Christianity or ancient religions or whatever that much. Mark is a – he's a Christian. He has like a public profession of faith. And him and Billy had talked about the fact that they wanted to talk about, like, faith stuff and some of their differences. And that Mark was kind of prepping for this, and his media manager, Anton, had sent him some of my stuff and said, like, Wes has done some stuff on some things that Billy has talked about. And, you know, maybe you should look up some of this stuff, you know, read into it. And Mark, very last minute, was like, well, I'm – I feel inadequate. Do you think I could just ask Wes? And so he DMed me on Instagram and just kind of laid this out, like, hey, I'm going to have Billy in my studio in 24 hours. I can tell him you're coming. I can tell him who you are. I can, like, give him your background. But would you be willing to come? And so that's what I did. And so that's how it got set up.

Speaker 3: So correct me if I'm wrong, but was Billy aware that this was going to be a debate or did he think it was going to be just a discussion? Like what did he think it was going to be?

Speaker 4: No, he'd been given all of the prerequisites. Like he knew we're going to go over some of his stuff that he'd said about Christianity, that I was going to come in, who I was, what my name was, some of my background. And that part of the conversation was going to be me kind of asking him some clarifying questions and rebutting some of the things that he said. So he – you didn't watch the three-hour live stream that they did, did you? I watched chunks of it.

Speaker 3: Okay. I watched a little bit. I'm like, oof. And then I shut it off. Then I watched a little bit more. Oof.

Speaker 4: Yeah. So unfortunately, Billy there says he had no idea going in. And, I mean, as Mark said in his video that he released yesterday, I mean, that's poundly false. He knew what it was going to be, who was going to be involved, and even some of the things that we would be talking about.

Speaker 3: Okay. And he also was claiming that it wasn't a debate, that he had been involved in debates before and that he would prepare for debates. But this is something he didn't prepare. But, again, it's like if you ask me about things that I know about, you can wake me up out of a full sleep and give me a couple seconds. I'll go, okay, this is what it is. If you know, you know.

Speaker 4: And it wasn't a debate in one sense. Like, it wasn't. Like, we didn't do, you know, opening statements and cross-examination and rebuttal. Right. It really was a conversation. Right. And it only kind of turned into a debate in the sense that Billy, I think, got caught out. And so the things that were talked about kind of showed that, you know, that he needed to go on the offense. Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Well, again, it's all very unfortunate. But the good part of it is I was introduced to you and your work. There you go. Very, very extensive and very fascinating. And the videos that you sent me on Instagram, I watched both of those today as well. Awesome. So really, really interesting stuff. And your knowledge of the history of the biblical texts and Codex Sinaiticus and all these different things, very, very fascinating stuff. So let's just get into your background. Like, how did you get started in your research and how did you get into this? Yeah.

Speaker 4: So I grew up in a Christian home. My parents were missionaries. So I was born in Pakistan and spent a portion of my childhood in the Middle East with my parents working in Amman, Jordan. And then we came back from the Middle East when I was pretty young. And so I grew up in this very, like, diverse home in the sense that my mom was a missionary kid who grew up in India. And so we had a lot of, like, worldview kind of perspectives represented in our home. Like, I often say we had the Bhagavad Gita and the Book of Mormon and the Koran on the shelf. Oh, wow.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And I think, you know, that always, although my parents were never overt with this kind of stuff, they always had the perspective that, you know, we're Christians. We believe that this worldly perspective is true. But, hey, this stuff isn't scary. This stuff isn't, you know, off limits. You know, we can investigate these things. And they never said that outright. But I always felt this kind of attitude of that kind of perspective. And, you know, having been exposed in majority Muslim contexts and seeing that kind of stuff and my mom having, like, a pretty good knowledge growing up in India of things like Hinduism and Sikhism. And I don't know how much of the kind of testimony stuff you watched of mine, but just before my 12th birthday, I actually was diagnosed with a neurological condition that left me paralyzed from the waist down.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I did see all that. Yeah.

Speaker 4: So that's a condition that's called acute transverse myelitis, which I often say is a word you can forget as soon as you hear it because it's a complicated one. But what happened was that I had the flu and my body's immune system attacked the nerve endings at the base of my spinal cord and caused swelling and cut off the communication between my brain and my legs.

Speaker 3: Instantaneously, right?

Speaker 4: Yeah, basically. I'd gone down for a nap. I was camping out in the bathroom floor for flu reasons. And when I woke up about 30 minutes later, I couldn't feel my legs. And so, yeah, that's the acute part of the acute transverse myelitis was that it was basically instantaneous. And that's what made the diagnosis as severe as it was. Like they said there's a 30% chance. It was like a small percentage of probability that I would recover, but a much higher percentage that there would be a lot of either complete paralysis for the rest of my life or some kind of issues with walking. It's related to like diseases like multiple sclerosis in that it's neurological and it affects that kind of thing. And one month from the day that I woke up and couldn't feel my legs, I woke up on a Saturday morning, got out of bed, walked over to my wheelchair and sat down.

Speaker 3: One month?

Speaker 4: One month. Yeah. January 8th to February 8th. Exactly.

Speaker 3: Very fortunate.

Speaker 4: You're telling me. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3: What treatment did they give you?

Speaker 4: So initially they gave me steroids to reduce the swelling. So I spent 11 days in the hospital being overseen by pediatric neurologists and specialists in this because it's a very rare condition. And so they were studying me and they gave me steroids and they did some other tests. But really there was no true kind of treatment in that. So I was doing physiotherapy. I'd be pulled out of gym class in school. But it was a little bit of a joke. Like, can you move your legs? You know, can you? Could you move anything? No, nothing. Could you feel anything? No. No. In fact, when I was in the hospital, I'd wake up and there'd be pinpricks in my legs because they'd be testing where the reactions were and they'd have used a syringe. And so I'd wake up and there'd be these tiny little pinpricks in my legs because they'd been testing while I was asleep to see what the kind of, you know, whether it was registering neurologically with anything. But I couldn't feel anything. I was fully a paraplegic.

Speaker 3: Wow.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I experienced this what I consider to be a true supernatural experience in that I walked into the hospital to the doctors that had overseen me, and they were the first ones that used the word miracle. They said we really don't have any type of medical explanation. And mainly because there was no atrophy. Because of the cutoff of the communication, my muscles in those 30 days were fine. In a short amount of time. But they said there should be something, and we're picking up nothing.

Speaker 3: That's crazy. Because I've broken limbs before and had them in casts, and just in the six weeks that you have a cast on, you have massive atrophy.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. So that was the kind of predication for them using the word miracle. And so that's kind of it marks this what I do consider to be like this supernatural something happened.

Speaker 3: Did you feel like that was like a calling that, like, led you to a very specific mindset after that?

Speaker 4: It's an interesting way of putting it. I mean, as much as you could at 12 years old.

Speaker 3: Right. But it must have had a significant impact on your psyche and your perceptions.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, it definitely led to things like later in life I got very involved in athletics and in track and field. And part of that was feeling a conviction that I knew what it was like to not be able to wake up and walk out of the room. Right. And so taking that pretty seriously and competing competitively well into university. Because even though I wasn't the most naturally talented individual on the team, I felt like a motivation to be able to, OK, I don't want to waste this.

Speaker 1: Right.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Right. And then later on, in terms of your original question, the difference in that was that I realized, OK, there's something out there, something happened that I can't totally explain on naturalistic terms. But how do we go from that to saying, OK, well, then this worldview is correct. And so despite being raised in a Christian home, I felt like my parents telling me what was true is not the worst reason to believe it, but it's also not the best. And so as a teenager, I did a lot of kind of soul searching. And like I said, I was able to do that to a certain level of degree because of the openness within my household where I did. I pulled the Koran off the shelf and I read it front to back, just trying to figure out, OK, what's going on here? What's all this about? Right. And it was through that period of like searching and it wasn't a crisis of faith. That would be an over exaggerated term, but it was kind of-

Speaker 3: An inspiration of faith perhaps.

Speaker 4: Maybe. Yeah. And I would go, OK, well, what do these guys believe? Right. What does this perspective hold? Right. And that was about a period of about a year and a half. And at the end of that, I did truly feel that, OK, well, I think in the ways that I, in my limited ability as a teenager to investigate these things, I think that Christianity is true. But it wasn't until I went to university where I was engaging with people of other faith perspectives in Toronto at York University where I was talking to Muslims and Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and atheists, you know, from the gamut. And I was having these conversations and I was expressing kind of my perspective on what I believed. And they would say things like, well, that sounds great, Wes, but, you know, that's all the Bible. You can't trust that. And so that's where I started to take the- Did the Mormon say that to you?

Speaker 3: Well, yes. Because that's kind of crazy.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. Well, in the sense that-

Speaker 3: The Mormon was the craziest one. Yeah. Because we know who wrote it.

Speaker 4: Yeah. And he's a shady dude. He is a shady dude. Well, no, they did in the sense that the Book of Mormon trumps the Bible. So they would believe. I think it's the 10th article of the Mormon Church is that they believe the Bible insofar as it is translated. And so they have this perspective that there's been things that have been affected. I mean, Joseph Smith made his own translation of the Bible.

Speaker 3: And it's rough. And when he was 14.

Speaker 4: Well, I think it was later on that he made the Joseph Smith translation. Oh, really? I don't know if the official LDS Church ascribes to the Joseph Smith translation. Because I think they even see, like, this is- We know what the Greek and the Hebrew looks like. And this is not even- Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, he was a legitimate con man. Which is fascinating. People have such a deep search for meaning and truth that if you are confident. Which is what a con man is. A confidence man. A confidence man. If you are really good at expressing yourself and really, like, you show confidence in your convictions, you can persuade a lot of people.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Confidence is not competency.

Speaker 3: Yes.

Speaker 4: And unfortunately, those things get confused a lot.

Speaker 3: It covers up for competency sometimes. Yeah.

Speaker 4: Yeah. In religion and politics and, like, all sorts of things, right?

Speaker 3: And everything. Yeah. And everything. I think because people want to- Like, it's very difficult to be an expert in a subject. And I think people want to believe that they are. And they don't want to do the work. Right.

Speaker 4: You know? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that's why, you know, experts themselves feel a lot of inadequacy. Sure. Is because they study a subject and realize, like, I'm never going to get to the bottom of this hole.

Speaker 3: Right. Right. So, unfortunately- Yeah. These things are very, very nuanced and very deep. Yeah. Especially when you're talking about ancient religion.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: I mean, you're talking about things that were a oral tradition for a long time before they're even written down. So, it's a long, long trudge to get to the bottom of things.

Speaker 4: Yeah. What I was trying to get Billy in that conversation that I had with him to get to the bottom of partly was a question of methodology. Like, I think he got frustrated at me at one point because I kept asking, you know, what are the criteria that you're using when you're looking at one source versus another source and coming up with a conclusion? Because in historiography, it's the inference to the best explanation. And so, there are different ways that you go about that, different methodologies. And historians very rarely disagree on the data and evidence. It's the conclusions that you draw from that. Right. But then there are some things that are just out and out false. And I don't think Billy totally knew what I was talking about. But it's those criteria that we look at when we look at something that does come from like an oral tradition and eventually gets written down and becomes a literary text. And then you analyze that on the basis of it being a literary text.

Speaker 3: This is sort of the problem between with being self-taught rather than conventionally academically trained. Definitely. Where you're trained in very specific disciplines and you're taught to understand the foundation before you understand, like, how to put a window in. Yeah. There's a lot of things that you have to know from the base, from the beginning. Like, do you have a waterline? Do you have power? Like, there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of things going on when you're trying to construct an expertise in something, especially something that is so complicated. And one of the things that I've gotten out of – I've probably watched probably 20 hours of your stuff over the last couple of weeks. And you've spent a lot of time on this. This is not a casual cursory examination of these texts and of religion. This is a long, long journey. And that's what's particularly exceptional and really interesting to me because I'm always fascinated by people that have really gone down the road. Like, really, really, really gone down the road because you don't meet a whole lot of them. I know a lot of Christians that can quote you some versions of the New Testament, some psalms. But the real – go all the way to the back, way, way, way, way, way. And that's what you've done that's very interesting. So this is like – how old are you?

Speaker 5: I'm 33.

Speaker 3: Which is very young for someone who has the depth of knowledge that you have. So you've been doing this essentially from that miraculous moment. That ignited this spark even though you came from a missionary background and then from then on. So for the past 11 years, 12 years or 20 years, 30 years, like it's your whole life essentially. It's all been this.

Speaker 4: Yeah. To a certain degree. I mean I went to university with full intention of going into the police force. I did like my undergraduate studies and then I kind of mapped out this plan that I was going to become a police detective. And that was my goal. And I think I realized – Why that?

Speaker 6: Why that?

Speaker 3: Because you like getting to the bottom of things? It could be. Because you do, right? Yeah. Well – Someone who spends 21 years like getting to the bottom of a religion, you'd probably be pretty good at cracking cases.

Speaker 4: I hope so. I think that might have been part of it. I also – there was an aspect of when I was in high school where they were like, you got to figure out what you're doing or you're going to be homeless and you're going to die. Yeah. I remember that part. I felt that like – That was a terrifying moment in life. Man, I always tell people when they're in high school like, you can chill out. Like it's going to be okay. I don't think so. You don't think so? I wonder if it's different now because – I think you should have a certain amount of desperation.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Because I think that it ignites the fire within you to do something.

Speaker 4: There's probably something to that. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. People that have been too pampered and taken care of and didn't have a fear of everything going completely sideways, they never really get the momentum that's necessary to accomplish things in life.

Speaker 4: Yeah. There's probably something to that. Yeah.

Speaker 3: I mean desperation. A little desperation fear I think is good for you. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody wants to be comfortable. I don't think that's necessarily a good path. I mean I think you should have perspective and you should enjoy your life as a young person and have those moments. But you should also realize you got work to do.

Speaker 4: Well, and stress is good, right? Stress creates perseverance. Yes. And creates patterns that allow you to succeed. Yes. I mean this is like Athletics 101, right?

Speaker 3: I think that's very important. You got to push yourself.

Speaker 4: And I think actually part of that also led in like I'm a big believer in athletic discipline needs to go hand in hand. I mean I know you are too. It needs to go hand in hand with any other type of like whether it's an intellectual endeavor or like because it trains you to be able to go into places that are uncomfortable. Yes. And that uncomfortability allows you to then become stronger. Yeah. And especially when you're with people who are better than you. I mean when I was running at York University, there were two guys on our team who – because I was okay individually but I ran for the relay team. I was a sprinter. And one of the guys was part of the – they medaled when Canada medaled at Worlds. He was part of that relay team. And then my other training partner, Busy, he ended up competing in Tokyo for Canada. And when you're beside someone who is like just a genetic freak, you're like, oh, okay. Like that's different. Yeah. Right? And it both pushes you but it also reveals your limitations where that doesn't inhibit you. Like you shouldn't – that shouldn't discourage you to go up to that line of being able to push yourself. But at the exact same time, it creates a realism that like I'm never going to – I can train as much as I want to. I'm not going to run like that. Right? Yeah. And so, yeah. But going back to what you were asking, like I think there was part of that in wanting to go into the police force. But then realizing like around my third year of university that my passions and motivations were very, very different. And that I didn't know how to go about that or where the proper place to do that was. But I knew that I needed to lean into that to some degree, particularly with the Bible. Because I was claiming that this Bible talks about this guy, Jesus, and I'm a Christian. So, I have a friend, Andy Bannister. He's out in the UK. And he says if you take Christ out of Christian, all you're left with is Ian. And Ian's a great guy who's not going to save you from your sins. And so, like if I'm wrong about the Bible, those people who push back on me, right, those skeptics of various worldviews. If the things they were saying about the Bible were true, then it did actually legitimately undermine what I believed. And so, I needed to take that seriously. I had an obligation to actually investigate those things as far as I could.

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Speaker 3: What is the oldest version of the Bible or the stories in the Bible? Is it the Dead Sea Scrolls or are there older versions?

Speaker 4: The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest of the Old Testament. So when they were discovered, I mean, so they were discovered in 1946 to 1957. And at that point during their discovery, they pushed back a lot of our previous oldest manuscripts a thousand years, which was a big deal. How old are they? They're anywhere between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century BC. So it's kind of tricky because the Dead Sea Scrolls are, they're like a library that we refer to. So it's approximately 970 documents, but it's distributed out between 10,000 and 11,000 fragments. So there's a lot going on there. Right. So and some of these, I mean, are so fragmentary that you look at them and it's like confetti. Because they're, I mean, 3,000 years old, but not quite that. They're like 2,000 plus years old. Animal skins too, right? Well, all sorts of things, animal skins, papyri. And then some of them are actually done on copper. Really? They're like inscribed in copper. Oh, wow. Yeah. One of the coolest ones, actually this relates because I know you're a Marco Allegro guy. The first time I was introduced to Marco Allegro was not his Sacred Mushroom and the Cross stuff, but he published a book on what's called the Copper Scroll. Because part of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments is this inscribed document on copper, which is an ancient treasure map.

Speaker 3: Can you see it? Yeah.

Speaker 4: A little online? Yeah.

Speaker 3: Jamie, pull up the, hey.

Speaker 4: There it is. Wow. Yeah. So it's in Hebrew and it is wild. So it has these sites where it says buried treasure is found. Whoa. And there have been a number of guys who have tried to like look for it. Does it say what the treasure is? You know what? Off the top of my head, I don't know. Look how crazy that language is. I know, right? But the Dead Sea Scroll, so it's like stuff like this. It's papyri, it's animal skins, and it's a number of different languages. So the vast majority of it is in Hebrew, but there's also a lot in Aramaic and then Greek and in Nabatean. So it's like an umbrella term to describe a whole bunch of literature. So a lot of it is biblical because it was written by this group out in the desert called the Essenes who lived at Qumran. But then other stuff of it is just Jewish literature of various stripes that were hidden in caves all around the Dead Sea.

Speaker 3: So the scrolls, as it were, aren't all biblical. Some of them is just accounting of the times.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Oh, Jamie, look at that. 65 tons of gold and 26 tons of silver.

Speaker 3: 65 tons.

Speaker 7: That's a lot.

Speaker 3: That's a lot.

Speaker 4: How many Cuban links can you make out of that? You can see why someone would try to track that down. Boy. Yeah. Wow. And when we're talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, you have ones like the Great Isaiah Scroll, which is fully complete. It's a copy of the book of Isaiah and it's a full complete scroll. But then other ones are so fragmentary that we think they're written in Hebrew, but we can't actually tell. Oh, wow. Because no one's willing to piece these. And this is true for a lot of stuff. So like the largest grouping of papyri literature in the world is the Oxyrhynchus Collection, which we get a good portion of our oldest manuscripts of the New Testament from. But if you go to Oxford and you look at the Oxyrhynchus Collection, you pull out that drawer. It just it's like a jigsaw puzzle. And you're like. Right. Like most of it is untranslated, untranscribed because the amount of man hours that it would just take to even put it together. Never mind. Then go to the effort of transcribing and translating it. And most people are not willing to do that.

Speaker 3: And if you're missing chunks, how do you even make that puzzle connect?

Speaker 4: Well, that's part of. So part of my area of specialty in research is in regards to that. So I study paratextual features. We're really going to get nerdy today. Let's get nerdy. So you look at the features of the manuscripts, not necessarily the words, but things like the spaces between the words, the development of punctuation, indentation or outdentation. And I look at the margins and I try to, based on the average size of manuscripts in and around that time, and also the average spacing of words and the margins on top, bottom and the side, recreate what the manuscript could have possibly looked like.

Speaker 3: Whoa.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 3: So when you say the book of Isaiah is intact, how similar is it to the book of Isaiah that's in the Bible?

Speaker 4: So that one is fascinating. So this isn't true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But when we discovered the Great Isaiah Scroll, previous to that, the earliest copy of Isaiah that we had was in the Masoretic Text, which is in the Middle Ages. Whoa. Yeah. So it was literally a thousand years. We literally pushed back our understanding of Isaiah a thousand years. And the thing that really shocked scholars, like I said, this isn't true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but one of the things that shocked them about Isaiah was that it was word for word identical to the Masoretic Text. Word for word. Word for word. Wow. Yeah. Is that it right there? So this is the Great Isaiah Scroll.

Speaker 3: So if you go to Israel and you go-

Speaker 4: Wait, is that papyrus? Yes. No, I think that one is vellum. What is vellum? So I should be more specific. So parchment is animal skin. Vellum can be used synonymously with the term parchment. Technically, parchment is like baby animal skin, like calves or lambs. But this is the Great Isaiah Scroll. And you can see they stitched together the parchment because it's so long.

Speaker 3: God, it's so beautiful. The way they wrote back then was so beautiful. I mean, maybe it's because I can't read it. Maybe if I saw English, I would think that's beautiful too. Yeah. Especially script. Like cursive. Cursive is very beautiful. But that is so fascinating because, I mean, obviously coming from a point of ignorance, the letters look so similar. This is what I always got about cuneiform. When I look at that, I'm like, it's just one particular sort of character that's this way and that way and up and down.

Speaker 4: Cuneiform is wild. Weird. It's really, really tricky. And that's the thing when, like, if you're studying ancient languages and you start to study Greek, like Greek, the Greek alphabet is similar enough that you're like, okay, alpha looks like an A, right? Delta looks like a D. So you can figure it out. And so it tricks you because you start off and you're like, oh, this is phobos, fear. I don't know what a phobia is. And you get this false sense of, like, encouragement. And then, you know, the further you go down the rabbit hole, you're like, oh, I'm screwed. But Hebrew is completely the opposite. Because the, like, writing system is so different, the learning curve is hard at the beginning. And then you're like, everything is just three letters with a suffix added to it. And so it feels like whereas the opposite is true with Greek. Greek, you're like, ah, I get this. And then when you really go down the rabbit hole, you're like, oh, crap. None of the things that I learned about that are supposed to be standard, all of them have exceptions. Wow. But, yeah, cuneiform is a wild one. Do you know Rick Strassman is?

Speaker 3: No. He's a scholar and he did a lot of work, early work, FDA approved work on psychedelics. And he spent 16 years teaching himself to read ancient Hebrew.

Speaker 5: Nice.

Speaker 3: Yeah. So because he wanted to really understand the Bible from the original source of ancient Hebrew. And to understand it in context. Ancient Hebrew, the way the words are structured is so different than English and that something must be lost in translation. So he spent 16 years teaching himself how to read ancient Hebrew. That is such dedication. 16 years.

Speaker 4: That's a long time. That seems too long.

Speaker 3: Well, you're self-taught. I mean, he's doing it himself.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Self-teaching. Yeah. I self-taught myself Greek at first. And then when I started learning it formally, I realized how much you miss when you self-teach yourself. Oh, I'm sure.

Speaker 3: Well, how many people can teach you ancient Hebrew? How many courses are available?

Speaker 4: Oh, you can take it at any graduate college. Yeah?

Speaker 3: Yeah. And is it, it's not something that we know what it sounded like, correct? Yeah.

Speaker 4: I mean, this is the big debate with ancient languages. Right. Like, same thing with, yeah, arguably we don't know how any of this was pronounced. Right. I mean, modern Greek speakers get really mad at me when I say that because they're like, of course we know how it's pronounced. Pronounce it like we pronounce it. Right. And on all my videos where I'm like site translating Greek manuscripts, all of, like, there's so many comments of modern Greek speakers getting mad at how I'm pronouncing things. But realistically, yeah, we don't really know how most of the things are pronounced with anything.

Speaker 3: But isn't that very bizarre when you're translating? Like, if you go back to like, say, the Epic of Gilgamesh, we don't even know what the word sounded like. Yeah. We kind of know what they represent. And then we do a literal translation of what they represent. But if you've never heard, no one can speak ancient Sumerian.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, Sumerian is a wild one because it's a language isolate. What does that mean? So Hebrew is an Afro Semitic language. So Hebrew is related to all of these other languages like Aramaic and Akkadian. But language isolates have no adjacent comparisons. Whoa. So because I tried to teach myself Sumerian and I failed and I just gave up because I couldn't do it because I had nothing to really compare it to. Right. So Sumeriologists are very like, they're a field of their own because I learned a little bit of Akkadian because I had studied Semitic languages. And there's enough crossover between things like Hebrew and Aramaic and Akkadian. But Sumerian, you have nothing to compare it to.

Speaker 3: What did it eventually become?

Speaker 4: It just died.

Speaker 3: It just died.

Speaker 4: It just died. How? Do we know? I mean, the Sumerians lost to the Assyrians and the Assyrians got taken over by the Babylonians. I mean, it's just the course of history where things happen. But there are a number of ancient languages that are language isolates like linear Elamite. We had no idea what linear Elamite even said until 2021.

Speaker 3: Well, I never even heard it until five seconds ago. I know. There you go.

Speaker 4: Jamie, if you pull up, if you look up, what's it called? There's a cup, a silver cup. It'll come up if you Google image linear Elamite because you think cuneiform looks wild. Linear Elamite is completely different than that too. And there's a silver cup, which we had no idea what it said. And then a bunch of researchers, ancient Near Eastern researchers developed. In the corner there, that one on- Far left corner? Oh, no, no. Here. Now it's moved because he clicked it. That one. Yeah, yeah. Click that. So that's linear Elamite. Whoa. And so that's in and around the same time that languages like Sumerian. So there's this very interesting kind of, if we're talking about the story in the Bible, like the Tower of Babel, where it says that God confused their languages and everybody started speaking different languages. You have these languages that just pop up and out of nowhere and have no relation to one another. So Akkadian starts to adopt certain words in Sumerian, but they're still Sumerian. It's like pizza is Italian, right? Or like kayak is Inuit. But when you're looking at the words that carry over, it's not because there's a relationship between Akkadian and Sumerian. It's because you have these cultures that live side by side. And eventually Akkadian starts to adopt these things. But Sumerian is, so that's why when I see people like Billy Carson talk about being able to read Sumerian, I'm like, dude, I read ancient languages and I can't, I've tried and I can't make heads or tails of Sumerian. So that's a tell. Unfortunately, it kind of gives away.

Speaker 3: Listen, I like Billy. He was a nice guy. I really enjoyed talking to him. I really do. I think his videos are fun. But I also think truth is important. I have no problem with him as an individual. He just needs to course correct. Yeah. Course correct and recognize what you know and what you don't know. You're not doing people a service, especially people like myself that aren't educated in this. We turn to others who claim to have a vast knowledge of this to help me out. Tell me what's going on. When I sit down and talk to you, tell me what's going on. And if you don't really know, you're fucking over a lot of people, unfortunately, for yourself. Yeah. How do you say it again? Lineal? Linear. Linear. All right. Can you put that back up again, Jamie? Can you show me that image that you showed me before? Actually, see if you can find the cup. That's pretty dope right there.

Speaker 4: If you scroll, there should be a cup. I think it's called the dashed.

Speaker 3: Is that it in the lower corner?

Speaker 4: No. It's not the cup? No. If you look up cup, yeah, that guy. Oh. So see that inscription at the top beside the face? Yeah. So that's the one. So it goes around the top of the cup, and they crack that.

Speaker 3: Look at that dude's honker.

Speaker 4: He's got a big nose, isn't he? Yeah, he can smell that Linear Elamite. And so actually, interestingly enough, if you pull back, Jamie, that's my – so there's an infographic that I made that just popped up. So if you click that guy, that's the one I made. Why is it coming up like that?

Speaker 5: Someone else reposted it. Oh. Okay. So is it just bad resolution, is that what you're saying?

Speaker 3: Oh, there it is. Oh, no, it's mine.

Speaker 4: That's yours. Okay. So actually, here, I'll be self-serving. If you go to WesleyHuff.com – That is – can we just look at that for a second? That is so cool. And how old is this? Four – I mean, 20th century BC. Wow.

Speaker 3: Yeah. So 4,000 plus years ago.

Speaker 4: Yeah. So if you go, Jamie, to WesleyHuff.com and then click my infographics tab at the top – so I started making these things for the graduate students I was teaching. Yeah. So if you go down, there should be an archaeology section. And in the archaeology section, I have that one on – I'm blanking on what it's called. I make ones for manuscripts too.

Speaker 3: What a great website you've got. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. This is awesome.

Speaker 4: It's so detailed. Yeah.

Speaker 3: So there's a linear Elamite one. What a fucking phenomenal resource this is. Right there.

Speaker 4: Oh, there it is. Yeah. Marv Dash. That's what it's called. So yeah, you see this. So I have Sumerian linear Elamite, Akkadian, and Paleo-Hebrew there at the bottom, the comparisons. And these are languages that operated alongside one another, but are almost completely foreign to one another. So there is crossover between Akkadian and Paleo-Hebrew.

Speaker 3: So that's interesting. Sumerian, when I'm thinking of cuneiform, I'm not thinking of that. Right? Yeah. So is there anything that looks different than some of the clay scrolls, the imprintations that they make with a clay wheel?

Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, it's all done with the stylus. So it's like a little wedge stylus. So there are different variations of it, but ultimately it's done with the stylus. The thing that's interesting, you're probably thinking more of what that later Akkadian looks like, right? Yeah. Where it's like the wedges? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Akkadian basically borrowed the writing system. And it had development over time, but it was very close.

Speaker 3: So when they conquered them, did they have their own writing system initially and just incorporated Sumerian writing to theirs?

Speaker 4: That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that one.

Speaker 3: God, I'd like to know.

Speaker 4: I know, right?

Speaker 3: I mean, it's so long ago, but not, you know?

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: I mean, it's so long ago in terms of a human life. Yeah. It's not that long when you think like we went from 4,000 years ago to that to large language models.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 3: That's pretty crazy. Yeah, quantum computing.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, even if you look at the – I mean, language systems develop. Paleo-Hebrew turns into what we saw in the Dead Sea Scrolls, whereas Paleo-Hebrew is a little bit different than what we eventually see in the Dead Sea Scrolls because there's like a development within the language. And then Modern Hebrew adopts the Hebrew in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but Modern Hebrew has – it has vowels that were developed in the Middle Ages to figure out how to pronounce it. Because basically Ancient Hebrew doesn't have a vowel system in its writing that's overly comprehensive. And so in the Middle Ages when you have these groups of Jews who are copying these Hebrew scriptures who aren't speaking it as much as they're reading it, you got to figure out how to pronounce it as – because vowels make a difference. But if you took all the vowels out of English, if you're a natural English reader, you could probably figure out what was what if you're looking at the page. And so in the Middle Ages, the Masoretic scribes come up with these vowel pointing systems and that's what you see when you like look at a Hebrew Bible today is you see these vowels. And sometimes like the introduction or removal of the vowel is significant in the changing of the words.

Speaker 3: It's also interesting and we're kind of seeing language change, written language, while right now in this current era because of the – we've kind of abandoned cursive. So if people in the future go to read the ancient scripts of human beings that lived in the 20th century, they'll be like, what is this shit? And then there wasn't a lot of it. Like there's no cursive on the internet. I mean there's cursive on the internet, but I mean no websites are written in cursive or very few at least. It's all printed. And so they've essentially in school stopped teaching. Most classes don't teach cursive. Like we all learned cursive as children. It was the way you could write things quicker. And then once printing and typewriters and computers became ubiquitous, like it's gone. And everybody's just texting.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, let's hope people in the future are still able to read the Declaration of Independence.

Speaker 3: Right. Because that's what it was written in, right? Stuff like that. Yeah. That's really interesting, right? Because if you were not taught that and then you went to read that and you said this is English, like what are you talking about? Like I recognize a few of these letters, but it's so vastly different than the printed text. Yeah. Language models are wild. Wild. Yeah. That people figured out how to associate sounds with little symbols. And then they did completely different shit in Korea. Completely different shit in Russia. Yeah. It's so fascinating. And then you have to have these experts who can translate these things and you're dependent upon them forever. Which that was what Lutheranism was all about, right? Like Martin Luther wanted to have phonetic translations of the Bible. And there was a lot of resistance to that because the people that knew how to read Latin were like, hey, hey, slow down.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Partly. I mean there were proto-reformers before Luther. Were there really? Like Wycliffe. So John Wycliffe and William Tyndale both translated the Bible, parts of the Bible into English and they predated. I mean and they weren't very popular for it either. I mean Wycliffe was declared a heretic and then his body was exhumed and burned because of the work that he did. Burned him after he was already dead. Yeah. Well Tyndale's line was that he wanted – I believe it was Tyndale. It was either Wycliffe or Tyndale. My friends who are specialists in this are going to get mad at me for this. But one of those two guys said that they wanted the plow boy to be able to read the Bible and know it as well as the priests. And so that was their motivation is that they're like public education for literacy in these areas was largely because they just wanted people to read the Bible. But that was a big motivation behind Luther was he's like I'm going to translate this thing to German. Because part of his kind of kicking off of what we call the Protestant Reformation was that he read the Bible in Greek. Because there was a guy named Desiderius Erasmus who was a – they called him humanists but it means something different than now. Humanists were like scholars who were trying to figure out the entirety of human knowledge up until that point. Like Renaissance men kind of right. So Desiderius Erasmus is like one of the last true Renaissance men. But he was compiling and he produced the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament. And so he comes out with this printed edition of the Greek New Testament. And Luther gets his hands on it. And so he's reading that. And he notices that in Matthew's gospel the word that's in the Latin is penitentium agitae, do penance. In Greek is metanoia, which is repentance. And the church was using this as like you need to do penance. You need to do all of this stuff to show that you're sorry. And part of that was paying the church. And Luther reads this and he goes, hey, guys, this means something different. This means repentance. It means changing your mind. It doesn't mean like to actually do things. And so part of his motivation is like the Latin isn't reflecting at least at the point that Latin had developed in that day. Like maybe when Jerome translates the Latin Vulgate back in the fourth century. And it's called the Vulgate because Vulgata means like regular. Like you think of vulgar. It's just the regular people language. Part of the reason was that in the fourth century, very few people were reading Greek. They were reading Latin. And so they're like, hey, Jerome, you need to produce a Bible in Latin because nobody can read the Bible anymore. And so he produces the Latin Vulgate. And ironically, by the time you get to Luther, a thousand years later, no one can read Latin. And they're all using the Vulgate.

Speaker 3: Wow. That is fascinating.

Speaker 4: Wow. And even Erasmus was. So he dedicates his first few additions to the pope because he knows that the pope is going to get wind that he's producing Greek New Testament, New Testament. And the church is using the Latin. And he he's risking his risking his life. So if he dedicates it to the pope, maybe the pope will take it easy on him.

Speaker 3: Did it work? Yeah, it did. Nice. A little flattery. Yeah. It goes a long way. Well, that's part of the problem, right, is that you're dealing with these priests. You're dealing with human beings. And when human beings are the sole purveyors of truth, they're the that becomes a problem. It's power. It's too much power. Most people suck at power. They're just it. It just makes them drunk with it and they abuse it. And you see that in many, many religions. You see that in cults. Yeah. For instance, is the best example of it. Because, you know, like when when you know the person who created this thing and, you know, this person is fucking insane and you have a bunch of people that follow them.

Speaker 4: They're just looking out for your best interest. Yeah. Right. They just they just want to make sure you're doing the right thing. Did you see Why Wild Country? Oh, yes. It's fucking awesome.

Speaker 3: Unfortunately. It's so good. It's so crazy. I mean, I'm so glad I wasn't there and a part of it. But it they all look good in the beginning. That's what's really wild. All these cult documentaries, all these expos in the beginning, like these people haven't made. They're all eating together and they're praying together and they seem they're just seeking enlightenment. Happy.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the ways my wife and I bond, we have very different tastes in movies, but we there's enough crossover that are like our guilty pleasure is cult documentaries. I love them. They're so I love them.

Speaker 3: I love them because there's something about people like absolutely believing things that's so appealing to me. I don't know why that is. Like, I like watching Islamic scholars speak, you know, with like full confidence that their their version of truth is truth. I'm just interested in that mindset. I just I think it's like a very deeply cut groove in the human psyche that people can fall into. And when when there's a cult, it's like, God, it's so obvious. Like, there's the guy. That's the guy. Here's a good example. There's a documentary called Holy Hell. Oh, yeah, of course. And you know that? Yeah. I bought the building that Holy Hell was like the the actual theater that this guy had built. It's a beautiful theater that he had his followers build so he can dance in front of them. That was going to be the comedy mothership. The first version of that. So I was under contract for that building. It fell apart. Thank the baby Jesus. Thank Allah. Thank somebody. And then we found this new place on Sixth Street. But that documentary is so fascinating because you you can see this guy who is a gay porn star and a hypnotist. So while take a bunch of really lost people and send them down this crazy road and then eventually it all falls apart.

Speaker 4: You know, what's interesting about that is I have less of a problem with the objective truth claims and more of a problem with them saying, but don't look into it. Don't test it. Like what I say goes and you're not allowed to explore it. Like talking about the Mormon Church. They recently did this thing where they're like, you don't need to go on the Internet and you don't watch the Book of Mormon. Yeah. I don't think you realize what you're sounding like when you come across in that way.

Speaker 3: Mormons are the nicest cult members. They're the nicest people. They really are so nice. I love them. I mean, the Mormons that I met have been so friendly. They're so family oriented. It's true. There's something. I mean, it's like really easy to, like, think these are great people. I'll join them. We know why they're family oriented, right?

Speaker 4: Why? Is because in what Joseph Smith wrote, there's an idea that everybody's soul pre-exists and you were born as a spirit child in a previous life. And the reason you need to have children is you need to bring those people's souls into existence. And so there's like because you have a heavenly father and a heavenly mother and you're all children of God in the actual, like, physical sense. And that the pursuit is exaltation where you will be a god on your own planet if you've done everything right.

Speaker 3: You get your own planet, which is pretty dope.

Speaker 4: You get your own planet. And this is so Joseph Smith in the King's funeral discourse. This is what he wrote. This is where he, like, formulated this idea where God, the father, has a body as tangible as ours of flesh and blood and that he lived on another planet. And he was, you know, circled around the star called Kolob and that if you do everything right, you will also be the god on your own planet. And so you got to encourage people to have kids because you're pulling those spirit babies out of the spiritual realm. But you're right. They are. They're incredibly nice people.

Speaker 3: The nicest.

Speaker 4: The nicest.

Speaker 3: Yeah. It's a really great cult, you know, I mean, or religion, whatever. I mean, I used to have a joke in my act that a cult is fake and it's made by one guy. That guy invented it. In a religion, that guy's dead. There might be something to that. Yeah. And some for sure. For sure. But the question to me is always, what were they originally trying to do? Right. What was it based on? What in the beginning there was light? What is all of that?

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: What are those stories? Yeah. And when you take these stories and you are telling them for so long, that's why the book of Isaiah, what you were telling me, is so fascinating that a thousand years later. Yeah. You have the exact translation of this at a time where most people were illiterate. Oh, yeah, definitely.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, it's only really been recently that we have the levels of literacy that we have today. I mean, this is part of the reason why you have these long spans of time between like when people live and then the ancient biographies that start to pop up about them is because most people are just illiterate.

Speaker 3: But to imagine how crazy that is, that something in a time where there's no printed press and something that had been passed on for so long as an oral tradition is exact word for word written. That's pretty wild. You find in a cave in Qumran. Yeah. And then the same thing you get in the English translation of the Bible today. That's nuts.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, up until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament manuscripts predated the Old Testament manuscripts by a long shot. Really? Yeah. Because the Christians were less discerning in their proliferation of written documents. So the Jews had this whole system where you had to be a trained scribe and they were very, very careful with the procedures that you went through. Whereas the Christians were like, we want to get this thing out as fast as we can as often as we can, which had a lot of benefits in that like their goal was a proselytization and evangelism. And that worked. But the downside of it was that you get really messy copies where you have copies all over the place, but human error gets involved with like spelling differences and additions, deletions, mostly for completely understandable reasons. But we actually have manuscripts where we know the person copied it and they didn't know how to read it because they make mistakes that you wouldn't make if you knew how to copy. There's this really great example of a guy who copies, I believe it's the genealogy of Matthew, and he's looking at a manuscript that has two columns and he's copying it from left to right. And he's copying it like this, whereas it's like the column you go down and then the next column. So, in the genealogy of Jesus, he's got all the wrong people begetting all the wrong people. And you're like, you wouldn't do this if you knew how to read because God is in the middle of the genealogy. So, like that kind of thing.

Speaker 3: That is a real problem.

Speaker 4: That is a real problem. But ironically, with the Christian manuscripts, because we have so many, it's actually because of the mistakes that we're able to trace the text back with a high degree of confidence. Because if you have copies that are floating around, you know, North Africa and places like Egypt, and then you have copies in Syria and you have copies out into Asia and into Europe and the British Isles. When mistakes pop up, they're geographically located. And because you have so many, you can compare and contrast them and figure out, okay, well, this obviously happened here at this time. And you can pinpoint those things. So, this is a field called textual criticism. And we do this with all ancient documents. Like the Bible is a more kind of fleshed out field of textual criticism because we have so many manuscripts. But we do it with, you know, Marcus Aurelius. We even do it with Shakespeare with the different copies. Because if you only have one copy, you have to trust that the person who copied that got it right.

Speaker 1: Right.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Which is the issue that we have for Beowulf. We only have one copy of Beowulf. And so, we don't know what it looked like prior to that. So, we just kind of accept that, okay, this is Beowulf. Like there's no way to compare and contrast the tradition of the manuscripts of Beowulf.

Speaker 3: God, when you're saying this about taking copied versions of it and comparing errors and going back. You're talking about so much time. Yeah. So much research.

Speaker 4: It's legwork.

Speaker 3: So much legwork.

Speaker 4: Yeah. And fortunately, like in the modern era, we get computers involved. And that cuts out a lot of like just manpower.

Speaker 3: I would like to see AI get to the bottom of all this.

Speaker 4: Well, there's an interesting. So, in Germany, at the Center for the Study of New Testament Research in Münster, there actually is called CBGM, the coherence-based genealogical method. And it's tracing not manuscripts but readings within manuscripts and finding the relationships between the different ones by like computer models. And so, this is actually the way that like modern era textual criticism is being done is with these language models that operate on tracing readings and how certain readings are related to one another. Which has allowed us to do things like look at 4th century manuscripts and actually see that their readings come hundreds of years earlier in other manuscripts that we have in collections. So, one of the clearest examples of this is there's a manuscript in the 4th century called Codex Vaticanus because it happens to be in the Vatican right now. And there is a manuscript from the 2nd century which has the exact same scribal conventions that Codex Vaticanus does in particular readings. And so, we know for a fact that the scribes who created Vaticanus did not have, I think it's P75, which is a Papyrus 75. But they had some sort of collection of manuscripts that were similar. And so, we can have confidence that the readings, although they're 4th century in particular areas of Codex Vaticanus, are actually 2nd century in their origination. And a large part of this is because of these like models that the computers got involved in.

Speaker 3: Wow, that is so fascinating. Now, when they're going over things like ancient Sumerian and they're reading things like the Epic of Gilgamesh, like if we can't say, we don't know how to make those words. We don't know what they sounded like. How are they translating it into an English version? One of the things that's been compared quite a bit is the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah and the Ark, the great flood. There seems to be some parallels. Yeah.

Speaker 4: How close is it? In some ways, it's very close. And in other ways, it's not. So, that's the story of Upnupishtim, which is kind of a side story in the Epic of Gilgamesh where Gilgamesh, he realizes his mortality and he's trying to find eternal life. And there's this guy, Upnupishtim, who he runs into, who tells him this story of the gods gifted him with eternal life because he saved all the animals on a boat. And so, there are actually parallels between that and say the Genesis 6 Noah Ark story in like making a big boat, putting all the animals on it, and then they get off and they make a sacrifice to, in his case, the gods in the Bible God. And I think what you're looking at there is probably a cultural remembrance of something that did take place. And so, you have these adjacent cultures who they're existing within this framework of the ancient Near East and you're seeing these kind of parallel echoes of things that actually did happen. So, there are definite parallels, but I think sometimes people look at those and they overplay that. So, one of the examples I often give is Advil and arsenic both come in pill form and have an A on the bottle. But it's not the similarities that matter in that case, it's the differences. And so, if you look at the differences, there are significant differences in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Upnupishtim story and the Genesis 6 story. If for another reason, then the Noah Ark story is a very small part of the Book of Genesis. And the story of Upnupishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh is a little bit more stretched out. It has more to do with the theme of what Gilgamesh is doing in his epic. But there are obviously parallels between that because these are both ancient Near Eastern stories and they're products of their day. In the same way that I think you see parallels between some of the New Testament Gospels and other ancient Greco-Roman biography. In that these are products of ancient history and so they're going to look like other ancient historical writings that kind of parallel around that. Does that make sense?

Speaker 3: No, it doesn't make sense. It's just when you're talking about the oldest of old stories, it's always so interesting to wonder like when they're taking these oral traditions. Like Socrates is famous for saying that he didn't believe that you should write things. Yeah, make people lazy. Right, you need to learn how to remember things, you need to exercise your memory. Which is so fascinating when you think that there must have been people that were in charge of memorizing these oral traditions. And when you're talking about, particularly if you're talking about the Old Testament, the series of writings. Like these are long stories that someone had to remember and pass on to generations. So the thing with me was always like well, what was the origin of all this? Like what was the first version of it? And where the hell did it come from? And what was it? What was going on? Where these people felt like in this time of incredibly difficult survival, right? You're essentially, you're hunter-gatherers, right? We're talking about thousands of years ago. And these people took great time and made great effort to preserve these stories. And then there's always human error, right? There's human error, as you were saying, with transcription and trying to decipher things and writing things down where you don't really speak the language. You got to wonder like how much did we lose in this oral tradition? Like what was the original story? And what were they trying to convey?

Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think that there's an aspect of like a message that's trying to be communicated. I mean we are modern people of the Enlightenment. So we almost have a perspective where we want something to be very like exhaustive that ancient writers didn't have those same sort of conventions. So they're going to capitalize on certain ideas and concepts for the purpose of when someone tells you a story, you don't memorize everything. You go to university, you write notes, right? The people who are writing everything the professor is saying word for word, probably not the people who are going to remember what the professor says as well as the people who write down the main things. And when you write down the main things, the main points without all of the other stuff that kind of is just – it's icing. Then you get the main idea more – ancient writers talk about this. So there's a guy named Quintilian who exists in the first century B.C. And there's this series of writings that we call Pro Gymnasmata, which are basically like how do you do good writing? So he's training people, maybe even individuals like Plutarch who is one of the best known ancient biographers and saying like it's just as important what you don't say as to what you do say. Because you don't want to A, writing in the ancient world is expensive, really expensive. And B, you want to make sure that your audience is actually getting the message that you want to convey. And so this is something that when you read like German scholars, biblical scholars of the 19th and 20th century or even prior to that, like 18th, 19th century, they look at the gospels and they're like, this isn't biography because it's not capitalizing on Jesus' childhood. And we all know that good biographies tell about your childhood and psychologize and these sorts of things. Whereas if you look at some of these ancient writers who are talking about how you should write biography, they say if there's nothing in their childhood that's that significant, don't write it. It's going to distract from like if there is something, say like Jesus' birth or Luke tells a story when he's 12 of Jesus, when he goes with Mary and Joseph and Mary and Joseph lose the son of God and they start going home without him. And they're like, where's Jesus? And they got to go back to Jerusalem. That's a significant story. And so it appears that Luke includes it because there's a significant reason to include that. But they wouldn't have had any problem with leaving out large portions of someone's life if it didn't contribute to what the ultimate goal of telling that person's life was.

Speaker 3: I think what's also what's important is we have to try as difficult as it might be to put our minds in the context of people who lived in a time where most people were illiterate. And you're telling these parables, you're telling these stories as an oral tradition and that they have a different mindset in terms of the distribution of information. Totally. And what the significance of these things are.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. These are documents. Well, in terms of the Bible, like as someone who identifies as a Christian, I would say that these are the Bible is written for you, but it wasn't written to you. It had a completely different original audience, but you should do your best at figuring out who it was written to and how that made a difference to them. Because then the application is going to come out even clearer for you. And that should be ultimately the goal of everyone who's looking at ancient documents. Who was the original audience? How would they have understood it?

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Because you can read all sorts of things because of your modern conventions into what someone is talking about in the ancient world and completely bypass what they're actually trying to convey in their intention.

Speaker 3: And again, it's almost impossible to put your mind completely into the context of these people that were living then. It's almost impossible to imagine the way they viewed the world and the way they communicated. When you're dealing with like really old stuff, like the Sumerian text, and then people have translations of it, which can be fantastical, like the Zechariah Sitchin stuff. It's like you have to be a scholar in ancient Sumerian and understand the origins of language and you have to. And then still there's massive debate. There's a whole website called Sitchiniswrong.com.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 3: But he's the most fun.

Speaker 4: I'm not convinced he could read Sumerian either. Really? Yeah. I think he was bullshitting. I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt. He takes so many liberties with the stuff he's commenting on that I have a hard time getting my head around.

Speaker 3: So if he couldn't read it, where would he be getting his translations? From actual translations. Okay. So he would take these translations and then make his own assumptions and his own interpretation. Is that what it is?

Speaker 4: Yeah. I think to a certain degree. I mean, even something like Nibiru is not a Sumerian word. It's an Akkadian word. But he makes a big deal about it being related to Sumerian. And it is a word that appears within Akkadian.

Speaker 3: And Akkadian is what time period?

Speaker 4: Akkadian is just after. So it exists kind of in a crossover where Sumerian predates Akkadian but Akkadian develops alongside. And then as cultures like the Assyrians come into power and kind of subvert the Sumerians.

Speaker 3: So oldest Sumerian writing is what? What's the oldest timeline? Like 5,000, 6,000?

Speaker 4: Yeah, around that. I think like 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. Okay. And then Akkadian is when? There's some overlap but it develops into a language like just after like the rise. And Akkadian develops into like it has stages. And then you have like Babylonian, Proto-Babylonian, Persian, Old Persian, Elamite as we look at it.

Speaker 3: We don't have it. There's no writing at all at Gobekli Tepe, correct? It's all just iconography.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Or at least that we figured out that looks like writing. Yeah. I'm really hoping to go to Gobekli Tepe.

Speaker 3: What's your take on this whole reluctance to further excavate and how they have such a small amount of the site? It's only 5% that's been uncovered. But through LIDAR they're aware there's a bunch more.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean I'm not an archaeologist. I have friends who are archaeologists. And I think it's – archaeology is tricky because so much of archaeology is dependent on governments and institutions and funding. They're getting mad at archaeologists for not excavating. It's kind of like getting mad at construction workers for not fixing your potholes.

Speaker 6: Right.

Speaker 4: Where it's like – yeah. Right. They're kind of doing the last stage. So, yeah. I mean I think there's certainly incentive by the Turkish government to want to capitalize on that being a tourist destination. And you really need to safeguard archaeological excavations because otherwise it's being compromised. Right. And like pillaging and stuff like that. It happens. Of course. I mean when I was in Egypt two summers ago and you go to the Valley of the Kings, they've got security cameras up everywhere because there are tombs there that we still haven't discovered. And so they're like, we don't want people digging around in here looking for –

Speaker 3: Of course. Well, they've lost so much over the history.

Speaker 4: Oh, we've only discovered 1 percent of ancient Egypt.

Speaker 3: That's so nuts.

Speaker 4: One percent. Isn't that crazy?

Speaker 3: That is the nuttiest part of all of history is Egypt to me. I still have not been. You got to go. I know. You got to go. I almost went in December. I just couldn't find the time. I'm just too damn busy. I will though. I definitely will. But it is to me the nuttiest time in history because good luck explaining the Great Pyramid. Good luck. And it's such a big timeframe.

Speaker 4: Like there's a thousand years between the pyramids being built and Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings. Yeah. A thousand years. Yeah. Nuts. It's so crazy. Egypt is one of the wildest places you'll ever go.

Speaker 3: Well, it just doesn't make sense. It's like how? What were you guys using? What were you doing? How did you do it? How did you measure it? How did you figure it out? Yeah. You've been to Greece, right? Yes. Have you been to Jordan?

Speaker 4: No.

Speaker 3: Oh, you got to go see Petra. Yeah. Petra's phenomenal.

Speaker 4: Jordan was, I mean Greece rather was fantastic.

Speaker 3: They're all crazy. God, it's just like when you're just there in the presence of these things and just trying to put your brain back thousands of years and imagine what society was like back then. It's crazy. It's crazy.

Speaker 4: Egypt was crazy because Egypt is like Greece in that you can go to the Pantheon and you see that kind of stuff, right? But you go to Egypt and there's 4,000 year old paint on the walls and you're like, what? I can't get paint to stay on my wall for 10 years. It's almost exclusively because of the climate and it got buried in sand, but it's so wild.

Speaker 3: So wild. 1% of ancient Egypt has been discovered. What do you really mean by that?

Speaker 4: Of the percentage of what we know that happened in Egyptian history, 1% has been excavated in terms of what we can actually pull out of the ground and look at artifacts. So there's whole eras of pharaohs that we don't know where they're buried. Even when Tutankhamen was discovered, he was kind of a footnote in the pharaohs that we knew about at that time. And we didn't know he was as extravagant, as rich, until we discovered his actual tomb. A lot of people at that time didn't even think he was worth looking into because we have these lists of pharaohs and the thing with the pharaohs is that they're always trying to, the next pharaoh is always trying to prove that he's the better one. And this is why you go to Egypt and you find statues of Ramses everywhere. And part of it was because Ramses, I think it was Ramses II, was he commissioned so many statues of himself because he's like, oh, I'm the best, I'm the greatest. And what they actually, they couldn't keep up with the commissioning and they started actually rubbing off the names of previous pharaohs on statues and just putting Ramses on it. Really? Wow. Because he was just, so you go from the top of Egypt to the bottom of Egypt and you're going to find statues of Ramses.

Speaker 3: He wanted to leave his mark.

Speaker 4: He wanted to leave it. And he did, right?

Speaker 3: It worked. We're talking about it now in 2024.

Speaker 5: I know.

Speaker 3: Yeah. That is nuts. So when you go there and you're in the presence of these things and you try to put yourself back into that time period, like what do you, have you ever tried to think like what, what was the motivation to make something as great as the Pyramid of Giza, the Great Pyramid? People definitely want to make their mark, right?

Speaker 4: Right. But that's a mark that just doesn't even make sense. There's something to that. I mean, if you think you're a God and you have this whole kind of worldview perspective and theology that you need to make something that, and bear yourself with all this crap because that's going to make a difference in your afterlife, then you're going to go big rather than going home, right? So the perceptions of people in the ancient world are just so different. We got it so good right now. Like longevity, health, food is just on a completely different scale. And so the conventions of needing to make sure that, especially if you're like the richest guy around, that you tick off all the boxes, because you know you're going to die and you're probably going to die sooner than you want to, sooner rather than later. And you have this whole perception of, well, if I bury myself with all this stuff and maybe even some of the people, we're just going to kill them and include them too, because they're going to help me out. That's going to help me out in the afterlife.

Speaker 3: You need slaves in the afterlife if you're a pharaoh. Yeah, of course you do. Yeah, you can't just kill by yourself. Why not, right? Yeah. That's ridiculous. Yeah. So Khufu's pyramid, what's the timeline that he was even in power?

Speaker 4: I don't know. I'm not an Egyptologist or an archaeologist necessarily. But he was, I think that was what, like 4,000 years ago? We only really have a tiny little statue of him. That's nuts. We don't actually have that much about him.

Speaker 3: I guess he was busy making a pyramid.

Speaker 4: So they say, right?

Speaker 3: So they say. Billy thinks different. Well, a lot of people think different. That's what's interesting about it is the archaeological argument that like Dr. Robert Shock makes about the water erosion in the Temple of the Sphinx. That's a fascinating argument because it does appear like that's water erosion. And that would put the timeline way, way back.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I think even just looking at the Sphinx, you can tell that no matter what your perspective is, you should entertain the idea at minimum that the head was built later.

Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 4: Because it doesn't fit the body.

Speaker 3: It has much less erosion. You could also attribute that to the different densities of the stone. That's one of the things about these layers of limestone. Some of them are much more porous and some, they erode easier. Yeah. You do see that. Yeah. And I think they're doing a terrible disservice by covering the Sphinx with new stones. They redid the paws and they're doing all that. My God, people, leave it alone. Leave it the way it is.

Speaker 4: Yeah. How do you balance between-

Speaker 3: Restoration and recreation.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Because they're in a recreation stage. Yeah. And it was obviously, they're doing it with smaller stones and it looks different. It's not the same thing. It's not what it initially was. It was carved from one piece of stone.

Speaker 4: Have you seen some of the restoration stuff that Saddam Hussein did in Iraq? No. Jamie, you got to pull up the Ziggurat at Ur.

Speaker 1: Oh no.

Speaker 4: So Saddam Hussein was a bit of a nut job, but he believed, this is as far as I understand it, that he was the recreation of Nebuchadnezzar. So he did all of this restorative work in Iraq on things like the walls of Babylon. And in Ur, he rebuilt the Ziggurat. So if you look at that picture over there that says 1932 and 2022, that's what he did is he basically tried to rebuild this entire thing. And it's amazing. I am trying hard to get to Iraq because I want to see this thing. Interestingly enough- Just don't die. Yeah. Don't die, dude.

Speaker 3: Don't go over there. So that's actually Ur. I'm sorry, but this is the modern version with the small bricks. The original version, was it all carved from one piece? No, it would have been clay bricks. So these were clay bricks. So what do we, can you, Jamie, can you go back to the 1930 image please so we could see what it looked like? God, I would rather just have that. You know, I mean, I want to see what it looked like and what it looks like all these years later. I don't want to see a recreation, which is very similar to what they've done to the Sphinx.

Speaker 4: Yeah. The Sphinx. Even when I was in Egypt, they were doing some work in like-

Speaker 3: Can you, Jamie, can you go to the rehabilitation of the Sphinx or whatever they were called?

Speaker 8: Yeah. I just clicked on like the ruins of it. I was going back to the 30s or 40s or something.

Speaker 3: Well, the restoration part is the interesting part. Like you could see the restoration. If you go to just Google restoration of the Sphinx pause.

Speaker 4: Well, they're talking about putting encasing stones on the pyramid.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I've heard that too. God, don't do that.

Speaker 4: I don't think they should do that either.

Speaker 3: No, you shouldn't do anything. I mean, obviously they took the original casing stones off, but that's also history. So now you can see like the new pause. Well that seems like the difference between buried and unburied. So like even when Napoleon came upon, like right there, like isn't that restored? Yeah. Because there was much more erosion then. Napoleon came upon it, it was buried, right?

Speaker 4: I think so.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I think that was the case. Like over time, because you're dealing with these crazy sandstorms, over time everything gets kind of buried.

Speaker 4: Oh, so much of it is under sand for so long. Like the temple of the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut was mostly under sand for a long, long time. Wow. Before they like uncovered it. And fortunately, like the aridness of Egypt preserves things like crazy.

Speaker 3: Yeah. See, that's what the paws look like now. That's a disaster. That's so gross. If you do take that timeline, the Robert Shock timeline, and you say, okay, so you're talking about thousands of years of rainfall. You have to go back to when there was rainfall in the Nile Valley. So now you're back like 9,000 years. One of the more interesting things about hieroglyphs and the interpretations of it is that the ancient hieroglyphs that, well, the ancient versions of pharaohs rather, like when they go back past the established dates of 2,500 BC and before that, you get to like 30,000 years ago. And then they say that these are myth. These are not, this is not representative of an actual history. This is some sort of a mythical history.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Numbers are tricky in ancient languages because it's not entirely clear whether numbers are meant to be representational.

Speaker 3: Is that like why they said that Noah lived 600 years old?

Speaker 4: Yeah. That's part of it. I mean, you have that and you have the Sumerian king lists, which have people living thousands of years, hundreds and thousands of years too. And I mean, there are some interesting academic articles on like the probability of the numbers that come up in those. Because we have a base 10 counting system because we count our fingers. Ancient near Eastern cultures like the Babylonians, the Akkadians, the Assyrians, they had a base 12 counting system because they would count each hinge or whatever you call these, like spaces one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12.

Speaker 3: There's different joints of the finger.

Speaker 4: Yeah. The joints. That's what I was looking for. Yeah. And so that's why we have 360 degrees in a circle, 365 days in a year. This comes from the Mesopotamian counting conventions. And you look at some of these lists and they're operational and all divisible by like 12 and 60. And you're like, what's going on here? So not all of them, but enough of them where it's statistically impossible. And I don't totally know what to make of those things because you do have the genealogies, I believe it's Genesis chapter four and Genesis chapter 11, where they're all divisible by these types of numbers that were very common in the ancient Near East. They're not random. Whereas if we look at the genealogies later in like Chronicles and Kings of the ages of the Israelite Kings, they're random. And so it's just like, what do we do with that? Because numbers are also far more representational, which is why we see numbers like 12 and 40 and seven come up in the Bible, but also other ancient Near Eastern literature. Like there are certain numbers in Egyptian society that also were seen as like perfect numbers or like numbers that you wanted to incorporate.

Speaker 3: So what's the earliest interpretation of calendars? Like what is the earliest where they did decide what a year was?

Speaker 5: I have no idea.

Speaker 3: Because you got to imagine if you're, you know, the average lifespan wasn't so good back then. A lot of people got infected, died of war, famine, all these things. It would take quite a long time for people to figure out what a year was. We're going thousands and thousands of years ago. We have to establish like, okay, a day is, let's put this stick in the ground. When the shadow is here, this is where we start. When the shadow goes all the way around like that, okay, maybe we can like mark these off. Okay, now we've got a sundial.

Speaker 4: And there are different timekeeping conventions depending on society. Like ancient Jews had a different timekeeping convention than ancient Romans. And so that's why you see like in Genesis chapter one, it talks about there being evening and there being morning is because, well, Jews today, right? You start the Sabbath on sundown the day before, right? So that's why it's because there's different cycles. And so we go on a 24 hour time system, but ancient Jews had a different convention of that. Ancient Romans had a different convention of that. Ancient Mesopotamian cultures had their own kind of conventions about these things. And calendars were all over the place. You know, when you get to the Julian calendar and they're like, we got to standardize this thing because everybody's operating on a different, you know, the Julian calendar and then the Gregorian calendar. Ancient timekeeping is very inexact and very messy. And so you kind of got to take certain things with a grain of salt in terms of that. But yeah, ancient calendars, I don't even know. I know that actually talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the group in Qumran who were a sectarian group of Jews who believed that the Jews in Jerusalem had basically capitulated and were not holy enough. And part of their reasoning is that they believe they have a perfect calendar. And so they use a different calendar that doesn't have to do things like incorporate an extra month every certain number of years because, you know, their thing is not perfect. And part of their reasoning as to why they're like the chosen is that they have a timekeeping system that they say is perfect.

Speaker 3: Many cultures used a 13 month calendar, right? Like what was the logic behind that? Does that work? I don't know. The idea was 13 months, 28 days each month and you wouldn't have to have leap years and all that shit.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Archaeologists. Okay.

Speaker 4: There it is. World oldest calendar.

Speaker 3: Wow. That's wild. So it is on Gobekli Tepe. Oh, the ancient carvings of the sun, moon, and various constellations sits on a pillar. Gobekli Tepe, 12,000 years old. Researchers believe the ancient people use a so-called lunisolar calendar to mark the changing of the seasons. Right. Interesting. So it was at least representative of the fact that we know when the days start getting shorter, it starts getting colder and then, okay, and then it warms up again, the days start getting longer.

Speaker 4: And I think that's why solstices are so key in most of human history is because you got to figure out what's a marker point.

Speaker 3: Right. Which is one of the things that's so fascinating about some of the constructions of the pyramid where on the summer solstice, these pillars line up so perfectly that the light shines straight down these hallways and illuminates everything. How did you guys nail that?

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, just because they're ancient doesn't mean they're stupid.

Speaker 3: Well, they're just brilliant and they weren't just stupid. They were fucking brilliant. That's what's ... I mean, we weren't just ancient. It's just so weird that people were so vastly more intelligent, at least in terms of their ability to build things, than anyone else anywhere around there. That's what's so weird about Egypt to me. It's like there's amazing pieces of ... even ancient Greece is incredible, but I can kind of believe you did it.

Speaker 9: You know?

Speaker 3: Right. I mean, I've seen 300,000 stones in the Great Pyramid, and some of them 50 tons, 60 tons- That's pretty crazy. ... from 500 miles away. Yeah.

Speaker 4: What did you do?

Speaker 10: How the hell did you do it?

Speaker 4: I mean, there have been a lot of things that have been lost. We still, as far as I'm aware, don't know how the Romans made their concrete. That Roman concrete is like this thing that survives. They were able to make domes out of it.

Speaker 3: Well, you know about terra preta in the Amazon. Do you know about that? No. Terra preta is their particular rich soil that is man-made soil. Oh, yes. I did know. I do know about that. That's a combination of charcoal and bacteria. It's incredible. Yeah. It's unbelievably fertile in terms of your ability to grow food on it. They made it, and we don't know how they did it. It's man-made stuff, which is so bananas. It's like a giant chunk of this stuff that is all over the Amazon, was made by people specifically to encourage the growth of plants.

Speaker 4: I mean, this is why history gets me so excited.

Speaker 3: Oh, it's so amazing, and it's so interesting, too. I was watching something on YouTube yesterday about the Mayan culture and the Aztecs. I went on a deep dive when I started getting ready for this, but when you think about how many people existed back then, and then Europeans come, and everybody dies. Everybody dies of disease. And it's like, how many people died? Like, millions? Millions of people died here? Millions of people died there? Holy shit. And you go through the story of the collapse of the Mayan civilization, the collapse of the Aztec civilization, the accounts that these priests had of visiting these Aztec markets, and how incredible they were. These people from Rome, who'd come to visit the Mayans, they're like, this is unbelievable. Or the Aztecs, rather. Like, this is unbelievable how sophisticated they are. And then, gone.

Speaker 5: Everybody's dead. Done-zo.

Speaker 3: You just gotta go, wow. How many times has this happened in history, where people have visited places and brought their cooties, and killed off a giant swath of the population? And one of the things that they're discovering now in the Amazon, which is so fascinating, is through use of LIDAR. They're discovering, like, oh my god, this was all populated.

Speaker 4: This whole thing was populated. Yeah, that's crazy. The ground-penetrating radar stuff.

Speaker 3: And the trees and all the rainforest is mostly from man-made agriculture. Yeah, that's wild. Nuts. Wild. And this is all recent, that they're figuring this out. Which is also so fascinating about history, is that it is a constant and never-ending search. And that even in today, with as much information as we have, you can pick up your phone and ask them, you know, when was Nero born? It'll tell you. Like, instantaneously. We still don't have answers to a lot of really fascinating questions, like the Olmecs, or all these other civilizations. Like, who? Where? Where'd they come from? Why do they look like this? Why'd they make these big stone hens? Stone heads, you know? Or Stonehenge. It's another one. Like, Jesus. What is this? Yeah. There's so many versions of that all over the world. And it just... the search for our origins is one of the most human endeavors. One of the most... because to know that we are particularly unique. We're so different. We stand out from every other animal on this planet. And there's this crazy, wild war of biology, where life is just eating life all around us. And it's got to some crazy place that's far beyond any other creature that's on this planet. And we did it in a bunch of different ways. We did it in a bunch of different ways all over the place, with different scribbles, and different icons, and different gods, and different things. And we're all wondering, like, which one... where did it start? What was the origin of all this? What was the need to write these things down? What purpose did it serve to have these myths, and legends, and stories? Like, was it just to keep society together? Or was it to retell a very important story that was a very unique thing that happened at the dawn of time?

Speaker 4: And that's why you see, I mean, the literary comparison of ancient Near Eastern origin stories is like a really interesting thing to do. Because when you look at something like the Enuma Elish, which was the Babylonian creation story, and then you look at something like Genesis chapter one, there are obvious crossovers with, like I said before, these ancient Near Eastern conventions. But then you can see that the author of Genesis is making these points that are actually rebutting something like the origin stories of the surrounding cultures, that largely believe that matter is eternal, and the gods come out of the created world, and that there's this narrative of the battle that takes place, where some gods fight against other gods, and the world around us that we see, and like human beings, are the end result of this battle. And so they would read this on every Babylonian new year. And one of the main themes was basically that, like, it's all chance. It's all a random mistake. You were created without purpose and intention, because Tiamat gets destroyed. And she's the god that you come from. And then you read Genesis chapter one, and it says, in the beginning, God creates the heavens and the earth, and he makes it good. And there's this idea that, like, that's countercultural in the idea that the Babylonians did not think that the world was good. And that, like, at the end of every refrain, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good. And then it's very good at the end, and that humanity in particular is created in the image of God. Like, that's a very... Not just like kings, which a lot of ancient Near Eastern cultures believed, that kings were created in the image of God, but that humanity in general is created in the image of God. And this idea of the Imago Dei, that you're... That's why you're different. Like, why are you different from all the animals? Because you're given something that exemplifies a unique quality. And then the ancient Near Eastern cultures that believe that the planets are gods and that the sea is a god, and then Genesis chapter one looks at that, and it kind of subverts the expectations of the day in getting to this ultimate question of, why are we here? What are we supposed to do while we're here, and how do we get out of here? And it says that, no, there's purpose, there's meaning, there's intention. And actually, a lot of the things that you worship, it's pretty stupid, because God created them.

Speaker 3: What is the original origin story, or the earliest, I should say, origin story of humanity? I don't know. Would it be the Mesopotamians? Would it be the Sumerians? Like, who had the one that's the oldest?

Speaker 4: I mean, the Enuma Leash is pretty old. There are a number of different variations. The problem is that we're largely relying on our complete copies are coming in languages like Akkadian, where the ones in Sumerian are very fragmentary. So even the Epic of Gilgamesh, the copy that we have that is the final, if you go and you read a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's going to be the one in Akkadian from the library of Ashurbanipal. But the earlier versions in Sumerian don't even have the flood story in them. And they're more pieced together. And we actually do have another flood story in the Atrasis, which appears to have been influenced, the Epic of Gilgamesh stories, influenced by the Atrasis. But in terms of written language, I guess it's the Enuma Leash. I wouldn't actually know what the oldest, oldest one is. But you get a lot of these origin stories, and they have these themes. We see it in the Bible, too. The ancient Near Eastern cultures were very preoccupied with chaos and order. And so it's all about kind of creating order out of the chaos of the world. And that's where I think you do see the parallels.

Speaker 3: Well, that's the establishment of society, right?

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. And establishing chaos and certain things being representational of chaos within the created order, like the Bible included, but a lot of other ancient cultures saw things like the ocean as the embodiment of unpredictability and chaos. And so that's why you have... Sea monsters are this very common depiction, the Leviathan in Job, which is this sea monster. And it's representational in a way of... Because it appears actually in Babylonian literature, too, the Leviathan. Really? Yeah. And it's encompassing chaos in the world. And the point of God bringing it up to Job in the book of Job is like, God has the ability to tame this thing. And even in the book of Revelation, at the end of the Bible, it says that in the new heavens and new earth, there will be no sea. And it's not because, you know, I had a friend who is Australian, and we were kind of working through translating sections of Revelation, and he's like, hold on, there will be no sea. He's like, I'm Australian, I love the sea. But the point of that though, is not necessarily that the body of water is not gonna exist. It's that the ocean, the sea, is so unpredictable. You go out there and storms can come out of nowhere and you die. And so there are these like motifs that are representational in the ancient world. And we see a lot of those in these creation stories. So would it be that the dangers of the sea would no longer exist? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So the sea kind of working as an analogy of that which is unpredictable. And actually, there's a lot of concepts of the realm of the dead being in the sea that we see throughout this literature. If you read the book of Jonah, there's this kind of stylistic, which you miss when you read it in the English, but it's very apparent in the Hebrew, where Noah keeps going down. He goes down from his town to the dock, and then he goes down into the boat, and then he goes down into, you know, the inside of the boat, and then the storm happens. And then they throw him overboard down into the sea and down into the fish. And he eventually, the fish takes him down into the depths of the sea. And when Jonah prays, he says, I cry out from the depths of Sheol, which is the realm of the dead. So there is actually a form of Jewish interpretation where it argues that Jonah actually died and was resurrected when he was spit up by the fish. And it could be, because in the gospels, Jesus says, all the people are following him, and they keep asking him for miracles, because they're like, we saw you do miracles, do more miracles for us. You know, come on, do a trick, do a trick, Jesus. And Jesus says, the only miracle you're going to get is the sign of Jonah, that just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, I will be in the belly of the earth three days and three nights, you know, prediction of his own death and resurrection. But there is an argument within rabbinical literature that when Jonah says that he's crying out from the depths of Sheol, it's because he's actually dead. And that's one interpretation. But another interpretation could just be that he saw and understood as a person of his day, the depths of the ocean as where the dead people ended up anyways. Like your soul goes down into the chaos and the disorder of Sheol, which is the realm of the dead.

Speaker 3: Is that where they disposed of bodies?

Speaker 4: In the ocean?

Speaker 3: Yeah. No. No? No. Vikings did, right?

Speaker 4: Didn't they like light boats on fire and push them out there?

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4: But it wasn't a common practice amongst other civilizations. Not that I know of. But Jews would definitely, I mean, really ancient Jewish conventions of burial. You would just bury someone in the earth. And then by the time you got to Jesus's day, you had like family tombs and stuff.

Speaker 3: Well, there was an ancient hominid that's not human. And one of the things that they were so fascinated about was that they buried their dead and that they did so in a cave. Do you remember that, Jamie? Do you remember who was discussing that with us? It was, they did not think that this version of ancient primate was capable of these things. And then they seemed to have confirmation through these very extensive cave systems that there was at least one area where they would put their dead.

Speaker 11: Yeah.

Speaker 3: And it was a difficult path to get to this too. This is a very small hominid. I think people have tried to make their way through it and it's really hard. Like some of these caves, you're like basically crawling on your stomach, which is fucking terrifying because people have died that way. Are you claustrophobic? No, I'm not claustrophobic. I'm normal stuff. You just don't want to crawl in a cave? I don't want to crawl in the middle of the earth into something that's like 11 inches high. Yeah. Squirming slowly. That's what they're doing. Yeah. The body barely fits in there. And the guy died recently. It was Brian Morescu, I think. Oh, it was Brian. Yes.

Speaker 8: That's right. I'll pull it up. Dentaleti Chamber.

Speaker 3: Yeah. So they've founded this ancient hominid, which, you know, didn't really look like us.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Was burying their dead.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, burial conventions change over time. The ways that they're burying, like in the ancient Israelite days are very different in the conventions than when you get to Jesus.

Speaker 3: Karen, it's archaeologists uncover evidence of intentional burial cave engravings by early human ancestor. What did that sucker look like? So the Denaldi Chamber, what is the type of Homo Naledi, right? Homo Naledi. Google that. See what they look like. Homo Naledi. What we think they look like, right? Whoa, that's crazy. That's crazy. So as a Christian, what do you think about all this stuff? Like what do you think about ancient hominids, Australopithecus, Neanderthals, what was God up to with all this?

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, I'm not a scientist, so I got to stay in my lane. I ultimately would be an advocate for intelligent design, where I would say that God purposefully created humanity in a way... You had Stephen Meyer on, right? Yes. Yeah. So I mean, he's one of those guys who talks about kind of the issues that he sees with evolution. And I think I have some of those issues too. My friend Jonathan McClatchy is a biologist, and he does some really great presentations on the ways that he sees kind of the intricacies of Neo-Doranian evolution is not quite explaining some of what's going on with things like the fossil record and some of the gaps that we have in there. When you talk about early hominids, I mean, ultimately I think that there are aspects of the fact that there are ancient cultures, which, I mean, humanity obviously looks very different today than it did if we're going tens of thousands of years ago. And so I think that there's a different kind of convention and understanding, but ultimately I would ascribe to there being an original Adam and Eve, and that those are our like, if you want to call them like our first parents kind of thing. But there are other Christians who I would disagree with, but I think have interesting articulations of that in terms of theistic evolution. I disagree with them, but it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility to find explanations. I don't think the Bible is trying to explain how people came into existence in the same way that maybe we want it to. And a lot of people read the origin stories in Genesis as a scientific textbook. And I think ultimately that misses the point of what Genesis is trying to say. This goes back to what we were talking about with like, how would have the original audience understood this? When they read Genesis chapter one, are they looking at that as an exact prescription of what God did? I mean, in some ways maybe, but in other ways they could see that as this like counter apologetic to the other ancient Near Eastern stories, like I explained. So I just think we need to be careful when we're looking at, or even like counting up the genealogies and coming up with how old the earth is. And I think that might be missing the forest for the trees in what we're actually looking at when we look at ancient documents and how we're trying to interpret them. But it is a big question, right?

Speaker 3: Well, the question of evolution is a fascinating one, right? Because there's obviously something happening, particularly with us, if we really are related to homo nidali, noleti, or there's something clearly is happening. This is like process of change. And if we don't completely understand all the factors in that process of change, we might miss out, the equation might be incomplete. We know a lot now about evolution that we did not know before, but like all sciences, new data comes in and you have to recalibrate things. Have you been paying attention to this? There's a new discussion about dark matter and dark energy. The new discussion is that it might not be a correct theory, and that what it might be is that time moves differently in the voids between galaxies. And this is a new theory and like new enough and discussed enough among people that really understand it, that it's getting to me, right? So I'm reading it. So see if you can find that. It's a very complex and nuanced conversation, but most of the universe is dark energy, right? It's a giant percentage of the universe is dark energy and dark matter, and we don't really know what that stuff is. And so this is proposing that there's an additional possible theory that might explain it better.

Speaker 4: I mean, that area of science is crazy. Nuts.

Speaker 3: Nuts. It's crazy. And then you have the James Webb telescope that's giving us even more data than ever before and you have to look at all of it and go, wait, why are those things here? How are they there so long ago? What are these red things at the beginning of time? What the fuck is all this?

Speaker 4: The universe is bonkers.

Speaker 3: Nuts.

Speaker 4: Yeah. And I mean, I think we get that in history too, whereas we have these kind of what we think are established conventions, and then all of a sudden we discover something and it completely overthrows the ideas that we have. Like Clovis first. Yeah. Or go back to Cle Tepe. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Or actually, good segue.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I made one. I made something for you.

Speaker 3: Ooh.

Speaker 2: So.

Speaker 4: I make papyri facsimiles. Oh, my description is a little bit wonky here. I'm going to fix that. So you were talking about like, what is our oldest manuscript evidence? So this guy is P52, John Ryland's 457. So that is, so that's a genuine Egyptian papyri that I made. I cut it out for you and then I transcribed the text on that manuscript. So when we're talking about what is potentially our oldest evidence for the New Testament, this manuscript that most likely comes from Oxyrhynchus Egypt, is the one that usually is universally accepted as our oldest one. And that contains John 18, where Jesus is on trial before Pilate. And yeah, so that's the one that's in the John Ryland's library in Manchester, England.

Speaker 3: So this is a copy of that exactly? This is exactly what it looks like?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So I cut that out on the papyri with a scalpel, and then I transcribed the text on.

Speaker 3: You did a great job, dude. You nerded out. I know. For real, nerded out. This is a real nerding out of...

Speaker 4: So that's actually, yeah, so that's someone else's facsimile, which is not as good as the one I made you.

Speaker 3: It's not as good.

Speaker 4: Yours is better. And where Jesus is on trial before Pilate, and Jesus says, everyone who is following the truth follows me. And on the back has the words of Pilate saying, what is truth? But so part of my research, so the reason I bring this up is because before this was discovered by C.H. Roberts in the 1940s, the convention was, because of a guy named C.H. Bower, that the gospel of John was second century. And so he had this, he was a student of Hegel. Have you ever heard of Hegelian dialectic? So you have like a thesis, synthesis and antithesis. So Hegel had this philosophical theory and his student Bower takes that and he incorporates this into history. And he says, the earliest gospel, Mark, has this very Jewish Jesus. And then the later gospels have a very, like the last of what I call the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Luke has a very kind of more divine Jesus. And so he says, based on this, John is the last, last written one. And it combines these two, where you get a very human and a very divine Jesus together. And so based on this, he says that John has to be second century. Well, we discover this guy, C.H. Roberts is literally going through these piles of manuscripts in these drawers that are being like stashed away. And he finds this guy and he sees that it's written on both sides, which is almost exclusively a Christian convention. Because in the ancient world, they used scrolls and the Christians, for reasons we're not entirely clear on, they start to make codices, books. And so they write on both sides. And so he says, okay, this is written on both sides. It's probably a Christian manuscript. So he sends it off to the leading paleographers or guys who date manuscripts. And they all say, this is the beginning of the second century. And so there's still debate about the dating of this, but the unanimous consensus is that it's comfortably second century, potentially the beginning of the second century, which means that this is found in Egypt. John is probably writing his gospel in Ephesus. So it has to be written by John, spread around, find its way to Egypt, be copied, and then end up in this manuscript. Which means that at minimum, you've already pushed the gospel of John back into the first century comfortably, and potentially even most likely into the lifetime of the eyewitnesses of these events. And so all of the literature up until that point from the scholarly consensus about the dating of the gospel of John gets totally rewritten. And it's because of that guy. And because of my academic work where I was telling you like in paratextual features, when we look at these tiny manuscripts and you figure out, okay, well, what does that look like on the page? I also made you. So this is, I used two different variations of papyri. So you have there where P52 would have been on the page. And based on the, it's called codicological conventions, the spacings of the words, and the way that the size of the margin that we can see, where it would have been on the page and how big the page would have actually been. So this is like a reconstruction. And then I filled in the rest of the text in the same sort of style, stylistic hand of the scribes at that time, what that page would have looked like. So this would have come from, would have been essentially a like a pocket copy of the gospel of John. Wow.

Speaker 3: That's unbelievable. Wow. That's so fascinating.

Speaker 4: So this is, this is the kind of work that I do in terms of trying to figure out, okay, you have these fragments, how big would have this codex actually been? How big would have the document been? And then you compare and you contrast them to say like non-Christian literature, like Thucydides, or Tacitus, or Pliny, or Cicero, or Cassio Dio, those kinds of guys. And look at the differences between how these documents would have been put together and written in their day.

Speaker 3: God, it's so beautiful. It's just so bizarre to imagine these people writing this stuff down so, so long ago.

Speaker 4: You know, what's wild is when you actually get the chance, which I have a number of times to actually handle the original documents.

Speaker 3: Oh my God. Do you have to wear rubber gloves?

Speaker 4: No. You know why? Is that we used to do that, but actually the oils in your hands are more abrasive than latex, or even cloth.

Speaker 3: So the oils are more abrasive? No, no, sorry. I said that wrong.

Speaker 4: They're less abrasive. Okay. So we used to handle things with gloves, and nowadays we don't do that anymore.

Speaker 3: Ooh, that's wild. So you're touching it with your actual fingers. Yeah.

Speaker 4: That's got to feel bizarre. I was at the, two summers ago, I was at the University of Pennsylvania, and I was looking at a manuscript called P1, or Poxy 2, 1.2, and it's a beginning of the third century copy of the first page of Matthew's Gospel. And when I requested access to it, they told me that the last person to request it was when Pope John Paul II came and visited the States, and they pulled it out for him. So on the, you know the library when you used to have to punch your name, write your name on the cards? Yeah. If there was a card. Yeah, that guy. So I made a facsimile of that one too. And that one is the, that's the genealogy of Jesus from Matthew's Gospel. Wow. Actually, you know what, Jamie, if you go up to the search bar and put CSNTM, those letters, CSNTM.org. So this is the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. So if you click Digital Manuscript Collection, so they go around the world and they try to digitize all the existing New Testament manuscripts to preserve them. And so you can actually, you see there on the side, you can click, well, I want to look at a papyri and you can go the different conventions of, you know, the date or the time.

Speaker 3: And so you could read the translation and then go and look at the original source of

Speaker 4: it. Yeah. So ideally you always want to go look at the original, but because of organizations like which is actually in Dallas. People like me don't have to go to Europe where a lot of these manuscripts are housed. We can look at them and because these are such high grade that you can figure these things out. So actually a guy I know, Elijah Hickson, he used that and he actually figured out that there was a prominent manuscript, P50, which is a forgery. And so he used that based on like looking at the digital. Really? Yeah. He filled in the gaps within the rips and saw that the words didn't match up when you fill in the gaps. And so when he's transcribing the text, he's like, wait a minute, I don't think that word fits in there. And based on that, he's like, yeah, that's a forgery because someone has written the text in after that piece of papyri, which is, these forgeries are almost always a genuine piece of ancient papyri. Someone gets it from like the black market antiquities.

Speaker 3: Oh, and then just writes on it afterwards.

Speaker 4: Yeah, right there. So P50. So if you fill in these holes, they're called lacunas. The words, a lot of the words don't fit. So someone's come along and they've like written, done a really good job because it fooled scholars. And they've written in the text, but not quite good enough to figure out that not all of the words fit in the gaps that you've presented.

Speaker 3: What is your take on the Voynich manuscript?

Speaker 4: I have no idea what to think of the Voynich manuscript, but it's middle ages. It's just a weird one.

Speaker 3: It's a really weird one. Yeah. Because people have been trying to crack that code forever. What is this? Is it just gibberish? Is it just fake words? Yeah. I mean, that's... And why so much time and effort put into making this fake book? Was it like a crazy schizophrenic person who made their own language?

Speaker 4: I don't know.

Speaker 3: Like a rich schizophrenic person. Well, didn't J.R.R. Tolkien, didn't he create an entire language for Lord of the Rings?

Speaker 4: So a lot of the languages, because he was a linguist, a lot of the languages are based on existing languages.

Speaker 3: Okay. So you just combine them together to form his own version of it?

Speaker 4: Yeah. Like Elvish and Dwarvish. They're all based on like ancient Norse or old English. So he would take those languages and he'd actually... He had... I mean, if there's anyone who's the best at world building, you can learn Elvish.

Speaker 10: It's a real language.

Speaker 4: Because he developed the language.

Speaker 3: That's so crazy. That is crazy. That is so crazy. The dedication. That's so bananas.

Speaker 4: I mean, he was a genius. Guys like him and even Lewis, they were friends, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Really? Yeah, yeah. in Lewis's conversion, because Tolkien was Catholic. And I think Lewis was Irish, and so he couldn't quite become a Catholic, but he became a Protestant Anglican. But yeah, the Inklings Society, they would meet in Oxford at the, oh, what's the pub called? People are going to listen to this and get mad at me, because there's something in Child's.

Speaker 3: One of those UK pubs that's been around for a thousand years?

Speaker 4: Yeah, right. They would meet and talk. They were called the Inklings Society. Wow. Yeah. It was Eagle and Child.

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: Wow. Yeah. It's funny when you read how Tolkien was, Tolkien really didn't like Lewis's stuff, because he said it was way too, way too like straightforward. He's like, you got a Jesus lion? Good one. Like nobody, no, you're not beating around the bush on anything when you got a literal Jesus who's sacrificed? Come on. Rises from the dead? What are you doing here?

Speaker 3: That's funny.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: But they were friends. That would have been an interesting conversation to be a fly on the wall. Yeah. Tolkien breaking down Lewis's... Yeah. That would be fascinating.

Speaker 4: Apparently the guy who wrote Dune sent a copy to Tolkien before he published it. Really? And Tolkien didn't like it. Wow. He was like, I got nothing good to say, so I'm going to say nothing at all. Wow. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy.

Speaker 3: Well, he was wrong. Even geniuses. Well, I mean, some geniuses are just like so in their own head. Different strokes. Yeah. And that's part of the problem. But it's also what makes them so great in the first place, is they have this like singular vision and dedication so much so that they're writing an elvish language and combining words for it.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Jamie, did you find that thing about the dark matter? Did you find what I was asking about?

Speaker 8: Well, I stopped because I found a video and I saw some people explaining it and it didn't... It started saying that it was almost like they started off with a theory and that's how they do things and then they start working through the theory until someone has a better

Speaker 3: theory. There's such a giant problem today in that if you just post some fantastical claim in a headline like that the theory of dark matter has been debunked and then you get clicks. Yeah. And so you can kind of get away with doing that now.

Speaker 8: I felt like this explained like I'm five on Reddit at a pretty top comment or 1% or...

Speaker 3: So dark energy is a problem, modern cosmology has most problems in science. You start with a model, you go out and make measurements, you find your measurements don't fit your model. This is a problem. When this happens, scientists go off and try to come up with new theories. I think that's meant no models. I think they meant new models. New models which do fit the new data in the case of things like dark energy we get hundreds if not thousands of new theories. ACDM is the current best model of cosmology. The CDM stands for cold dark matter. It's a model that includes certain theories to explain dark matter and the lambda A is a cosmological constant. That's the Greek word lambda or the Greek letter. Yeah. Which is used to model dark energy. But this mathematical model doesn't explain what dark matter or dark energy are. It just incorporates them to make the maths work. So this is a long... I don't know if this is exactly what they were saying about... It was like a much more of a synopsis. But what they were saying was that it might be that time moves differently in between galaxies. See if you could Google that. Physics and cosmology are just wild. It's just it's so insane because we're so separate from it because of light pollution that the most majestic thing that you could ever see we gave up so that we could drive at night. It's really weird. It's really weird because when you go to a place you know I've talked about it a bunch of times but I'll say it again I went to the Keck Observatory many years ago and we got there on a perfect time where the the moon was not out at all and the sky was insane. It was like you were in the cockpit of a spaceship and you know it was just like you were in a giant glass cockpit which is essentially we are kind of in an organic spaceship hurling through the universe so it should look like that. But it just doesn't because of the fact that we're constantly inundated by light pollution. And I think the ancient societies and ancient cultures didn't have that. And because they didn't have that I think they had a much more humble view of our place in the universe because you're just presented with something that's absolutely impossible. Impossible to imagine.

Speaker 4: We definitely lose our sense of awe when we can't see kind of ourselves in the grand scheme of the universe. Yeah. And you're right when you go somewhere where there's no light pollution you look up at the sky it's like even not at somewhere like the Keck Observatory where you can get a crazy view of it. Yeah. When you just go out in the country and look up and you're like.

Speaker 3: That's the Milky Way. You can see the Milky Way. Dark energy debunked by lumpy universe expansion. Yeah. This is the one. Learn how the existence of dark energy is being challenged due to new evidence that the expanding universe is actually lumpy. So what they mean by lumpy is this we're talking about how time moves differently. See if it has a synopsis of it.

Speaker 8: It's like a rethinking article I found gets into explaining what dark energy is and then gets into the weeds. There's probably a paragraph at the bottom that says what you're looking for.

Speaker 3: What is it? Timescape model. So timescape model rejects the idea that dark energy is the driving force of universe expansion. Improving analysis of type L.A. L.A. supernovae has suggested that the acceleration based on light curves seen in 1998 was a case of misidentification. The timescape model amends this by considering differences of time in void and matter dense areas. The model suggests that time moves much slower in matter dense areas like the Milky Way galaxies than in voids. With more time passing in voids increased expansion takes place making it seem like expansion is accelerating as the voids increasingly spread through the universe. Dark energy therefore is not needed to explain the expansion of the universe according to the researchers. Who fucking knows? It's too much. It's too much like what are you even saying? How crazy is this? One of the more controversial aspects of the James Webb Telescope was this theory that perhaps the universe was quite a bit older than 13 point whatever billion years and they were trying to push it back to 22 based on the existence of galaxies. People are pushing back against that and there's a lot of debate about that but the bottom line is all of it is too many numbers for your brain to even register that however many billions of years ago there was nothing and then all of a sudden there was something. And Terrence McKenna had a great line that said that science requires one miracle.

Speaker 4: The Big Bang.

Speaker 3: It requires a miracle.

Speaker 4: Well I always say that when people ask me about you know the miracles in the Bible and I say well you know if the first miracle happened if everything you know nothing became everything then you know Jesus turning water into wine.

Speaker 3: That's an easy one. Well yeah. That's a party trick. Yeah exactly. I don't know if that's true compared to the birth of the universe but we're convinced at the creation of the universe and we're very skeptical at other miracles.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Very odd.

Speaker 4: Yeah I mean I think there's an inconsistency there and you do see when the Big Bang is first hypothesized that there are individuals who are uncomfortable with that sounding like in the beginning because before that the idea was that the universe was eternal and if you propose a point in time where everything starts to exist well that for and you see some of these people are pushing back on it. They say things like well that sounds too religious. That sounds like a beginning point in time and at that point if there's a Big Bang you have to figure out OK well what's the Big Banger. Right. And I mean that's ultimately it's a metaphysical religious question. How did that thing get kicked off.

Speaker 3: Brian Cox was explaining to us that there was an actual environment that existed pre the Big Bang. Don't they call it the environment. Is that what the term of it is.

Speaker 4: Is this like Lawrence Krauss having a definition for nothing. I don't know.

Speaker 3: It's not nothing. I don't know. It was just like what are you even saying. You know. And then there's Sir Roger Penrose who thinks there's a series of these things that happen and that it's just this constant birth of universes and death of universes and birth of new universe. And it's like Big Bang expansion heat death yeah contraction Big Bang like but we're almost like that's too much. I don't want to. I can kind of wrap my head around 14 billion years. I can't wrap my head around eternity.

Speaker 4: In theology it's often described as the difference between understanding and comprehension which my wife tells me are synonyms and that's nonsense. But the idea is like you can understand eternity is a long point in time. You can comprehend it.

Speaker 3: It's like numbers. Yeah. You can't you can understand how many zeros are in 14 billion years.

Speaker 4: How much water is in the ocean.

Speaker 3: Right.

Speaker 4: I can comprehend like it's like that's a lot of water. But when you start talking about like tens of thousands of gallons I'm like lost me.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I don't really know what that looks like. I kind of do. My brain's not set up for that. Which is part of the weird thing about people is that our brain is clearly set up differently than any every other creature that exists. You know if you have if evolution is the only thing that created us it's just evolution. How the fuck did we get so far ahead of everybody else. I mean not even just and we're the doughiest like weakest softest but also the smartest. Like we gave up that that was the trade off and somehow or another by evolving into this particular form we figured out a way to uniquely change the environment in ways that no other creature has even come close to. Yeah. And it's it's interesting to me that there are certain things that we think of in terms of like unexplained phenomena that we'll accept because we have some sort of a scientific definition of what this unexplained phenomena is like the Big Bang. I mean and you can say that there's theories it's not it's not completely unexplained that kind of get it but you kind of don't. Something that's smaller than the head of a pen that becomes the entire universe that we say is pretty fucking crazy. Yeah. You know and just to say that that just happened and you don't you don't really I know you don't want to say you don't know but you really don't know. There's no way you can know. It's not really possible to know. There's no like working theory where you can convince me that the whole universe gets compressed into something smaller than the head of a pen and then instantaneously becomes everything that you say.

Speaker 4: So I think that's why you see natural materialism being woefully inadequate to really explain the ultimate worldview questions that we have.

Speaker 3: Just the universe itself right. Just what we don't know enough. Maybe we one day will. Maybe these you know sentient AI systems that we're going to create with quantum computers are going to be able to figure things out in a way that we can't. But at the end of the day you have one miracle. You have the Big Bang. All of science agrees this happened. That is so much crazier than anything that any religion is proposing that it's so interesting to me that we're because while we say we have echoes of the Big Bang there's you know radio echoes. Yeah. Yeah. But also if a miracle did take place like let's assume that there is actually a higher power that occasionally interacts with human beings. If a miracle did take place and you were there you don't have a camera. You don't have a cell phone. You don't have a pen. You can't write things down. Maybe you can't even read. And you have this thing that happens to you and this thing changes the course of human history. This thing changes the direction that the ideology that these people subscribe to and the moral and ethical structure they live their life by. It changes untold billions of human beings from that point on. Yeah. Pretty fascinating. Even if this is just a revelation without a divine interaction that's a fucking miracle. It's a miracle that it was created at all. Like the whole idea that Christianity when you're saying that the book of was it the book of Isaiah. Yeah. That the same book is exactly the same as that's a miracle. That's pretty fucking crazy. Yeah. That's crazy. If you just imagine the sheer number of illiterate people the sheer number of days that have to go by where people are telling the story exactly the same and that it's entrusted in the hands of these very few people that are so dedicated to it that they get the exact words right a thousand years later. Pretty bananas.

Speaker 4: Well I mean that is kind of the crazy thing about Christianity where you have this Jewish itinerant guy who's walking around for century Roman occupied Judea. He's making some pretty audacious claims claims to be God himself and then he predicts his own death and resurrection and then his disciples are they think it's over like they're like he's dead we're done. And then they go from 11 scared men because Judas commits suicide as scared men in an upper room to completely overhauling the Roman world in only a couple hundred years because of this claim that they say they saw Jesus resurrected. Like there's something different that goes on there that they're like this is a miracle right. Dead people don't usually rise from the dead.

Speaker 3: So what is your personal belief when it comes to the resurrection. What do you think. Do you have a belief or do you just try to interpret the text and try to see what is the message.

Speaker 4: Well I think so as a historian I do think it is a historical question. You have a guy who objectively lived. He objectively died and then individuals close to his inner circle claim that they see him not dead. Right.

Speaker 3: Again. This is a highly unusual activity. Highly unusual. Right. So but it's hard when you're dealing with illiterate populations you're dealing with thousands of years of time you're dealing with an oral tradition and then you have us sitting here talking about it in 2024 trying to figure it at the end of 2024 trying to figure this out. Literally the end. Yeah. Last couple of days. It's it's very difficult for anybody who thinks of themselves as an intelligent person who's secular to even entertain the possibility that someone died and come back to life.

Speaker 4: And I get that. But we've already talked about the fact that we don't think that the only thing that exists is matter in motion. We as in you and I. Right. Like we believe that there's something else going on in this world that's a little bit crazy. There's something else. And that to I think exclude that I think excludes something that that you're kind of putting blinders on for. And you do have I mean you're right in terms of all of these ancient conventions and the ways that things were spread around and but the Gospels are written in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses. And they're written in this period of time where you have groups of individuals who could have fact check those things.

Speaker 3: So you fact check someone coming back from the dead. Well if you how many people saw his body right.

Speaker 4: Well Paul says that 400 people saw him all at once for when people saw the crucifixion no saw the resurrection resurrected Jesus. Yeah. First Corinthians 15 Paul says that Jesus appeared to the disciples and then he appeared to 400 people all at once. I mean if we read the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of or the Gospel of Luke and Acts so same author wrote these both documents. He says that Jesus was walking around teaching them for 40 days after he was resurrected from the dead. And so these are written within a time period when you have people who would have seen Jesus as ministry who were there say it's something like the feeding of the 5000 who could have been able to verify or debunk some of these things that are being said. And you go from a bunch of scared guys who because Jesus wasn't the only messianic figure who arose and claimed to be the Messiah. Right. There were a number of individuals both prior to and after Jesus but they die and the movement dies with them.

Speaker 3: Do you think it's possible that he didn't die. And do you think it's possible that they thought he was dead. Because that does happen. There was actually a case very recently where a guy was about to be harvested for organs. They thought he was dead. And this guy started moving again and came back to life. It's very very bizarre case because his family had been told that he was going to be harvested for organs. They were preparing for that. Yeah.

Speaker 4: This guy comes back. Yeah. I mean we know a lot about Roman crucifixion. Yeah. Pretty brutal. And we know that they did their job well. Yeah. And so in fact if you look at say very skeptical biblical scholars like non-believing atheist agnostic Christian scholars they will say if we can know anything about Jesus like they'll cast a doubt on a lot of the things that we read about in the gospels in terms of the actual historical Jesus of Nazareth they'll say one thing we can be sure of is that he died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. Because we have not just multiple attested documents that we refer to as the New Testament but Roman and Greek and Jewish writers refer to that claim afterwards and talk about the fact that you have this guy and it's mocked within earliest Christianity. So one of our earliest in fact not one of the earliest depiction of Jesus on the cross is called the Alexa Manos Graffito and it's probably from the end of the first century and it's a it depicts a an individual with their arms raised in an act of worship worshiping a man with a donkey's head who's being crucified. And right beside it it says Alexa Manos worships his God in Greek. And it's mocking right. Because crucifixion was for the lowest of the low. It was for like slaves. In fact if you were a Roman citizen you were banned from being crucified.

Speaker 3: Who was it that got crucified upside down? Peter. Was it because like regular crucifixion wasn't good enough for him or what was he what didn't deserve it because Christ had gone through it.

Speaker 4: Well so the story is that they say we're going to crucify you and he says it's like too big of an honor to die like my Lord and they say well we can fix that.

Speaker 3: Jesus.

Speaker 4: Shut your mouth buddy. Listen the Romans were pretty brutal. But this is why we know like we have. It's interesting we know a lot about crucifixion but crucifixion was seen as so disgusting. I believe it was Cicero who said that like the word crucifixion shouldn't even be on a Roman man's lips. I mean the word excruciating X is off of in Latin and cruce off the cross. That's where we get that word is because this was designed to humiliate and it was designed to be as painful as possible. There was actually a really good article done by JAMA the Journal of the American Medical Association which was done by a number of I think was in the 70s early 80s. It was done by a group of biblical scholars and then medical professionals. And so they looked at the conventions of what we do know about Roman crucifixion and then they looked at the descriptions in the gospel to try to figure out OK if we could diagnose how Jesus died how would he have died. And so they basically came up with this idea that he probably asphyxiated to death. You kind of drown in your own blood. But the chances of Jesus surviving the crucifixion I think are are narrow to none. And the chance of him appearing three days later completely fine. I mean you don't if the first thing you do if you survive a crucifixion and then you go and you find your disciples the first thing you say is not you know peace be with you. Get me to a hospital. Right.

Speaker 3: Do they have them back then. No no. Also are we entirely certain of their measurement of days.

Speaker 4: So this is an interesting question because of the differences between when when the gospel of John says Jesus died compared to the synoptics because John appears to be using the Roman convention of counting time and the other gospels when they describe the timing appear to be using the Jewish ones. And actually if you if if you correlate between the two they match up pretty well. So the thing is with Jews any part of a day was considered a day. So three days and three nights becomes almost an idiom for any part of that day is the day. So if on if Jesus and because they count evening and morning evening to morning is the day it's very possible that it wasn't like how we would think of three 24 hour days especially if he dies on Friday and wakes up on Sunday.

Speaker 3: So that would actually make it less time than than more time. Yeah. So it's not like he had recovery time. Oh no he didn't have recovery time. That's what I'm saying. It's not like it was three days it was actually three months. Oh no no no. Yeah. Not like that. So then 400 people saw him afterwards. That's the claim that that Paul makes. Paul makes it. Yeah. And how many different people have some sort of a recollection or writing or something that's a tribute to them of being witness to his resurrection.

Speaker 4: We have Peter Paul Jude James and Matthew Mark and Luke. The thing with Matthew Mark and Luke is that Matthew and Luke or Matthew and John are attributed to direct disciples of Jesus. Luke and Mark are not. So they are not eyewitnesses within the Jesus community. In fact Luke prefaces his gospel by saying that. He's right up front about this. He's like hey I'm not an eyewitness don't confuse me with an eyewitness. But he actually uses conventional writing what's the term I'm looking for. He uses writing conventions of the day that would fit within regular biography that was written within the Roman world. So you have a guy named Quintilian who is basically I mentioned before he's teaching people how to write and he says that if you're going to write biography you need to be interviewing eyewitnesses and you can't be too far away from the event to be able to write these things. And Quintilian, Lucian and Josephus who are all these very prominent ancient biographers and writers of history have a lot of crossover in the way they describe how you should write history with the words that Luke uses at the beginning of his gospel where he says I'm interviewing eyewitnesses and I'm writing up an orderly account. And so he's saying you know I'm going to use these methods that are expected as good history of my day. I'm not an eyewitness so I'm going to try to find the people who are eyewitnesses and I'm going to try to encapsulate this within a document that communicates what is being written.

Speaker 3: So we have an account of the resurrection. Do we have an account of the denial of the resurrection? Is there an historical record of him just dying and this like a refutal or rebuttal rather to what they're saying?

Speaker 4: No the only ones from the ancient world that deny his resurrection are groups that come on afterwards that sometimes are sometimes are described as Gnostics and they're not necessarily just denying it for the reasons we might think they were. They're denying it because they have incorporated ideas of pagan philosophy where they believe that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad. So if Jesus was crucified he if so let me back up if Jesus is God he cannot have a physical body. So they deny that he actually had a physicality to him. This is sometimes called docetism because docane in Greek means to seem. So these groups that we describe as the docetics they are denying that Jesus had a physical body he only seemed to have a physical body. And they wrote documents later on. So the Gospel of Peter which comes around in you know second third fourth centuries is being written and it has Jesus kind of chilling on the cross because he's not really physical because he's divine and physical entities don't have physical bodies. So we don't actually get like a concrete denial of his resurrection in that way until you get things like the Gospel of Barnabas in the Middle Ages which is a it's actually the document that Billy brought up to me in the conversation we had is the evidence that Jesus was never crucified. The Gospel of Barnabas. Well Gospel of Barnabas is 15th century it paraphrases Dante's Inferno it's not an ancient document. So but in the ancient world no nobody really had that big of a problem with these kind of supernatural claims. More the more of the kind of skepticism was why you would worship a crucified individual to begin with.

Speaker 3: Wow. So they were less surprised that he was resurrected.

Speaker 4: Or or that you would you would worship a crucified like teacher was just seen as silly

Speaker 3: because it's so humiliating to be crucified.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. And that like a God would let himself go through this. Right. Like what do you what are you talking about. In fact the ancient world didn't really have a problem with supernatural events. There is an ancient writer who mocks Christianity and he particularly mocks Christianity in saying that of course Jesus did miracles because Jesus had a childhood in Egypt and he goes all those Egyptians are magicians anyways. So he just learned the magic when he was a child. So he actually confirms incidentally two things that the narrative in the Gospels where it says that the Holy Family fled to Egypt during the reign of Herod he corroborates that he actually thinks that happened and that Jesus did miracles. He just attributes the miracles to Jesus being a traveling magician anyways. And you know anybody who lived in Egypt knows some magic.

Speaker 3: That is what's really fascinating that the mindset of the people that lived back then was that whatever was going on in Egypt was so crazy that they had to be magicians.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. But everybody believed in supernatural events. Like there's no such thing as like a secular work in the ancient world. Even Plutarch who's one of the most famous biographers in the ancient world. He wrote 90 biographies of which 60 still survive today. He was a priest of Apollo. So like he's already assuming that the gods exist that crazy things are going to happen in the world. And so they didn't have a problem with people doing miracles or crazy things happening or.

Speaker 3: Well that's also why it's so interesting trying to put your mind into the context of people that live back then when you try to interpret what these stories were all about because they did believe in things that weren't real. So when they talk about this thing that we're supposed to believe is real when you have all this evidence that they believe things that aren't true. Yeah. It's interesting right. Because like you're now saying yeah but this one really was true. Right. But there were so many different things that they thought of and believe that weren't true.

Speaker 4: Yeah. So this historiographically is so when we do history it's an inference to the best explanation. And so there are probabilities of things that have happened in history where we can say OK there's a higher probability of event A happening and a lower probability of event B happening. So the example I often give is like Jonah being swallowed by the fish. Like that's low probabilistically. Not that it didn't happen but that like as a historian we got to like say well there's no independent cross reference sources. You don't have multiple attestation for this particular event. The interesting thing about Jesus is that we have more evidence from different writings in the ancient world than we probably should have for someone of his stature. Because we have Matthew Mark and Luke and John these four biographies. There's really only one other person in and around that time that can claim to have that much kind of independent testimony of their life. And it's the Roman Emperor Tiberius. So he has he also has four biographers. He has Cassio Dio, Suetonius Tacitus and Velius Perturculus. And so the Roman Emperor who's the most famous most powerful person at the time has a similar amount of historiographical evidence biographically for his you know the events of his lifetime that Jesus does.

Speaker 3: What is the interpretation of Jesus from non-Jesus followers at the time? What did they think he was or who he was?

Speaker 4: He was a crucified traveling rabbi. I mean you have you have so you have individuals like Josephus mentions him end of first century beginning in second century. He was a he was a Jewish Roman writer. Tacitus mentions him who also wrote about the emperor. And you know you have a number of these individuals Cassio or Suetonius. But what they're doing mostly is describing what they're what the followers of Christianity are saying about him. So you do have to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt in that they're not saying things that they believe happened. They're saying they're talking about things that Christians believe happened. And Christians are this very unusual group because they're monotheistic in a world that does not believe in monotheism. And Jews are monotheistic in that time as well. But there was this idea that your religion could be tied to your ethnicity and that was OK. Like the Jews believe in one God and that's weird. But they're Jews. Whereas the Christians start to convert people who are of all different ethnic backgrounds. And so they're like well what the heck is going on here. Because why why are you saying. So the earliest criticisms of Christianity were actually that it was atheistic being the negative participle and theos meaning God. Because the ancient world was polytheistic. But more than that it was what's sometimes referred to as he know theism in that it's not that they believe in many gods. It's that they believe in many gods. And your gods could be my gods. Jupiter could be Zeus. Just same God by a different name. And your cities could have gods. Osiris and Ra can live in Egypt. And Zeus and Athena can live here. And that doesn't compromise anything. But then the Christians are coming around and they're saying actually no none of those gods exist. If they exist then they're demons. But they don't actually exist. And this was a big point of persecution within early Christianity is that a lot of physical events were tied to supernatural events. So there's an ancient historian who has this line where he says if the Nile River is too high in Egypt or the Tiber River is too low in Rome the cry will ring out the Christians to the lions. Because if you have a say a famine in Athens and they're going okay what's the reason for the famine. Well Athena's mad because there's a bunch of people running around saying she doesn't exist. Okay well let's deal with them.

Speaker 1: Let's let's.

Speaker 4: To the lions. Yeah. Let's get rid of them and that'll solve our issue. So Christians were this very oddball group. Kind of crazy that it wound up taking over the area. Well that's part of I think the argument of well how do you explain that. How do you explain it going from 11 scared disciples in an upper room to being willing to go out and die for the proclamation that you believe that Jesus rose from the dead and you saw him and you touched him and you ate with him and you know he wasn't a ghost. You actually ate fish with the resurrected Jesus.

Speaker 3: How does Constantine fit into this like what what is Constantine's education in Christianity.

Speaker 4: Yeah so Constantine is a pagan up until a point in time when he converts. So who educates him. Good question. I don't know in terms of his education. I know he does have some like crossover with some prominent Christians later on. He's a sun worshiper. But right right before right before Constantine you had a guy named Diocletian who is the emperor who basically had the goal of wiping out Christianity entirely. And so he the worst point of persecution was under the Diocletian rule. He actually made it so that if you had to go into like the equivalent of your town hall and you had to take a pinch of incense and offer it on to the the altar of Caesar him right the king and say Caesar is Lord. And part of this was that they knew that Christians say Jesus is Lord and Christians wouldn't do that. So here's how you outed them. And if you didn't do this so if you did do it you were getting this given this piece of paper is called a libelous and a libelous allowed you to buy and sell. If you didn't do it you didn't get a libelous which meant that you were not allowed to buy and sell. And so you have this incredible era of persecution where Christians are being like killed and Christian literature in particular is being destroyed because they're hunting it out. So Constantine comes after this and he knows that this is bad for Roman society. And so him and Licinius get together. They're both ruling the Roman Empire at the time. And in 313 they put out this edict of tolerance which includes Christianity. So it's called the Edict of Milan and it decriminalizes Christianity so it's no longer illegal to be a Christian. What was their motivation? I think they just felt like in order to establish peace within the empire you need to make sure that people aren't fearing you constantly to that degree. And so it wasn't just Christianity that benefited from the Edict of Milan a number of religion you know religious minority groups were benefited from this particular event. But this happens between 313 and 325 Constantine converts and so he becomes friendly to Christians. He also he commissions books of the Bible to be written and so this is where we first get our understanding like when we think of a Bible we think of it as like in a single bound volume like because we have the 66 books of the Bible and you know as a nice cover on the page or on the front. But in the ancient world those existed independently. So like p52 like that would be a separate copy of the Gospel of John and that's what it would have been understood as scripture. While Constantine as like a peace offering commissions all of these documents to be brought together and published in one book. And so we actually have what we think are some of these documents. So when I was talking with Billy Carson he brought up the Sinai Bible Codex Sinaiticus. Codex Sinaiticus is probably one of these documents that Constantine commissioned because it's one of our earliest examples of a cover to cover Genesis to Revelation copy of the Bible and it comes from the fourth century and based on both its dating and based on the fact that this would have been incredibly expensive to make. Like it took 360 sheep just to put together which would have been the equivalent of like I don't know tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars today. So the reason why we're pretty sure that documents like Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, potentially even Codex Alexandrinus or Codex Washingtonianus are documents that could have been part of this commissioning is just because they're such giant projects in you know very few people would have had the ability to produce something like this other than an emperor. And so we actually have some of these documents that survive today.

Speaker 3: Are there any books that were decided and how did they pick the order that these stories are in the Bible and are there any books that were excluded where there's debate on it?

Speaker 4: Yeah. Great question. So this is the issue of what's sometimes called the canon of scripture. So very early on when you have Christians having these conversations the four gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke and John there's unanimous agreement about those particularly and that's not to say that there aren't other gospels that pop up. It's that you have this chain of custody that goes back to the earliest Jesus community. Jesus has disciples and there's a group of individuals who we call the apostolic fathers who are the disciples of Jesus' disciples. And so they comment on the books that the disciples of Jesus or that people within the community of the disciples of Jesus wrote. And so we actually have a very close connection to the time and we see early on that you have guys like Ignatius of Antioch arguing that there are only four gospels in the second century and there couldn't be any more than four. Or Theophilus of Antioch makes the similar argument and they name Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Now Ignatius of Antioch also talks about other gospels but he specifically highlights the fact that the gospel of Thomas, gospel of truth, gospel of the Hebrews, gospel of you know these ones that we kind of hear about Mary, Judas. That the reason we know that they're not associated with the names that are attached to them is because they're being written in times when those people were dead and they have these rings of pagan philosophy that are incorporated into them which is completely foreign to first century Judaism. So Jesus would not have, so in the gospel of James, Jesus is worshiping a goddess named Sophia. It's like okay well no first century Jew is going to do that, that's obviously paganism. And so we have these early conversations but when Christians are thinking about well what is and isn't scripture, the earliest Christians are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah. And the Jews had this idea that the promises of God are followed up by the writings, the documents that establish those. So the word that's often used is covenant, God makes a covenant with people and that's always followed up by written text. So this is why sometimes, well in the case of Moses it's literally inscribed on a tablet and in the prophets sometimes you get this command, write this on a scroll, inscribe this on a tablet. And that the Jewish scriptures in Jesus' day were seen as a story in search of a conclusion because they were looking for this figure, this Mashiach, the Messiah, who would come and fulfill things like the reign of David. They're talking about these things, they're actually expecting them to happen. And so the story in search of a conclusion in the Christian understanding is that Jesus is that individual, he comes and he does things like he says at the Last Supper right before his crucifixion, that he's establishing a new covenant in his blood. And so the earliest Christians, mostly who are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah, they see, okay there's a new covenant which is actually promised in Jeremiah 31, 31 when God says that he's going to make a new covenant and inscribe the law on people's hearts. That covenant has come, the promises have come, so the earliest Christians very organically say, okay where's the writing? Because we expect this to happen. Promises are followed up by writings. And so they start to have these conversations of what are the writings and where can we find them? And so very early on, because the New Testament has 27 books in it, very early on 24 of the 27 are unanimously accepted. So by the time you get to the middle of the second century, we have lists in documents like there's a document called the Meritorium Fragment, which there's debate on its dating, but it's probably like mid to late second century, and it includes 24 of the 27. And it gives reasoning why. Now the other books that are in our New Testament that aren't in that 24 are ones that were discussed because the earliest Christians were trying to figure out, okay, can we tie this to either an apostle or someone who knew an apostle? Because we have a lot of books flying around with the names of John and Peter on them. So you have the Acts of Peter and you have the Revelation of Peter and you have the Gospels of Peter and you have... So how do we do our due diligence to try to tie this back? So there's two letters of Peter, first and second Peter in the New Testament. And the early Christians are like, we got to make sure we can tie these to Peter. Or the book of Jude and the book of James, which are ascribed to the brothers of Jesus. They were like, can we really say that those are written by those people? And so there are some books that the dust kind of takes time to settle on within the whole 27 canon because these groups are debating and discussing, well, why do we have these ones and not other ones? And so there are various canon lists that come up throughout the ancient world where some people are hypothesizing, well, maybe this book is part of it, or maybe this book is part of it. But it's this ongoing conversation of people and by basically the end of the second century, we have more or less unanimous agreement of the 27 books being those that encapsulate scripture that can be tied to either someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus.

Speaker 3: And so these books that were not included, are any of them interesting? I mean, are... They're all interesting. But does any of it seem like it belongs in the New Testament?

Speaker 4: So part of the problem with some of these other books is they appear to be almost completely reliant on the other books. So you do have... And some of them have an agenda to them. So like the Docetic Gospel of Peter seems to be uncomfortable with the fact that the biblical gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, have women being the first witnesses to the empty tomb. Because in the ancient world, women were not seen as good eyewitnesses. So you almost have this apologetic trying to solve that problem by having all the right people be witness to the resurrection. So you have all the Roman and Jewish officials camping out in front of the tomb, which also gives away the fact that no Jewish priest on the eve of Passover is gonna be camping out in front of a dead body. Like they just didn't do that. So it betrays that the author of the Gospel of Peter has no understanding of purity ritual rights within first century Second Temple Judaism, but is also clearly trying to remedy this embarrassing fact.

Speaker 3: Wow. That's what's so interesting about trying to interpret this stuff. You have to think about it in the terms of the culture of the times.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. And one of the most interesting ways that we figure out, okay, how can we tie, say, the Gospel of Matthew to the first century in Judea is studies that have been done on name frequency. So this is called onomastic congruence, where we look at the most popular names within a particular geographical area, and we compare it to how names are differentiated. So the name Joe is pretty common. So when you have a room and there's more than one Joe, you differentiate, okay? That's Joe Rogan, or that's MMA Joe, we figure out a way to do it. And that's called a disambiguator. And we see this in the New Testament, when you have lots of Peters, right? You have Simon Peter, you have Peter the Canaanian, or James the son of Zebedee, or you have lots of Marys. So you have these disambiguators, you even have lots of Jesuses, which is why Jesus is often described as the Lord Jesus, or Jesus of Nazareth, because Yehoshua is a common Jewish name. And so we can look at the popularity of names written in documents and actually pinpoint some of these documents to particular times in particular places. In fact, Jamie, are you able to, if you go on Apologetics Canada, our YouTube page. So the first episode of the Can I Trust the Bible series we did, we made an animation about this, where we looked at the data and then we actually compared it to one of these other gospels, the gospel of Judas. And so in the first episode of Can I Trust the Bible in the right books, partway through, it's near the end, the last animation, if you can find it, we had a guy put this together for us, where we looked at the studies. And there've been some really recent ones by a guy named Luke Vanderwey, who published this in, I believe it was a Cambridge, no, no, no, Birmingham University. He did his PhD on it. And he narrowed the gap within all of these literary bodies that talk about names. And we're able to pinpoint and actually show, yeah. So if you go to, yeah, right here. These particular decades that they're writing. A series of scholarly studies has shown that though Jews were located in many places across the Roman Empire, people's names often tended to be geographically located. By observing literary and archaeological artifacts, a list of common names can be clearly identified. By narrowing down the most popular names in places that Jesus lived, traveled, and ministered, and by comparing these to the lists from the studies, an interesting correlation can be seen. Just as we see today with popular names, a qualifier or nickname is often used. For example, notice that when Matthew lists the disciples in his gospel, certain names have a qualifier or nickname and others do not. Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector, James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus, Simon the zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him. As we would expect, the most popular names are those that have an added description. When we compare the most popular names in Judea and Galilee during the first century with names we see listed in key places in the biblical gospels, we find that all the names with qualifiers match with what we'd assume if they were actually written in the time and place they claim to be narrating. In contrast, the gospel of Judas only has two names that would fit, Jesus and Judas, but contains a host of other characters whose names match not with first century Judea or Galilee like the biblical gospels, but with names that were popular in Egypt during the second and third centuries. Consider how difficult it would be for someone living outside of the locations and times that these events took place to get the right names with the right qualifiers. We have four biblical gospels, with four different authors, and yet each gets this test of naming frequency and attribution right every time, a test and standard that the non-biblical gospels simply do not pass. So we can use...

Speaker 3: That is so interesting. Isn't it? So this is... God, that's so interesting. This is so... Totally makes sense too.

Speaker 4: Yeah. So it's the levels of methodology that we can use to find internal accuracy. If we really want to figure out, okay, where was this written and is it coming from early eyewitness testimony? We look at something like the biblical gospels and they fit the bill for something that's written in first century Judea. But if we look at something like the other gospels, they're doing things like the gospel of Judas does, where other characters are coming up with names that are almost either non-existent or very unpopular in places like Judea and Galilee, but are popular in third and fourth century Egypt. So what can we then conclude from that? Well, this is being written in third or fourth century Egypt. Right.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Wow. That's really amazing. It's such a complex and fascinating subject. It really is. And I think it's because of the barrier to entry, it's so high. There's so much to learn. There's so much to dig deep. Most people barely scratch the surface of this stuff. Right. And it takes someone like you to really kind of... Because it's real easy to lean into the fun stuff. It's real easy to lean into the Anunnaki stuff. But the actual real shit that we know is 100% the accounts of people that lived back then. That to me is as fascinating, if not more than even we're made by aliens. All of it is bizarre. And the fact that we're still going over these texts thousands of years later is also fascinating.

Speaker 4: Yeah. And a lot of this stuff, like the unmasked congruence is something that has really only been studied to the level that it has within the last like 50 years. So we're constantly discovering ways that we can use different types of methodological analysis to figure out the historical validity of something. So this is, we call it verisimilitude, which is historians are looking for what can show us the appearance, likelihood, and probability of something being true. And so sometimes documents out themselves as being unreliable and not true because they inadvertently include these clues. So the gospel of Barnabas, which I mentioned before, which Billy Carson has brought up as an evidence that he sees as denying the crucifixion, it talks about Jesus getting in a boat and traveling to Nazareth, but Nazareth is landlocked. So that person clearly did not know anything about the geography of like first century Israel because you're not getting in a boat to go to Nazareth. But if you're writing, I mean, in the case of the gospel of Barnabas, you're talking about like a thousand plus years later. But if you've never been there and you don't understand, it's like, have you ever seen middle age paintings of lions?

Speaker 3: Yes.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3: They had no idea what they were. Well, we brought that up the other day because I was in Ravello and there's a church, an ancient church in Ravello and it has a depiction of the whale and the whale doesn't look anything like a whale. Like it has wings. It looks like a lion's head. It's so weird.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, a lot of the middle ages, throughout the middle ages. There it is.

Speaker 3: Yeah. That's crazy.

Speaker 4: I mean, it looks like a dragon. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. And lions look a lot like dogs because they're like, what's your frame of reference?

Speaker 3: Right. Right. Right. And also you're getting someone describing it to an artist. Yeah. You probably can't paint it.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 3: So you have to describe it.

Speaker 4: Yeah. It's like, yeah, yeah. That's what it looks like. Yeah. Yeah. Tertiary. Secondary. So, and a lot of these writings kind of out themselves as that, literarily within the things that they choose to include. Names are a small example, but geography or distances between places, you know, the biblical gospels described going up to Jerusalem. And we can kind of read that and not think anything about it. But Jerusalem on the, on the map. Yeah. Elevation of sea level, you do go up to it. And so it's like these small clues that we as historians are looking for, or on the parable of the good Samaritan, it's going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and you literally, you go down like an elevation in sea level to go to Jericho or the, the story of Zacchaeus, who's the guy who climbs a tree to see Jesus, he's a, he's a wee little man. He's like a, like a is, is a, he's short and he can't see over the crowd. And he hears this miracle worker, Jesus is coming. So he climbs a sycamore tree and the gospels specifically say he climbs a sycamore tree. Well, this can be like a detail we can pass over, but we know based on kind of the acidity of the soils, the sycamore trees only grow in those areas in that, you know, timeframe. So we can look and see, okay, well, Luke, whoever Luke is getting this from, he's adding this detail. Maybe he's not even, even aware of the significance of it, but whoever he's getting this from has been there because they actually know what tree would have been growing there and tell him that Zacchaeus climbs a sycamore tree. And so it's like fauna and flora and distance between locations, things that actually other ancient writers get wrong sometimes. Have you ever had a debate with a snarky atheist?

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Speaker 3: I think that would be fun. Like a, like a, a formal debate? No, not even a formal debate. Just, I think it would be a fascinating conversation because I'm sure, well, atheists, they vary just like Christians vary, but the worst versions of them are essentially believers in the religion of atheism.

Speaker 5: Right.

Speaker 3: They, they worship the concept of there being no God. This is it. When you die, nothing happens.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: And that to me is always so arrogant. I just, just the fact that you exist at all is so bizarre and so spectacular. The idea that, you know, for sure that when the lights shut out, that that's a wrap, like, because there's no evidence of the contrary. Well, okay.

Speaker 4: Kind of assuming your conclusion there.

Speaker 3: Absence of evidence is not evidence. It's especially when you're talking about something that's as bizarre as death. And especially when you have people that have near death experiences that are radically similar.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Those are really weird. They're really weird. How, how many similarities people have in these near death experiences from accidents and all sorts of things that people, you know, come back from where their heart stops beating, they see themselves above their body. There's a, there's a lot of weirdness to it that makes you, I just see, it thinks it's a little silly because how could you know what you don't know?

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: You cannot know what you don't know. And it, the problem is that there's a cachet, that there's a social credit amongst academics in particular, that's, um, that's ascribed to a person who is atheist, a person who is, he's brilliant. He's not silly. He doesn't believe in myths. He doesn't. I get it. I get why there's social pressure in that regard. I get it. But to not look at the universe itself, just the, this creation engine of planets and stellar nurseries, just the, the bizarreness of the epicness of it all. And to not wonder if maybe you're, you have a very narrow perception of what this whole thing is all about.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Deny the virgin birth, but not the virgin birth of the universe.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, all of it, like everything. Just the, the, the big, there, there's so many more impressive miracles than any of the things that people think of in the body. It's just, there's, they're so weird in our day and age that we're not willing to like, if we want it, we, we want to think that things are very clean and easy to measure and they often are not. And, you know, I think most of what it means to be a human being in a, in a meaningful way is not measurable. Most of it, love and friendship and community, these things are not very measurable. They're very strange. You know, the, the, the bond that people have with their family and their loved ones. And it's very strange. Yeah. That love connection, whatever love is, whatever good is, it's a very real thing. And it seems to not exist, certainly not in the volume in other animals that exist in us. There's obviously nurturing in other animals. They nurture their loved ones, but their perception of life and death and all of it is very different than ours. So it leads me to why, why, why is, why is our version of life so much more rich and complicated than any other being that exists? And why do we have this insatiable desire to learn and know more?

Speaker 4: Yeah. What is it? Why does this, you know, however many three pounds of gray matter in my brain, why is that able to plummet the intricacies of the universe? Right. Right. Like, and I, and I think that that's, that's ultimately the questions that we should be asking in terms of you matter more than you are matter. There's something going on.

Speaker 3: There's something going on with all of us.

Speaker 9: Yeah.

Speaker 3: We kind of know it and we don't know it, you know? But it's just, you can't measure it and you can't put it on a scale. And so people don't like that.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: They don't like that. It makes them feel dumb to believe in that. It makes them feel dumb to even speculate, you know, to even just say, what do you think happens when you die? Like even that conversation, it's like, people don't like that. Nothing. You go, it goes dark and that's it. It's over. You die. Like, how the fuck do you know? Have you died? Like, you don't know.

Speaker 4: So in all of this, what do you think of Jesus? Like in terms of your own like journeying and trying to find answers to ultimate questions, what do you think of the historical person of Jesus?

Speaker 3: Well, it certainly seems like there's a lot of people that believe that there was this very exceptional human being that existed. So the question is, what does that mean? Does, does it mean he was the son of God? Does it mean he was just some completely unique human being that had this vision of humanity and this way of educating people and spreading this ideology that would ultimately change the way human beings interact with each other forever? So what is, is, is he the son of God? Well, are we all? That's another question, right? Or do we all have that inside of us? Do we all have that ability to change everything around us, inside of us? Do we all have that unique connection to the divine? And is he a representation of the best version of that? Or was he an actual person that was the son of God? And is it important?

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: I don't know. I mean, what does it mean? It's just the fact that it's a question to ponder is a miracle in itself, in a way. Just the fact that there's this concept of this person that died for our sins as the son of God, but you have to buy a bunch, you have to believe in a bunch of stuff to go that way. Like just the concept of that is interesting to people because what it can do to people is offer them a very unique way to change the way they feel about the world itself. And if you do follow that, I know a lot of Christians are hardcore Christians are some of the nicest people you'll ever meet in your life. So it does work. You're right. Like if you do live like a Christian and you do follow the principles of Christ, you will have a richer, more love filled life. So it is true, right? But you have to submit to this concept that this guy was the child of God who came down to earth, let himself be crucified, came back from the dead, explained a bunch of stuff for people and then said, all right, see you when I come back.

Speaker 4: And you don't know how you can wrap your head around that particular claim.

Speaker 3: And if he came back, here's the thing. If he came back, who the fuck would believe him today with all the fake news and all the CGI and AI? Like imagine that would be the most bizarre thing of all time. If we get to a point where artificial reality is indiscernible from regular reality and Jesus chooses to come back at that moment, boy, that's the ultimate test of faith, right? When it's impossible to discern. If we really reach a point where virtual reality is indistinguishable from regular reality, which we're probably a hundred years away from that or something, like maybe not even that.

Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that's probably why Jesus came in the first century and not the 21st century.

Speaker 3: But imagine, imagine if that's the that's the big catch, like Jesus does return. But when he returns, we're just so confused that we we can't even tell. Yeah. Or maybe that's how he returns in the first place. Maybe he returns through AI. Yeah. Maybe that's the portal to Jesus.

Speaker 4: I don't know anything about that.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, that scares the shit out of me.

Speaker 4: I really appreciate. I mean, guys that you're friends with, right? Like the Jordan Petersons and the Douglas Murray's of the world or, you know, the Tom Hollands, not the Spider-Man actor, the historian who talk about this stuff. I think I really like the way that Jordan Peterson articulates it. But I think he misses the force for the trees. How so? In that he sees Jesus as an archetype. And I don't think actually even Jesus gives you the opportunity to see him as the archetype. Because I both I have this love hate relationship with all of Peterson's stuff because he's he seems to get so much right where he walks up to the line, but he doesn't want to cross over.

Speaker 3: And is the crossover, you think, connected to a life in academia? No. What do you think it is?

Speaker 4: I wonder, and I'd love to talk to him about this, like, how do you remedy this issue that because he seems to think it that the concept of Jesus as an example is more important than the actual flesh and blood first century itinerant Jewish preacher who was crucified and rose from the dead physically, which is the claim of the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. That that's that's an example for us to look on and live by. But I actually think that Jesus condemns moralism. And ultimately, what I see Peterson doing is looking at Jesus as a moral example. And if Jesus is nothing but a moral example, then you can save yourself and you don't actually need a savior. And so I think actually Jesus would have critiqued that because Jesus was very against moralism.

Speaker 3: And how does he how do you define Jesus being against moralism? Like, what do you mean by that exactly?

Speaker 4: Well, Jesus looks at the religiosity of his day with like particular groups like the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who are these other like these other groups of Jews during his day. So we talked about the Essenes actually aren't mentioned in the Bible. But there are other groups like the Pharisees who are like lay scholars and the Sadducees who are professional priest scholars. And he's constantly critiquing the fact that they have this hypocritical religiosity to them where they're doing things like tithing their mint leaves, like to make sure that they get all of this is where we get the idea of the letter of the law versus the intention of the law. Like Jesus critiques them for that, because he says you're trying to do everything right and you're missing the point. So one of the things he says is like, if your donkey falls in a ravine on the Sabbath, do you pull it out or is that work? Like, what's the point of the Sabbath? Is it to not do any work? Like, is it to make sure that you're not working too hard because you might be breaking the Sabbath or like, what is the point? He says, like, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath and that there's this intention. This is the whole Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter five. Is he keeps saying, you have heard it said, but I say, and he refers to the Mosaic law and it looks like he's critiquing the Mosaic law, but he's not actually. He's getting back to the intention of the law. So when he says, you know, you have heard it said, do not commit murder, but I say to you, anybody who harbors a hate for their brother in their heart has already committed murder. And what he's getting to is like, what's the intention? What's the meaning of the law that God puts, gives to you? Because the law is like a mirror. It shows you how dirty you are. But his critique is, he's like, you guys are trying to clean yourself with a mirror. That's stupid. It's just going to, if anything, it's going to make you more messy. Like get in the shower. The law is not what cleans you. The law is what reveals that you're dirty. And so in that sense, I think, you know, if Jesus is a moral example, it actually misses what I think Jesus actually said about what his purpose was in that you can't do enough to actually live up to the standard that God holds you to. And so if you keep striving, you're, you're actually going to wear yourself out and be exhausted.

Speaker 3: Like atheists.

Speaker 4: I didn't say you did, Joe.

Speaker 3: Go crazy. They go crazy when they get older. Yeah. Listen, Wes, this is such an awesome conversation. And I'm sad that it went down the way it went down with you and Billy. But the good thing out of it is that a lot of people became aware of your work and it's such exhaustive work. It's really amazing what you've done. Thank you so much for these gifts. We will find a great place for them on the wall here. And thanks for it. And let's do it again. And I would love to do it with you and someone who disagrees too. I think it would be a fascinating conversation.

Speaker 5: Yeah, that'd be great.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it would be really cool.

Speaker 5: This has been a pleasure.

Speaker 3: My pleasure. Thank you very much. Oh, tell everybody how to find you, how to find all of the different, you have two different YouTube channels. You have your own and you have this new one with Apologetics Canada.

Speaker 4: Yeah, so I work for a national not-for-profit in Canada that is an organization. We want people to have an intellectually robust and a biblically grounded and a faith. We want people to know what they believe and why they believe it. And so we produce materials like we played that clip from Can I Trust the Bible? That's a series that's ongoing. You know, I'm going to be traveling in 2025 to produce more of that content to try to, you know, get this stuff that's all up here out into people so that they can be able to access it.

Speaker 3: Do you have two of them that are on, well, there's more, but there's the two Can I Trust the Bible versions, one and two, I'll watch both of those.

Speaker 4: Yeah, awesome. Yeah. So yeah, WesleyHuff.com is my website. ApologeticsCanada.com is where, you know, if you want to see where I'm speaking or what we're up to, I'm part of a team that does a lot of this stuff. So those are the two places. All my social media handles can be found on WesleyHuff.com.

Speaker 3: All right. Beautiful. Awesome. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Bye.