Biblical Scholar Reacts to Muslim Polemics | ft. Blogging Theology & ManyProphetsOneMessage

Hello everyone, welcome back to Orthodox Jahada. I'm here again with, uh, Father Stephen, who we've had on before to review his magnificent book called "The Religion of the Apostles." He is again a PhD in Biblical Studies, and he's a pastor at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana. He is educated in a multitude of ancient languages, which would be very useful for our talk today. So, how are you doing, Father Stephen?

I am doing well. I'm doing well. Keeping cool. It's very good. Cool? Yeah, that's important. And hydrated, hopefully, too.

So, um, yeah, today basically we're gonna do a, uh, just, uh, we're gonna have Father Stephen perhaps painfully, uh, react to some videos by some, uh, Islamic polemicists on Paul. Now, everyone who's in this, uh, apologetic scene knows that Saint Paul is often put in question and put in suspicion and derision by, um, Islamic apologists because he's kind of inconvenient to their narrative, I suppose would be the way to put it. Um, but, uh, yeah, so while I get those, um, videos up, do you mind kind of telling us a little bit about, uh, because, um, like, what, what your experience is in terms of academia with, uh, Saint Paul? Like, how has he been seen, uh, you know, in biblical studies and whatnot?

Yeah, well, yeah, so there's been a sort of renaissance in the way Saint Paul is, uh, looked at in in scholarship. Uh, and this is kind of pertinent to the way in which a lot of Islamic apologists, uh, want to try to use Saint Paul's. In a lot of cases, they're relying on old, out-of-date scholarship. There was, it was very common in, I get to pick on 19th-century Germans, some more. It was very common in the 19th and early 20th centuries to kind of draw this contrast between the teachings of, quote unquote, the historical Jesus and the teachings of Saint Paul. Part of this was a whole agenda to say that there are theologies, plural, in the New Testament, all these conflicting views. And a lot of it presupposed, as many Islamic apologists do, that a certain Protestant reading of that time period just is what Saint Paul said.

But since the publication of "Paul and Palestinian Judaism" by Sanders, that was the beginning of sort of what's been called the New Perspective on Paul. Uh, which, uh, sort of reassessed. Now that we have access to so much Jewish literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Second Temple Jewish literature that we didn't have access to before. And now that some folks like Sanders and Dunn and N.T. Wright have figured out, like, hey, this might be pertinent to understanding the Bible. Uh, which sounds obvious, but was revolutionary in the 1980s. Uh, now sort of saying, well, if Saint Paul is responding to the Pharisaic Judaism of his day, and that Judaism is different than we thought, then don't we have to reassess what Saint Paul is saying in response to it? And so that's what sort of generated the New Perspective on Paul. A lot of which concerned what is meant by "works of the law." Whether "works of the law" specifically the dividing line with what's called the Old Perspective or the Lutheran perspective and the New Perspective is that while the Lutheran perspective is that "works of the law" just means works, uh, the, uh, New Perspective holds that "works of the law" refers to specifically sort of the the boundary marker commandments of the Torah that separated Israel from the nations. So things like circumcision, the food laws, those things that were particular to the holiness and set-apart nature of Israel. That those are the things, uh, Saint Paul is arguing aren't about salvation, not just sort of good works in general.

And now, even in scholarship, it's progressed even beyond that. There's what was first called the Post-New Perspective, very creatively. Uh, it's now called, uh, usually referred to as "Paul within Judaism," which is really where, in terms of this scheme at least, that's where I would be, and where things like "Religion of the Apostles" would be. Which is basically that Saint Paul never left Judaism. That what Saint Paul is teaching is within the Judaisms of the the first century, and he is not seeing himself as having made a break, let alone starting over and making a new religion, but sees Christ within the frame of of Judaism. Uh, so that's been a huge change. And, uh, since I've previewed these videos, Islamic apologists seem to have not gotten the memo about all that. So we'll go into more detail here.

All right, so, um, I'm just going to start start playing, and then, time, I'm going to pause, and then I just need to go grab my phone upstairs. But as soon as I've paused and you start talking, I'm just going to go, zoop out. Um, but, uh, yeah, so just tell me when. Hopefully, everyone can hear this.

Paul of Tarsus has done more than any other person in history to influence and shape conceptions about the person and message of Jesus. In this video, we are going to consider the question: Is Paul a reliable source of information about Jesus? The early followers of Jesus were hunted and persecuted by Paul, who started out as a zealous enemy of Christianity. Then, one day, while on a sandy desert road to Damascus, Paul said that he had a mystical encounter with a disembodied voice claiming to be Jesus.

Look at Paul's here already. Time to become a super. Yeah, go ahead.

Uh, yeah, so I'm not sure where they're getting this, uh, "he had an encounter with a disembodied voice." Um, this event is recounted multiple times. It's recounted twice in, uh, the Acts of the Apostles. The first time it's sort of narrated historically, quote-unquote, as it happens, as it were, by Saint Luke, uh, in the early part of the Acts of the Apostles. Then Saint Paul re-narrates it with a few added details, uh, during a sermon near the end of the Acts of the Apostles. And then Saint Paul refers to it himself in one of his epistles. And at no point does he say he encountered a disembodied voice. In fact, he distinguishes, uh, in his own recounting of it, between the light that shone from heaven that was visible to all of the people with him, and the voice that he heard, but they did not hear. So the idea that this was a disembodied voice and there was not a visual element is literally nowhere in in the biblical accounts of this event. Uh, and every artistic depiction of this event, whether iconographically or even in Western art, has the light and has Christ looking into the heavens. Uh, Saint Paul frequently says, even outside of recounting the event, that Christ revealed himself to him, not that he spoke to him. And Christ also appears to say Paul two other times in the Acts of the Apostles, if you read closely. So already, I'm not sure where that disembodied voice thing is coming from. And as we talked about, we were talking about the book, that's not even how the word of the Lord came to the prophets in the Old Testament. If you read closely, uh, that the the word of the Lord is described as coming to them in visions and in some cases as standing somewhere or or touching them. So, yeah, this is, we're already off on a tangent, I suppose.

One of the things I hear often is that it's like, only Paul saw this, or only Paul had this experience, but the other people there didn't. What would, what would you say about that?

Yeah, well, what what Saint Paul himself says is that they saw that he was having this experience, right? They saw the light. So they saw that something was happening, but they didn't receive the same revelation he did, right? I mean, Christ didn't appear to all of them. Christ appeared to him. But they were all aware that he was having some sort of experience. And we don't have their testimony, obviously, for them to say exactly what, you know, they they saw and or didn't, right?

Evangelist dedicating his life to spreading what he claimed was the message of Jesus. Paul's biggest claim to legitimacy as an apostle is the divine revelation which he said he received directly from Jesus. For example, Paul wrote, "I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. Rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ." Unfortunately, there is no way of independently verifying Paul's claims of mystical desert encounters with Jesus. We just have to take him at his word.

Pause it here to test Paul's up. Uh, so this is going to be a little bit of a running theme, uh, which is, uh, I've noticed that, uh, Islamic apologists seem to be really willing to make arguments against Christianity that their own religion couldn't withstand. Right? So there's no independent verification of Saint Paul's vision. Uh, we just have to take him at his word for it. Uh, is there any independent verification of any of the experiences or any of the details of the life of the Muslim prophet? No, right? There is no. And in fact, we have more textual evidence from closer to the time it happened for Saint Paul's experience on the road to Damascus, for Christ's crucifixion, and even his resurrection, than we do for any event in the life of the Muslim prophet. So casually throwing out, "Oh, we don't have any verification of this, we just have to take his word for it." I don't believe we even have a first-person account of most of this from the Muslim prophet. We at least have a first-person account from, say, Paul. Yeah, yeah. Not written down. Yeah, yeah. So, uh, I, I, you know, it's, it's kind of cheap to throw that in there to try to make it sound like Saint Paul is being deceptive or or making it up. But, you know, if you applied that same standard, well, anything we can't independently verify, we have to be suspicious of. A lot of Islam, it seems to me, would fall apart very quickly if you use the same standard, right, of suspicion. So I think that's a little cheap to throw that in there. Yeah, because my understanding was that there was, there wasn't anyone else with, um, Muhammad in in the cave when the when the angel came to him. So, yeah. Either that's a good point. Um, I think so.

Apostleship is to scrutinize his writings. He made repeated claims of divine inspiration. And since God is all-knowing and all-wise, it stands to reason that Paul's writings should be free of error. In the following prophecy, Paul provided a timeline for the world to end: "We will not all sleep, that we will all be changed in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed." Sleep here is being used as a metaphor for death. So Paul seems to be saying that not all of the believers in his day would die before the return of Jesus. Obviously, this is a false prophecy, as it has been nearly 2,000 years since Paul wrote these words, and the return of Jesus still has not taken place.

Yeah, he's going to go into this some more, but we'll go ahead and deposit here. So, um, how, first of all, how does diversity quoted give a timeline? With give a timeline, and then there's no timeline. So that already is skewing it. And I'm going to, I'm going to try and be generous here, right? From my my knowledge of Islam is somewhat limited, but from my knowledge of the of the Quran, while there are theories of interpretation about the historical context of different Surahs and different passages in different sections, it's not like the New Testament, right, where you have a letter that was written as a literary whole, right, and and is presented sort of in this way. So I'm trying to be generous and say, maybe maybe context doesn't function the same way in terms of interpreting their scriptures as it does with ours. Uh, but basically, this this has been pulled completely out of context, right? So, uh, a a text means something in context. So there there is an argument that Saint Paul is making that's directed to a particular group of people at a particular point in time to address a particular issue, right? So if you pull it out of that context, you could you could make it say whatever you want. So what he's suggesting here by interpreting that way is that Saint Paul's intent when he wrote that sentence was to communicate to the Christian community at Thessalonica when Jesus was returning, right? Which makes no sense in context, right? It's very clear in context what he's talking about.

So, uh, in context, there is some kind of question, some kind of misunderstanding among the Christian community of Thessalonica about the the bodily resurrection and how it works. Uh, and this is this would be expected, right? Because among, uh, the Judaisms of the first century, and even Rabbinic Judaism today, there is not one consistent teaching on the bodily resurrection, and even the afterlife in a broad sense. Uh, so even even Rabbinic Judaism today, some Orthodox Jews don't even believe in an afterlife, period, right? Let alone a bodily resurrection. So within Jewish Christians, there would have been ambiguity. And we know that the the pagans thought the bodily resurrection was ridiculous, the whole idea. So the pagan converts to Christianity of Thessalonica wouldn't have necessarily understood it either. So we can understand why they'd be confused. And so what Saint Paul is writing about, right, and and that whole word "proceed" is key to his argument, is that it seems like they believed that if people had died, people in the Christian community had died, they were going to sort of miss out on the second coming of Christ, right? And therefore miss out on sort of life in the kingdom, right? And so what Saint Paul is is communicating here is that those who have fallen asleep are also going to be participating in in the kingdom, right? That they're going to be raised from the dead, reunited with those who are alive at the time, um, and and then together they will be with the Lord with Christ in the kingdom. So he's he's trying to communicate that, like, and he says at the beginning of this, "I do not want you to grieve as those who have no hope," right? Meaning they were grieving their deceased loved ones, like they were gone forever. And he said, "No, no, no, it's not just the people who are alive when Christ comes back, it's all those who will fall asleep beforehand." So this has nothing to do with the timetable. He's not addressing when it will happen at all in this in this verse.

So we could go a little further because, yeah, there will be more of me conclude that Paul and his followers expected the imminent end of the world. For example, the distinguished New Testament scholar, Professor C.K. Barrett, wrote in his commentary on this prophecy, "Paul expects that at the parousia, second coming of Jesus, he himself will not be among the dead of whom he speaks in the third person, but among the living of whom he speaks in the first person. He expected the parousia within his own lifetime." A virtually identical end-of-world prophecy can be found in the Gospel of Mark. The renowned Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, wrote that it is the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.

Now, some Christians by cleaning. Yeah, so this is this is another, this is another sort of theme, is this sort of cherry-picking of sometimes dubious authorities, right? So, uh, I'm not here to bury C.K. Barrett, but I mean, that's pretty cherry-picked. And I doubt this particular Islamic apologist agrees with C.K. Barrett about anything else, but apparently he's an authority on this point. Um, but, um, even with with C.K. with what Barrett said, right, notice he's talking about "expected." And so part of the the issue here with with Barrett, frankly, because Barrett's working on the whole perspective, Barrett, as, uh, a Protestant commentator of his era, understands basically Christianity to have restarted from simplicity and from scratch with the apostles. And so approaches, he approached the idea of the second coming of Christ at all, that there was going to be a second coming of Christ, there was going to be a split between the two comings of the Messiah, he argues was this new revelation that came to the apostles. But of course, now we know better, right? We know that in the understanding of the Judaisms of the time of Second Temple Judaism, the history of the world is divided into these ages or epochs, right? And these eras, right? So there's one that runs from, uh, Adam to Noah, one that runs from Noah to Abraham, Abraham to Moses, Moses to David, David to the coming of the Messiah. And then there is a Messianic age before the end. You can see this all over the New Testament. But sort of Exhibit A, you can look at Daniel 7, right? The Son of Man is enthroned, the beast, the last beast that pretty clearly represented the Roman Empire, is is overthrown and imprisoned. And then after a long time, as Daniel says, then the end of the judgment comes, right? And so when Saint Paul has his vision of Christ enthroned, that Jesus is the Messiah, he's enthroned on the throne of God, he doesn't start any religion. He says, "Oh, the Messiah has come. So now we're in the Messianic age. Now we're in this age, and this age will last until the end when when Christ appears and the judgment happens." And there is nowhere in Second Temple Judaism indicating Daniel predicted very accurately exactly when Christ would be born. That's why in the first century, there were so many first and early second centuries, there were so many false messiahs popping up all over the place in Judea because Daniel had prophesied when it was going to happen. And so when that time rolled around, you had a lot of people showing up and trying to to claim the mantle. But there is no prediction of how long the Messianic age is going to be, right? You get in Saint John's Revelation, a thousand years. You get Daniel's, "a long time." Um, but there's just this idea that there's this time. And as the Gospels make very clear, "no one knows the day or the hour." And that also means the month of the year Christ is going to come, like a thief in the night. You don't know when it's going to happen, right? And so, yes, that first generation of Christians, and the second generation of Christians, and the third generation of Christians, and every subsequent generation of Christians has believed that Christ could return during their lifetime. This is not sort of this aberrant thing where, uh, a lot of writers of Barrett's time period write as if after all the apostles died, they just said, "Oh, well, this is going to be a long time." As if there were second-century writings saying the same thing, and third-century writings saying the same thing, and fourth-century writings saying the same thing. This is this is just a constant of Christian teaching because we understand we're in this final age, the Messianic age, the end times, the latter days, the last days, uh, that's what that means, that last, uh, that last time period. So that's not a unique, that's not a unique thing, right? And this, the C.S. Lewis reference is also just bizarre because he's not really a biblical scholar. I mean, he is a popular Christian writer, but I mean, that's kind of like quoting J.K. Rowling in terms of the amount of weight it has, you know? Um, the, uh, but the verse about "some here will not taste death before they see they, uh, see the Son of Man coming into his kingdom." That's based on the assumption that what Christ is talking about there is his second coming, and not talking about his resurrection and his ascension and enthronement, which I would suggest is exactly what it's talking about. And there were people there who were still alive when that happened, and some who weren't.

Okay. Think that when he made the statement, "We will not all sleep," he was not including the believers of his day among those who will not taste death, but rather he was referring to believers at some unspecified time in the future. So what did Paul intend by a statement? Shall we interpret it literally or figuratively? We can look to Paul's related prophecies to help us arrive at the correct understanding. In the following prophecy, Paul advised believers with regards to how they should conduct themselves going forward: "But those who marry will face many troubles in this life. And I want to spare you this. What I mean, brothers and sisters, is that the time is short. From now on, those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn as if they did not; those who are happy as if they were not; those who buy something as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away."

Um, so first of all, you know, you could always sense a straw man coming when they say, "some Christians" and don't say who. Somebody makes this argument time about it. Um, and that would be a really silly argument, right, to say Saint Paul isn't talking to who he's talking to, he's talking to some theoretical future people. Like, I don't know any Christians who say, I mean, even though the sort of wackiest end times obsessed evangelicals with the huge wall charts and the book of Revelation and stuff wouldn't say that the book of Revelation was irrelevant to the people who originally read it. It was only written, right, to a later generation. So that's weird. But also, you know, yes, Saint Paul says "we" because he was alive at the time, right? "We who are alive," right? He wouldn't include himself with the dead people because he wasn't dead, right? Like, how else would Saint Paul have said that, right? Like, that's, he's alive. So yes, "we who are living" versus "the dead." So that that in and of itself is a bizarre problem. But now go ahead and we'll clear the rest.

Why he thinks this has anything to do with it. Emotions and materialism. Believers are told that all such activities are futile, as time is short and the world is passing away. Believers are advised to avoid such things from now on, i.e., with immediate effect, going forward. This is clear proof that Paul genuinely believed that the world's end was imminent, otherwise his advice about living as bachelors, not feeling human emotions, and being completely detached from material things is nonsensical, as Christians would have been unnecessarily going about life as celibate, emotionless ascetics for nearly two thousand years of counting. This is highly problematic.

Yeah, so there's a bunch of things here, right? Um, what, one of the biggest ones was, you know, again, and and you could correct me on this, but my understanding is that the Islamic understanding of Jesus as a prophet, one of the primary things he taught, according to them, was detachment from material possessions, right? Like, isn't there a story with a comb and a bolt? Like, he only owned like three objects, that he gave one of them away? I think a lot of Muslims do emphasize asceticism and charity. So I'm not sure if I've ever heard them say that it's like a primary teaching of Jesus, but I, I don't see why that would be like contrary. Yeah. And so it seems to me that if if if that is what Saint Paul's teaching here, that would mean he he is sort of teaching what Jesus taught from their perspective, right? Then he, you know, uh, wasn't extolling the virtues of wealth. And we're also going to get into, you know, they're about to say Saint Paul was anti-good works and anti-work. So he's at the same time promoting asceticism and then saying don't do good works. Uh, but we accept both of both of their interpretations. But, um, yeah, so, uh, Saint Paul calling on people to be sober-minded and to be separate from the world and holy, uh, in light of the fact that Christ is going to come to judge the living and the dead, does not seem to me to constitute predicting a date of his return, right? This is the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, right? There's the wise virgins who are ready when the bridegroom comes, and the foolish ones who aren't. Uh, which again, is a parable of Christ, which Saint Paul seems to be teaching the same thing. Um, you know, this is just a general kind of statement. It doesn't seem to be to be dependent on, right? Would we expect Saint Paul to say, if he was valid from their perspective, would you say, "Well, look, Christ isn't returning for at least 2,000 years, so just go about your business, do whatever you want, because you got a long time. Don't worry about it, right?" I mean, that would that would make no sense. Uh, so it seems to be he's saying the only thing that makes sense according to any reasonable interpretation of what Saint Paul would be teaching. Yeah.

I, I think, I think one of the things that's concerning them is the fact that he's making it sound so imminent, like it's going to happen in your lifetime. And so they're taking Paul as meaning that it's going to be literally in their lifetime, and that's why he's telling them not to, uh, marry and whatnot. Uh, what do you see? So you see this more as just like general injunctions and that, yeah, he would say it's better for you to become a monk, basically?

I know I don't mind. Says that so. Well, yeah, yeah. And Christians were saying that in the second century, the third century, in the fourth century, the fifth century, right? I mean, this is Christians have always taught that the coming of Christ is imminent, yeah, right? If not his his second coming, then your death, which is as good, right, as far as you're concerned. Um, and the judgment is is always imminent. And so you live in light of that, and you do not become overly attached to the things of the world, right? And that's exactly what Saint Paul is talking about. There's there's never been a generation of Christians that taught the coming of Christ is far off, therefore be worldly, immerse yourself in the things of this world, you know. Um, that's never been the teaching of Christianity. That's not what Christ taught. Um, is, is there anything here kind of tied into the destruction of the temple at all, or is that something that's kind of more of a feature of Jesus's speeches in terms of the, you know, the end of the age and what not, or what do you think?

Well, so part of how prophecy works biblically is that you have a a preliminary fulfillment, a sort of physical fulfillment that serves as a sign for the rest of it, right? That the rest will come true. There are bunches of examples of this. One really clear one is in Isaiah. But Isaiah says, uh, you know, "Behold, depending on what you're eating, a young woman or a virgin," right, "will have a child. You will call his name Immanuel." That's in the context of the Zero-Ephraimite War. So he was talking about something that was going to happen right then, first of all, right? And then there's a larger. But so he says, "This child is going to be born. You're going to see it. And when you see this child born, this will be the sign to you that God is going to deliver Judah from the northern kingdom of Israel and their their Syrian allies." That's the sort of the first level. But you already have that two-part, right, there. This one was going to have a baby, that's going to be the sign of delivery from the war. And then Saint Matthew takes that and says, "Now, this is fulfilled. This is filled up to overflowing because the birth of Christ is now the signal of this much greater deliverance than just deliverance from this internecine war, you know, in the Near East. Uh, this is what's going on in Hebrews with how they understand the land promised to Abraham, right? The end of the book of Joshua says that at the end of the book of Joshua, all of the promises about giving the land to Israel have been fulfilled. The end of Joshua, straight up says that. But Hebrews says, "Well, yeah, but that was the sign of the heavenly promised land. That was the real promise, right? So we know that that one is true because this is true." And so Christ does that same thing in Saint Matthew's Gospel, in Saint Luke's Gospel, in particular, when he's talking about his return, he uses the destruction of the temple as sort of the sign that they're going to see in their lifetime. And when you see this, this will give you a picture of what's going to happen at the end. And when this comes true, then you'll know that this other thing is for sure going to happen, even though it's in the more remote distance and you can't see it from here.

Bit of the standard that the Old Testament lays out. True divine inspiration. If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. We can see that according to the Bible itself, anyone who makes a claim about the future which then fails to come true cannot be inspired by God. One of Paul's core teachings is the idea that salvation is achieved through faith in Jesus alone and not any kind of works. As Paul informed us, "But what does it say? The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart—that is the message concerning faith that we proclaim: If you declare with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." Here, Paul is quoting from the Old Testament in order to lend support to his theology that we are saved by faith alone and not works. Let's take a look at the original passage in the book of Deuteronomy: "The word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you may obey it." Notice the problem. Paul has taken the quote out of its original context. He left out the part that states, "so that you may obey it." In other words, Paul has omitted God's command to obey the Mosaic Law. We can see that the original passage in the Old Testament actually establishes the opposite of what Paul intended. Works are indeed important.

Go ahead, pause it.

So, first of all, that's a weird verse to use to try to prove Protestantism. Uh, I've never, I've never seen a Protestant use that particular verse, especially, I mean, there's stuff nearby, right? Like, right that that verse. Um, but so, yeah, there's there's this just presupposition that a particular Protestant reading of Saint Paul is exactly what Saint Paul was saying, which is problematic for any number of reasons. Many of them probably obvious, like Protestants who actually believe sola fide are a minority among Christians today, let alone historically, and didn't exist before the 16th century, right? So, you know, there's there's a lot of argument they would have to make to argue that Saint Paul is even talking about any kind of sola fide. And there would be a vast majority of Christians who would argue back against them that that's not what Saint Paul is saying. Uh, so that's that's problem. Like, like the Council of Trent and all that. Yeah. You know, or just, yeah, I mean, countless. Um, so, and and of course, you know, they're doing this, they're doing this precisely backward, right? The the argument they're making is is one that I could make if I was discussing this with with a Protestant friend, right? I could take him to Deuteronomy and say, "Well, no, see, since Saint Paul is quoting this, he's not teaching sola fide, right?" Okay. I would say, you know, this is this is one of my, if anybody listens to my whole council, God podcast, what I've been going through, especially Romans, one of the ways I critiqued the Protestant reading of Romans was just to flip back to the Old Testament like this and say, "Here's what Saint Paul is quoting. Here's what it means. Saint Paul knows the Old Testament better than me, so he's probably not quoting it out of context. This is probably what he means." And so of course, prior to the problem here is the word "believe" and the way they're understanding it, right? I'm amazed at how many English-speaking Christians don't realize that the words translated "believe," "believe," "faith," "faithfulness," that these are all the same Greek word. They're all forms of the same Greek word. These are all the same concept. And even among Protestants now, Protestant biblical scholars of the New Testament, is the dawning realization because of the the New Perspective on Paul and the Paul within Judaism perspective that faith and belief when they're talked about really mean something more like faithfulness or loyalty, not intellectual assent. You get some particularly Calvinist and Lutheran apologists who have to cling to that because that's the basis of their whole their whole version of Christianity is based on clinging to that old understanding of sola fide. But even Protestant scholars now are like, "Yeah, that's not really what he's talking about." So if if you translate that as, "If you confess with your mouth and are faithful in your heart," right? Both confessing and being faithful involve works, right? They, being faithful, in fact, involves obedience. And so when you understand it that way, Saint Paul is quoting Deuteronomy exactly correctly, right? And in the same context. Yeah.

Last time you came on, you spoke about how they would, uh, quotes like, just the first bit of the of the passage, and, uh, the readers would know what the rest was, right? What's going on here, rather than like some kind of deliberate omission?

Right, yeah. So they're saying, "Oh, he left off the," like, how much was he supposed to quote? Right? It went, when he quotes that, he's speaking to an audience that was familiar enough with the scriptures, right? It's like, I can, I can quote a line from, uh, you know, unfortunately, we're now more into movies and TV shows and and pop songs than the Bible, but I could quote a line from a song and it brings the whole song into your mind, yeah, yeah, right? Or or the whole movie, the whole context comes to you, not just the line I quote. Uh, and so, you know, they were less about pop culture and more about Bible, so the same thing is true with with the scriptures. You could just reference that, "Oh, goes back to Deuteronomy," understands the context. And and the context that's in Deuteronomy is in in the context of blessings and curses. Uh, it's in the context of, "Here's what will happen if you keep the commandments and live in accordance with God's will, and what synergizes, what you're doing synergizes and brings into line with what God is doing in the world, then all of these good things will happen. If you try to oppose and rebel, here's all the bad things that will that will result." Which is again, exactly what Saint Paul is talking about. He's talking about finding salvation, but he's invoking a synergistic passage because he's views that synergistically. Excellent. Opposite of what Paul intended. Works are indeed important.

Another of Paul's core teachings is the idea that all of God's covenantal promises to Abraham were fulfilled by the coming of Jesus. As Paul informed us, "The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed." Scripture does not say "and to seeds," meaning many people, but "and to your seed," meaning one person, who is Christ. Here, Paul is making the argument that God's promise to Abraham did not speak of seeds in the plural, but rather seed in the singular, and concludes that the single seed is a reference to one man, i.e., Jesus. Let's take a look at the original passage in the book of Genesis: "And I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him." The original Hebrew word used for seed is a collective noun that can be used to refer to both a single descendant or many descendants. It depends on the context in which it appears. This is just like the English language. For example, the word "sheep" can mean one sheep or many, depending on the context. So how should we interpret the mention of seed in the Old Testament? We find an answer in the same book of Genesis: "And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth, so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered." Here, God promised Abraham that he will be blessed with a multitude of descendants, likening his seed to the dust of the earth. Therefore, we can see that the correct context for seed is not a single seed, as Paul incorrectly interpreted it, but rather many.

Okay, go ahead. Part of it. Uh, so part of that's true. So the video is not factually wrong. There is that that *zera* is a collective noun, right? But the way it is writes it, and I actually bring that up all the time, uh, which is why it was sort of funny to me that he thought that meant Saint Paul was wrong. But so the the second example he gives is a case where it it is referring to the plural. But that doesn't mean it's always referring to the plural. But more importantly, Saint Paul is quoting the Greek. And, uh, the Greek there in Genesis has *spermati*, which is the dative singular of of *sperma*, seed, which is what's used to translate *zera*. So St. Paul is pointing them to, uh, the the Greek text. And and that's very obvious, right? Because he says, "It does not say seeds plural, but seed singular." He couldn't make that argument in Hebrew, right? So the guy who made the video is right in that, yes, I can't point at the word sheep and say, "See, it says sheep, not sheep," right? In the same way, you couldn't point at *zera* and say that. So that's clearly not what what Saint Paul is pointing at. Saint Paul's pointing at the Greek. So I reference this all the time in terms of the fact that Saint Paul clearly saw the Greek as authoritative. He saw the Greek Old Testament tradition as as authoritative. So in order for an Islamic apologist to make this argument, he has to argue that a particular version of the Hebrew text had been canonized in the first century BC at the exclusion of of all others, which is completely historically untenable and and easily disprovable. Because, for example, among the Dead Sea Scrolls, uh, there are, for example, Hebrew copies of both versions of the book of Jeremiah. The version that's in the Hebrew Masoretic text, and the Hebrew version that was translated into the Greek tradition. Both there side by side. And they apparently had no problem with there being multiple versions of the book of of Jeremiah. And Saint Paul frequently references things outside of the Masoretic text, and even outside of all the available texts, the Old Testament, like when he refers to Jannes and Jambres contesting with Moses, when he refers to the rock following them in the wilderness. This is coming from, you know, external sources. He also quotes Menander, one of his comedic plays, to the the church at Corinth. You know, the, uh, the, uh, the idea that because something doesn't correspond to a particular version of the Hebrew text, it is wrong, it is kind of absurd at that point in history.

Paul taught that the nation of Israel will be saved from its sins through Jesus. As Paul informed us, "And in this way all Israel will be saved. As it is written: 'A deliverer will come from Zion; he will turn godlessness away from Jacob.'" Here, Paul has quoted from the Old Testament book of Isaiah. The redeemer will come to Zion to those in Jacob who repent of their sins, declares the Lord. Note the clear mismatch. Paul's quote mentions that the savior will remove sin from Israel, whereas the book of Isaiah states that their savior will come to Israel after they have repented from sin. Just what is going on here? Paul may have been quoting from the Septuagint, a Greek version of the Old Testament. "And the deliverer shall come for Zion's sake, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob." We can see that Paul's quote closely matches the Greek Septuagint. It turns out that there are two variant readings of the Old Testament: the one in Hebrew and the Greek Septuagint. That Paul seems to have quoted from. There is, in fact, strong evidence that the Greek Septuagint contains a later reading. This is because the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest surviving manuscripts for the Old Testament, support the reading that is found in the Hebrew scriptures. This means that when Paul chose to quote from the Greek Septuagint, he unknowingly used the later, incorrect reading. God obviously would not have inspired him to make such a mistake.

Go ahead, pause.

Uh, so, so first of all, is is the earliest version of the Quran the real one? Uh, I, I haven't looked into the textual stuff. I think the earliest version we have, or the earliest manuscript we have, doesn't even have diacritical marks in it. So, well, this isn't even, this isn't even talking about that we have. They're projecting. Since the Dead Sea Scrolls have this, this must be the original. So the original would be in, like, even if we go from people's brains, weren't there Surahs that were written on palm leaves and rocks and stones and things? So is that the real Quran? And the later compiled version, is it real? Do we need to find out what those readings were? I don't think they would apply it that way, right? So they're taking a a particular, they're taking something from New Testament biblical studies among a certain species of conservative Protestant, which is that, quote unquote, "the original" is the real one, is the authoritative one, is the one that comes from God. And anything later, therefore, is, quote unquote, "not inspired" or "not real" or. Right? Now, that's not really tenable in the New Testament because what even what the original is is questionable in a lot of cases, right? So Saint Paul's Second Corinthians used to be at least two letters that have been put together. For example, Saint Paul, when he wrote his epistles, didn't write them by hand, he dictated them to a scribe, who wrote it down, you know, correcting grammar and, you know, what have you, and then showed it to Saint Paul. Saint Paul went over it, made his own editorial editions, right? Then it was taken by the scribe and read to the addressee. Uh, and then later, those were collected. Every manuscript we have of Saint Paul's epistles comes from an epistle collection. We don't have a single manuscript of an individual epistle. So what's the original? Is it what Saint Paul originally said? Is it what was first written down? Is it what was written down after he corrected it? Is it what was first read to the addressee? Is it what was collected in the collection, right? And if you have something like Second Corinthians, where originally it was two letters, are the two separate letters the original and the compiled version is somehow fake? But those problems become insurmountable when you go to the Old Testament because we have no idea who wrote most of the Old Testament, right? Like, like who wrote the books of First or Fourth Kingdoms? People will say, "Oh, well, Samuel wrote First and Second Samuel." The problem with that is Samuel dies in First Samuel 23. It's very clear from the text that the same author wrote all four. Um, we don't know. And the the language that the Torah is written in did not exist at the time of Moses. So it's at least been translated. It's at least been reached. And there are places in the Torah where where place names have been updated, and we know because they say so. They say, "He went to this city, which used to be called." Right? So someone has come in and sort of updated those places. They preserved the original, but updated the place names for a later reader. So there's been all this editorial process. According to the book of Isaiah, to get really pertinent to this, the prophecies of Isaiah were compiled after his death by his disciples. He did sit down and write the book of Isaiah. So now, again, what's the original? Is it what he said? Is it what they wrote down as separate things? Is it how they compiled it? Um, this is what explains, by the way, the whole First, Second, and Third Isaiah thing. It's just that you have three separate compilations of Isaiah's prophecies that were later put together into one big collection. It's not that they were by different people at different times, it's just three different three different collections. Um, but so this idea that we can determine based on, you know, the Dead Sea Scrolls, uh, Isaiah scroll, which does match pretty much identically the Masoretic text, is from, I believe, the third century BC, around the time that, you know, shortly before the the Greek was being translated. But Isaiah lived in the 8th century BC. So the idea that based on what has survived, we can determine what the original was is specious, right? But even if we were able to, right? Even if we were able to discern that, okay, here's what I somehow time machine, you know, we have.

We had a TARDIS in a video camera, right? And we went back and recorded Isaiah giving his prophecy, right? And that was different in the wording than what we have preserved for us in the scripture. It's what we have preserved for us in the scripture that's authoritative in the church, not that videotape, right? Because we believe that the Holy Spirit didn't sort of inspire things and then it was sort of up to us to preserve them correctly. The Holy Spirit was also involved in the process. All of that editing that took place, and translation that took place, and collection that took place, all of that was being guided by the Holy Spirit, not just the original event, right?

So we don't say that like the the there's a famous recent evangelical Protestant statement on inerrancy that says that the original autographs, right, that original was inspired and we can now reconstruct that very accurately using computer tools. Which sounds fine on its surface until you realize that they're saying that for 1950 years no Christian has had an inerrant Bible or a reliable Bible, right? Yeah, thankfully now we have computer tools so we can get back to the actual Bible. Um, it kind of it kind of falls apart. Whereas what Christians have always taught all along is that the Bible that they have in their era is reliable.

And this is what we see Saint Paul doing. He's perfectly free, as we just said before, to quote the Greek. Well, doesn't Jesus quote the LXX as well? Yes, he does. Including of Isaiah. Uh, in fact, when, uh, the the reading we have on the Indiction on September 1st, uh, where he reads, you know, "I've come to give sight to the blind and preach good news to the poor." The gift of sight to the blind is only in the Greek version of Isaiah. Which means not only was he quoting it, but he was reading the Greek version in a synagogue before he preached on it. Which we now know was very common in Galilee, which is where he was, uh, that they were actually using it. The the the Greek translation had a privileged place in in first-century Judaism and first-century BC Judaism that it lost because of Christians. Where you are not allowed to read the Aramaic in the synagogue by itself. You could read the Hebrew, right, which nobody understood by that point, and then you could read the Arabic sort of to help them understand it. But you had to read the original Hebrew. Whereas with the Greek, you could only read the Greek. This was the Palestinian Jewish practice and also the Alexandrian Jewish practice at that time. And so when Saint Paul is writing to communities that are out in the broader world, the scriptures they've heard are the Greek scriptures. So he's going to quote the Greek scriptures. Saying that that's an error or a distortion would be like if I was at a church where everybody had only read the King James Version of the Bible, and so I quoted the scriptures and I quoted the King James Version, right? And then you came and said, "Well, I've looked at the Greek, and the Greek is older, and the King James Version got this wrong, and it has something different here." And so, "See, clearly you don't know what you're talking about because you quoted the King James Version." Well, I'm talking to people who this is their Bible, right? And it was viewed, and the reason it was their Bible is that all of the other Jews, not just Saint Paul, saw it as a as being completely reliable and able to be preached from. And and most importantly, Jesus as well. Yes. Christ himself. Yes.

Paul argued that nobody can achieve righteousness through the works of the Mosaic Law. As Paul informed us, as it is written: "There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit; the poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. There is no fear of God before their eyes." Therefore, no one will be declared righteous in God's sight by the works of the law.

What Paul quotes here is a compilation of six separate passages from the Old Testament book of Psalms and Isaiah. He has strung them together to appear as one quote. Let's examine one of the passages that Paul referenced from Psalm 14: "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.' They are corrupt; their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good. Do all these evildoers no wrong? They devour my people as though eating bread; they never call on the Lord. But there they are, overwhelmed with dread, for God is present in the company of the righteous." We can see that the original passage is talking about those who say there is no God. It is these people who are said to do no good. Such evildoers are then contrasted with a second group of people, referred to as "my people," who are said to be the company of the righteous. It turns out that Paul has distorted this passage. It does not say, as Paul quotes it, that no human being is righteous. Rather, it says that those who deny God are not righteous.

Go ahead. Pause. So, uh, first of all, Saint Paul didn't know any atheists. Richard Dawkins was not alive. There were no atheists in that sense, right? "The fool says in his heart there is no God" is talking about judgment. It's talking about justice. Uh, it's saying that I can live as I please, I can do what I want, and there will be no consequences. That's what is meant by him saying "in his heart there is no God," not that he doesn't believe in the supernatural and he's a materialist, right? Because those didn't exist in the ancient world. Um, but, uh, you know, there are a number of, so there's this implication that somehow Saint Paul is pulling a fast one by quoting several different sources all in a row. This is common. You see this all over the place in Jewish literature and Jewish authors at this time. This was a common way you would draw together. If you, if you pick up "Religion of the Apostles," there are a bunch of places where I will have parentheses at the end of a sentence and I'll list a whole bunch of biblical passages, right, to direct you to that. And so that's all Saint Paul is doing. He didn't have verse references, so he's pointing them, he's reminding them of a whole bunch of different passages, right, saying, "Look, this is taught all through the scriptures, right?" And then here's the conclusion, that's the, the therefore, right? Um, and so there's a little slippage in the argument because he starts out by set by pointing out what what Saint Paul actually said, that there's not justification through works of the law, but then it gets switched to, "Well, he says no one is righteous." But look, here are some people who are called righteous, right? It's sort of how he ends up, right? And, uh, Saint Paul, if you follow the rest of Romans, doesn't say that there's no one who is called righteous. He talks about Abraham being called righteous, sort of immediately after this. And the question is, why? Because justification is the same word as righteousness. Saint Paul is talking about how one comes to be called righteous, right? And he's saying no one does that through the works of law. So that raises the question, I referenced earlier, talking about the whole Old and New Perspective on Paul thing, which is what the "works of the law" refer to. And, and there's sort of now a silver bullet on this. So this is going to be the book recommendation for today's stream, uh, and that is this, right, which is, uh, Matthew J. Thomas's, it's actually his published dissertation, and it's called, uh, "Paul's Works of the Law in the Perspective of Second Century Reception." And I have said that this book should have a sticker on the front that says, "This Machine Kills Protestantism." Because even though the author actually is a Protestant, and I think still considers himself one, uh, I'm sorry, I thought he was a Dominican. I thought he was, oh, is he? Okay, well, that explains that. Um, I think it was because, uh, Alistair McGrath wrote the, uh, the, uh, preface. But, uh, E.D.T. Wright has been praising it all over the place, uh, who is still a Protestant, um, but he goes through systematically through second-century literature, anything that we could could remotely be considered Christian, including like Gnostic sources. So, I mean, he goes through everything and shows that there's just no one in the, uh, second century who understands Saint Paul to be saying that "works of the law" refers to good works. Every single time Saint Paul's "works of the law" or Saint Paul's teaching is cited in the second century, the people who are still within the living memory of the apostles, right, who we would expect to most have it right, every one of them understands "works of the law" to refer to, again, those boundary markers, right? And Saint Paul is teaching that those boundary markers are now not important, right? Because those boundaries have been expanded to include people of all nations, right? So Israel is still called to be separate, but Israel is now sort of reconstituted, right, as the church. So the church is now still called to be different, but it's not a separation between Judeans and people of other descents, right? If they have come to worship, uh, if they're now in Christ, right? That's that's going to be Saint Paul's argument. So that that's all Saint Paul is arguing from those Old Testament passages, right, is that those, uh, observing those boundary markers are not enough to to justify you. And justification and righteousness, again, it's the same Greek word behind it. It's it's justice. And we've absorbed a lot of the Protestant definition of justification. But justification is Saint Paul uses it, and this is just the lexical meaning of the word in Aramaic that stands behind it, is closer to the way we use justification in word processing. If something is left-justified, it's lined up down the left side, it's put in order, right? If it's right-justified, it's full-justified, it's all the way down, right? And so justification is being set back in order, right? Justice is the correct order of things, right? Everything is in its proper place and functioning properly. To be justified is to be put back in order in that way when things are out of whack. And so Saint Paul is saying, not only is it not possible, that was never the purpose of those boundary markers, right? Getting circumcised was never the way sin was, you know, removed from a person and healed through being circumcised or through not eating pork, right? That was never that was not their purpose, right? They had a different purpose.

Paul offered the following reason as to why God revealed the Law to Moses and the Israelites: "Now we know that whatever the law says it says to those who are under the law, that for this purpose every mouth may be stopped and all the world may become guilty before God." According to Paul, the law was revealed to make us realize that it is impossible to keep and that we are therefore all guilty before God. Let's compare this to what God has to say about the law in the Old Testament: "Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so that you may obey it." We can see that God says very clearly that the law is not too difficult to obey or beyond our reach, which is the complete opposite of what Paul claimed.

Go ahead and pause it. At some very negative, yeah, of course. That's the verse he just pointed out that Saint Paul quotes. Um, yeah. So this is again, just sort of assuming that Protestantism is correct, right? This particular strand of Protestantism is correct. But even, even Lutherans, right, who are the ones who are most accused of being sort of anti-law in general, right, out of Protestants, have three uses of the law, right? What he's talking about this guilt is the first use of the law. They also have a second and a third use of the law. Even they don't think that Saint Paul only believed in the first use of the law. Uh, so this is kind of incredulous and out of context. But it's also talk about out of context in Romans. Saint Paul has already said in Romans 2 that there are Gentiles who don't have the law but who keep the law. Saint Paul at several points talks about people who keep the Torah perfectly, one of them being himself. He says, before his encounter with Christ in Damascus, he was blameless according to the law. So Saint Paul very clearly didn't think it was about, he talks about Gentiles, some Gentiles keeping the law who don't even have it because they're a law unto themselves, right? So he doesn't see the law as impossible to keep. It's impossible to make that argument about Saint Paul. So that's that's again, sort of a, an obvious straw man. Part part of what doesn't click for people on this is they think that if someone was blameless according to the law, that would mean that they never sinned, they never committed a sin, right? Which is not at all what that means. Because part of the Torah, a huge chunk of the commandments are about what you do when you sin, repentance, sacrifice, right? How you make it right. Or if you steal, you make restitution, right? That's a huge chunk of the Torah. So if you sin and then do what the Torah prescribes in repentance, you have kept the Torah. And this is why God himself can say, uh, to to Jeroboam through the prophet, that David was blameless and kept all of his commandments. God didn't miss the whole adultery and murder thing, right? Like he was aware of that, right? But David repented and he did what was required by by the Torah to make that to make that right. And so that's what Saint Paul is saying about himself when he says he was blameless according to the law. He's not saying I never sinned, right? He's saying he followed the precepts of the law. And so when he sinned, he went to the Day of Atonement, he went and brought sacrifices to the temple, he went and did all of those, all of those things. So how, what, what do you think? What's the understanding of Paul saying that it's like impossible to keep the law, or what they're quoting here? Well, he's, yeah. So in, in the larger context, he's talking about the fact that, uh, what, when he says, "What the law says, it says to those under the law," right? He's talking about the ancient Israelites, right, who had it and didn't keep it, right? So he, he makes the point in that context. He says, "This is another thing Saint Paul says that runs totally counter to how they're portraying him." He says, "It is not the hearers of the law, but the doers who are justified." You say that's sick, what Saint Paul says. So he's attacking the, uh, sort of Jewish identity concept of of justification, right? So, if we're talking about what Judaizers were, what we now call Judaizers, there are people who are saying, "You have to take on a Jewish identity in order to find salvation in Christ. It's not enough to be part of the Christian community, the church, to follow Christ. You also have to take on a Jewish identity. You have to be circumcised. You have to follow our diet, our festivals, our, you have to do it. You have to take on that Jewish identity." Right? And so Saint Paul is attacking that and saying, "No, just Jewish identity, you know, have you read the Old Testament? Like, how many of the Israelites found salvation in the Old Testament? How many good kings were there, even? That identity doesn't get you anything, right? That identity just makes you more condemned because you should have known better. You heard, you actually heard the Torah, unlike those Gentiles who kept it better than you without hearing it, right? And so you're now more accountable."

Things to say about the law here. He called it a curse: "For as many as are of the works of the law are under a curse." Paul also had bad things to say about his past efforts of keeping the law. Here he referred to it as garbage: "As for righteousness based on the law, faultless." But whatever... I just love the graphics. Yeah. And so he just quoted Saint Paul saying he was blameless according to the law, even though that contradicts what he was saying two minutes ago. Um, but, uh, yeah. So, uh, what Saint Paul is talking about there again, in context, is he's writing about how their, their, that the new covenant, the revelation of Christ, is greater and bigger than the previous revelation. This is the idea of fulfillment, right? Filled up to overflowing, filled full. And he's saying, in comparison, right, what he has now in Christ is so much greater than that that it looks like garbage, right? He's not saying it was garbage back then. He's not saying it was garbage in the Old Covenant, but he's saying what Christ has is greater. And so if you go from Christ back to these things that were shadows and predictions and preliminary fulfillments, right, and and, uh, that sort of thing, then you're forsaking the greater for the lesser, right? It's like throwing away the good food and eating the garbage, right? It's so, if this is this is a, a greater less argument. It's like saying, John says, you know, "The law came through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." That's not saying the law is horrible, but it's saying this is now greater. This is now bigger. And one of the best places to look for that is when Saint Paul talks about the fruit, the fruit of the Spirit, right? Right before he goes through the fruit of the Spirit, he says, "The whole law is summed up in this commandment: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" Then he gives the fruit of the Spirit at the end, you know, "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control." Against these things there is no law, right? So he's saying, uh, if you do all of these things, you will go beyond what the Torah requires of you. And since you're going beyond it, you won't have to worry about it. If you're truly loving your neighbor as yourself, you're not going to steal from them, cheat with their wife, kill them, right? You're not going to do any of those things. You're going to do much, you know, much more and much, much greater. So it's an intensification argument. Saint Paul's making.

"Love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him and to keep his commands, decrees and laws. Then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you." Here God stated that obeying the law will bring one blessing and prosperity. We can see that Paul's teachings about the law completely contradict the Old Testament on many points. So Paul cannot have gotten his message from the same God that inspired the Old Testament.

Oh, let pause one more. Just I didn't comment on the curse thing and the blessing thing. It's like, yeah, if you keep reading in Deuteronomy, it says that if the Israelites don't keep the Torah, they will be under a curse, which is what Saint Paul is referring to. Those who are under the Torah are under a curse because they haven't kept it. Yeah, that makes, then, yeah, makes perfect sense.

The Bible informs us that towards the end of his ministerial career, Paul visited Jerusalem, which was home to thousands of Christians who zealously obeyed the Law of Moses. We are told that senior Christians directly confronted Paul about rumors that he was preaching against the Law of Moses. "The next day Paul and the rest of us went to see James, and all the elders were present. Then they said to Paul, 'You see, brother, how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law. They have been informed that you teach all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to turn away from Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or live according to our customs.'" If Paul was a genuine apostle, then we should expect him to be forthcoming about his true beliefs and teachings. Let's now see how Paul actually reacted: "'What shall we do? They will certainly hear that you have come. So do what we tell you. There are four men with us who have made a vow. Take these men, join their purification rites and pay their expenses, so that they may have their heads shaved. Then everyone will know there is no truth in these reports about you.' The next day Paul took the men and purified himself along with them." We can see that the senior Christians in Jerusalem commanded Paul to undergo a public head-shaving ritual that was derived from the Law of Moses. Paul submissively complied with their command, thus denying the rumors that he preached against the Law of Moses. Now, in the previous section, we saw examples of Paul's negative attitude towards a Mosaic Law, labeling it a curse and describing efforts to obey it as garbage. By conducting himself in this manner, Paul was being two-faced, or he behaved in one way to the faces of senior Christians and another way in his writings. In the following examples, Paul wrote that Jews are the same as non-Jews, bound to keep...

So yeah, so this is again, uh, we're gonna assume that this particular Protestant interpretation is correct. We're gonna find something [Music] that contradicts that interpretation and therefore say that Saint Paul is two-faced. Or what could come to the more natural conclusion that, hey, maybe that interpretation is incorrect, right? Maybe if the fact that every time Saint Paul talks about whether he's teaching against the Law of Moses, he says he isn't, means he isn't, that we should therefore interpret his words as not being that, right? Um, so that's kind of a weird, again, right? You, you, rather than disproving the interpretation, it's somehow, you know, uh, uh, an interpretation just has to be true. I mean, it has to be true for this apologetic argument to work, but other than that, I don't see why it has to be true. Um, and, uh, the whole issue with a Nazarite vow is is not an issue. Um, at least for us as Orthodox Christians, uh, that the apostles continued to go to the temple, they continued to participate in all of those things. The sin offerings and the Day of Atonement that are seen as fulfilled in Christ and participated in through the Eucharist is one segment of the Jewish ritual and sacrificial system. Um, but just to point out another, see, this is just, I'm going to argue against Saint Paul and offer a bunch of arguments that aren't logically consistent with each other. Uh, what is it? A Nazarite vow, essentially asceticism, a form of asceticism. Um, okay, you know, that's seems kind of consistent to me again with what Saint Paul is writing in his letters. Um, what about the whole, um, thing about him saying, you know, "go to all the food markets and whatnot"? I can't remember if they bring that up here or not, but because in Acts 21, uh, it goes on to say that we only, you know, they basically reaffirmed the four decrees of the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. And I've heard a lot of Muslims make it sound like when Paul tells people to go and take from the meat market, you know, without asking, that that's like a contravention of of that. Oh, yeah. He, he never actually says that. Um, you have to, because when he says, what they're interpreting is saying that he says it like two chapters before he says, "What the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, and I do not want you to be partakers of demons, so don't eat it." Right? So Saint Paul gives a variety of reasons to try to convince different people that they shouldn't eat food offered to idols. He never, ever, not once, says gives for people to knowingly eat food offered to idols. The closest he actually comes is he says that if you're at someone's house enjoying hospitality and you're not sure, right, rather than violating that hospitality and, uh, uh, inquire to pray over it and bless it and basically give thanks to God for it, meaning turn it into an offering to God before you eat it, right? In that instance, right? But he says in that same context, the verse before that, "If you know for a fact it's been offered to idols, don't eat it, even for hospitality's sake." But he says different places, you know, "Okay, so you think an idol is nothing, then you still shouldn't do it because your weaker brother might stumble." Or, and then he says, "Well, it's offered to demonstrate." He gives all kinds of reasons not to do it, to try to aim at various audiences, right? And what he wants to argue about with them, right? But just to make the case to everyone, don't do it. He never says it's okay to knowingly eat meat that was offered to an idol.

"Any of the Mosaic Law, there is neither Jew nor Greek. We have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code." We can see that Paul taught the very things he was accused of and deceptively denied.

Go ahead, pause. So again, uh, "we serve in the new way and not the old." How is that saying don't follow the Torah? Let's talk about the way, the Spirit. And in the in the context again, it's that same context of like the fruit of the Spirit. The way of the Spirit supersedes because it's greater. It demands more, right? It doesn't just demand you don't harm your neighbor. It demands you actually positively love your neighbor, right? Uh, and so by doing it in the Spirit. So this is the whole, uh, slave-son's paradigm that that Saint Paul works with when he's talking about the law and the Spirit, the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, right? When, when, and this is, you know, in the context of ancient households, parts of that house, there were slaves, there were servants, and there were children, right? And he points out when the children are, small children, they're basically treated like the slaves, right? They just, they have all these rules to follow, right? They have all these things they have to do, and the same kind of strictures. But the difference between a slave and a son is that when the son becomes an adult, right, he's now in a different place. That the adult son is not now unbound by the rules. He can't go and beat his father and dishonor his father and, you know, do whatever he wants, commit murder, steal, right? But now, as a son, right, the son is the image of the father. So the son is now responsible to not only follow his father's rules, right, not only follow his father's strictures and live in a certain way, but he's now also called to live in a way that brings honor to his father, that carries on his father's name in the world, that represents his father to the world. And that's this, that's the exact analogy Saint Paul makes that now we're not slaves, we're sons of the New Covenant. So yes, we're still responsible to keep those rules, but we're now also have this greater responsibility to be the image of Christ, to bring honor to Christ, to represent Christ's name in the world, that goes above and beyond that. And the whole, "there is no Jew or Greek," you notice they leave off the rest of that: "male, female, slave, free," right? Yeah, which clearly doesn't mean what they're saying. Obviously, they're still Jews and Greeks, but neither Jews nor Greeks, based on that identity, have a special status before God, right? They're both equally accountable before, before God.

In this video, we've examined a number of Paul's writings and found many issues which seriously undermine his claims of apostleship and divine inspiration. A big problem which arises from this is the fact that Paul dominates the pages of the New Testament with over half of its books being attributed to him. So, if one reads the New Testament and takes it at face value, you are viewing Jesus through the lens of Paul, who has been proven to be an unreliable source. Sincere truth-seeking Christians face the difficult task of peeling away layers of myth in order to arrive at the true historical Jesus. God, out of His mercy for mankind, did not leave us in a state of confusion.

Well, we can skip the propaganda. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, and of course, we'll just avoid the whole concept of the textual history of the Quran and, you know, the dubiousness of a lot of details of the biography of the Muslim prophet and all that, because, you know, we've just got that the straight, objective, no layers required, you know, no inquiry. Real quick. Um, yeah, but of course, they just, to sort of sum that up, they didn't actually analyze any of Saint Paul's writings. They took snippets from his writings out of context and tried to pit them against each other. That's that's not how you analyze someone's writings and take apart their arguments and any of that. So, yeah, this, yeah, this is going to be true for the other videos as well. Um, this is kind of a far cry from the heady days of Saint John of Damascus debating the nature of God, you know, in the court of the Caliph. Yeah, this is the, at best, the Great Value version of that. I don't know, they don't have Walmart over there, do they? But the generic brand, the cheap brand. Oh, man. Yeah. Um, so, yeah, there's four videos, but we might not do all four. Um, I think some of them already, one of them duplicates a lot of this. Yeah, yeah. But this one's in, this next one's interesting by our good friend Paul Williams at Blogging Theology. And this is going to be about Judaizing. So, yeah. Well, this one was kind of interesting, but, uh, yeah. So I haven't been to a bookshop for months, but thankfully I do still get books sent to me from Amazon. And this, uh, tome arrived today in the post. It's called "After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity, 100-300 CE Common Era A.D." by Bart Ehrman. And this is published by Oxford University Press. And I said, right, it's a little gem. This actually. And it says on the back cover, "Revealing the rich diversity of the early Christian movement, this book brings together an extensive collection of texts from the second and third centuries, both orthodox and heterodox (in inverted commas)." Selections include the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, the writings of Nag Hammadi, the early pseudo-epigrapha, martyrologies, anti-Jewish tracts, esteriologies, canon lists, church orders, liturgical texts, and theological treatises. Featuring large textual excerpts, entire documents wherever possible, concise introductions, and lucid, up-to-date translations, this is ideal for courses in early Christianity, Christian origins, and early church history. And indeed, it's got some rave reviews, uh, from academics on the back. And, um, you can pause for just a second. Play with you. Yes. Just for the record, that that is actually a worthwhile compilation of material. Um, Bart Ehrman, there's some things I don't like about him, but there are also some things that are, he actually is a very good textual critic, which is his actual field. He is really one of the top New Testament textual critics in the world. The further he goes outside that, the more questionable things get. But in terms of compiling critical editions of text, and even translating, he, he does do a good job. He also, [Music] I have two other good things to say about him. He donates a lot of money to charity, a lot. So, I think some people sometimes get the impression he's in it for the money, but he actually, a lot of his stuff, he donates literally all the proceeds to to charities. Third good thing I'll say about him is he, he does publicly change his mind on things sometimes, significant things, which a lot of scholars will not do publicly, right? Even if they've privately changed their mind, they won't just come out and admit, "Yeah, I think I was wrong, and I changed my mind." And he has changed his mind about something as significant as he now says, for example, that Saint Paul believed Christ was divine, which is a major shift from what he used to teach. So the bad things are, the biggest bad thing is when he's writing or talking to a popular audience, he cheats all over the place. He says stuff he knows is at best an oversimplification, if not untrue, when he's talking to a popular audience, and he knows he can get away with it, where when he's in an academic setting, he would, he's much more reserved and would never say stuff like that. Um, so it's well known among biblical scholars that when he publishes a popular book, they'll frequently be lampooned. His most recent one was literally lampooned by everybody in the scholarly guild, but was like a bestseller and got him interviewed on NPR and all this. He literally argued that no Jewish people in the first century believed in an afterlife. None of them. Wow. [Laughter] So, yeah, so it's that level of stuff when he does popular stuff, and people who are of his similar American political bent just eat it up in the NPR crowd. Um, so, yeah, I was, that's the, the good of the better part. But this is, this is a decent thing. This is not his popular-level wackiness. This is his more legit, uh, scholarship. Yeah, I was actually thinking of getting that. Yeah, I saw this video, I was like, "Oh, that looks good. Compilation of anti-Nicene documents. That's quite cool." Yeah. Um, some of the, uh, the letters written by so-called Jewish Christians, and these are not people who followed the Apostle Paul, but continued to obey the Jewish law. To all intents and purposes, they were Jews who accepted Jesus as the Messiah, as a human Messiah, and as a prophet. Um, one of the texts is the Gospel of the Ebionites, which I'm not going to read today, but because I want to look at, uh, a letter. I wasn't reading real quick. Again, the Gospel of the Ebionites, sometimes called the Gospel to the Hebrews or the Gospel of the Nazoreans, is a fragment. So go ahead and do a little of this now. A lot of what he started talking about now, when you talk about the Ebionites and these Jewish Christians, is built on conjecture. We know almost nothing about these groups. Ebioni is the term for them that Saint Irenaeus of Lyons coined, um, and he also coined the term Gnostics. So, um, but what Saint Irenaeus does in "Against Heresies" is, you know, there's all these teachers and groups teaching and doing all kinds of things. He tries to kind of group them and categorize them, right? Because you kind of have to do that. You can't sort of go through and individually refute every individual false teacher in the second century, right? Takes forever. So he kind of groups them, right? So the groups that are grouped together as Gnostics are a whole bunch of diverse groups who probably wouldn't have liked each other, right? They probably would have argued with each other as much as they argued with mainstream Christians. Um, and the same thing is true with these Ebionites or Nazoreans. It's not clear if those are the same groups. We don't have anything actually written by them. The reason that gospel is called by different names is we're kind of guessing. It's a fragment, there's not much to go on. But it has some weird stuff in it, including in the fragment we have, Christ referring to the Holy Spirit as his mother. Yeah, so I don't know how that fits with the concept of the Ebionites. Um, oh, with or Jewish Christian? Uh, well, I had an interesting thought on that, actually. I don't know how you would even go about exploring this, but there is that weird place in the Quran that seems to say that the Holy Trinity is the Father, Christ, and his mother. Oh, and I'm wondering, because there is evidence of some weird non-canonical Christian literature traditions from it showing up in the Quran, I'm wondering if there might be a connection there, huh? With the Holy Spirit as his mother, and somehow wires crossing that might be how you get there. But, um, but yeah, it's, it's definitely weird. And then the Ebionites, the, the two other main people who refer to them are, uh, Epiphanius of, uh, Salamis and, uh, Methodius of Olympus, and their two descriptions do not match at all. So Epiphanius says that they're like vegetarians, and, and there's a whole bunch of sort of odd details that don't match Methodius. And so then scholars go in and try and dissect that and try and say, well, everywhere where they disagree, this one is right, that one's wrong. So, but going on that, we know even less about these groups and who they are. So, uh, I know Islamic apologists talk very confidently about the existence and nature of these Jewish Christians, these Ebionites. But we don't know that for sure. And he's even already mischaracterized them a little, because they did not believe that Jesus was a human prophet. They had an adoptionist Christology where they believed that, according again to some of our few sources, they believed that a created angelic being, sort of the Arian version of the second person of the Trinity, became incarnate in the person Jesus at his baptism, according to one of the sources. Now, again, is that one reliable? Are they talking about different groups? Who knows? But there's there's nothing he can base that presupposition that there's any continuity between the Islamic view of Jesus and the Ebionite view of Jesus when they had this adoptionist Christology that seems similar to Corinthianism. And that fits too, actually, because a number of the descriptive factors that you find in Epiphanius and Methodius also seem very close to Gnosticism. So it seems more like this was some kind of Jewish Gnostic group more than some kind of Rabbinic Jewish plus Jesus group, which is how they're wanting to present them. So Epiphanius talks about the, um, Ebionites in his Panarion. Is that it? Yeah, yeah. Okay. That would be interesting to look into as well. Then just, it's erroneous. And Epiphanius, Peter to James, and its reception. And I'll just read you what Bart Ehrman has to say about it, and then I'll read a couple of extracts from the letter, because it's really, really interesting. If you're interested in the great diversity of doctrine and faith in early Christianity, to such a degree that you could even speak of early Christianities (plural), people have very, very different beliefs about the law, about Jesus, about God, or even if one God made him all, there's more than one thought. Anyway, that's in the subject in a letter to, uh, of Peter to James. This introduction is by Bart Ehrman. He says, "The Letter of Peter to James is one of a number of early Christian writings produced in the name of Jesus' disciple Simon Peter. It does not survive as an independently transmitted letter, but only as the preface to the Homilies of Clement, a collection of stories and sermons by Clement of Rome." Go ahead and pause here. This is important, and he's about to ignore it. Um, if something only survives as a preface, as a cover letter to another document, then that means, first of all, that that other document predates the, the preface, right? That predates the cover letter, right? And one would then expect that one would interpret the cover letter or the preface based on the contents of the book, right, that it's that it's prefaced to. Okay. There is nothing Ebionite or Jewish Christian about the Clementine Homilies or the Clement. There's another text, the Recognitions of Clement, that does have a couple of passages that people have associated with the Ebionites, some people, some scholars, but not in the Clementine Homilies. So that alone could give you pause in terms of how you're going to interpret this. The account of its reception by James, that's the brother of Jesus and leader of the church in Jerusalem, is also part of this preface. The date of the composition of these works is difficult to determine, but they are probably to be situated in the early 3rd century. The letter Peter urges James to pass along the accompanying sermons carefully and only to those who are worthy to receive them. The clear concern is that Peter's teachings not be corrupted by those who have a different understanding of the truth. Both the letter and the reception are Jewish Christian writings, as seen in their emphasis on emulating the actions of Moses, on keeping the law, and on opposition to the person Peter calls "my enemy," commonly understood to be none other than the Apostle Paul, who taught that salvation comes to all people, Jew and Gentile, apart from following the law of Moses, and you urge Gentiles not to be circumcised. You see in the letter of Galatians, he talks about that. Paul's notion stood in sharp contrast to the views of Jewish Christians like the Ebionites, as seen here, for example, in the insistence by James, the brother of Jesus himself, "The only one who has been circumcised is a believing Christian." So that's Bart Ehrman's introduction. And the letter of James, you can already see the presupposition again, right? In terms of Saint Paul taught the law is bad, right? So anything that says law good is therefore now Ebionite, even though Paul says law good, right? So that alone is is a, a false dichotomy. But go ahead now, and we'll, we'll come back. Something else he's already dropped, but we'll wait until he goes into it further. Peter to James, the Lord and Bishop of the Holy Church, peace be with you always from the Father of all through Jesus Christ. Knowing well that you, my brother, eagerly take pains about what is for the benefit of us all, I earnestly beseech you not to pass on any, not to pass on to anyone of the Gentiles the books of my preachings which I hear forward to you. Of course, we know in Matthew's Gospel that Jesus says, said that he was only sent to the lost of the house of Israel. And Peter here is saying the fact that he was only sent to preach to the Jews. Go ahead and pause. So, uh, he's already made an error. Uh, already within the pages of the New Testament, you find the term Gentiles being applied to the to people outside the church. Gentiles just means the nations, right? So there was not a concept of ethnicity in the first century. Identity was determined ritually, right? Not by who your father was, right? So if you were an Ethiopian Jew, you were a Jew, meaning you were a Judean. It didn't matter what you looked like, it didn't matter, right, what you were descended from. You, you were because you had been circumcised and you ate the Passover, right? It's ritually determined. You become a Christian by being baptized and receiving the Eucharist, and then the nations are those outside, outside the camp, right? So, and as he already, as Ehrman already pointed out in the preface, as we're going to see, as he goes on, the whole tenor of this letter is, "I'm passing on to you, Saint James, the secret teachings, right, that you don't know, and I want you to only give them to the worthy, to the initiates, right, to only the select group." Now, what does that sound like? First of all, it sounds like Gnosticism to me. But, um, but so when he says, "Don't give them to the Gentiles," is he speaking ethnically, or is he saying outside of that elect group, don't teach them to anybody, right? So the Gentiles in this case are the opposite of the people who he's going to teach it to. Not, this is not an ethnic thing, which is what he's just tried to make it to try to set it against Saint Paul. Saint Paul also did not have the ethnic thing in mind. The whole argument, remember, was about whether you had to take on this Jewish identity ritually through the ritual of circumcision of our own tribe before probation. So even to the Jews, they have to be tested first. But if someone worthy of them has been examined and found to be worthy, then you may hand over to him in the same way as Moses handed over his office of a teacher to the seventy. So here is Peter comparing himself with Moses, the Jewish prophet. And then skipping to chapter 2, the letter to of Peter to James says, "In order now that the same may also take place among us, hand over the books of my preaching in the same mysterious way to our seventy brethren, that they may prepare those who are candidates for positions as teachers. For if we do not proceed in this way, our word of truth will be split into many options. This I do not know as a prophet, but I have already, I had already the beginning of the..."

Evil before me for some among the gentiles have rejected my lawful preaching and have preferred a lawless and absurd doctrine of the man who is my enemy. So this is Peter talking about Paul, referring to him as the lawless and absurd doctrine of the man who is my enemy. And indeed, some have attempted, while I am still alive, to distort my words by interpretations of many sorts, as if I taught the disillusion of the law. And although I was of this opinion, did not express it openly. But that may God forbid. So Peter is absolutely rejecting the idea that, openly or in a private way, that he rejected the law. He nearly upheld the law of Moses, which Saint Paul also says several times in the scriptures that he doesn't reject the law of Moses, but he upholds the law. He establishes the law, says Paul over and over again.

But, but see, he's skimming over a lot of details, right? So notice he talks about Moses, right, giving over his teaching in a mysterious way to the 70 elders, and then says Peter's teaching needs to be given in the same mysterious way, right? So he's not talking about the Torah when he's talking about Moses. Torah is available publicly. He's saying Moses had some secret teachings, understanding of the law, that he passed on to the elders of Israel, right? So this is, at best, sort of the concept of the Oral Torah, right, in Rabbinic Judaism, right? Which, uh, all of our testimony to the Ebionites says they rejected the idea of the Oral Torah. But so this is making a comparison to the Oral Torah and saying that Saint Peter also had this secret teaching, and that his secret teaching is at odds with what is being preached publicly by Saint Paul and by others, right? And he's giving that secret teaching just to Saint James, so that Saint James can give it just to those who have been tested and the worthy, right? Not to be proclaimed out there openly, right? So this is, this is just textbook Gnostic stuff. This is not anything about the law and Saint Paul's view of the law at all.

God forbid that I should have preached anything other than that, he says. For to do such a thing means to act contrary to the law of God, which was made known by Moses and was confirmed by our Lord in its everlasting continuance. So he's saying here that Jesus himself taught that the law would continue. The Jewish law should be obeyed, for he said, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but one jot or tittle shall not pass away from the law." And this is a quote from, um, Matthew 24:35 and 5:18. There's two verses there in Matthew that's pretty clear.

So ending that and just reminding ourselves of what Paul taught in, uh, his letter to the Ephesians. Paul says he, Jesus has abolished the law with his commandments and ordinances, so that he might create in himself one new humanity in the place of two, thus making peace. So he believes that Jesus has conditioned the law. Uh, so, yeah. So another thing before we completely leave the letter, why is the letter from Saint Peter? I mean, we know it's pseudographic. Why would they choose Saint Peter? Because Saint James is the one who had the preeminent place among the Ebionites, at least as far as we know from our limited sources. So why would he be made subsidiary to, [Music] Saint Peter? If this is an Ebionite thing, well, this makes sense if the idea is this is a sort of Gnostic group trying to undermine mainstream Christianity, in which Saint Peter is seen to have this authority, right? So Saint Peter, who, who you guys believe was entrusted with the, with this authority, secretly taught this other stuff, and he gave it to Saint James, who gave it to us, right? So, uh, again, that, that structure, the idea is again, this is just a sort of textbook Gnostic thing. And of course, you notice what he quoted in a bad translation from, from Saint Paul, right? So, yeah, if you, and to his credit, he didn't leave off after "abolish the law." He could have just said "abolish the law" and then stopped, right? But to his credit, he kept reading. But what he kept reading undermines his interpretation, because he abolished the law of ordinances, right? So he didn't abolish the whole Torah. He abolished a lot of ordinances. And what does he say was the result of that? Creating one new man, right? So what was abolished was again, those boundary markers, those boundary marker commandments that separated Jew from Gentile in terms of identity. Those are abolished so that there can be one new man, that new man being the Christian, right? And so now Christian is the identity established through ritual, through baptism, and through the Eucharist, not through circumcision.

In the past, even though in Matthew's Gospel, chapter 5, verse 17, he says, "Do not think I have come to abolish the law; I have not come to abolish it but to fulfill." So it's not decisive. Opposite of what Paul is teaching. And in this letter, or Peter to James, Peter is crystal clear that he himself upholds that teaching of Jesus, which we see in Matthew's Gospel. And calling Paul, who is my enemy, I think that's probably enough for now.

Now, I just asked you all to say, and Bart will doubtless say, and I would agree with him, I don't think this letter is actually from the historical Peter to James. For a start, people like, all virtually all of Jesus' disciples, what we would perhaps call today peasants, they were uneducated. And in fact, there's a verse in Acts and the Sanhedrin actually says that they are untutored, they are uneducated people. They didn't go to Galilee and university and learn how to read and write. They couldn't read, they couldn't write. They weren't in a position to write letters, and neither was James. So I think that this is, even though it's not by Peter, nevertheless, it does reflect the views, I think, of Jewish Christianity, and very likely would be Peter's view as well, historically. So even though it's not by him, I think it probably faithfully reflects the historical Peter's own views. And definitely it was James, because no evidence in support of that conclusion whatsoever, right? So this is something that was written minimally 150 years after Saint Peter was martyred. Just because Saint Peter was Jewish, you know, was Jewish, not even all first-century Jews had the same beliefs. So there's, there's zero reason to think it had anything to do with Saint Peter's own. You know, you could say what you can say from this is that this text reflects the view of one sect that existed in the early third century, that that seems to have had some elements carried on from Judaism, also seems to have had some heavy Gnostic elements combined together.

Yeah, I think, um, it's, uh, it's just, it's funny for me that he, he does this whole thing and then at the end he's like, yeah, I don't think this is by Peter. But he titles the video, "Why the Apostle Peter Calls Paul the Man Who Is My Enemy." Yeah, this is just clickbait. But yeah, you, in the New Testament, in Acts, it has James clearly upholding the Jewish law. Um, so this is a very different kind of Christianity than you are here preaching about today in the churches. It's very different from Paul's Christianity, but it bears witness to the great diversity of Christianities we see in the early centuries. Jewish Christianity ultimately became extinct, perhaps to be reborn as Islam, as, uh, another text I quote in another video once said, Islam, in a sense, carries that same belief about Jesus being a prophet and a Messiah and not God, and teaching, in the main, the continuance of the Jewish law and not teaching its abolition as Paul did. Anyway, I hope that was this interest. Until next time.

Yeah, just for the record, we have no evidence whatsoever of any Christian sect that believed that Christ was not divine in any sense. Yeah, they all believed Christ is divine in some sense. They just disagreed about in what sense. Yeah. We're coming up to the two-hour mark. So, um, uh, maybe we should just not, not do the other two videos. But could you maybe talk about why, what would be a good reason to reject these Judaizing sects as being as having legitimate apostolic succession compared to, um, what we have? Well, I mean, there really isn't one. That's, um, the, I mean, just on a basic logical level, right? Every, every scholar agrees Jesus existed. The people who say he didn't exist are wingnuts. And so he taught something, he had disciples, those disciples received it and taught something, right? And so, um, the idea that that the earliest texts we have, which are the New Testament writings, the Apostolic Fathers, even the second-century Gnostic texts, right? The idea that all those are wrong and that there was somehow an original Christianity that didn't see Jesus as divine in any way, that left no evidence of itself, seems weird to me, right? Like, um, there's not a, to be fair, to be fair, New Testament scholarship, especially the 19th and early 20th century, and even sometimes today, and even some Patristic scholarship, sort of does this all the time. Try to create these heresies and movements and communities based on what's called mirror reading of certain texts. I ended up getting into this in my dissertation on First John, because one of the big debates is who are the heretics that Saint John is talking about? Trying to identify them with some group we know about from some other writer or reconstruct something we don't know about, right? But, but it all ends up just being conjecture, and you create this weird circularity where you say, okay, well, based on the text, I'm going to hypothesize this group, and then now based on this hypothesized group, I'm going to interpret the text, and you get these weird circles and irrefutable arguments. And so I think a lot of Islamic apologists are sort of casting about and they find these things, right? They find some New Testament scholar's conjecture of this community or that community, and it kind of works with the narrative they want to tell, and so they try to fit it in. It's sort of like the Trail of Blood, I don't know if you're, you're familiar with that, over it, right? Yeah, certain Baptist groups here don't want to, they want to say they were not part of the Protestant Reformation, they're not related to the Roman Catholic Church in any way, that they're part of this line of true believers that goes all the way back to the time of Christ, it was always separate. And in order to do that, they have to daisy chain together a bunch of heretical groups like the Montanists and the, you know, the Marcionites and all these, all these groups, even though they don't believe most of what those groups. And I see a lot of that even in the videos you know we watched for this, where you know they're citing someone who they disagree with about everything except the point they're citing. None of them would say that the Holy Spirit was Jesus' mother, right? That opposed, you know, all he says. But if it's in some way convenient to their narrative, they'll sort of try to chain it in as evidence of their position. And that to me is just sort of a house of cards, right? In some cases, there's so much conjecture involved that it's hard to even disprove it because it's not based on anything substantial. But in other cases, it just sort of collapses under its own weight when you start pointing out like, well, hey, let's read the rest of this text, you know, let's read the, let's read the, uh, the rest of this. So, but yeah, so they're getting, they're doing a lot of cherry-picking of sort of New Testament scholarship that conjectures these things and wants to create, create these things. And then because a Christian said it's real, well, now I as a Muslim can point to that and say, oh, see, look, the Christians say this, that really supports my position. Yeah, yeah. I, I, it really does seem to be that way. Um, but yeah, well, thank you very much, Father, for coming on and giving everyone, uh, an apologetic for Saint Paul. I think a lot of people were edified by this. And of course, we did a really great interview on your book, which I will once again plug. By the way, how is, has this, is this still in in print now, or are they still out of stock? In ancient faith, now it is for the non-stock. Back in stock. We don't know for how long. It was a pretty major printing this time, I'm given to understand. But I don't know how much of it is already gone. I don't know how much is left. So if you want a physical copy, get them while they're hot off the press. Yeah, they sell them on Amazon too, right? Yeah, there's a Kindle and Amazon, or a Kindle and Audible version too, if you prefer that. And those of course don't go out of stock. So, yeah. And of course, um, for us, you can, um, join us at the channel here, so, as a member or as a patron, so that we can use the money to buy these kinds of books and have excellent Orthodox and even non-Orthodox writers on to talk about, um, stuff that's germane to the channel. Um, but yeah, as I understand, Father Stephen really enjoyed the interview we did last time. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. There's probably, probably, uh, well, I don't want to offend anybody, it's definitely one of the best interviews that's, uh, that I've done on the book. So, yeah, I appreciate how you, I, I plugged your documentary on Jewish Christian worship last time. I'll plug it again. So, but I, I appreciate the depth of the work you're doing on this channel and getting into content rather than just doing commercials for things. Yeah, trying to, we're really just trying to pull down the academia that's vindicating the Orthodox view down to the popular level. That's kind of the aim here. And I think that's what the aim of your book was to do as well. Yeah, that's, that's what I'm hoping to do. I, for the rest of my life, I'll be paying off my, uh, degree. But hopefully, I can spread some of that around to other people. Not the debt, the debt I'm stuck with, but the knowledge, hopefully I can spread her. Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Father Stephen. Um, I don't know when we'll do a next stream together. At least, at least we'll do another stream together when your new book comes out, um, because I would definitely be reading that and then we can also discuss it with, with respect to other books on violence in the Old Testament. Yeah, yeah. It is, uh, the people who have, who have already read drafts, uh, it is a, have already come immediately commented, it is a different approach. What, what you get typically, there's two questions, two super chats. So Nathaniel Hill gave $50. Thank you so much. He said, Father Stephen, I am almost up to date listening to your entire Whole Council podcast and about to start going through your YouTube archive. Are there any further archives? Did you start at Genesis, and was that recorded? Thank you so much. Yeah, so the, the history of the Whole Council podcast is, it's actually my parish Bible study that I started 11 years ago now. And we did start with Genesis 1:1, but it was not recorded. No, when I got to, well, I wouldn't want, 11 years ago, I didn't know what I was talking about. So we have to redo the whole thing. Then I am, I'm going to loop back around. I'm going to, once we get to Revelation, I'm going to loop back around and start over Genesis. So, I went and bought a, like, $20 voice recorder because people were saying people would miss one and they'd be like, oh, I missed it, I wish I could listen. So I started recording it with Deuteronomy 5. That's why that's where the archive picks up. And because it's on that voice recorder, it is potato quality. And that's, and at one point there, I was writing words on a whiteboard and pointing at them in an audio recording. That's the level of professionalism I was exercising. So, but those recordings are the ones that are on my YouTube channel in the archive. Or those old potato quality recordings. And then Ancient Faith picked it up and started, when I got to St. Luke's Gospel, and they sent me some better quality recording equipment. So at least the sound quality is better. It's still not very professional, but the sound is decent. And so, yeah, from Luke on, it's on Ancient Faith. And then when we loop around, that stuff will be on Ancient Faith. But I uploaded all those files with just a still image onto the YouTube channel. So you can listen to them. You'll hear things like the old freezer that started to break down in the parish hall beeping in the background, and me having to go and reset it. It's very earthy, the archives. But Purcell 10, thank you. He says, thanks Lewis and Father Stephen. A great video. Father Stephen, can you talk about your next book? Thanks again. God bless. Uh, yeah, the, the next one coming out that, uh, I don't have a date to announce yet, but, uh, Lord willing, uh, before the end of this year, uh, will come out is, uh, called God is a Man of War, and it's about, uh, violence in the Old Testament and how we understand it. A lot of the passages that people are shocked by. And as I was just commenting, I take a little bit of a different approach. The two most common approaches you get in books on the topic, at least at the present day, are either to choking, I'll be right back. Sure. To either deny that any of that stuff actually happened, right? Sort of just say, oh, well, no, that really, these are just parables or stories. To me, that's more problematic, right? That would be like if I came up to you and said, I have a book that will tell you all about the God that I worship. Here it is. And I handed you Game of Thrones. You'd probably look at me and be like, uh, right? Um, if God could have expressed himself any way he wanted to, and he chose to express himself by stories that are full of like murder and violence and rape, that's worse than if these are things that really happened and God is trying to explain some kind of meaning or spiritual level to these events that we know happen in the world. So you get that, that sort of denial, or you get, um, some kind of marginalization. Like, yeah, this happened, but, you know, this is, this is the understanding of these sort of primitive ancient people who didn't really know God, and this is just their ideas about God. And so you get some kind of insipid Marcionism where sort of the Old Testament is sort of less Bible, right, than the New Testament. It's at least demoted if not rejected. And so I take neither of those two approaches. So, are you familiar with this one, Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric by William J. Webb and Gordon K. Ost? That what is, is, uh, relatively good that's compared to the ones I was just describing? What one's thinking of in particular? Crucifixion of the Warrior God? Haven't heard of that one. Okay. That's, that's a big one in biblical scholarship circles in the US right now. Still by Boyd. And then a lot of the popular level stuff, you know, the Unhitched, the Old Testament, Stanley stuff, goes down that road. And, you know, hey, I'll take a shot at him while I'm here. David Bentley Hart, who I don't think is really actually a Christian at this point, but we won't go down that whole rabbit hole. Yeah, so that's more, that's more what I was referring to. Um, but I say I take kind of a distinctive, it's, it's not a super long book. It's, it's at its popular level, it's aimed at people, but it's sort of aimed at giving you principles to sort of be able to read that and understand that and put it in a specifically Orthodox Christian context and our understanding of death and our understanding of the atonement and that kind of thing. Yeah, that's why I postponed doing my series on the Old Testament. So like, I'm just waiting for your book basically so I can start that up more or less. But we have been more focused on metaphysics on the channel and we'll be for a bit, and then we'll shift over to doing biblical theology and stuff. I think, so this is all kind of like teaser for stuff that's going to be on the chat. But yeah, so yeah, awesome. Thanks so much for coming on, Father Stephen. And, uh, I hope we'll see you again, um, soon. Yeah, worldwide. Have a wonderful day, everyone, wherever you are. And, uh, yeah, God bless.