Transcription
There are other messianic movements in the ancient world, but I bet you couldn't name any of the individuals involved in those. And there's a reason why we're asking questions about Jesus of Nazareth and not Simon Barulva.
Wesley Huff, welcome to my podcast.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I am a trained historian. I work primarily in the area of New Testament manuscripts.
One of the points that I make when I often do presentations on this is that as time goes on, we're not getting farther away from the original wording of the Bible. We're actually getting closer to it.
How does the Bible compare to other ancient documents that we do trust?
I think it depends on what we mean when we say trust and compare.
Speaking in tongues in the New Testament is almost exclusively an actual language. The English Bible is changed, but it's changed for the sake of clarity, not corruption. You know, if you evaluate what Jesus's claims actually are about himself, he's either lying through his teeth. He's either a lunatic or he's the Lord of the universe who actually validated the claims that he made about who he is by rising from the dead. The people who rise from the dead have more credibility and authority than people who don't rise from the dead.
Wesley Huff, welcome to my podcast.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I'm really excited to talk to you. Uh, I know we just had you film a course for Peterson Academy, which I'm I'm so thrilled about. I think I first saw you I saw you before you went on Rogan, but I saw some of your stuff on Instagram and I was like, "Yes, this is the kind of thing that would have helped me uh the like the logical part of my brain uh before I became a Christian." And I didn't really see a lot of that or really any of that online. I probably could have dug deeper, but I wasn't a Christian, so I wasn't digging that deep. But uh before we get started, for anyone who isn't familiar with you, although I'm sure a lot of my audience is, can you give a brief background about who you are and what it is you do?
Yeah, so I am a trained historian. I work primarily in the area of New Testament manuscripts, although I look at kind of the ancient literary culture more broadly. And so I study ancient scribal culture. So the ways that scribes wrote and particularly the features that they uh incorporated into manuscripts that made things like reading publicly easier. So
Oh okay.
Yeah. So it's called parextual features and reader aids is kind of the formal category. So I look at a number of Christian manuscripts from the second and third centuries and uh really the conclusion I'm drawing is can we differentiate between a manuscript that was produced privately as someone's like personal copy say of the gospel of John or uh that was produced for a public reading lurggical setting in a Christian community. So I do comparative analysis with a number of ancient literary works. But then because my area is it's New Testament studies formally, but it kind of crosses over into early church history and then kind of broader antiquity in general. I I get away with talking about a bunch of different stuff.
Wow. Okay. That's very niche. That's cool though. Did you were you a Christian before you went into that?
Yeah. So I grew up as a missionary kid. My my parents were missionaries both in Pakistan and in the in the Middle Eastern country of Jordan uh when I was very young and then my dad was a pastor for a long long time now retired but um so I grew up both a both a missionary kid and a pastor's kid so very much within a Christian context but it was in my teen years in sifting through some of the things granting that my parents raised me to believe something very specific but kind of figuring out you know sift ing through is my parents telling me to believe this a good enough reason to believe it. And I don't think it's a bad reason. I want my kids to believe things because I tell them. But uh going through some of that data and living in a missionary household, uh I'd read the Quran as a teenager. I'd read a number of other literature. We had a Book of Mormon in our house. Um, I read the Bavagita. And so just trying to figure out, okay, well, what's really going on in terms of these big worldview questions and is Christianity really the answer?
Yeah. Okay. And did you come across anything in your findings that surprised you since you've been studying this?
I mean, I think I was definitely solidified in the worldview that I was raised in, uh, because I felt like it genuinely answered answers that that fit within categories like logical consistency and empirical adequacy, experiential relevance, and historical accuracy. When I investigated things like say the Quran, I found that there were more red flags than there weren't. Even in some of the narratives and some of some of the stories that I was familiar with with the Bible, the Quran would tell similar stories but seem to get the details wrong.
And was that just comparing it to the Bible or historically?
On both ends. I mean, if if you like in my field in New Testament studies, even the most radically skeptical scholars will say, "If we can't really even know anything about Jesus, we know that he was crucified under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate." And that's something that's fundamentally denied within the Quran. Chapter 4:157 denies the crucifixion outright. And so, there are ways that that Muslims try to get around that um that Jesus may have survived the crucifixion. And so in that particular passage when it says that they neither killed him nor did they crucify him. Well, maybe was that maybe they tried to crucify him but they didn't kill him kind of kind of thing. But I I found things that I I just didn't think lined up perfectly and talking with Muslims not really getting answers that sufficed in terms of my curiosity. And and the thing that stood out to me about Jesus in particular was that it the Christian worldview hinged on him being a historical character.
Mhm.
Whereas if you in my investigation of something like Buddhism, it could have been another character who came up with the phil philosophical system that eventually was described as Buddhism in terms of, you know, the the path and um the the philosophical categories. It didn't have to be Gutama Sedartha who we refer to as the Buddha, but it had to be Jesus. And the historical information around the person of Jesus, I I've just found sufficient.
Okay. Fascinating. I mean, that's good. And I suppose I found it sufficient, too. Otherwise, I wouldn't be a Christian. But, um, just based on the text, like from a historian's perspective, uh, how does the Bible compare to other ancient documents that we do trust?
Yeah, I mean I think it depends on what we mean when we say trust and compare. Like I I think
Sounds like my dad.
Yeah, that's right.
Pulling that out here.
Um, but but I think you know the definitions matter in the sense of how we're defining those categories. Uh, when we're talking about someone like Alexander the Great, we're waiting about 450 years between when he lived and when our first kind of comprehensive biographical material comes up. So there's a guy named Aryan who who wrote our first kind of comprehensive biography. And it's not that we distrust that biographical material. There's reasons to believe that Aryan got significant details about Alexander the Great's life right.
But it was 450 years later.
It was. And that's not unusual for the ancient world. I think because we live in such a hyperiterate culture, we assume that people should be writing things down during the lifetimes of individuals, right? And that's just not how things operated in the ancient world is some of the best biographies we have by individuals uh like uh valisculus or Tacitus or Sutonius or Casio of the Roman emperors are coming in periods after they actually lived sometimes centuries afterwards right and and this is just the norm and the fact that we're waiting a few decades for Jesus is actually closer in proximity And interestingly enough, I would argue within the kind of cultural and uh uh literary memory of Jesus than the vast majority of the people who we would just kind of assume existed within the ancient world.
Oh, that's cool. I didn't know that.
That's cool. Okay. Um, I've got a whole bunch of questions that I spent a bit of time on. Okay. and I don't was like sometimes I want to have a conversation but there are a bunch of things I actually want answered so I'm going to run through a few of them.
Okay.
Um, how close how close are modern Bibles to original manuscripts and does it matter which translation you read from your perspective?
Yeah, that's a great question so interestingly enough one of the points that I make when I often do presentations on this is that as time goes on we're not getting farther away from the original wording of the Bible we're actually getting closer to it.
Okay.
So So, as time chronologically goes on, I would argue that because of the evidence that we've actually had the privilege to be available to us, mainly the manuscripts, although not limited to it, we are able to track and trace the chain of custody back to the original wording more accurately. So, the way I often word this is if you compare, say, a modern translation of the Bible to something like the King James Bible.
Yeah. So the King James Bible is translated between 1604 and 1611. It's translated not from handwritten manuscripts as much as it's translated from printed editions of the Greek New Testament and Hebrew Old Testament. Okay?
So there's a printed edition of the Blom Blombberg Hebrew text and then there are these seven printed editions of the Greek New Testament. um five by a guy named Desidarius Arasimus who was this great Dutch scholar in the middle ages and then updates by a guy named Stfanus and a guy named Basa and that kind of sits like is the center the like the base for what the King James translators are primarily using.
Okay.
The main texts that are being used are the additions of Arasmus. those are primarily built on 31 approximate manuscripts um that go back to approximately the 11th century. So there's a there's a bit of a there's a bit of a blurriness to that. Uh Arasmus consulted an an individual named Bombasius in Rome to check a manuscript that existed in the Vatican known as Codex Vaticanis which is actually from the 4th century. But if we skip ahead like 2026 today, we're not only aware of those 31 approximate manuscripts that the King James translations base text was relied upon, but we have close just over 5,000 more Greek manuscripts that have been dug up and have been analyzed and have been transcribed and translated and so on and so forth. And so that's not to cast dispersion on the King James Bible, which I think is a very well done translation, especially for its time. We just have more information in the 19th century, we just dug up more.
That that definitely makes sense. So when people are read reading like ESV, that doesn't necessarily mean it's like the dumbed down version of the King James.
No, definitely not. Um, because modern translations take into account the breadth of the evidence. So the vast majority of the manuscript evidence that we have in terms of something like the earliest copies of the papyrie there's the you know the documents written between the 2nd and 4th centuries on papyrus were just not we we didn't even know of them.
Yeah.
Uh in in the 17th century when the King James translator now the King James translators would have utilized that if they had it. They just didn't have it. Um, and so in in regards to that, yeah, an ESV is taking into consideration the breadth of the material.
Cool.
And something like the Dead Sea Scrolls, right? It, you know, those were discovered between 1946 and 1957. And so, we just know more now. So that's why I say, you know, as time goes on, even though chronologically, the 17th century is closer to the first century than we are, the available data that we've been able to analyze and study uh is just far more in the in the modern era.
Imagine your favorite lecture, dial that up on Max, put that on steroids, and then add some cinematic elements to it. That's the best way I could describe a Peterson Academy lecture. There's always that one professor who's like, "Oh man, you know, you got to take this one professor. They're the best." But at Peterson Academy, it's all of those that one professor. I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago. And I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college. It's very common nowadays for students to be in thousands and thousands of dollars of debt. It breaks my heart the interest rates that are just going to keep on piling up on them for an education that doesn't entirely serve them. You are stuck in the room. You have to do a particular set of courses. I have to convince myself to stay focused. It's just pretty dry. With Peterson Academy, it's a fraction of the cost and you get access to all these different topics. Goes anything from sciences, nutrition, why we get sick, all the way up to history. Tons of courses, tons of really good lecturers. I'm always looking for high-quality educational content. Peterson Academy provides it all. The instructors are amazing. They're so well known in their field that you just want to pay attention. The more I access, the more I listen, the more I learn, the more I want to learn. I just keep expanding and I just want more. Traditional university can sometimes ground you down. Peterson Academy will be able to scratch that itch of you wanting to learn and continuing to grow as a person. I can't wait to see where Peterson Academy goes. There's just so much potential and it's just the beginning. I went to college because I had to. I go to Peterson Academy because I want to. You just kind of have to focus on what's going to actually change your life. Stop paying attention to what things are supposed to look like and actually aim for something and you might just stumble across something like Peterson Academy.
I grew up like with my dad telling me the psychological significance behind some of these Old Testament stories. He was always reading in the King James version. And as a kid, I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is a lot. I'm not really sure what's going on." But then I felt like when I first became a Christian, I felt like I was cheating using using the ESV. Cuz I was like, "I get it. It resonates. It feels good." But like, am I am I doing things I don't know, the easy way or something.
Yeah. I mean, if you want to read a King James version, I have no problem with that. But I think there is aspects of the language that is archaic there. There's language and this isn't the fault of the King James translators. There are certain wordages. My my friend Mark Ward has an excellent book uh titled The Use and abuse of the King James Bible. And in it, he has lists of words that are either outdated or have actually changed their meaning.
Oh, yeah. Of course.
You're going to run into words. So, the the key example that um my friend Mark uses is halt. So, in the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, you have this kind of grand narrative. Elijah's in this competition, uh, we at my house for our kids, we have this this book that's called the the God contest. And it's the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, right? The prophets of Baal, they come and they're challenged by Elijah. You know, if Baal is the God that exists, you you try to sacrifice. You you put some put the bulls on the altar and see if Baal can call down fire to burn things up. then doesn't work. And then Elijah gets them to pour all this water on the altar, you know, really soak it. And then he calls down fire from Yahweh, from God, and then he burns up and there's nothing left. And in the meantime, he's mocking the prophets of Baal. You know, maybe Bale's on the toilet. Maybe Bale's gone for gone for a vacation kind of thing. Um, but in the midst of that, the King James translation has this this terminology where it says he's he's talking to Israel and he says, "How long will the halt?" And so you think, "Okay, well, what does that word mean, halt?" Well, if I asked you, you know, Michaela, what does the word halt mean?
Like stop suddenly.
Yeah, exactly. Right. Halt. Who goes there kind of thing, right? But if you look at like an ESV, um, it says something like, "How long will you go back and forth?"
Oh, yeah. That's not the same thing.
And you're like, "Wait, wait a minute. What's where's the what's happening here?" Right.
That's a way different.
Until you go to the New Testament and you find out that Jesus does things like he cures, he heals the halt and the blind. And halt in Elizabeth and King James language means to to be like physically disabled to to stumble like and so when Elijah says how long will you halt thee? It's like how long will you you kind of limp in in regards to this decision.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so that's one that's even like a word that we would associate with something that's archaic. You know, halt. Who goes there?
But we're still getting it wrong.
Wow.
Right. And so there are things like that. There are things uh there are other words that we just don't use anymore. Um, they're just passages in the King James. So if if someone is like starting out and they they're just assuming, well, the King James is the Bible. I read the King James. I think they're it's not the worst thing they could possibly do. I just think they're going to be better served with a modern translation that's actually going to be understandable.
I I was
and I was pretty familiar with the King James. Not from a not from like a a Christian perspective exactly, but I was familiar with it. But ESV, I was like, this just there's like less of a it's less hard to listen to God, I think, that way if it's in an understandable language. But I was like, maybe I'm being lazy or something. But I like that argument. I like the halt argument. I'm going to remember that. Yeah, that's very interesting.
I often say like the English Bible is changed, but it's changed for the sake of clarity, not corruption. So it's it's in order to actually be understood, read, and applied to your life, it makes sense that there are just and we just find more about what certain terms mean. So in the King James at I think I think it's 2 Chronicles 26:18, it says at Parbar westward, four at the causeway and two at Parbar. So you read that and you go, I don't know what that means. Right? Um, you read the ESV and it says something like, "As for the court to the west, there were two at the court and four at the road itself." You're like, "Okay, I know what that means." And there are certain words that in the 17th century they didn't know what a parbar was, so they transliterated it. The Hebrew word is literally parbar.
And so they were like, "We don't know what this word means. We'll transliterate it." And so, but now because of our expansion of the Seemetic language, we know that means a court and so we can translate it as court. So, yeah, does that impact like the essential truths of the Christian faith? No. But
Do you want to know what it actually says?
Yes. Then read, you know, an NIV, an ESB, an NL, an an NIV, an NLT. You're you're going to be best served in that way.
Cool. Okay. Um, what's your perspective on whether or not a Christian can lose salvation?
I would say ultimately what we see within the testimony of scripture is that if someone truly has had in the language of salvation that we see in the Bible, their heart of stone removed and they're given a heart of flesh, they're empowered by the spirit. And we look at something like John chapter 6 where Jesus says, "All the father gives to me I will raise up on the last day and no one can snatch them from my father's hand." I think it is impossible for a true genuine believer to lose their salvation. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't people who have like profound experiences where they think that they are born again and then maybe later in their life they backtrack on that or something like that. I mean, the parable of the the seed and the swers, right, communicates this. There are people that are going to fall on rocky ground. they're going to, you know, have the the shoots of the root in the shallow ground, but then as the winds and the rain come, they're they're not going to survive. Um, I can think of people in my own life who it appeared at face value to have a genuine conversion experience and then later in life they decide, you know, I don't actually believe this. I'm just not convinced that you can know the creator of the universe and have a personal relationship with him and then decide that that you can be made a new creation in Christ and then undo that. I just I look at the angel coming to Mary and saying you will name him Jesus because he will save his people and the emphaticness of that not may save his people not could save his people but that he will save his people. And so I see that and and I don't along with you know, there are passages like the Gospel of John chapter 6 where Jesus is talking to the Jews and he's saying things like that and then he's saying listen you don't understand what I'm saying because my sheep hear my voice and you're not my sheep. You're you're not getting it. Something's not clicking. And for that reason, I think a genuine believer who has been transformed by the spirit, it is impossible to lose their salvation. That doesn't mean that there aren't periods of time where maybe we we waver um, you know, dark nights of the soul as John Wesley would describe it, but at the end of the day, the perseverance of the saints is something that is is going to follow through in the life of the believer till the end.
Okay, cool. I had a experience like that when I first when my mom had cancer and then in the hospital said it went from being like I would say agnostic not atheist but agnostic to Catholic and we were like that's weird. um for a long time after that I was like she changed you know like um she became a lot more patient and kind in a completely different way and I I knew my mom I was 27 or something at that point so it was a big change and I was like okay whatever that is that she has I want to have that peace like that's a real thing everybody in my family noticed that okay maybe we weren't religious or Christian but we could see a piece she like exuded a piece that wasn't there before and she was like Yeah, it's God. Um, and then when I met my husband, because he he's been a Christian for his entire life, I had an experience that I thought was me getting saved. And I was convinced I was saved for like this was I think it was almost two years. It might have been a year and a half. And I was reading the Bible and I was praying and I was pretty convinced. But then a year and a half later, it might have been 2 years um I like it um in a completely different way than it had before. And I was like, I wonder how many people have because you don't know and you don't know. I think you don't know until you're saved what what it feels like or um how overwhelming that experience is. M um, and so I misattributed it for a whole year and a half and it took some kind of bad periods. Um, and then for some reason that was time for me and I guess another question that could lead off of this is how much of being saved is on the individual versus God's timing.
Hm. I mean, at the end of the day, I think that the act of salvation of taking someone from death to life is a work of God and God entirely. I think when you read scripture and you see, you know, Paul in Romans talking about us being enemies of God, us being children of wrath, and then being becoming children of God, that's a spiritual work that we're we're fighting against the work of the spirit until our eyes are opened. And in order to realize that truly and fundamentally, I believe that is what the testimony of scripture communicates is that it is a work of God in the person's life. When Jesus says that he's knocking on the door, the whole reason you're able to hear him is because there's an empowering of the spirit to even hear the knocking to begin with because our fleshly desire is going to want to drown that out. We're going to be, you know, uh, we're going to be tempted by the whims and the ways of the world and the the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life are going to attempt to drown that out. I think so. I think that the work of salvation is entirely a work of God. And I'm very thankful and I see that in my own life. Like I know my own heart and I know it's kind of proclivities that are acting that are constantly trying to pull me away. And apart from God breaking into my life and taking my heart of stone and giving me a heart of flesh, my desire is to choose all of those things, right? It's not necessarily that God is throwing us a life preserver and it's our duty to like reach out and grab the life preserver. I think we're actively trying to swim down to the bottom of the ocean.
Mhm. And
that's way darker. I shouldn't even laugh at that. But
I know, but you you think about like our our own our own like the the innateness of our depravity. And I think, you know, there there are glimmers of hope and that we're all created in the image of God. And so, of course, you know, even people who have no understanding, no desire for God can do good things. Of course, they can because they're they they bear the image of their creator. And so it's less of a matter of like can you do good things if you're not a believer and more of a question of what's the point of those good things to begin with. You know where are we coming up with a standard to ground what we call good or not good. But I I think it genuinely is. It's a work of God in our life that thanks be to God. He broke into my life and he renewed me and he opened my eyes. this con there's this constant language of um he that is Jesus saying if you have ears to hear listen you know if you have eyes to see see and then that's paralleled sometimes even with his miracles you know opening a blind man's eyes that this blind man he he can't see he can't comprehend the world around him visually until I open his eyes and then there being almost like a spiritual parallel in the teachings of Jesus where then he's saying you're not going to understand these things. You know, you you my my sheep hear my voice and you're not my sheep. So, you're not getting this.
Yeah.
Right. He raises Lazarus from the dead and then what did the Pharisees try to do? They scheme to try to figure out how to kill Lazarus. Well, I'm sorry. Did you just see what happened? So, I I think I think it is a the Phil the the like theological term is monism. It's a monergistic act. It's a it's a the single act. It's God that's, you know, reaching into our lives and he's he's renewing our our minds to really understand what's going on.
So then one of the things that happened to me when I was saved was even though I'd been reading the Bible and trying to understand it was that it was like a different language came out from it. I was like I was getting way deeper meaning. I was understanding parts that I had almost skipped like subconsciously. And it's not like I was trying to skim through the Bible, but I was re I was rereading parts of the Bible and I was like, I didn't even notice this like whole line. Like a lot of the demonic stuff. I didn't realize how much there is about demons in the Bible until I read it when I was saved and I was like, I've read this before and just skimmed over that part. That's terrifying.
Yeah. Um, so then why is the purpose of talking about it then to make people aware and like help them identify patterns of when God is kind of knocking on the door? Is that do you think the purpose behind spreading the gospel?
Yeah, I think we kind of live in this tension between Jesus's great commission to make disciples of all nations and something like when Peter writes to the dispersed church in the ancient world and he says in 1 Peter 3:15-16, "But in your hearts over your Christ as Lord, always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have." And he prefaces it well. He follows it up by saying, "But do so with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ will be ashamed of their slander." So it's this justosition. Do I believe that salvation is a work of the spirit? Yes, I do. But I'm I also am commanded to give an answer, to give a reason. And the word that's used there in Greek is apologia. It's a legal term. It's literally what a a defense lawyer will do in standing up before a jury and saying, "I'm I'm giving a legal defense for my client." And so, yeah, we we give an answer for the hope that we have. And part of that is, you know, I've talked to people who they've put up all these barriers. They have these intellectual barriers barriers to God. And I talk to them and as those kind of fall by the way, I can see they're like, "Okay, I have no more excuse. I have no more excuse. I have no more excuse." And then God uses that to lead this person into the admission that okay, you know, I I have a decision now. I either follow God or I choose to rebel. But um and and I think that's that's where kind of the conversation I is engaged in is that I don't think salvation is an intellectual endeavor. I don't think it's just about knowing enough
Because if
you can't if you could prove God, you wouldn't need faith, too.
I think that I think there's a component of that. It's it's it's also the fact that faith in the Greek, the term pistus can equally as well be translated as trust. And so, it's something like this, like I trust based on evidence in that my wife is back in Canada with my four children and I have trust. I have faith that she is doing everything that is right to parent those children right in my absence. But I know that I have faith in that because I know she is. I have evidence to to point to that. I know the character of my wife. And I think in that sense there's an aspect of there are certain things that we don't understand about God. But based on the character of what he has given us to work off of, we can then, you know, fill in the gaps and say, "Maybe I don't understand everything, but I do know enough to put my trust and faith in God in moments where I don't really know what's going on because of what he has revealed to me." And so there's there's that. Um, I think there's also an aspect of, you know, God uses the evidence that he gives into the world to when the person stands before him in judgment to say, you know, you you really don't have an excuse. You were given even if it's just creation. At the beginning of the book of Romans, Paul says that God's invisible qualities and divine attributes have been revealed by nature, by creation, so that no man is without excuse. And that word is unapologetus, without a defense and there's an aspect of no one's going to be able to stand before God and say I just didn't know because there's an aspect of the creation that's also communicating something maybe you know, not specifically about who the character of Jesus is but I want people to understand that there's a decision that they need to make but I I think I think it's reasonable I think the evidence is is on the side of the Christian worldview here's a question for you When you think about the questions of like the intellectual barriers to faith, what do you find is the biggest hang-ups for people?
Well, let me see. How can I word this? So, one of the really intense I don't know what word to use other than the spiritual things I went through like when I got saved because it was it was a very dramatic experience for me was God telling me and not in a like voice exactly but showing me that I had been trying to rationalize like all the way down um something that I couldn't rationalize that I is too small to rationalize. So to answer that question like how does like the kind of rationalization play a role or or hinder people? I I think people are trying to rationalize something that you c that you can't rationalize. And I think it says in the Bible that you need faith is part of it. Faith is faith is all of it. So I what like what changed for me was obviously if somebody could somebody could explain the historical evidence but I kind of knew the historical evidence and that's not what really did it for me even though that's what I thought would um I needed to have that extra step of you have faith that this was real and faith that we were created in the image of God and everything that has to do with that. And that's part of what saves you. And that's what I was shown when I was saved. And I was like, "Oh, okay." And it was like this weight was lifted that I didn't have to understand all the way to the bottom. And that not only did I not have to, but I wasn't able to. Like I I there was there's no way to to prove it. So, I I think um it was kind of a roundabout answer, but I think a lot of people are stuck on proving why it makes sense all the way to the bottom when part of it is that you you need faith and you can't explain something like God all the way to the bottom.
So, that's what I was shown was just like kind of how dare you try to explain something as big as me all the way to the bottom. You can't do it. Yeah. Yeah.
I don't know if that answers your question at all.
Yeah. No, I I I I get what you're saying, though. I mean, I think there really is something to say. like I'm a I'm I find my default is very heady. But then I interact with and work with a lot of people who are not believers in terms of the Christian faith, but know a lot more about the Bible than maybe I even ever will. And am constantly thinking, okay, well, what what's the difference? Why isn't that switch toggled? And I think, you know, when you read scripture and you see Paul saying things like faith is a gift, you're saved by faith and through grace and that that's a gift. It's something that God gives you. I think it helps me understand that I'm never going to argue anyone into the kingdom, nor should I try to because that would be exhausting. You know, if every conversation I had, I had the expectation that someone was going to fall on their knees and say, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Um, it's completely unrealistic.
Yeah.
And and it would be exhausting. And so I I shouldn't try to, you know, I sometimes say, um, that's the spirit's job, right? The Holy Spirit has the job to do that. My application to join the Trinity has been denied. I failed the minimum requirements. So let try to like my endeavor to steal the Holy Spirit's job is a is a work in futility and I shouldn't be trying to do it. But I still think, you know, I'm excited to tell people about that which I think is verifiably true even when there are legitimate true divine mysteries.
Yes, I like that. That was a much better answer than the answer I gave you.
Your answer was great. Okay, I've got I've got some other good questions. Um, okay, this has been on my mind.
What What do you think the biblical view of suicide is?
Wow. Okay, let's just throw that out there.
Yeah. I mean, suicide is a complex topic because it's wrapped up in a lot of pain and suffering.
I gave Let me give you an example. Yeah.
This is cuz I just had this conversation with my husband because like I've wondered this. What happens if you have someone who's been in a battle and they're very very injured and in a lot of pain and they decide to take their own life and this is like an injury that's going to do them in and they're stuck somewhere.
Yeah.
Like what happens to those? cuz I find it hard to believe that that falls into the category of something that dooms you. But I but um and then I tried to do some digging into the Bible was like does it talk about suicide anywhere dooming anybody?
M
So that's just some context around but
Yeah, I mean this was an interesting conversation cuz uh early on in the Protestant Reformation Martin Luther when he's involved in kind of his ragings against the the um the abuses of the Catholic Church. There's a particular story where one of his congregants commit suicide and they won't allow this this I believe he was like young like in his 20s to be buried on the church grounds because this is a damnable sin and in kind of a rage Martin Luther Martin Luther is a little bit of an emotional person [laughter] he goes and he starts digging a grave for this boy on the church and saying
Oh wow.
that you Oh, this person was consumed by Satan. Like Satan was the one who led this person to lie to himself, to commit murder against his own image. And there's kind of a wrestling there in that when you're overcome in those moments. I mean, so a friend of actually the organization I work for, a guy named Euan Gallagher, who's an MDPhD in in Toronto, um wrote a book called How Then Shall We Die, which talks a lot about this things like suicide, assisted suicide, um, a very relevant conversation particularly where I live in Canada with maid medical assistance and dying.
Yeah. And and one of the things that I found very profound about what Euan articulates is that he says, you know, if we human life is intrinsically bearing of worth. We have worth by nature of bearing the image of God. That's intrinsic to us. It's not about what you can contribute to society. And one of the dangers of allowing ourselves to buy into something like medical assistance and dying is that we allow ourselves to say that if I'm no longer able to contribute because I am too depressed or too in pain or too in a state of any range of suffering then I I I don't deserve to live.
Mhm.
And even if we don't intend it to, what that taste kind of says is that you don't actually have intrinsic worth, but your ability to no longer contribute because of whatever the range of circumstances are um means that you should be removed from society. Now, that is, I think, more application to something like made for someone um who has a treatable issue than it does for someone who's genuinely like in in the the situation that you're positing that they're, you know, going through chemotherapy and they're they're they're just in so much pain. And and I'm sympathetic to that. I'm sympathetic to that because I think there is a conversation about quality of life. And at the exact same time, I feel the tension of also understanding that, you know, life is sacred no matter what. Um, there's a particular person in my home church community uh in Toronto who has MS and though she's very early, like in her 40s, um, she has been declining for years and is in a very uh, precarious state right now. in that, you know, she she's really not lucid most of the time, can't move, can't talk, in a lot of pain.
Yeah. And so looking at this particular individual and knowing that she is just in those moments where she's able to communicate so joyful in spite of this is it's convicting to me in thinking about my own struggle with whatever you know fill in the blank. I'm not as bad as Carol. Carol is in a genuine state of something that would be a nightmare for most people. And yet Carol's life is sacred. And there's something about that that speaks profoundly to me. And just the perseverance of understanding how she lives her life. I I don't claim to understand what any individual is going through, especially in those kind of circumstances. And far be it for me to pass judgment on someone who's genuinely in those kind of states. But at the end of the day, I would want to say, you know, don't buy into a culture of death that tells you that your worth is less because you are struggling or you are in pain or you are suffering or God cares for you more than you could ever know. And the gift of life, even in the times where we don't feel like it is a gift, is still sacred. And so, you know, something like the command to not murder, I think we should take very seriously. You know, there's something about the violation against the sacredness of someone else's life or my own life that I think that I think we should take seriously. But it's a it's a very hard question in regards to the conversation of suicide. It it's tricky because you can see like the the maid situation in Canada is insane and I've covered that a couple times on the podcast where it's like I've had some rough periods of time where I never got to that point, you know, but I wasn't very far from getting to that point where like maybe death would have been easier, but for like short trials in life that is so it's so risky to have that option so available.
Mhm.
Um, and it's like what 5% of deaths now or something in Canada are from maid. I don't don't quote me on that stat. I just read that stat was on X. I don't know if it's real,
Right?
But it it's
It's shockingly high no matter what the number is.
It's scary bad. But then I can also see, you know, like maid's been available in some states in the US for for decades. If you're in the last 6 months of life and you're in a lot of chronic pain and you have a, you know, stage 4 cancer and you don't want to put your family through that and no one really had a complaint about that until it moved beyond that, at least not that I'd heard of. They're like, "That's a little bit that's different than this like easy access." Or even the health care system being like,
"Well, surgery is going to be a couple year wait time. Would you rather die?"
"Yeah."
"Which is what's happening in Canada, which is, it's incredibly to to describe it as problematic is such a gross understatement, but but it really is. It's a marginalizing of value."
"Yeah, it is. And what makes it, I don't know if it makes it worse or not, but the fact that it takes so long to get health care help in Canada or that certain things aren't available."
"Yeah."
"Is there aren't even like other options for these desperate people. It makes me so angry. The the maid situation in Canada, it's so bad."
"That was a good. That was a nuanced answer. I think that's a tricky. That's a tricky question. That's why I asked you. What do you think?"
"Only the easy questions on the Michaela Peterson podcast." [laughter]
"Uh, okay. I've got, I've got a fun one. Um, what is, so, can you explain the gift of speaking in tongues and have you seen anybody with that? And does it still exist?"
"So, speaking in tongues in the New Testament is almost exclusively an actual language."
"Okay, let's get into this."
"Okay. I don't think I've heard that before."
"So when you look at something like what happens at Pentecost when you have uh a number of the disciples, you know, Peter's there, they go back. I think this is an interesting narrative because they're preaching the gospel at the scene of the crime only weeks after the actual resurrection of Jesus in a place where people could have seen Jesus crucified. And so it's this interesting statement in terms of if they were purposefully lying about this whole narrative, why did they go back to ground zero where they would have known that people could have seen Jesus die talking about how he was resurrected? But then there's this instance where the spirit descends and appears above the heads of uh the apostles in tongues of fire and they're speaking in the language of individuals from the Jewish diaspora who had congregated in Jerusalem for this particular event which was like a, it was a, it was a religious gathering, right? So people from all around the the the Roman world who are in the Jewish diaspora who aren't necessarily speaking, say, the native language of Jerusalem or gathering and the apostles are speaking to them in their own languages. And so then you have this instance of their speaking in tongues. Now later on in the Pauline epistles, Paul says there needs to be a translator. There needs to be someone if you have an instance of speaking in tongues, there needs to be someone who can interpret."
"Okay. And so I think what we see primarily is that this is a kind of supernatural experience of someone communicating in an existing language in a language that they don't otherwise know."
"Okay, that."
"But the caveat to that is that then Paul talks about the language of angels. And so this is usually what's capitalized on in say, like the charismatic communities of Christianity. I'm very wary of a lot of that, although I don't totally understand it entirely. I have never encountered that. Um, I'm not precluding that it is a possibility because you do have some of these passages that talk about, you know, we speak in the languages of angels. Um, but I think what's going on there is is that you have these kind of understandings of what sometimes are referred to as the spiritual sign gifts of speaking in tongues, of healing and of prophecy that are referred to in the New Testament. I think something is going on in the New Testament that's different. And I think it's going on in the apostolic period in this time period where you have the disciples of Jesus going around and preaching things for the foundation of the building of the church where there's a uniqueness to all of it."
"In that time period."
"In that time period. So it's, it's normative in a way that it is not now in that the disciples are going around and they're say, healing people in a way that we just don't see now because the disciples are building, the apostles are building the foundation of the church. And even if you think about the analogy of a foundation in terms of like architecture, you don't continue to build foundations upon foundations upon foundations upon foundations. That actually makes the building. It compromises the integrity of the building."
"And I think in that period of time, you have things like the New Testament books being written. But in this age of the apostolic witness, Jesus appears as the resurrected Messiah, as a savior, as a son of God, as the second person of the Trinity to his disciples in the upper room. He breathes on them and he says, 'I give you my spirit.' And they are given the authority to communicate in the name of Jesus. And so there's a different level of authority that is then codified in the books of the New Testament."
"And so now we have the New Testament. Now we have the books of scripture where God speaks directly to us in a different way. And so I mean, I think those things happen. I have a, a, a miracle story in my own life where I believe I was healed of something. And so I think those things are a reality. I think healing, speaking in tongues, um, those things happen, prophesying. I just don't think they're normative in the way that we see happening in the New Testament because I think something is going on that's different to establish the church and to kind of give it the groundwork in order to set it off to what it is. But if I'm taking the reading of what I see going on in the New Testament, tongues is almost exclusively an actual language that someone can understand. And Paul in the life of the church requires there to be an interpreter."
"Wow. I don't know what I was expecting for an answer, but I wasn't expecting that answer."
"Okay. Did you expect me to burst out in in."
"That would have been amazing. That would have made that, that would have gone viral, right? That's the episode."
"Yeah, that's the kind of clip I [snorts] need. [laughter] Um,"
"No, I think I've talked to a lot of people that are not, not charismatics, but,"
"Um [clears throat] maybe more open to that. I think it depends like, not, not open to that like that far, right?"
"But, but I've also talked even people from around here. There are a lot of churches around here in Scottsdale and I know there was one lady that was doing my lashes that was going to a church and she said there was like a someone who could, who could see the future and all these things and I was like,"
"Uh, maybe."
"Maybe, but also maybe not. And maybe the maybe not is fairly likely. And in that case, maybe you should be very careful about what's going on over there. Charismania, charismania is what we call it sometimes."
"Is that?"
"Yeah. Yeah. And you can see how people could get swept up in that and then be like, conned by people, which just gives Christianity a bad name. So it's like,"
"So I've seen, I've seen that around. I don't know. Not that I was comparing you to the, that person, but I've just, I've just seen that. Um, I haven't heard that speaking in tongues might be a language and I didn't know that section from Paul. So that's, that's cool. That makes sense. That makes sense to me. Um, okay. Here's one I that I want to use. Where do I have it? My pregnancy has my brain just [laughter] It's pretty rough just being alive right now, but I'm making it through. Give me a sec. Did I delete it? Okay, I can just remember it. Okay. Best historical evidence for the resurrection."
"Oh, okay. Best historical resurre evidence for the resurrection. I mean, I take, I take kind of a cumulative approach to the resurrection in that one of the best pieces of evidence that I think speaks to the tangibleness of the resurrection is that you and I, Michaela, are talking about it 2,000 years later."
"Yeah."
"In that there are other messianic movements in the ancient world, but I bet you couldn't name any of the individuals involved in those. And there's a reason why we're asking questions about Jesus of Nazareth and nar and not Simon Bar Kokhba. And that's because Simon Bar Kokhba led a revolt and died and his movement died with him. And so I think there's something unique about the movement of Jesus that requires an explanation for what's going on because we see the disciples scared and hiding when the crucifixion event takes place. Simon, right, Peter, who's supposed to be the good guy, right? He's like Jesus's right-hand man. Tells Peter, 'You're going to, you're going to deny me.' And lo and behold, that's what he does. Right? When push comes to shove, Peter decides three times to say, 'I don't even know who that Jesus guy is.' And the disciples, the 11 of them, because Judas has gone and hung himself, are hiding in an upper room, scared and cowering. What, what takes them from that to being this incredible missionary force to be able to go back into Jerusalem on something like the day of Pentecost proclaiming the resurrection to a group of people who very well could have seen Jesus crucified. Something happens and I think there needs to at minimum be an accounting for that. And you talk to secular scholars and they will grant, okay, the disciples had some sort of experience."
"Yeah."
"Right. Something motivated them to do this because it just seems a little bit crazy. I mean, there's the adage that uh uh liars make poor martyrs in that you will die for something you, you believe to be true, but something you know to be a lie, it's a lot harder to actually go to your grave, too."
"Yeah. You won't push yourself that far."
"Yeah. So sometimes when people hear, you know, liars or sorry, yeah, liars make bad martyrs, point to something like the the like suicide bombers or or those who flew the the planes into the towers on 9/11."
"True. Yeah."
"And my answer to that is that those aren't martyrs. Those are murderers. A. And B, they don't actually know definitively that what they're dying for is true. They might believe it's true, but the difference between them and the disciples is that the disciples both were there when Jesus died and claimed to have seen him resurrected."
"Whereas the people who hijacked the planes on 9/11 weren't there when Muhammad was waging his, you know, escapades in 7th century Arabia. So they're going off of what they believe to be true, not what they know definitively to be true objectively within their kind of own conscious experience."
"And so I think, you know, there needs to be an account. I think the breadth of the historical case for the credibility of the Gospels is comprehensive enough that it gives us a base work to say that the disciples were not lying, that they believed what they were doing to be true and that the account for that, all of the kind of alternatives to Jesus's resurrection, I think ultimately fall short whether we're talking about group hallucinations or, um, you know, whatever that be, the disciples stealing the body and trying to make up a story. I think, I think they're implausible based on then what transpires in the years following Jesus's actual, you know, death."
"That was great. I, I already, I had known about the like, if you, if you don't believe in a lie, then you're not going to be a martyr for it. I knew that, but I hadn't connected that to they had also seen him be crucified, which everybody basically even secular scholars believe."
"Mhm."
"So yeah."
"And they know that it's costly. So a few, a few uh, you know, uh, a short time after Pentecost, who's, you know, part of this inner group, he's not one of the disciples, but he's part of this inner group. He is then proclaiming the, you know, the gospel message and then he gets stoned to death. And the disciples see this and so that's like a warning shot across the bow."
"Yeah."
"They at that point know this is costly. They could lose their lives for it. That is the moment that you decide, okay, you know, we've gone a little too far. Our friends are being killed. Yeah."
"So maybe we, maybe we can slow our role in this whole conversation on the Jesus stuff. But that's not what they do. They seem to be more empowered than ever. And so it's just, it's, I, I think we see an interesting test case. It's the whole C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity has the whole uh, the what's referred to as the Lewis N.T. dilemma that Jesus is either a liar, he's a lunatic, or he's Lord. And, and I think that's still, I think that still applies today. You know, if you evaluate what Jesus's claims actually are about himself, he's either lying through his teeth, he's either a lunatic, or he's the Lord of the universe who actually validated the claims that he made about who he is by rising from the dead. And so, I think, you know, I think the evidence is on the side, though, of course, not everybody agrees that that actually happened, that Jesus predicted his own death and resurrection and then pulled it off. And I have a friend who likes to say the people who rise from the dead have more credibility and authority than people who don't rise from the dead. And so that, that means something."
"That's good. I'm going to use that in conversations with people, unsuspecting people."
"There you go."
"Who aren't Christians yet. I'm going to remember that."
"The Stephen part is good, too, because."
"Yes. And they see other people suffer for for. Okay, that's perfect. Okay. Um, I'm gonna wrap up, but I want to ask you a few PA questions."
"Yay."
"Uh, like I said, I'm really glad you came to teach. I think people on the platform are going to be absolutely thrilled and I've heard good things from everybody who was there and I would have gone except I'm pregnant and kind of [laughter] I'm just focusing on surviving and doing that for now."
"Fair enough."
"But, um, what made you decide to agree to teach at Peterson Academy?"
"It's a good question. I mean, I think I think you guys are doing something that's novel. I think you're tapping into something. As someone who has a broader kind of exposure to the academic world, I, I think that traditional academia could very well be in trouble because of a number of factors. But I think that there's room for broadening the categories of how we educate people in a world where I'm seeing students turn in things that are very clearly written by AI."
"Yeah."
"Where a lot of the universities are turning into diploma mills and where education is becoming sort of this fuzzy category of you have a piece of paper or some letters behind your name, but you don't seem to have any actual knowledge is becoming complicated and so I think there's room for expanding the category of what we understand as post-secondary education. And so I like what you guys are doing. I like what your, your data has started because I think that it, it's tapping into something that has potential longevity in a way that is affordable and is approachable and that people actually want to invest in. Peterson Academy is doing something that, uh, I think is worth being involved in."
"Thank you. I hope so. Mhm."
"I think AI is going to change."
"I think a lot."
"I think, I think I'm already seeing. I had a friend who had a student who clearly submitted an AI assignment and he gave him a zero and then,"
"And then the student sent in an apology letter and he thought, I wonder if I check this by AI whether the apology letter was written by AI. And the the,"
"The probability of it being written by AI was also very high. So, I mean, we're."
"Oh my gosh."
"I, I'm, I think we may very well see a, I wrote most of my essays in my undergrad by hand."
"Oh, okay."
"And so I, I think we could be going back to that. I think either that or oral examination."
"Because normal examination at minimum communicates that you actually understand what you're learning."
"Yeah. Yeah. Agree. That or they're gonna have to come up with some AI tech that can identify AI faster than AI can stop sounding like AI, which seems less likely."
"Right?"
"Uh, I, I don't know. Or just do by hand. That would be an easy way to do it. It's hard to write those long essays by hand, but something needs to change because."
"Yeah."
"Yeah. Something, something's got to give. We're, we're entering into like a, a, uh, um, a point of of saturation where it's getting tricky with the students that are coming in."
"Yeah, that's for sure. And is your course aimed at secular people or Christians or is it kind of applicable to everybody?"
"My attempt is just to make it relevant to anybody who's who's tuning in. I mean, I obviously have the bias of the fact that I'm a Christian. I believe this stuff is true. And so I'm coming at something like the 66 books of the Bible with a presupposition that I believe that they're inspired."
"I believe that they have the mark of divinity on them."
"But I hope a fair-minded individual is able to actually just look at what I'm presenting and say, at minimum, okay, there's, there's reasonable grounds to assert that this is communicating things that are true. That there's reasonable grounds to look at something like the gospel biographies of Jesus and say that they trace back to early eyewitness testimony. I think, I think that is the case and I think it's, it's verifiable in that regard. Um,"
"I'm hoping to present foils in in quotations of individuals who communicate opposite positions of what I hold and then say, you know, there are reasons why they hold these. It's never, it's, it's hardly ever a case of we're, we're arguing about the data. It's, it's the conclusions that we draw from the evidence that we present. And so it's up to every individual to look at what is presented. I'm just hoping to be able to present enough information that communicates, I, I think this stuff is reliable. I think it communicates what is so a word that's often used in my field is verisimilitude, which is simply a, it's a great term, but it just means the appearance of likelihood, truth, and probability. And so in historiography, in history, we're looking for verisimilitude in all sorts of fields. Does it have the fingerprint of authenticity? And I think when we're looking at the various books that make up the canon of the Bible, it does have that. And so hopefully I'm trying to present that in a way that is reasonable and understandable."
"That's great. I, I would have taken a course on like the historical reliability of the Bible in college before I was a Christian, for sure. That's what I was looking for. I took a, uh,"
"I went to an art school so it was already getting pretty progressive when I went there. This was like 2012, 2013, but I took an intro to theology course,"
"Which nobody took. And the average age in there was probably 70. And it was all men and me."
"I don't even know if they went to any other courses in the school. It was Concordia in Montreal. So, I didn't know like 65 or 70-year-old men were even going there. They were in this intro to theology course, and it was so far over my head. It might not have been an intro course. It might have been a 300 level course. I can't remember, but it was so far over my head that what I was trying to find was,"
"Any information about."
"The reliability of the Bible. Um,"
"Anyway, I think I ended up dropping that course. I was taking Latin at the time, too."
"Nice."
"Oh, Latin. Latin was harder than all other five courses I was taking. Yeah."
"And I was in psychology and classics."
"And all I was doing was Latin. I, and I got sick, so I eventually dropped Latin, too. But I was like, why do I need to learn this many conjugations of each word in a language that doesn't exist anymore? I think if I had been healthier at the time, I would have finished it cuz it was really interesting to learn like the, well, you know, this, but the background behind a lot of the words we use now, I found that interesting. But I had no memory. I can't believe how good your memory has been, by the way. And I know I have pregnancy fog going on, so I'm feeling like lesser because of that, but the number of names you just remembered was absurd."
"Well, it's, it's very pocketed cuz if if you ask my wife, I don't remember anything. But, um, I, I think part of the reason that I am really motivated for this stuff is because I don't, I talk to a lot of people who are way smarter than me and a lot of the stuff that they say, I feel like I'm trying to like boil down to a way that has it comprehensive to me. Mhm."
"And so I, I, I hope that one of the reasons why people have resonated with the material that I put out in the world is because I'm not actually that smart. I'm just really interested in the topic. And so I'm trying to first learn it myself in order to be able to tell other people about it in a way that I wish I had heard it because that, that wasn't I also took like an intro to New Testament at York University and in my undergrad and, um, one of the things that stood out to me was if you take a class on Buddhism, there's a lot of people who are actually practicing Buddhists who are teaching those classes or if you take a class on Islam, a lot of the professors are practicing Muslims, but if you take a class on Christianity in a secular university, it's going to be taught by an atheist or an agnostic."
"Yeah, that's very true."
"And so, um, I thought, you know, I, I realized this very early on. I'm sure it's not true at every university in every humanities department everywhere, but I was like, there seems to be something going on here where the presuppositions are a lot more on the secular materialistic side than they are not for Christianity. Whereas when I take the class on Islam, the guy is a believer in Islam. And so I, that's played into the conversation for me is I've studied under mostly people who don't believe this stuff and that's helped me fine-tune how I do believe it. Mhm."
"And interestingly enough, it hasn't, I think my dad when I got involved in this was very worried that I was going to study this stuff and that, you know, the the questions and the pushbacks and all those things were going to cause me to doubt what I believed more than was necessary. And I actually found the opposite true. Reading the the people who the detractors of the Christian worldview only made me go, 'Huh, I've never thought about it that way before.' or 'Let me dig into why that might be.' and only given me confidence that, you know what, I believed all the way along or, you know, what we have now is what the original authors wrote in regards to the scripture or that we do have the relevant historical, um, in the case of the New Testament, I think, you know, eyewitness accounts of who Jesus was in juxtaposition to other books that were floating around bearing the names of Jesus and the apostles that just had no credibility. What are those?"
"Okay, so like the, the Gnostic Gospels or things like that, like the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Thomas."
"I don't even know if I know about these."
"Okay, so the podcast is not done."
"Okay, but then then it can be done. But what is this? Yeah."
"So there were other books at the time written by other eyewitness people."
"So no, so you have the first century, you have the Gospels, and even then the understanding is that there's one gospel message, right? That's the message of who Jesus is and what he came to do."
"But the idea is that those Gospels are according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. One gospel, but four accounts of it."
"Eventually, gospel literature is kind of framed in an understanding of it looks a particular way. But there were groups in the subsequent centuries after Jesus's death that aimed to appropriate Jesus and the disciples. So they wrote documents that tried to shoehorn the credibility of adding Jesus into their philosophical systems."
"In order to kind of bring Jesus into the mix."
"So interestingly enough, they always almost always portray Jesus as a pagan mystic, and that's very palatable for the pagan mystical world. And so at even face value, we can go, is it more likely that the first century Nazarene rabbi, itinerant Jesus of Nazareth was actually a pagan mystic that later people tried to paint as a Jew? Or is it the opposite, right? That he's clearly, you know, born in Bethlehem, growing up in Nazareth, wandering around Galilee, that in this Jewish saturated Hebraic world and that later people are like, let's make him into a little bit more of a like a pagan philosopher. I think that's what's going on, right? But you have uh documents, even early documents, something like the Gospel of Thomas, 114 sayings. Um, it's one of the more famous ones because in 1945 it was discovered in the Nag Hammadi Desert, what's known as the Nag Hammadi library. Also contains other documents like, uh, the secret gospel of John and the Gospel of Philip. But the Gospel of Thomas is one of the more kind of famous, well-known ones. It's not a gospel in the formal sense of like a birth, life, death, and resurrection, but it's 114 sayings of Jesus."
"But the, this Gnostic group, which so the term Gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge. And the idea is within historical biblical Christianity, salvation is something that is done external to you on your behalf by the finished work of Jesus. Gnosticism comes from the East. It makes its way into the, the Roman world and it starts to appropriate and include individuals into its system. And so by the second century, Jesus gets kind of by osmosis grouped into these philosophical systems. And though there's a whole bunch of dozens of different Gnostic groups which don't even agree with one another, the kind of central thread is that salvation is not something external to you. It's actually innate about you because it's not just that Jesus is God, but Michaela, you're divine. And the way you unlock that is by secret knowledge. So you listen to the secret knowledge, once it kind of clicks and you become enlightened, then you realize I'm actually a divine being."
"Oh, this is what Gnosticism is."
"So Gnosticism is about. So Gnostic literature often has Jesus, he, he's very secretive and unlike the more public ministry that we see in the biblical Gospels, Jesus is whispering the secret knowledge into the ears of whoever is the claimed individual. Interestingly enough, it's never the individuals that are, are the key people in the biblical Gospels. It's never, uh, Peter, James, and John. It's, it's always the, it's always Judas or Thomas or Philip. It's kind of the other background here, Mary Magdalene. Um, in a way that kind of is trying to ostracize the key figures in the biblical Gospels and actually say, you know, you guys think it's Matthew and Peter and James. It's actually, it's actually Philip or Mary Magdalene."
"Oh, interesting. Um, but the Gospel of Thomas has a number of key features to it. It's, I mean, right off the bat, all of these are written when people that are associated with their names are long dead."
"So Thomas is dead by the time the Gospel of Thomas is written, which is a key indicator that, you know, this isn't reliable."
"Um, but then it has teachings like the last line of the Gospel of Thomas, has one of the disciples saying to Jesus, 'Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.' Okay. So starting off on a good note."
"And then Jesus replies and says,"
"Don't worry."
"'Because I will make her appear male as you males. And the last line of the Gospel of Thomas is, 'Every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.'"
"Wow. They're really ahead of their time though."
"I know, right? But it's this kind of stuff. So, so when you have these these other pieces of literature that are, are they're, they're trying to kidnap, they're trying to put words on the mouth of Jesus that Jesus never said. And interestingly enough, early Christians are well aware of these guys like Irenaeus, write treatises like Against Heresies, where he stipulates that there is a book called the Gospel of Thomas and it's nonsense. It's heresy. It's silly. And for a long long time until 1945, we had no like tangible artifact evidence for the Gospel of Thomas. But when eventually that comes to light, what does it do? It confirms that what was talking about with the silliness of the Gospel of Thomas, actually happens. And, and we have, we have evidence for that also in the, the Gospel of Peter. Um, the Gospel of Peter pops up also discovered in the 19th century. And when we discover it, we have, um, a particular church leader, I believe he's in Turkey and he's writing to, there's a church in Rhodes that writes to him and says, 'Hey, we've come across this Gospel of Peter. We're not sure what this is.' And he says, 'Okay, well, you keep reading it. I'm going to look into it.' And then he finds a copy of it and then writes immediately to them and says, 'This is heretical.' Like all the way through this thing, it doesn't represent anything that's accurate about Jesus. Stop reading it within your church community. Now, we don't find the actual copy of the Gospel of Peter until long, long, long, long, long, long time after that. That's cool. But then once again, what does it do? It confirms that when we discover the Gospel of Peter, it has these kind of Gnostic esoteric denying that Jesus ever had a physical body. And so Jesus is on the cross and he's kind of chilling. He's floating because he's like,"
"The ancient world had no problem with believing Jesus was God, but believing that Jesus was a man, that's the actual hang-up. And so,"
"Okay."
"If Jesus, if Jesus denying the incarnation was a central point to a lot of this stuff because the physical is evil and the spiritual is good. So you,"
"Wow."
"Wow. This idea, which is once again why you read the book of Acts and you get to Acts 17, Paul is preaching on Mars Hill at the Areopagus and it seems that his audience of like Jew, of Greek philosophers are tracking with him until he drops the word anastasis, resurrection, and then all of a sudden they're like, 'No, we're out.' And it's because an idea of a bodily resurrection, they're like, 'That's the opposite of what we're trying to attain. I'm stuck in a meat prison because I'm a spirit that is stuck in a body and I, death actually releases me from this.' So this whole Jewish narrative idea of a resurrection of the dead, I, I want nothing to do with that."
"And so this is a Platonic thought that is adopted by Gnosticism. And so they have no, they have no hang-up with Jesus being God. They just deny entirely that he was physical."
"Wow. Wow. It's no wonder you've gone deep on this. It's kind of tempting. It's kind of tempting. Wow, that was cool. Okay, Wesley, where can I direct people to online for anyone listening?"
"Yeah, so I'm the vice president of an organization called Apologetics Canada. Um, so you can go to apologeticscanada.com. We've been producing, me specifically, a series called 'Can I Trust the Bible?' which is a documentary series. Flying to places like Egypt and Turkey and, um, Italy and talking about,"
"How the reliability of the Bible can tangibly be explained."
"In the places that, that, that these things happen. So we flew to Egypt. We talked about the Nag Hammadi library and I'm standing in the Nag Hammadi desert where the Gospel of Thomas approximately was found and I'm, I'm telling the story of its discovery and then I go to the Coptic Museum in Cairo and stand in front of the, the Gospel of Thomas and talk about, you know, why this wasn't included in your Bible, stuff like that. So we've been producing that. Um, we just, we just released episode three of 'Can I Trust the Bible?' talking about what did and didn't happen at the Council of Nicaea, dispelling some of these myths and we went and to the modern site of what was the ancient city of Nicaea to tell it. So, that was really fun. We're going to be dropping another episode very soon, uh, in the coming months and then I'm flying out to, um, an undisclosed location to talk about and record some more episodes. So, that's something that I've been heavily involved with. Um, so you can go to apologeticscanada.com or the Apologetics Canada YouTube to try to, uh, keep tabs on that. You can also go to my website, wesleyhuff.com, where I, uh, have the, the relevant social media tags and and blogs and videos that that I also produce."
"Amazing."
"That's great."
"That, that was great."
"I have something for you."
"Okay."
"Okay. So, I brought this with hope that one day it may very well get to your dad."
"Oh my god."
"But I want you to hold on to it. Okay. So, but I'm, I'm gonna."
"I'll get it to him."
"I'm gonna outline what this is."
"Okay."
"Um, so I am a lover of facsimiles, which are reproductions or photocopies of ancient documents. And so what this is, it's a, it's a leather-bound facsimile of our earliest near-complete copy of the Gospel of John. So, so this is a facsimile of what's called Papyrus 66. So, it comes from either the late 2nd or early 3rd century and it preserves for us the vast majority of the Gospel of John. So, this is what John looked like that Christians were reading in the, the second century, potentially."
"Oh my gosh."
"And so, this is in what's called,"
"You could show."
"This is what's called Greek uncial,"
"Or or majuscule text. So it's in what's referred to as scriptio continua. It's all capitals, little spaces, and little to no punctuation between words. This is what,"
"Greek, Latin, Coptic, a lot of ancient languages just looked like."
"But what's interesting about this, this one of my favorite manuscripts is that,"
"The ancient world, um, seemed to like scrolls over codices over books. Christians, for some reason, prefer books. And there isn't really a good answer to why that is. But the downside of books is that the front and the back are the most vulnerable."
"And so we have a lot of middles of books from the ancient world."
"Oh."
"But what something like P66 preserves for us is the beginning of the Gospel of John. And so we have John chapter 1 preserved for us from the late 2nd or early third century. And walking through this, I can sight-translate this and it virtually sounds like any Greek, any English translation of the Gospel of John that I have on my person."
"And."
"You can just read that."
"Yeah. So, and theon, right? In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And so this is one of my favorite manuscripts because manuscripts that are handwritten tend to have the vulnerability of mistakes that scribes make. And actually this manuscript has a decent amount of its own mistakes because the scribe appears to be more concerned with making a very pretty manuscript."
"Than making a a very careful manuscript."
"And so,"
"It appears that the scribe himself goes back and makes something like 300 corrections to his own text."
"Oh wow."
"But in what we label as verses 1-4, there are no differences between the Greek text here and what you would translate from a, a modern critical Greek text that would be used for modern translation."
"That's cool."
"So I've sat with, you know, the Greek text that we translate English translations from and sat beside this and followed along and it's exact."
"Wow."
"Right down to verse 14. And there's something beautiful about reading something that a Christian was reading in the second century and 1900 years later, 1800 years later, reading along and thinking, when the Christian read, 'In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,' and then, 'The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,' that I, in conjunction with someone nearly 2,000 years ago, can say, 'Amen' to that."
"Yeah, this is yours."
"And it is a, a photocopy of the actual manuscript."
"That is in the, the, the original is in, um, the Bodleian or sorry, not the Bodleian, it's in, uh, the, uh, it's in Geneva in Switzerland."
"Oh, this is cool. You can see where it starts breaking down."
"Yeah. Right in the back. So most of the manuscripts I'm looking at look a lot more fragmentary."
"Just at the back. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Okay, I'll get this to Dad. I might wait a little until he's feeling better so he can actually,"
"You know, appreciate it. But like, this is, this is amazing. Thank you. That's really kind of you."
"No problem."
"That's very cool."
"Yeah, it is my pleasure. And know that I'm, I'm praying for you and your dad and your family and exciting to see that grow in, you know, your upcoming, you know, growing of your own family. Um, but I've been, I've been praying for a long time, years. I, I knew about your dad years ago before anything blew up because I was studying at the University of Toronto and so."
"Oh, that's funny."
"Yeah."
"When there were just the protests there."
"Yeah."
"Yeah. It's crazy. It's been a crazy 10-year period."
"Yeah. It's been a minute."
"Well, thank you so much, Wesley, for coming on. Thanks for doing a course. I'm so excited for the course. I'll link. We're going to put this episode out way before your course comes out, but the course will be linked, too, and everything else we talked about. So, thanks again."
"Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm glad we're able to make it work out. [music]"