Transcription
It's not so much about the philosophy of Christianity, the problem of evil, all this kind of stuff. I'm interested in the Bible as a text. What are the manuscripts? How old are they? Who wrote them? Why were they written? Why do they contradict each other? Do they contradict each other? I really can't explain why I find that so interesting, but I think it's because it's unique. There's no other ancient text quite like this where you have four accounts of the same story which are so important to so many people's lives and have such a wealth of scholarship around them. You can get a PhD on any word in the New Testament. You could do an entire PhD thesis on any one of those words. There's just so much to uncover, and yeah, I find I find it interesting.
What is captivating to you on an emotional level about the Gospels? This Jesus figure transformed the lives and societies of billions who came after, with billions of people and hundreds, maybe thousands of societies. That's a mystery to explain. You have to explain what it was about this person that did that. And then there are two questions: What is it about the figure of Jesus as known in popular culture, Son of God, Miracle Worker, healer? And what is it about the historical man, whatever he actually did, that brought about that image and changed the world? Those are kind of two separate questions, right? You have the Zealots of the world, Zealots who merely think of him as a humanistic kind of rabble-rouser. Yeah, and it was simply that being in the right place at the right time in the right kind of rebellion that, you know, instigated the kind of transformation of a couple billion souls. Yeah.
Well, we know that Jesus existed. We know that Jesus was crucified. And we know that not long afterwards, lots of people started to believe that he'd raised him from the dead. And not long after that, in my view, people began to believe that he was God incarnate. Christians will say that they already believed that at the time that Jesus was around. I think that's a slightly later development, still quite early, but slightly later. And these are historical mysteries to explain. Even for a secular historian, this is one of the most extraordinary events in human history. Mhm. Something happens around sort of the Year 30 AD, and suddenly, you know, society's disrupted and and, you know, changes the face of the Roman Empire and all of this kind of stuff. As a secular historian, how can you not be interested in that? It's fascinating. It's like studying World War II or something. It's sort of like someone say, "Why are you interested in World War II?" As a historian, how can you not be? It's one of the most important and and foundational shifts that's happened in society in in the past few hundred years. And I think the same thing is true for the development of the Christian religion across the the broad sphere of human existence.
That's fascinating. As speaking as a Baháʼí, the Baháʼí Faith was founded by the Forerunner to the Prophet Founder, Baháʼu'lláh. The Báb, who is similar to a John the Baptist kind of figure in in a lot of different ways, the gate, the gate. And what's fascinating about it is because this religion began in the mid-19th century in Iran, Persia, there's documentation of people meeting them. You know, there's the English historian E.G. Browne, who sat with Baháʼu'lláh and recorded his conversation. There's talk of what they did and where they went and what they said. When so there wasn't just like a Sermon on the Mount and a couple of little apocryphal stories. There is reams of documentation of what actually happened. So from a Baháʼí perspective, it's really exciting. And when I, when we think about Baháʼu'lláh as being as an equal station as Jesus Christ, of saying like, "Hey, this is really exciting." Yeah. There's only, you know, five or six million Baháʼís on the planet right now, but hopefully that it will spark also a world movement. And guess what, kiddos? This is as if Jesus Christ was walking the planet and and people saw him and wrote about him and there's news articles.
Yeah. The thing is, I'm always really suspicious of the the rate at which mythologies can spring up around people. And even like a few hundred years ago, it's it's relatively easy to see how the way that people remember somebody can be mythologically embellished. And so especially when it comes to someone like Jesus living thousands of years ago, it becomes really easy to see how that happened. I mean, just the other day, I was with some people, some Christians, and one of them asked me about my PhD in Theology. And I was like, "I don't, I don't have a PhD." "You don't?" "I thought you had a p-" "Oh, like like a Master's?" "No, no, I just have an undergrad." "You just-" "I could have sworn you had a PhD." And someone was, "I'm sure I, I heard somewhere that you-" And I'm sure that if they had just said to somebody, "Oh yeah, Alex has got a PhD in theology," they'd be like, "Okay, that checks out. That's what-" And before you know it, like everybody just remembers me as someone who's got a PhD in theology. Mark Twain said, "If you give a man a reputation as an early riser, that man can sleep until noon." Right? It's so easy to see how once you have some kind of reputation about you, you don't really need to do anything. And I I imagine something like that is probably going on in the early church with the memory of Jesus, especially given that the even the earliest gospel account is written decades after Jesus's death.
Sure. There's debate about whether this is written by like an eyewitness. I mean, Mark is, according to the tradition, written by John Mark, who's a sort of a companion of Peter and so not an eyewitness to the resurrection, but sort of hung out with the eyewitnesses and and this kind of thing. But we're talking about something happening decades after. And the earliest gospel doesn't mention or narrate any post-resurrection appearances. To the later, the Gospels get, the more embellished stories get. So Mark, the the earliest version of Mark, there's a longer ending which is added later. But the earliest Mark doesn't have any post-resurrection appearances of Jesus narrated. It ends with the the man and the at the tomb saying, "Go to Galilee. That's where you'll meet Jesus." In Matthew's gospel, we go to Galilee and we meet Jesus with the 11 disciples. In Luke's gospel, the location is changed to Jerusalem. Jesus appears to them in Jerusalem, tells them explicitly not to leave Jerusalem. You also have the road to Emmaus, another story which gets sort of thrown in the Gospels. John's gospel, the latest gospel, is where you get Jesus supposedly sort of like walking through walls and and and appearing the and also Doubting Thomas and these much more potentially theologically motivated stories.
So as time goes on here, my, so here are the two theses: Either all of these events actually happened, and it's just coincidentally the earlier the source, the less is reported. Or another hypothesis is that it's something to do with the distance of the text from the source material that explains these these appearances. The one spanner in the works here is Paul. Because Paul is the earliest New Testament source, and he says that Jesus appeared to 500 people in First Corinthians, uh, 15. And that's pretty mysterious. But Paul mentions it once. He doesn't tell us who they are. Uh, he tells us that the 500 appear, that Jesus appeared to 500 at one time. Maybe it was a live stream. Yeah.
Well, do you know what? It it was probably something similar to that in terms of broadcasting. Because there's Dale Allison in his great history of the resurrection, his sort of case for the resurrection, it's a wonderful, wonderful text. He points out that the Greek terms here can also be translated as that Jesus appeared above 500 people or over 500 people. And in the psychological literature, we have examples of people seeing visions in the sky. How do 500 people see Jesus all at one time? Probably some kind of vision in the sky, similar to the one that Paul had himself. So I'm not sure that that would be the best kind of evidence. Also, of course, people forget that in the Gospel of Matthew, chap 27, Matthew says that when Jesus dies, the two, there's a great earthquake, the second at the the time in in Matthew's gospel, and the tombs open and the holy ones of Jerusalem get out of their graves and start walking around Jerusalem and quote, "appeared to many." So a lot of Christians simply think this didn't happen. This is some kind of myth. But we have as much evidence for the 500 appearances in Paul, just one mention. Yeah. And if you think that the people, how, how do you pick and choose? A lot of people just don't even know that Matthew's gospel says when Jesus dies, the graves open and many of the Holy ones are walking around Jerusalem, appearing to many. If you think that Matthew either made this up or got it wrong, or maybe it's supposed to be understood mythologically, what are you saying? You're saying that Matthew is willing to incorporate mythological stories about people rising from the dead that didn't actually happen in order to serve a theological point? And then you have to, uh, go back and address the resurrection.
And what about the Gnostic Gospels? Do you think that they add anything to this, uh, to this equation? Oh, they add so much. This is not my area of expertise. So much. A lot of Christians get annoyed at me for just how much I bring up the the Gnostic Gospels because they're all saying, "Alex, you know, they're dated so much later and they're obvious frauds." And okay, fine. Even if they are, what it tells us is what early Christian communities believed about Jesus. Even if you can't properly source these in eyewitness testimony or anything, you have Gospels with all kinds of theologies which tell us that there are early Christian communities who have completely different visions of what Jesus is all about. The most famous is probably the Gospel of Thomas. Likely dated to the mid-first century, mid-2nd century AD. Mhm. Um, so later than the Gospel of John. Some people date it earlier, a bit controversial. It's a sayings gospel, just a list of Jesus's sayings. It's got some weird, weird stuff in there. But also doesn't mention the resurrection. Doesn't even mention, because the Gnostic Gospels, Gnostic for gnosis, for knowledge, it's all about having the right kind of knowledge that will save you. It's not about throwing yourself on the resurrection. It's about learning the right kind of thing.
So in one passage, Thomas is pulled aside and Jesus says three words to him. Thomas goes back and the disciples say, "What did Jesus just say to you?" And Thomas says, "If I told you, you would pick up stones and throw them at me, and the stones would turn into fire and then come and consume you." He seems to be saying that if I, if I told you what I just, what Jesus just told me, you would accuse me of blasphemy and tried to stone me to death. What can someone say in three words there could be that kind of level of blasphemy? People suspect it's something. I got them. I got the three words right here, ready? You ready? Hit me. "There's no hell." Yeah. Well, it could be that. But then, you know, well, the question, does it, does it fulfill blasphemy? Like if somebody said, "I don't believe in hell," which wasn't a very sort of well-understood doctrine at the time. Jesus, Evangelical community, that's blasphemy. Church. Yeah. Yeah. At the time of Jesus, I think the only thing that could really get that is something something like, I mean, people suspect that Jesus might have said something like, "You are God," or "I am you," or "You are divine," or something. And the message of the Gnostic Gospels seems to be something like, Jesus has attained this spiritual status with God, but that's something that you can do too, if you have the right kind of, like the Buddha, you can, you can attain, can do it as well. And there are some indications even in the canonical Gospels that that's what Jesus was about. So when Jesus famously says, "I and the Father are one," or "Anyone who's seen me has seen the Father," he then says that "I am in the Father and the Father is in me." He seems to specify that that's what he means. But then he prays in John chapter 17 that the disciples will all be as one, and that they will be in him as he's in the Father, as if this, this unity that Jesus has with the Father is something the disciples can also achieve. So if you want to say that Jesus is claiming to be God, then this would seem to imply that the disciples can do the same thing. That if you don't fully understand what we're getting at here, it can sound incredibly blasphemous. You're saying that Thomas the Apostle is God? That's blasphemy. I'll throw these stones at you. But the point, and that's why you have these secret teachings of Jesus, even in the canonical Gospels. In the Gospel of Mark, it's said that Jesus is walking around speaking in parables. You can look this up. This is amazing. In the Gospel of Mark, and and the Gospel says that's how it begins, that's the whole beginning. And the Gospel says he did this so that there will be any quotes to Psalms, ever seeing, but like, ever looking, but never seeing, ever hearing, but never understanding. But when he was alone with his disciples, then he explained everything. So even in the canonical Gospels, we have a public ministry and a private ministry of Jesus, and we don't know what the private ministry is. We don't know what the secret stuff Jesus was saying to the disciples. The Gnostic Gospels are by and large people's attempts to sort of portray what it was that Jesus was saying in those private meetings. But it's the reason that it's not canonical is because, in part, well, partly it's late, but also it's got some weird theological stuff in there. Thomas, at the end, says, the Gospel of Thomas, at the end, the disciple says to Jesus, "What about Mary Magdalene? You know, she's a woman, but she's been really good. Is she going to enter the kingdom of God?" And you'd expect Jesus to say something like, "Yeah, no problem." You know? But Jesus says, "I will, I will make her into a man, but any woman who makes herself into a man will inherit the kingdom of God," or something like that. Which is like, bizarre. That's weird. Yeah. So stuff like that. Or when Jesus, there's like isolated quotes, no narrative, so they're just completely out of context. Jesus says something like, um, "Whoever comes to know the father and the mother, he shall be called the son of a prostitute." Which is really strange. That might be a mistranslation because I think like you, we, the version we discovered in the 1940s was written in Coptic. It was a Coptic translation of of of an earlier source. And there's some suggestion that the translated word for like prostitute is very similar to, I think, something like son of God. So son, and there's like a mistranslation, "son of a son of God." Yeah. Yeah. So this is why it's interesting because there's theology to impact, but there's also like, is it just a mistranslation? We know there are frauds. My favorite obvious fraud is the Gospel of Jesus's wife. You heard of the Gospel of Jesus's wife? That sounds like a Dan Brown novel. Exactly. And suspiciously, it got uncovered around the time of the success of The Da Vinci Code. A small, yeah, it was. Yeah, it was right.
Okay, I know you're, which mentions Jesus's wife. It also mentions Mary Magdalene, implying that that's the wife. And some scholars think that this is real. They date the papyrus, it's pretty old, it's like old papyrus, and people aren't really sure what's going on here. We know it's a fraud. The reason we know it's a fraud is because the Gospel of Jesus's wife, this fragment of the Gospel of Jesus's wife, quotes the Gospel of Thomas in an Aramaic translation. The Gospel of Thomas, we have a Coptic version. It's an Aramaic translation. It makes a typo in the translation on this ancient fragment. In the translation of the Gospel of Thomas, there's a mistake. There is one other place where that exact typo occurs, which is on a website which translates the Gospel of Thomas into Aramaic. So, so whoever wrote this, whoever forged this, Google search, they took it off the internet. And and this website also has the exact same line formatting, which is like unfathomably unlikely, as well as that same mistake. It's like a typological error. And so, and they've taken this and they've written this this forged material onto genuinely old papyrus to try and fool people and make a bunch of money. But we know it's a, we know it's a fraud because we can see, well, where did he get this translation? He got it from a website.
I asked you what moved you and captivated you about the Gospels. Uh, what moves you and captivates you about the personage of Jesus Christ? It seems, seems like Jesus challenges you, like he challenges his disciples to try to understand what he's really about. The big motif, especially I think in Mark's Gospel, is the disciples' sort of ignorance and cowardice. They will flee at the time of the of the crucifixion. Like it's like if they, if they'd have understood what Jesus is saying, they would have known what was happening and they would have stood firm in their faith. There's this motif that people are constantly not understanding him. The Pharisees are constantly misunderstanding him, and he gets angry at them for for it. The disciples are bewildered, like, "What does this mean?" Please. How is that captivating to you? Because it tells us that that whoever wrote these Gospels was doing it in such a way, aware of the fact that Jesus's motivations and sort of characteristics were unclear, and that it's sort of up to you to try and work out, not not only who this Jesus actually was, but also what the Gospel authors are trying to say Jesus was. So there's a bit of a challenge. It's like a, it's it's almost like fan theories about TV shows and stuff, and the Gnostic Gospels are like the the expanded universe. It's just so interesting to try and figure out who this, who this man was, because he was such a significant figure. And we're like, "How much do we actually know about him?" We don't know anything about his life between his birth and and his baptism. And even the birth narratives are probably, uh, like mythological. And at least in the case of Luke, fleeing, fleeing to Egypt and the firstborn sons being killed and all that. I think that that Luke's birth narrative in particular was added later. I think the Gospel already existed, and the birth narrative gets added on at a later point. It's really interesting in Matthew's Gospel, you have the genealogy of Jesus. That's how it starts. So it lists all of the names back to back to, I think, Abraham. And then we get on with the with the with the birth narrative. And then on with the story. In Luke's Gospel, you have all of this stuff about the birth of John the Baptist, or the pregnancy. Isn't that there to show the importance of Jesus's connection to Abraham, father of monotheism? So that's what it's trying to do. Matthew is trying to show Jesus's fulfilling prophecy. So in particular, he of the line of David. Uh, Luke's go begins with it's pregnancy stuff, and then it has the birth narrative, and that all wraps up, and then you have a genealogy. I think you have a baptism, and then you have the genealogy, almost as if the Gospel had started with the genealogy, like Matthew's Gospel, and told the story. And then somebody took this birth narrative and sort of stuck it on at the beginning. You know? And this one, the genealogy goes all the way back to God. It doesn't go back to Abraham. It goes back to God himself. Wow. And so it's possible that that's impressive. 23 and Me brings you back to this. Yeah. Yeah. That would be that would be good on the TV show. You know, you're related to. Opens the picture. Like, no way. You know.
I I think that Christians will dispute this, but I think that in the early Church community, not everybody was agreed about the divine status of Jesus. I thought, I think there are many people who don't, who didn't believe that Jesus was God. And as the church begins to decide that Jesus is God, you look at Luke's Gospel. And when did the church decide that? It's impossible to say. Christian, like 300 years later, right? Was that the? Well, it seems Council of, of, I think Council of, that was the Trinity was established, right? That was an establishment of lots of church doctrine. But but the, the idea, the ideas that were agreed upon are much earlier than that. For example, the canonization of the four Gospels. Some people think that that's in the Council of Nicea. Like, I think Athanasius is our first, he like writes the books of the New Testament that we have today. And that, that's that's much earlier. I can't remember exactly when. But no, a lot of these ideas are much earlier than that. Paul himself, some, some will say Paul thinks Jesus is God. That's a very plausible thing to say. If that's the case, then since Paul is writing a couple of decades after the death of Jesus, then we know that that belief was already there. Just a couple of decades after. He can't, the only one thinking that way. Exactly. Writing that way. Exactly. And, um, some people say that Jesus himself was claiming to be God during his lifetime. So Christians believed it even before his crucifixion. I think that's a little dubious. But I think that that explains maybe why Luke has added on this story, because they're trying to portray Jesus as divine from the beginning. Here's God, you know, sending the angel, saying that you're going to give birth to to Jesus, and sort of giving this much higher Christology than perhaps was present at the time of the writing of the original gospel.
Isn't it, isn't it difficult to dive into the Bible and kind of find what Jesus says, where he says, "Like, I am God"? I mean, he says, "I and the Father are one." He calls God the Father, but he repeatedly calls himself the Son of Man. Y- over and over again, which I know can be translated as like, "I'm an everyday guy kind of saying, like, hey, I'm just, I'm a dude kind of, whatever the Aramaic version of of that is." But speaking as a Baháʼí, it's Baháʼí view these divine teachers as what we call manifestations of God. There is a special station for a kind of a certain kind of prophethood that is above a regular wise dude, you know? Jesus is above Desmond Tutu or or, you know, Ekhart Tolle, you know? But has a station that is closer to a godliness. So there is kind of a greater investment of divine qualities in the station of people. But Muhammad, the Buddha, Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, all of these great divine teachers that have started kind of world-changing, civilizational-changing, you know, movements have these qualities. But to say that they are God is is a stretch. But to say they are man is not, is not quite a stretch. But it's, it's difficult for me as a Baháʼí. When I read the Gospels, I'm like, "Where, where's the Trinity here?" Like, I don't see it. I see how you came up with it two, 300 years later, but I don't see what Jesus says that points directly to a Trinity or Jesus as God himself.
Was this partially being in the land and time of gods where villages had their gods and peoples had their gods, and that he needs to be like seen as like a son of a god, which is very, seems very Greek to me. Like there is gods and then they have sons, and sometimes those sons come down on, you know, and walk among humans, you know what I mean? Populate with humans, and you end up giving birth to sort of human gods. As a Baháʼí, I get very confused by the certainty with which Christians say, "Christ is Lord. The Trinity is infallibly true, and it's the only way to understand the divinity of Jesus." This is church doctrine, you know? There are debates in the early church about how to consider Jesus. Is he fully God? Fully man? Is he a god with the appearance of of a man? Does he sort of seem like he's feeling pain, but doesn't really, because he's God and God can't feel pain? Like people aren't really sure. And then it's finally decided: Jesus is fully God and fully man. But it's like, okay, what I'm interested in, because I don't care about church, like doctrine, mean, you know, it's it means literally nothing to me. What I care about is what do we get from the actual Gospels and the letters of Paul, right? Okay. Does Jesus claim to be God? Like, there are quotes that seem to imply that, such as "I and the Father are one." "Anyone who's seen me has seen the Father." As he says to Philip. Um, also, interestingly, in John, ver chapter 8, verse 58, Jesus says, "Before Abraham was, I am." The reason that's interesting is twofold. Firstly, he seems to be giving himself in potentially eternality, but certainly existing before his birth in a way that he doesn't seem to give to Abraham. If Abraham's very special, but before Abraham was, I am. Abraham had a beginning. I existed beforehand. The reason it's got that weird grammar, "Before Abraham was, I am," because Jesus says "ego eimi" in the Greek, which is thought to be an invocation of God's name in Exodus. When Moses says, you know, "Who shall I say that I've spoken to?" God says, "I am that I am." Like the name of God is "I am Yahweh." Mhm. And so when Jesus says, "ego eimi," "I am," it's like he's saying, "Before Abraham was, I am," and invoking the name of God. And then the Pharisees pick up stones to throw to throw at him to stone him. So they think he's committed blasphemy. How can that be explained unless it was quite obvious that he was saying, "I am claiming to be God?" The issue is, "I am" can also just mean like, "It's me." In the very next chapter, the blind man is healed. He goes back. People say, "Aren't you the man who was born blind?" And he goes, "Ego eimi." When Jesus walks on the water, the disciples think they've seen a ghost, and Jesus says, "Don't be afraid. Ego eimi." And that's translated by most Bibles as just, "It's me." So it's not entirely clear. But Jesus does seem to be doing something like claiming to have existed before his human birth, that's for sure.
We know that some people will say that this is, which goes hand in hand with the belief of manifestation, that this this very special, mystical station of these, this range of divine teachers goes before Abraham into into prehistory. There is a kind of a unified kind of field among them. It's hard to kind of differentiate between them. I do think Jesus is saying he's more like more special than Abraham there, which is probably what really upset the Jews there, because Abra, they say, like, "Are you saying that you're you're greater than the father of our faith? You've been born, you've been alive for 30 years, you're saying you've met our father Abraham?" And they get really angry at him. But the thing about the Pharisees is they're constantly misunderstanding Jesus. The Pharisees say to him, but when Jesus says, "I and the Father are one," he's speaking to his Jewish opponents. And they say to him, they explicitly say, they pick up stones again, and they go like, "You claim to be God." They say, "You're claiming to be God." What does Jesus say? He doesn't go, "Yeah, you're right. That's me." He says, "Haven't you read your own scriptures?" Kind of weird. He says, "Do not your own scriptures say that I shall call you gods?" What? Okay, right. Unpack that. He's quoting Psalm 82. In Psalm 82, it says that God is presiding am above the council of the gods, and he renders judgment on them. And at a later point, it says, "I shall make you gods. You shall be called sons of the Most High." So in this Psalm, you seem to have this like divine council, and God calls them gods, in scare quotes, it's like gods, which is really weird. Because this divine council shows up, like in the Book of Job, God, like Satan is part of the divine council. So you have this even in the Old Testament, this imagery of God and then a bunch of sort of divine pre-existing beings who aren't God, but are like these very special parts of the divine council. When Jesus says, "I and the Father are one," and then the Pharisees like, "You claim to be God," he says, "Haven't you read your own scriptures? Does it not say in your own scripture, uh, that I shall make you gods? And if, and if God will do that for them, who he revealed his word to, would he not do it for me too? So why are you accusing me of blasphemy for saying that I am the Son of God?" So if you read Jesus's own clarification, it seems like he's being intentionally provocative, saying something like, "I am the Father are one," to see if the Pharisees are willing to like, to to think outside of the box, or if they're just going to accuse him of blasphemy. And when they accuse him of blasphemy, he says, "You're just not getting it right." And so then when people say to me, "Well, why would the Pharisees have stoned him in John chapter 8 if he wasn't claiming to be God?" It's like, well, they do that in John chapter 10 as well, but they were wrong. You know, they're constantly misunderstanding. Jesus says to Philip, Philip says, it's just after he says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Philip says, "When can I see the Father?" He says, "No one comes to the Father." Is also the name of Dwight, Tru, and, uh, and Angela's son, by the way. Just throw. Is that right? It was that named after Philip the Apostle? Yes. Yes, that's why Dwight, that's why Dwight named him that. Yeah. It's Dwight, Dwight's a, what is he? He's a, he's a, he's a Mennonite. Would be a weird offshoot of Mennonite. Yeah, like an ancient Mennonite, like they speak only old German. It would be like a 13th century Mennonite. You know, why? Probably some kind of ritual human sacrifice going on as well. Yeah. Why did the Amish girl get excommunicated? Why two men? Mennonite. Good night, everybody. Someone liked it. Um, anyway, go ahead. You. Jesus said, Phil, Jesus says to Philip, Philip says, you know, well, when can we see the Father? And Jesus says, "Philip, Philip, how long have you been with me? Anyone who's seen me has seen the Father." Well, Jesus is claiming to be God again. Okay, maybe not. Because then he then clarifies this whole thing. "I am in the Father, the Father is in me." And he sort of ends up saying like, "When this is all revealed to you, you will be in me. I will be in the Father." Sort of this big, sort of divine concoction, this big divine cocktail. And so if you have a naive reading where somebody pulls a quote and says, "I and the Father are one. There it is. Jesus is claiming to-" I can say, well, Jesus also says, "The Father is greater than I." Jesus also says, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Right? You know, Jesus says things which separate him from God. And if I say that to a Christian, if I say, "Why does God say that, the Father is greater than I?" They go, "Oh, well, but you've got to understand the context. You've got to read what happened before." But when it comes to, "Before Abraham was, I am," it's like, "There it is. There's your quote." And that's all you need. That's very frustrating. And as two as two non-Christians having a conversation about Christians, one of the things that's very frustrating to me as Christians, it seems it all seems very cherry-picked in a way. Like, like I referenced before, Jesus calling himself the Son of Man. Like, why is he the Son of God? He calls himself the Son of Man the entire freaking Bible, like 137 times. "Oh, well, you've got to understand the context and what that phrase means and why and this, but in this one phrase, he says that, see, that's the truth." Like, well, who decided that? Did you decide that? In 300? Did you decide that? Did the seventh, 7th Avenue Methodist Church of of the Lutheran, you know, you know, this church on the corner decide that? Like, who, who's making these decisions? There seems to be some universalities, uh, that have kind of been predetermined. And it's very, it's very frustrating to engage in kind of a deeper conversation of just, let's just look at the text and can we decide for our ourselves, like, why do you, you know, sign up to be a Christian? And you, and you sign up for this specific and certain doctrine, and don't you, you can't change the doctrine at all.
Most of Jesus's wrath in the New Testament is reserved for the Pharisees. Why? Because they're hypocrites. Because they're the ones who are supposed to know better, right? People are constantly coming to him and sinning and getting things wrong, but he's totally forgiving. And the Pharisees are the kind of priest class, Jewish of the time, that are supposed to be the knowledgeable ones. Yeah. And this is who Jesus calls, like, "You, you brood of vipers," and says these things, very unlike Jesus. And I think it's because the Pharisees are the ones that are claiming, like, "I know, we know the the law of God. We've, we've got it under wraps." If, if somebody says, "You know, I'm I'm a sinner, I've messed up," or they misunderstand something, that's fine. But if they claim to be this authority, then it makes it all the worse. And what's the lesson we can learn from that? When we look at the religious traditions of today that say, "No, no, I have the word of Jesus, and you can do this and can't do this because Jesus said this and Jesus said that." Mhm. That's exactly what the Pharisees were doing to Jesus when he was healing on the Sabbath. But the law says you can't do that. And Jesus is like, "Come on, man, like, well, this is-"
I'm sorry to keep going back to my faith, but I just find this fascinating. First of all, I find it fascinating that I'm learning so much about Christianity from an atheist. God bless you, Alex. Baháʼu'lláh claims to be, in a certain regard, the return of Christ, in that there is a fulfillment of a Christ prophecy. "You are not ready to know all that I can tell you. I will return again to you under a different name. He will come like a thief in the night," etc. That Baháʼís believe is is true for Baháʼu'lláh. He's going to piss a lot of Christians off. But, and the Christians will just say, "Well, he can't be the return of Christ, and here's why, because it doesn't fulfill this prophecy, it doesn't fulfill this prophecy." And then you say, "Yeah, but the Pharisees were using all of those arguments of why Jesus couldn't be the Messiah because he wasn't of the House of David, and he wasn't on a throne, and he didn't have a sword by his hand, and he didn't, you know, lead an army, and he didn't, you know what I mean?" Like, and I'll point that out, like, "Well, that doesn't, it doesn't correlate." There's zero correlation between those two things. It's like, "No, it's actually the exact same thing." I'm not saying Christians all need to sign up and believe that Baháʼu'lláh is the return of Christ, but it's all too easy to just say, "No, that's not what the scripture says." It's like, scripture doesn't, like, there are where scripture just says something quite explicitly and and straightforwardly. But I think especially when it comes to things like Jesus, yeah, things like Jesus's divinity, things like prophecies, there are a little bit more, sort of, a little bit more room to maneuver.
The other thing to notice about all of this, of course, the Jesus claiming to be God's stuff, is that is that I've just given you a bunch of reasons why these three famous quotes in the Gospel of John might not indicate that Jesus is God. But let's just say that actually he did. Let's say we uncover a new ancient manuscript of the Gospel of John, and Jesus literally says, "I am God. Worship me." Right? Even then, there's an even bigger question. John is the latest of the four Gospels to be written, probably around 90 AD, maybe slightly later. If Jesus was actually just walking around explicitly claiming to be God, why do none of the other Gospels mention it? Do they think it was like an irrelevant detail, like not worth including in their narrative? You know, they'll include the story about Jesus like withering the fig tree, but oh, there's stuff about him, they needed to goose the mythology a little bit. Like, as as we get to these later Gospels, let's just goose it up. We'll we'll turn the temperature up a little bit, make them a little more godly. It's if in order to reach a greater audience, like this is going to play better in the hinterlands. We don't know why it would happen. I don't know if if it develops like cleanly from like Mark through to John. But a lot of scholars think that John didn't have knowledge of the synoptics. The synoptics, the other three, you know, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they all rely on each other. They're sort of copying each other. They seem to share common sources. John has been long thought to be its own thing, right? Even if it's just, John says this, and the others don't. And there's no like development per se. The fact that John seems to, people interpret John as saying that Jesus was just claiming to be God, like the fact that nobody else would have written about that. The fact that, and people say that's an argument from silence. Just because it wasn't written about doesn't mean he wasn't doing it. I I had this argument the other day where someone said, "That's an argument from silence." Said, "Sure." They said, "For example, we don't have any writings of of the destruction of Pompeii. We don't have any writings that refer to it. But it would be wrong to say that just because no one wrote about it, it happened." And I'm like, "Yeah, but imagine if we had somebody who'd written an account of Pompeii at the time that it happened and just didn't mention the destruction. But they were writing a text about Pompeii at the time of destruction happened, but they didn't mention it. That would be bizarre." And you think that there was something going like, AR there, that's something like what we have. We have three independent Gospels all writing about the life of Jesus from apparently eyewitnesses who just don't mention the fact that Jesus explicitly claimed to be God. And when I ask Christians, "Why doesn't Jesus just say, 'I am God'?" They say, "Well, he must have some reason for not saying it explicitly. You know, he can't just go around claiming to be God. They would have killed him. He needed to do his his mission, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Eventually, yeah, in good time. When he comes to John's Gospel, they say, "Well, in John chapter 8, he claims to be God. Before Abraham was, I am." And like, "Are you sure that they would have understood that?" "Like, yeah, yeah, anybody who knew at the time, they would have totally understood he was claiming to be God. Why else would they pick up stones to to to stone him?" It's like, "Okay, so five minutes ago, you told me that in the synoptics, he didn't claim to be God because he couldn't. He couldn't just go walking around claiming to be God. There's no way he could." But then in John's Gospel, there he is, obviously walking around claiming to be God. It's like, take your pick. Of course, not all Christians hold those two contradictory. Necessarily saying, "Before Abraham was, I am." Why does that mean he is God? It's the invocation of. There's a lot of other ways you could you could interpret that. There are. And that's the problem. I mean, people will say that the the traditional sort of interpretation of this will just say, "Look, you don't, you don't get it. You don't get how important this phrase 'I am' is." Of course, remember that we're reading a Greek translation of an Aramaic-speaking man quoting allegedly a Hebrew prophecy, right? What I would say is that at best, I think we we could have reason to think that John, the author of John's Gospel, is trying to put the words "I am" in the divine sense into Jesus's mouth. But we can't be sure about that because all we know is that John wrote that Jesus said "ego eimi," and like I say, like Paul says "ego eimi," lots of people threw it around. And also, when people say, "Why would they stone him if he wasn't claiming to be God?" In the book of Acts, since Stephen has a vision before the Pharisees, he looks up and what does he see? He sees, he says, "I see God, and I see Jesus sat at the right hand of God." Firstly, separating Jesus from God. Mhm. Secondly, he then gets stoned to death. They pelt him and they kill him. A lot of stoning going on. If you're, if you're willing to stone Stephen just for saying that he saw Jesus at the right hand side of God, you clearly don't have to be claiming to be God, God, much less even just claiming that Jesus is God, in order to be in fear of your life. So given that, I don't think we have quite enough evidence to to know that that's what Jesus was saying there. But even if he was saying it, there, the fact that it doesn't show up in any other sources gives me reason to suspect that that's a historical account.
Why, you know what? We need to shut up about the Bible. I didn't, I didn't have any Bible questions on here. I don't have any. And we just spent 45 minutes talking about the Bible. I wanted to talk to you about consciousness. What the hell is going on? Everything's about. Where did Cartic go? He just left. He's like, "This is boring." I don't give a. My producer's gone crazy. The Soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.