Transcription
So we've only got the history as they wanted it told. So you mean to tell me that the Bible wasn't written by the Finger of God, but maybe there have been men that have edited it over centuries? Christianity came from somewhere, right? And maybe some of the somewhere that it came from we should be looking for in the Psalms.
We're now, because of finding the Dead Sea Scroll and other ancient texts coming to light, we are able to pick up what the old Believers, these other voices, actually thought about the changes to Solomon's Temple. You think that Jesus revered the temple and found the temple to be important, and if that's the case, why is it that mainstream Christianity today very much looks at the temple as something that has passed away and was not important to Jesus? Jesus came to restore the temple, the true Temple.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Stick of Joseph. It's Hayden here, and we just barely got back from a trip in England. We spent over a week there. We interviewed Dr. Margaret Barker, whose interview you're going to hear today. I want to give a little bit of context before we dive into this video because we just started having the conversation with zero context.
I'm talking on the camera, buddy. I'm just recording something real quick. All right, do you want to say hi on the camera real quick?
Yeah, okay. Oh hi! Can you say hi everybody?
Hi everybody! My heart and I went to church!
You went to church?
Yeah, you did. You want to say hi to the camera?
Hi!
Okay. For those of you who maybe are new to the channel or you haven't watched some of our previous episodes with David Butler and Mike Day, some of this might be a little confusing on how it relates to the Book of Mormon.
So the basic context is this: the Book of Mormon starts at 600 BC with a guy named Lehi who's commanded to leave Jerusalem, right? And he's leaving because the people have become wicked. Now since the Book of Mormon has come out, biblical scholars have recognized that around that same time period there seemed to be a religious divide happening in Jerusalem, and we're going to talk about what that divide consisted of. But the group that ended up winning in the end are called the Deuteronomists, and this seems to be the group that Lehi was saying were the wicked men.
You know this is obviously all in theory, and we could be wrong in this, but that is the context of all this. We're going to be talking about the Deuteronomists a little bit—who these people are, what they believed—and then we're going to be talking about something called the school of Isaiah. This is essentially a group of people who believed in visions. They believed in a God that had a body, and maybe they even believed that God had a family, meaning that it was the Father, the Son, and the Mother made one Divine family.
This has a really interesting connection because of all the biblical prophets, the one that is quoted the most in the Book of Mormon is Isaiah. We have full chapters, almost a full book, dedicated to Isaiah, and there seemed to be a group of priests and believers who followed the thoughts of Isaiah around the time the Babylonians came in and destroyed Jerusalem.
So we're going to talk about what the beliefs of those people were. Now what you will see is that Margaret Barker is not a Latter-Day Saint; she is a Methodist pastor. I don't know exactly what the phrase is that they use, but she's a preacher. She preaches and she is also a biblical scholar, and so she came to all of this knowledge that we're going to be talking about without the Book of Mormon and without using that as a text.
What you'll see throughout this interview is that there are a lot of interesting crossovers that she will say regarding the school of Isaiah that seem to relate to Lehi and Nephi and those who traveled to the promised land after being commanded to leave Jerusalem.
I just wanted to give this as a little bit of context. If you like this video, we ask you that you subscribe because we're going to be releasing two more interviews, and also share this around if you felt like this was something that built your faith. More importantly, we hope that this gets you into the scriptures yourself, reading the word of God and feasting upon it as the Book of Mormon says.
So without further ado, let's get into the video recording.
He mirrors my accent all the time.
Record! Okay, I'm just going to talk to our cam first. You start that.
Welcome to the Stick of Joseph, and today we are so excited. We are in England! I don't even know what's the name of the city that we're in right now, Margaret.
You're not in any city, but you're near the town of Burton on Trent, which is where the best beer is made.
I'm told.
Um, because the water is good.
So we'll go get some beers after this.
You'll have to drink them all!
But we could go get some.
I, you're not a big fan—sorry.
Well, we are here with, as many of you probably know, esteemed scholar Margaret Barker.
And Dr. Margaret Barker, and we are ecstatic! We are so excited to talk to you.
We have learned a lot about you, actually, from our friend David Butler as well as another friend of ours, who will soon be a doctor, Mike Day, and they have recommended your work over and over again.
We have found that you are very much revered in LDS culture and in LDS studies.
Before we get into today's subject, why do you think that is? Were you surprised about the reception from Latter-day Saints and Mormons with your work?
I was completely surprised. My initial contact with No B. Reynolds, and he picked up and read at some conference or other my book, The Great Angel, and he thought I was a kind of hidden Latter-day Saint and discovered that I was in fact a Methodist.
Um, and he just couldn't believe how similar the ideas were, and I had no idea. I mean, I had LDS friends even then, but I had no idea of how LDS beliefs corresponded to and overlapped with what I was doing, and it was a complete surprise to me—a complete surprise. But it was a nice surprise at the beginning of a very happy journey.
I've now got lots and lots of friends in America and in this country, and I'm learning as I go along.
And hopefully we've bought a lot of books of yours.
I think that we probably have!
I personally...
That all helps!
Yes, it all helps!
Yeah, well that's awesome.
Well, closer to No, it's been great!
So today we want to talk about the deuteronomistic reforms and what you say the school of Isaiah. These are both things that are new to us.
I never even knew the word deuteronomistic until I met Dave.
For those who aren't familiar, in layman's terms, what do we mean by what do you mean by deuteronomistic reforms, and what is the school of Isaiah?
And we'll start there, start with two definitions.
Well, deuteronomistic derives obviously from the book Deuteronomy, and the book Deuteronomy has certain characteristics in it. It's the last of the five books of Moses, was probably compiled very late indeed, and then attributed to Moses. It's a revision of the law of Moses for a new situation for them going into the land, and it has very strict, almost brutal attitudes towards the people who are already there in the land.
You don't tolerate their religion, you hew down their statues, you destroy their altars, you have nothing to do with them. It's really pretty brutal stuff.
And we don't know where they came from—the people who adopted this very much as their manifesto.
We don't know where they came from.
This is one of the big mysteries.
But we do know that over 15 years or so they started to gain considerable influence in Jerusalem, and the first sign of their influence is way back in the time of Solomon's great-grandson.
It's a long way back, but they really come into, you might call, written history in about 750 BC, something like that.
And there they are, constantly campaigning to have the religion in Jerusalem much more in accordance with what they think religion should be like.
And constantly they gained influence, and they removed some of the traditional symbols and things from the temple.
Then, you know, a few chapters later in the book of Kings, you'll find another king removing the symbols from the temple.
From this, we assume that between those two kings someone put them back again.
There was a toing and froing in the kingdom of Judah and in Jerusalem between those who wanted a simple religion, almost like Protestants in Europe, and those who wanted to stick with the old ways, like the old Catholics in Europe.
Eventually, things came to a head in the time of the Boy King Josiah, and in the year 623—you said his age, Boy King—he was 12 when he came to the throne.
Really? Okay, so he was very young.
So he was clearly manipulated.
He being manipulated by other people.
Let's put it, a 12-year-old in charge of all of us—you don't put a 12-year-old in charge of the temple.
No, and all sorts of things began happening when he was in his early 20s. And the reformers, the purgers, got their way, and we have the last final and most detailed description of how the temple was, in their view, cleaned up.
But in the view of many other people, it was desecrated.
Now, the people who wrote the accounts of this were so horrified by what they were describing in the temple that it was their style not to use the actual words.
So when they were describing the angel priests of the temple, they used another word which sounded almost the same but it actually meant a male prostitute.
Now, clearly, they didn't have male prostitutes in the temple, but they didn't like the idea of these angel priests.
In fact, the Deuteronomists didn't like the idea of angels at all, and they dropped the... they wouldn't use the title Lord of Hosts, only use the title Lord.
All sorts of things—they were very much like the extreme Protestants in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.
And, in fact, years ago, I was talking to an old gentleman who was an expert on English history of that period, and he said to me, did I know that King Edward VI, who was the great Protestant innovator in England, who destroyed statues and all sorts of things—did I know that he modeled himself on King Josiah?
And I didn't know this at all, but that just shows how closely the experience in England, when we had pictures destroyed and, old church paintings were painted over, statues had their heads taken off—all these things, what we call the English Reformation—that was almost exactly what happened in the time of Josiah.
And then Josiah's people, or their heirs, they were the ones who wrote the books of Samuel and Kings and other things, and they told the history as they wanted it told.
And so the kings who agreed with them, even posthumously and retrospectively, they were good kings; and the kings who followed the old ways were the bad kings.
And Josiah was a good king because he did as he was told.
There are traditions that he repented, and that the middle chapter of the book of Lamentations is actually King Josiah's penitence.
But these are all just stories, and they removed from the temple symbols of the Lady of the Temple, the Mother in Heaven.
They removed the angel priests. They removed the teaching that it was possible to see God and have a vision of God.
They removed the teaching that God could become incarnate in a human being and be seen as a human being.
They removed the tradition of the women weaving in the temple, weaving the garments for the angel priests, and all this—this is all taken out.
And so when you come to try and reconstruct what the Solomon's Temple was like, you have to bear in mind all the time that you're reading through this editorial filter.
But they didn't manage to silence everybody, and so the people who were the old Believers—and these are not the old Believers in Russia; it's just my name for the people from the first temple.
The old Believers kept their own traditions alive, and they had no good word at all for the people who were making the changes in the temple.
They called them the apostate generation because they'd lost the true faith.
They said all their deeds were impure, their temple offerings were impure, and they really... well, they gave as good as they got, to be honest.
They really hadn't got a good thing to say about them.
Now, the people that the old Believers called the apostate generation are the people who compiled many of the books of the Old Testament, particularly the history books.
So we've only got the history as they wanted it told.
So you mean to tell me that the Bible wasn't written by the Finger of God, but maybe there have been men that have edited it over centuries to say what they want?
I don't think they—I don't think they edited all of it, but certainly the histories, the histories were edited, and they used old sources, but they used them in a way that suited them.
And they told the history in their way.
But you see, if you go to any communist state, the first thing they do is rewrite history. The past is never convenient when the regime changes; the history books change.
And that's how, in England at the moment, we're having a great rewriting of the story of the British Empire, and all sorts of things are being rewritten.
Not all the rewriting is accurate or fair, but this is what the new generation is now being taught.
And okay, you know, the old iteration was a bit selective, but the new one is just as selective.
And you have to find, if you want to try and find what was historically the case, you have to pick your way between the two.
And we're now, because of finding the Dead Sea Scroll and other ancient texts coming to light, we are able to pick up what the old Believers, these other voices, actually thought about the changes to Solomon's Temple.
And they hadn't got a good word for it, and they were waiting and waiting and waiting for the great day of restoration, the day when the temple would be restored, when the Messiah would come, the glory of the Lord would return to the temple—all those things—all the things that the Deuteronomist had removed.
Now, the people who were most responsible for preserving the older ways were Isaiah and his disciples, and then their descendants.
And I call them the school of Isaiah, but they weren't a formal school; they were just a group of people who perpetuated a certain way of teaching and a way of thinking and, I think, preserved old books.
But you know, that's something that is controversial—yes.
But they certainly preserved what would have been in the books, and they preserved all the prophecies that Christians came to use for Christmas—not all of them, all but one—and they preserved the prophecies that Christians used for Good Friday and Easter.
So Isaiah obviously has a particular part to play in the transmission of whatever version of Temple religion came into Christianity.
I mean, that's fairly vague, but that's as much as the evidence will allow.
Isaiah is important, but Isaiah himself seems, and his disciples seem to have gone into exile.
There are these other texts, these non-canonical texts not in the Bible, and they are suggesting that they were living somewhere east of the River Jordan in the area that's now the southern part of the kingdom of Jordan, and that they existed there as a group of prophets, in exile, if you like, who had brought with them their books and traditions from the city of Jerusalem, which they regarded now as utterly wicked and utterly corrupt.
And you can see the preface to the book of Isaiah—Isaiah chapter 1 actually sums up what is in the book of Isaiah very well.
We don't know who wrote this bit; it was a person who was producing the introduction to the completed scroll of Isaiah.
Isaiah chapter 1: "The vision of Isaiah son of Amos"—that's not Amos the prophet, that's someone else—"which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, kings of Judah."
And then he begins by saying, "Sons have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me."
There's been a rebellion in Jerusalem against the old ways.
And then the one that becomes the great Christmas prophecy: "The ox knows its owner and the ass its master's crib; Israel doesn't know; my people doesn't understand."
That's why we have an ox and an ass on Christmas cards and in Christmas pictures, to remind us that Isaiah was the one who set in writing that Israel, Judah, and Jerusalem somehow had lost the plot—they had rebelled.
"And, oh sinful nation, people laden with iniquity, you have despised the Holy One."
All these things—he's not very happy with them.
And then if you go over a little bit further down, Isaiah 21: "How the faithful city has become a harlot."
So whatever personified the city has now become utterly corrupted.
The city has become a harlot; she that was full of justice, righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers.
"Your silver has become dross; your wine mixed with water; your princes are rebels, the companions of thieves," etc., etc.
Whoever wrote this preface did not like Jerusalem and said that second temple Jerusalem, that's the Jerusalem of the reformers, and the reformers rebuilt Jerusalem.
They came back from Babylon; the Isaiah people said, "This is the apostate generation; these are the people whose deeds are impure, unclean."
And basically, they kept alive the traditions of the old believers and the other point of view.
Now, what is interesting when you look at the histories as they're recorded by these other people, in, for example, the Book of Enoch—Enoch's a very, very interesting book.
This is an anthology, and as we have it now in Ethiopic, it's a bit of a muddle, to put it mildly, but there are bits in that that have clearly survived intact.
And one of them is, in most editions, it's put as Chapter 93 that describes the history of Israel, the history of Jerusalem—I'm beg your pardon—in terms of ten epochs, and they called each epoch a week, ten weeks.
The turning point in the history of Jerusalem and Judah is at the end of the fifth week.
Midway through the histories, and in that fifth week, Isaiah ascends; the people in the temple have their eyes closed and lose their spiritual sight; they godlessly forsake wisdom—that's a quote—and then the temple is burned.
So the turning point for these people in the history of the city is not when the Babylonians destroy the city in 587, it's just after Isaiah ascends and has his vision, and the people in the temple forsake wisdom and lose their spiritual sight.
Wow.
And that, for them, is the turning point.
And then begins the age of wrath, what the other believers, the older believers, called the age of wrath.
And in the age of wrath, the Lord hides his face from his people.
Now, the age of wrath ends in the New Testament, the Christians constantly emphasizing we have seen the face of the Lord.
In the prologue to John's gospel, we beheld the glory, full of grace and truth.
Right at the end of the Book of Revelation, on the last page of my Bible, Revelation 22, when they're all back in the Holy of Holies of the new Temple, and the servants of the Lord are in there with Him—Revelation 22:4: "They shall see His face; His name shall be on their foreheads."
Now, that's just not a throwaway line; that's the key thing—they are back and they see the face of the Lord.
Now, the Deuteronomists had none of this; the Deuteronomists emphasized that there was no vision, that you saw—you never saw the Lord.
Deuteronomy chapter 4, let me find you the bit.
Deuteronomy chapter 4, verse 12—this is their account of sin, and they call Sinai Horeb for some reason, okay?
Deuteronomy 4:12: "The Lord spoke to you out of the midst of the fire; you heard the sound of words, but you saw no form; there was only a voice."
So for the Deuteronomists, they're absolutely clear—you can't see the Lord.
So why do you think—because this is—and it's funny because atheists will use this as an argument to discredit the Bible and say it's not worth anything.
They'll be like, "Look, there's obvious contradictions in here."
Why were the Deuteronomists or those who put together and edited the Bible, why were they okay with just keeping this apparent contradiction?
Especially seeing that in Exodus, Moses does; he indeed—have you not? And Isaiah sees the Lord in Isaiah 6.
Why do you think that they just kind of...
No, I would love to know the answer to that.
Why is it that the book of Isaiah and indeed the books of the prophets are in the Hebrew Scriptures?
That's a very big question because there is this dividing line that goes right through.
One of the key notes of the Deuteronomist is that you cannot see the Lord.
They didn't believe in what we would call Incarnation. Okay?
So Anor God—Isaiah sees the Lord in human form; Ezekiel, at the end of chapter one, the likeness of the glory of the Lord, it's in human form.
But the Deuteronomist said, "No, no, no, you just hear the words; there’s no human form."
That's one of their characteristics, and that was one of the things they didn't like about the first temple.
Another one is that they didn't like the old wisdom teaching.
Back in Deuteronomy 4, now which is got open, so I'll read this one.
Moses speaking: "I have taught you the statutes and the ordinances as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should do them in the land into which you are entering to take possession.
Keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, 'Surely this great are a wise and understanding people.'"
What they're saying is the law of Moses is all you need; that will be the equivalent of wisdom and understanding for you, and people will say, "What an amazingly wise people if you follow only the law of Moses."
And they were very much against prophetic vision.
There's another couple of famous verses—Deuteronomy 29:29. That's a very easy one to remember.
Deuteronomy 29:29: "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed"—that's the law of Moses—"belong to us and our children forever, that we may do the words of the law."
Secret things are all very fine, all these visions and all the rest of it, but you know, don't mess with them.
And then at the end, in the next chapter, Deuteronomy 30, verse 11, this is another dig at the older faith—the commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you; neither is it far off.
It is not in heaven that you should say, "Who will go up for us to heaven and bring it down, that we may hear it and see it?"
Neither is it beyond the sea that you should say, "Who will go over the sea and bring it to us that we may hear and do it?"
The word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.
No one would dispute the last verse, but what were they forbidding?
No one needs to go up to heaven to receive these things, and yet right at the beginning of John's gospel, John the Baptist says of Jesus that this is John chapter 3.
John chapter 3, where he says of Jesus: John, 3:31: "He who comes from above is above all; he who is of the earth belongs to the earth and of the earth he speaks; he, Jesus, bears witness to what he has seen and heard, and yet no one receives his testimony."
John the Baptist knows that in this early stage of Jesus' ministry, he's just back from the wilderness; Jesus has been in heaven, and he bears witness to what he has seen and heard.
And yet, no one receives his testimony.
John presents Jesus as one of the old believers who ascends to heaven and learns things in heaven.
And in John's gospel, Jesus says, "You know, I speak what the Father has told me to say," and this sort of thing.
And John's gospel, again, emphasizes, "We have seen the Lord."
Very important.
And to bring that down—to understand the temple, the whole temple journey, the purpose of the temple was to behold the face of the Lord and to receive sacred knowledge, secret knowledge.
And I know Dave you've done a lot of work on this idea of secret knowledge. Can you talk a little bit about that?
What the Deuteronomists might have been saying in Deuteronomy that they don't need the secret works, and maybe the implications of that?
Uh, you mean what it is that Deuteronomy wants to forbid?
Yes.
Well, let me come with a little angle to your question because I think there are so many interesting things that Margaret has touched on that I love.
There is a possibility that the Deuteronomist were basically a foreign movement.
They seem to sort of come in with Hezekiah, and Mosha Weinfeld—in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic reform finds a number of points of Assyrian influence in the book of Deuteronomy.
So the invaders of the northern kingdom kind of made their way into the kingdom culturally, and so now who are the Deuteronomist?
Well, it seems to be a scribal and sort of lawyerly group; they are not priests, right?
And so Deuteronomy seems to, in fact, know nothing or very little or only rumors of what they know.
They don't want you to know because, as Margaret read—“That's all very well and good for God to have secrets, but what you need to do is obey.”
Yes, yes.
And so it's super interesting to me to think about if that's right—if Hezekiah is when this movement starts really getting traction—and maybe they're earlier, right?
Maybe Asa earlier is under their influence.
It's very interesting that Isaiah seems to also have followers.
So I think what we're conceptualizing here is that Jerusalem has a group of lawyers and scribes who are pushing one way to consolidate power, which is another piece of the Deuteronomic movement is to consolidate everything into Jerusalem.
And it has all kinds of consequences: you get rid of the high places in the northern kingdom, so one consequence is that it probably creates a second-class set of priests—people who used to be priests at what had been perfectly good family villages, local shrines—and who had basically their vocation had been violently taken away from them.
Another consequence is the instance of inventing secular slaughter.
So prior to the Deuteronomic reform, any killing of an animal was sacrifice, and so every sacrifice was a meal, and you had to dispose of the blood in prescribed ways.
Well, you know, if you live 30 miles from Jerusalem and you want to eat a goat with your family, you don't go into Jerusalem to have it slaughtered.
So secular slaughter comes into being.
Right?
So there's these centralizing priests, and then—oh, not priests, excuse me—lawyers or scribes, and then it seems like Isaiah is the founding prophet of a movement.
Because it seems like John Eaton suggests that some of what's in Second Isaiah may even have existed earlier, pre-exilic old, and these are the servant songs and other things and have been passed down either maybe in individual texts, sort of free-floating as it were, or even orally.
Yeah.
By essentially a priestly, which is to say, temple and visionary group.
Yeah.
And the kinds of things that they are passing down seem to be the practices that we see in the tetrateuch, right?
Seeing God, which is the Hebrew Bible, right?
The tetrateuch is the first four books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.
But you think about much of what Deuteronomy seems to forbid, is what Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did, actually did.
And it's interesting when you pointed out that maybe there's these two groups, right?
There are those who are interested in the vision, the visions, the mysteries, the secrets, and then there are—in the Isaiah camp, and then there are the scribes and the lawyer group.
Right?
I immediately thought of right at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, which we talked to in detail, right?
In Matthew 7, it says, "And it came to pass that when Jesus had ended these sayings," which you know Jack Welch, as well as your assertion in your book, Dave, is that Jesus was actually laying out temple teachings in the Sermon on the Mount; that was the purpose.
He says, "The people were astonished at his doctrine, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes."
And so it kind of seems at least these people, or at least the writers of the New Testament, looked the same at the scribes and that lawyer class—maybe as the ones who didn't have authority, and Christ, who is speaking very esoterically and mysteriously in the Sermon on the Mount, that he is the one who has the authority.
He, in the school of Isaiah—with the school that is that sees itself as prophetic and royal, right?
He's identified as a royal figure at the beginning of two of the gospels.
So what are the doctrines that these priests are preserving?
Well, it's an interesting question, and I forget where the verse is. I'll try and find it, but in Deuteronomy there's a verse that says—and it's talking about wisdom—and it says that true wisdom is not knowing.
I'm really paraphrasing; it's not knowing the secrets of creation and it's not knowing everything.
It's knowing—it's knowing law; it's legal acumen.
I'll look for this and we'll find it.
But Margaret, do you know? You’re like a walking Bible dictionary; my paraphrase is so bad I'd probably throw Dake off.
I can't place it off the top of my head.
But yeah, so...
But you can imagine, right?
So what kinds of knowledge do you get if you ascend into the presence of God?
Is it an understanding of creation?
Right? Is it the power to—is this how we should understand the miracles of Jesus?
Is it demonstrating that He knew the secrets of creation?
Right? Is it understanding the meaning of what it means to be made in the image of God?
Right?
Things like this that the Deuteronomists didn't deny they existed, but they said, "It's none of your business."
That's their line.
It's, you know, "Don't worry yourself with this."
And the very fact that in the Beatitudes, we have "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," that straightaway puts the teaching of Jesus into the first temple.
He's an inheritor of the first temple, not of the Deuteronomy-inspired second temple.
And another key thing is that when you look at the sacred calendar in Deuteronomy, it doesn't have the Day of Atonement.
Now, the Day of Atonement is set out in the earlier books, but Deuteronomy has no concept of atonement, and that is central to the Christian message.
So what was the purpose of sacrifice then if there isn't a concept?
There are all sorts of things you could do for sacrifice, but these are all... It's quite difficult to disentangle them because most of these are set out in Leviticus, and they're very, very...
And they, from the old Temple... sacrifice served many purposes.
But the Deuteronomist did they repurpose sacrifice?
So you talked about how it kind of got secular, so it is interesting, actually, one of the comments that Weinfeld and others make is that for Deuteronomy, it seems that the purpose has become a way to feed the poor.
Actually, it's worth saying that there are some admirable sides to Deuteronomy—it's quite likely characterized as certain kinds of liberalization—but yes, sacrifice seems to have essentially lost its meaning.
Yes! Well, you find several Jewish commentators point out that the Day of Atonement ritual seems to have lost its meaning in the Second Temple.
It used to be the fashion—TK Chene and people like that used to say—and we're going back 100 years now, more than 100 years—that the Day of Atonement was introduced late, and it was kind of copying something from abroad.
It was foreign, very strange.
And then this all changed completely! There was a complete vault of us, and the feeling now is that it's a very old ritual whose meaning was lost in the Second Temple.
They kept the outer form, but like with so many rituals, they gave it a kind of new meaning, but they kept the show on the road.
But it had lost its heartland, and this, of course, was all part of the old Temple.
The central sacrifice of the old Temple was done with a substitute for the high priest.
So do you think overall then? Do you think that Jesus revered the temple and found the temple to be important?
Important?
And if that's the case, why is it that mainstream Christianity today, at least I can speak of Protestantism in America, very much looks at the temple as something that is passed away and was not important to Jesus?
They often cite the veil being rent on the temple as a sign of, "Look, the temple—Jesus didn't care about the temple!"
What are your thoughts on that?
I think these Protestants should read their Bible more carefully.
I speak as someone who was born and raised as a very, very fundamentalist Protestant, and I've moved a long way from that, but I do speak their language; it's my mother tongue.
I think they should read more carefully what is there.
Jesus cleansed the temple, and the temple he cleansed was the Second Temple, which by his time was a den of thieves and robbers and Roman collaborators and all sorts of things!
And the famous prophecy, you know, from The Sermon on the Mount, from—when he was sitting on the Mount of Olives—not on The Sermon on the Mount—in Holy Week, when he says, "You see these stones, not one shall be left upon another."
And of course, that prophecy was fulfilled.
Jesus came to restore the temple, the true Temple.
Now if you read John's account of the cleansing of the temple, which John for stylistic reasons puts at the beginning of his account of the work of Jesus—John chapter 2.
He doesn't put it at the beginning of Holy Week; he puts it at the beginning of the ministry.
Yeah!
And it says John chapter 2, verse 13: "The Passover of the Jews was at hand," and then he found people selling oxen and sheep and all this kind of thing.
Look at verse 15: "Making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple..."
Now a whip of cords is a few bits of string.
You wouldn't drive an ox out of the temple with one of those!
What's he doing?
He's doing something symbolic.
Now we know that the action of the high priest on the Day of Atonement was to sprinkle the cleansed blood with the action of a whip.
It actually says that—the mixed blood of the goat and the ox have been mixed at this point; takes the blood and sprinkles it.
And if you look at the detailed description of where he sprinkles it—this is in the Mishnah; it's not in Leviticus—it's how it was done in the Second Temple period.
He sprinkles with the action of a whip all these around the temple.
Now presumably, well, the liturgical thing that was used for it was probably a bunch of herbs, but the temple authorities who saw this little whip doing this, they would have known immediately what he was doing!
What he was doing!
And they did not like what they saw.
And so—because he's making himself the high priest at that point, well, he's declaring himself to the high priest and repossessing their polluted temple, and they didn't like it!
So you see, it's just a little thing, making a whip of cords.
Now, there are no spare lines in John's gospel.
You look at every line and say, "Why is that there?"
Well, why is that line there?
Jesus is cleansing that temple!
And then immediately, when you get Peter writing in 1 Peter, he describes the Christian community as the new Temple—1 Peter 2:4: "Come to him, that living stone, rejected by men but in God's sight chosen and precious."
"Like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ."
And then the quote: "I'm laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone, chosen and precious."
So the early Christian model for what their community was was a living temple, and that's very important!
Now, if Jesus had rejected the temple or hadn't intended to have the Third Temple in some form, his earliest followers would not have seen themselves as a temple.
So then, do you think that the temple just changed forms in which we—because I'm curious as to why the temple—or when it stopped being important to perform these ordinances inside the temple?
Does that make sense?
Yes, it makes perfect sense.
I don't think it ever stopped; I think it probably got put into a back cupboard and not looked at very often.
So do you think that modern-day temple worship is important in some form in Christianity?
Traditional Christian liturgies, or liturgies in traditional Christian churches where the shape of the building is traditional and the shape of the liturgy—the order what things have done, all the rest of it—they do actually reflect a temple, and the movement of the temple, particularly on the Day of Atonement.
One of the formative experiences of my scholarly life and indeed my life, full stop, was the first time I ever visited an Orthodox church—it was a Russian Orthodox Church in Oxford—and the bishop was there, and he was presiding at the Sunday service.
And I was watching absolutely fascinated because I had expected that this would all be completely strange to me, and in fact, I recognized everything—absolutely everything!
I thought I've seen this somewhere before, and you know, the shape of the church and then the bishop movements in and out, and people coming in and out of the sanctuary, and it was the Holy of Holies alive and well in Oxford, you know, which is quite surprising!
And I then took a much greater interest in Orthodoxy after this—this was way back in the '90s.
And the shape of the churches and literally the shape of the liturgy and the meaning of the icon screen and the meaning of the icons—that the temple is alive and well, certainly in the Orthodox church.
And this, for me, has been an extraordinary journey of discovery, a journey of delight, I have to say.
But I also think the Orthodox are not always aware of all the treasures that they have; sometimes when I ask a pointed question about a particular point of their liturgy or a particular detail, and I— or something like that, I am simply told, "Oh, it's tradition; we've always done it that way," and I know that I'm not going to get any more information.
But I see things now, and I go looking for them that I can find in old temple tradition!
Wow!
So it is still there, but I think their awareness of it—hm, in detail, has gone.
And that's been accompanied—and I'm speaking for Christianity in general now, not particularly Orthodoxy—with horrible anti-Semitism, which is a terrible blot!
Because people have failed to distinguish between the particularly nasty group of high priests who were in charge of the temple in Jerusalem in the time of Jesus and generations and generations of people of Hebrew heritage.
I won't call them other than that; from whom the Christians came.
And we have to look for our temple roots not in the dreadful what Isaiah calls the harlot that the Second Temple became.
And you know, the Book of Revelation—the great finale is the burning of the harlot, and it's the burning of Jerusalem.
The Christians hoped that this would be the beginning of the new era, but then they had to do some rethinking.
But certainly, it was a battle over the purity of the temple, and the Christians have their roots firmly in the first temple—the true temple.
But you see, when the actual temple was destroyed, and you know the very stones were overturned—as Jesus prophesied gradually—Christians moved away from the detailed understanding of what this was about.
The most notable example is that in the old temple, when you were marked as belonging to the Lord, when you were marked as a priest, a diagonal cross was put on your forehead, and that was the sign of the name of the Lord—a diagonal cross.
And then, as the temple roots faded, you can see this happening—that cross rotates 45° and becomes the upright cross that's now used to mark in baptism.
You have that marked on your forehead, but it was originally a diagonal cross—a sign that you belong to the Lord.
And the original Christian thing was that all those who wore the mark of the Lord were the new priesthood; that was hugely important!
Now, it's quite difficult to give this little talk if you're in a seminary where people are training to be priests, which is a separate cast of people, particularly if they are bishops present, because they start wriggling a bit.
But there is no justification in Christian Origins for a divided hierarchy.
You have to divide up functions for practical reasons, but the priesthood of all believers, the high priesthood of all believers is absolutely fundamental to anyone who wears the mark of baptism!
So do you think then, based on what you're saying, do you think that temple worship in the first, the original temple, was available to every person—not just the high priest?
No.
I think the essence of what Jesus did was to open up the high priesthood.
There is this very curious mystical doctrine in the New Testament that Christ is in His followers and His followers are in Him.
You get this set out a little bit in John chapter 17, and then the implications are worked out in several places in the New Testament.
This Christ mysticism—being all in Christ and in a sense, we are all part of the Great High Priest—that's important!
So why is the veil of the temple torn?
For practical reasons? Possibly an aftershock of the earthquake of the crucifixion?
But the symbolism of it is that the veil which divides the material world from the Holy of Holies, which represents not heaven, but the middle state between the material world and the highest heaven—that is now opened to all.
And so, when you see the Holy of Holies depicted in the icon of, for example, Mary being presented in the temple as a little girl, you see the Holy of Holies depicted with the four pillars and the curtains are all hooked up.
So little details like that in icons are as much part of the text of the transmission of Christian things as are a written text!
Okay, yeah!
So you mentioned to us that you had the opportunity to go through the open house of the Rome temple—the LDS Rome temple.
Did you see any echoes of ancient temple worship in the way that it was constructed?
The movement—yeah! Tell us about that.
Well, it was just the sense of move—I it doesn't look anything like I imagine Solomon's temple!
Yeah!
Um, well, electric light for a start.
Um, but the idea that you start and you move up, and gradually you literally move up—that is something I think that preserves and sets out for those who experience it—and obviously, I haven't—what the experience of moving up into the highest part of the temple must have been like.
And I think the—I mean, it's in a vernacular setting.
I've been in the Paris temple as well—at Versailles—again, before it was consecrated, and I had the same feeling there that it was reproducing in a local context the universal experience of being in a temple and going up and finally achieving the place of light, if you like.
That was the impression I got.
It's not an imitation of what Solomon's temple was like in any respect, and I think some people find that rather difficult!
You know, did they have armchairs in the temple? You've missed the point here!
Um, it's bringing that experience into wherever we are in the world now in the 21st century.
Yeah, that’s an outsider's feeling—
That's interesting.
And what was the basic story, and it's hard because so much of the temple—maybe if the Deuteronomists didn't do what they did, maybe we'd have a lot more text that explained a little bit more about it.
But what do you think the broad story was of the temple?
What was the journey of the temple telling people to do?
Like, what did the temple in its whole form represent?
I guess the whole temple was a microcosm of the creation; it was a model of the creation.
And whatever was done in the temple was for the benefit of the creation.
Conversely, whatever was done out in the world that was evil or sinful registered itself as a pollution in the temple.
And so when you cleanse the temple, for example, on the Day of Atonement, that was the ritual way of cleansing the whole land.
And whatever was done in the land affected the temple; whatever was done in the temple affected the land.
And the heel of the temple represented the material creation.
The veil of the temple represented matter, and it was woven from the four colors—red, blue, purple wool, and then white linen.
And this represented what later became known as the four elements—fire and water—and they were woven together.
When you passed beyond matter, you passed beyond the state of existence that's limited by matter.
So you pass beyond time, and you pass beyond physicality.
So you pass into the Holy of Holies, which represents unity.
And in the old versions of Genesis, the Hebrew and the Greek, the beginning of creation is not described as the first day; it's described as day one, because it's outside the sequence.
It's not first, second, third; it's one, and then second, third, fourth.
And that one is the Eternal presence beyond the material world to which the material world constantly relates, if it is of the mind to do so.
And the great covenant, the Eternal Covenant binds the material world to the world beyond the veil.
And so the Eternal Covenant is also the covenant with eternity.
And when you break that bond, that's when the restraining and constraining factors in the material world just all fly apart.
You know there's that line in Proverbs if I can find it?
Yes, Proverbs 29, verse 18, which says if I remember the Hebrew correctly, "Where there is no prophetic vision, the people unravel."
That's what the Hebrew is literally: if you lose the vision what holds you together?
I think, well, you know, look around you now; everything is doing its own thing, isn't it?
It's unraveling—it's unraveling chaos!
Yeah!
With this idea of the Deuteronomistic reforms, I'm curious to hear how widely accepted this is or how new the scholarship is on this, because a lot of people that I talk to view the Bible as inherent and that it basically is written, like Hayden said, from the hand of God.
But it was inspired, yes, yes, but the hands were human—very human, spelling mistakes, all sorts of things.
So how widely accepted is this idea of the Deuteronomistic reforms meddling around with the things?
I don't know; I haven't done a sort of market survey.
I know a lot of people who go along with it; I know a lot of people who would say it makes sense of what we find in the New Testament.
It certainly makes sense of the wider context of non-canonical texts that have survived from the Hebrew tradition.
If we take Deuteronomy as the absolute norm for everything, we have a huge problem with most of the Psalms and their worldview.
We have direct contradictions with Isaiah, who says I saw the Lord, and the Deuteronomist, who said, "Sorry, you didn't."
The greatest prophet of the Old Testament—he's out there!
There are huge problems where, if you say, "Look, we've got two streams," and we know the pure in heart see God from the Beatitudes—we know which stream Christianity is rooted in!
Yeah, we've got to be very, very careful, but to have an uncritical view of the Bible, of Bible inerrancy is frankly lazy!
If you're going to preach responsibly—and I have been a Methodist preacher now for 40 years—if you're going to preach responsibly, you've got to prepare people for the problems and show that properly approached, they are not a problem.
But if you keep thumping the page and shouting louder, it doesn't actually get you anywhere.
And I think it's like anything else—there's a difference between having a first aid first responder certificate and being a surgeon.
We need people to clean up wounds and put on plasters and things, but we also need brain surgeons!
And not everything can be dealt with with a plaster, for sure!
Yeah, and Dave, what has been your experience? When did you—I'm interested to hear this; it'll be fun with Margaret here.
When did you first read about the Deuteronomist? When did you encounter Margaret's work?
And was that a hard thing for you to swallow at first?
It was easy for us to some degree because we were with you and Mike Day when we were first introduced to this.
But for you, you're kind of discovering in books on your own.
What are your thoughts on this subject?
That's an interesting question.
I actually wanted to say something else—maybe I'll come back.
Actually, I wanted to say two things. So now I have way too many things that I want to say.
So I'm really glad, Margaret, that you said a few words on your preaching and the role that the responsibility of the preacher to say, "Hey listen, this is a book that the Bible is important, and it can be the word of God."
You need to understand that you can't take it naively—that translation is a real barrier.
Yeah!
And so is understanding, and realizing there are conflicting voices.
Yeah!
And in fact, there are voices that put other voices to death in the same book.
The—for people of whom this is a new idea, one thing to understand is that it's not a new idea in scholarship.
It's the idea, I think, as early as right at the beginning of the 19th century you get some Germans start to say, "Hey, I think there are different voices here."
And I think for the whole second half of the 20th century, the idea of the Deuteronomist or the Deuteronomic school has been a foundational idea.
You can't do a Hebrew Bible 101 at a university level without encountering the idea.
And I'm sure that's where I first encountered it!
The astonishing thing was encountering Margaret's writings, and the writings of—and then following through with the footnotes in Margaret's books to get to the so what of it!
Because there's the pulpit so what—how do I handle this, this conflict-filled book, this challenging book?
But there's also the so what of, well, how do I see the relationship of its parts to each other and to the New Testament?
And I recently reread Aubrey Johnson's The Cultic Prophet in Israel, which I am certain that I—that's my library because it was in one of your footnotes!
I'm 100% certain—a professor in Ciff in Wes.
Yeah, yeah!
And it's a very sort of baryan book, uh, in that he—it's a big thick lovely book.
What does baryan mean?
Please, for not smart people!
Oh, yeah, he just—you made up that word!
So I'll just understand that.
But Johnson looks at—I want to say it's 1 Chronicles 24, but David appoints musicians who are said also to be Ne'im; they're prophets!
And these are in Chronicles; they're not in Kings, which is already—
Which is a suspicious thing!
Yes!
Because Kings is a Deuteronomic book—it seems to be, right?
So one of the things, Johnson suggests that these same prophets—the musical prophets—seem to have become just musicians in the Second Temple, and he says, "Why?"
And this says one possibility is, "Hey, they did their traditional duty, and they prophesied peace—how long, Lord? Don't worry; there is peace, before the Babylonians came."
And it turned out that actually there wasn't peace, and so they lost credibility—that's one of his arguments.
But I think another possibility is, man, if there were angelic—if there were prophets, singing prophets in the temple, that sounds an awful lot like angel priests to me.
Yeah!
And so in 2 Kings 23, when Josiah breaks down the houses of the Kesim, which are near the temple—which is translated sodomites, which William D calls a historical slander—there's no reason to think they were male cult prostitutes.
Right!
In fact, maybe they were this—these guilds of singing prophets who were in fact the angel priests, and that's what he destroyed.
Wow!
So, Margaret, with that—are the Psalms and the School of Isaiah, are they related in some way?
Let's talk about that for a bit.
Absolutely related!
And if you rely, as often happens for your account of the temple and the monarchy, if you rely on 1 and 2 Kings and indeed 1 and 2 Samuel, which are heavily influenced by Deuteronomy's ideals, you would have huge problems!
But if you go to the Chronicles—now the name for the books of Chronicles in the Greek translation is Paralipomenon, which means "the things that were left out."
And if you read the account of the temple and the singers and all that kind of stuff in Chronicles, and then take away what Kings mentions, you realize that the music and the prophecy and the golden chariot of the cherubim and all these things were left out!
You can't imagine somebody writing an account of Canterbury Cathedral, shall we say, without mentioning that it had an Archbishop of Canterbury!
If someone left that out, you think this is not a full account!
And you have this in 2 Chronicles as well, where David receives—see if we’ll find 1 Chronicles 29—is what I'm looking for.
1 Chronicles 28: "David gave Solomon his son a plan of the temple."
His plan for the golden chariot of the cherubim that spread their wings and covered the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord—now you don't find the golden chariot of the cherubim mentioned anywhere in 1 Kings, and that must have been the main piece of furnishing!
Why did they not do that?
And all sorts of other things that are not mentioned in Chronicles, like—now this is a—while I've got 1 Chronicles 29 open...
1 Chronicles 29, verse—this is the coronation of Solomon when David is still alive, remember, and David is presiding over the installation of his son to ensure the succession.
1 Chronicles 29:20: "David said to all the assembly, bless the Lord your God."
"And all the assembly blessed the Lord, the God of their fathers, and bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord and the king."
Now my English translation puts in a second verb, "worshiped the Lord," and did "obeisance to the king," that destroys the theology!
When they worshiped the Lord, it was the king; they worshiped the Lord in the king!
The Hebrew says they worship the Lord and the king, and that shows that in the temple they imagined when you saw the Lord, you saw a royal human being—that's how they imagined it.
And then later on, verse 23, Solomon sat on the throne of the Lord as king—that's quite clear.
Solomon sits on the golden throne of the Lord as king.
He sits on the throne of the Lord!
And when things like that are left out of the books of Kings, you begin to spot the agenda, shall we say.
And without Chronicles, we would not be able to give a proper context for the Psalms.
Interesting!
And why do you think what about Isaiah gathered these sort of people?
How was Isaiah—because there's nothing in the Bible that talks about Isaiah went around and started gathering people that believed in what he believed?
What do you think it is about Isaiah's ideas and the way that he spoke and prophesied that gathered the right people in order to create this school of Isaiah?
There you go!
You go to one of the legends that we know of later from the Hebrew tradition; it's a book called the Ascension of Isaiah, and that describes how Isaiah and a group of prophets—Micah, Joel, and Habakkuk, and several others that aren't named, and his son Shear—went to live first in Bethlehem and then further east on a mountain where they lived in great poverty and wore sackcloth and so on.
But they left the wicked city!
And you have to follow Isaiah, Micah, Joel, and Habakkuk; you follow those four, you have—I was going to say a 3D; it would be a 4D picture of the Jerusalem they left and what it was they objected to.
Now, Isaiah gives us most of the Christian Christmas prophecies about the lady—the virgin bearing a child and then the spirit of the Lord will rest upon him, and all those—and his name shall be called wonderful counselor.
And then the other Christmas prophecy: "Bethlehem Ephrathah, out of you shall come a governor who will rule my people Israel"; that's in Micah.
That's all part of the same tradition.
Habakkuk also—in the Western Church, we don't choose his prophecy, but in the Orthodox Church, the beginning of Habakkuk chapter 2 is the key prophecy around which they build their Christmas Eve liturgy.
Back—Habakkuk chapter 3, sorry—verse 2 and 3, which again from Isaiah's circle, that is the key Christmas prophecy for the Christmas Eve services in the Orthodox Churches.
So there's a lot of straws blowing in the wind, and after a while, even the most skeptical person has to admit there is a wind!
It's all blowing in the same direction, so we have to pick up details of the Isaiah school and their fate and what happened to them and so forth from these later legends.
And it's a part of the sleight of hand of people who look at the Bible texts and say these are as old as they say they are, and then the other ancient texts, and they say, "Well, we haven't got a copy of this earlier than the 4th century AD," so it's a late text.
But that's sheer nonsense because until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the earliest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible was more than 1,000 AD.
Really? I did not know that!
Yes, it was!
And then the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and everyone went—yoo!
And there's a full scroll of Isaiah there, which is an amazing thing.
And you know, a vowel here and there, there are some words different which suggest that our Isaiah text is, in fact, a revision.
Isaiah 7:14, 7:10, where are we?
Isaiah 7:11, when Isaiah is speaking to King Ahaz, and he says, "Ask a sign from the Lord your God," and the sign is the Virgin; she will conceive and bear a son.
If you look at the photographs, or indeed the facsimile of the Isaiah scroll—not the printed editions, look at the photographs—that doesn't say "Ask a sign of the Lord your God."
It says, "Ask a sign of the Mother of the Lord your God."
"Behold, the virgin will conceive!"
So that's a big deal.
It's a mega deal!
It is, yes, but you see, somebody realized that that was not something that was a rather major prophecy and really ought to disappear.
And so the Hebrew from which our Old Testament is translated has "Ask a sign of the Lord your God."
All you have to do to the Hebrew to change that is to change an Aleph, which would give you "Mother of the Lord"—an Aleph, which is kind of an X letter, to an Ayin, which is kind of a Y with a curly tail.
So it's a very easy thing to do, and anyone reading through quickly would probably notice it.
You look carefully; it's an Aleph!
It says, "Ask a sign from the Mother of the Lord your God."
That is actually a really huge deal, because when you talk to—you know, Jews, they read that prophecy, for example, and they're like, "This is not talking about Mary; you Christians have hijacked this."
But if it is saying, for there's so many implications of the theology there, right?
One, how does the Lord God have a mother?
Because that's crazy!
That's a big question, right?
Then it completely gets rid of a lot of the arguments against that actually being a prophecy of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ!
Yes! Wow!
I did not—and it gets rid of the idea of the Trinity altogether!
Man, I mean... or the conception of it—right?
Because you have because you have the mother—the Mother of the Lord your God is a separate...
Yes!
Well, it’s... that’s... that is actually a...
Wow!
That is a really interesting perspective!
Yeah!
If you could do more, it's like classic stuff!
You could shake that down into two!
Oh my goodness!
Yeah, wow!
Yeah!
No, but I think we should stop there!
That would be incredible for a second episode if you'd like!
You can come back anytime!
And maybe we should come back and chat more!
Because we have another episode coming up when we get into the implications of the Mother of the Lord!
Until next time, stay curious and hungry!