Ancient Language Scholar Exposes Hidden Truths of BANNED Bible Book | Wesley Huffs

Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. This in the New Testament, there's a book called the book of Hebrews. And the book of Hebrews is all about this. How all of these motifs in the Old Testament are fulfilled and actually we're pointing to Jesus all the way along. This is the kind of thing that like we could go down every tangent, like every five seconds with what you say. Because there's so many pieces of history and evidence that we got to run through to buttress it. And like I'm really amazed by the scope of your knowledge on this stuff. And I think we mentioned it earlier, but just to be clear for people out there. You're proficient in multiple languages, including ancient Greek. What else? Well, they're all dead languages. So I don't know if that counts for anything. That does count for something. Nobody speaks them. But people spoke them in the past. You can study it. They did. Yeah, they did. And we can debate as to how they actually pronounced it because we have no idea. Yeah. So primarily Greek and Hebrew. Sorry, Greek, Hebrew, and Coptic are the languages that I operate. Coptic is like Egyptian. Coptic is a form of ancient Egyptian. So I know a little bit of Demotic, which is ancient Egyptian prior to Coptic. And I've dabbled in some languages that are related to Hebrew. So the Afro-Semitic languages like Akkadian and like Aramaic. And then very, very, very recently, like as in I've got some lexicons in the last week, I've been trying to make sense of some more Sumerian. But Sumerian is a weird one because it's a language isolate and it is not related to any of the other languages in any specific way. So it's kind of off on its own. We have some of these examples of language isolates. Whereas like. At a minimum, Semitic languages have some correlative crossovers. So if you know Hebrew, you can figure out Aramaic based on the Hebrew you know. You can figure out some Akkadian based on that. But that is not true for Sumerian. Now, you've studied the. We talked about some of it today, but you've studied the history of the other religions too. Obviously, Judaism, it's tied very correlated to Christianity. But Islam, you mentioned. You read the whole book. You read the whole Quran and you have colleagues like in the space and talk with them. When it comes to the history of say like the pagan religions that predate this stuff, like we've been talking about ancient Rome today, right? Ancient Rome, ancient Greece. Have you studied the origins of their religions as well? Yeah, definitely. Would you mind. Let's start with Rome. Can you explain the basis of what they believed in starting in the BC times for people out there? Yeah. So it's a little bit tricky. It's a little bit tricky in the sense of there are multiple religions working alongside one another within Greco-Roman antiquity in that the ancient world was not just polytheistic in that they believed in multiple gods, but they were henotheistic. And what henotheism is, is that there's all the gods existed on a hierarchy. And so when my patron god, I go to war and I defeat you, that's a symbol that my patron god is actually stronger than your patron god. And some of our gods could actually be the same. They're the same gods by different names. So Zeus and Jupiter, there's a lot of crossover between Greece and Rome because the idea was within a henotheistic worldview that they were actually the same gods. We just call them different things. And maybe we have some different articulations of different stories. One of, if not the most common DMs I get on Instagram are many of you asking me what my favorite books are. Well, today's your lucky day, because if you use the link in my description below to join my newsletter, I'm going to give you my top 10 book recommendations right now. Also, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to get a copy of my book, I have a link in the description below. Also, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make money producing content from the show, you can do so via the Discord link in my description below. And finally, you can join my Patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the Patreon link in my description below. As always, please take one second to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already, I really appreciate that. Also, the like button's a big help and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below. And we have good evidence for this, obviously. Yeah, and they had no problem with going in and doing things, so I was in Egypt last summer and if you go to Luxor, in one of the quintessential temple of Luxor, you go in and the temple is very, very old, thousands of years old. But there's a section in what is actually the end of the Holy of Holies in that temple where Alexander the Great has built a separate little box that has a roof. And if you didn't know, if you couldn't read the inscriptions on the wall, you wouldn't necessarily identify it as having been Alexander the Great, other than maybe there's a few Hellenistic Greek motifs on some of the columns or whatever. But in the actual pictography of the hieroglyphics, Alexander the Great is portrayed as a pharaoh and he's being portrayed as a pharaoh that is being seen as being approved by the gods. And this was not problematic to Alexander the Great being a worshipper of Zeus because it's not a competition to his religion. So, you know, in the ancient world, Zeus rules the day. In Greece, Zeus rules the day. So when you're in Egypt, you just give homage to the fact that the god of Egypt is, you know, the way you convince everybody that you're the king is then you, you know, portray yourself as being approved by said gods. So this was just how the ancient world operated. There are multiple gods. There were even house gods. So. But they don't have anything like the. Sorry to cut you off, but it's not like. There are stories that are paralleled with like a physical being like Jesus that then resurrects. No, not in the same way. So any of the sort of. So this is an idea that's often referred to as Jesus mythicism, that the idea of a god being virgin born and having 12 disciples and then being crucified and rising from the dead on the third day, that this is just all, it's a parallel to. It's a parallel to other ancient gods like Addis or Mithras or Osiris or. And so Jesus mythicists draw these parallels that actually, if you read the documentation, don't actually exist. There is no example of all those things within these other gods. And even the closest thing, if you want to say that Osiris was resurrected, well, okay, maybe, but the story is that he's cut into a whole bunch of pieces, he's thrown into the Nile River. And his wife, Isis, goes and collects all of his body parts, except for his penis. She can't find the penis because it's eaten by the Oxyrhynchus fish in the Nile. And so she creates a wooden penis. And then she wraps it all together. And this is the first mummy because she wraps all the body pieces together so that there's one unit. And he comes back to life as the revivified mummy god of the dead. And he keeps with and then creates Horus. That's the origin of Horus. And that's. That's possible? Listen, no, but we're talking ancient Egyptian mythology here. But nonetheless, so some people say, well, that's actually, that's an example of. How do we get the term woody from? I don't know. I'm not going to go there. I'm sorry, my head's going there. When some people point to that and they say, oh, well, that's actually a virgin birth, right? That's the virgin birth of Horus. Oh. But for all intents and purposes, that is nothing even analogous to what the gospel described as a virgin birth. So you're really, you're pulling at any type of parallelism that you can possibly find. So there's a scholar named N.T. Wright. He currently is. Like N.T.? Like the letters N.T.? Yeah. So what's his name? It's, yeah, the letters N.T. and then W-R-I-G-H-T. English theologian. Yes, very prolific Pauline scholar. He wrote a book called, that right there, The Resurrection of the Son of God. Second one is the green one. He goes 150 years before Jesus and he goes 150 years after Jesus and he tries to find any parallels in any other ancient pagan stories. What did he find? Nothing. There's nothing analogous. Now is it, but this guy, this guy is a Christian, right? He is a Christian. Yeah, but he's a pretty prolific historian. Right. But there could be like a bias there, hypothetically. There could be, but I think it's related. It's related to the fact that the ancient world thought that resurrection was nonsensical. So anything that you could think of as a resurrection, like Osiris being the mummified God of the dead. I mean, he doesn't even actually leave the realm of the dead. He's relegated to the land of the dead at that point. So using that as an example of the resurrected Jesus who comes back in a new glorified body that is real, where he talks with his disciples, he eats fish, they touch him, they speak with him. This is sometimes referred to as multivalent experiences, where it's not just them seeing him, but they actually touch him, they eat with him, they speak with him, they walk with him, that kind of thing. To say that that is the exact same thing as what happens to Osiris is pretty ridiculous. It's a stretch. Yeah. And I think this goes part and parcel for every other example that you can find. Now, there are some parallels, obviously. But the parallels that match. are just broad examples of, uh, Horus gets in a boat and Jesus gets in a boat. And you're like, okay, well, I can agree with that one. You know, um, some of these people are called the great shepherd. Okay. Well, the shepherd was a common motif in ancient near Eastern, uh, society. So I'm fine with that one, but it's when you go to the particulars of virgin birth and what that means within Christianity, very specifically, um, having 12 disciples, uh, bat being baptized by John the Baptist, who is his cousin, uh, which is another thing that actually Josephus mentions is John the Baptist. Um, and there's some interesting stuff in Islam with John the Baptist too. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Um, um, so all of these very specifics about Jesus's life, I can agree on a lot of parallelisms that are, uh, at best cursory, but it's the differences that make the difference. And when we're really getting down to the specifics, do you know what the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is? No. Okay. So the Texas sharpshooter fallacy in, uh, the like formal rules of logic, uh, comes from the idea that you have a Texas, a Texan with a pistol and he's firing in the side of a barn and he's just firing at random. And then he goes and he finds the closest cluster of bullet holes and he draws the target around them. That's making himself look like a great John. Yeah. And so when we, yeah, right. When we come to things like historical parallelism, we need to make sure a, we're not committing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy and just looking for all the closest cluster of things, even though there's a mound of differences over here, but you know, these five things actually correlate and we're not committing the correlation versus causation fallacy because some things are always going to correlate that don't necessarily cause that thing. You have to draw a direct line within historiography to proving, okay, A follows B and that's really hard to do in the whole Jesus mythicist theory. Nevermind the fact that, um, there's a whole field of study called, uh, the discipline of the historical Jesus or historical Jesus studies. And what's this? It's, it's a form of historiography. Uh, that's not necessarily a, like a believing Christian one. There's a journal of the historical Jesus, which has both like believing and non-believing scholars that publish in it. Um, but all of them believe in the historical Jesus and have actually published pretty widely on dismantling all of this Jesus mythicist stuff, because it just doesn't add up. Wait, maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but like Jesus of Nazareth is a historical character. That's, that's proven fact, whether or not you believe every single thing that's like written down in text, that's up for debate and stuff. But are you just saying that they're confirming that he was a historical figure or that the actual narrative around him is, um, both? And so a part of Jesus mythicism is an argument that Jesus never existed. And that the reason why we can show that he never existed was because of all these parallels, that he was actually just a copycat. So it's a version of historical denialism. Meaning he existed, but he was just copying shit. I know that they invented him afterwards to justify the religion. But we, but we know he existed. Yes. Like that's historical. Yes. But. So what's the point? But these communities exist online and there are some more type of. I mean, do you see other communities exist online? Hey, you're not wrong there, but it's, but there are some more kind of academic formulations of this. Um, there's a guy named Bob Price, um, who, who has a formal PhD in history who uses some of these arguments in order to deny that Jesus actually existed. Um, uh, there are, there are a few others of them, but of the thousands of scholars that exist within historiography, the ones that deny the historical Jesus myth. Based on these arguments, I could probably count on one hand. Yeah. Who, who have like actual accreditation? Well, another thing here too, that we haven't like, I think it it's come up intermittently today. I can't remember what we were talking about before versus what we were talking about on camera. So apologies if this came up more than I thought, but you know, when you're looking at all these texts and I'm not just talking about the Bible or ancient texts related to Christianity, I'm talking about everything, every topic, every religion, all of it. There are all kinds of. Potential translations. Sure. I mean, you will have one line in the Bible that people translate fucking 40 different ways. And this word being there versus that word being here can completely shift the meaning with this. So how, like, as someone who can actually translate some of these language, how do you, how do you even navigate that? If sometimes something is like, wait, all these versions of the Bible translated this different, you know, and, and it could throw off the whole meaning of like an entire book or something like that, or a story within the Bible. Like, how do you navigate that? Yeah. So translation exists on a continuum of philosophy. So typically what you're looking at is what's often referred to as formal versus dynamic equivalence, and that's sometimes, uh, parsed out by using the terms phrase for phrase and thought for thought. So we have this like incredible amount of English translations of the Bible to the point where we do not need any more English translations of the Bible. Like it's, it's, it's a problem. Um, and this is true. This is not something that other languages have. I have friends who are say, uh, Cantonese or Korean, or even French. They only really have a handful of translations in their language in English. We have just so many, and this is, uh, it's an epidemic of the fact that a lot of scholarship has existed in, in the English speaking world for a long, long time. But, um, they exist on this continuum of getting the thought for thought or the word for word in that. So you have said number of words in the Greek or Hebrew, you're trying to render them in that number of words in English. Now that's not always possible. And even the most like literalistic translation is going to have to deviate from that at some point. So let me give you an example of this in the sense of, uh, one of the most quoted verses of the Bible in the Bible is a version of Exodus 34:6, where God appears to Moses and he says that he's a compassionate God. He's abounding in love and mercy and, and then in the Hebrew, it literally says, and I am long of nose. Now no translation renders that in any language that I'm aware of specifically English as long of nose. So what does that mean? Well, it's an idiom. It means that he's slow to anger, right? So even the most literalistic translations, there are a few out there. The new American standard Bible is pretty literalistic. The English standard version is pretty literalistic. They're not going to render that as long of nose because it just doesn't make any sense. And so some are going for more of, and this is kind of my beef with some more classical translations. Um, so in, if you come to my church at West Toronto Baptist, we have pew Bibles in that you sit in the seats and there's a Bible in front of you. That's an ESV, an English standard version. It's a pretty darn good translation of the Bible. On what basis? I don't love it. On the basis of that, it's, it's pretty. It has. It has a very knowledgeable committee of scholars who are committed to rendering the text to the best of their ability. However, it's a very literalistic translation. And so particularly in the old Testament, I don't love some of its translation choices because it just feels awkward. So actually when I was on a plane, uh, flying over here, I was looking at an ESV, an English standard version, and I was looking at Mark chapter one where Mark chapter one quotes, Isaiah saying the prophecy about Jesus via John the Baptist calling John the Baptist, one who's crying out in the wilderness. But it starts by saying, I am sending a prophet before your face. Now that is literally what the Greek says. I'm sending him before your face. But if you jump to a more dynamic equivalent translation, like the NIV, the new international version or the NET, the new English translation, it's going to say something like I'm sending a prophet ahead of you. Cause we just don't say a before your face, right? Like, um, Hey, Julian, I'm, I'm going to send this thing before your face. Right. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. Awkward. But that is literally what the text says. That's what I would say. It's awkward. I feel like it almost makes sense. It's just awkward. Like, why would you say that? Yeah. Yeah. Some of these translations are like driving an old stick shift. Yes. We're like, you can figure it out, but you gotta really get it into gear and you gotta fight with it sometimes where some translations are going to go and really try to render the meaning of the text. Now, academically, there's a debate. What do you want? Do you want something that is very, uh, emblematic and, and authentic to the actual words? Because Jesus didn't well, um, Mark did not say sending him ahead of you. He said sending him before your face, or there's another example in the gospel of Luke where Jesus says to his disciples, uh, um, uh, Oh, what's it, what's the phrase it's, um, let these words sink into your ears. Now that's literally what the Greek says now, a more form, a more dynamic equivalent translation is going to say, listen carefully to what I'm about to say now, Jesus did not say that, but that's what he meant. And so this is the, and we can ascertain that. Yeah. And it's fair. It's fair to make that leap. Totally. So you have these issues like idioms. You have these issues like kind of awkward wording that if you just translated them directly, it doesn't, you gotta figure it out. And so actually if you go to, um, yeah. It's a shameless plug. If you go to wesleyhuff.com. Oh, I know. Right. You gotta get it in there somewhere. We'll have that link in description. Okay. I appreciate that. I actually have a section. so uh one of my you should have made it weshoff.com two syllables i already bought the domain so unfortunately there's a tab at the top that says infographics this podcast was called trendifier at one point was the dumbest name of all time and now it's not i'm just saying there you go i could switch it up it still is my name though okay here we go i'm pulling it over to this okay so if you if you scroll down i actually have i actually oh no go down keep going keep going keep going keep going right no keep going sorry i thought that was it that's not it under manuscripts no i think it's under your sausage mcbuffin with egg didn't change your receipt did the sausage mcbuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just five dollars only at mcdonald's for a limited time price and participation may vary promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing sam's club is the club for every holiday club guess who's joining the club walmart plus yep sam's club plus membership now comes with walmart plus at no extra cost two memberships one great price just 120 bucks a year can save you time and over 700 dollars want to get in on the membership duo of the century visit samsclub.com come join us sam's club annual plan only auto renews tnc apply estimate based on average combined walmart plus and sam's club plus savings among members of both for one plus year versus non-member or club member pricing fees excludes membership fee see walmart plus terms and sam's club terms for more info the bible archaeology is it not there i hope it's there translation so up that one so that is my trying to map the continuum of bible translations uh via thought for thought and word for word and so these are like the main english translations that if you go to amazon and you're looking for english bible translation and you can see there's a lot there like there's there's too many right and and so it exists on this continuum of dynamic and formal equivalence and um so this uh i often tell people see this less as a spectrum and more of a lot of these translations are actually on top of each other more than they're like one is slightly further to the left or to the right okay but then you have paraphrases on the end and paraphrases are um something that i would not recommend um because it's not actually trying to translate the words as much as it's trying to create a paraphrase of what's being said um but to your question who's making this determination i might have missed that in there me right so this is just you um it's it's an educated perspective on bible translations more generally so i am getting advice from other people some of whom sit on the translation committees for these very bibles uh who i have kind of what are the backgrounds of those people are they always like all christian or no it's all over the place all right that's good yeah i like that most bibles will have a translation committee so there are some like evangelical bible translations which are pretty good so the niv the new international version is an example of a more sort of evangelical bible translation but the people are still bible scholars like they're the top of their field um but if you have something like the nrsv um or the um amp or you know these even the net is done by uh is headed by the individual who runs the organization that i showed you before the center for the study of new testament manuscripts so he has out of um dallas seminary uh put together his own committee of bible experts and they came up with the new english translation um which has exhaustive footnotes so one of the things about the net is that i don't always love the way that they translate the text but they go to length like sometimes i have a paper copy and the footnotes are longer than the actual text of the bible because they're like hey any possible issue you have with like interpretation or manuscripts or variants or whatever translation we're going to try to give it to you as best we possibly can that's legible so usually when people ask me a question about the bible or like a specific verse and i'm like i don't know what i do is i pop over to the net and i look at what the translation notes say because it's exhaustive um so your question about translation and the complexity of translation is a good one because whether we're talking about the bible now fortunately we have all of this stuff with the bible which is why when people ask me what's the most accurate bible i usually say that's i don't know the answer to that question because i don't know what you mean by accurate because some bibles are really great at rendering what the meaning of the text is others are really great at rendering like the actual literal words some are a mix but what's more important that's the debate and ultimately i don't know because sometimes you miss things in one or the other see i and this just you know armchair non-expert i would think the the best translation would be the literal words that then as a second layer once you have the literal words of whatever was written in the language on paper you could then have some sort of expert translation of say some of the idioms or culturally unique things that would have been said within those languages that don't translate perfectly to english or whatever language you're translating it yeah and there are some bibles that try to do that but i think they don't do a really great job of that so the the amp the amplified bible gives you all the possible translations of given words and that's like interesting but largely unhelpful because words almost exist exclusively in their meaning in their context so sure these are all the possible uh hypotheticals of what a word could be translated but what does it mean in that context because it it doesn't mean all these things and it could just mean one of those things and so that's where i don't actually recommend something like the amplified bible where they're trying to do that but they're almost they're almost going over and above in an unhelpful way i mean all this caveat aside is the fact that we have phenomenal english translations like the amount of scholarship that's been poured into the english bible is ridiculous and largely the reasons why we debate about these things is because there's so much the problem remains when we don't have this 2000 year history of translating the bible and looking at all the different um options and versions and with other documents so when you're talking about something like the epic of gilgamesh you're reliant on really only a handful of translations unless you're able to go back and read you know a cadian cuneiform right which is far more unique yes and look there's still arguments on how things are translated within the languages that we have far more understanding on totally i mean you you're you're familiar with my buddy danny jones's podcast right dangerous podcast so danny's one of my best friends and he's a gangster because you know he's such a humble guy but a lot of people don't realize before he was ever a podcaster he was a world-class documentarian and cinematographer all these things and the reason i think he's one of the best on planet earth he might be second best in my book behind joe rogan is that he doesn't give a who he's talking to he wants to capture what they say put it out there document it and let other people decide so you're talking about a guy who talks to people from every end of the spectrum literally known to man and the the range of his podcast at this point with with the opinions of guests has gotten i i don't think there's anything else like it online now he had a guest somewhat recently like in the last six months named amin hillman and and this is where i see you smile about that this is where i also want to make sure i'm clear like as the guy hosting the show just kind of where i stand yeah on some stuff i'm going to come back to almond i i was not the biggest fan of him but just so people understand where i'm at i don't so i i grew up catholic you know saint anthony's the name of the family i i i wear i wear the pendant in that way but like i'm not a practicing catholic i do believe there's a god there's a creator i think i'm gonna have to answer that someday so i want to live well on here i think that a lot of people in the world use different organized religions like christianity for good there's a small percentage that uses it for bad i have some issues with you know some of the history there and things that have gone on but that's just like my personal end of it so when i tell you i look at these hardcore ancient histories and what we were told versus hardcore religious people and scholars like i really come at it somewhere in the middle here and am open to what people say that said i think everyone from either angle is motivated by the things that happen to them so to bring this back to amen this is a guy who to empathize with him has been attacked mercilessly for years by structures up to and including the literal catholic church where you know they got him kicked out of jobs and like that and at the base case as a as someone on an expert of languages there's no doubt that he has a massive understanding it doesn't mean he's right about everything but he has a massive understanding of ancient languages and certain parts of that that very few if any people study there are guys like brian marescu who who talk about and have cited him before and talk about what what a what a brilliant guy he is that said the reason i wasn't the biggest fan is because i think you know in the equal but opposite reaction to life that i talked about earlier he has been strongly behaviorally motivated by anger at what has been i agree unfairly done to him in many ways that has kind of pushed him to a point where he wants to get to the opposite conclusion no matter what. it's not good enough that like, for example, the Catholic church and the teachings of Christianity are wrong. It's like, no, Jesus used kids as drugs and it has to go too, too far. That said, you know, I haven't, I listened to that podcast back when it came out. I haven't listened to it since. So I'm a little, there were a lot of things in there. I'm a little hazy on some of the stuff. I know you've gone through that and whatever, but what were, what were some of the biggest points of contention that you felt you had evidence against that, that he made from, let's say like a translation basis in there? Yeah, that's a good kind of segue within this conversation because Ammon does have a very specific level of expertise and he's very proficient in classical Greek as it relates to medical texts. Now, classicalism in terms of ancient Greek literature is huge. I mean, there's a wide spectrum of all sorts of things. That fall into classics, everything from like Plato and Xenophon to these medical texts that individuals like Ammon are dealing with. I think part of the problem, and aside from the character assassination that I can't speak to because I've only seen bits and parts of it and would probably agree with you that it's not, that's not fair. His arguments in particular are not just fringe, they're him against the entirety of, of the scholarship. And that's where he's taking very specific parameters for words and he's then applying them in ways in context where they just do not apply. And individuals who I greatly disagree on a whole range of things, individuals like Dan McClellan and Kip Davis, who, Kip is actually a fellow Canadian, he lives out in British Columbia, but have pointed out the fact that what he's doing is he's he's applying a very specific level of terminology within the ancient Greek language in cases where it doesn't apply. And so it's the equivalent of saying, so in my own sort of sphere and field, there are specific terminologies that exist within theology. Like we talk about Christ condescending. And what we mean by that is literally the Latin con meaning with and descend to come down. And so when we're talking about the condescension of Christ, what we're talking about is the humility of Christ to step out of his eternal throne as the second person of the Trinity stepping into humanity. But if you were to say to someone after this, if someone said like, hey, you met Westhoff, how was he? And you went, ah, he's a little bit condescending. You wouldn't be talking about my humility, right? Because that word has a different meaning in its different context. And part of the problem with something like what Ammon says is that he's taking terminology that exists within the parameters of a specific field, and then he's applying them in areas where there's an entirely different contextual meaning and spectrum of understanding. So part of what he said that some people jumped on was that he says that the word Christ comes from the Greek word hrio, which it does, right? To anoint. And in ancient Greek medical texts, there is a usage of that, which he has capitalized on with applying drugs to your eyes. Now, more broadly, hrio does mean to rub, particularly a liquid ointment or substance on your body. So this relates to everything from bathing to ritual, which is a very common practice in religious circumstances. But you could likewise say if you put on, if you were an ancient Roman and you had a bath and you came out and you put on cream, skin cream, right? So your skin didn't dry out. That that was an example of hrio. You were applying it to your body. Well, within the religious connotation of Christianity is the translation of the Greek word mashiach, Messiah, which likewise means anointed one, right? There were multiple anointed ones in the Old Testament. It was just a word that was referred to priests or kings or, and had a very specific connotation in the mashiach who would come and be different. And the Greek translation of that, which both the Greek translation of the Old Testament and in the New Testament both use is Christ. Why? Because it means anointed one. So Ammon takes that and he says, well, in this very specific instance in, uh, this stream of classical medical literature, it means to apply a drug to your eyes, specifically in related to, um, uh, not the bot fly. What does he say? The, um, he relates it to a fly. Uh, and I don't remember the detail, but well, and it does mean that in the particular instance that it's being used, but this is where semantic range is very important. And this is the problem that others have. Uh, yeah. Should we, should we pull up this clip by the way? Sure. So there's, there's context. I think I have it. I just want to see so that, cause I want people to follow along with what you're, what you're getting at here. So this is, let me turn this bad boy up. Right. What is the antichrist? What is the Christ? If you have to know the antichrist, you have to know the Christ, right? It's a great word for, for applying a drug to your eyes so that they may be open. That's what the Christ means in Greek. Yes. It's from the verb to be stung by the gadfly. Who's the gadfly? It's a state of mania. They call it in Greek to be an altered state. It's a thing that had to go along. Remember they have orgies and stuff like that. So you better buckle up. Okay. So that, and, and that's kind of what you were just getting at with, with, with what he says there, but you're saying that like, he's stretching some of his knowledge on the pharmacological history of language and bringing that into say Jesus's lexicon and how he says things. Yeah. So, so there's, there's two, two sort of terms that are used specifically within biblical studies, but this applies to anything within the ancient world where we're trying to come up with translations in deriving meaning. The first is there's a, there's a discipline called hermeneutics and hermeneutics is this interpretation. It's the methodology of interpretation that we use on a particular text before hermeneutics is exegesis. And exegesis is a Greek word that literally means to bring out, right? The opposite would be eisegesis to read into. So when you're exegesis, when you're exegeting something and you're looking at an ancient language, you're trying to get at the author's intention by different levels of contextual application. So there's immediate contextualization, there's document contextualization, there's historical contextualization. Unfortunately, what Amon is doing is he's confusing and conflating whole realms of how we do interpretation of ancient languages and how those operate, right? Within a specific context. So in the biblical documents, Christ has a very specific meaning and application. That doesn't mean that hrio does not mean applying a drug to your eyes that you may see. That's not what anybody is saying. Now, I don't think anybody who reads classical Greek would say that that's not true. It's just that that's what it means in a very specific instance, right? I could talk about the right to bear arms and I could be talking about a grizzly bear, right? And talking. Right. So you're saying it's cherry picking. It's not even that it's cherry picking, it's broad brushing. It's broad brushing in a way that. I think it's very clear that Amon has a lot of proficiency in classical Greek. Yes. But he doesn't appear to have as much of a proficiency in Koine Greek, which is what the Bible is written in. So Koine means common. So if you read something like. So when I was doing my language exams as part of my entry to my PhD program, I had to do a series of different exams that span different levels of competency. And one of them is I had to translate a section of this ancient writer, Xenophon. Xenophon wrote a biography of Plato and then he wrote a number of other philosophical exercises that are very important. Xenophon's Greek is very, very different and far more. More complex than something like the Gospel of Mark. And even in the New Testament, the Greek spans between very simple and very complicated. So the Gospel of Mark, actually I mentioned earlier, when Luke says that he's writing up an orderly account and that others have written accounts, he's implying that there are accounts that are not orderly. And I and a number of other scholars think he's actually referring to Mark, because if you read Mark in Greek, it's very, very simple. It's almost written like a child. It has what's called parataxis formulations. Parataxis? Yeah. So children, when they say things, like my son will say, "Daddy, and then I went to the park and then I got on the slide, and then I. And then, and then, and then, and then, and then. Mark continually says the phrase, Caiuthas, and immediately. Everything is immediately. And immediately, Jesus got up out of the water. And immediately, he went out into the wilderness. And immediately, he was in the temple. And immediately. And it's just a symptom of very simple writing. It's called parataxis. And so a lot of the times you'll see this in the translations, but sometimes they just leave out the end immediately, because it's just superfluous. It's just, it's not needed. Because it's just like ad nauseum repeated all the time. And if it's deemed to not actually be communicative to what Mark is saying in that particular instance, it's just kind of the repetitiveness of the phrase, then some translations actually leave it out in some instances entirely. So you have this spectrum. For a long time, scholars looked at the Greek of the Bible, and they were confused by it. Because they were like, why is it so different than the classical Greek? Why does it operate on a, at times, a more simplistic level? But it just looks different. And there was a period of time in the Middle Ages where they referred to it literally as Holy Ghost Greek, where they said, actually, this is what inspired Greek looks like. This is divine Greek. And then in the 1800s, between 1864 and 1867, these two guys, Grenfell and Hunt, who were fresh graduates from Oxford University, Queens College, they head over to Egypt to look for not a statuary or a monumental architecture, which was the standard for the time in Egyptology. They were looking specifically for manuscripts. And they end up going all up and down the Nile. They're running out of finances. They don't know what to do. And they stop in this city called Oxyrhynchus, and they turn to the garbage dumps. And they dig up the garbage dumps, and they find, thousands, half a million papyri. Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. Sam's Club is the club for every holiday club. Guess who's joining the club this season? Walmart Plus. Yep. Sam's Club Plus membership now comes with Walmart Plus, at no extra cost. Two memberships, one great price. Just $120 a year can save you time and over $700. Want to get in on the membership duo of the century? Visit samsclub.com. Come join us. Sam's Club. Annual plan only. Auto renews. TNC apply. Estimate based on average combined Walmart Plus and Sam's Club Plus savings among members of both for one plus year versus non-member or club member pricing slash fees. Excludes membership fees. See Walmart Plus terms and Sam's Club terms for more info. In the garbage dumps. Because Oxyrhynchus was this key center of learning. However, a lot of it is just what's sometimes called a garbage dump. It's a garbage dump. It's a garbage dump. It's a garbage sometimes called documentary papyri, where it's things like receipts, or it's things like communication from political officials. And lo and behold, this Greek looks like New Testament Greek. And so that's when we get this classification of koine, of marketplace Greek, of common Greek. And actually, it was the opposite of what scholars in the past thought. This isn't like special divine Greek. This is actually regular people Greek. This is what you would have been talking in the marketplace. And so the gospel authors are writing in this way, A, because it's simple, and B, because that's what the average person is going to be able to understand if they are or have some level of literacy. They're not going to be reading Plato. They're not going to be reading Cicero. But they may be able to read their receipts, their laundry lists. Yeah. The Cicero, I'd love to get your thoughts. I'd almost love to see. Do you watch the whole Amun podcast and keep pausing it and react? And see, maybe there's even some stuff you're like, oh. But some of the stuff he has on Cicero, because that's separate from the biblical things, I mean, I don't know if it's right or wrong or whatever, but that was eye-opening for sure. And I know that was eye-opening for Danny too. That said, your point about Amun having a knowledge that very few people have on certain aspects of linguistic politics. Yeah. patterns in ancient languages, I forget some of the terms of them. I'll fuck that up if I try to say it. But your point there is right. And I also think that's the slippery slope with a guy like him too, because I will tell you, I don't care what the topic is, whenever I hear someone come out and say, "I'm the only guy that knows about what's happening with this language, because I've been studying this my whole life." Right. And there's really no one else who's gone to Israel and studied the Greek among the architecture there. When I hear that, that says to me like, he's therefore saying, "Because I'm the only knowledge on this, you have to listen to me." And he's precluding that there could be any defenses against what he's saying, because other people don't know. Which, it's a strong word to use. Right. But when I hear stuff like that, I go, "Oh, oh, is that like charlatanism?" You know, because you're trying to say like, "You gotta come through me. There's no other bridge here. Right. to this knowledge." Yeah. There is a logical fallacy that's the logical fallacy of the populace in saying that the majority is always right. And I think it's not true that the majority is always right. I mean, I hold positions that is not the position of the majority, even within my field. But it's a matter of then, do you have good evidence to put that out there? To push back against the consensus. Because I'm fine with people holding fringe views. I hold a bunch of fringe views. The fact that I did the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as early as I do, is not the consensus within my field. However, I think there are good reasons to do that. And unfortunately, there are positions within Ammon to give him the credit where it's due in saying he knows classical Greek, and in a particular vein, incredibly well. However, he then extrapolates that and says, "This expertise allows me to make conclusions, like the Greek translation of the Old Testament is not a translation, it's the original. And the Hebrew is the translation." When of the tens of thousands of Septuagint scholars, so that's the Greek translation of the Old Testament that's Septuagint, no one holds that position. Not like there's a few little, there's a contingent here, nobody. And I think, unfortunately, it's emblematic of the fact that specificity and expertise in one area does not necessarily then extrapolate into all of the areas that could possibly be adjacent to that. Yes, that's a good point. That's really well said. Listen, I want to get to one more main topic in here, and then we're going to do a Patreon episode. There's going to be stuff in there. We'll talk about the Templars, we'll talk about evolution, we'll talk about the biblical timeline and all that. But on the actual episode here, just because we talked about it earlier and got off it and said we come back, some of the other banned books, quote, unquote, of the Bible, you got things like, "The Book of Enoch," "Nephilim." My buddy, Mark Gagnon, actually just did an episode with a guy that I haven't seen yet that's popping off where they went into all this. So I got to check that out. Everyone check out "Camp Gagnon," great show. But let's start with Enoch. What's the history there and what's the arguments against that being a part of the Bible? Yeah, so we've talked about a number of documents that would fall into the category of apocryphal literature. And so apocrypha, the Greek word, means secret or strange, and it becomes sort of the categorical term within early Christianity to describe anything outside of that which is canonical. So the canon is what's considered scripture, everything else is apocryphal. That doesn't necessarily mean it's heretical, but it just means it's in a separate category. Within the category of apocryphal, you also have documents that are sometimes referred to as pseudepigraphical, right? So think of pseudo, like a pseudonym, right? It's not your real name. Pseudo and graphe. It's the pseudonym. It's a strange writing. It's not your, like, pseudo means false, and then graphe means writing. So pseudepigraphical documents are documents like the Book of Enoch, which have a label of being written by a particular individual who it's largely agreed upon is not the individual. And so that's in a category of its own. The thing with Enoch is that it was never considered banned. It was always paused. It was part of a group of Jewish literature, which was very important within sort of the Jewish understanding. So we've largely been talking almost exclusively, I think, about documents that post-date the New Testament documents, right? So the gospels that were written by the various Gnostic groups, those are after Jesus. Enoch comes before Jesus, and it's in a category of literature that was written between the last book of the Old Testament and the first book of the New Testament. So there's about 400 years there. Between, I mentioned, in the Protestant Old Testament, you have the last book is Malachi. Between Malachi and Matthew, there's a 400-year gap, which is sometimes referred to as the 400 years of silence, which is a bit of a misnomer, because it wasn't silent. There was a whole bunch of Jewish literature being written, but there was this cultural understanding within ancient Judaism that the voice of God was not being communicated through prophets in the same way. So that's why it's sometimes referred to as that. However, the Jews are writing all sorts of things. And one of those things that's really interesting is that the first thing that they were writing on was the book of Enoch. Now, we also need to be careful with the book of Enoch, because what we call specifically 1st Enoch, there's a 1st and 2nd Enoch, when the book of Enoch is usually referred to, it's usually referred to, we're usually pointing to the book of 1st Enoch. The book of 1st Enoch, as it exists, you can go buy a copy of 1st Enoch. In fact, there's a pretty recent, very good translation of it by the publisher, Herminia, which is the most updated one, takes into consideration things like the Dead Sea Scrolls. And what you have there is a collection of various Jewish texts that span about a period of 200 years before Jesus and about 50 to 100 years after Jesus in multiple languages. So you have sections of the book of Enoch in Aramaic, you have sections in Coptic, and you have sections in Greek. And those are all brought together in what we call 1st Enoch. Now, the Old Testament. The Old Sections are really, really old. The Old Sections are about 200 BC. They're in the 3rd century BC, and they're largely written in Aramaic and Greek. And those predate Jesus by a ways. And actually, the New Testament shows recognition of it. In the book of Jude, it refers to a section of the book of Enoch. So it's present in the Bible. Now, that doesn't mean they thought it was scripture, because we know unanimously they did not think it was scripture. Jude is simply referring to a piece of literature that was written in the Bible. So it's a piece of literature that they would have been familiar with to make a particular argument. Paul also quotes, he quotes Menander, the Greek philosopher. He didn't think Menander was divinely inspired. He's just using the literature of the day to make particular arguments. But when we're talking about the book of Enoch, Jewish scripture occasionally refers to supernatural beings, like angels, like seraphim, like cherubim, like demons. But it doesn't really, or the Watchers is another one. Is that the jinn? No. That's different. That's Islam? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That comes along. That's about 600 years after. Beck Lover somewhere is like, God damn it, Julian. Yeah, no, the jinn are a separate thing. They're entirely, they're good and bad jinn. They're not even in this sort of category. But so you have these things mentioned in the Old Testament, but they're never really explained. And so within this 400 year period between the Old and the New Testament, you have these things mentioned in the Old Testament, but they're never really explained. So the Jews are like, okay, what do we think of this? How are we to understand these supernatural beings that are created by God, that exist in some sort of parallel world in the unseen realm? And they're interacting with one another and they have different forms and functions. So one of the issues is that we often refer to a bunch of these things as angels. Angel is not what the thing is. It's what the thing does. So Malach. In the Hebrew or Angelos in the Greek means messenger. So it is not a description of its ontology, what it is. It's a description of what it does. Got it. These are supernatural beings who go and they communicate messages to people. They're in some sort of relation in terms of their supernaturalness to other creatures, like the Seraphim and like the Cherubim, who are supernatural divine throne guardians. Yeah. Which was a concept that was not foreign to the ancient world. You have Lamassu, which are the winged bulls with the human heads in Babylon, and you have Sphinxes in Egyptian and Hellenistic culture. These were just concepts that existed within the ancient world. The gods have throne guardians. And within biblical Judaism, these are the Seraphim and they are the Cherubim. So sometimes you'll see those memes, the biblically accurate angels. Yeah. Those are Cherubim. That's what they are. It's not actually an angel. It's kind of a misnomer in terms, but I get it because we kind of broad brush with all these categories. The book of Enoch is part of the literature that's trying to explain that. What on earth is this? Actually, if you go back to my wesleyhuff.com, I do. So every Monday, I do these posts that I call Manuscript Monday. So if you go back to the homepage, yeah, click that, scroll down, and you'll see the blog post. Keep going. Keep going. Right there. So biblically accurate angels. So I actually explain some of these. If you go down, go up, right there. So like angels, Seraphim, Cherubim, and then how these are portrayed. And I particularly go through the manuscripts and how both Christian and Jewish interpretation of them reflects them differently. But these are these characters, which the book of Enoch is trying to make sense of, along with demons. And so the way that they go about that is by capitalizing on the events that happen immediately before Genesis. Genesis chapter six in the biblical flood, where you have the great grandfather of Noah, Enoch, as this character who is explaining some of these fallen angels or beings. Genesis chapter six says that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were pleasing to the eyes and slept with them, and that these created men of renown. And that's the word Nephilim. Ah, there it is. So the trickiness of this is that in. In ancient Judaism, when it's translated into other languages, Nephilim is almost exclusively translated as giants. But the word etymologically in Hebrew, nephal, literally means to fall. So there's this whole narrative within ancient Judaism of these things are fallen angels. And so, but that's not the same thing necessarily in ancient Judaism as demons, and that's where it gets complicated. Okay. So I'm just reading the background here so people have it. The Nephilim, let me pull this over here so it's on the screen, the Nephilim are mysterious beings, or people in the Bible traditionally imagined as being of great size and strength. The origins of the Nephilim are disputed. Some, including the author of the book of Enoch, view them as the offspring of fallen angels and humans. Others view them as descendants of Seth and Cain. The reference to them is Genesis 6:1-4, but the passage is ambiguous, and the identity of the Nephilim is disputed according to the Numbers 13:33. 10 of the 12 spies report the existence of Nephilim in Canaan prior to the conquest by the Israelites. A similar or identical biblical Hebrew term read as Nephilim by some scholars or as the word fallen by others appears in the Ezekiel 32:27 and is also mentioned in the Deuterocanonical books, Judas 16:6, Sirach 16:7, Baruch 3:26-28, and Wisdom 14:6. Yeah. So let me read that for us. When men began to multiply in the face of the land, the daughters of them were born. The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were attractive, and they took as their wives any they chose. Then Yahweh said, "My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh. His days shall be 120 years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bore children to them. These were mighty men who were of old, men of renown. So that's literally what the Hebrew says. And so it's not like the Wikipedia article accurately says, it's not entirely clear what's going on there. But Enoch is part of the Jewish conversation in trying to flesh this out. But, and particularly in the Book of the Watchers, which is the oldest book. And so that's what Enoch is. Now, part of the confusion about the Book of Enoch is because the Book of Enoch is never considered scripture by the Jews, but ends up in the Ethiopian Bible. And part of- - Ethiopian Bible. - Yeah. So the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is a wing of, you have these different sort of overarching denominations of Christendom. You have today Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic, Roman Catholic, and then the Ethiopian Church. And the Ethiopian Church, we know that around the fourth century, missionaries from Syria went down to what then was referred to as the Kingdom of Aksum, which is in modern day Ethiopia. And they brought with them a whole host of literature. And part of this literature was New Testament books in Greek and the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which at that point was finalized. And the Ethiopian Church took all of this literature, which included literature that nobody considered scripture at the time, and they appear to have just been non-discretionary and included everything. So all of the debates that were happening in the Latin West and the Greek East about what was and wasn't scripture, they looked at that and they said, "We're not really interested in that. We'll just take everything." So in being non-discretionary, they end up just canonizing everything, which leaves them with a canon of scripture that is completely unique and includes books like Enoch, which the ancient Bible calls the book of Enoch, which is the book of Enoch, which the ancient Bible ancient Jews and every ancient Christian didn't, well, actually I should preface that. There were a couple of early Christians who said, we think this could be scripture, but then they accept when, you know, all the debates happen that, okay, those are pretty good reasons where we're not going to accept it in the end. And so I don't know where the idea came from, but there is definitely a prevailing myth on the internet that the Ethiopian Bible is the oldest Bible. And that's not true. In fact, the oldest copy of the Ethiopian Bible, which is full in terms of a Genesis revelation copy. um is 14th century so it's a long long time after but some there's a lot of talk online about enoch and particularly the copy of enoch that is in the ethiopian bible and that oh well that's actually reflective of the original bible because the ethiopian bible is the oldest i don't know how that myth started it's patently untrue um but what ends up being what we call the book of enoch ends up in its final form in the ethiopic canon it's a lot on the bone today man yeah you know a lot of stuff sorry about that no i'm opening up the fire hose sorry that's exactly what we want we want the fire hose coming out i i really appreciate you sharing so much knowledge i'm sure people will have all kinds of opinions online in the comment sections and stuff but you know all of ancient history where it ties into religion and and ideas and how we formulated today like because it all comes back to this today it's so fascinating to me so i appreciate guys like you coming in here and doing this we're going to go do a patreon episode now i went through some of those topics we'll definitely get into the templars and and some of the things in in the middle ages that that i think are interesting when you look at the history of the christian church and some other stuff including evolution so people if you want to join on patreon or youtube membership you can hit that link in the description below that's down there but we will have your links as well down below wes so people can follow you on instagram we'll have your website you can follow us on instagram we'll have your website as well and i appreciate you coming here from toronto to do it brother i appreciate you giving me a platform my wife is certainly bored of hearing all this stuff she better listen to this one though that's right here anyway we'll do it again sometime all right sounds good all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace thank you guys for checking out this clip if you haven't already subscribed please subscribe and hit the like button on this video it is a huge huge help and if you'd like to check out this clip's full podcast episode that link is in the description below or right here and finally you can follow me on instagram and x by using the links in my description below your sausage mcmuffin with egg didn't change your receipt did the sausage mcmuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just five dollars only at mcdonald's for a limited time price and participation may vary promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing sam's club is the club for every holiday club guess who's joining the club this season walmart plus yep sam's club plus membership now comes with walmart plus at no extra cost two memberships one great price just 120 bucks a year can save you time and over 700 want to get in on the membership duo of the century visit sam'sclub.com come join us sam's club annual plan only auto renews tnc apply estimate based on average combined walmart plus and sam's club plus savings among members of both for one plus year versus non-member or club member pricing slash fees excludes membership fees see walmart plus terms and sam's club terms for more info when you shop kroger delivery you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door our refrigerated trucks keep your items fresh while our associates are committed to getting every detail right carefully selecting and packing your order with care because bringing you fresh quality groceries is what we do best and right now enjoy twenty dollars off your first online order of seventy five dollars or more restrictions apply see site for details kroger fresh for everyone this is blue from the ups store with a very special holiday announcement for small business owners we're open let's be real your deadlines don't take holidays so while the other guys are checking out the ups store is here to pack ship print shred notarize and check more things off your list all year long with over 5 500 locations there's a blue near you at the ups store shredding services are provided by iron mountain as is visit the ups store.com shredding for full details most locations are independently owned products services prices and hours of operation may vary see store for details it's officially the holiday season in abercrombie's new collection has outfits for everything on your calendar it's the busiest time of year and between shopping and party invites i don't have time to plan every look but abercrombie's always got me covered their sweaters are the perfect easy layer for low-key plans and on a nice night out i'm reaching for their classic trousers fill your closet with the pieces you'll need all season long have a very abercrombie holiday shop in the app online and in stores