Is the KJV Crap?

Salkku X tapaa me jälleen. Viisi numeroa. Viisi vihjette. Armauksia pätelyä. Poveria. Palkintona X-PENG-6 Säköauto. Täysin omaksi. Kymmellön viikkoa aika ratkaista kodi osoitteessa poverpistefi. Kautta X. Älä jää kyydistä. Sä käsivät järjestelmässä. Palkintona, joka on tärkeää järjestelmässä järjestelmässä. Sivat me järjestelmässä järjestelmässä. Sä jätetään ei ole, että se on tärkeää käsivässä. Käsivätä, mitä on järjestelmässä. Ja mitä on järjestelmässä järjestelmässä? Tämä on järjestelmässä. Sitten se on tärkeää, että se on tärkeää, että se on tärkeää. Palkintona. Palkintona ja sivat ja hänen järjestelmässä. KJV. Tätä on järjestelmässä. Englis on järjestelmässä. We have access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, all that kind of stuff. So some of the things we'll talk about have to do with translations, some of the things have to do with manuscripts and what sources are being used. Okay. So for instance, one of the first things, one of the biggest things, one of the most influential things is something known as the comma Joe Hanayam. Are you familiar with that phrase? I'm familiar with the Oxford comma. No, this is a different one. There's a different comma. Also known as the Joe Hanayam comma. Right. And comma here just means clause. Okay. And so it is first John 5 versus 7 and 8. And these two verses read for there are three that bear record in heaven, the father, the word and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one. And so this is a central Trinitarian proof text. Right. Right. The only problem is it's not in any early Greek manuscripts. It's something that pops up in Latin manuscripts. And so the King James version, the source text that the translators went to when they were like, why the bishops Bible translated this way? They would go back to a source text for the Greek New Testament. And the source text they went back to was what became known as the textus receptus, which is a version of the Greek New Testament that was originally cobbled together at the beginning of the 16th century by Dessiderius Erasmus. And he, when he first started this project, he went to his library in Switzerland and was like, give me all your Greek New Testament manuscripts. And they were like, we got six of them. And then they added a seventh later on. But it was like two manuscripts that represented the majority of the New Testament, and then the other four to five represented smaller portions. And he basically just took them and collated them and said, okay, like this reading over here, like this reading over here. And in the between the second and the third edition, some people started asking him why he didn't include this verse. This is a clause that crosses two verses. And there's another part of one of the verses that's not a part of this. But they said, where's that phrase? And he was like, it's not in any Greek manuscripts. And he got leaned on by people who had a lot of power and influence. And he basically said, look, I'm not going to include this unless I have a Greek manuscript that has it because it's not in any of the Greek manuscripts. And lo and behold, somebody shows up with a Greek manuscript that has it. I have to enter my pillow. So yeah. And quite literally, it's dated to more or less within a couple of years of when it showed up at Erasmus' doorstep. And scholars who have looked at it have said, yeah, it looks like somebody just translated the Latin back into Greek while transcribing this manuscript. But he said, okay, fine, I'll include it in the third edition. So the third edition of his Texas Receptus, which was really called the Novum Instrumentum, a new instrument. The third edition has the Comma Jo Hanayam. And it just so happens that the edition that the King James translators relied on for their revision was the third edition. Okay. So the King James version, of course, included the Jo Hanayam Comma. And that's one of the things that was stricken. Once we started doing more text critical work in the 1700s and then more earnestly in the 1800s. So I'll use scholars and how you're trying to deceive everyone by taking the scriptures out of the books. Yeah, yeah, that's, oh gosh. And there's about, we've talked about this before, I think, the, there are about 16 verses in the New Testament that are commonly just omitted, just deleted from contemporary translations of the Bible. And it sends some people into conceptions. They just, yeah, they're like, and the reality is it's a more accurate book. It's a more accurate New Testament without it. So somebody added it to it. I want to talk about another one that's relevant to the use of Erasmus's textus receptus. Oh, sure. And this comes from the book of Revelation. Revelation 2219. And when Erasmus went and asked for all those manuscripts, what he got omitted the last chapter or so of the book of Revelation, he did not have a manuscript that included the end of the book of Revelation. So what he did was he took the Latin and he just translated the Latin back into Greek and just slapped that on the end of his product. Okay. So it's, it's, it's in Greek in the textus receptus, but it is Greek that was translated from a Latin manuscript. And part of the, the Revelation 2219 in the King James version, it talks about somebody's name, the people's names being in the book of life, which in Latin would be Libro. And so the Erasmus's textus receptus has book of life. All fine and good except for the fact that the Latin is wrong. Or at least the, somebody was wrong in transmission because the Latin probably said "League no" which meant tree. Because the Greek manuscripts, the Greek manuscripts, I'll say tree of life. So, so Revelation 2219 in the King James version refers to the book of life, but it should refer to the tree of life, having your name written in the tree of life. And the trees. I mean, I guess people. The Revelation talks a little bit about this, about this tree that grows alongside the river. But yeah, an interesting little variation that we see based on the fact that Erasmus was like, "Where the last chapter go?" I'll just translate it from Latin. That looks like the word book. So wait, the textus receptus that he was creating was a Latin, was in Latin, right? No, he was creating a Greek edition of the New Testament. He was basically, so he's taking original Greek sources and just cobbling together a Greek version. Right. Okay, I get it. This would be called an eclectic edition. Eclectic meaning it's cobbled together from a bunch of different manuscripts. The alternative would be a diplomatic edition. That's where you're just basing it on a single manuscript. So most critical editions of the Hebrew Bible, they're based on the Leningrad Codex, they're diplomatic editions. Most critical editions of the New Testament are based on a bunch of different manuscripts, they're eclectic editions. But you can have the opposite. You can have a New Testament manuscript that's based on Codex Sanaticus or something like that. That would be a single manuscript. That would be a diplomatic edition. And there's an Oxford Hebrew Bible project that's trying to put together an eclectic edition of the Hebrew Bible, whether incorporating Dead Sea Scroll readings and Septuagint readings and things like that. So yes, he was generating a Greek edition of the New Testament. It was the first widely available Greek edition of the New Testament. Okay. Because up until him, if you wanted the Greek New Testament, you had to go find a manuscript. And most of the manuscripts that were the early manuscripts didn't cover the whole New Testament. And so his edition of the Greek New Testament is what it made it possible for Martin Luther. To translate the New Testament from Greek into German. Because before that, they were using the Latin. Right. And this kind of caused this sea change where everybody was like, all right, we're leaving the Latin behind. We're going back to the Greek. So it was a big deal. Yeah. I get it now. I had, I had translation on my mind. And so I was thinking that he was translating to something, but I just hadn't. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, now that I understand what we're talking about, let's continue going on with KJV and ways that it might have gotten a few things a little, a wonky doodle. Let's talk unicorns because there's something just delightful about, about a Bible. Frankly, I don't want to give this one up. I want there to be unicorns in the Bible. You're about to tell me that I can't have my unicorns and I'm about to be sad, but let's talk about where they come from and what it's trying to translate. So yesterday, I got to teach my eight year old daughter about how we cleaned up when I was a kid. My mom used to say, time to finger vacuum. Finger vacuum meant crawl around on your hands and knees and use your fingers to pick up all the little stuff that you can see that's in the carpet. It reminded me that there's so many times when I wish that something would just take care of these little small messes that pop up on our carpet every day. But with narwhal things, Things really are a lot easier and thank you to Narwhal by the way for sponsoring today's show. If you've never had a robotic vacuum and mop system, Narwhal is exactly where you want to start. I absolutely love my Narwhal Flow 2. I have experimented in my life with robot vacuums before and they have not been great. I'll be honest with you. The hair gets tangled up in them. They just push dirt around on the floor. This thing is the next generation of robot vacuums and mopping systems. The Flow 2 has the Flow Wash mopping system which is real time water infusion, which means that they are squirting 16 angled nozzles spraying fresh water continuously. It's got this reverse rolling mop which I love because it leaves just a streak of clean behind but dries really quickly. It's heated water so it cleans deep. It's an amazing thing. But that's not all. The Nar Mind system is an autonomous system. It has dual RGB cameras. It's got two cameras and it's watching everything and it recognizes all of the objects and adjusts accordingly to your floor. Listen I've got pets. They have toys. My floor never looks the same twice but my Narwhal understands what it's looking at. Moves around what it needs to move around. Understands what is a chair leg and what is a cable, you know a phone cord or something. And acts accordingly. It's just a genuinely remarkable tool. Yeah. The Narwhal Flow 2 has powerful suction with carpet focus technology. It does a phenomenal job. It's got an all in one base station and that AI power management that protects long term battery health. This is really the top of the line when it comes to robot vacuums. If you want to treat your home to spotless fresh floors, visit us dot narwhal dot com slash Dan. That's us dot N-A-R-W-A-L dot com slash Dan. Yeah. So the King James version has nine occurrences. I think six occurrences in the singular unicorn three occurrences of the plural unicorns. And when we look in the first place, we can go as a sub two agent because that's the tradition that resulted in that's one of the traditions that the King James translators referred to. In fact, when we go all the way back to I in fact, I pulled up Tindles Pentuk because William Tindle translated more than the New Testament. He also translated the entire Pentuk, which was published in 1530. But in Deuteronomy 3317, we have a reference to this where it says his horns as the horns of and unicorn. And you know, unicorn has a Y instead of an I and an E on the end and all that kind of stuff. But so the use of unicorn goes all the way back to to Tindle in English. And it's actually used in something related is used in the in the vulgets. I think they use rhinoceros in the let me just pull up the the vulgar real quick to make sure. But the Latin would be translating the septuogens monoceros. Is it monoceros or monoceros? Yeah. It's monoceros, which means one horn. Okay. And so the septuogen is probably the foundation of this misunderstanding. I think once you get into the the Latin vulget, you get the this was probably Jerome's attempt to try to understand the Hebrew word by appealing to the Greek because the Hebrew has Raem. And that is kind of an unusual term for a long time. People weren't exactly sure what it was. Most scholars today would say it is a now extinct kind of ox called an orix. Oh, okay. But when you go, but they didn't know this anciently. I'm looking in the yeah, rhinoceros is what the vulget has in in Deuteronomy 33 17. So the it sounds like the the vulget is like a one horn. What's that? Well, we got these things called rhinoceros is rhinocerye. Maybe that's what's going on. So the the vulget is using that the Greek is probably basing this translation on reports from Persia, from people who are exploring and legends from even further east into, you know, like the Indus Valley or something like that. Because there's an idea that in Persia, they knew about this animal that had one long horn. Not not quite a unicorn, but some single horned animal. And deeper into the Indus Valley into India, there were reports coming out of this creature that had a long horn that was, you know, its horn had healing properties and stuff like that. And that's where the the mythical creature probably comes from. And so this is like fifth, fourth century BCE explorers writing in Greek are talking about these mythical creatures. And I think the the Septuagin translator either was trying to reflect that idea or was just trying to reflect the idea of a rhinoceros. Okay. So when we get into English, they're like, what? They don't really know what's either they don't know what's going on or unicorn originally had a broader semantic range and could include a rhinoceros. Sure. But very quickly, the idea was that this is a this this mythical creature. When in reality, the Hebrew, Rahem would have just referred to this particular kind of ox. And one of the reason one of the confusing reason one of the reasons we know it's is not a one horned animal is because due to around me 33 17 has it talks about the plural horns of the Rahem in Hebrew. And so the animal the animal is singular. The horns are plural. Oh, okay. You can use a singular word for an animal to speak collectively about multiple animals. Like we talked about that in Exodus where the plague of frogs just mentions a frog. A frog. So yes. So there's like this Kaiju frog crawling out of the out of the Nile and also the word for bird every bird of this guy, all the birds. It's just office in the singular. Okay. And so maybe that's what's going on. But when the King James version translated to do around me 33 17, it kind of fiddled with that a little bit and it talks about the horns of unicorns in the plural. So they didn't want quite when a band in the notion that this word referred to a single horned animal, whether whether it was understood as natural or or mythological. But like the way that it talks about these animals in the Bible, it doesn't it's it's not it doesn't seem like it's referring to a mythical creature with magical abilities. It just seems like it's referring to an animal that the people reading it would understand would know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if we wrote about a bear, no, no one would think, Oh, it's mythical or whatever. They just yeah, that's that's a thing that exists. And we all know what a bear is. Yeah. And certainly the some of these animals would have been better well known than than others. Because I think I think you got plenty of examples of of different regions, even in the United States, but especially around the world where some some people might know about a certain animal and and people who don't live very far away from them might be like, what's that? Yeah. Like when I the the first time I went to Israel, Palestine, I was in I forget the ruins of an ancient city and I heard this this high pitch squeak almost like a yell. And I was like, what is that? And somebody was like, Oh, it's a high racks. And I was like, and what pretel is a high racks. And they were like, it's kind of a it's kind of a rodent that that hides out in in rocky areas. And then I was like looking at a pile of of basalt rocks. And then this little rodent poked its head out and went and yelled at me. And I was like, Oh, that's a high racks. I heavily encourage everyone to look up high racks is because they're I wouldn't say cute. They look mad. They all look pretty mad. They do. Yeah. And they sound mad like they sound like they're like, get out of here. Hey, what are you doing? Yeah. Yeah. So I had no idea what a high racks was until I started getting shouted at by one. So I had to have some knowledge dropped on me. But yeah. So I'm, you know, we've. If somebody, I tell this story in 2000 years from now, somebody reads a transcript and they have, and they've, and you know, the knowledge of the high racks has been lost because maybe it's extinct or something like that. Then yeah, they might be like high racks that kind of sounds like the Toyota high lux. So it was probably an animal that looked a lot like a car or I don't know. Yeah, I think there are kinds of ways to do that. And if you're, if you're trying to translate a word that you don't have a translation for, you kind of go with whatever you got. Yeah. And in the King James version, they're using a lot of traditions that, you know, are found in the translations that precede them. And some of them are kind of silly. One of the ones that I wanted to jump to, we don't, we're, we don't have a lot of time, but I wanted to jump to how the KJV handles the were, how it translates a bit. A bunch of different words all to the word hell. Oh, and doesn't, and doesn't bother to distinguish any of them. Yeah. So this is, so you got three different word. Well, one in Hebrew shel, it's translated hell in the King James version. Right. And, and this is just based on the assumption that's the, you know, the assumption of univocality. Well, we're, we're talking about the realm of the dead. And it's not particularly happy. That must mean hell. Yeah. The reality is that they had, they did not have a concept of hell in the Hebrew Bible. Everybody went to the same place. Good, bad. Nor heaven. Just, just, just, yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Sure. Which is just the realm of the dead. And it was a, it was a hazy, murky, not very exciting existence. And they didn't know an awful lot about it. So, so right off the bat. Yeah. That's, that's a mistranslation in the King James version. And then you've got a few different words that are used in the New Testament. The main two are Hades and Gehenna. It's really Gehenna in, in Greek transliteration. But those are the two that are most commonly translated hell. And then you've got one occurrence of the word Tardarus. And in Greek, Gehenna is, is a Greek Jewish term. It comes from Gehenna from the valley of the sun of Hinnom. And this is this valley that comes around the south end of Jerusalem. And this is associated with child sacrifice in the pre-exilic period, the Toffet, which is where the pre-exilic kings were supposed to have offered their children as sacrifice, make them pass through the fire, that, that, all that stuff. That's supposed to be on the edge of the valley of Hinnom. And in Greco-Roman period Jewish tradition, that location becomes associated with the bad place. Just because it is, there's fire, there's wickedness, there's killing, that is the bad place. And so that becomes kind of an eschatological location of divine punishment. And so in the New Testament, that's Gehenna. Hades is just, is largely borrowed from, from Greek mythology. And Tardarus in Greek mythology is one of the two places you can go within Hades. Hades is kind of a more generic realm of the dead. And for certain groups, if you've been good, you go to the fields of Elysium. That is, you know, in Gladiator. That's what he says. You are in Elysium. And then the other place is Tardarus. That's, if you've been bad. Yeah. And you don't want to, you don't want to end up in Tardarus. But in borrowing that concept into the New Testament, Hades kind of has more of a negative tone. So it's, it's kind of conceptually merging with the idea of Gehenna. But, but Tardarus is, I think it's, it's used in one of the letters of Peter. And that's more directly referring to the lake of fire, kind of bad part of, of Hades. It'd be, I'm trying to imagine what Christianity today would look like. If those three words, slash four words were each given a different translation or we're getting, you know, what I mean, we're separated out for distinct concepts. I think that's a, that's a big deal difference. Well, yeah, you can, you can look in Mormonism for their, their grieves of glory. If you really wanted to try to, sure, man. But no, it's, although it's not quite the hierarchy yet. That Mormonism presents. But, but yeah, I think it would be fascinating if, if those different concepts were allowed to stay different. But that's kind of, that's kind of the pattern is that, is everything gets kind of lumped together. You have the good side and the bad side and, you know, all of the bad entities from the Hebrew Bible get just consolidated in, in Satan, whereas all the good, all the supernatural mediator figures from the Hebrew Bible get consolidated into Jesus. Right. And all of the different concepts of post-mortem divine punishment get consolidated into hell. Whereas the idea of post-mortem good stuff gets consolidated into heaven. There's only one concept. And, and yeah, I think that's an outgrowth of the fact that everybody's presupposing it all has to be pointed in the same direction. Right. But yeah, I think it would be an interesting thought experiment. Somebody will have to make a movie one day about Christianity that did not presuppose univocality. That would be interesting. It would be a mess. It would be a mess. And I don't think, and I think that, you know, to some extent, these consolidations kind of have to happen or at least like, like, so yeah, for any kind of, you need to have, for any kind of consistency. You have to converge on some sort of understanding. Yeah. But also the way the KJV talked about the word, "Kashaf." I don't know how to say that, but a sorcerer, a diviner, or as in the KJV, that shall not suffer a witch to live, which is-- Oh, yeah. Exodus 228, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, it should be 17 in the Hebrew. Yeah. So, Mahashefa is the word in Hebrew, but it's based on, it's a noun form based on the verbal roots, "Kashaf" to practice sorcery. Yeah. And this is-- this is wit, like a lot of people say, "Oh, King James was anti-witch." And so he either told him to write this in or made them change it to wit or something like that. And, yeah, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth for King James. So, obviously, he had a witch thing. But it's just not true because it's in the Bishop's Bible, it's in the Geneva Bible, it's in the Great Bible, it's in the Matthew's Bible, it's in the Coverdale Bible, it's in the Tindal translation. Like, it is thou shalt not suffer a witch to live every single place it occurs in English up to and including the King James version. But yeah, in Hebrew, it actually doesn't address the law to you in the second person. It just says, "Machashefa lo tachaie," which would be a witch shall not live. Okay. So, the verb is actually third feminine singular. But is witch the right-- I guess the problem that I have with the word witch in this case is that it's gendered in most-- Yeah, and it's a feminine noun in the Hebrew. Oh, okay. Now, interestingly enough, the ancient Greek translation not only changed it to masculine, but changed it to plural. Oh. And they have pharmacus, which is based on the word pharmacon or pharmacus, which is, could be magician, could be sorcerer, but fundamentally it refers to someone who mixes up potions. Now, shall not suffer a pharmacist to live. Right. Yeah, I hear what you say. This is an anti-vaxxer. This is a COVID-denier who prophesied thousands of years prior to the arrival of COVID-19 that this was all going to happen and that Fauci, because the original Greek could be rendered Fauci if you-- You just got to-- because it starts with enough, you just got to change, you got to-- you got to, you know, elide the row and the moo, and then you got to kind of take the capa and render it more of a chuh. So anyway, yeah, for some weird reason, the Greek decided to just fiddle with it and make its-- and pharmacus can refer to-- potions for good or potions for bad. So you see the usage of the word in reference to people who are using it to heal, but you more commonly see it as in reference to people who are using these potions for ill. And so the pharmacia became kind of a bad word in early Christianity, which, you know, gives rise now to all kinds of ridiculous conspiracy theories that I have to see on TikTok day after day after day. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for our twisted scripture for today. I mean, you know, KJV still has some of the best-- some of the prettiest language of any of the translations. Yeah, there are some renderings that you can't get away from. You just got to lean into that King James English. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's-- it was the time-- of Shakespeare. They say Shakespeare may have written some of it, but he probably got it. Oh gosh. Come on. What is it? Psalm 46 or something? Oh gosh. There's a whole there's a whole thing. Anyway, look into it. Shakespeare. Psalm 46. Shakespeare. It's all in there. 46 in 46 in. All right. We'll leave it at that. So we'll move on to history's mysteries. So guide me in. Where what are we doing? What are we talking about? Where are we here? We're talking about a weird thing that a lot of folks have observed in some of the early Jewish and Christian discussions about God and the use of the Greek word "thouses," because we know this word means God. And ostensibly early Jewish and Christian authors are all monotheists. And so there can only be one God. But we've got this weird thing where sometimes the word God might seem to be referring to somebody else. And in some places, some of these authors write the word God without the definite article. Now, if you don't know biblical Greek, even personal names, most of the time you include the definite article. So when you see in your English translation, and Jesus said to them in the Greek, it would be, and the Jesus said to them, the definite article is being used most of the time. Now, there are certain syntactical circumstances where you actually don't use the definite article. But in some Greek texts, we have the ost being used without the definite article in other instances where you would normally expect it. And a lot of folks who think that the Trinity is in the Bible are happy to imagine that this is still referring to the God of Israel. It's just identifying Jesus as the God of Israel because obviously that's what the Trinity is, baby. That's what the Bible is saying. But we've got to, we've got to handful a very interesting commentary from people from before and after the Gospel of John, which is where this is most debated, who actually directly address what they're doing. And I want to start with phyllo. Phyllo of Alexandria was born at the end of the first century BCE, died around 50s, 50s, 60s CE. So it was alive during the life of Jesus. And he wrote a lot of texts way too much. He was Jewish, right? Yes, he was an early Jewish philosopher. So he was incorporating a lot of stoic and middle platonic philosophy into Judaism. Kind of, it's a little bit synchrotistic. But basically trying to show that Judaism fits within a Greek philosophical worldview. But he talks a lot about the logos. And this is translated word most of the time in English translations, the word of God, for instance, is in Greek as logos, and when he's talking about the logos, he's largely borrowing this framework from Greco-Roman philosophy because starting with Plato, but also including stoicism, they had this concept of the logos as God's rationality. And it could be the rationality that was inside God's head. So like you have an idea that's inside your head. But then once you speak it, it is expressed and it is now outside of you. And it is separate from you. And so the logos can be can be both things. But there's a lot more. When you say that it's like rationality, then it makes sense to me that logos would be the root word of our logic. Yes. Yeah. That's exactly right. So we have a phylo in a text called "On Dreams." Like I said, he wrote about too many things. But he's examining a lot of different ways that God is influencing dreams and stuff like that. But there's one part where he's talking about Genesis 31 13. And this is where God. Well, it says that it's the angel of the Lord appears to Jacob. And then in verse 13 says, "I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed the altar and all that kind of stuff." And phylo is quoting the Greek translation, which doesn't say that. It says, "I am the God that anointed you or that appeared to you in the place of God." Because Bethel means house of God. And so the Greek translators just thought, "Oh, this is a sentence, not a name." And so phylo is like, "Huh, this is weird. Let's consider whether there are two gods." And now I'm quoting from "On Dreams Book One" starting in section 228. "For we read, I am the God that appeared to the not in my place, but in the place of God, as though it were another." What are we to say then? He that is truly God is one, but those that are improperly so-called are more than one. Accordingly, the Holy Word in the present instance has indicated him who is truly God by means of the articles, saying, "I am the God," definite article, "the," while it omits the article when mentioning him who is improperly so-called, saying, "Who appeared to the in the place, not of the God, but simply of God." Here it gives the title of God to his chief logos, his chief word, not from any superstitious nicety in applying names, but with one aim before him to use words to express facts. And so what Filos basically is saying is that you have one entity that is truly in essence God, and then you have other entities that can just be referred to as God without actually being God, and when the scriptures are referring to those entities as God, even though they're not God, it omits the definite article. And- They're not the God, they're just God. That's somehow a lower place in the- Yeah, and a way to think of it is to understand God here, it's in the qualitative sense. Okay. So it would be kind of like another word for God in English coming through different roots as deity. Right. And you could say, "There's the deity, and then there's deity." Right. And so, so and so is not the deity, so and so is just deity. And so it kind of means divine. Right. And so- And Filos talks about this elsewhere, there's a part where he's talking about passage in Genesis where he's wondering why God tells somebody to come up to God, I think it is. And he says, "Why not come up to me or something like that?" And he says that it's not proper to refer to this entity as as the God because this is the second God, God's chief logos, God's word. So Filos explicitly refers to the word of God as a second God. Okay. And so when this is being written less than a century prior to the gospel of John, and the gospel of John seems to be relying an awful lot on very similar philosophical frameworks, but then we get to this really interesting discussion in Justin Martyr. And Justin Martyr is- Well, we should mention the part of the gospel of John that- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That we're that we're sort of talking about, which is John 1-1, right? Well, John 1-1 is the main one, but there are a few places where you have that also being used without the definite article where we might expect the definite article if it's referring to the God of Israel. But yes, John 1-1 says in the beginning was the word and the word was "prost ontoun", which means with God or toward God or next to God. And then it says, "Kethyocino logos" and "theos" was the word. And that's traditionally translated and the word was God, which would identify the word as the very God of Israel. But there's no definite article there. And in this situation, the syntactical relationship indicates that the word that "os" is not being used to identify a specific God but is used in the qualitative sense to mean deity or divine. And so the author could be appealing to something very close to what what Philo is saying that the law does- The author of the gospel of John came after Philo. The gospel was written after- so could have been aware of Philo's writing? I think almost certainly aware of Philo's writing because there's because the the logos theology that we find in John is resonates quite a lot with what the logos theology that we find in Philo. Okay, so when the author of John excludes that definite article, it's likely an intentional thing that's informed by Philo's ideas of how that definite article operates. In this particular instance, we wouldn't necessarily expect the definite article. So it's not definitive there. Okay. But I think what the author is doing is it's you using the the word God with this understanding that there can be the God and then there can be Thing the entities that are improperly so called are people who carry the label without being God So so you could say and the word was with God and the word was divine or the word was also Deity in some way but but not conflate them as the same Right, it's not it's not equating them and there's another interesting occurrence in John 10 where a lot of people will point out that the Jesus's Jewish opponents understood that he was Identifying as the very God of Israel when he says I and the Father are one and they take up rocks to stone him and In verse 33 and Jesus is like ah for which of my good works are you stoning me and they say we're not stoning you for your good works We're stoning you because you being human make yourself God now if you look in an English translation that's capital G God It makes it sound like they're saying you're claiming to be the God of Israel right But I don't think that's what's going on because in the Greek there should be a definite article there and there's not okay And so I think and there are a lot of later manuscripts that add the definite article because they're like huh Why doesn't have a definite it should have a definite article put a definite article in there but without the article if We keep filo's statement in mind the author of John could be representing the Jewish foes of Jesus as understanding Jesus to be claiming to be not necessarily the God of Israel, but at least divine right much like the logos and I think there's some parallelism going on here too because The word Anthropos which means human also does not have a definite article and so I mean just the symmetry of the accusation is You are human and that's a qualitative Statement and you're making yourself divine also a qualitative statement, so it would be it would be more parallel that way and Jesus's response is Now look at Psalm 82 where the scripture says you are gods talking to humans It's very clearly not saying you are the God of Israel just that you're your divinities your gods and and so Jesus's defense makes no sense if we understand this passage to be talking about The accusation that Jesus is claiming to be the very God of Israel right and so there are a handful of instances in the gospel of John where we have this use of Thelus without the definite article that in light of Philo's statement probably indicates an intentional reference to the logos as divine not as the very God of Israel All right, and then and then you might say well That was so much later than Philo John's not doing that but we find very similar statements Or discussions in even later authors as late as the third century CE But I want to I want to stop first in Justin Martyr who's writing around 150 CE So right around the dead center of the second century CE and Justin is actually talking to This is a text called dialogue with trifo and it's it's this Alectic back and forth between Justin and a Jewish thinker and Justin is just trying to prove Christianity true from the Jewish scriptures But he says in this in this one section I shall attempt to prove my assertion namely that there exists and is mentioned in scripture another God and Lord under the creator of all things who is also called an angel and we have multiple references to Jesus as the logos the angel and another God and A little bit down he says then if I could not prove to you from the scriptures that one of these three and he's talking about Genesis 18 where the three entities appear to Abraham if I could not prove to you from the scriptures that one of these three is God And yet is termed an angel because as stated above he delivered the messages of God the creator of all to whom so ever God desires and on and on and on so he's talking about how there's a being that is not God that is referred to as God Yeah, then he says let us return to the scriptures and I shall try to convince you that he who is said to have appeared to Abraham Jacob and Moses is called God now all these times Jesus has been referred to as God Justin martyr has omitted the death and the article hmm and he says He who is said to have appeared to Abraham Jacob and Moses and is called God is Distinct from God the creator distinct that is in number But not in mind and the word in Greek Gnomi which is translated here mind is like will Intent it doesn't mean it doesn't mean substance or essence it just means in intent or in will so Justin martyr is doing the same thing that Philo explains Using the word God without the definite article to refer to the word of God to the logos whom Justin understands to be Jesus And then I think one of the most illuminating references comes from origin of Alexandria So this is a writer a theologian and all Who's in Alexandria in the early third century CE and is talking about John one one And he says John has used the articles in one place and omitted them in another very Precisely and not as though he did not understand the precision of the Greek language in the case of the word He adds the article the but in the case of the noun God He inserts it in one place and omits it in another For he adds the article when the noun God stands for the uncreated cause of the universe But he omits it when the word is referred to as God And as the God and God differ in these places So perhaps the word and word differ and he goes on to talk about for like three pages about what it means for God and the words to be referred to as the God versus just God and the word versus just word so Even as late as the third this is like 220 230 CE This is almost 200 years after philo is writing we have multiple authors who are who are either mimicking what philo is talking about or are quite explicitly addressing What John is talking about as reflecting philos idea that this is there's a distinction to be made here between Hothios the God and just Thelios God I guess one of the questions that that that origin quote brings up for me is Is was the author of the gospel of John a good writer like was he was he a careful and good writer because if so Then yeah, it stands to reason that these would be conscious choices that the this writer is making Yeah, if they are you know expert in The language Then it makes sense to say that these were conscious decisions Yeah, the author of the gospel John is generally treated as a competence writer certainly not the the most flowery prose that has ever probed but But is is definitely not a clumsy or an uncareful Writer now in terms of editing as another story as we've talked about with Hugo Mendes, but But in terms of the Greek yeah, I think the author is considered competent and and I want to read one more portion from origin Oh, okay, he says the God therefore is the true God the others Are gods formed according to him as images of the prototype But again the archetypal image of the many images is the word with the God who was in The beginning by being with the God he always continues to be God Mm without the definite article so right so very clearly origin is Is has either notice what phyllo is doing and and notice that John is doing the same thing or has just noticed This pattern in John independent of phyllo and is arriving at a very similar conclusion I happen to think he probably is aware of of phyllo and and is saying hey, that's that's a framework for understanding what the author of the gospel is John of John is doing but origin was also Probably the quintessential proto-Trinitarian who thought that that Jesus was God So we I think what what's happening is is this is a discussion about this vestige of the way Earlier authors are are talking about the word as distinct from God and origin is noticing it even though he's already developing a far more sophisticated trinitarian philosophy. Even though I think he was a bit of a sort of ordinationist and thought that the word in Jesus was less than. Even if there are some scholars who argue that he was no subordinationist and was one of the first true trinitarians. But remains to be seen in my opinion. Well, and it points out that, you know, as we discuss the the trinity and whatever, and we've talked about the trinity idea before, it was a later innovation. It was not like it developed over a long time after all of this was written after after all of the yeah, the books of the New Testament were written. Yeah, and even after Justin Martyr, because I think he says multiple times the word is another God. Yeah. So yeah, you don't have the, no, no, it's very God from very God quite yet. Yeah, interesting. There you go. I like it when we do a little bit of a little bit of grammatical geek out. I enjoy those moments that I think that's a lot of fun. I think so too. So okay, I want to hear the the DMV, the Dan McClillin translation of John one one. How would you how would you do it? So for an academic audience, I would say and the word was deity. But I that would require translating the osse of deity in the other places as well. And the word was with the deity and the word was deity. I think that would be most precise. But deity is a is a pretty cumbersome word for a lot of people. So for the general public, I would translate it divine. Okay, so and the word was with God and the word was divine. Yeah. Okay, interesting. Well, there you have it friends. If you would like to become a part of making this show happen every week, every episode you can go to our patreon over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Sign up there. Give us a little bit of money. You get access to an early and add free version of every episode. You can get access to the the after party with bonus content every week. And you can make our hearts swell with joy. And that's always nice. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. Thanks to JJ for being our producer. And we'll talk to you all next time. Bye everybody.