The REAL Story Behind The 1947 Dead Sea Scrolls Discovery | Dan Hummel

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 5-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. So, Alessi Alamon, who's worked with me for a very long time, has had a chance to talk with you. And he said you are the guy when it comes to looking at modern day religion through the scope of geopolitics and how things have been maybe, you know, changed all over the place. How'd you even end up like covering this kind of topic? It's obviously like hot button at the moment right now, but certainly a tough space where there's people with a lot of opinions in it. Yeah, so I'm a historian. So I came to all the stuff we're going to talk about today from being trained as a historian. I was really interested as a grad student in merging diplomatic history, which is how you, you know, study sort of the relations between different states and then religious history. And there's a bunch of different topics you could do on that. But the one I picked was Christian Zionism. I didn't pick it in 20. This was like early 2010s. I didn't do it because it was it wasn't particularly hot topic then. I mean, it was something that some people had studied and some hadn't. But I grew up an evangelical Christian. I started. I sort of knew a bit of this world of the evangelical arguments for supporting Israel. Where'd you grow up? I grew up. So I was a missionary kid. So that's my parents were Christian missionaries. And that meant that we moved around a lot. So I was born in Orange County, California. Both my parents are from there, but then moved to Texas when I was a baby and then ultimately moved to Germany. So I went to seven. I was in Germany. You were doing some missions, some Tom Cruise missions. That's right. My parents were for sure. Actually, it was a really exciting time for them. As American Christian missionaries, this would be in the late eighties. So there was still an East and West Germany and they were there and we were there as a family when the Berlin Wall came down in 89 and then the country reunified as what we know today as Germany. And so East Germany was communist up until then and was very much opposed to organized religion, particularly sort of American Christianity. So my parents were there and got to work in a very what we call in the mission world. Sort of an open field at that point. So right after reunification, there was a bunch of church planting and growing in East Germany. So we were there for four years, moved back to California and then ultimately landed in Colorado Springs, which in the nineties was one of the hotspots for evangelical organizations moving and cheap land, growing economy, sort of centrally located if you think it's not on either the coast, so you can fly to both the coast a little quicker. And a beautiful place, Rocky Mountain is great. So I ended up spending a pretty normal middle school, high school in Colorado, Colorado Springs. I met my wife in Colorado Springs. We ended up dating all through college at Colorado State. That's where I really got interested in history was at Colorado State and particularly history that I was in middle school when 9-11 happened. Iraq War followed when I was in high school. So I was very interested in. Foreign policy and the Middle East in particular. So at Colorado State, I majored in history and philosophy. And then I went back. We were just talking about this before I graduated in 2007. Job market is pretty rough. So as many people who graduate with a history degree do, they just go back and do more schooling. And that's what I did. And so I ended up taking classes in Arabic, the language and then Middle East history and really got into that. So I ended up getting a master's degree in. Middle East studies at Colorado State. Hey, guys, three quick things. Number one, if you haven't subscribed, please subscribe to huge, huge help. Number two, if you'd like to join my Patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes, you can join via the link in my description or in the pinned comment below. And number three, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make content from the show and make money, you can join via the discord link in my description below. You still speak Arabic a little bit. I do not. I never really spoke it. I was really interested in reading it. So as a historian. The sort of the the coin of the realm is being able to read sources. And and so as someone who is interested in diplomatic history, you want to be able to read the transcripts or the memos that are being sent between different officials. So I didn't you know, that was part of the frustration of taking Arabic at a place like Colorado State is they really emphasize the the you could say the social and casual talking or verbal skills. And I was really interested in, like, pretty narrow. Vocab on government functions and things like that. I didn't really care about the does that say bomb, please come on, intelligence and, you know, economic terms, all that kind of stuff. So so I know I can't speak it, but I did have that training and and that fit into my Ph.D. program at University of Wisconsin, where I ended up taking Hebrew, modern Hebrew. And I did actually more of that than than the Arabic because of the topic I picked, Christian Zionism. I was very interested in understanding how did the Israeli government think about and perceive American Christianity? And what year is that where you're in grad school looking at that approximately? Yeah, so I went to we moved to Madison, my wife and I, in 2010. OK, so from 2010 to 2015, I graduated 2016. I was at Madison. I spent a year in Israel. There's a great exchange program with a it's called the Mossy program at UW with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. So every year there's a bunch of students that go to. They go to the Hebrew U from UW Madison and vice versa. So there's these I what was that like? It was crazy. It was a really interesting year. This was 2012. It was basically July 2012 to July 2013. There was a Gaza incursion during that. I believe it was Pillar of Smoke or something was the name of the operation. And it was the first time I'd ever had like a missile siren in my life. So that happened for a few weeks. There were a bunch of people. There were a bunch of missile sirens. You know, we were students, so or I was a student. And so we were very we lived on a little the whole year, but we got to live right down next to the old city, which is, you know, historic space. We're about five minute walk from there on Yaffo Street. So it was an eye opening year. I had very little knowledge on the personal knowledge of of Israel as a country, of the West Bank, of any of that stuff. What do you think of it? I think it's a beautiful place to live in there for a full year. So growing up in the evangelical world, you are presented with a very spiritual and sort of, yeah, spiritual and clean, I guess you could say, image of what Israel is like. And I think a lot of people who go on a tour of Israel, particularly Christians in America, they spend 10 to 14 days there. I think they get that view because they get to see the nice things that are built specifically for. Mm hmm. Tourists. When you live there, you realize it's no different than any other place on the planet in a lot of ways. I mean, there's plumbing and there's electricity, there's dust, you know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, but growing up in a in a religious home where Israel, the nation of Israel, sort of spoken about is like fulfillment of prophecy. You just get a high view of like, oh, this must be like like there's some liminal space I'm going to cross and it's going to be something more than what the rest of the earth is. And then you take a shit in your toilet clogs and it's all reality. I got you. That's right. And people are just. As or maybe even more. There are a lot of nice people there, but, you know, just as grumpy and short with each other as anywhere else. It definitely opens your eyes to the reality of the occupation. You know, we lived in downtown Jerusalem. It wasn't more than five miles away. Our major checkpoints that if you're not an American citizen or Israeli citizen, you can't really, you know, cross at any point. And where do they where do those checkpoints go into? The ones I'm thinking about the West Bank. So. Jerusalem is sort of right on the eastern edge of the pre 1967 lines. That's right. And in fact, East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel in 1967. And that's one of these things that's being, you know, in some future diplomatic solution, something with East Jerusalem will have to happen. So that's even closer than five miles. I mean, that would have been a ten minute walk for me. But but East Jerusalem is different. It was annexed so that it's open flow. Anyone can sort of go on either side of the city, but not the case in the West Bank. So you're saying that before you took this year, by the way, how long had you been in grad school at that point, studying specifically like Christian Zionism, Zionism related topics? Oh, it's Chris. I'm specifically very little. So the first couple of years of a Ph.D. program, you're doing general classes. So you take a class on American economic history and another one on religious history. 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 a chance to get a copy of my book. I'm going to give you my top ten book recommendations right now. 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 is a big help and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below. So I almost I knew almost nothing I'd read after you take those classes, you have to do. What is called a prospectus for your dissertation, so you have to write up about 20 pages and say, this is what I want to study and this is what I intend to find. It's a total shot in the dark. Um, you're sort of just trying to project like what you think you'll find. So I'd read maybe, you know, five books or something on, uh, modern Israel and, uh, Christian Zionism. So I had very little background knowledge. I was reading a lot that whole sort of in the six months to the lead up, I was reading a bunch of articles and stuff. Was it, was any of it morphing your opinion to something new as opposed to what you had just heard growing up? I'm going to come back to your childhood a little bit, but I like staying with this cause this is interesting. You spent a full year there early on. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so one of the biggest, uh, there were a ton of things I just had no idea about before, um, before moving there. One of the ones specific on my topic was when I read about Christian Zionism from largely American historians and political scientists, I assumed it was mostly an American movement. I assume the most, and there's a sort of famous or infamous, whatever, uh, journal, articles from the eighties and nineties that would talk about the oddness of like Southern Baptist preachers meeting with Israeli officials and how like big clash of cultures that is. When I went there, I realized actually the, the Christians who are interested in Israel for prophecy reasons or theological reasons, the vast majority of them are not American. They're Christians from what we call the global South. So from South America, from, uh, Africa, from Asia, like in terms of numbers, um, I went, I went to different sort of, uh, as an observer, went to rallies. Um, one of them had 5,000 people in the room. I would guess there were no more than a few hundred Americans. As an observer. As an observer. That's right. I was, um, I did actually a lot of that. That's one of the, the, uh, things that is not, historians tend not to do that as much as, as a anthropologist or something, but, um, no, I was not waving my flag, uh, at the same time. You didn't put the fist in the air just to pretend to blend in? It's also a different type of Christianity. So, so the, the, the typical, um, Christians at these things are very charismatic. They speak in tongues. They raise their hands. Um, this, this is very common in that world. I didn't grow up in that world. So I, I felt out of place just even though we're all sort of Christians. Um, it was not my type of worship music. It was not, I don't speak in tongues. Um, I don't sort of, uh, I mean, I remember there were healings happening in the room, you know, people claiming to be healed from long-term sicknesses and things like that. Speaking in tongues though? Yeah. You know what that is? Like the Voldemort kind of speak? A version of that. Well, I don't, that would be really offensive to the, to the Pentecostals. But the idea is that the Holy Spirit gifts is sort of like speaking through you and it's in a language that you don't understand, but it's a holy language. So, um, this is very, I mean, there's hundreds of millions of Christians who, who do this. Um, hundreds of millions. Oh yeah. Yeah. Around the world for sure. Yeah. Does, does it have any like real patterns to it or is it just like making sounds? I'm a little skeptical. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, many, many people are skeptical as we get older. Many of us fight the good old battle of trying to keep good, healthy hair up top. And one of the best things you can do for healthy hair upkeep is using red light therapy. That's why you got to check out my friends at I restore and their red light therapy cap. 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Just head to iRestore.com, link in my description below, and use code JULIAN at checkout to get your discount on the iRestore Elite Helmet or the Illumina Face Mask. Once again, that's code JULIAN at iRestore.com, link in my description below. Please support our show and tell them I sent you. And most importantly, give your hair and skin the upgrade they deserve so you can feel confident and refreshed. By the way, someone who does this is Paula White Kane, who's Trump's spiritual advisor. Oh, she's a real gem. You can get YouTube videos of her speaking in tongues. Yeah, that's not exactly an endorsement for it. Yeah, in most cases, the tongue being spoken is, it's only, it's sort of a, again, I'm on the outside of it, but no one understands it except for the Holy Spirit. So the original, so this is about 100 and so years old, 1906 is when the Pentecostal movement started. The original first years after that, so 1906 to 1916, say, what was meant by speaking in tongues was a miraculous ability to speak in another human language that you didn't know. So you could go, to get back to missionary work, you could go as just a total uneducated in the sense of Japanese language to Japan, and the Holy Spirit would gift you the ability to speak in Japanese when you got there. And so there were reports of that. They were, of course, plenty of people were skeptical even within the Christian world. But that was the original. The original idea of what speaking in tongues was, it developed over time to be something that was much more about this language that no one can understand. Now, other people might have the gift of translating it. That's another one of these gifts. You translate? The thing that no one else can understand. But in most cases, that's not happening. It's only sort of an utterance that, you know, you're supposed to basically acknowledge the spiritual power of the person doing it. Dave, can we pull up Paula Deen doing this? Paula Kane. White Kane. Paula Deen. Paula Deen, I think. Sorry, I did. You know what? I did that on another podcast. I'm sorry, Paula Deen. That's twice now. Damn it. Yeah, it's Paula Kane White. Is that what you said? Paula White Kane. Paula White Kane. And Kane is the journey guy, I think. Yeah. All right. So she really does this. Is this Paula White speaking in tongues with subtitles? We should leave the subtitles on. This might be the gift of translation right here. All right, let's see. That's not what I thought it was going to sound like. So the idea, too, is when they, when they, do the video on the crowd, is that every, a lot of those people are doing the same thing, but they don't have the mic. So, right. But yeah, so that's, a version of that is one of the things I experienced going to these Christian Zionist rallies in Israel. And that was just totally, so again, if you read the literature still, I think this is the case, though there's been a lot of good literature in recent years. But still, when you read the literature, you assume what you're going to see is a bunch of Southern Baptists who are pro-Israel. And they're there, but they're like in a little corner of the, of the stadium or the, the auditorium. And the vast majority of these people are from Nigeria or Brazil or South Korea. And they're, they're still very pro-Israel. We don't care about them as much when we talk about geopolitics, because Brazil and Nigeria aren't as important geopolitically as the U.S. is to the fate of the state of Israel. But in terms of numbers, there's way more of them there. So that was one of the things I wrote a book in 2019. It was my dissertation turned into a book. And it was a book that I wrote in 2019. And it was a book where I spent an extra year writing that to get a handle on like, what is what's now called global Christian Zionism? What is this movement that is somewhat connected to the American political religious scene, but also is its own life? And to try to sort of see how are those things connected? And how are they basically different phenomena? All right, can I pull you back for one second, and then we'll come back around to that. And I just want to get an idea of like some of the origins of how you looked at this. So you'd mentioned at the beginning of the book, you were a Christian Zionist. And you were a Christian as a child, you were the son of Christian missionaries. So your parents were obviously highly involved living out their Christian spirit, like in the best kind of way traveling the world trying to spread the word. But that means as I'm taking it, it was really ingrained in you from a young child that you were going to be an evangelical Christian. This is what we believe. And, you know, this is what it is like, how would you describe how you came to believe in like the religion of Christianity? Was it just something that was always there? Therefore, you believed or did you have your own? Yeah, I had my own journey with it growing up where you're like, okay, I buy this, I don't buy that, yada, yada. You're asking me for my testimony, right? We called in the evangelical world, right? So, yeah, I did. I never had, I don't remember a time where I didn't sort of just assume Christianity was true, having grown up in it. But I do have my sort of conversion story or the day, I don't know the actual date. But when I was seven, so this was back, we moved back from Germany. We were in California for a year before moving to Colorado. I remember walking with my dad along the street. Yeah. Our house was on and doing a version of what's called the sinner's prayer. So like praying to God that I'm a sinner, I need forgiveness. I, you know, I'm asking you to come into my heart, Jesus, and I want to follow you, that type of prayer. So I sort of date my formal status as a Christian, I guess you could say to that. So I was seven. I never had like a huge rebellious phase where I rejected all that and tried out other religions or something. But I definitely in college, I was a history and philosophy major at a major state school. So most of my professors were not Christians. Some of the philosophy professors were not Christians. So I was a were very opposed to Christianity, or at least they were opposed to any type of Christianity that sort of relied on theology to argue for the validity of Christianity. And so that was a challenging period. I never had a crisis of faith, but I remember I read a ton. And that's where I really got confirmed that like, oh, I think I've always sort of believed this as a kid. I now have reasons that I can actually talk about for why I believe this. Some of that was reading people like C.S. Lewis, which is sort of very common. Some of this reading, this was sort of before my time, but I read his stuff, a guy named Francis Schaeffer, who in the 1970s and 80s wrote a bunch of books thinking about modern thought and culture and how Christianity sort of intersected with that. And then some of it was reading around some of these hot issues. This was back in the 2000s. The New Atheists were a big deal then. So people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. And so I read their stuff. I read the rebuttals to their stuff. And I ended up sort of becoming much more intellectually mature, you could say, as a Christian. So I think the bigger change for me was coming out of the particular subculture of Christianity. 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And moving into a much, you could say, more broader tradition of Christianity that I definitely appreciate where I grew up. And particularly, I grew up really caring about the Bible and reading it for myself. So I like that. But in terms of the conclusions drawn, I now locate myself much more in a sort of general. Still evangelical, but Protestant Christianity. And that was the bigger. I mean, it's not nearly as dramatic to most people. But that was the bigger change was sort of like working through that, relating to my family, which many of them are still in that subculture. And then also thinking about. I now write about that. So I write about dispensationalism, Christian Zionism, how to write about that in a way that sort of respects where I came from, but is also pretty different in my conclusions. So you're going. You're going to. Even though you guys were moving around a bunch, you're going to churches all the time. As you're growing up, you're hearing pastors preach and all that. Do you remember the first times you heard them talk about the state of Israel and how it was framed? I honestly don't. No, I don't. But there's a moment. It couldn't have been the first time. But in Colorado Springs, I went to a megachurch. I've gone to megachurches a lot of my life. So these are these big 2000 plus membership churches. It's often in auditoriums. And it happened to be the megachurch that a guy named Jerry Jenkins went to. And Jerry Jenkins is one of the co-authors of the Left Behind novels, which were these really popular novels in the 90s and 2000s. It was a fictionalized version of the end times. The rapture was in the first book, and then the Antichrist and all that kind of stuff. This is a big touchpoint beyond just Christian culture in the 90s. The book sold 80 million copies or something. I think it was the best-selling. Yeah. series until Harry Potter or something like that. Really? Wow. At least in those few decades. And that guy went to our church. Now, it's a huge church, so it's like I never actually met him. But he was. One of the Sundays in the main service, we sort of gave him a round of applause or something. And I assume it was because he published a book, because they were publishing all these books. And that drove me to be more interested in that series. I ended up getting really into the Left Behind books as a 10-year-old. 11-year-old. And that's where I really started reading. So I guess it was reading more than hearing about Israel. Because in those books, the state of Israel plays a huge role, a good guy role, in what happens in the world. And then there's these particular characters who are Jewish that are very admirable and they're portrayed as really protagonist-type characters. And I think that was probably. So I was 10, 11. That was probably the first time I really was like, "Oh, that's a real. " They're talking about this country and I can see that country on the map. It's a real place. And it was very much inflected through those books and that particular theology that was informing those books. Got it. So what's that. There's that famous, I guess, verse in there that you'll hear Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee always quote. It says something like, "God protects those who protect Israel," and everything. Yeah, yeah. And I think where a lot of people go, "Wait a minute," is in the Bible when it's referring to that, it's referring to something different than the state that was created in 1948. Is that fair to say? Yeah. Well, that's the debate, is what is it referring to? So yeah, it's Genesis 12:3. So this is at the front end of the Bible. Oh, he's on it. He's going to. Oh yeah. This is probably the verse right now in this conversation. The verse. Yeah. There's a lot of verses. So this is the one you. It's like a move from Jay-Z to this. Here we go. So the first 11 chapters of Genesis are the creation, and then the Noah. The Noah's flood, and then the Tower of Babel. And so the Tower of Babel happens in chapter 11. What happens there again? So the humans try to build a tower up to heaven, and God confounds them and sort of disperses them all around the world. And many Christians traditionally thought this is where we get languages and even sort of racial and ethnic differences sort of as. Interesting. And so the idea here is humans had so much hubris that they thought they could reach God. And then God. Yeah. Sort of confounds them. And so this is in the story of. So the book of Genesis is setting up the world. God creates a beautiful world, humans screw it up. How's God going to correct it? And so Genesis 12 is where we're introduced to this character, Abram, who turns into Abraham. And this is one of the first things God tells Abraham. He says, "I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you, I will curse." And that actually is worked out through the rest of Genesis. Yeah. And it has sort of its own narrative purpose in the Bible. But what Christian Zionists do, what people like Ted Cruz do, is they make some interpretive jumps from, "Okay, this is a verse blessing Abram, Abraham." Now, Abraham is the father of the Israelites, and so is the father of the Jewish people, you could say. But the jump here is saying, "When God says, 'I will bless those who bless you,' God doesn't mean just Abraham. He means, 'All the people who are part of Abraham's family,' and that the nation of Israel today is in the lineage of Abraham from Genesis 12." In Ted Cruz's mind, that is a very easy move to make, because in dispensationalism, in the sort of conservative evangelical world, there's a lot of continuity between the Jewish people of the Old Testament and the state of Israel today. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And there's a lot of traditions, including, frankly, most Christian traditions, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, a lot of other Protestants. God has a chosen people, always, and they're called Israel. But in the Old Testament, that is the nation of Israel, the kingdom of Israel. In the New Testament, after Jesus comes, it's the church, and so, yeah. All right. Can I ask about the nation real quick? Yeah. Was there a specific geographic area given for that when they were referring to the nation, or was it an idea of a group of people themselves? So, in Genesis 12, there's no specific territory laid out, but just a few chapters later in Genesis 15, God restates the covenant, or this is the beginning of the covenant. So, another thing, like, "I'm gonna bless you as long as you serve me." And in that, there is territory laid out. And this is the very. When Tucker Carlson interviewed Mike Huckabee, the ambassador, the US ambassador to Israel, they got into a debate about this. And in Genesis 15, the territory is very vast. It's from the Nile to the Euphrates, is what God promises. So, that's, like, a lot of modern-day Egypt, all of modern-day Jordan, Iraq. Yeah, this is the greater Israel thing. Yeah, yeah. This is the greater Israel thing. So, in that text, that's what God promises Abraham, is, like, "Your descendants will have this land." So, that's another one of these sort of things where people have different takes on that. But. One question on this. You know, how do you even. Let's say that that was all exactly what it is and everything. How do you even draw everyone back to Abraham when there were so few people on the earth at the time that, frankly, his spawn is everywhere? And you also have. Like, here in America, we have a melting pot of everybody, right? In Israel, they have some of that, too, because they have people whose ethnicity is derived from that region of the world, and then they have people whose ethnicity is derived from. Eastern Europe, but they put it all under one umbrella. So, how do they put two and be able to fit you know that feels like a square and a square peg in a round hole to me yeah i i think for a lot of christians and frankly a lot of jews it's it's through um i mean i guess today they might do like dna testing or something um but it's through like this this through the mother i mean that's what the traditional jewish way is if your mother was jewish you're jewish so the idea here is that there's a continuous group of people that um at least in the bible are documented you know generation after generation and then when the biblical story ends um are continue to be you know sort of part of this community some of it's uh now there's always people that are not genetically related to israelites who are who are coming into the israelite kingdom so even there's the book of ruth so ruth is this character she's not israelite she's another nation she comes in and so it's never just um genetics but there is this idea that god has covenanted um himself to a particular people group largely genetic not not totally genetic and that that is a continual like sort of unit through history that um you know it has documentation going all the way from back then to the middle ages to to today uh there's a lot been a lot of people over the you know centuries who've been skeptical of that or said it's been it's been so diluted through all the different ways that of course a big part of the jewish stories they get scattered over and over again and so they're intermarrying and uh and that dilutes the understanding of who's in and who's out right so um the idea here is there's always been a remnant and the remnant can be traced and that um the you know the jews who founded the state of israel were part of that lineage and so the state of israel is um is part of that lineage and part of that too is the way that evangelicals understand the prophetic so the prophecy books in the bible talk about um israel will be scattered and then regathered in its land and so that that's something that for the for these evangelicals they see that as something that when the prophets said it would be fulfilled many many centuries in the future and so they see a continuity here which is these prophets spoke to a particular nation of israel back in say 600 bc and then in 1948 it's happening like the sort of prophecy is being fulfilled and so there's a continuity to the story there so that that's another way they would make that case okay you and i were talking off camera before we we got on about the nature of passed down text with any ancient text including in the context we were talking about it with the new testament where there's some arguments about when each gospel was written how long after the facts were they therefore what's true what's been changed what's not and i recognize that as i was telling you like all ancient texts there's some level of error there because humans are flawed and you know we change stories sometimes over time but like if there's a modicum of truth in a bunch of these texts i think that's really really interesting to me when it comes to the old testament text though i keep thinking this while you're talking and i don't even know if we've talked about this on a podcast i'm not entirely sure but when we're talking about like for example the book of genesis or you mentioned the the the book of ruth or the the book of revelations what what's the what do we know about the records of when these were written and and who wrote them and you know i guess it's best we can do it how long after the fact they're writing this stuff yeah yeah and that that's definitely not my uh my area specialty but i know the basics here and the basics are particularly the old the further back you go the less we know about um the origins of the texts like who originally wrote um you know the creation story um the the idea i mean the the sort of classic christian you know the the classic christian teachings that that moses did because in one of the books early books moses sort of inserts himself as the narrator but um but i think we can say moses probably did some of it there's probably a lot of other things going on i think a lot of the scholarship talks about there's an editor that comes along centuries later and sort of smooths it out and makes it a thematically linguistically more coherent and that we're talking about you know in the sort of uh 1000 to 800 bc uh time period um now the things in genesis are purported to be have happened you know thousands of years before that and and all that and and some of this is is um there's there's it's narrated in the bible that there's are discoveries of old scrolls in the temple of sort of after the king david era and so we at least from the stories in the bible we know that they're actually recovering their own scripture through the story of the bible um and so uh the the sort of you know you have some that are dated uh really old like that and then many scholars date the book of daniel as the last book written in the uh old testament and what do they date what did they base that on it being the last book written so some of it is is there are prophecies in that book that seem to be fulfilled in the second century so the depending on your metaphysics if you don't think prophecies are true then you would say well if the prophecy is fulfilled then this must have been written after that what are those prophecies so those are largely about uh the the destruction of different uh sort of kingdoms in the second century something having to do with like alexander the great and and the the consequences of his conquest of that whole sort of hellenistic area there's also part daniel's also partially written in aramaic and that's a language that's more to the what we call the second temple period so like the second century bc through the second century through 80 70 when the temple is destroyed and so it's the first time that we're talking about a book of the bible that has aramaic in it and so the idea is that's probably a later um written book so you're talking about a a collection of books that are written over like a thousand years and edited throughout all that time it seems like every ai expert you hear from recommends a different tool there's the big ones we first heard about when this was all starting like chat gpt and claude now there seems to be an ai program you can use that has some sort of specialty in anything one's better research another's better at writing you have several subscriptions that can't even talk to each other that's why i like using perplexity computer instead of locking you into one model it orchestrates leading ai models automatically picks the right one for each part of your project in what i do every day that could include things like researching the market finding the best flights to get guests in here and even automating some email follow-ups you give the computer the whole project and it breaks down the work into tasks and keeps going till it's finished the limited time only you can try perplexity computer yourself for free just go to pplx.ai julian that link is in my description below you can click it right down there that's pplx ai julian link in my description below to try perplexity computer today most ai tools answer questions perplexity computer completes full projects now by the time we get to um well certainly by the time of jesus but even before that there's a pretty standard uh text that that every jew is referring to as the law the prophets and um the poetry and and proverbs type type things that's where we get the word tanakh is is um tanakh so that's uh in english it'd be t-a-n-a-c-h okay um and and um this would be the torah um which would be the first five books and that's sort of the law um the i'm gonna forget the word now the neviim i think is the the um the prophets and then there's the historical books that would be like first and second kings first and second samuel they're just sort of narrating narrating through um the the history of israel and and and that's sort of the corpus that we call the old testament jews called the hebrew bible so by the time like jesus is referencing these various parts of the um the old testament during his you know during the gospels and um they're pretty set uh by point um so we know from that point what's interesting too is like when the dead sea scrolls were discovered in the in the 40s um so these are sort of uh you know they are from the first or second century and no one's really touched them between then and 1947. um these are in in caves that are just outside of um the dead sea in in modern-day israel and when those were discovered they had copies of say like the book of isaiah and that was really to scholars because it was like well if we can sort of see what they thought isaiah was like in the year 100 and and compared to today we'll know how much has changed since then and overall not much change there's a lot of grammatical things and small um small differences but the big you know the the 80 90 of what we have today is isaiah is what the the dead sea scroll people had as well it might even be more than that it was really like like there were tons and tons of sort of like you know historical things and part of that is um hebrew doesn't have vowels um and so it it it can be hard to know um exactly what words are and stuff like that yeah it also has a limited number of total words right i forget maybe it's like 30 or 40 000 words or something like that i might be misremembering that as opposed to other languages that much more yeah english certainly has way more yeah yeah and part of that's the verb structure so like all semitic languages hebrew has um you know a lot of words that come down to a root of three um consonants and then you you build up all different types of words out of that those consonants and so it creates a smaller sort of uh corpus of words than something like english which doesn't have that verb structure and also is global and assimilating words um all over the place can we pull up the discovery of the dead sea scrolls that's crazy that they find something that's like 1900 years later yeah and their nitpick and define grammatical changes and things like that but as you said conservatively speaking 80 and 90 so i mean there's a crazy political part of this too so it's 1947 so it's right at the um you know the creation of israel's like the next year and so this actually becomes tied up in a a sort of politics of um claiming who whose land is this right so it's like the dead sea community um was uh we think part of this like sort of a radical set called the essenes who were around the time that jesus was around there's some people have speculated that john the baptist might have been in a scene they were sort of separatists um and so uh so the idea here is like well if if if we can discover things in in the state of israel that are from the first century then like this you know that's a pre that that that that goes back before all the muslim conquests um and so it can be a claim by uh jews that like hey you know we're older here like we have of course they have the bible and um sort of these stories but these are like actual artifacts um being found and then most of the scholars who end up studying the dead sea scrolls first are either western american or french or british or israeli um scholars so um there's there's some pretty significant um uh israeli politicians who started out as as scholars or israeli scholars who who were studying the dead sea scrolls in the 40s and 50s as you and i both know so much of this stuff when it comes to these arguments where religion meets politics and stuff is based on semantics and based on narrative wouldn't you think that if you found something as 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's club.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 potentially groundbreaking is this you'd want to make sure you had representation from all the different types of religions or groups in the world and their best scholars to be able to come in all together and not even come to a consensus but everyone have a chance to review it and find what they can and then put it out to the public all the different perspectives and allow people to decide because i find it interesting when right away you say it's just some western guys and some israeli guys coming in and looking at this stuff when you know there's a whole big world out there of other types of people hey guys if you haven't already subscribed please hit that subscribe button it's a huge huge help thank you yes well so part of it would be yes there is a big world how many people have the expertise to read first century texts i do not um most people don't and and the people who do tended to be in the year nineteen forty-nine percent of the world in the year nineteen forty-seven tend to be in western universities um including the you know these uh some of these israeli scholars were trained in europe um in previous you know before world war ii and stuff like that so that's part of it i think they tried to give them credit they did try to make this a more uh cosmopolitan global effort to study these dead sea scrolls a big part of the effort was actually just understanding so these are um these are parchment papers wrapped around in sort of scrolls can we pull them up deep so while while dan's explaining this but there's a good picture of that yeah and and they were often in jars um in in and the reason they're even um still around is because they were in very very dry caves where um you know water's the the enemy of keeping paper and so you can see from the pictures there i mean there's like you know scraps a lot of these are like scraps you're like peeling apart layers of these scrolls so a big challenge was just understanding what did they say um and that's where uh you you can start you know you start pulling these away you see some of them are basically like the texts of of the bible um and you can then start comparing them to to the text we have now um so so a big challenge was that so they in that sense they gathered uh i mean it was under the auspices of the israeli government that's a big part of the politics here is who controls the caves and this is before it was created too so it's just like 47 is the discovery yeah so so 47 is the discovery and um there's a whole interesting story which i don't remember all the details to about who actually gets to buy these things because it's sort of on the black market for a while or it's on i mean these are recognized to be very valuable they're discovered i believe by some shepherds who yeah let's pull that up who's sheep um or or uh other animals sort of like go into one of these caves so deep scattered right here the first seven original dead sea scrolls found in 1947 were initially bought from bedouin shepherds by two distinct buyers through bethlehem antiques dealers archaeologist eleazar alipa sukranik bought three skulls scrolls for the hebrew university and archbishop mar athenas yeshua samuel bought the other four for the syrian orthodox church yeah can we hit the wikipedia the cia pedia one right there dave let's just see what they what they say so the dead sea scrolls to go up a little bit sorry dead sea scrolls is the narrow sense identical with the scrolls or a set of ancient jewish biblical manuscripts from the second temple period that's that like hundred year kind of thing you were saying okay they were they were discovered over a period of 10 years between 1946 and 56 at the kamran caves near ein fishkin in the west bank in the northern shore of the dead sea dating from the third century bce to the first century ce the dead sea scrolls include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in the various jewish and christian biblical canons including dudo canonical deuterocanonical manuscripts from the late second temple judaism as well as extra biblical books as such they cast new light on the emergence of rabbinic judaism and christianity and their relationship with jewish religious traditions in the wider sense the dead sea scrolls also include similar findings and elsewhere in the judean desert and are sometimes called judean desert scrolls some of the scrolls found outside kamran are from later centuries almost all of the 15 000 scrolls and scroll fragments are held in the shrine of the book at the israel museum in jerusalem so they were bought off these guys who were selling them did we ever get the story of how they like they just walked into the caves one day and they're like oh shit i believe the story is they had like an errant animal like either a sheep or something that went into one of these caves and these caves are weird i don't know if you can pull up the caves are sort of like on a at least some of them are on a cliff and so it it's not somewhere where people would be walking by regularly and obviously for centuries no one you know uh no one walked by yeah so you see like the top left yeah see the one over one over right there whoa so all those holes right there right those are the caves yeah so obviously is that the dead sea down below like we're looking from where the dead sea is or am i uh that's a good question uh i don't know damn it dan you're supposed to know my geography is not not that good but um but yeah they're right there um you can go to them today or you can you i don't know if you can go in them but you can go and drive by them um still today yeah look at that one on the left do you see it gray on the far left over yeah yeah perfect oh are those people those are people inside are they living inside wait they have like cavemen yeah i think those oh they're excavators okay well they were they were peering out like they were trolls under the yeah sorry excavators all right wow it's so so a sheep went in there i think that's the sort of um that's the folk history i don't know if there's like a better documentation of that but the idea is like they stumbled upon them shout out to that sheep right right um so yeah so for centuries no one knew these existed if they had they probably would have done something with them and it's just through the the sort of fortune of the the dry desert that they were preserved and um and so they become this huge bombshell i mean it's sort of a it's a it's a really dramatic moment in archaeology history which doesn't have too many dramatic moments where you suddenly get to pull back almost 2 000 years and see like oh how much of this is human construction between then and now and uh yeah what's interesting though too is is going back to who who got to do this so as you mentioned western some israeli scholars did this it's actually not the so a lot of those scholars actually ended up becoming quite um they were not zionists in the way that we might think of christian zionists today even if they were christian um they were actually many of them became critical of of israeli policy because for an archaeologist your desire is to preserve whatever is around wars don't preserve things and um and for most of these these archaeologists they wanted access to the whole region and besides israel the whole region is full of arab and you know turkey and uh iran um of nations that are hostile to israel and so um so so there's there's famous um sort of archaeologists in the 60s and 70s who are very critical of israel because um in a if you want to give them credit they want open they don't want war they want to preserve things If you think about just their own self-interest, they want to be on the good side of Arab countries because they want access to Jordan. They want access to Egypt. And to be very pro-Israel is a quick way to sort of get on the bad list of those countries. Not going to get you inside the bars there. Yeah. I feel you. So they find all this stuff, and what was interesting there in the language is how when they're describing these books of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or these scrolls I should say, where it's between, I want to say it was like 3rd century B.C. and 1st century C.E. Yeah. And it used some sort of phrase like the Judaic and then Christian traditions. Yeah. Obviously, and I'm way oversimplifying here. You can go way more academic on me. But with Judaism, they follow the Torah. Which is effectively the Old Testament, right? And then with Christianity, it adds in the New Testament, and this figure is a Messiah, Jesus Christ. And that's where the difference between the two religions are. So when they say they found stuff within those traditions, thinking of the timeline, it's overlapping for before, during, and after Christ based on the years right there. But how do they – if you're finding both, how do you make sense of deciding that both can be right? And let me ask that. In a better way. If Christianity is right, the Messiah happened, and it was Jesus. And it already – it happened. And therefore, the Judaism religion that's waiting for the Messiah to happen is incorrect. If Judaism is correct, Jesus was just a guy who talked, and he wasn't an actual Messiah. So not that I care, but like it has to be one or the other there. But it sounds like they found evidence and said, well, it can all be true. Or am I just misunderstanding? I think what they were saying there was that the – so the Old Testament texts that were in the scrolls are claimed by both Christians and Jews. So Christians claim the Old Testament as part of their scripture. Jews claim the Hebrew Bible. So if you find a scroll of Isaiah or Jeremiah, it's both interesting to Christians and to Jews. Got it. Now, I mean you bring up a much sort of bigger question about sort of how do – how does Judaism and Christianity, how do Jews and Christians think about themselves in relation to each other? And for a lot of the last 2,000 years, it's been a story of conflict and antithesis. The idea that, like you said, that Jesus came and sort of in the theological language we use now, sort of the church superseded Israel. So superseding as taking the place of. So yeah, God worked with Jews in the Old Testament. Now he's working with anyone who believes. He believes in Jesus. And so the implications of that theologically, if you look at like Augustine, he says, well, the Jews are going to stick around but as an example of what happens when a people rejects Jesus. They're going to wander. They're not going to have a state. They're going to be guests in other people's lands. And it will be a good teaching tool for the rest of us to remember what happens. So that's what Augustine said. That was in the 4th century. What about the other religions that do have states, though, that don't accept Jesus? How did he? Yeah, so he would say, I mean, this is part of the particular thing is like there's a particular both, you could say closeness and animosity between Jews and Christians because of the claim that, you know, both are claiming the Old Testament. And so that wasn't, Augustine wasn't creating a bigger, I guess, yeah, theology of you only get a state if you're a Christian type thing. But he was saying the particular way that the Jewish people lost. Yeah, they lost their sovereignty, particularly they were occupied by the Romans. And then in the year 70, they tried to revolt or they tried to vote in 67. And by 70, you know, the Romans come in, destroy their temple, scatter them. The Roman army puts salt on where the temple is as a sign of like nothing will grow here ever again. And then since then, you know, up until Augustine's time, up until you could say the 20th century, Jews are wandering. People, they don't get to claim statehood. So Augustine was saying that throughout the Middle Ages, you get other types of Christian views. This is where like the anti-Jewish idea of like blood libel comes from. There's also a bigger theological idea. So the idea that the Old Testament is about laws and rules and the New Testament is about grace and love. And so Christianity is a superior religion to Judaism. These are sort of the categories that. Christians and Jews have through the 20th century. So what changed? Yeah. And again, I don't know if it were up to me. No one would fight over this stuff. You believe what you want to believe. We all have in common that we don't know what the fuck happens to the lights go out anyway. But since people do, and this is like a really big deal, the split in the 20th century, it sounds like obviously it's even before 1948 when an actual state forms. But what changes such that suddenly there's now a group of Christians who become. You know, rabidly in support of like the Jewish state in particularly. Yeah. Well, it's part of a bigger movement, you could say, between Jews and Christians. So some of what happens is you get more liberal ideas of religion in the 19th century that are less exclusivist. And so you get Christians who say, yeah, Jesus is a way to the afterlife, to heaven, but it doesn't have to be the only way. And so in 1893, there's a world fair in Chicago. It's something called the World Parliament of Religions put on by these more liberal people. The World Parliament of Religions. Yeah. Funky. Yeah, let's Google that. Pull up some images of that. Interesting. And so you're getting not just Muslims, Jews, and Christians, but you're getting Hindu and Buddhist leaders. And yeah, sometimes it looks. So they're all in their different garb. So that's it. That's in 1890, September 11th to 27th in 1893. Yeah. It's all like chilling. So this is interesting. This is in Chicago. And the idea here is maybe there's a larger truth that all the religions are pointing toward. So that's one thing that just sort of softens some of the edges. Another is by the 20s and 30s, you start getting this idea that the difference between communism and then fascism and the West is this religious tradition that goes back to the Hebrew Bible. And so you start getting this is where the term Judeo-Christianity. comes from. Oh, it comes from that? From the 20s and 30s. All right. Can you explain that some more like in detail? Yeah. How specifically that rose? So the idea here is it's really important that it's in the 20s and 30s. So it's post-World War I. Yep. Bolshevik Revolution happens. Major Red Scare in the US. Mm-hmm. And one of the questions that a lot of Americans are asking is sort of what makes democracy and capitalism distinct from communism? And one of the things that a lot of not just people like Woodrow Wilson would come up with this, but not just politicians come up with is, well, these ideas like democracy and capitalism are based on Christianity or Christian ideas or more to the point, biblical ideas. So that's interesting. Yeah. They base capitalism on Christian ideas. How do they square that? Yeah. So capitalism would be like the Bible assumes sort of something like property. Like property rights. A lot of the rights language is in this era said like rights aren't just a natural thing out there. Like we have to source them. And this goes back to people are endowed by their creator with life, liberty, and pursuit. Right? So it goes to sort of this idea of this tradition of Western liberalism that isn't Christian per se but is inspired by sort of Christian ideas. A key text here is in Genesis 1. When God creates man and woman, he creates them in his image. And so the idea is like every person, every man and woman is endowed by their creator with the image of God on them. So there's like a dignity to the individual person. A lot of this was about differentiating the collectivism of Bolshevism and communism and the individuality that was at the heart of Western ideas of rights and you get capitalism and democracy and things coming out of that. It's interesting how that can go. Because like it's interesting how when I've read parts of the Bible and heard some of the stories, I'm always struck by how there's almost a mix of the two. Like there's a mix of individualism and there's a mix of socialism. I don't mean that literally politically. I mean that like some of the themes are kind of interspersed together. And then when you look at how these systems, if you want to put labels on it, let's say you have. You have radical socialism and radical libertarianism. If you saw either of those put into place today in any type of large population, they technically don't work. You know what I mean? But it's like they had like this weird balance in the Bible. People are going to twist my words when I say that, but that's always interesting. Oh, I think you're totally right. And that's part of what we're seeing in the American context is a largely Protestant reading of this. So you go back to the Middle Ages, Middle Age Catholicism, not high on individual. Right. Very communal, very, you know. Payer ties. Payer ties. You're part of your, you're a serf or you're part of your community. That's right. The king runs things. It's like, it's not democratic. So it's not like every Christian. Yeah. every society that bases itself on Christianity has to become a Western democracy. But you're getting in the 20th century, people in America, people in Britain making this case that particularly a Protestant reading of the Bible would put these ideas about individualism, dignity as sort of the unique contributions of Christianity to modern civilization. And they're pitting that against communism first, and then when fascism becomes a bigger deal in the 20s and 30s against fascism. Both of them are seen as these authoritarian, absolutist type collective projects. Can we take one tangent on this? Because obviously, we're talking about the change that happened to where Christian Zionism really rose in the 20th century out of the 19th. But just for like some historical context, because I always throw this around all the time, but there's a huge story in the middle of this involving Martin Luther and all that. When the Protestant Reformation, I think it was, happened to where they split, Martin Luther led the movement and they split off from the Catholic Church, that was back, I want to say in the 15th century, correct me if I'm wrong. 16th century. 16th century. What led to that and how was it set up differently? Obviously, we know they're different sects today, but back at the beginning, what were the key differences between what became the Protestant Church and the Catholic Church? Yeah. So Luther, Martin Luther's the guy that sort of kicks this off. He nails his 95 theses to a wall in Wittenberg, that's sort of the, you know, the beginning of the Reformation. His big concerns were about corruption in the Catholic hierarchy, in the church hierarchy. And then he was really worked up over this idea of, well, now I'm forgetting the term, not tithes, but. Something involving payments? Yeah, involving payments for getting rid of your sins in the next life. And maybe we can. Yeah, that's on the tip of my tongue. I know what you're talking about. Maybe Dee can find it. Yeah, yeah. The thing that the 95 thesis, the thing the Catholic Church would make people do. I want to say it starts with a C, but I'm not. Would pay to get rid of their sins. What's the term for what the Catholic Church. Indulgences. It's not a C, indulgences. Yes. 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, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and hit the bell icon. And if you'd like to check out this 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. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one. Right to your door. 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