Yes, Jesus Is God and You Should Be Catholic (Dr. Brant Pitre) | Ep. 561

Why would I stake my life on these documents? Why would I take the New Testament seriously? Why would I trust something that was written 2,000 years ago? If you want to throw out the New Testament as a reliable witness to Jesus and the apostles and the early years, you better be prepared to throw all the other ancient history as well. We have hundreds of manuscripts that are written really close to the event and the only reason, at least I can see, that you would doubt the substance of what they're claiming is because. The claims they make on you. Is there any good reason to think Christ was from the dead? When they argue for believing the resurrection, they appeal to prophecy. People will complain. They'll say, "Look, nowhere is he claiming to be God. You're just sort of reading into the tea leaves and coming out with something. Sure. The church came up with hundreds of years after the supposed resurrection. Let's go back to the Old Testament. Let's go back to Moses. We'll start from the beginning. Dr. Petra. Petra? Petrie. Petrie. Yeah, it's fine. It's really good to have you on the show. It's great to be here, finally. I've been wanting to talk to you for a long time. We did something a long time ago. It was just audio. Yeah, I think we did an audio interview once and I think one time I zoomed in and it was, you know, zoom is never the same. It has face to face. So thank you, Ma'am, for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here. Yeah, I'm glad you exist and I'm glad you're doing the work that you're doing. Even just having you on Alex's or Condor's show recently. First of all, Kudos to him. He's someone who's really serious about engaging the best arguments, say, for and against atheism. So he could have found some knucklehead to press and make look silly, but that's not what he's about. And so it's like, well done. Representing the Catholic Church, say, D. Garejo. Yeah, I was actually, I was really excited when they invited me on the show. Because all my kids knew exactly who he was, even though I wasn't as familiar with him. And they all said the same thing that he was serious, that he was honest and honest seeker, and that he was always respectful with his discourse, and that I would really enjoy it if I went on. And that's exactly what happened. Yeah. We had a really fantastic conversation about, did Jesus claim to be God? And yeah, it was excellent. We're going to have that conversation today. Yeah. I'm really excited to learn from you. That's just launch into it. You might hear somebody say, why would I take the New Testament seriously? Why would I trust something? That was written 2,000 years ago. That's probably gone through multiple editions. It was clearly like, was it propaganda of a sort? It was clearly biased. So why would I stake my life on these documents when they're so old and yes, maybe filled with contradictions? People say this, right? And they throw out all these objections. So we'll start there. Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think the first thing I would try to say is, well, why do you accept any historical claims? Are any historical narratives about any other historical figures? So I think it's important just from the perspective of a reason, right, before we get into faith or anything like that. Just to back up and say, for example, like, how do you know what Alexander the Great did and what Alexander the Great said when he was going about the Mediterranean world in the fourth century BC? How do you know that Josephus, first century Jewish historian, famous, really important source? How do you know that his accounts of the Jewish war and the Jewish revolt destruction of the temple in 7080? How do you know those are reliable? Why do you accept those narratives? And the honest answer to that question is that most people just accept them because, well, everyone accepts them. But there actually are historical methods, historical reasons of evaluating evidence in terms of its reliability or unreliability. And when you begin to actually back up from the big questions that the New Testament raises, did Jesus claim to be God? Did he found the church? Was he raised from the dead? And just ask, well, why should I even accept? Let's just start with the Gospels. I'll do the whole New Testament, just the Gospels to begin with. The answer is that they stand up remarkably well when you compare them to other biographies of ancient figures. So let's just do Alexander the Great as an example for an analogy. So Alexander the Great lives in the fourth century BC. And just like with Jesus, we have like four major biographies of Alexander the Great. But they were actually written by Quintus Kertius and Plutarch, me might have read Plutarch's Lives in college or something like that, of Aryan and they wrote these biographies of Alexander the Great in the first century BC, first century AD and second century AD. So if Alexander lives in the fourth century BC, you don't get a biography of him. The earliest one is 300 years later. And then 400 years later for the ones that are most familiar with, like Plutarchs. Well, compare that with the Gospels. Look at Jesus of Nazareth, another historical figure who makes divine claims. Alexander actually claimed to be divine. He demanded people worship him. That's another reason that interesting analogy. He's a kingly figure. He's very influential world history. He makes divine claims. He actually demanded that some people worship him while he was still alive and some of the Greeks reacted against it. You have Jesus obviously is going to make Messianic claims. There's claims to be a king and divine claims and we have four biographies. But in this case, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, even on the latest kind of standard, even skeptical New Testament scholar dating of them, they're within 40 to 60 years of Jesus' death. So Jesus dies around 30, 33 AD. The standard gospel dating among New Testament scholars today is that Mark is the earliest around 70 and then John's probably the latest around 90, 95, maybe 100 AD. Well, that's four to six decades as opposed to three to four centuries. And yet no one questions the kind of basic data that we have about Alexander the Great based on these boggings that are hundreds of years later. Whereas you have all kinds of doubts about the gospels because I say, oh, the time gap between the gospels in life of Jesus is too great. No, actually, it's not because they are written within what scholars refer to as the living memory of the events. The living memory of the historical events. So if you think about it, Jesus begins gathering his apostles, his 12 apostles in the, in the, either late 20s or early 30s, he stays with them for about three years before he's crucified and then put to death and then raised from the dead. We'll come to that maybe later. Look at the evidence for that. So if that's around 33 AD, those the apostles, those disciples begin telling stories about him, begin preaching and evangelizing, and then narratives of his life, gospel accounts, two of which are attributed to eyewitnesses, Matthew and John, and two of which Luke and Mark, which are attributed to disciples of either eyewitnesses, like Peter, Mark is a companion of Peter, according to the Rechrist Father's, or disciples of disciples, like Luke, he's a companion of Paul. Those are written within three, four, five decades, right, within the living memory of the events. And in any other, with any other historical figure, right, that kind of chronological proximity to the event, especially with multiple accounts, would be a starting point for beginning to treat the sources as if they were reliable, unless they give you reason to doubt them. Does that make sense? You follow the one to begin here? Yeah, I do. So in other words, just on a level of reason alone, the New Testament documents, the gospels in particular are written within living memory of events, chronological proximity to the life and death of Jesus. And, and this is really important, we have just hundreds of manuscripts from the first two, three, four, five, six centuries of these books in ways that we just don't for lots of the classical sources, like copies of Homer, copies of the Iliad, the Odyssey, a lot of the manuscripts for classical sources will have one, two, three, maybe 10, 20, but with the got with the New Testament, the gospels we have dozens, hundreds throughout the centuries. So, the textual evidence, the chronological proximity, the the the the personal proximity to, if Matthew and John, for example, are written by eyewitnesses, we can discuss debates about that if you want. But if they are written by who they purport to be, then this is the kind of thing that even just on a human level, you would give credence to them until you would have reason otherwise to doubt them. It does. Yeah. I know the objection you'll hear is, yeah, but Alexander the great isn't making claims upon my sex life. He's not, well, not claiming that I have to worship him to not be burned in hell forever. So, if he were making those claims, you better believe I'd be saying yes, one, two, three centuries. I'm not going to take it seriously. Sure. No. And this is of course the reason why it's a funny thing when you talk about evidence. People often say, well, there's no evidence, no historical evidence, except for the gospels. But that's the problem is the gospels are historical evidence. Like you can't have one standard for all other historical documents and then a different standard for the New Testament. The reason that sometimes happens is precisely because of what you just said, because when it comes to the claims made by Jesus Nazareth, the stakes are high. Literally, there are of eternal significance because we're talking about eternal life, eternal death. We're talking about a man who claims to not only be the long way to Jewish king, the Messiah, but the divine son of God, right? The pre-existent son of God. And so, it's precisely the divine claims that Jesus makes, although Alexander made him too, but there's no one worshipping him alive today, right? There's not a cult of Alexander. There's not a church of Alexander. So whether you accept those sources or not doesn't have any kind of existential impact on your personal life, but whether you accept Jesus Nazareth as the Messiah and the son of God will change literally the way the way you live the rest of your life. Like it has an impact on this life and then of course the life to come. So I think that's one of the reasons people have a different set of standards for the gospels than they'll have for other sources. But I believe that as a Christian, especially as a Catholic, right, we uphold faith and reason that it's really important to say that believing in Jesus and accepting the historical accounts of them that we have in the gospels is not just something I know through faith. It's actually a reasonable position when you begin to look at the sources of his life, the accounts of his life, just according to the standards or how you would judge other historical documents about other historical figures, other biographies. Like Lucian is a, he's a really Greek writer who writes a life of demon acts, a philosopher. Well, he was a student of demon acts. And so if you look at classical writers, they'll just assume yeah, he's giving us at least the substance of what this philosopher said. Well, likewise, if Jesus of Nazareth has disciples, has a group of disciples and some of those disciples give us B.O.I, ancient Greco-Roman biographies, lives of what Jesus didn't say. And then our first step are kind of basic posture from a historical perspective should be, well, let me see what they claim about him and also do they corroborate with what one another, like do the claims correlate with one another at the level of history. And at least for me, two after 20, 30 years now, studying them, my confidence goes up more and more. The more I look at the New Testament documents, the more I look at the Gospels, especially when you really start to look at the genre of the Gospels and the things that say Luke or John themselves are claiming about the kind of books they're writing and the kind of claims they're making, then it's really clear that the Gospels are not, they're not like ancient folklore, they're not just trying to tell fairy tales or stories about some mythical figure. They really are making historical claims about an individual man, Jesus of Nazareth, about what he did and what he said. In fact, the best example of this honestly is probably just the beginning of the gospel of Luke. So when you're looking at a particular, when you're reading any book, you always want to ask, what's the genre? So if you go into a library and you stumble into the fiction section and you meant to go to the history section and you pull a book off the shelf and you start reading it, thinking it's history, but it's fiction, you're going to misinterpret it. And same thing, if you begin to read a story and it starts with once upon a time, that's a genre clue. So authors telling you, I'm about to tell you a fairy tale. And what you're saying is these genre clues existed two thousand times. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. In fact, one of the standard things that ancient writers would do Josephus does this in his own biography of himself, as they tell you what kind of book they're about to write. So for example, this is how Luke's gospel begins. This is Luke 1, 1 to 4. In as much as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also having followed all things closely for some time past to write an orderly, in Greek, literally an accurate account for you, most excellent theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you've been informed. So notice Luke does three things there first. He tells you everything I'm about to say about Jesus Nazareth is based on the testimony of eyewitnesses. So the Greek where there is all top tie, it's actually where we get the word all top see from. Like in all top sees when the doctor outtops means oneself, it's to see when the doctor looks for himself at someone who's died at the causes of death, right? In this case, the outtop tie, the autopsy is the eyewitnesses of what was done and set. Now you don't begin fairy tales that way, you don't begin folklore that way, that's how you begin history or biography when you want the reader to know that what I'm telling you isn't just made up, it's actually based on what those who are with Jesus saw and what they heard from him, right? I witnessed testimony and maybe eyewitness testimony, but another way to describe it. Second, notice he also says, I want to give you an accurate account. So I'm going to try Luke's very clear about this. He wants to put it in or he wants it to be orderly and accurate because that's one of the standards of ancient historiography. You'll see Lucien, I mentioned him earlier, we'll talk about the historian's goal is to tell what happened. Like accuracy Josephus talks about that truth is a goal, not just from modern history, but ancient history as well. So sure enough, the third thing Luke says here, it's so that you may know the truth about the things you've been informed about regarding Jesus' Nazareth. Now we don't know who this theophilus is, but he's clearly someone who's heard the gospel, he's heard about Jesus and now Luke wants to give him an accurate, truthful, historical account based on how it was testimony of what Jesus did and said, right? So just Luke alone, that tells you that the genre of this book is a historical biography. It's not just any kind of biography, it's a historical account that's aiming, whether you think it does or not, it's at least aiming and purporting to tell you the truth. What Jesus Nazareth did and what he said. So that's our starting point really for beginning to accept the reliability of the gospel, so that the gospel authors are attempting to tell us the truth in an accurate way. Yeah, absolutely. What stuck out to me that time was that he said many accounts had been written. What does many mean? That's a great question. Okay, so this gets into the very complex question of the the authorship and order and literary relationship of the gospel. Who wrote first, who wrote second, who copied from whom that kind of thing? I actually deal with this in my book, The Case for Jesus. I've got a whole chapter on it where I try to take you through it because it is complicated. They're different theories, Matt. There've been different theories honestly since the early church fathers, right? So some church fathers, most of them actually took the position, St. Augustine, for example, that Matthew wrote first and then Mark wrote second, Luke wrote third, John wrote fourth. Others actually suggested that Mark wrote first and then Matthew and Luke followed later and then contemporary scholars will have different orders that they suggest as well. You probably I think you may have even talked with Dr. Barbara about this about a cue hypothesis, the idea that there's a kind of law saying source. Most of the Christian tradition has regarded Luke's reference there as a reference to at least Matthew and Mark because that's not many. I know. I know. Actually, it's interesting. New Testament scholars say some are actually arguing. There's been a couple books out recently that Luke doesn't just know Matthew and Mark. He also knows John as well. So still not many. No, no, no, that's right. It's interesting because because there are accounts that we don't have. Now, are there historical illusions to accounts we don't have? Papius is one of the early church fathers. He talks about a collection of sayings that it's attributed to Matthew. Then, of course, later in later centuries, you're going to have the rise of the Apocryphal Gospels, lost Gospels, like the Gospel of Judas. That's coming off to. But that's much later. In fact, one of the points I want to make is, and one of the reasons I accept the general reliability of the four Gospels, just from the level of reason, is that when you look at the early church fathers, although they have differences about who wrote first, who wrote second, like in other words, about the order or the dating, they're completely unanimous. And I mean unanimous on the fact that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written by Matthew, the Apostle, Mark, the disciple, Peter, Luke, the companion of Paul, and then John, the beloved disciple, the son of Zebidi, one of the twelve. Do we have any Gospels? Say, do we have any record of Luke not being a tribute to Luke by being anonymous, by being attributed to somebody else? And so to with every other Gospel? All for the canonical Gospels, when it comes to not just the internal evidence of the manuscripts, but the external evidence from the church fathers. In other words, what did people from the time period, or shortly thereafter, say about them, who wrote them, all of them are unanimous. So for example, let's just, let's break that down for a second, back up. What's internal, what's external evidence? Because this is actually important for the whole question of reliability. So if I go into a bookstore and I see a book by like Pope Benedict, Jesus Nazareth came out, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, how do you know the Pope wrote it? Well, there's name on it. There's two ways to know. First, you open it up and you look at the internal evidence. It's got his name at the beginning, right? So that's your first clue that he might be the author. Now, you can forge names as well, right? Like you can write a book and put it in someone else's name. So you can also then consult contemporaries. Hey, did somebody who knows the Pope like gay or again swine, right? It was his personal assistant for many years. Did Pope Benedict write Jesus Nazareth? Oh, absolutely. I saw him in this, you know, study for many years, he's been working on this. So you can corroborate internal evidence with external evidence from either eyewitnesses or people living in that time period. If other people are having claimed to have written Jesus of Nazareth, then we get a sort that out. That we would have to sort out. But if you have unanimous internal evidence, all the books say the Pope wrote it, and external evidence, all of his contemporaries or near contemporaries agree on it, then it's reasonable to conclude that he actually wrote the book. The same standard applies when it comes to ancient documents. It doesn't matter that 2000 years had passed. The same standard applies. So if we have copies of the gospel of Matthew, Matthew, Luke, and John, like manuscripts in Greek, and all of them have the titles that attribute them to the same people, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and then this is important. We look at the external evidence from people like Papius who's living in the early second century or Irenaeus, who's a disciple, Polycarb, who's a disciple of Saint John himself, or a origin. Great scholar has access to the library at Alexandria, and all of those early church fathers are also unanimous. That Matthew was written by Matthew, Mark is written by Mark, Luke's written by the companion Paul, and John's written by the beloved disciple. Then it's reasonable, this is the point, it's reasonable to conclude that the gospel's are actually written by the people to whom-- Not just reasonable to conclude, but unreasonable to conclude the opposite. It would be unreasonable to conclude the opposite. Although, I mean, I should be honest, and I talk about this in the case of Jesus, in the 20th century, the hypothesis that the gospels were originally anonymous actually became-- it arose, and it became very popular, very widespread. And by the time I was in graduate school in the late 90s, it was almost kind of an undubated, pre-supposition. Well, of course, the gospels are anonymous. Wait, did that come from? Well, that's a long story. It comes from a late 19th century theories about how the canon and the gospel developed. Adolfo and Harnack was a writer who popularized this idea. It also came from figures like Rural Boltman, who was an early 20th century scholar. Based on pre-suppositions that he had about the gospel's genre being folklore, it became actually more plausible to describe them kind of a genre category of anonymity. In other words, these are compendiums of stories like Grims Ferry Tales. Like, we don't really know who originally authored these tales. They've been gathered together, and then later, the church adds those titles to the books in order to give them a theory. So the theory arose that they circulated for about 100 years without any titles. And then in the second century AD, at the time it was like Euroneas, then the church started adding the titles to give them authority. One of the reasons that they said this is because in some of those early manuscripts, the title just will say "Kata Mathaion," and others, "according to Matthew." It won't have the full gospel according to Matthew. And they'll say, "Oh, that's a symbol that the fourfold canon had already begun, and these were just abbreviations that were added later." And so they didn't even need to put the word gospel. It's a weak theory, but that's the reasoning that'll be given. The problem with that is, it doesn't make any sense. In other words, if the gospels were published anonymously without any titles, if that were true, and then they began to be copied, remember, this is before the printing press, and circulated throughout the Greek world, and only 100 years later were the titles added. The question is, how would all these different scribes in Africa, and Italy, and Asia Minor, how would they all add the same titles? Different languages. Well, they're going to get translated, but even just in terms of the Greek texts for now, how would they ascribe them to the same people? What you would expect, if they were originally anonymous, was, well, one scribe might ascribe it to Matthew, another would ascribe it to Peter, like you'd have discrepancies on who the author actually was. But that's precisely what we don't find. I remember studying this for the first time as a grad student. I was like, I just assumed the gospels were anonymous. So when I started doing textual criticism, I was like, oh, the world are the anonymous copies. And then what I realized was there are none. You can't find anonymous copies. They all have titles, and they all are unanimous on to whom each of the books has attributed. Yeah, the other thing that strikes me is if you are going to attribute the gospels to people to give them authority, John makes sense, but I'm not sure if Matthew, Mark, and Luke do when you could have chose Peter or James or the Blessed Virgin Mary. No, this is absolutely crazy. If you're faking a book and you're foraging it and you want it to get authority and you want it to sell, right? You want people to read it. Well, just go for the top. Attribute it to Jesus, the gospel of Jesus himself, like why why settle for less or at least attribute it to Peter, right? Not Peter's companion. But not Peter's companion, Mark and Luke don't make any sense. Mark doesn't make sense because yes, he's the companion Peter court of tradition, but if you can just say whoever you want wrote it, then go for Peter himself. Same thing for Luke, he's once a root, why not attribute it to Paul if you want to get authority to it. So that doesn't actually make sense. Even Matthew's kind of it's a little bit ambiguous because on the one hand, yes, he would have been a disciple. He's one of the twelve. On the other hand, he's a tax collector man, like they are despised, certainly within Jewish segments of society. You wouldn't want to attribute it to a tax collector. Is it an ex-collective? Is writing too specifically or do you want that room? Yeah, most scholars agree that Matthew's audience, that Matthew's primary audience is Jewish, Jewish, that's true. Yeah, a tax collector would be Jewish. It's not the guy, it's not the guy. It's like trust me, I'm an IRS agent. Like even even today, that's probably not going to fly, right? So it's a much more plausible suggestion that the reason the gospel Matthew is attributed to Matthew is because out of all of Jesus' apostles, who possesses scribal literacy? Think about it. People often say, "Oh, you know, in fact, some scholars will say, well, there's no way that the apostles wrote any the gospels because they were illiterate fishermen." And okay, it is true. Some of the twelve apostles were fishermen. Peter, Andrew, James, John, they're fishermen, but not all of them. We know from the gospels themselves that Matthew is a tax collector. And in order to write out tax documents, he had to possess scribal literacy, probably not only in Hebrew, like the language of the scriptures, but also in Greek, which is the language of commerce in the first century AD. So just imagine, like we're sitting around, you're listening to the teachings of the greatest teacher in the world. Jesus Nazareth, for three years, sermon after sermon. Parable to the parable. It's like, did it not occur to anyone? Like, maybe we should write some of this down. Okay, well, let's see, let's see. Who might write this down? Fisherman, fishermen, fishermen, tax collector. It's kind of obvious that he would be a likely candidate. It's plausible. It's reasonable, right? That he would be one to take, at least take notes, which we know students would actually do from Greco-Roman sources that they would take notes of their masters if they were scribally literate. So, in other words, to get back to the external internal evidence issue, when we look at the actual sources, all the manuscripts, and I give charts of this in the book, the fact of the matter is, is that over and over again, all the extensorses, ancient manuscripts, ancient papyri, like fragments, as well as the external evidence from the church for all those is unanimous that the first gospel is written by Matthew, the tax collector. Second one is by Mark, the companion of St. Peter, the third one is by Luke, the companion of Paul, and then the fourth one is by John, the beloved disciple. And here, there's actually a really important contrast, Matt, too, with, for example, the letter to the Hebrews. So, we actually have a document in the New Testament that is anonymous, the letter to the Hebrews. It's formally anonymous. It doesn't have a name at the beginning. It doesn't have a name at the end. It's just identified by its audience, the epistle to the Hebrews. And that's how it was promulgated, and that's how it was published. So, guess what happens when you have an actually anonymous document? When you start to look at the manuscripts for the letters of the Hebrews, some of them attribute it to Paul. Some of them attribute it to Timothy, Paul's disciple. Some say Luke translated it from Hebrew after Paul wrote it originally. So, like, there's actually discrepancies. Some of the fathers say it was written by Barnabas. Others say, again, that Paul wrote it in Hebrew and that Luke translated. In other words, you get discrepancy and debate both in the internal evidence, the manuscripts, and in the external evidence from the fathers, when you have an actually anonymous document like Hebrews. That's precisely what you don't find with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So, again, and just a level of history, what we have here then is four historical biographies, Greco-Roman biographies, written within the living memory of the events, two of them by eyewitnesses, two, the master teacher, philosopher, Messianic, Claimant, and question. And obviously, very, very similar. And the claims they make about Jesus, otherwise, there wouldn't even be a synoptic problem of who copied from whom, because a lot of the stories and sayings of Jesus, and especially Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are extremely similar. And in fact, even verbatim at points. If you're a professor and you found this kind of word for correspondence and like term papers, you'd know somebody is copying from someone else. So, the corroboration, but also the diversity, all those things lead to the conclusion that these accounts, the four gospels, should at least be treated with the kind of reasonable credibility that you would lend to any other biographies of ancient figures written within living memory of the events. This episode is sponsored by Catholic Match. You know, our culture tells us that dating apps are about superficial connections and endless swiping where half the people don't even know what they truly believe or what they're actually looking for. But if you're a Catholic, you understand that marriage is a sacred vocation, not just another relationship, and dating is certainly not a hobby or a game. That's why there's Catholic Match, which is the largest and most trusted Catholic dating app in the world, purposefully designed for faithful men and women who are serious about finding each other for the right reasons. 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I remember being in grade 10 in a religion class, and someone said, well, if Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John kind of didn't know each other and didn't know what the others were writing, then there might be some evidence to think this is true, because how could four people get these events basically the same? But it seems like that isn't what happened, and so if that isn't what happened, and if Matthew, Mark, and Luke were aware of each other, and John was aware of the rest, why do we say we have four accounts? Why can we just say we have one? They'll copy from each other, and therefore it might be false. Sure, sure. Not that it might be false, but that we don't have four independent accounts, so we can't lay too much. That's great. Okay. Again, you have to ask yourself about how do you approach historical evidence, right? Do you demand independent accounts in other cases, or with regard to other historical figures? And it's frequently the case that we don't demand that as long as the people in question are eyewitnesses are in close proximity, they have access to the events that they're reporting to describe. So for example, I mentioned the biographies of Alexander the Great earlier, right? It's very clear if you look at some, if you look at these carefully, that some of them are aware of the others and are drawing on them as sources, but that doesn't mean that they don't count as multiple testimonies. Why not? Oh, because they have their own information that they're contributing to. In other words, they're, you can actually flip that and say the fact that they agree is corroborative. You follow? Like if everyone, if you have multiple accounts of an event like say, I bring this example up in the book, in the sinking of the Titanic, okay? And they're discrepancy. Some I wouldn't have to say some, there's some say this about the details, but they all agree that the ship sank. When they agree with one another, the fact that if anything for me, the discrepancies make it more believable. Oh, that makes sense. No, absolutely. They make it more, they make it more clear that what you're dealing with here is authentic human testimony. Yeah. Because even when you are I relate and account of an event that we've experienced in our own life, we might tell it one way to someone else, another way to another person, but the substance, right? That's true of this morning, right? You and me meeting each other, you meeting my wife, if you were to write a page of what happened and I was to write a page, that'd be different. That's right. And we, and if I'm telling my wife about my interaction with your wife this morning, I'm going to emphasize different things and maybe if I'm telling my kids after our interview, how it went because their interests are different, right? So differences don't mean that they're, and that there's necessarily like conflict with the guard to truth. That's just how human, that's how ordinary human discourse operates, right? But it is also important that even when a source like, let's say, let's say Matthew is using Mark, okay? The fact that he uses Mark and then expands it, doesn't negate the value of the fact that he is a, he is a distinct, separate witness and corroborative testimony to the things he's saying and doing about Jesus. That makes sense. And for what it's worth, we do have independent witnesses as well. Josephus is probably exhibit A here. So I mentioned him earlier. He's a first century Jewish historian, very, very famous, very important figure because he gives us the bulk of what we know about the history of the Jewish people in the first century AD. Well, we don't have to rely only on the gospels for the core of who Jesus was, who he claimed to be and what he did and said during his lifetime because Josephus and the antiquities of the Jews, his famous history of the Jewish people actually has a paragraph mentioning Jesus of Nazareth and he describes them as a man who performed wondrous deeds. There is some dispute about one of the lines about whether he claims to be the Messiah or not, but some scholars have argued that that's part of it as well and that the tribe of those who accepted him and who believe in them continued to this day. So and that he was handed over by the leaders of the Jewish people to be executed under Pontius Pilate. So we also have corroboration not just from the four gospels, but from our first century Jewish historian Josephus. Just to put a spotlight on that for those who are listening and they'll hear, wait a minute, I've heard that that was doctored by Christians later. I know you kind of eluding at that, but that's the argument that you hear. Oh yeah, okay. So yeah, but you might hear that on the internet, okay, but actual scholarship, even the most skeptical scholarship that has analyzed this makes it really clear. Though it is true that in like some later translations of Josephus, a line or two may have been added by later Christian scribes and millages. The earliest Greek manuscripts we possess, again, same thing, are unanimous that that witness, that testimony is part of Josephus's historical account. And Christian, non-Christian, Protestant Catholic, Jewish scholars are like except Josephus's basic testimony. It's called the testimonium flavianum, the testimony of Flavius Josephus as a historically reliable witness, external witness from the New Testament to Jesus of Nazareth. And for what it's worth, he also, he actually has a longer paragraph on John the Baptist as well. Because John the Baptist was super famous in the first century. Yeah, Josephus gives more time to John than he does to Jesus ironically enough. Which again, if you think of a Christian as doctorate, they would want to go whole hog on, you know, unjust glorifying Jesus and give him more attention to John the Baptist. Josephus does the opposite. So whatever you might have heard on the internet, actual experts in Josephus accept the basic substance of the testimony of Josephus about Jesus as a witness. So this points to the historicity of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, not just that we have external evidence that points to the history of Christ, but even to other figures like John the Baptist. Absolutely. What other things maybe did modern scholarship call into question that they were wrong to because we have ancient sources for either how Jews lived or what they believed and taught or different figures in the New Testament. Well, minus scholarship and I love minus scholarship. I get you're in my life. I'm one of them, right? But minus scholarship kind of called everything into question. I mean, that was one of the tendencies of modernity was to kind of approach especially religious sources with a skeptical eye. If we back up for just second, one of the reasons doubts about the history of the gospels really arose in the 19th century in particular was because of the philosophical mindset of the 19th century was very dominated, especially in Western Europe by rationalism, right? So rationalism is the idea that mirror, the miracles are not possible. Prophecy is not possible. It's a tendency to deny anything that's supernatural, that only allows natural causes, natural events, purely natural effects to be treated as credible. So if you dispense with the idea that the supernatural exists, that miracles are possible, that prophecy is possible, which was a very popular view in the 19th century, well, then you turn to the gospels. What do you see in the gospels? Yeah. Miracle, miracle, miracle, prophecy, prophecy, raising the dead, healing lepers. So the actual, I actually would argue that the, the, the rise of the theory of anonymity and unreliability, it's not actually really about the historical data, because the historical data for the gospel, authorship, and chronological proximity is super strong. It's about doubt about the miraculous. In other words, there's no way these documents could be telling us about something that actually happened because I don't know if you know this, dead people stay dead, right? And Jesus doesn't, right? Like even the miracle, the resurrection with which the whole gospel is climax, it's just, it's just too, it's, it's incredible, literally, right? It's unbelievable. And so there's, there's, there's, the questions about the miraculous are also under the surface of the modern period. So in other words, modern scholars and modern scholarship is called in the question, virtually everything when it comes to historicity. They're very skeptical schools. But you actually see that swinging back. Like in other words, even to the state, for example, we probably talked about him in our previous talk, Bart Arman, who just just retired famous, used to be atheist. I think he's agnostic now, New Testament scholar, very influential, I've read his books when I was in grad school. You know, he published a book, did Jesus exist? And he has no religious theological or faith motivations here. And he just decimates a lot of the radical, they call it the Jesus mythosism school, it's either that Jesus Nasr never existed. That is not a credible scholarly position, even for someone like Bart, who is, who is not a believing Christian himself. Right. So I would say, what about the murder of the innocence where Joseph was told to wake and flee? I mean, do we have any external experience with something that is a good question place? And if we don't, doesn't that count against the, oh, okay, well, okay, a lot of historical method, that's okay though. First, number one, just because you don't have an external corroborative source, doesn't mean it didn't happen. Okay, that's not how history works. For most, especially ancient history, a lot of times we have one source if we're lucky. Okay. So just because something's not corroborated by an external witness explicitly, doesn't give you reason to doubt it, especially if the source in question, like in this case, the gospel Matthew, which tells us about the massacre of the infants, is credible on other grounds. Like in other words, if you've established that he's telling you lots of true things about what Jesus didn't said in other grounds, it makes it reasonable at least given the benefit of the doubt. The second thing is, although we don't have an external witness to the massacre of the infants, we do have an external witness, and Josephus, Jewish historian I mentioned earlier, to the fact that Herod the Great was a absolutely murderous, horrible person. He, he executed two of his own sons because he thought they posted threat through his throne. They executed his wife, and then went mad with love, regretting that he had executed her, put her to death because he was still in love with her, which I'm like, if you love with her, you probably shouldn't murder her. It's just a basic thing. Yeah, it's just a, you know, just some advice. So if Herod was willing to kill his own sons because he thought they posted threat to the throne, then it is reasonable and even plausible to assume that if he had heard there was an infant who, who, who've been born and that people were beginning to talk about as if it were the Messiah, and there were, and this post-apocredible threat through his throne, which it would, by the way, because Herod, he wasn't actually, he wanted to be considered the Messiah. It's one of the reasons he expanded the temple. So he glorified the temple edifice because when the Messiah was supposed to come, one of the things the prophecy said he would do is build a new temple. So Herod said, "Women, I'm going to show you. I'm going to expand the temple complex." And he, and he did, he used slaves to do it, and Carpenter's too, and during Joseph, himself, like, I don't go down the road, but like, uh, I've done some study on this. It's fascinating. Like Joseph was a Carpenter. The word they used for him is one of the, one of the people who were conscripted in the time of Herod to actually work on the temple. Anyway, that's, don't, please don't say that. I said Joseph built a town. I'm just saying this is the kind of thing that was happening. Anyway, back to Herod. So, um, rumors of a child that would be an authentic Messiah, an authentic king would definitely pose a threat to Herod because although Herod was referred to as a king, he's not actually from the line of David. He's not even actually fully Jewish. He's an Idoumian, so he's like a half Jew. Okay, he was put in power by the Romans as a puppet king. And as an Idoumian, as a half, as a half Jew, there was always a kind of, uh, shall we say, skeptical attitude toward the authenticity. Like, you're not, you're not really the king. So he was always trying to prove his kingship, right, through expanding the temple. So, and any threats to his kingship, he would stamp out. Um, maybe one thing if Josephus referred to Herod as Herod the Peaceful, or something like Oh, yeah. No, no, no, no. This is a murderous thug who would kill anybody he thought threatened his claim to power. And if my memory serves, which I might be wrong, but if I'm not mistaken, um, there are a few Herod. So I don't want to mix them up, but I'm pretty sure it was Herod the Great, who um, he realized no one would mourn for him because everyone hated him. So one of the things that he planned to do was actually bring in a gatherup of a bunch of the men from this, and from the city from Jerusalem and execute them on the day of his death. So that there would be mourning throughout the city so that people would mourn at least would be mourning. Brilliant. Okay, I know why I was really totally wicked and evil kind of way, right? So this, but this is the whole Herodian family. I mean, they're just not a good family. Somebody should do like a, you know, TV series about them, the heros. It would be, it would be terrible. It would make Dallas or, you know, one of these, you know, 80s TV dramas about wicked families look, look, look like child's play. So all that to say, the backup, the point is is that the description of the massacre, the infants in Matthew 2, although it is not corroborated by external evidence, does fit with what we know from other sources about the character of Herod the Great. Yes. Yeah. So again, it's reasonable to include this is the kind of thing he might do. One of the, I think the first question I asked, which you've answered is why except something that was written 2000 years ago and you're saying essentially that good evidence doesn't become bad evidence because of the duration of time. That is so important, Matt. Yeah. Sometimes I'll hear people say, how do you, like, that's been 2000 years. So what? So is all the other history? Like, and so will the Lord of the Rings be in like 2000 years? Or forget the Lord of the Rings for that. 1000 years from now, L.E.V. Zell's account of the Holocaust night. Fair enough, right? She was like, it was non-fictional. Yeah, no, that's fine. It's going to be just as reliable. I wouldn't have an account to that. Those time periods as it is right now. Quantological distance doesn't make a source that's close to the events unreliable. Unless there's been a bunch of contradictions and edils. Isn't that the claim of Bart Irman and others? No, no, no, no. Well, I mean, yes and no. Okay. So Bart is a, Bart does, he's a textual critic. Textual criticism is the study of the ancient manuscripts of the Greek New Testament and a comparison and contrast of them, like, where they agree where they differ. And one of the things that Bart has done is, in his early scholarly career, he has a book called the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, where he analyzes how in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth centuries, there were Christian scribes who did add lines, take out passages from the New Testament. Some of it was dropped, doctrinally motivated, right? Some of it to defend orthodoxy, some of it to defend heterodoxy and that kind of thing. So it is the case that there are passages versus here and there, where there was some corruption in the textual transition in the manuscript. But those are totally the minority. Like the vast bulk of the New Testament has not been subject to that kind of discrepancy. And we can know that why by looking at the different-- By the 200 years of textual criticism that have contributed to what we call now, a critical addition of the New Testament. So like if you're a New Testament scholar, you have most operate with a Greek New Testament called Nestle Alon, it's now a since 28th edition. And what it does is it has the Greek text on the main text and then in the footnotes, it'll have the text critical discrepancies like where they differ. The vast majority of the differences are grammatical, dealing with particles, dealing with maybe with mind or vocabulary. They don't deal with the kind of doctrinal or major doctrinal-- If you're an atheist or skeptic, and you were trying to disprove the gospels by showing that there were these major discrepancies, what is the-- forget the little grammatical errors? What's the biggest discrepancy that would cause you to say, look, these have been significantly altered? Oh gosh, okay. So probably the ending of the gospel of Mark. If you look at the ending of the gospel of Mark and you have a New Testament, you can actually-- you'll see that there's a long ending, there's a short ending, and then there's a really short ending, right? So the gospel mark-- and it's different manuscripts-- some it ends in verse 8. Others, it goes all the way down to verse-- what is this? 20. And then if you look in your footnote, it'll say some ancient manuscripts omit 9 to 20, and they substitute another ending. So there are like three different versions of the way the gospel of Mark ended. This is probably the most famous text-critical issue. And so scholars continue to debate to this day, what is the earliest version, right? So in other words, did Mark originally end with the women going out from the tomb because they were afraid, like, end of story? Most scholars think that, or did it have a longer ending where he goes on to relate the appearance to Mary Magdalene, the appearance to some of the disciples on the road, and then the famous passage about the apostles going out and being able to pick up snakes and drink poison without being hurt, and the gospel going out to the end of the earth, or was it this other more obscure ending? And the answer is, we don't know. Scholars don't know they have different opinions. Some people think the most think the short ending is the earliest, like, that it stopped right where it was. But others actually have argued that the longer ending is original, and what happened was the last page of the manuscript was ripped off. So if you ever had like a paperback book, you weren't very kind to it, right? What pages tend to get ripped off? The cover or the back, right? Yeah. So some people suggested that that might be the case. The answer is, we don't really know. We don't know the answer that. But, say you're an atheist, there's no doctrine or dogma of the Christian faith, which stands or falls on which of those endings is the most original. Like that's, but that does that make sense? Yeah. In other words, even if you, sure, it's not like you have a gospel that saying Jesus didn't rise from the dead or didn't bingo, right? And I, in fact, the longer ending of Mark simply corroborates a resurrection of counts that we have in Luke and in Matthew anyway. So what about John four, the woman of the well? Is it? Oh, you mean John A. the one caught adulterous? Yeah. No, actually, that's another, I said, this was the most famous. That might be the most famous. So there's some reason to think that wasn't in the original manuscript. Yes, that's correct. Actually, so the earliest manuscripts we have of the gospel, John, do not contain the famous story of Jesus encountering the woman caught in adultery and then him set good evidence to think that's not part of the apostles' writing? Well, and if so, would that not be the inherent word of God then? Okay, no, no, okay, okay, well, okay, now you just crossed over from history and ethyology. I see the difference, right? Okay, so it's one thing, no, no, hold on. It's one thing to ask, the historical question, was it in the earliest text? That's a legitimate historical question. It's another thing to ask the question of whether it's the inspired word of God, right? Because we know, not only from the New Testament, but you look at the Old Testament that you have books in the Old Testament like the book of Daniel, for example, which clearly goes through successive editions. There's a short version and then there's a longer version that has actually more accounts. Bell in the Dragon, that's a fantastic story. A story of Susanna, you know, in the whole trial of her being, you know, accused of immorality and then those, they're in the Catholic Old Testament, not in a Protestant Old Testament because they follow the shorter edition dandle, the longer edition dandle was in the Catholic Old Testament. So the question of original form and inspiration are distinct. In order to ask the question of inherent word of God, you have to have a supernatural authority. And that's actually where the church comes in. So the church is going to make decisions, the bishops and successors of the apostles. They're going to make decisions about what's canonical, namely what texts are the inspired word of God and what's not canonical. Textual critics are going to make historical claims about what's the earliest form of the book or what's the latest form of the book. But guess what? The Holy Spirit can inspire somebody early or he can inspire them late. In other words, the church has always been open to the fact that just because something is added to a book later, like say, for example, the longer chapters in the book of Daniel, it does not mean they're not necessarily inspired. In fact, the Holy Spirit works through secondary agents, secondary causes, different authors, different editions. And so what if what if, let's say it's after the first was a council of room 382? 382, very fast. Yeah. What if it's after that? That we see a big insertion of the apostles at that point? Could we say that it's not inspired? Yeah. So okay, so there's actually a great example of this. There's a famous passage called the Joanine Coda. You may have heard of this. It's in first John, let's see, my eyes aren't as good as they used to be, Matt. But in the letters of John, there's this famous section. It's in first John chapter 5. And he's talking about the Spirit. The Spirit is the witness of the truth. And then it says in chapter 5 verse 6, there are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three agree. And then there's a little innote there. And what it refers to is the fact that some man's works will go on to make this kind of trinitarian statement about the Father and the Son of the Spirit. And these are one, right? Now that verse is called the Joanine Coda. It's like a little addition. That verse is not in any of our Greek manuscripts like the first millennium. Okay. And none of the church fathers, when they're doing their trinitarian debates, they don't refer to it even in the Greek speaking writers. It really comes in the later middle ages and the second millennium. And it gets brought into a Greek manuscript, especially in the east. And then becomes part of what was called the textus receptus. It's kind of received Greek edition. Erasmus uses it. And then it will make its way into like the King James Bible through that way. Okay. So, um, and the question is, well, wait. If it's added that late, is it inspired scripture or not? And eventually, it's going to take a while, but in the 20th century, the church will make a ruling on that. And say that this is not the original text. Although it actually did, I think it was in the late 19th century. I might be getting this dates exactly wrong. At first, the Magisterium, because this was the question, what do we do with this verse? Is it canonical? Is it not? The Magisterium said, like, it would be rash to dismiss it. Okay. Let's give it a few hundred years. Because it's been, because it had been being read even in the west for a bottom millennium. Um, but after much more critical work was done on that, um, you'll notice it's no longer in most printed editions of the Bible, because it really, there's a very weak case for it. But, okay. Does the dogma of the Trinity standard fall in that verse? The answer is no, because there are other passages in the New Testament. Obviously, the great commission where Jesus says, you know, go out into all the world, you know, baptizing them in the name of the Father, end of the Son, end of the Holy Spirit. And there we see already an implicit statement of both unity, because it's the name, right? And triunity of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. So, um, it's a fascinating text critical issue, um, but it doesn't undermine the dogma of the Trinity, just because that verse was a much later addition that reflected later, Trinitarian theology. And at least, according to the church, it should not be treated as the inspired word of God. Makes a lot of things. Yeah. So, yeah, there are, now, now I'm not a textual critic. I'll be honest like, because I'm not a detailed, like comparing and contrasting all those manuscripts, God bless the scholars the last hundred, fifty years, you did all that, because it takes a certain kind of meticulous eye to do that kind of thing. But what I can't say is this is that, um, that when you back up from that, at the end of the day, in the final analysis, a text critic, however great they may be, they can't tell you what's something's the word of God. You need a supernatural authority to make that kind of supernatural claim. So, to sum it up, you would say that the New Testament documents are the, what, the best attested documents that we have from antiquity? Or no? Oh, in terms of quantitative attestation of manuscript numbers, absolutely. Like, there's no contest there. Now, but that doesn't solve the historical question. You have to answer that on other grounds, right? You have to look at things like, um, contextual plausibility. Number one, like, do the, do the events and the described in the New Testament? Are they contextual plaus, contextually plausible within a first century Jewish context, given everything we know Jewish scripture, in 2000 years from now, somebody was looking back and they were reading a novel Star Wars, let's say. And you could say, well, no, this is actually the best attested because this novel went around busts. But that wouldn't, wouldn't follow that it was true, and it didn't fit them within the context. Because the genre's fiction and it's a novel. And right, it turns out they didn't have spaceships back there. Exactly. And we still don't have the flying car, and I'm waiting, but whatever, you know, when I was growing up in the 80s, I was sure I'd be, you know, watching George Jetson, I was sure I'd be flying. So, you know, they, they didn't get that one right. But, yeah, it's, it's a genre matters. Yeah. Contextual plausibility, chronological proximity, like how close is it to the events, right? Also, consequences, like if you look at the New Testament, you can see the effects of the New Testament documents, both in there being copied in the second century, like already, they're quote, the fathers from the second century, Irenaeus, just they're quoting the New Testament text. We know they exist, right? And we see the effects of what they're claiming in the spread of Christianity throughout the world. So, there are lots of other historical approaches and historical criteria that the New Testament documents meet in terms of being a reliable witness to what both Jesus of Nazareth, as well as his first followers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, what they did and what they said Paul in the, in the second half of the first century, AD, like I mean, if, put it this way, if you want to, if you want to throw out the New Testament as a reliable witness to Jesus and the apostles and the early years, you better be prepared to throw all the other ancient history as well because it, it stacks up so well against most of the history and accounts of people and events and antiquity. Like I said earlier, for a lot of, a lot of ancient figures, we only have one source, two sources. A lot of times, those are in medieval manuscripts that are thousand years later and yet nobody blinks an eye. But oh yeah, of course, this is a reliable witness to them. But when it comes to the New Testament, we have hundreds of manuscripts that are written really close to the event and the only reason, at least I can see, that you would doubt the substance of what they're claiming is because the claims they make on you. Yeah, yeah. Like it's because if Alexander the Great claim to be God, which he did, and he wanted people to worship him, which he did, doesn't have any impact on my life. But if Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be God and then verified that vindicated that claim not only through his miracles, but through his prophecies and ultimately, of course, through the resurrection, an empty tomb and the resurrection of the body, then when he says things like, "I and the Father are one," or unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins. That's John. Okay. Now, now this is kind of where the rubber has to be, like I have to make a decision. Yeah. Like, am I going to accept that? Yep. And if I do, then do I have to live like he does? Do I have to pray like he does? Do I have to imitate him? Like, what does that mean for who I am and what my life is like now? And so, yeah, the stakes are, you know, before we talk about whether or not Jesus Christ claimed to be divine, I want you to pretend that a good friend, my friend, Ben Shapiro was sitting here. All right. I want you to substitute any Jew you want. No pressure. Okay. And good reason to think that the Jews at the time of the birth of Christ were indeed expecting the Messiah and what kind of Messiah were they expecting? This is a great question. So, the first thing I would say is that just as today, especially for Catholics, I want to make a qualification, I have a caveat, because sometimes people say, "Well, what do Catholics believe?" As Catholics, we can say Catholics, we believe X, right? Look in the catechism of the Catholic Church. This is the Catholic faith. But it's not as easy to say the same thing when you talk about the Jewish people or, or even in this case, like, I have a lot of Protestant friends. What do the Protestants believe? Well, there's a lot of diversity there, right? So, first point would be there's diversity in Judaism today. And there's the same thing was true in the first century AD. Okay. So, there was a diversity of opinion. The sagacies did not believe all the same things that the Pharisees believed. And the Pharisees did not believe all the same thing that the Essenes, which were a Jewish sect that Joseph has mentioned. In fact, Joseph has mentioned four. The sagacies, the Pharisees, the Essenes, and they also talked about the zealots. Okay. So, there were these factions. There were different groups within Judaism. So, you know, caveat, they didn't all believe the same thing. It didn't even accept the same scriptures, right? So, the sagacies only accepted the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, right? Of the books of Moses, whereas the Pharisees accepted a much broader canon, which is basically identical to the contemporary Jewish tonk that Jewish scriptures, the Torah, the law on the prophets, they would find it a Jewish Bible today. Then there were Samaritans too, who accepted the laws of Moses, but they didn't accept the prophets. So, just, and they have a different temple call up and-- That's really helpful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, there's diversity on the ground. So, let's just put that out there. First, second, according to Josephus, however, there is a common Judaism. And most Jews on the first century in the ground followed the Pharisees. Josephus tells us that they were the most popular group among the Jewish people. For one thing, they were the ones who were in charge of the synagogue system, right? And the synagogue, the local synagogues, was where most people got their instruction that it's where they heard the scriptures read. That's where they heard preaching and teaching. It's one of the reasons why when Jesus starts his ministry, where does he go? Well, if you want an audience, you go to the synagogue because that's where people are gathering once a week, right? So, when it comes to the Pharisees and the kind of common Judaism that you see reflected in Jewish synagogues in the first century, I would argue that if you look at their messianic expectations, for me personally, the real place you want to go is the book of Daniel. It's the book of Daniel. And why do I say that? Well, because Josephus himself tells us that out of all the prophets, Daniel is the most or one of the most significant, because Daniel not only prophesies what's going to happen in the future, he actually gives you a timeline. He tells you when it's going to happen. And this is very significant. So, if you go back to the book of Daniel, you're going to see there are basically three key prophecies that are going to be really crucial for understanding what Josephus is referring to there. And what kind of expectations Jews would have had on the ground, just ordinary common Jews in the first century in terms of expectations about the Messiah. The first one is the prophecy of the statue, the different statues of metal and Daniel chapter two, and the coming of the kingdom of God. The second one is the prophecy of these four beasts followed by the coming of the Son of Man in Daniel chapter seven. And then the third one, which a lot of people forget about, is Daniel chapter nine, which has this prophecy of the destruction of the temple and the death of the Mashiach. Mashiach is the word for anointed one. It means the Messiah. Okay. So now, these three prophecies are really crucial because when Jesus begins going around in the synagogues, what's one of the first things he says? Repent, believe the gospel because the kingdom of God is what at hand. All right. Second, when he starts going around and talking over and over, how does he refer to himself over and over again? Son of man. The son of man. The son of man. I just a son of man. The son of man. Yeah. I've been told by Father Richard Roer that he was just this is a god bless him, but not a terribly orthodox Catholic priest that he is merely referring to his humanity when he says. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Well, I mean, it is true. The expression Benadam, son of man, is used in Psalm 8, for example, just to refer to a human being like a son of Adam, a son of man. It can be used generically that way. But when you put a definite article on it, the son of man, which is how Jesus always uses it, and you describe that figure doing things like coming on the clouds, that's an illusion in the book of Daniel where Daniel sees this vision of one like a son of man coming on the clouds of having been presented to the ancient of days and then be giving glory and honor and kingdom and dominion. Right. I mean, so this is a very, very significant figure, which we know, by the way, from ancient Jewish writings like Fourth Ezra, and Second Baruch, these were early Jewish, but writing, they aren't in the Bible, but they reflect what Jews on the ground were believing that that figure in Daniel 7 was interpreted as a messianic figure, as a future king, as a coming king, who would inaugurate the coming of the age to come, the kingdom of God. Right. And so, if you want to understand Jesus and like how he fit into Jewish expectations about the Messiah, you have to look at the book of Daniel, because in the sense it's like his primary reference point, kingdom of God, son of man, those are the two things Jesus is talking about all the time, well, where are they from? They're from Daniel. So if you were first introduced you and you're hearing Jesus, talk about the kingdom of God. You know what he's referring to. Yeah, it's an illusion to scripture because you're on a synagogue every Sabbath, right? Almost at every Sunday, but that's that would not be not me right. Yeah, then we'd definitely correct me on that one, but it's Catholics, you know, we always do it. But every Sabbath you're going, and this is actually what was unique about Judaism too, like you not only rest once a week, but you learn. You study the scriptures. Joseph is a viable talk about like the literacy, the focus on literacy and study was distinctively Jewish, right? You have all kinds of other religious cults in the ancient world, Greco-Roman, cult of Artemis, cults of Zeus. They don't have texts. They don't have sacred texts that are the center of their formation and worship. You know, they have festivals and they do all kinds of things that those festivals, but Jews are different. Like the first century Jews are different. So they would be familiar with the scriptures, the law and the prophets are what it read at synagogue. Anyway, so if you back up and you look at the book of Daniel, for example, in chapter two, one of the things you're going to see is that Daniel, you know, he set the book set during the Babylonian exile. And there's this great story where a King Nebuchadnezzar has this dream of this statue, right? Daniel chapter two. And it's got a golden head and silver chest and bronze thighs and then legs made of iron and clay. And the king freaks out because he has this dream because in the dream, he sees this big statue and this little stone appears not made by a human hand and it hits the statue at the base of the statue and then the whole thing comes crashing down and then that little bit of stone, not made by a human hand, becomes a giant mountain and spreads throughout the earth. Right? And the king freaks out. Nebuchadnezzar is like, I need to know what this dream means. So he calls his like dream readers in, you know, the wise men. And he says, I need you to interpret my dream, which is what they would do for the kings, but he said, but I need you to, I need you to tell me the dream first and then interpret it. Like I'm not going to tell you what I, that way I know you're giving me the truth. And they're like, um, nobody can do that. Like we can interpret your dream. We can't tell you what you dream. They're like, okay, then I'm going to execute you and your family. No, no joke. This is how kings roll back then. That's fascinating. So Daniel of course comes in because he's one of the wise men in the court and he says, well, look, no man on earth can do that, but there is a god in Israel. There is a god in heaven who is the revealer of mysteries and he can reveal the dream and its interpretation. So Daniel in chapter two, uh, uh, he, he tells the dream to the king and he says, this okay, is your dream. You're the head. You're the golden head. It's the Babylonian empire, right? But then there's going to be another empire after you. And that's the silver one. Um, then there'll be another one after that. It's bronze. Then there'll be a third after that. It'll be iron. And then the death kingdom will be the little stone that's going to start out really small. It's going to destroy all these other kingdoms and it's going to spread throughout the earth, okay? And that kingdom will be set up by God. 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But in the first century, we look at these early Jewish apocrypha, like 4,000, Rosemaroo, the standard, the most ancient interpretation of this passage in Daniel is that the gold head represents the Babylonian empire. The silver is the meadow Persian empire. It's successor because the mead's in Persians united and overthrew Babylon. This is what happens when empires. They only can stay empires for so long before they're overthrown by somebody else. So Babylon is the golden head. Meadow Persians are the silver. The bronze is the Greeks who then overthrew them. Alexander the Great, we mentioned him. And then he succeeded by the Roman empire, which is strong. It's like made of iron, right? But it's iron mixed with clay. It's not permanent. There's a weakness in it as well. So during that fourth empire, here comes the stone. The Rome. Here comes this little bitty stone. And some made by-- It's made by human hand, Daniel says. So it's a supernatural kingdom. And it's real small. And yet somehow, it strikes the base of the statue. And the whole thing comes crashing down, right? Now that already tells you this is no ordinary stone because if I threw a little pebble at a metal statue, it's not going to bounce off it. It's not going to destroy it. But this is an ordinary stone because that stone, Daniel, said, is the kingdom of God. And it's going to start out small. Daniel says it's the kingdom of God. Oh yeah, yeah. In Daniel chapter 24, yes. He says, you can see it here. Line just ladies out there. Find you so for man who loves you the way Brent loves the club. This is beautiful. No, in the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom. Okay. Yeah. Which shall never be destroyed. Whew. Nor shall it sovereignty be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end. And it shall stand forever just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand. Yeah. And it broken pieces, the brine, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold. A great God has made known to the king, which she'll be here after the dream is certain and its interpretation is sure. Wow. Trish King Nebuchadnezzar actually falls on his knees and he starts to worship Daniel. Like he's like, you're God through. I know Daniel, of course, you know, don't worship me. But that's the prophecy of the kingdom of God. Right. So imagine now put yourself in the first century. You're a Jew. Yeah. You know the book of Daniel. Yeah. You know the history. Babylon was succeeded by the Medi-Persians. Medi-Persian was succeeded by the Greek. They all keep destroying your land and taking them. Now it's the Romans. Who's here? Yeah. It's the Romans. Yeah. Right. So when are you expecting the Messiah and the come? Not the Messiah. We're just kingdom. When's King of God going to come? It's going to come during the fourth kingdom. And so this fella shows up, casting out demons, raising people from the dead. And he's saying the repent of the kingdom of God is what at hand? You follow? I mean, this is this is what Jesus means. So when he's prophesying about this, it's really important to look at Daniel because if you read like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, they don't really talk about the kingdom of God. That's not a common thing. They do lots of other themes like a new Exodus is coming, a new heavens, a new earth, new creation. You got a suffering serving. Like there's all kinds of stuff. There's a new temple. That's a big one. But kingdom of God is Daniel. Right. And so what I would say is Jews, not all Jews necessarily, but many Jews in the first century AD, those who thought Daniel was scripture would have recognized that in terms of the timeline, the kingdom is supposed to come during the fourth, the kingdom of God is supposed to come during the fourth kingdom. And that's the kingdom of Rome. Right. So Roman Empire. Right. And it's going to, it's going to smash that kingdom, leave it in ruins and grow up and become a great mountain that fills the whole earth. That's the other thing. Think about naturally, mountains might turn into pebbles, but pebbles don't turn into mountains. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So this is a supernatural kingdom. It's going to start out really small. Maybe let's try to think of an analogy. Maybe like a mustard seed. Very good. It's like the smallest the seas. Yeah. Maybe even start out with like 12 guys from Nazareth. So yet it's going to become a great mountain that fills the whole earth. And where's it going to spread from? The ruins of the fourth kingdom, Rome, which is Rome. Come on. No joke. Why do you think Peter and Paul be lined it for Rome? You ever thought about this? No. Yeah. I mean, on a practical level, you might say, well, if you evangelize the capital, you evangelize the empire. Right. So there's like a kind of earthly strategy that would make sense. Right. You know, why do you want to share the gospel? You get on online. You get on the internet, right? Because it's got a big audience. But there's actually a deeper reason there in terms of prophecy and fulfillment. The two pillars of the church, Peter and Paul, they're, they're, they go to Rome to shed their blood. Because the seed of the Christians is the blood of the sea, the blood of the martyrs, excuse me, yeah. Blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. They do it for Daniel said, whoa, man. So what would be really cool? Peter's name meant like, that would be, let's say that again, I love to learn. No, it's all right. Yeah. It would be really cool if Peter's name actually meant, right? Yeah, it's a small stuff. Anyway, so that's, that's in one example. Yeah. All right. That's a good example. Yeah. It's a really important. So what are the, what are these first century Jews who are expecting the Messiah? Yeah. What are they expecting in a Messiah? Yeah. Okay. Well, that's okay. There's a lot of diversity there too as well. So let's, let's give some examples. And yeah, and why, why use the word Messiah? Is that because of Daniel? Yeah. That what they, when they say they're waiting for a Messiah, what did they mean by that? Perfect. Okay. Good question. So I'll back up. The word Messiah, Mashiach, in Hebrew, a creestos in Greek, it just means anointed one, right? So if you go back and you look for example, and first book, first book is Samuel, when Saul, not Saul, when Samuel the prophet is sent to pick a king because Saul's not doing so good, God tells him, I'm going to show you who the Lord's anointed is. So in Hebrew, that's just Mashiach. It's an anointed one. Of course, Samuel assumes that it's going to be, you know, the older sons of Jesse, especially the tall ones, but God doesn't like the tall. He wants the short guys. Saul's tall, David's short. I like that. And so he chooses the youngest son. And when God says this is he, this is the one, Samuel takes out a horn of oil and he dumps it over David's head to consecrate him through the oil, through the anointing for the mission of being a king, right? And it says that when the oil was poured on David's head from that moment forward, the spirit was upon him, right? So it's a supernatural consecration to the mission of being king. That's what Messiah means, the anointed one, the one who is anointed not only with oil, but with the spirit of God to be king of Israel. Okay. So David is a Messiah. Solomon his son also gets anointing. He is a Messiah. Any anointed king of Israel is a Messiah, right? In the little M since the work. Okay? But what of course happens is that over history things don't go so well with the David kingdom and even though God promises that in day, second Samuel seven that the kingdom is going to last forever. We all know what happens. Solomon breaks the laws. God says in Deuteronomy, don't multiply weapons, don't multiply wealth gold and don't multiply wives and Solomon does all three, man. He gets the horses from Egypt. He gets a 666 gold talents a year and then he gets 700 wives and 300 on a copy. And why you need 300 concubines when you already have 700 wives? I don't know. I mean, just think about the anniversaries. I mean, how are you going to keep all that straight? But I'd actually get. Yeah. But no, actually, I'm joking, but what is he doing? He's trying to unite the world through his political, through political, these political marriages, through his own virility, like he's going to bring about the union of Israel and the nations. And of course, what happens instead is that they corrupt his heart. He becomes an idol. And the kingdom falls apart. So within 200 years, the 10 northern tribes go into exile in the Assyrian exile in the eighth century. And then by the sixth century, the whole thing falls apart with the great Babylonian exile in 587 BC when the time of Jeremiah, and as he killed the temples, destroyed, and the last remnant of the Jews were taken into exile. And it looks like the promises of God are just completely thwarted by the Gentile nations. In fact, the Babylonian king takes out the reigning Israelite king at the time and slaughter all his sons in his sight and the gouges is is out. Gouges is eyes out. So that will be the last thing that he sees is the decimation of the heirs. Okay. So we got a problem now because you have a god who promised David that his king would last forever and that he'd always have a son that sit on the throne. But now the 10 northern tribes are scattered among the Gentiles. The two southern tribes are there in Babylon, like Daniel, you know, just the temple's death gone. And would emerge as in the midst of all of that, starting with the Assyrian exile in eighth century all the way down into Babylonian exile. Does the prophets begin to say that one day, God's going to raise up a new David? He's going to send a new shepherd. He's going to send a new king and he's going to restore the kingdom. He's going to make a new temple, new David, new kingdom. And not just a new kingdom. Isaiah even says there'll be a new heavens and a new earth. Beat their shords into plowshares and their pruning horks, right? Pruning forks. Oh, forget how I said, I'm not a farmer. They'll beat the swords into plowshares for sure because they'll be peace, right? They'll be peace. Yeah. He's going to make the whole world new. So, in Isaiah in particular says that when he does this, he's going to come and he's going to inaugurate a new Exodus. You'll hear a voice crying in the wilderness, come forth my people, right? Yeah. And he's going to bring us out into the desert. Whoa. Yeah. And bring us back home to the promised land, right? Yeah. So. And then I think fast forward to Gabriel saying he will sit on the throne of David, all the David. He said on throne of his father, David. Kingdom will have no end. His kingdom will have no end. That's exactly right. So because the promises of God will meet for filming. They might appear to be forwarded. Shouldn't just rapport. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. No, don't be sorry. This is incredible. I just wanted to insert here. Yeah. This is a beautiful lesson for those of us who look around the world today and feel hopeless. We might look at the church. We might have been told that the corruption is worse than it is, although I'm not sure. Maybe it is just as bad as it seems. And you think, well, where's God in all of this? I'm sure if you were like if you're alive at the time of Solomon, who starts off as this pure child, Lord, just give me wisdom. And according to kings becomes wisest of wise men, the queen of sheep, the Gentiles are trying to come and worship in the temple in Jerusalem because of the wisdom of Solomon that come from the ends of the earth. And then by the end of his life, sacrificing children. He's not sacrificing, making human sacrifice to ball. Like that's how far he falls. All right. And yet God's there. He has an abandoned his people. He doesn't abandon them through Solomon. He doesn't abandon them. Ten tribes of the ten northern tribes. A lot of people don't forget about the Assyrian Exile in the eighth century. But way before the temple was destroyed, ten of the twelve tribes of Jacob are just decimated by the Assyrians, made slaves and scattered to the four winds. This is where the whole legend of the lost tribes of Israel comes from, the lost ten tribes. Like the majority of Israel was decimated. Sometimes with my students, I'll give an analogy. Imagine, this is hilarious, but imagine if Canada invaded the United States when it was still young and ten of the thirteen colonies, you know, like they captured them and took them away. Like it would that would really rock the nation, right? That's how devastating the Assyrian Exile was in the eighth century. In the sixth century BC, when you have the last two Jews in Benjamin or brought in an Exile, it just appears like God is just abandoned. But he hasn't, right? It's all part of his divine providence. And so so when I when you hear people say that the Jews in the first century were expecting a sort of a king in the same line as David or the military leader to kind of crush the Romans. That makes sense now. Yeah, it does make sense. So on the one hand, it's a caricature. Okay, so it is true that there were Jews in the first century who expected a purely military figure to come and deliver them from the Romans. That makes sense. David was a military figure. Saul, I mean, like, you know, these were, you know, they were earthly men, but that's not all they were waiting for. Like you can't reduce Messianic expectation to that. Okay. Because if you start looking at the prophets, they're saying a lot more about the Messiah than just a purely military figure who's going to bring about some kind of political deliverance because I mean, Isaiah is talking about a new axis. He's talking about a new heavens and a new earth. Daniel's talking about a kingdom that spreads to the ends of the earth. Like it becomes a universal kingdom. Jeremiah, a and Ezekiel, Zedekiah, I'm sorry, Zechariah as well. Talk about the conversion of the Gentiles. This is really, really important in the book of Isaiah. Isaiah talks, Isaiah 56. He talks about in this new temple that the Gentiles will come and my house shall be a house of prayer for all nations. Right? So it's way more than just a military look. It's a new Exodus. It's a new David. It's a new creation. It's a new temple and it's the conversion of the Gentile nations and the end gathering of the scattered tribes of Israel from the ends of the earth back to the new temple. Okay. I did my dissertation on this by the way. Like so my dissertation was called Jesus the Tribulation and the end of the Exile. No, it's not in print anymore. But it was all about the expectation that in Jewish eschatology in the first century, their beliefs about the end, that there would be a time of tribulation or suffering before the kingdom. And then when the kingdom comes that the scattered tribes of Israel and the Gentile nations would come together and pilgrimage to a new temple. So it's just way more going on on the ground and Judaism. Then a lot of contemporary Christians are really aware of, right? So if you go back to Daniel for just a second, when Jesus steps on to the scene or actually back up, when John the Baptist starts on the steps on the scene and he starts baptizing people out in the Jordan. Why has he gone out to the desert? This is water in Jerusalem, this water in the temple. Why not just bring their mixed fuzz there like ritual baths? Well, he goes to the Jordan because that's where the first Exodus ended. So where's the new Exodus going to begin? Same place the first one in it. We're going to go out into the desert. I'm going to call you to baptize to repent because the kingdom's coming. I'm going to put you down in the water with the Jordan and then you go up in the promised land. Why? As a kind of like inauguration of a new Exodus. But the first Exodus starts in Egypt and ends in the promised land. The new Exodus is going to start in the promised land, the earthly promised land and end in the new Jerusalem, end in the new heavens, the new creation. It's a heavenly kingdom, right? And that's really important because if you go back to Daniel 7, I mentioned earlier a second prophecy. The prophecy is the son of man in Daniel 7 also has a sequence of kingdoms. But in this case, it's a sequence of these different beasts, right? And it's the same basic symbolism. Like there's a line it represents the Babylonian empire. There's a bear that represents the meadow Persians. There's a leopard with wings that represents Greek because that's how quickly Alexander spread. And then there's this great terrible beast that smashes all the others. And that represents the Roman Empire, according to early Jewish interpretation. And then once you have all those beasts at the end of that, Daniel sees one like a son of man coming on the clouds of heaven, presented to the ancient of days, who's the Lord, the God of Israel. And then that son of man is given a kingdom and power and dominion and glory that never ends. So again, it's a sequence of kings this time. But the fifth king is the son of man. And if fifth kingdom is heavenly, right? Like there's a lot more going on. So when Jesus comes onto the scene and he starts referring himself to son of man, the son of man, the son of man, like when he heals the paralytic. And he says your sins are forgiven. Who can forgive sins? We got alone. Jesus says, so you may know the son of man has authority on earth. Interesting. To forgive sins, I say rise, take up your power and walk. So he's not just referring to a son of man there, right? It's, it does mean he's human because he is, that's important. But it also is a heavenly figure. In fact, there was a Jewish scholar, Daniel Boyard, and he taught at Yale for many years. He was an expert in rabbinics. He published a book on the, I think it's called the Jewish Gospel. And it's a book on the gospels. And he's very clear about this. If you look at his chapter, grab a boy, and says, Daniel 7, like or not, depicts a second divine figure, a kind of a heavenly being who looks like a man. That's why Daniel says, I saw one like a son of man. Because he's riding on the clouds, which is something only God does in the Old Testament. But he looks like he's a man. So is he divine or is he human? And Rabbi Boyard is like, yeah, both. He's a, he's a divine human figure. And that's the figure. Jesus takes from Jewish scripture and uses to refer to himself over and over again. Because it's a riddle, Matt. You see? It's like, wait, a son of man, the son of man, wait, are you saying you're human? Are you saying that? Are you that heavenly figure from Daniel? And the answer is both. See, son of man, that perfectly protects both the fullness of his humanity and the implication of his divinity. You see? Because it's both. So same thing. If you're if you're a Jew and you're in the first century AD and you know the book of Daniel and you're familiar with the kind of interpretations of the sequence of kingdoms that you see in 4th, azeros, 2nd, Baruch, these different Jewish writings, then when Jesus starts talking about himself as the son of man, and he starts saying things like you're going to see him coming on the clouds or heaven, you recognize that's a messianic claim. But it's a messianic claim about a heavenly kingdom. It's not just natural, it's supernatural. Okay. And when's the son of man supposed to come? Let's see. Babylon, and Medo, Persia, Greek, oh wait, Rome's the 4th, Rome's the Beast, Rome's the 4th kingdom. We're living, yeah, sometimes soon. So I actually think people don't realize this. One of the reasons if you look at Josephus, one of the reasons they have so many messianic claimants in the first century is because they knew the timeline. See, have these other figures rising up like the Egyptian and and then there's another figure actually named Jesus son of anionis to start prophesying the kingdoms, going to be just, no, that excuse me, there's another figure Jesus son of anionis who starts prophesying that the temple is going to be destroyed. These other messianic claimants, the reason they're rising up is because at the times right, like people are like messianic expectations at a fever pitch in the first century because of the sequence of kingdoms and then there's also one other passage. I'll just, I really want to make sure I'll hit this one, Daniel 9, because that's the only one we actually see the word machiaque. Okay. Now, I can't go into this in a ton of detail because it, but in the case for Jesus, I have a chapter on it and I would just encourage people look at it, but basically what you see is that in Daniel 9, Daniel gives, this is a really important prophecy because he gives it after Gabriel comes to him. So like the angel comes to him, kind of reminds you like Mary, he's praying at the hour prayer. So Jews had morning and evening prayer, like Daniel actually paid three times a day. Sounds very much like the liturgy hour. It's not like these sets times of prayer. He's praying the time in evening sacrifice. The angel comes to him and gives him this prophecy where he actually gives a timeline. Okay. He says, "No, from the going forth of the word to restore and build Jerusalem, there'll be 70 weeks of years." So 490 years. Okay. Until the coming of this time of an abomination of desolation, a destruction where the temple in the city will be destroyed. And then he says, "A machiaque, a Messiah will be cut off." Now, and he revival when you say someone's cut off, it means they're killed. Now, this isn't obscure passage. There's lots of different debates about how to interpret it, but as I show in the book, what's fascinating is if you look at the church fathers, even Blaise Pascal, whose famous mathematician in his pulsais writes about this, if you look at the Old Testament, the word that goes forth to restore the city after it's destroyed is at the time of art exerxes, in about 457 BC. And if you fast forward 409 years from that, you went up a ride around 33 AD. Okay. So there's actually a timeline given in the book of Daniel, "For the Messiah to be killed for the destruction of the city, Jerusalem, and the temple, right, to take place. It's going to be 70 weeks of years after the restoration of the temple in city began under King Arteseerxes." Which by the way, why 70 weeks of years? Remember, 490 in a Jewish context is going to be an echo of the Jubilee. So in the Old Testament, John Burisma, my friend John Burisma, word is dissertation on this, the Jubilee is at the end of the 49 year, you have a 50th year. It's a great Jubilee. And in the 50th year, all debts are forgiven. If you've been exiled from your land, you return to the land. Anybody who's got student loans, imagine that. Everybody's loans are forgiven. All debt is forgiven. And then you come back to the land of your people, the land of your home. So that was supposed to happen in the 50th year of the Jubilee. So 490 is like a super Jubilee. But instead of forgiving economic debt, it's going to forgive Daniel says, "To finish the transgression, I'll just read the passage. 70 weeks of years are decree concerning the people and the holy city to finish the transgression and to put it into sin, to atone for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal the vision in the prophet and to anoint a most holy one, like a new temple, right?" So it's a Jubilee from sin. It's a relief from the sin, the debt of sin. Because in Jewish scripture, sin's always, it's a burden. It's like, and you know this, if you're a sinner, which we all are, like sins heavy, and you got to carry it around with you. It's a weight. Just like debt. Debt's always at the back of your mind. It's a weight. And so God wants to lift that weight. He wants to forgive that debt. He wants to release that. He wants the Jubilee from sin to take place. And it's going to be like a mega Jubilee at the end of the 490 years. 490 years, 70 weeks of years. So Daniel's prophecy there is that, a Messiah is going to come. He's going to be killed, which is weird. Jerusalem's going to be destroyed. Trump's going to be destroyed. But sins will be a tone for. Right? So it's very mysterious prophecy, but it's another one of the reasons why, in fact, like Josephus says, Daniel spoke with God, but he didn't just prophesy future events as the other prophets. He also determined the time. These would come to pass. You see, this says, if you look, the restoration began at times at King Ardizurkesis. And from that date to the coming of Christ was the 70 weeks of years. Right? So this is why in the 1st century everybody's ready. Like if Daniel's right, then it should be happening sometime soon. Right? And that's when Jesus Nazareth is going to step on the scene, say the kingdom of God is at hand, say, refer to himself as the Son of Man, but then also start saying this mysterious thing that they're going to take the Son of Man, go betray him into the hand of the Gentiles. It's going to be put to death in three days. He's going to rise again. And this is the part where the apostle is like, wait, what? Like it was with you. Yeah, I was with you until the whole passion and death thing, right? And so it is, it, this, it is true that there was this, there wasn't a kind of widespread expectation. Oh, of course, the Messiah is going to die in the way that Jesus dies. Like this is a bit of a stomach bump. Daniel's prophecy is cryptic. It's obscure, but it says a Messiah shall be cut off. He will be, he will be put to death. So in due to injury, actually, if you look at rabbinic tradition, too, they'll talk about these two, there's two traditions. This is the rabbi, sorry, the Messiah has been David and the Messiah has been Joseph. It's fascinating. Now, it's later than the New Testament, but it does reflect the idea I'm talking about here, namely that there's both a kind of glorious Messiah, that's Messiah's son of David. And then there's also a suffering Messiah, Messiah's son of Joseph. And, and Jesus is going to like fuse those two into one. And that's going to be part of the mystery of what he's proclaiming to the disciples because he's saying, yeah, it's the kingdom of God, but it doesn't look like a kingdom. It looks like a mustard plant, which is like just a ugly bush. Like a mustard tree is not beautiful. Like if he would have said, the kingdom of God is like a cedar of Lebanon. I got that. I can roll with that. I mean, that's the glorious trees. Yeah. Make the temple with that. But a mustard tree, it's like, it's a weed, man. But see, that's the kingdom. It doesn't look glorious, but it is God's plant. Like, it's a big sense. Of course. And it starts off beautiful. Yeah. But and you know, what's your scene? Once you get them in your yard, you can't stop it. They just, it's like, it's like you can't get that weed out. It's like cocoa grass in your garden, if you're a gardener, or well, there's all kinds of weeds problematic. The weeds always seem to do good. The fruit's not so good. But at least my garden. So, so those are riddles. This is, I mean, Vatican II in the in the document on the church, it said the church is the kingdom of God present in mystery. That's really important. It's the kingdom, but it doesn't look like it. It's present in mystery. There's a in, it's a hiddenness to it. And the same thing's true with Jesus. Like, he, he looks like the Messiah, and he doesn't. He looks like the Messiah when he's casting out demons and raising the dead and preaching someone around. He doesn't win. He's pulling a sleep in the boat. He's sleeping in the boat. Doesn't have any place to lay his head. And then they drag him out. And they hang him on a cross, which is, that's how, that's how you execute slaves. It's not ding. Like, you want, if you're a citizen, you get beheaded. Like, St. Paul. That's the dignified death. The crucifixion is, is meant to shame you as much as to make you suffer. Because it's the death of a slave. It's public humiliation. And, and in the dead see scrolls and in the, and in the, in the pinnitude, because well, anyone who's hung out on tree overnight, they're cursed. So like, wait, you can't be the Messiah and be a curse. It just, like, it doesn't compute. It doesn't compute. But, as I said, it's, you know, his ways they're not our ways, you know. Bible across America, an inspiring initiative from the St. Paul Center represents an unprecedented opportunity to unite the entire church through the world's largest Bible study. This transformative program invites believers to embark on a spiritual journey alongside thousands of fellow individuals and groups from across the globe, creating a powerful sense of communion that transcends geographical boundaries. As participants delve deeply into scripture together, they will discover new dimensions of knowledge and cultivate a more profound love for Jesus Christ. The experience goes beyond mere academic study, offering participants the chance to encounter Christ in a personal and meaningful way through both the sacred scripture and the vibrant community of fellow seekers. Through this dual approach of scripture engagement and communal learning, participants will find themselves increasingly equipped and empowered to share their faith with confidence and authenticity, becoming effective witnesses to others in their own lives and communities. I have benefited a great deal from the St. Paul Center. Thank God for people like Dr. Scott Hahn, Dr. John Bergzman, I highly recommend them. So, transform your journey this year. Join the movement alongside a global community starting February 18th. Don't miss out. Sign up today at St. Paul Center.com/lent. That's beautiful. Thank you for that. That was so terrific. Let's talk about the kind of Messiah they got. Where does Jesus Christ claim to be divine? And if he did, how are people responding to that? Another question I have, and maybe this is unanswerable, is when did the Blessed Virgin Mary figure that out? When did the apostles figure that out? Okay. Okay. Yeah. All right. Let's do one at a time. Because people will complain. They'll say, "Look, no way is he claiming to be God? You're just sort of reading into the tea leaves and coming out with something that the church came up with hundreds of years after the supposed resurrection." Yeah. No, this is. Yeah, this is a big question. In fact, I just published a book called Jesus in Divine Christology. Just so everyone's watching. We're going to put links to each of these books in the description below. Please check these out. These are terrific. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. So I've written the book, the case for Jesus, for like a general audience a few years back. And then I realized I wanted to go even more depth on this. Because there is a lot of scholarly debate about this. And it's actually pretty widespread scholarly assumption these days and 20th century leaks that. Well, of course, Jesus and Nazareth maybe claimed to be Messiah, but he didn't claim to be God, right? So I wrote this book, Jesus in Divine Christology, to be a full-scale, in-depth scholarly academic treatment of the evidence. Okay. Let's actually look at what the evidence is for the historical Jesus, like Jesus and Nazareth, making divine self-claims. Okay. So what's the evidence of Jesus' claim to be God? Well, the first thing I would say is based on our earlier conversation about the reliability of Gossips, starting. Taking that as a starting point. Number one, you may have heard it said that Jesus is only a human figure in the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, sometimes called the synoptic Gospels because they see things so similar. And he only claims to be divine in the Gospel of John. Right. So I think pretty much everyone recognizes he claims to be divine in John. So for example, John 8, he says, "Before Abraham was, I am." He takes the divine name from the burning bush as his own. Or in John 10, he says, "I and the Father are one." Right? I mean, these are very clear divine claims. But what scholars will say, many will say, "Yeah, but John is the latest gospel. It's not as reliable. It was written after the belief in his divinity has developed. But if you look at the earlier Gospels, especially the earliest gospel, which is widely regarded to be the gospel, Mark, he doesn't make any such divine claims. He's just a human figure. He might be a messianic figure, but he's just a human messianic figure." And so in Jesus' divine Christology, I challenge that hypothesis and argue that actually, on the one hand, it is true. Jesus does not go around the streets of Galilee and Jerusalem saying, "Hey, everybody, I'm God." Right? I'm the second person to the most holy Trinity, right? He doesn't do that. That's true. So he doesn't explicitly state that for most of his public ministry. On the other hand, he does claim to be divine. He does claim to be God, but he does it in a Jewish way. Using riddles and parables and especially illusions to scripture. Okay? And the reason he does it in a riddle-like or mysterious way is because he is biting his time. This is really important. Like, if he comes out with an explicit claim of divinity, at the beginning of his public ministry, he would end up on a cross or at least end up stone to death right away because that would be considered blasphemy, and, apparently, for blasphemy and for a century is death by stoning. Okay? Like, that's the ordinary method. But there's another dimension to it too, which is that Jesus doesn't go around shoving his divinity on people's throat, so to speak. He actually wants to invite you into the mystery. Like, he wants you to answer the question, "Who do you say that I am?" Okay? And he also has to introduce, frankly, gradually. Like, this is a pretty stupendous thing to claim, and he's going to even have to introduce his own disciples into it gradually. All right? So, let me just look at a couple of examples, and I'll show you what I mean by saying he does claim to be divine, but he does it in a Jewish way. The first example of this would be the famous story of the healing of the paralytic. Okay? We all know this. I mean, if you know the gospel, if you know the story. I'm Mark chapter two, right? So, he's in a room and he's in a house, he's preaching. There's a man who's paralyzed, and he's been healing people. So, they bring the paralyzed man to him, but they can't get through the door because so many people. So, they drop him down through the roof, into Jesus' presence, right? And this is what Mark says about it. He says, "When they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof, and when they made it opening, they let down the power, power it on which the paralytic lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, my son, which is a weird thing to say, from one adult man to another adult man, your sins are forgiven." Pause. We just want to say, "Nobody asked here." Yeah, yeah. I don't know about you, but if I'm the paralyzed guy who just got like a let down through a roof, my reaction to that is sweet. Also, yeah, that's nice, but it does not exactly what I came here for, right? You know what I mean? So, my son, your sins are forgiven. Now, it says, some of the scribes who were sitting there, questioning their hearts, saying, "Why does this man speak thus? It is blasphemy. Who can forgive sins but God alone?" Okay, pause there. Actually, in Greek, in the original Greek, it's more explicit. It's who can forgive sins, but haste, hotheth, the one God. The same language from the Shema, the ancient Jewish prayer, here, O Israel, Shema Israel, that the Lord your God, the Lord is one. You would love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength. That was recited by Jews daily. They would have known that, common Jews, just like Catholics, if you know your faith, they're faith. You know they are Father, right? So, they say, who can forgive sins but the one God, meaning the God of Israel, the God of the Shema? And Jesus says to them, "No, no, no, you got me all wrong. That's not what I meant. You misunderstood me. I would never." I would never. No, he doesn't say that at all. He actually responds by saying, immediately Jesus perceiving in his spirit that they questioned him, said to himself, said to them, excuse me, why do you question thus in your hearts? Which is easier to say to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven, or to say rise, take up your palate and walk. Definitely the first one. Yeah, definitely. But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, I say to you, rise, take up your palate and go home. And he rose and immediately, Mark loves that word. He took up his palate and went out before them all so that they were all amazed and glorified God saying, we never saw anything like this. Okay, like Gerd and Falls, right? In the story. Now, notice what Jesus did there. What he said was, which is greater, just to say your sins are forgiven or to say rise up, take up your palate and walk. But so that you know that I have the power to perform the invisible miracle of forgiving this man's sins, which requires divine power, I'll perform the visible miracle of healing as paralysis because the Son of Man has authority on earth. That's a strange line on earth. Well, think about it. Daniel 7. Where is the Son of Man when Daniel sees him? Is he on earth? No, he's up in heaven. I saw the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven. He's a heavenly being. But now he's an earthly being in Jesus, right? That's what's that's the mystery here. Right? And so Jesus doesn't say, hey, everybody, I'm God. But does he have to? No, in this first century Jewish context, notice who picks up on the implication of his worth? It's the scribes. Why do they pick up on it? Because they know the scriptures. Like they know the scriptures. And they know that in the Old Testament, Jacob, no, great Old Testament scholar, wrote it. I think it's like 2000 page commentary on the vidicus. No joke. Three volumes. News and or says this in his commentary on the vidicus one through four. Thinking of those who find Leviticus boring and I know, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I own it, of course. But when milkroom says this, if you look at the Old Testament in Leviticus, whenever it says the priests were offered sacrifice and sins would be forgiven, it's always in the divine passive. It's not the priest who forgives the sins. It's God who forgives because only God can forgive sin because every sin isn't just an offense against another human being. It's an offense against against Almighty God. And so only he at the end of the day can actually declare sins forgiven. But you know what Jesus doesn't say? Lord, forgive us and he just, he declares it. Your sins are forgiven. And that's where like, whoa, like, okay, you can't do this. Now, I should note here that some scholars like Bart Ayrman and others will say, no, no, no, you're misinterpreting it. Actually, priests could forgive sins. They could declare sins forgiven. And I disagree. And in fact, the evidence supports me because you notice they don't say who can forgive sins but the priests alone. They just say that. I said, yeah, you're right. But that's not what they said. Who can forgive sins but the one God? Right. This is the divine prognosis. And Jesus lays claim to it. Right. Right at the beginning of the spoke minister. And this is Mark chapter two. So this is how he starts. All right. So it's no wonder he's going to get into trouble over and over again. Now, that's Mark two. I would highlight for me, there's another passage. Gosh, there's so many. Mark four, stilling in the storm. There's another good one. Right. You mentioned him being asleep in the boat earlier. Right. So you know, this story is famous. They got on see a gallery. And a great storm comes out, squall. And look, if you've, I don't know how much time he's been on water, but I'm from South Louisiana, fishing, hunting. If you're in a marsh and you're in a boat, when a storm breaks out, like you get real scared, real fast, because you know you are vulnerable. Okay. So being on the water in a storm is a really terrifying experience because if there are two powerful forces in this world that human beings, man still have not conquered, it's wind and waves. Right. And I know this. We have hurricanes, right. We know how powerful the wind and how powerful the waves could be. So storm comes up, right. Jesus is just sleeping through the whole thing, which by the way, shows he's human. He's he gets tired. His limits, right. He's sleeping. He's in the stern of sleeping in the cushion. They wake him up, say, "Teacher, don't you care that we're bearishing?" And what does he do? Yeah. He woke. Yeah. Hello. Yeah. He woke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, peace. Be still. I haven't done that once. And if I did, it wouldn't do it. Oh. That's not a book. Did you imagine? No, I mean, it's being with someone who just seemed like a palace. Peace, no, in a little bit, maybe. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's totally human. He's asleep. He's tired. I mean, they've been preaching and teaching and you know, he's been able to bukes the wind and the waves. He tells them and in the Greek, it's really emphatic. He's like, shut up. You know, be quiet. Shalom, actually, peace. And the wind ceased and there was a great calm. And he said to them, "Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?" Come on. Yeah. And the answer is, yeah, no, I don't. I don't. Yeah. So you got me, right? And they were filled with awe and they said and wanted to watch their reaction. They're all Jews, right? This is disciples. They're Jews. Who is this that even the wind and sea obey? Right. See, this is way more than anointed king, right? Because you go back to the Old Testament. You go like to book a joke and you look at Psalm like Psalm 107. Who controls the wind in the waves? It's this Lord. Like God has power over wind in waves. Okay. In fact, there's a beautiful, and in one of the Psalms, it actually describes how the Lord still the waves and calm the wind. Like, I mean, it's almost a parallel to this statement here. So if you know the Psalms, Jesus didn't say, "Hey, everybody, I'm God." But he just did something that the Old Testament says only the Lord does. You follow? Yeah, it's way more impressive. It is more impressive, right? But it's also mysterious. See, we're Western modern technology. Like, we think we got all the mysteries figured out. No, no, no, no. Christianity is a mystery religion. Like, there's a visible and then there's an invisible element to it. And that's exactly, and Judaism's the same way. The temple sacrifices like these are all visible signs of invisible heavenly realities, invisible mysteries. And so Jesus here is bringing the disciples into the mystery and they get it because what is the mystery? It's the mystery of who he is. It's the mystery of his identity. They ask the question, who? Not just what can he do. Who is this? They'd even the wind in Ceobayam and that's the end of the story. Because Mark wants you to ask that question too, right? In fact, that question is kind of the light motif, the kind of golden thread running through the whole book. Like, who are you, man? Because it's true. There are going to be miracle workers in the Old Testament. You know, Elijah, you know, performed some amazing miracles, Elijah or Alicia, they perform. But what they'll do is they'll pray. They'll ask God, Jesus doesn't, did you see him pray here? No, he didn't say father, no, he's like, you're quiet. So he exercises power over the natural elements. It's like a cosmic power. Yeah. And again, if you look at my book, "Vine Christology," Jesus is a Vine Christology, or the case for Jesus, it's not just me as a Catholic. I quote at link Jewish, atheist, Protestant, Catholic scholars like across the spec. Yeah, let me ask you that. How do modern Jewish scholars look at Christ? And when they do read the life of Christ, do they draw the same conclusions that you're drawing? I would issue the caveat depends on which person you're asking. Are there any significant Jewish questions? Oh, absolutely. I mentioned Daniel Boyar and earlier he's been done a very, a very important book. Another one is Rabbi Jacob Newsner, who was very prolific. I think he wrote like 800 books or something. I don't know how that is even possible, but he did. Okay, he passed away not too long ago. And so Daniel Boyar is a good example. They're also, remember the Jesus seminar back in the 90s, some of the younger people might not remember. They're very, very skeptical. They put out this whole book called the five gospels where they like said, Jesus said these words. He didn't say these were in the color code and all that. Even in every, in every episode that'll look at in the book, I make sure to show you Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and atheist or secular scholars who say the same things I'm saying that in this episode, Jesus is acting like he is the Lord, the God of Israel. Jesus seminar says he's acting like Zeus here because Zeus and Poseidon they have power over the elements, right? In fact, in the Jewish annotated New Testament, there's a wonderful, it's a commentary on the New Testament from a Jewish perspective. It was actually edited by my former professor, Amy Jo Levine and Mark Zavee Brettler. Two Jewish scholars, it's all Jewish scholars who contributed to it. Amy Jo was my professor when I was at Vanderbilt and Nashville. Many years ago, a wonderful, wonderful teacher and really kind of got me started looking at the New Testament through ancient Jewish eyes. But yeah, if you look at, there's a essay on Christology at the end of the Jewish annotated New Testament, I think it's Baisivey Brettler. He's really clear that yeah, in Mark, when he stills the storm and when he walks on the sea, these are things that God does. What is a Jew to make of it when he says it's something greater than the temple is here? Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, obviously, it's going to, there are going to be two issues. Number one, what is the text saying? Like, is Jesus being depicted as divine? So, you know, like Jewish commentators, like, Amy Jo Levine or, I don't want to speak for AJ on this passage in particular, but like, and if we are and we'll say, yeah, the gospels are depicting him in this case, as a divine being. Now, the next question is, okay, but did this happen? And is he, so those are distinct questions. Yeah, of course. But my point and one of the things I want to make sure I'm emphasizing here is that whatever you make of the reliability of the gospels, you have to deal with the historical fact that all four first-century biographies, not just John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, in all four of them, Jesus makes divine claims. He speaks as if he's God, healing the paralytic, he acts as if he's God in stilling the storm, and then as we'll see if we get to it, he's also crucified, he's handed over under a charge of blasphemy, which by the way, wasn't blasphemy to claim to be the Messiah in the first century. But people get this wrong. To merely claim to be the anointed heir to the throne of David is not a blasphemous charge. Otherwise, how are you going to know who he is? Like, wait for the Messiah. We're allowed to see a Messiah, but you can't tell. Exactly. No, it doesn't make sense. But then that would be blasphemy too. Would it be? Well, no, it wouldn't be. To accuse somebody else of being, if it's not blasphemous to claim to be the Messiah, it's clearly not blasphemous to accuse somebody of being the Messiah. Absolutely. It's not blasphemous to merely claim. So what do the skeptics who do not believe he is claiming to be God think the reason he was crucified for blasphemy was? I'll get there in just a minute. What they'll say is he will, they'll say, well, that part didn't happen. They'll call on a question in the narrative. Oh, I see. Yeah. So one of the great things about skepticism is you can always take the evidence off the table that doesn't fit your theory. Yeah, well, you can remove, well, I don't think he performed miracles. Well, there goes all the miracles, right? I don't think he was executed for blasphemy. So we'll take that out. So if you eliminate all the evidence that doesn't fit your hypothesis, yeah, well, I mean, it's going to be pretty easy to arrive at that conclusion, right? It looks like to play tennis without the niche. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and now I'm not saying they don't have reasons for doubting it. But, but, but it, it at the end of the day, maybe we'll get the blasphemy in just a second. Can I do one more? I just want to say one more thing. We'll put a pen on that and we'll come back to it. What what I would say is that if you, you don't even have to get to the blasphemy chart, you can just look at his public ministry in the in Matthew, Mark, and look, and it's Luke, especially the miracles to see that he's making. He's speaking and acting as if he's God. So the other two that just wanted to highlight were the walking on the sea. So the famous chapter, Mark chapter about that. Okay, okay. This is such fantastic. Okay. So walking on the sea is not just in synopsics. This one's in John too, right? So they go into the boat. They're going to see a gallery and tell people how big the sea of Galilee is. I'm glad you asked. So the sea of Galilee is about seven miles wide at its widest point. Okay? Pretty big. It's, yeah, it's not a pond. It's not a, it's not a little bitty of lake. It's, it's a sea. Like there's a reading they call it the sea of Galilee. Okay? And so in the gospel of Mark, it actually says that they had gone out onto the sea. And this is really interesting because, well, let me just actually, let me just find the passage. Okay. So this is what it says. When he came, the boat was out on the sea and he was alone, he was alone, Jesus was alone on the land. He saw that they were distressed and rowing for the wind was against them. And about the fourth watch of the night. So this is later, he came to them walking on the sea. He meant to pass them by, but when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost. So the disciples believe in ghosts if you're a ghost believer, there you go. Actually, it's a spirit. And they cried out for they all saw him and they were terrified. But immediately he spoke to them and he said, take heart. Literally in Greek, I am. Mego and me have no fear. He got into the boat with them and the wind ceased and they were utterly astounded. Right. Now, what's interesting here is that if you look at the gospel of John's account, he adds a detail. Mark and Matthew, they all say that he was in the midst of the sea. If you look at the Greek, John says he was, there were four miles from the shore when Jesus comes walking. Okay. Well, miles long when woke. That's what I like to tell my students. I'm like, listen, if Jesus did not know he was God at mile one, a bed by mile four, he had figured it out. Like I'm not like all the other people. Right. So this is a massive astonishing display of supernatural power over the elements. Okay. It's especially astonishing when you go back to the book of Job in chapter nine, because Job says only God can walk on the sea. In fact, the Septuagint, they're into Greek translation of the says that God walks on the waves as though on dry ground. Right. It's a discretion of his divine power over the sea. So when Jesus comes to them, doing something Job says only God can do, all I'm gonna see. And then says, I am, don't be afraid. This is a theophany, a revelation of God or Christophany. It's a revelation of his divinity. Now, some people will say, well, no, no, no, he's just identifying himself. I wanted to ask you this. Is there any other way to say, I like it sounds like I've heard some people talk about this. It's like you can't say I am. Is anyone allowed to say I am or is that always claiming the one? Great question. Okay. So the expression in Greek, ego, am I am can be used to identify yourself. In fact, in Luke, in the Root of Emmaus, when they doubt, how careful do you have to be without being accused of breast treatment? You don't have to be that careful. Like for example, in Luke 24, when they're like, is it him? He says, "Ago and me outtoss. It is I myself." So he puts a little emphasis there to make it clear. Okay. When the blind man is healed in John chapter, I think it's nine. And they're like, wait, is this the same guy? He says, "Ago and me." Like, I am. And in that context, it clearly means what? It's me, right? So he is identifying himself. Yeah. There's no doubt about that. I'm not denying that. But he's not only doing that because context is how you determine what ego and me means. You got to look at the context, right? If the high priest asked some, are you the Messiah and you say, "I am," which he does, that's just your answering, yes. Right? So in context, when he says, "Ago and me," and he's walking on the water like, okay, then we taking it up to the next level because you're saying it in the context of something that only God does. And I'll take it one step further. He doesn't just say, "I am." This is really important. He says, "Ago and me mayful based them. I am, don't be afraid." That expression is from Isaiah 43. Isaiah 43, God says, "I am, do not be afraid." See, this is the language of a theophany. Whenever God appears, whenever the God of Israel appears in the Old Testament, the reaction is what? Bear. Like, I'm afraid, I'm terrified. It's the most very much tremendous. It's the mystery and tremendous awe of being in the presence of the Creator, the world. And so frequently when God will appear, he'll say, "Do not fear." So Jesus isn't just taking "I am" from the burning bush in Exodus 3. He's taking the "I am" from Isaiah 43, which is one of the most monotheistic passages in the Old Testament. Because in that passage, when God says, "I am," don't be afraid. He also says, "There is no God but me." Like, you can go, I can read the prophecy. So Jesus is using the language of Jewish monotheism. Not just to reveal his identity like that it's him, but to reveal his divinity. Okay, this is a divine manifestation. And if you have any doubts about that, just go to the Gospel Matthew. I read you Mark's version. You look at Matthew. How do they respond? They hit the ground. It says, "They fell down and worshiped him." And so surely you are the Son of God. Okay. I don't know about this, but is there a way that worship could mean something else? Alex O'Connor and I were discussing this as opposed to attributing divinity to him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure. We talked about this because he, he rightly objected, not objective, but he pointed out that again, the word proskuneo, which literally means to get down on your knees or get down on your face. It's like prostration. It doesn't always mean the worship that's given to a divinity. It can mean the kind of homage given to a king. Like, I bow down before the king. So what the way you interpret the the meaning of the gesture is with the context. Okay. Sometimes it's just homage, right? Other times it's actually worship. For example, back to Alexander the Great, there was actually what Alexander scholars called the proskuneus controversy, which is that Alexander the Great and his growing estimation of his own divine identity began demanding that some of his subjects proskuneit like bow down and worship him as a God while he was still alive. Now, some of the Easterners, I believe some of the Persians, they were actually okay to do this, but the Macedonians, like his own like the Greeks, they're like, um, will worship you after your dead, but not while you're alive. Like we don't do that. In other words, you can be deified after your dead, but we're not giving you divine worship now. So there was actually a controversy over his demand. And it's the same Greek word that Matthew uses, proskuneesis. So in some contexts, it means divinity. In some contexts, it just means homage that you would give a king the way you understand what it means as you look at the context. So what's the context in Matthew? He just finished walking on the sea, taking the divine I am name as his own, using the language of God, do not fear, right? And revealing all three of those things while he's walking on the water, which Job says only God can do to the apostles. And then their reaction is what? -Proskuneisms. -Proskuneisms. Get down, worship him. Now, do they fully grasp the entire mystery of consubstantiality, the trending? No, no, no, no, no, like they're in the early stages here of understanding, but they recognize this is no ordinary God, right? This is the Son of God. And it's a sunship that's different than like Israel are called the sons of God. They're like the adopted sons of God in the Old Testament. Angels get called sons of God. They're the created sons of God. The king gets called the son of God. Like he's the anointed son of God in like the royal son of God. But this is a sunship that goes above and beyond that, right? Like Jesus says in Matthew 11, "No one knows who the son is except the father. And no one knows who the father is except the son. And anyone to whom the son chooses to reveal him." Wait, because you're saying your sunship is so mysterious that only God the father has access to. Like what are you talking about, right? And of the history interpretation, it's yeah, because they're talking about a divine sunship, an eternal sunship, right? An uncreated sunship. That's what eventually church will grow in understanding of the mystery of the divinity of Christ. And that's going to take time to fully understand, but they definitely recognize this is no ordinary guy. And so they hit the deck, which is not something you do as a Jew with just anybody. Does it make sense? All right, so let's talk more about the claim for which Christ went to the cross, namely blasphemy. Yeah, okay, this is a great question, because you would ask, you know, what would people say nowadays that he was executed for? And it's really interesting and kind of paradox that if there is anything that New Testament scholars agree upon, it's that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified under Pontius Pilate and put to death. This is one of the things that's not only attested in all four gospels and of course the letters of Paul, but also by Josephus in his ancient Jewish antiquities. So we have absolutely, you know, solid evidence for the fact of the crucifixion. But when it comes to the reason for the crucifixion, there's a lot of debate about why was Jesus crucified? And this is an important question to address, because if you're if the if you're picture of Jesus, we've portrait of Jesus, isn't a crucifiable Jesus? Like if he's just a good moral teacher, telling everybody to love one another. Yeah, exactly. If he's just like, you know, you need to learn to share and be kind to your neighbor, that kind of guy doesn't end up on a Roman cross. Like you have to have a crucifiable Jesus for it to be the historical Jesus, for it to be, you know, the one that that our sources attest to. So the question is why? Well, so people will say different things. Some people will say that Jesus was crucified. In fact, one more popular explanation was that he was crucified because of his actions against the temple. Like, remember, so he goes into the temple when he gets to Jerusalem in his last week and he overturns the tables of the money, changes, stop making my father's house, you know, into a house of commerce, it's house of prayer. And it is true that when they bring him to trial, if you look at the gospel, Mark is account of his hearing before the Sanhedrin. It is true that some of the witnesses say this set man said he would destroy the temple, made with hands, and raise up another, not made with hands. But the problem with that is if you keep reading, it says their testimony didn't agree. That's not actually the charge that he's charged with, right? That's very, very important because if you go back to the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament, you have to have the testimony of two, three witnesses for a capital case. Okay? You can't put someone to death just on the testimony of one person. So they have to have multiple witnesses agreeing that he committed a capital crime. And so when it comes to the, you know, the actual incident in the temple, that's not enough. So if we actually look at what the gospel say, some people say it's because he's spoken, it's the law, like some scholars say, oh, he's killed because he spoke into the law. The gospel's don't say that. Some will say it's, he was killed because he spoke into the temple. It doesn't say that either. The only positive evidence we have in the gospels, and it's in all four in terms of a capital crime that he was accused of and charged with is the sin of blasphemy. Okay? So for example, just give it read the gospel, Mark here. It says in Mark 1458, we heard him say, I'll destroy this temple that's made with hands in three days. I'll build another not made with hands yet even so their testimony didn't agree. So then the high priest stood up in the midst and asked Jesus, have you no answer to make what is this they that they testify against you, but he was silent and he made no answer. So again, the high priest asked him, here's the key, are you the creast of Christ, the son of the blessed? So Kayif has asked him point blank about his identity, are you the Messiah, the son of the blessed? And listen to his answer, Jesus said, I am and is important. You will see the son of man sitting at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven. And the high priest tore his mantle and said, why do we still need witnesses? You have heard his blasphemy, that's the key, blasphemy. What is your decision? And they all condemn him as deserving death. So according to the gospel account, especially Mark's the earliest, like most people think, the charge is blasphemy. As I mentioned earlier, it's really important for us as Christians, like contemporary Christians, may not realize this to recognize that it wasn't blasphemy to simply claim to be the Messiah. That's not a capital crime, it's not a punishable claim, because all the Messiah is the anointed King of Israel, okay, a descendant of David's throne. So why do they charge him with blasphemy if all he's claiming to be is the Messiah? And the answer is he isn't just claiming to be the Messiah. He's claiming to be divine because he says, I am the Christ and boy, that matters. And you will see the son of man coming on the clouds of heaven and seated at the right hand of power. Okay, so those are the two things. What kind of Messiah is he claiming to be? Number one, a Messiah who's seated at the right hand of God, right? Now this is an illusion of Psalm 110. In Psalm 110, there's a depiction of the King sitting at the right hand of God in heaven. Now anyone in an ancient Near Eastern context, or even in first century context would know, if you sit on the throne of the King, you are equal with the King, right? If you sit at his right hand on his throne, likewise, if you sit at the right hand of God of the throne in heaven, you are equal with what? With God, right? It's co-equal authority. And again, I have Jewish Christian commentators alike who recognize that in Psalm 110. And in the end in Mark, Joel Marcus, wonderful commentary on Mark says, this is a claim to co-equality with God, to say, I'm going to sit at the right hand of God. But to add insult to injury, then he also says, and you will see the son of man coming on the clouds, right? Again, this is an illusion of Daniel 7, right? When you have this divine figure coming on the clouds of heaven, which is something only God does in the Old Testament. When Ezekiel sees the chariot throne, it's God coming on the clouds. When Isaiah or Jeremiah talk about God coming in judgment, he comes on the clouds. Because remember, this isn't just like serious or chemilist. This is the glory cloud. Remember the glory cloud of God in the Old Testament, the shaky knot, right? But Jesus does is basically say, I am the Messiah, but I'm not just any Messiah. I'm the divine Messiah of Daniel 7, and the heavenly King, co-equal with God of Psalm 110. So he claims to be a divine Messiah. That's why my book was called Jesus and Divine Christology. Because it's not just Christ, no, I put here, Christology. It's not just a Christ. He's a divine Christ. And once you see the illusions to the Old Testament, then you understand, now that's why the high priest says, you've all heard the blasphemy. We don't need witnesses anymore, because he just made a divine claim in our presence. And in the book of Leviticus and in Jewish tradition, to claim to be divine is certainly blasphemy. And the punishment for blasphemy is death. And that's why he's handed over to the authorities. Now they've got a charge, which is not only a capital crime from a Jewish perspective, but it's also a political threat from a Roman perspective. Because if he's claiming to be divine Messiah, he's claiming to be a divine King. And there's only one King in a Roman empire. And that's Caesar. Does it make sense? So this is both the religious and political charge that they need to justify handing him over for a capital case to the Roman authorities who are then, as we all know, going to take him and crucify him. So this is in Mark. It's in Matthew. And then also in John, I should add, even the Gospel John says this, because when pilots, you know, discussing with the Sanhedrin about the charge against him, they actually say in the Gospel John chapter 19, we have a law. And by that law, he deserves to die because he has made himself the son of God. Right. And then again, and if you go back to John chapter 10, this isn't the first time Jesus has been accused of blasphemy after he makes the famous claim, I and the Father are one. And if you literally just go two verses further, it says, for he asked them why you want to stone me. And they said, we stone you for no good work, but for blasphemy. This is John 10, because you being a man, make yourself God. I mean, it couldn't be more clear. According to the first century biographies of Jesus, all written within the living memory of his disciples and the lifetime of his disciples, the living, living memory of the events, the charge that Jesus is, that is made against Jesus, which leads to his execution is blasphemy. So he ends his public career with a divine claim that literally costs him his life. So anyone who wants to claim that Jesus of Nazareth didn't claim to be divine has to remove all of the evidence for the very reason that which for which he's executed from the data that we have in the Gospels. And again, it's fine. If you want to, if you want to have a theory that only works if you take date off the table, okay, we'll take all the date off the table, but for me personally, that seems like special pleading, right? In other words, I want to have a data, I want to have a hypothesis that makes the most sense of all the evidence, of the best evidence that we have. And in this case, all the evidence, literally all of it, points to the fact that Jesus Nazareth was crucified for blasphemy. And note this, one other thing. If he wasn't claiming to be claiming to be God, then why would he be accused by Caiaphas of blasphemy in the context of a question about his identity? Like that's what he's asking, who? Who are you? And the answer to that leads him to Calvary, it's as simple. So from the beginning of his ministry to the end, the underlying question that animates the whole thing is who do you claim to be? And then also for us, it's the questions, who do you say that I am? So I mean, it is absolutely in my mind irrefutable that Jesus Nazareth coordinated the historical data, not from a respective face, just historical evidence. Didn't just claim to be in the Messiah, he claimed to be divine. This episode is sponsored by Calguise. Big Pharma ruined your skincare. I mean, come on, can you pronounce every ingredient on your lotion bottle? Does your moisturizer read like a lab report? What Big Pharma did to food? They also did to skincare. They ruined it. They used slick marketing to convince us to rub industrial byproduct on our faces. And here's the problem. Skin issues are extremely common nowadays. It seems everyone knows someone struggling with bad skin or some sort of skin condition. Here's the truth. 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I think in my next life, maybe when my leader I've been traveling around and it's dragged up on a cross, but has there hopes in him just dissipated? Absolutely. I think that or at least for some of them. Obviously, John to his credit, although he flees like everyone else and gets simminy, he goes back to the cross. John chapter 9, I don't know if you think about that dude that John fled. He came back. He then came back. So they all fled at first. John's there at the foot of the cross. This doesn't make sense. In fact, the best example of this too is in Luke 24 when he meets the disciples on the road to Emmaus and they start talking with one another. And he veils himself. Their eyes were kept from recognizing. It's not like they forgot what he looked like. It's only been three days. But he said, "What are you talking about?" And they said, "Well, Jesus Nazareth, who was a prophet, mighty and word indeed, we had hoped he was the Messiah." That past tense to me is very strong because it suggests that their faith is in shambles. And it's the cross. It's always a cross. What do you mean by that? What I mean is the cross is the great scandal of Christianity. Paul says, he says, Paul says it's a scandal on stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. The Greek word for stumbling block is scandal on. So it's a scandal to the Jewish people who remember it, like I said, for Judaism, if you're hungry and you treat it, die, you're a cursed. It's like a curse. It's the worst death bottle. The word for foolishness to Gentiles in Greek is Moran. It's Moria, actually, like the minds Moria. It means it's like Moronic. It's idiocy to say that this guy, the son of God, I mean, the Greeks are seeking wisdom and we're preaching the Moronic idea that a guy who was crucified is the son of God. And then from a Jewish perspective, and all the disciples of Jews, remember? So they Paul's not, that's not a dig against the Jewish people. Paul is Jewish. But all the apostles were literally scandalized. They tripped over the stumbling block of Jesus's manner of death, of his mode of execution, of his crucifixion. So I suspect their faith is in shambles. And so Jesus meets them on the road to Emmaus. And he says to them, when they say that, like we had hoped he had hoped he was Messiah, he says, "Oh, foolish men and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken." Was it not necessary that Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? And then Luke says this, "Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted them, the scriptures, all the things concerning himself." So look what he does. He meets them where they are. They have lost their faith. They've tripped over the stumbling block of the crucifixion of the cross. How does he respond? He says, "All right, let's go back to the Old Testament. I'm going to start from the beginning. And I'm going to interpret the Old Testament to you typologically, crystallologically. I'm going to show you the prophecies of the Christ and how they were fulfilled even in his suffering and his death. Right? This is why for me personally, I've written several books, The Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, The Jewish Roots of Mary, Jesus, in the case of Jesus, could be called The Jewish Roots of his divinity. I won't call it that, but the publisher was like, "Okay, don't beat a dead horse." They're like, "Enough of a good thing." But the reason I do that is, I'm basically just trying to imitate him. If you want to see that the crucifixion is part of the plan of God, then you've got to go back to the beginning and see all the signs and the shadows and the prophecies and the prefigurations starting with Moses all the way through. You've got to do the Jewish Roots of Christianity. Oh, as you can't see it, you can't see it clearly. And in fact, it's fascinating that in the 19th century, which you talked about, when a lot of the skepticism arose, there was a council, Vatican I, the first Vatican council. A lot of people don't remember Vatican I, there's so much folks on Vatican II, but in Vatican I, the council fathers actually taught, this is Catholic doctrine, that there are three principal motives of credibility for believing the good news, of Jesus believing the gospel. The testimony of miracles, we've looked at some of that. The perpetuity of the church, the fact that the church is endured for 2000 years, and it's like, how is this even possible, especially when it's so poorly run so often, right? Chester's said that. But then the third one, it's the testimony of prophecy. And for whatever reasons, really interesting, I don't think Christians say almost, we almost never appeal to that. Like, because it involves the Old Testament. It involves looking at the Old Testament. I was speaking with Dr. Hahn recently, and he said, if you only know the New Testament, then you don't know the New Testament point in being in the New Testament. That is absolutely right. It's like, if you'd only read the New Testament, then now, Jalusus, it's like coming into the end of a movie, the last 20 minutes. I am your father. Right, exactly. Right. If you watch the last 20 minutes of Star Wars, you're going to figure out Luke's good, Vader's bad, but are you going to feel the back? I am your father or any of that. Are you going to really, although that's Empire, so different, that's not new though. Are you going to understand fully what's happening? No. Right. And that's how many Christians read the New Testament. We're like reading the last, we're watching the last 20 minutes of the movie. Yeah. Frodo's throwing the ring into the Old Testament. Exactly. Exactly. And you can't begin to grasp that unless you go all the way back to the Shire. Right. And where it all began. So Jesus does that. That's his pedagogy. That's how he teaches the gospel. And I think in our multicultural post-modern environment, it is even more fundamental, more crucial than ever, that we go back to the beginning and we imitate him. We start mowsing the prophets and we show how as Christians, we read the New Testament in the light of the Old and the Old Testament in the light of the New because what Vatican woman was getting at there is that it's only through prophecy that we can see the Christianity isn't a man-made religion. It's a revealed religion. It's divinely revealed. Right. Because there are lots of, I mean, so many other religious groups and like, you know, we got Islam, we got Buddhism and Hinduism, all these different things. But Jesus is the only founder of any world religion who was ever pre-announced. Like, I don't want to throw you off track, but I don't want to ask you. Oh, sure, sure. Can you give me one shadow from the Old Testament that points to his being crucified? Oh, I mean, well, we already saw the book of Daniel chapter 9. Yeah. Talks about the Messiah being cut off. The other really famous prophecy is from Isaiah chapter 53, which is it's part of a series of oracles where Isaiah is describing the servant of the Lord. He's called the servant of the Lord. And this figure, although he isn't explicitly called the Messiah, like what a definite article. In Isaiah 61, for example, he'll say, "The spear of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the captives and the poor." Right. And that word for anointing there in Hebrews is the same root that is used for the noun Messiah. He's anointed me with the spirit. In fact, that's the passage. Jesus quotes. Right. When he begins his public ministry in Nazareth, and Luke 4. But the biggest one would be Isaiah 53, where the servant is described as undergoing this radical experience of suffering and even death, where he appears to be forsaken by God, but which precisely through this suffering and death, forgiveness of sins takes place. Why can't this suffering serve and just refer to the people of Israel and not this specific? I wouldn't say that it doesn't. See, it's a both-and. One of the things you have to look at in Old Testament is there's an idea with called corporate personality. In other words, the king embodies the people in his person, and then the people are like the corporate extension of the king. So you'll see Isaiah kind of pivot between both of these. Sometimes it's like he's talking about Israel as a collective group, which certainly does suffer and appear to be abandoned by God, for example, like in the exile. But then other times he's talking about an individual, the servant with first person singular. This is going to play a huge role, and by the way, just as I mean, fast forward, to the way that Paul talks about Christ in the church, like the church is the body of Christ, and then Christ is the head. That's a very Jewish way of understanding worship between the king and his people. So I wouldn't say it's in either or I would actually say it's a both-and. And we do know from ancient interpreters of these texts that the servant was often viewed not just as Israel, it is that, but also as an image of the king, an image of the anointed one, the one who produced the good. Anyway, and so in Isaiah, it's a very famous passage. That's not to read the whole thing, but he says of the servant, "Surely he has born our griefs and carried our sorrows that we esteemed him stricken, smitten my God and afflicted, but he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that made his whole and by his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep are going to stray. We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all." So one of the reasons you see this as an individual is he's distinguishing there. The author, Isaiah, is between all of us, the people, and this individual who's carried our sorrows, carried our sufferings, appeared to be forsaken, which is what crucifixion looks like. He's abandoned, but by his wounds were healed. This is the mystery of iniquity, the mystery of the atonement, but he says, "He shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul. He shall be satisfied, and by the knowledge of the righteous one, my servant shall make many to be accounted righteous." Jesus alludes to this in the last supper when he says, "Take this, drink of it all of you. This is the blood of the covenant which has been poured out for who? For many." So it's for many in that time. No, it's okay. For many for the forgiveness of sins. So Jesus himself interprets Isaiah 53 messianically and with reference to his death at the last supper in the words of institution. That's how he understands his death. That makes sense? Yeah, it does. Sorry. No, it's okay, man. Very moved by how Lord, I love Him so much. How beautiful is He? And look, the fact that you're moved to tears, I mean, why is that? It's because when you look at the New Testament and light of the Old, you can see it's our Father's plan. Like it's part of the plan. He's not just one more Roman servants, slave, dead on a cross. He's not just one more Jew executed by the Romans. The Romans executed 500 Jews a day when they besieged the temple. Jerusalem, Josephus tells us that. It was absolute massacre. Jesus is just one out of all those many souls who were torn out of this world under the under the hill of the Romans, right? But what's different about this one is that as the suffering servant, he's taking on us on himself theiquity of us all so that he might make many righteous, right? And bear their iniquities. He becomes the sin bearer. This is an image from the Old Testament of the way sacrifice became part of the plan so that the sin bearer bears the sins of the people precisely so that their sins might be forgiven and relieved. And so this is what this is what as it means when he says by he was wound of archer and inscrations, crush where our sins and buy his wounds were healed. So that's the Christian theology. That's Jesus's own theology of his suffering. He doesn't see it as pointless. He doesn't see it as as as an empty tragedy. It's a sacrifice. Would it be helpful to point to the binding of Isaac and to see how? Oh, I mean, yeah, if you got through more hours. Yeah, we don't have to go there. I mean, yeah, I mean, I'd have to promise to come back. Yeah, I'll come back one time. I mean, the one thing I would say about the about the binding of Isaac and Genesis 22 is in the early church and in the New Testament as well. The idea that Jesus isn't just a new day, but he's not just a new solemn. He's a new Isaac is definitely on the table. In fact, like if you go back and you look at Genesis 22, when Isaac, you know, God makes it stunning claim to like, not claim, but a command, you know, take your only son Isaac whom you love, bring him to the Mount Mariah and offer him there was a burn offering. I mean, this is this is insane. Why would God make Abraham do this? I ask him to do this because we've waited all these years decades to finally have a son and as soon as he gets me, okay, now I want you to kill him, right? And now we all know that he doesn't actually want him to go through with it. But the question still remains like, why would he do this? And the answer is really simple, at least from a New Testament perspective, namely that he needs someone who has so much faith, which Abraham does, that he would trust him to pre-enact the crucifixion 2000 years in advance. Because what we have is the father Abraham takes his only beloved son Isaac who carries the wood of his own sacrifice. I mean, Isaac knows how sacrifices are carried out. You lay the lamb on the sacrifice on the wood, right? He carries the wood of his own sacrifice up a mountain. That mountain is Mariah, which we'll get that in a second. And then at the very last minute, God stops Abraham and says, because you have done this, every nation on earth will be blessed because of you. And then of course, he provides a lamb. I'm in a ram caught in a thicket and renames the mountain Yahweh, E-Rat. The Lord will provide the lamb. Now, what's powerful about that from Christian perspective is that that mountain, Mariah, in Second Chronicles 3.1, is identified as Jerusalem. It's the place where David and Solomon are going to build the temple. It's the temple mount. So, in other words, Father Abraham offers his only son Isaac on a mountain in Jerusalem in 2018, 100 BC, the same place to millennia later. Same mountain. Same mountain. Same mountain. I mean, it's where the Second Chronicles 1 says, Mariah is where David and Solomon build the temple. So, it's Jerusalem. Fast forward. God the Father offers his only beloved son, Jesus Christ, as a sacrifice for sin on Mount Mariah in Jerusalem, 2000 years later. And what happens, man, after he's crucified, the nations begin to convert. I mean, is this a coincidence? I'll never forget one time when I was teaching, I was a brand new professor and I was teaching Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac, the Akadah, Jewish traditions, called the binding of Isaac. Because he isn't actually sacrifice, right? He's just bound. And I point out that actually, if you look at it carefully, the sacrifice of Isaac happens on Mount Mariah and then the Old Testament tells us Mount Mariah is where the temple is built in Jerusalem. So in other words, the sacrifice of Isaac and the sacrifice of Jesus are in the same mountain. And one of my students raised her hand, she's like, is this public knowledge? Because she was so shocked, she's grown up Christian. She was now, she'd become unitarian. So she's no longer Christian. She's like, why didn't I ever hear this before? And I'm like, it's in the Old Testament. You know, like you got to read the Old Testament. You got to look at the Old Testament. Not just the prophecies like Isaiah, but the prefigurations. Okay. Like the sacrifice. Let's move to the resurrection. Oh, yeah, sure. Christ, is there any good reason to think Christ rose from the dead? How would you begin to speak to a skeptic about this? This is a great, great question. We could probably do a whole show just on the resurrection. You've got half hour. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Let me just, I'll, I'll say a couple of things. First of all, let's say with a reason people didn't believe. Okay. Who's the people when you meet anyone? Like, I know the apostles. Okay. Okay. Let me, let me, let me say it a little better. Let's start with a reason. I'm trying to try to do this right. Let's say, okay, I'm trying to, let me clarify on something about an assumption people sometimes make that is not correct. So what I want to say is they did not believe in the resurrection because they were more gullible than we are today. Yeah. Okay. I want to clarify that. Right. Dead people stayed dead. Yeah. And just because they're ancient and they have cell phones and everything internet doesn't mean they were stupid. They knew better than we do actually because they actually buried their dead like themselves. They knew dead people stayed dead. And if you look at every one of the gospels, Matthew Martin Luke, they all tell you the initial reaction of the disciples is they didn't believe. They didn't believe. They thought it was an idol tale that you know, like it was unbelievable, not believe. Even in Matthew 28, it says Jesus is standing before the resurrected, but some doubt it. I'm like, come on, what more do you need? Right. So I want to emphasize that it wasn't because they were credulous. Are gullible because according to the gospels, they were doubtful and skeptical. That's not the reason. All right. So why did they believe? I would point to three key reasons. Number one, the empty tomb. Okay. So the empty tomb is really important. All the gospels attest to the the fact that the tomb was empty. For two reasons. Number one, according to Matthew, we know that Roman guard was set over the tomb. Okay. And we also know from the book of Acts that the penalty for falling asleep on guard duty for a Roman soldier is death. Okay. So the idea that these fishermen from Galilee somehow snuck in and like took the body away while the Roman guard wasn't looking is preposterous. It's just not a plausible credible hypothesis. So the empty tomb is both the first key reason for believing in the resurrection. And it's also the reason for believing that when they say resurrection, they don't mean that it's so into heaven. They don't mean that he was elevated or caught up into the clouds or that he lived on in their hearts or any of these other kind of misinterpretation. It's not about it. They mortality of the soul. It's about what happened to his corpse. The resurrection means something happened to the corpse of Jesus. And the empty tomb means that that corpse is gone. Right. Like it's not there anymore. So the first reason for believing in the resurrection, the first reason the apostles would have believed is that the tomb was empty. But tombs can get emptied in a lot of ways. So that's not the only motive for believing in the resurrection. Right. I mean, remember when Mary Magdalene gets there, her first thought is, "Well, wait, where have you taken my Lord?" Like, she thinks they might have taken his body away because she gets there a little bit later. So the second reason for believing in the resurrection are the appearances of Jesus to various apostles. It's not just that the tomb was empty. It's that he appears to Peter and John and Mary Magdalene and to the 11 and to Thomas and to James and according to Paul, 500 brothers, like there are multiple appearances of Jesus to the apostles after his execution and death and burial on a cross. And when he makes these appearances, his appearances, he does so in his body. That's really, really important. So we were talking about Luke 24 before about the road to Emmaus and Jesus appears to the disciples a little bit later in the same chapter. He appears to the 11 and they think he's a ghost. And what does he say? "See my hands and feet touch me. A ghost doesn't have flesh." And bones, as you see that I have. Another, he even asked them, "Give me something to eat." Give me some fish. Because if there's one thing, I don't know a lot about ghosts, I don't really like ghost movies that kind of scare me. But if there's one thing I do know about ghosts is they can't eat fish. I'm pretty sure that you need a body to eat. He's trying to show them not only do I have a real body, but it's the same body. Because look at the wounds. Look at my feet, look at my hands. These are marks of crucifixion. So the resurrection of Jesus is, he's in the same body, but it is transfigured. Because now he can appear wherever he wills. He can appear under, he can hide his appearance like on the road to Emmaus. He can appear, he can walk through walls. So it's a real body, but it's supernatural. So to speak, transfigured. It's glorified as how St. Paul talks it. So the second reason for believing in the resurrection is the multiple appearances of Jesus to the apostles. And again, we have testimony for them in not only in Matthew, not only Mark, not only Luke, not in John, but also in Paul. He talks about these and 1 Corinthians 15, which is one of our earliest witnesses. So we have multiple testimonies to the fact that not only was it too empty, but Jesus appeared to the apostles. Now some people might say, well, yeah, but why would you trust them? Maybe they were just credulous, but the interesting thing is you actually read the gospels. Again, every time that he appears, people, they don't believe it first. Like he has to convince them. Their initial response is doubt. But when they touch his body, or like when Thomas, you know, says, I'm not going to believe until I stick my hand in his thought. I mean, crass, right? But through repeated appearances, they too come to believe. So the second reason is the multiple appearances, which by the way, just real quick sign up. Sometimes people say, oh, but there's discrepancies, right? Because in one gospel, it's like there's two women at the tomb. And another one's like one woman at the tomb and does he appear at first in Galilee or as in Jerusalem? Like, so there are discrepancies about details. That's actually true. Like it's kind of hard to correlate a timeline of exactly when the appearance is, but the one thing you all agree on one is the tomb's empty. And he's appearing in his body to lots of people. Yeah. So even if the details are hard to harmonize, the substance is the same, right? But the third reason and I'll end with this one, because I think this is the one people are probably least familiar with, is the argument from prophecy, right? So a lot of Christians today, like a lot of apologists, when they want to argue for believing in the resurrection, what they'll usually do is appeal to like the sincerity of Peter and Paul, or the apostles, like these guys, they clearly believe Jesus was raised from dead. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been martyred for his sake, for his Messiah. I mean, they were willing to be crucified upside down, like Peter or decapitated like Paul, they would not have done that if they knew he hadn't been raised and it was all just a hoax. Okay. That's a credible argument. But it's interesting, the church fathers, they don't, that's not how they do it. Like they don't appeal to like the sincerity of the apostles. When they argue for believing the resurrection, they appeal to prophecy and they appeal to one prophecy in particular. And it's the only one Jesus links with the resurrection. It's the sign of Jonah, sign of Jonah. So real quick, so you probably remember this in Matthew chapter 12 and Luke that's it too. It says, some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him, "Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you." And Jesus said, "An evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except one, the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three nights and three days in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will arise at the judgment with this generation in condemnate, for they repent it at the preaching of Jonah and behold something greater than Jonah is here." Apostle, Jesus just told you the one sign you're going to get is the sign of Jonah and he links it with his resurrection. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so the Son of man being the heart of the earth three days and three nights. Now I don't know about you, but when I used to read that one, Jonah, I was like, "Okay, I get it three days, three days, I get the parallel, but it wasn't entirely to impress by it because when I think of Jonah, I always kind of think of like, you know, Pinocchio. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or like, what's the Veggie Tales, Jonah? Like, you know, that kind of stuff. Right. Like, we have this kind of fantastic, incredible, like, how could a man stay alive in the belly of the whale for three days, you know? It just doesn't make any sense. And so I didn't really kind of blow by that passing. But then one day, when I was actually reading Jonah in Hebrew, it hit me a lot harder because if you go back to the book of Jonah and you look at it and you don't skip the prayer of Jonah, but you actually read it, what you realize is something fascinating, namely that the book of Jonah doesn't actually say, he was alive for three days in the night, three nights in the belly. Well, it's actually a story of a death and resurrection. And Old Testament scholars have shown this too. There's an ancient Near Eastern motif of you go down into the underworld for three days and you come up and fascinating. Look at Jonah, listen to his prayer. If you read it, look what he says. He says, Jonah prayed to the Lord, God, from the belly of the fish saying, "I call to the Lord out of my distress and He answered me out of the belly of sheel. I cry and you heard my voice. You cast me into the deep into the heart of the sea. The flood was round about me. Your waves and billows passed over me." And he said, "The water is closed in over me. The deep was round about me. Weeds wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains and I went down to the land whose bar is closed upon me forever. Yet you brought up my life from the pit." Okay, pause. "Sheel is the name for the realm of the dead and the Old Testament. The pit is the Hebrew name for the realm of the dead and the Old Testament." And he actually says, "My soul fainted within me. Neffish is the Hebrew name for soul." In other words, "I die." But as I died, my prayer came to you. As my soul fainted, my prayer came to you and your holy temple. And then what happens? The Lord spoke to the fish. It vomited Jonah out upon the dry land and the word of the Lord came to Jonah. Second time, arise. Go to Ninevo and preach to the Gentiles. Right? Okay, so pause. It's fascinating. Not just Jonah, but if you look at ancient Jewish Targums and some of the ancient Jewish Midrashwabah, like these commentaries on it, this is not just me. They recognize, there is a stream of interpretations. This is Jonah dies and the whale vomits his corpse up onto the land. And it's a resurrection story. It's a death descent to the 80s and a resurrection story. And that after he's resurrected, the miracle is not just that he spit out by the whale. It's that he goes to the Ninevites, who these wicked Gentiles preach us to them and what happens? They all convert from the king all the way down. They start worshipping the God of Israel, repent for their sins. And this is insane. The Ninevites, this is some of the worst people, though like the pre-Babalones. They're just, they're the worst. They're oppressors of Israel, they're wicked, and yet through the miracle of Jonah and his preaching, they convert. Right? Now, go back to the Sinai Jonah. With that in mind, if Jonah, the story Jonah is the story of a death and resurrection, a death descent into the 80s and a resurrection, and then a conversion of the Gentiles, now go back. What does Jesus say? You want to sign? You're not going to get anyone except one, the Sinai Jonah. As he was in the belly of the whale, three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be where? In the grave. And then he will rise on the third day. And the men of Nineval, rise at the judgment of this generation, condemn it for they repented at the teaching, preaching of Jonah, something greater than Jonah is here. So what happens? Son of Man is crucified, Son of Man is buried. He goes down to the realm dead for three days. On the third day, he rises again and what happens after the resurrection? He sends his apostles, go to all nations, teaching them everything I've taught you, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, the Holy Spirit. And what happens, Matt? One by one, the nations start to fall. They start to convert. They start to abandon the temples. They abandon Artemis. They abandon Ephesus. I mean, they abandon the goddess of Ephesus. They abandon Zeus and they start to worship the God of the Jews. They start to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. How is this even possible? It's fascinating if you look at Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. There's these prophecies. One day the nations are going to convert. One day the nations will be gathered into one day the nations will call upon the God of Israel. One day the House of Prayer will be a house of prayer for all nations. And you're looking around in the seventh century, sixth century, fifth century, first century. You're like, how is that ever going to happen? The prophecy of the conversion of the nations. And yet that prophecy begins after the resurrection of Jesus. It actually begins at the cross when the centurion at the foot of the cross says, surely this man was what? The Son of God. And then so there's a great line. This is how the early church falls. If you don't mind, I'll just read this one passage to you. So Eusebius. So he's in the fourth century. So this is the early church. The early church is going around. Their spread, the Paul's going to every city. And like Gentile after Gentile, these Gentiles are just coming in. They're accepting the good news of this man who was crucified as like the Son of God, the King of Israel. And they don't even know any of the houses possible. And so what Eusebius says is it's a sign of Jonah. In other words, the sign of Jonah isn't just the resurrection of Jesus. It's the conversion of the Gentiles after his resurrection. Just like the conversion of the Ninevites, Jonah's preaching was a miracle. It was a sign that the one God was a true God. So to the conversion of the Gentiles, it's a sign that Jesus is the Messiah and is the Son of God. And so Eusebius writes this, listen this. This is fourth century. So it's like a few years later. He said, "Behold how today, yes, even in our own time, our eyes see not only Egyptians, but every race of men who used to be idolaters, released from the errors of polytheism and the demons and calling on the God of the prophets." The God of Israel. "Yes, in our own time, the knowledge of the omnipotent God shines forth and sets a seal of certainty on the forecasts of the prophets." You see this actually going on. You know I will only expect to hear of it. And if you ask the moment when the change began for all your inquiry, you will receive no other answer, but the moment of the appearance of the Savior. I mean, like, so yeah, maybe it's a coincidence that all the prophets, prophecies began to be fulfilled after Jesus and Nazareth, whose crucified died and reputedly rose again. But maybe it's not a coincidence, maybe it's providence. Maybe it's actually the fulfillment of prophecy. Maybe this is why Jesus went back and began with Moses and all the prophets interpreted the things in the scriptures concerning himself. Like, this is the motive for believing that he's not just the Messiah, he's not just the Son of God, but he's the resurrected Son of God. And all the claims he made during his earthly life are vindicated by the truth of the resurrection. And look, you look around, you still see it today. The Gentiles, the nations are still converting. They're converting now. People every day, people are converting to worship the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, God of Jacob, who becomes man in Jesus' Nazareth. This is so powerful. This is not fair to ask you this, but I don't care. It's my show. I'm going to do it anyway. You're a Catholic. How has your study of the Old Testament convinced you of the truth claims of the Catholic Church? I know we don't have a lot of time, but I wanted to wrap up with this. So I would say that as for me personally, as a Catholic, the looking at the Old Testament and looking at the Jewish roots of Christianity, hasn't just convinced me of the Messiah, the Jesus, the divinity of Jesus, but it's also convinced me of the scriptural and the biblical foundations of distinctively Catholic teachings, like our beliefs about Mary, our beliefs about the papacy. I've written a book on that. I mentioned Jesus in Jewish roots of Mary. I highly recommend it. Yeah, I highly recommend it. I would get that book. Put the link in the description below. We can maybe come back some time. I'll do another show just on her, but basically it's simple. In a nutshell, I would say, all Christians would believe, I think, because the New Testament says it, that Jesus is the new Adam. He's the new King. He's the new David. He is the new temple. He's fulfilling all these prophecies. But what happens in Catholic faith, we always believe everything we believe about Mary is based on what we believe on Jesus. So if Jesus is the new Adam, who's going to deliver humanity from death, well, who's the new Eve? As I try to show in the book, you look at the scriptures. It's Mary and the tradition, does the Father say this one? If Jesus is the new temple, where's the new ark? Because you're not at the ark of the covenant. Well, you look at the New Testament as I show in the book. Mary's being depicted as the new ark. If Jesus is the new King, then who's the Queen? Right? Well, a lot of people don't realize this, but in Judaism, the Queen was not the King's wife. It was the King's mother. Right? So in other words, looking at the Jewish roots of Christianity, it hasn't just helped me understand the Jewish roots of Christianity. It's helped me understand the Jews of Catholicism, in particular. And I could go into so many more details, even like the Catholic literature, like why do you have a priest with vestments and tabernacles and candles and incense and all that stuff that can often be very puzzling for our non-Catholic, especially non-Catholic Protestant brothers and sisters and those traditions. All of it is rooted in the tabernacle Moses, the temple solemn and the Old Testament. These are the signs and shadows, the prefigurations that illuminate the mystery, not just the Christianity, but the mystery of Catholicism in particular. So for me, personally, it has helped deepen my understanding of the fullness of the Catholic faith in a way that I would not grasp if I didn't look at how the Old Testament prefigures the new and then how the new fulfills the old. Like looking at the whole canon, that's what Catholic means, by the way. "Cath the whole" loss means according to the whole. We usually say it means universal, but actually literally means according to the whole. So when you look at it, according to the whole in light of Judaism, at least for me, it over and over again. Every time I think there's an aspect of Catholicism that either does make sense or isn't biblical, if you look at it through Jewish eyes, you can see it. Let me ask you to give us just one. You don't have to go into it. I understand this could be an entire show. What's something from the Old Testament that might point to what the Catholics teach about the Pope? Oh, okay. I think, I need to finish my trilogy. I wrote a book on Jewish Roots of the Eucharist. I wrote a book on the Jewish Roots of Mary, and I'm gonna write one of the Jewish Roots of the Church. We're all excited. But I'd say for me personally, probably the clearest thing is the figure of the overseer of the temple that's mentioned in Isaiah 22. So in Isaiah chapter 22, there's this figure, and he's called the al-Bayi, which means the over the house. So he's like the one who oversees the house, which is the house of God, the temple. And in Isaiah, he describes him as being marked out by two things. He has the keys of the kingdom, and he has the power to open and shut. It's a symbol of authority, right? And Isaiah basically describes this figure as as second in rank only to the king. Okay. So basically, if the king goes away as the king sometimes does, the al-Bayi, the over the house, would reign in his stead, right? He would have them. Like, if I gave you my keys to my house, I'm going away, Matt. Here's my keys. What am I telling you? You have authority over my house. And he was actually called father. He would be a father to Israel. And in Isaiah 22, that's his title. So he's a paternal figure, second only to the king. Well, when you fast forward to the New Testament, when Jesus, when Peter makes the great revelation or the right declaration, to Jesus, is any answer to Jesus' question? Who do you say they are? Peter says, "You are the Christ, Son of the living God." And Peter, and Jesus says to him, "Flesh in blood has not revealed this to you, but my father in heaven." See, it's a mystery, like we've talked about earlier. His divinity is a mystery. Peter didn't get it because he was smart. He didn't get it because he was, like, some kind of genius. He got it because he was humble and because God gave it to him as a gift of grace. It was a gift. It's a revelation. He says, "Flesh in blood has not revealed this to you, my father in heaven. I say you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church." And we talk about that some other time against heaven, not prevail against it. But the line that's important is I will give you singular, not their power. You, the keys of the kingdom of heaven, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, whatever you lose on earth will be lost in heaven. That image of supreme authority is stunning. In fact, W.D. Davies and Dale Allyson, they wrote this massive three-volume commentary on Matthew. It's the best. But they're both Protestant scholars. Dale Allyson actually says, "With these words Jesus is making Peter the supreme rabbi and giving him authority over the entire Ecclesia, the entire church." With one qualifier, he doesn't say whatever heaven says you will bind on earth. It's the opposite. It's like whatever he binds on earth is bound in heaven. It's ratified. I mean, this is just it's kind of astonishing and calculable authority over the church, over the Ecclesia. And in Judaism, the power to bind and lose was the power to teach and discipline. So doctrine and discipline. Jesus actually says it. Remember, Matthew 23, the Pharisees bind heavy burdens and they lock shut the kingdom. They don't let other people enter, but that's the image of keys. It's the same verb and the image of binding and losing. It means their teaching is binding. So what Jesus doing is giving the same authority that the figure of the over-the-house had in the Davidic kingdom to the new father, the new second to the king, and the new kingdom. And that's Peter. And so the Pope, what are we going to call him? We're going to call him Papa, right? Because he's the father of the visible kingdom on earth whose invisible head is the reigning king in heaven, right? So this is, I mean, it's deeply the opposite of the papacy is deeply Jewish and you can see it right there in the image of the keys and binding and losing. And it's important because Jesus gives the power to bind and lose to the apostles in Matthew 18. So it's not just the Peter and the other, they all have the power to bind and lose. They have teaching authority, the bishops, they're successful, but only Peter has the keys. It's a singular office. So anyway, I hope that might help a little bit. That's one reason I'm Catholic. Dr. Peecher, this was absolutely wonderful. I'm really grateful that you took the time to come out and do this. And yeah, praise God. I love this stuff. I was telling you, it's all I know how to do. I hope it's helpful because I'm like the guy in the parable. I'm too weak to dig. I'm too proud to beg. I don't know how to do anything else, but I do love the Bible. All right. And I do love teaching. Final question. And then I'd love you to point people to wherever they can learn. Sure. About you. Read more about you. I know you're writing or have written a book on the litigy you might want to refer people to, but let me just ask you, we see your love and passion for Scripture. And maybe we're comparing that with ourselves. And we pick up the scriptures, and we wish we weren't bored, but we are. What's some advice you might give us to reignite our love for the Scriptures? Okay. Number one, find a good translation. That's important. So I mean, there are lots of them, but I personally, I read the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition. One of the reasons I like it is I'm a former English major. I like beautiful English. I think having a readable, but accurate and beautiful translation can facilitate reading scriptures. So I recommend a Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition. Second, pray before you read. So in other words, I'll do a little prayer like Lord writes a word on my mind, my lips, and my heart, so that I might know it and live it and teach your people. That's this little prayer. Because then what you're doing is you're not just trying to understand it on your own powers, but like actually asking for grace, because it is mysterious. Like the Bible is mysterious. And you don't master the Scriptures, like they master you. Okay. So having humility and also asking for assistance is really important. I love, in fact, that in the Catholic liturgy, when the gospel reading comes, we actually make that little sign. We mark a sign of the cross on our forehead, on our lips, and on our heart. Now it goes back to the 13th century. It's a medieval tradition, because it was meant, it was basically to say what I just said. I want you to write your word in my mind. I want it to be on my lips, and I want it to be in my heart. So I think praying before you read Scripture. And then the third thing I would say is, especially if you're just getting started, focus on the narrative books, the Scripture, like the ones that tell the story of salvation. So read Genesis, read Exodus, read Matthew, read Mark, like read the first books of the Old Testament, read the gospels so you can begin to get the story. Don't start with the Vedicus. And don't start with the prophets, like Isaiah. They're really difficult. Now at some point you can get to them. Start with the Psalms too. Like why not pray Scriptures? Because they're not just for information. They also put a T-Shot of prayer. So I would say find parts of the Scripture that are accessible to you and that resonate with you. And read those, like start there, and then branch out. You don't have to read the Bible from cover to cover. It's a library. It's not a novel. It's different than that. So that might be something that's really good. Is that helpful? Absolutely. Yeah. I reckon people learn more about you. Oh, okay. Yeah. So you can learn more about me. I have a website, brandpatri.com. And I have lots of Bible studies, like audio and video Bible studies that you can go to is at a company, CatholicProductions.com. They've been producing my work for many years. And there you'll find copies of my books like Jewish Roots of Mary, the case for Jesus. I have a book in the introduction of the spiritual life. I think you and I might have talked about it a few years ago. Where I'm sorry, but it is about the Jewish Roots of Spirituality too. Like I look at meditation, contemplative prayer, the seven capital sins, and their opposing virtues, like the spiritual practices of Christianity, fasting, all was giving prayer. But I start in the Old Testament. Like, what does the Old Testament say about this spiritual life? What does Jesus say about this spiritual life? And then what do the saints say about it? So I really love that book. And it was been, it's helpful to me. I really wrote it to try to help myself. But I hope it might be helpful as well. All that's available at brandpeatree.com. And also there, you mentioned, I've done a lot on the Jewish Roots of the literature as well. So I've been working last couple of years on a book, actually, might be two books on the Mass. And I did a series called The Mass Readings, Explained, where basically we produce videos where every Sunday, I do kind of what we did here, but with the Sunday Mass Readings, taking you through the Old Testament reading, how it's filled in the New Testament reading. So we do a lot of the same kind of road to a mess approach. It's not homily. Sometimes all like your homies, they're not homilys. They are lectures. They're explanations. I'm trying to explain the text from a historical perspective. But with a spiritual, you know, spiritual end in mind. So yeah. And so if you're interested in that, you can check out the Mass Explained. The Mass Readings Explained. Those are two video series that I did walking through the Mass. Actually, the one on the Mass, it was funny because I released it. And we basically walked through the order of Mass looking in scripture and tradition. And a friend of mine was like, he texted me. He said, "Brandt, 52 videos." Like, because it's, I was like, well, it was meant one for each week to kind of take you through. If I'd have been smart, how'd I call it the Mass in a year, like Father Mike Schmitt. It's so, what a, it's like, oh, I missed time. I'm now, I missed that opportunity. But anyway, yeah, I love scripture, but I also love liturgy. And I like, I've found when you bring the two together, it just blows up. So maybe we can come back some time. That would be great. Don't be trick. God bless you. Thank you. Thanks Matt. Appreciate it. You're all over. Oh, this is an illusion. An echo of voice that has died. And soon that echo will cease. They say that Merlin is mad. They say he was a king, Indovid. The son of a princess of lost Atlantis. They say the future and the past are known to him. But the fire and the wind tell him their secrets. But the magic of the hillfolk and druids come forth at his easy command. They say he's who hundreds, hundreds do you hear at the world burned and trembled at his wrath. The Merlin died long before you and I were born. Merlin Emris has returned to the land of the living. Fort again has gone. Rum has gone. The Saxon is here. Saxon hangest has assembled the greatest war host ever seen in the island of the mighty. And before the summer is through he means to take the throne. And he will have it. If we are too busy swabbling amongst ourselves to take up arms against him, here is your hope. A king will arise to hold all Britain in his hand. A hiking. You will be the wonder of the world. You. To a future of peace. There'll be no peace in these lands till we are all dust. Men, for the island of the mighty. You stand together. You stand as Britain's. You stand as one. Great darkness is falling upon this land. These brothers are only hoped to stand against it. Not our only hope. They say Mervin flew 17 men with his own hands. Like a thay he slew 500. No matter skipper or such a thing, no mortal man. [BLANK_AUDIO]