Joe Rogan Experience #2252 - Wesley Huff

Joe Rogan podcast check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day Wes very nice to meet you Joe pleasure so uh I like many people was introduced to you because of the uh debate that you had with Billy Carson quote unquote you know it's one of those things where uh it's very unfortunate when people get caught with their pants down and um I'm not an expert in many things but the things that I am an expert on you could wake me up at 4:00 in the morning and

ask me about those things and I go oh yeah no um yeah this is what it is yeah I know you know like martial arts or comedy I could tell you I could give you an expert version of reality uhhuh um it it seems like he does not have that and he is a wonderful talker and it's a lot of fun I like watching his videos it's I I love all that ancient history stuff and even the the most ridiculous tinfoil hat aspects of ancient it's fun it's entertainment but I know the there's a different

like Andrew Schultz and I had a discussion about this like he said when he had Billy on the podcast he said we're not gonna [ __ ] research anything We're not gonna search anything we're not going to do any just let him talk because it's fun yeah Andrew's awesome um but when he was on with you it was quite apparent that you are an actual expert in in the Bible and in Many religious text and that he didn't necessarily have the facts straight so what was the Fallout of all of that well it's interesting you

say the expert thing cuz I I literally was asked to do it 24 hours beforehand so I had like the least amount of preparation right going into it and I I was okay with that because I I listen i' listen to Billy Carson well and I'd listen to the stuff he said so I knew enough about the ways that he'd articulated things about the ancient near East and the Bible and Christianity to know enough that he his level is a is pretty surface but the fall out was that not only did he not want us

to release the the conversation but then he started throwing out ceas and's assist letters and then he started you know trying to sue people so I mean I was never worried because I'm a Canadian and anybody who's tried to sue internationally knows that good luck yeah right yeah as far as I understand it he would have had to file a claim in a Canadian court that would have been reviewed to have legal precedence that he he'd have to prove that he could win what was his argument um apart from the fact that he was embarrassed

that he lost well yeah that's well that's not really an argument right we've all been there you're hung over thinking about all the dumb stuff you did last night and wondering if anybody remembers unfortunately someone does remember for everything you do online and they've got receipts I'm talking about your internet provider and data Brokers and every shady marketing company that gets their greedy hands on your private activity but this year is going to be different give your online privacy a fresh start with expressvpn expressvpn is an easyto usee app that encrypts your online activity and

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do private January with expressvpn get four extra months of fresh clean privacy protection with my special link at expressvpn.com Rogan that's expressvpn.com Rogan to get four extra months completely free tap the banner to learn more well the ceas assist letter yeah the C assist letter said you I don't want you to use my name or my face in anything going forward and anything you've used up until this point you need to remove and I was given 24 hours notice to do this but if you're a public figure he's clearly a public figure is that even

can you actually say no no no you can't do it so what was the does he have a lawyer that wrote this season assist is he a lawyer no so he actually it's interesting cuz he Mark Menard who was the guy who hosted this interaction um he sent Mark a handwritten one and then he eventually gave Mark an official one from his lawyer so I actually was sent one by his lawyer which I you know screenshotted posted publicly online and said I'm going to ignore this uh and then uh but he'd sent Mark who was

the podcast host as as far as I'm aware numerous cease and assists and Anton who was the media manager he' sent a number of cease and assists it's un unfortunate it is unfortunate you're when you get caught with your pants down you're supposed to say I got caught with my pants down that's what you're supposed to do it's especially if you're public like it's very clear that you're incorrect well the irony of the situation is if he just kind of left it it probably wouldn't have made anywhere close to the splash no that it's made

and we told him that we said like hey barbar stri effect is going to happen like you're a big enough personality that if I make a video and say say like hey I had this conversation didn't go well for Billy and Billy doesn't want it released that's going to start to gain traction sooner or later yeah um it's you know the problem is to really delve into these subjects to to re it takes a tremendous amount of research years and years and years of research you really have to know what you're talking about most of

us don't well especially with languages yeah like we didn't get into it I I hoped to have in our initial conversation kind of pressed him a little bit more on the more overt things he'd said about like Greek and Hebrew and Samaran because I've studied a number of ancient languages and when you study the languages you realize the complexities of these things and so when someone hasn't and they're making statements that are obviously indicative of someone who hasn't studied them it's it's super apparent right and so I think it's one thing to be making claims

about say like Christian history or the Bible but when you start to get into like Linguistics and philology it gets messy and if you don't know what you're talking about it gets really apparent really fast so the gentleman who brought the two of you together what was his goal like what was he trying to do and how did he approach you yeah so he's friends or I should say was friends he was friends with Billy they live in the same neighborhood oh boy so it's actually become really um it's become pretty rough for him so

he released a video yesterday which I think people should go and check out where he kind of gives his perspective he's been friends with Billy for years he was at Billy's Wedding Billy had 15 people at his wedding Mark was one of them and they're they live in this community in Florida their their sons are friends their wives would hang out and um Mark told me he's like I've been hearing Billy say you know he wants to debate nobody will debate him for years and so as far as I think Mark was concerned he was

giving Billy the opportunity that Billy had told a lot of people he wanted right and so he you know this was set up um in that Mark and Billy have been talking they've been on each other's podcasts in the past and they've been friends but more like business colleagues like Marcus come out and said I I hadn't really gone into the stuff he'd said about Christianity or ancient religions or whatever that much Mark is a he's a Christian um he has like a public profession of faith and he him and Billy had talked about the

fact that they wanted to talk about like Faith stuff and some of their differences and that um that Mark was kind of prepping for this and his media manager Anton had sent him some of my stuff and said like Wes has done some stuff on some things that that Billy has talked about and uh you know maybe you should look up some some of this stuff you know read into it and Mark very last last minute was like well I'm I feel inadequate do you think I could just ask Wes and so he dm' me

on Instagram and just kind of laid this out like hey I'm gonna have Billy in my studio in 24 hours I can tell him you're coming can tell him who you are I can like give him your background but would you be willing to come and so that's what I did and so that's how it got set up so um correct me if I'm wrong but was Billy aware that this was going to be a debate or did he think it was going be just a discussion like what did he think it was going to

be no he'd been given all of the pre prerequisites like he knew we're going to go over some of his stuff that he' said about Christianity that I was going to come in who I was what my name was some some of my background and that part of the conversation was going to be me kind of asking him some clarifying questions and and rebutting some of the things that he said so he you didn't watch the 3-hour live stream that he did I watched chunks of it okay I I watched a little bit of like

oof and then I shut it off then I watched a little bit more o yeah so unfortunately Billy there says he had no idea going in and I mean as Mark said in his video that he released yesterday I mean that's ply false he knew what it was going to be who was going to be involved and even some of the things that we would be talking about okay and he also was claiming that it wasn't a debate that he had been involved in debates before and that he would prepare for debates but this something

he didn't prepare but again it's like if you ask me about things that I know about you can wake me up out of a full sleep and give me a couple seconds I'll go oh okay uh this is what it is if you know you know and it wasn't a debate in one sense like it wasn't like we didn't do you know opening statements and cross-examination and rebuttal it really was a conversation and um it only kind of turned into a debate in the sense that Billy I think got caught out and so the things

that were talked about kind of showed that you know that he needed to go on the offense yes yeah well again it's all very unfortunate but the good part of it is I was introduced to you in your work and there you go very very extensive and very fascinating and the videos that you sent me on Instagram I watched both those today as well awesome so really really interesting stuff and your knowledge of the history of the biblical texts and the Codex cus and all all these different things very very fascinating stuff so let's just

get into your background like how did how did you get started in your research and how did you how did you get into this yeah so I grew up in a Christian home I my parents were missionaries so I was born in Pakistan and spent a portion of my childhood in the middle e East with my parents working in Aman Jordan and then uh we came back from from the Middle East when I was pretty young and uh so I grew up in this very like uh diverse home in the sense that my mom was

uh a missionary kid who grew up in India and so we had a lot of like worldview kind of perspectives uh represented in our home like I often say we had the babad Gita and the Book of Mormon and the Quran on the Shelf wow yeah and I think you know that always although my parents were never overt with this kind of stuff uh they always had the perspective that you know we're Christians we believe that this worldly perspective is true but hey this stuff isn't scary this stuff isn't you know off limits you know

we can investigate these things and they never said that outright but that I always felt this kind of attitude of that kind of perspective and you know having been exposed in majority Muslim contexts and seeing that kind of stuff and my mom having like a a a pretty good knowledge growing up in India of things like Hinduism and Sikhism and and that um and uh I don't know how much of of the kind of testimony stuff you watched of mine but um just before my 12th birthday I actually was diagnosed with a neurological condition that

left me paralyzed from the ways down yeah I did see all that yeah so that um so that's a condition that's called a q transverse myelitis which I often say is a forget is a word you can forget as soon as you hear it cuz one but what happened was that I had the flu and my body's immune system attacked the nerve endings at the base of my spinal cord and cause swelling and cut off the communication between my brain and my legs and instantaneously right yeah basically i' I'd gone down for a nap I

was camping out in the bathroom floor um for flu reasons and uh when I woke up about 30 minutes later I couldn't feel my legs and so yeah that's the acute part of the acute transverse myelitis was that it was basically instantaneous and that's what made the diagnosis as severe as it was like they said there's a 30% chance this it was it was like a small percentage of uh uh probability that I I would recover but a much higher percentage that there would be a lot of either complete paralysis for the rest of my

life or um some kind of uh issues with walking it's related to like dis is like multiple SC sclerosis in that it's it's neurological and it it affects that kind of thing and um one month from the day that I I woke up and couldn't feel my legs I I woke up on Saturday morning got out of bed walked over to my wheelchair and sat down one month one month yeah January 8th to February 8th exactly very fortunate uh you're telling me yeah yeah what treatment did they give you so there um initially they gave

me uh steroids to reduce the the swelling but uh so I spent 11 days in the hospital um being overseen by uh pediatric pediatric neurologists uh and specialists in in this because it's a very rare condition and so they were studying me and um they gave me steroids and they they did some other tests but really there was no true kind of treatment in that and at so I was doing um physiotherapy I would be pulled out of gym class in school but it was a little bit of a joke like can you move your

legs you know can you can you it was could you move anything no nothing could you feel anything no no in fact um when I was in the hospital i' I'd wake up and there'd be uh pin Pricks in my legs CU they'd be testing where uh like where the reactions were and they'd have used a syringe and so I'd wake up and i' do tiny little pin Pricks in my legs because they'd been testing while I was asleep to see what the kind of um you know we it was registering neurologically with anything but

I couldn't feel anything I was fully a paraplegic whoa yeah but but going back to that like so I I experienced this what I consider to be a true Supernatural experience in that I walked into the hospital to the doctors that had overseen me and they were the first ones that Ed the word miracle they said we really don't have any type of medical explanation and mainly because there was no um atrophy because of the the cut off of the communication my muscles in those 30 days were fine um and it's a short amount of

time but uh they said there should be something and we're we're picking up nothing that's crazy because uh I've broken limbs before and had them in casts and just in the six weeks that you have a cast on yeah you have massive atrophy yeah yeah so that was the the kind of predication for them using word miracle and so that's kind of it marks this what I do consider to be like this Supernatural something happened and but did you feel like that was like a calling that like LED you to a very specific mindset after

that it's an interesting way of putting it I mean as much as you could at 12 years old right but it must have had a significant impact on your psyche and your perceptions yeah well it definitely led to things like later in life I got very involved in athletics in in track and field and part of that was feeling a conviction that I knew what it was like to not be able to wake up and walk out of the room right and so taking that pretty seriously and and competing competitively well into University um because

even though you know I wasn't the most naturally talented individual on the team I I felt like a motivation to be able to okay I don't want to waste them this right yeah right and then later on in terms of your original question the the difference in that was that I I realized okay there's something out there something happened that I can't totally explain on naturalistic terms but how do we how do we go from that to saying okay well then this worldview is correct and so despite you know being raised in a Christian home

I felt like my parents telling me what was true is not the worst reason to believe it but it's also not the best and so as a teenager I did a lot of kind of soul searching and like I said you know I was able to do that um to a certain level of degree because of the openness within my household where I did I pulled the Quran off the shelf and I read it you know front to back just trying to figure out okay what what's going on here what's all this about right and

um it was through that period of like searching and it wasn't a crisis of Faith that's that would be an over exaggerated term but it was kind of an inspiration of Faith perhaps maybe yeah digging through okay well what do these guys believe what what does this perspective hold and um that was about a period of about a year and a half and at the end of that um I I did truly feel that okay well I think in the ways that I in my limited ability as a teenager to investigate these things I think

that Christianity is true but it wasn't until I went to University where I was engaging with people of other Faith perspectives um in Toronto at at York University where I was talking to Muslims and Mormons Jehovah's Witnesses and atheists you know from the gamut and I was having these conversations and I was expressing kind of my perspective on what I believed and they would say things like well that sounds great Wes but you know that's all the Bible you can't trust that and so that's where I started to take the the Mormon say that to

you well that's kind of crazy yeah yeah well in the sense that so um the Mormon one is the craziest one because we know who wrote it you know and he's a shady dude he is a shady dude um well no they did in the sense that um The Book of Mormon uh trumps the the Bible so they would believe I think it's the 10th article of the Mormon church is that they believe the Bible in so far as it is translated and so they they have this perspective that there's been things that have been

affected I mean uh Joseph Smith made his own translation of the Bible and it's rough and when he was 14 well I think it was later on that he he made the Joseph Smith translation but I don't even know if the official like LDS church ascribes to the Joseph Smith translation because I think they even see like uh like this is we know what the Greek and the Hebrew looks like and this is not even yeah yeah well he was uh you know legitimate con man yeah which is fascinating that it's people have such a

a deep search for meaning and truth that if you are confident and if which is what a con man is you know confidence man if you are really good at expressing yourself and really like you show confidence in your convictions you can you can persuade a lot of people yeah confidence is not competency yes and unfortunately those things get confused a lot like well he covers up for competency sometimes yeah in in religion and politics and like all sorts of things right and everything yeah and everything I mean I think it's I think because people

want to like it's very difficult to be an expert in a subject and I think people want to believe that they are and they don't want to do the work right you know yeah yeah well I mean I think that's why um you know experts themselves feel a lot of inadequacy is cu they study a subject and realize like I'm never going to get to the bottom of this hole right so unfortunately subjects are very very nuanced and very deep especially when you're talking about ancient religion yeah I mean you're you're you're talking about things

that were a oral tradition for a long time before they're even written down so it's it's a long long trudge to get to the the bottom of things things yeah and part of the whole like what I was trying to get Billy in that conversation that I had with him to get to the bottom of partly was a question of methodology like I think he got he got frustrated at me at one point because I kept asking you know what are the criteria that you're using when you're looking at One Source versus another source and

coming up with a conclusion because in historiography it's uh it's the inference to the best explanation MH and so there are different ways that you go about that different methodologies and historians very rarely disagree on the the data and evidence it's the conclusions that you draw from that but then there are some things that are just out andout false and I don't think Billy totally knew what I was talking about but it's those criteria that we look at when we look at something that does come from like an oral tradition and eventually gets written down

and and becomes a a literary text and then you Analyze That on the basis of it being a literary text this is sort of the problem between uh with uh being self-taught rather than conventionally academically trained definitely where you're trained in very specific disciplines and you're taught to understand the foundation before you understand like how to put a window in yeah you have there's a lot of things that you have to know from the base from the beginning like do you have a water line do you have power like a lot of stuff there's a

lot of things going on when you're trying to construct uh an expertise in something especially something that is so complicated and one of the things that I've gotten out of uh pay I've probably watched probably 20 hours of your stuff over the last couple weeks and you you've spent a lot of time on this this is not a casual cursory examination of these texts and of religion this is a this is a long long journey and that's what's particularly exceptional and really interesting to me because I'm always fascinated by people that have really gone down

the road like really really really gone down the road because you don't meet a whole lot of them you know I know a lot of Christians that can quote you some you know some versions of the New Testament you know some Psalms some they but but the real the B the go all the way to the back way way way way way and that's that's what you've done that's very interesting so this is like how old are you I'm 33 which is very young for someone who has chicken the depth of knowledge that you have

you know um so you've been doing this essentially from that miraculous moment you've that ignited this spark even though you came from a missionary background and and then from then on so for the past 11 years 12 years or 20 years 30 years like it's your whole life essentially it's all been this yeah I to a certain degree I mean I went to University with full intention of going into the police force I did like um my undergraduate studies and then I had kind of mapped out this plan that I was going to become a

police detective and that was my goal and I think I realized that why that um cuz you like getting to the bottom of things it could be cuz you do right well well if someone who spends 21 years like getting to the bottom of a religion you you know you'd probably be pretty good at cracking cases I hope so um I think that might have been part of it I also there was an aspect of when I was in high school where there were like you got to figure out what you're doing or you're going

to be homeless and you're going to die like I felt that like Terri moment in life man I always tell people when they're in high school like you can chill out like it's going to be okay I don't think so you don't think so I wonder if it's now because I think you should have a certain amount of desperation cuz I think that it ignites the Fire Within you to do something there's probably something to that yeah the people that I know that have been too pampered and taken care of and didn't have a fear

of everything going completely sideways they never really get the momentum that's necessary to accomplish things in life yeah there's probably something to that I mean desperation little desperation fear I think is good for you yeah yeah everybody wants to be comfortable I don't think I don't think that's necessarily a good path I mean I think you should have perspective and you should enjoy your life as a young person and and and have those but you should also realize you got work to do well stress is good right stress creates perseverance and creates patterns that allow

you to succeed yes I mean this is like Athletics 101 right I think that's very important you got to push yourself and I think actually part of that also LED in like I'm a big believer in athletic discipline needs to go hand in hand I mean I know you are too needs to go hand inand with any other type of like whether it's an intellectual Endeavor or like because it trains you to be able to go into places that are uncomfortable yes and that uncomfortability allows you to then become stronger you know realize where your

inadequacies are and especially when you're with people who are better than you I mean when I was running at York University there were two guys on our team who uh cuz I I I was okay individually but I ran for the uh relay team I was a sprinter and um one of the guys was part of the uh he he they medled when Canada medled at Worlds he was part of that relay team and then my other training partner bsy who um he ended up competing in Tokyo for Canada and when you're beside someone who

is like just a genetic freak you're like oh okay like that's different yeah right and and it both pushes you but it also reveals your limitations where that doesn't inhibit you like you shouldn't that shouldn't discourage you to go up to that line of being able to push yourself but at the exact same time it it creates a realism that like I'm never going to I can train as much as I want to I'm not going to run like that right and um so yeah but but going back to what you were asking like I

think there was part of that in wanting to go into the police force but then realizing like around my third year of University that my passions and motivations were very very different and that I didn't know how to go about that or where the proper place to do that was but I knew that I needed to lean into that to some degree particularly with the Bible cuz I was I was claiming that this Bible talks about this guy Jesus and I'm a Christian so I have a a friend Andy banister he's out in the UK

and he says if you take Christ out of Christian all you're left with is Ian and Ian's a great guy who's not going to save you from your sins and so like if if I'm wrong about the Bible those people who push back on me right those Skeptics of various worldviews uh if the things they were saying about the Bible were true then it did actually legitimately undermine what I believed and so I needed to take that seriously I had an obligation to actually investigate those things as far as I could playoffs we're talking about

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Old Testament so when they were discovered I mean um so they were discovered 1946 to 1957 and at that point during their Discovery they pushed back a lot of our previous uh oldest manuscripts a thousand years which was a big deal um how old are they they're anywhere between the 3r century BC and the first century BC so it's kind of tricky because the Dead Sea Scrolls are they're like a library that we refer to so it's um approximately 970 documents but it's distributed out between um 10,000 and 11,000 fragments so there's a lot going

on there yeah right so and some of these I mean are are so fragmentary that you look at them and it's like confetti cuz they're I mean 3,000 years old but not quite that they're like two 2,000 plus years old animal skins too right yeah well all sorts of things animal skins uh papy and then some of them are actually done on copper they're like inscribed in Copper oh wow yeah one of the coolest ones actually this relates cuz I know you're a Marco legro guy the first time I was introduced to Marco legro was

not his sacred mushroom and the cross stuff but he published a book on What's called the Copper Scroll cuz part of the Dead SE scroll fragments are is this inscribed document on copper which is an ancient treasure map can you see it online yeah Jamie pull up the hey there it is wow yeah so it's in Hebrew and it is wild so it it has these sites where it says buried treasure is found and there have been a number of guys who have tried to like look for it and um so does it say what

the treasure is uh you know what off the top of my head I don't know um but look how crazy that language is I know right um and so but but the dsy scroll so it's like stuff like this it's papy it's animal skins um and it's uh a number different languages so the vast majority of it is in Hebrew but there's also a lot in Aramaic and then uh Greek and in naban so it's like a it's like a an an umbrella term to just describe a whole bunch of literature so a lot of

it is biblical because it was written by this group out in the desert called the essin who lived at kumran so but then other stuff of it is just you know it's just Jewish literature of various Stripes that is uh is were hidden in caves all around the Dead Sea so the Scrolls as it were aren't all biblical some of them is just a a counting of the times yeah oh Jamie looked it up 65 tons of gold and 26 tons of silver 65 tons that's a lot that's a lot how many Cuban links can

you make out of that you can see why someone would try to track that down boy yeah wow and and you know when it when we're talking about the Dey Scrolls like you have ones like the great Isaiah scroll which is fully complete like it's a it's a copy of the book of Isaiah and it's a full complete scroll but then other ones are so fragmentary that we we think they're written in Hebrew but we can't actually tell oh wow because no one's willing to like piece these and this is true for a lot of

stuff so um like uh the largest grouping of of papy literature in the world is the ox rinkus collection which we get a a good portion of our oldest manuscripts of the new Testament from but if you go to Oxford and you look at the ox or the uh oxar rinkus collection you pull out that drawer it just it's it's like a jigsaw puzzle and you're like right like most of it is is untranslated untranscribed because the amount of man hours that it would just take to even put it together never mind then go to

the effort of transcribing and translating it and most people are not willing to do that and if you're missing chunks how do you even make that puzzle connect well that's part of so part of my area area of uh speciality in research is in regards to that is so I study paratextual features we're we're really going to get nerdy today let get nerdy um where so you look at the features of the manuscripts not necessarily the words but things like the spaces between the words the development of punctuation uh indentation or out dentation and I

look look at the margins and I try to based on the average size of manuscripts in and around that time and also the average spacing of words and um the margins on top bottom and the side recreate what the manuscript could have possibly looked like whoa yeah so when you say the book of Isaiah is intact how similar is it to the book of Isaiah that's in the Bible so that one is fascinating so this isn't true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls but when we discovered the great Isaiah scroll previous to that the

earliest copy of Isaiah that we had was uh in the mastic text which is in the Middle Ages whoa yeah so it was literally a thousand years we literally pushed back our understanding of Isaiah a thousand years and the thing that really shocked Scholars like I said this isn't true for all the Dead Sea Scrolls but one of the things that shocked them about Isaiah was that it was word for word identical to the Matic text word for word word for word wow yeah this the scroll so if you go to Israel and you go

is that Papyrus um yes no I think that one is Vellum what is Vellum so uh so I should be more specific so parchment is animal skin Vellum can be used uh synonymously with the term parchment technically parchment is is like baby animal skin like Calves or Lambs um but this is the the great Isaiah scroll and you can see like they stitch together uh the parchment cuz it's it's it's so long God it's so beautiful the way they wrote back then was so beautiful I mean maybe it's cuz I can't read it that it's

so fat maybe if I saw English I would think that's beautiful too yeah especially script like cursive cursive is very beautiful but that is so fascinating because the I mean obviously coming from a point of ignorance the letters look so similar like so many this is the the what I always got about uniform when I look at that I'm like it's just one particular sort of character that's this way and that way and up and down and oh K form is wild weird it's really really tricky and that's the thing when like if you're studying

ancient languages and you you start to study Greek like Greek the Greek alphabet is similar enough that you're like okay Alpha looks like an a right Delta looks like a d so you can figure it out and so it tricks you because you start off and you're like oh this is Phobos fear I know what a phob is and you get this false sense of like encouragement and then you know the further you go down the rabbit hole you're like oh I'm screwed so um but Hebrew is completely the opposite because the like writing system

is so different the learning curve is hard at the beginning and then you're like everything is just three letters with a suffix added to it and so it feels like whereas the opposite is true with with Greek Greek you're like ah I get this and then when you really go down the rabbit hole you're like oh crap none of the things that I learned about that are supposed to be standard all of them have exceptions wow but uh yeah Kun is a wild one do you know who Rick stman is no uh he's um he's

a scholar and he did a lot of uh work early work FDA approved work on psychedelics and he spent 16 years teaching himself to read ancient Hebrew nice yeah so because he wanted to really understand the Bible from the original source of ancient Hebrew and to understand it in context because ancient Hebrew the way the words are structured is so different than English and that that something must be Lost in Translation so he spent 16 years teaching himself W how to read ancient Hebrew I was like that is so that is such dedication 16 years

that's a long time that seems too long well you're self-taught I mean he's doing it himself yeah self- teing yeah I I I selftaught myself Greek at first and then when I started learning it formally I realized how much you when you self te yourself oh I'm sure well how many people can teach you ancient Hebrew how many courses are available oh you can take it at any graduate college yeah and is it um it's not something that we know what what it sounded like correct yeah I mean this is the big debate with ancient

languages like same thing with yeah arguably we don't know how any of this was pronounced right I mean modern Greek speakers get really mad at me when I say that because they're like of course we know how it's pronounced it pronounced like we pronounce it right um and and on all my videos where I'm like trans translating Greek manuscripts um all of like there's so many comments of of modern Greek speakers getting mad at how I'm pronouncing things but realistically yeah we don't we we don't really know how most of the things are pronounced with

anything but isn't that very bizarre when you're translate like if you go back to like say the Epic of Gilgamesh you don't we don't even know what the word sounded like we kind of know what they represent and then we do a literal translation of what they represent but if you've never heard no one can speak ancient Sumerian yeah well Sumerian is a wild one because it's a language isolate so uh so Hebrew is a is an afro emetic language so Hebrew is related to all of these other languages like Aramaic and Acadian but anguage

isolates have no adjacent comp comparisons whoa so I tried to teach myself Sumerian and I failed and I just gave up because I couldn't do it because I had nothing to really compare it to so Su mariology are very like they're a field of their own because I learned a little bit of Acadian because I had studied semetic languages and there's enough crossover between things like Hebrew and Aramaic and Acadian but suan you have nothing to compare it to and what did what did it eventually become it just died it just died it just died

how do we know uh I mean the Sumerians lost to the Assyrians and the Assyrians got taken over by the Babylonians I mean it's just the the you know the course of history where things happen but there are a number of ancient languages that are anguage language isolates like um linear elamite we had no idea what linear elamite even said until 2021 well I never even heard it until 5 seconds ago I know there you go Jamie if you pull up um if you look up uh what's it called there's a cup a silver cup

it'll come up if you if you Google image linear elamite because you think kuna form looks wild linear elmite is completely different than that too and um there's a silver cup which we had no idea what it said and then a bunch of researchers ancient uh NE Eastern researchers uh develop well so let's in in the corner there uh that one on far left corner oh no no here now it's moved cuz he clicked it that one yeah yeah click that that so that's linear elmite and so that's in and around the same time that

language is like Sumerian so there's this very interesting kind of if we're talking about the a story in the Bible like the the tab Babel where it says that God confused their languages and everybody started speaking different languages you have these languages that just pop up and out of nowhere and have no relation to one another so Acadian starts to adopt certain words in Sumerian but they're still Sumerian word it's like pizza is Italian right or like kayak is Inuit um but when you're looking at the words that carry over it's not because there there's

a relationship between a Cadian and Sumerian it's because you have these cultures that live side by side and eventually a Cadian starts to adopt these things but Sumerian is so that's why when I see people like Billy Carson talk about being able to read Sumerian I'm like dude I read ancient languages and I can't I've tried and I can't make heads or taals of Samaran so that's a tell unfortunately kind gives away un listen I like Billy he was a nice guy I really enjoy talking to him I I really do I think his videos

are fun but I also think truth is important I have no problem with him as an individual he just needs to course correct yeah yeah course correct in and recognize what you know and what you don't know and that you're not doing people a service especially people like myself that aren't educated in this like we we turn to others who claim to have a vast knowledge of this to help me out tell me what's going on when I sit down and talk to you tell me what's going on and if you don't really know you're

kind of you're [ __ ] over a lot of people unfortunately for yourself yeah this this um how do you say it again lineal linear linear Elite can you put that back up again Jamie so this was um in can you show me that that image that you showed me you before actually see if you can find the cupy doe there if you scroll there's a there should be a c I think it's called the dashed is that it in the lower corner not the cup no if you go it's got yeah if you look

up cup yeah that that guy so so see that inscription of the top beside the face yeah so that's the one so it goes around the top of the cup and they crack that look at that dude's Honker a big nose isn't it that's a nose yeah he can smell that linear Elite and so when so actually interestingly enough if you pull back Jamie that's my that's my uh so there's an infographic that I made that just popped up so if you click that guy that's the one I made why is it coming up like

that someone else reposted it oh okay so is it just bad resolution is that what you're saying oh there it is oh no this is mine so so actually here I'll be self- serving if you go to Wesley huff.com that is so we just at that for a second that is so cool and how old is this uh four I mean 20th century BC wow yeah so 4,000 plus years ago yeah so if you go Jamie to Wesley huff.com and then click my infographics tab at the top so I started making these things for The

Graduate students I was teaching and uh yeah so if you go down there should be an archaeology section and in the archaeology section I have that one on um uh I'm blanking on what what is called I make ones for manuscripts too what a great website you've got oh thank you appreciate that this is awesome it's so detailed yeah so there's a linear Elite one what a [ __ ] phenomenal resource this is right there oh there it is yeah Mar Dash that's what it's called so yeah you see that so I have Sumerian lar

Elite a Acadian and pale Hebrew there at the bottom the comparisons and these are languages that operated like alongside one another but um are almost completely uh foreign to one another so there there is crossover between aadan and P Hebrew so that's interesting Sumerian when I'm thinking of CII form I'm not thinking of that right that that looks different than some of like U the clay Scrolls the where they've you know the the imprints that they make with a clay wheel yeah well it's all done um with the stylus so it's like a little wedge

stylus so there there are different variations of it but but um ultimately it's done with the stylus the thing that's interesting like like you're probably thinking more of what that later Acadian looks like right where it's like the wedges yeah yeah yeah so so they aadan basically borrowed the writing system and and it had development over time but it was it's very close when they conquered them did they have their own writing system initially and just Incorporated Sumerian writing to theirs that's a good question I don't know the answer to that one but God I'd

like to know I know right I mean it's so long ago but not you know yeah I mean it's so long ago in terms of a human life yeah but it's not that long when you think like we went from 4,000 years ago to that to large language models yeah that's pretty crazy yeah Quantum Computing yeah well even if you look at the I mean language systems developed Pooh Hebrew turns into what we saw in the dead sey Scrolls whereas paleo Hebrew is a little bit different than what we eventually see in the Dead Sea

Scrolls because there's a like a development within the language and then modern Hebrew adopts the Hebrew in the Dead Sea Scrolls but modern Hebrew has um it has vowels where that were developed in the Middle Ages to to figure out how to pronounce it because basically ancient Hebrew doesn't have a vowel system in its writing that's overly comprehensive and so in the Middle Ages when you have uh these groups of Jews who are copying these Hebrew scriptures who aren't speaking it as much as they're reading it you got to figure out how to pronounce it

as because because vowels make a difference but if if you took all the vowels out of English if you were a natural English reader you could probably figure out what was what if you're looking at the page um and so in the Middle Ages the mastic scribes come up with these vowel pointing systems and that's what you see when you like look at a Hebrew Bible today is you see these these vowels and sometimes like like the introduction or Moval of the vowel is significant in the changing of the words MH it's it's all interesting

and you know we're kind of seeing language change written language while right now in this current ERA because of the because of the we've kind of abandoned cursive right so if people in the future go to read ancient scripts of of human beings that lived in the 20th century they'll be like what is this [ __ ] yeah and then you know if there wasn't a lot of it like there's no cursive on the internet I mean there's cursive on the internet but I mean no websites are written in cursive or very few at least

it's all printed and so they've essentially in school stopped teaching most classes don't teach cursive like we all learned cursive as children it was the way you could write things quicker yeah and then once Printing and typewriters and computers became ubiquitous like it's gone yeah and everybody's just texting yeah well let's hope people in the future are still able to read the Declaration of Independence like CU that's where he was written right stuff like that yeah that's really interesting right because if you did were not taught that and then you went to read that and

you said this is English like what are you talking about like I recognize a few of these letters but it's so vastly different than the printed text yeah language models are wild wild yeah the whole thing is wild that people figured out how to associate sounds with little symbols and then they did completely different [ __ ] in Korea with completely different [ __ ] in Russia like it's it's so fascinating and then you have to have these experts who can translate these things and you're dependent upon them forever which that was what Lutheranism was

all about right like Martin Luther wanted to have phonetic translations of the Bible and there was a lot of resistance to that because the people that knew how to read Latin were like hey hey slow down yeah partly I mean there were protore reformers before Luther guys like like uh Wickliffe so John Wickliffe and um uh William Tindale both translated the Bible parts of the Bible into English and they predated I mean and they weren't very popular for it either I mean wickliff was declared a heretic and then his body was exuded and burned because

that of of the work that he did but yeah him after he was already dead yeah well tindale's um tindale's line was that he wanted I believe it was Tindale it was either Wickliffe or Tindale my friends who are specialist in specialists in this are going to get mad at me for this but one of those two guys said that they wanted the plow booy to be able to read the Bible and know it as well as the priests and so that's that was their motivation is that they're like you know public education for literacy

in these areas was largely because they just wanted people to read the Bible but that was a big motivation behind Luther was he's like I'm going to translate this thing into German because part of his kind of kicking off of the what we call the Protestant Reformation was that he read read the Bible in Greek cuz there was a guy named desiderius arasmus who uh was a they call them humanists but they it means something different than now humanists were like Scholars who were trying to figure out the entirety of human knowledge up until that

point like Renaissance men kind of right so deser arasmus is like one of the last true Renaissance men but he was compiling and he he produced the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament and so he comes out with this printed edition of the Greek New Testament and Luther gets it hand his hands on it and so he's reading that and he notices that in Matthew's gospel the word that's in the Latin is penitenti Agate do Penance in Greek is metano which is repentance and the church was using this as like you need to

do Penance you need to you know do all of this stuff to show that you're sorry and part of that was you know paying the church and Luther reads this and he goes hey guys this means something different this means repentance it means changing your mind it doesn't mean like to actually do things and so part of his motivation is like the Latin isn't reflecting at least at the point that Latin had developed in in that day like maybe when Jerome translates the Latin Vulgate back in the the 4th century and it's called The Vulgate

because vulgata means like regular like think vulg it's just the regular people language part of the reason was that in theth Century very few people were reading Greek they were reading Latin and so they're like hey Jerome you need to produce a Bible in Latin because nobody can read the Bible anymore and so he produces the Latin Vulgate and ironically by the time you get to Luther a thousand years later no one can read Latin and they're all using the Vulgate wow that is fascinating wow and even arasmus was um so he dedicates his first

few additions to the pope because he knows that the pope is going to get wind that he's producing Greek New Testament New Testaments and the church is using the Latin and um he he's risking risking his life so if he dedicates it to the pope maybe the pope will take it easy on him did it work yeah yeah it did nice little flattery yeah see it goes a long way well that's part of the problem right is that you're dealing with these priests you're dealing with human beings and when beings are the sole purveyors of

truth they're the that it becomes a problem it's power it's too much power most people suck at Power they're just it it just makes them drunk with it and they abuse it and you see that in many many religions you see that in Cults you know for instance is the best example of it CU you know like when when you know the person who created this thing and you know this person is [ __ ] insane and you have a bunch of people that follow them they're just looking out for your best interest Joe yeah

right they just they just want to make sure you're doing the right thing did you see Wild Wild Country oh yes it's [ __ ] awesome unfortunately it's so good it's so crazy I mean I'm so glad I wasn't there and a part of it but it um they all look good in the beginning that's what's really wild all these uh cult documentaries all these exposes in the beginning like these people haven't made they're all eating together and they have community and they're praying together and they seem happy yeah yeah one of the ways my

wife and I Bond we have very different tastes in movies but we there's enough crossover that are like our guilty pleasure is cult documentaries I love them they're so I love them because there's something about people like absolutely believing things it's so appealing to me I don't know why that is like I like watching Islamic scholars speak you know with like full confidence that their their version of truth is truth I'm just interested in that mindset I just I think it's a like a very deeply cut Groove in the human psyche that people can fall

into and when some when there's a cult it's like God it's so obvious like there's the guy that's the guy like here's a good example there's a documentary called holy hell oh yeah of course and you know that yeah I bought the building that holy hell was like the the the actual theater that this guy had built it's a beautiful theater that he had his followers buil so he can dance in front of them that was going to be the comedy Mothership the first version of it that's so I was under contract for that building

but it fell apart thank baby Jesus thank so much thank all thank somebody um and then we found this new place on Sixth Street but that documentary is so fascinating because you you can see this guy who is a gay porn star and a hypnotist take a bunch of really lost people and send them down this crazy Road and then eventually it all falls apart and you know what's interesting about that is I have less of a problem with the objective truth claims and more of a problem with them saying but don't look into it

like don't test it like what I say goes and you're not allowed to explore it like talking about the Mormon Church they recently did this thing where they're like you don't need to go on the internet and you don't need to and it's like don't watch The Book of Mormon yeah guys you I don't think you realize what you're sounding like when when you come across in that way Mormons are the nicest cult members they're the nicest people they really are so nice I love them I mean the Mormons that I've met have been so

friendly they're so family oriented it's true there's some I mean it's like really easy to like think these are great people I'll join them you know why they're family oriented right why is because in in the in what Joseph Smith wrote there's an idea that everybody's soul pre-exists and you were born as a spirit child in a previous life and the reason you need to have children is you need to bring those people Souls into existence and so there's like because you have a heavenly father and a heavenly mother and um you're all children of

God in the actual like physical sense and that the pursuit is exaltation where you will be a God on your own Planet if you've done everything right you get your own Planet which is pretty dop your own planet and and this is so Joseph Smith in uh in the F the king's Fallout funeral discourse this is what he wrote this is where he like formulated this idea where God the father has a body as tangible as ours of Flesh and Blood and that he lived on another planet and he that was you know circled around

the star called collab and that if you do everything right you will also be the God on on your own planet and so you got to encourage people to have kids cuz you're pulling those Spirit babies out of the out of the spiritual realm but you're right they are they're incredibly nice people the nicest the nicest yeah it's it's a really great cult you know I mean or religion whatever I mean I I used to have a joke in my act that uh a cult is is fake and it's made by one guy that guy

invented it in a religion that guy's dead H there might be something do that yeah and some for sure but the the question to me is always what were they originally trying to do right what was it based on what in the beginning there was light what what is what is all of that what what are those stories yeah and when you take these stories and you are telling them for so long that's why the book of Isaiah what you were telling me is so fascinating that a thousand years later yeah you have the exact

translation of this at a time where most people were illiterate right oh yeah definitely yeah for I mean it's only really been recently that we have the levels of literacy that we have today I mean this is part of the reason why you have these long spans of time between like when people live and then the ancient biographies that start to pop up about them is because most people are just illiterate but to imagine how crazy that is that something in a time where there's no printed press and uh something that had been passed on

for so long as a oral tradition is exact word for word written you find in a cave in kumran yeah and then the same thing you get in the English translation of the Bible today that's nuts yeah I mean up until the discovery of the Dead sey Scrolls the New Testament manuscripts predated the Old Testament manuscripts by a long shot really yeah because um the Christians were the Christians were less Discerning in their proliferation of written documents so the Jews had this whole system where you had to be a trained scribe and they were very

very careful with the procedures that you went through whereas the Christians were like we want to get this thing out as fast as we can as uh you know often as we can which had a lot of benefits in that like their goal was a PR priz and evangelism and that worked but the downside of it was that you get really messy copies where you have copies all over the place but um human gets involved with like spelling differences and you know additions deletions mostly for completely like understandable reasons but we actually have manuscripts where

we know the person copied it and they didn't know how to read it because they make mistakes that you wouldn't make if you knew how to copy there's this really great example of a guy who copies I believe it's the genealogy of Matthew and he um he's looking at a manuscript that has uh two columns and he's copying it from left to right and he's copying it like this whereas it's like the column you go down and then the next column so in the genealogy of Jesus he's got all the wrong people begetting all the

wrong people and you're like you wouldn't you wouldn't do this if you knew how to read because God is in the middle of the genealogy so like that kind of thing that is a real problem that is a real problem but ironically the with the the Christian manuscripts because we have so many it's actually because of the mistakes that we're able to trace the text back with a high degree of confidence because if you have copies that are floating around you know North Africa in places like Egypt and then you have copies in Syria and

you have copies out into Asia and into Europe and the British Isles when mistakes pop up they're geographically located and because you have so many you can compare and contrast them and figure out okay well this obviously happened here at this time and you can pinpoint Point those things so this is a field called textual criticism where you and they we do this with all ancient documents like the Bible is a a a more kind of um uh fleshed out um field of textual criticism because we have so many manuscripts but we do it with

you know Marcus aurelus um we even do it with Shakespeare with the different copies because if you only have one copy you have to trust that the person who copied that got it right right yeah which is the issue that we have for um the um bolf we only have one copy of bolf and so we don't know what it looked like prior to that so we just kind of accept that okay this is Beowolf like there's no way to compare and contrast the the tradition of the manuscripts of Beowolf God when you're saying this

about taking copied versions of it and comparing errors and going back and like you're talking about so much time yeah so much research it's leg work so much leg work yeah and fortunately like in the modern era we get computers involved and that cuts out a lot of the like just Manpower I would like to see AI get to the bottom of all this well there's an interesting so in Germany at the the center for the study of of um New Testament research um in moer um they're actually it's called cbgm the coherence-based genealogical method

and it's tracing not manuscripts but readings within manuscript and finding the relationships between the different ones by like computer models and so they are actually get so this is actually the way that like modern era textual criticism is being done is with these these language models that operate on tracing readings and how certain readings are related to one another which has allowed us to do things like look at Fourth Century manuscripts and actually see that their readings come hundreds of years early in other manuscripts that we have in collections so one of the the clearest

examples of this is there's a manuscript in the 4th Century called codex vaticanus because it happens to be in the Vatican right now and um there is a a manuscript from the second century which has the exact same scribal conventions that codex vaticanus does in particular readings and so we know for a fact that the scribes who created vaticanus did not have I think it's p75 which which is papyrus 75 but they had some sort of collection of manuscripts that were similar and so we can have confidence that the readings although they're fourth Century in

particular areas of codex fanis are actually second century in their origination and a large part of this is because of these like models that the computers got involved in wow that is so fascinating now when they're going over things like ancient surian and they're reading things like the Epic of Gilgamesh MH like if we can't say we we don't how know how to make those words we don't know what they sounded like how are they translating it into an English version like when you like one of the things that's been compared quite a bit is

um the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah and the Ark the great flood there seems to be some parallels yeah like how close is it um in some way it's very close and in other ways it's not so that's the story of NNU ptim which is kind of a Side Story in the Epic of Gilgamesh where um Gilgamesh is he realizes his mortality and he's trying to find eternal life and there's this guyn pisham who he runs into who tells in this story of the Gods gifted him with eternal life because he saved

all the animals on a boat and so there are actually parallels between that and say the Genesis 6 Noah Arc story uh in like making a big boat putting all the animals on it and they get off and they make a sacrifice to in his case the gods and in the Bible God and I think what you're looking at there is probably a cultural remembrance of something that did take place and so you have these adjacent cultures who they're existing within this framework of the ancient e eist and you're seeing these kind of parallel Echoes

of things that actually did happen so there are definite parallels but I think sometimes people look at those and they overplay that so the one of the examples I often give is Advil and arsenic both come in pill form and have an A on the bottle but it's not the the similarities that matter in that case is the differences and so if you look at the differences there are significant differences in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the opop pisham story and the Genesis 6 story if for no other reason then the no Arc story is

is a very small part of the Book of Genesis and the the story ofish in the Epic of gilgames is a little bit more stretched out it has more to do with the theme of what Gilgamesh is doing in his epic so but there are obviously parallels between that because these are both ancient new Eastern stories and they're products of their day in the in the same way that I think you see parallels between some of the New Testament gospels and other ancient GRE Roman biography in that you know these are products of ancient history

and so they're going to look like other ancient historical writings that kind of parallel around that does that make sense no it does make sense it's just when you're talking about the oldest of old stories it's always so interesting to wonder like when what was like when they're taking these oral Traditions like like Socrates is famous for saying that he didn't believe that you should write things yeah make people lazy right you need to learn how to remember things you need to exercise your memory which is so fascinating when you think that there must have

been people that were in charge of memorizing these oral Traditions yeah and when you're talking about particularly if you're talking about the Old Testament the the series of writings like these are long stories that someone had to remember and pass on to Generations so the thing with me was always like well what was the origin of all this like what was the first version of it and where the hell did it come from and what was it what was going on where these people felt like in this time of incredibly difficult survival right you're essentially

you're hunter gatherers right we're talking about thousands of years ago and these people took great time and made great effort to preserve these stories uhhuh and then there's always human error right there's human error as you saying with transcription and trying to decipher things and writing things down where you don't really speak the language you got to wonder like how much did we lose in this oral tradition like what was the original story and what were they trying to convey yeah and I think that there's an aspect of like a message that's trying to be

communicated I mean we are modern uh people of the Enlightenment so we almost have a perspective where we want something to be very uh like exhaustive that ancient writers didn't have those same sort of conventions or so they're going to capitalize on certain ideas and concepts for the purpose of When someone tells you a story you don't memorize everything right you me this is you go to university you write notes right the people who are writing everything the professor is saying word for word probably not the people who are going to remember what the professor

says as well as the people who write down the main things and when you write down the main things the main points without all of the other stuff that kind of is is just uh it's icing then you get the main idea more ancient writers talk about this so there's a guy named uh quintilian who exists in the first century BC and uh there's this this series of writings that we call um uh proy nasada which are basically like how do you do good writing so he's training people maybe even individuals like plutar who is

one of the best known ancient biographers uh and saying like it's just as important what you don't say as to what you do say because you don't want to a writing in the ancient world is expensive really expensive and B you want to make sure that your audience is actually getting the message that you want to convey and so um this is something that when you read like uh German Scholars biblical Scholars of the 19th and 20th Century um or even prior to that uh like 18 19th century they look at the gospels and they're

like this isn't biography because it's not capitalizing on Jesus's childhood and we all know that good biographies tell about your childhood and psychologize and these sorts of things whereas if you look at some of the ancient writers who are talking about how you should write biography they say if there's nothing in their childhood that's that significant don't write it it's going to distract from like if there is something say like Jesus's birth or Luke tells a story when he's 12 of Jesus when he goes with Mary and Joseph and you know Mary and Joseph lose

the Son of God and they start going home without him and they're like where's Jesus and they got to go back to Jerusalem that's a significant story and so it appears that that Luke includes it because there's a significant reason to include that but they wouldn't have had any problem with leaving out large portions of someone's life if it didn't contribute to what the ultimate goal of telling that person's life was I think what's also what's important is we have to try as difficult as it might be to put our minds in the context of

people who lived in a time where most people were illiterate and your telling these Parables you're telling these stories as an oral tradition and that they have a different mindset in terms of the distribution of information totally and what the significance of these things are yeah yeah these are documents well in terms of the Bible like as someone who identifies as a Christian I would say that these are the Bible is written for you but it wasn't written to you it had a completely different original audience but you should do your best at figuring out

who it was written to and how that made a difference to them cuz then the application is going to come out even clear for you and that should be ultimately you know the goal of everyone who's looking at ancient documents who was the original audience how would they have understood it yeah because you can read all sorts of things because of your modern conventions into what someone is talking about in the ancient world and completely bypass what they're actually trying to convey in their intention yeah and again it's almost impossible to put your mind completely

into the context of these people that were living then it's almost impossible to imagine the way they viewed the world and the way they communicated you know and when you're dealing with like really old stuff like the surian text and then people have translations of it which can be Fantastical like the Zechariah Hitchin stuff it's like you have to be uh a scholar in ancient Sumerian and understand the origins of language and you have to and then still there's massive debate there's a whole website called sit inis wrong.com yeah but he's the most fun he's

fun I'm not convinced he could read Samarian either really yeah I think he was bullshitting I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt he just he takes so many liberties with the stuff he's commenting on that I have a hard time getting my head around so if he couldn't read it where would he be getting his translations from actual translations okay so he would take these translations and then make his own assumptions and his own trans his own interpretation is that what it is yeah I think to a certain degree um I mean

even something like Nibiru is not a Sumerian word it's an Acadian word but he makes a big deal about it being related to Samaran and it's it is a word that appears within Acadian and Acadian is what time period aadan is just after so it exists kind of in a crossover where Sumerian predates Acadian but Acadian uh develops alongside and then um you know as cultures like the Assyrians come into power and kind of subvert the Sumerians so what so oldest Sumerian writing is what what's the oldest time timeline 5,000 6000 yeah around that I

think like four four to 5,000 years ago okay and then Acadian is when there's some overlap but it's it develops into a language like just after like the rise and Acadian develops into like it it has stages um and then you have like uh Babylonian Proto Babylonian Persian old Persian um Elite as as we we don't have there's no writing at all goly tape correct it's all just iconography yeah or at least that we figured out that looks like like writing yeah I'm really hoping to go to go go backe what do you what's your

take on this whole reluctance to further excavate and how they have such a small amount of the site it's only 5% that's been uncovered but through lar they're aware there's a a bunch more yeah I mean I'm not an archaeologist I have friends who are archaeologist and I think it's Archaeology is tricky because so much of Archaeology is dependent on governments and institutions and funding that getting mad at archaeologists for not Excavating is kind of like getting mad at construction workers for not fixing your potholes right where it's like yeah like they they're kind of

doing the last stage so yeah I mean I think there's certainly incentive by the Turkish government to want to capitalize on that being a tourist destination and um you really need to safeguard archaeological excavations because otherwise it's it's being compromised right and um like pillaging and and stuff like that it happens I mean when I was in Egypt two summers ago and you go to the Valley of the Kings they've got security cameras up everywhere because there are tombs there that we still haven't discovered and so they're like we don't want people digging around in

here looking for well they've lost so much over their history oh we've only discovered 1% of ancient Egypt that's so nuts 1% isn't that crazy that is the nuttiest part of all of history is Egypt to me I I still have not been you got to go I know I almost I almost went in December I just couldn't find the time I'm just too damn busy I will though I will I definitely will but it is the to me the nuttiest time in history because uh good luck explaining the Great Pyramid good luck and and

it's such a big time frame like there's a thousand years between the pyramids being built and um to and common in the Valley of the Kings yeah a thousand years yeah nuts it's so crazy Egypt is one of the wildest places you'll ever go well it just doesn't make sense it's like how what what were you guys using what were you doing how'd you do it how'd you measure it how'd you figure it out yeah you've been to Greece right yes have you been to Jordan no oh you got to go see Petra yeah Petra

is phenomenal Jordan was I mean uh Greece rather was fantastic they're all crazy God it's just like uh when you're just there in the presence of these things and just trying to put your brain back thousands of years and imagine what Society was like back then it's crazy it's crazy Egypt was crazy because Egypt is like Greece in that you have like you can go to the pantheon and you see that kind of stuff right um but uh you go to Egypt and and there's 4,000 year old paint on the walls and you're like what

I can't I can't get paint to stand on my wall for 10 years like and it's it's almost exclusively because of the climate and it got buried in sand but it's so wild so wild when you say that 1% of ancient Egypt has been discovered what do you really mean by that of the percentage of what we know that happened in in Egyptian history 1% has been excavated in terms of what we can actually pull out of the ground and look at artifacts so there's whole eras of pharaohs that we just we don't know where

they're buried we like even when t common was discovered he was kind of a footnote in the Pharaohs that we knew about at that time and we didn't know he he was you know as extravagant as rich as you know until we discovered his actual tomb a lot of people at that time didn't even think it was he was worth uh looking into because we have these lists of pharaohs and the thing with the Pharaohs is that they're always trying to the next Pharaoh is always trying to prove that he's the better one and this

is you go to Egypt and you find statues of Ramsay everywhere and part of it was because Ramsay I think it was Ramsey thei was he commissioned so many statues of himself because he's like oh I'm the best I'm the greatest and what they actually they couldn't keep up with the commissioning and they started actually rubbing off the names of previous pharaohs on statues and just putting ramsy on it really wow because he was just so you go like from the top of Egypt to the bottom of Egypt and you're going to find statues of

Ramsay's he wanted to leave his mark wanteded to leave and he did right like it worked we're talking about it now in 2024 I know I know yeah that is nuts so when you go there and you're in the presence of these things and you try to put yourself back into that time period like what do you have you ever tried to think like what what was the motivation to make something as great as the the Pyramid of Giza the Great Pyramid people definitely want to make their Mark right well but that's a Mark that

just doesn't even make sense there's something something to that I mean if you think you're a God right and and you have this whole kind of worldview perspective of and theology that you know you need to make something that um and and and bear yourself with all this crap because that's going to make a difference in your afterlife then you're going to go big rather than going home right so um the perceptions of people in the ancient world are just so different we got it so good right now oh yeah like longevity Health uh food

is just on a completely different scale and so the the conventions of needing to make sure that especially if you're like the richest guy around that you take off all the boxes because you know you're going to die and you're probably going to die sooner than you want to sooner rather than later and you have this whole perception of well you know if I bury myself with all this stuff and maybe even some of the people um we're just going to kill them and include them too um because they're going to help me out that's

going to help me out in the afterlife you need slaves in the afterlife if you're a pharaoh of course you do can't just by yourself yeah that's ridiculous yeah so uh kuf Fu's pyramid what what's the timeline that he was even in power um I don't know I'm I'm not an egyptologist or an archaeologist necessar neily but he was I think that was what like 4,000 years ago we only really have a tiny little statue of him we don't actually have that much about him I guess he was busy making a pyramid so they say

right so they say bil thinks different but um well a lot of people think different you know that's what's interesting about it is um the um like the archaeological argument that like Dr Robert shock makes about the water erosion in the temple of the Sphinx yeah that's a fascinating argument because it does appear like that's water erosion and that would put the timeline Way Way Back yeah I think even just looking at the spin you can tell that no matter what your perspective is you you should entertain the idea at minimum that the head was

built later yeah for sure because it doesn't fit the body it has much less erosion but you could also attribute that to the different densities of the stone like that's one of the things about these layers of limestone it's like some of them are much more porous and some they are Ries yeah you do see that yeah you know and I think they're doing a terrible disservice by covering the Sphinx with like new stones and you know they redid the paws and they're doing all that like my God people like leave it alone like leave

it the way it is yeah it's this tricky balance between restoration and Recreation yeah because they're in a recreation stage yeah and it was obviously they're doing it with smaller stones and it like looks different it's not the same thing it's not what it initially was it was carved from one piece of stone have you seen some of the restoration stuff that Saddam Hussein did in Iraq Jamie you got to pull up the ziggurat at er oh no so Saddam Hussein was a bit of a nut job but he believed as this is as far

as I understanded that he was the recreation of Nebuchadnezzar oh boy so he did all of this restorative work in uh in Iraq on things like the walls of Babylon and in ER he rebuilt the zigurat so if you look at that picture over there this is 1932 and 2022 um that's what he did is he basically tried to rebuild this entire thing wow and it's amazing I am trying hard to get to Iraq because I want to I want to see this thing interestingly enough don't die yeah don't die dude don't go over there

so that's actually that's so I'm sorry but that so this is the this is the modern version with the small bricks the original version was it all carved from One Piece no it would have been clay bricks so is these were clay bricks so what do we the can you Jamie can you go back to the 1930 image please so we could see what it looked like God I would rather just have that H you know I mean I want to see what it looked like and what it looks like all these years later I

don't want to see a recreation which is very similar to what they've done to the Sphinx yeah the Sphinx even when I was in Egypt there they were doing some work in like um can you uh Jamie can you go to the the rehabilitation of the Sphinx or whatever they would call yeah they clicked on like the ruins of it I was go back to 30s or 40s or something well the restoration part is the interesting part like you could see the restoration if you go to Just Just Google restoration of the Sphinx paw well

they're they're talking about putting encasing stones on the pyramid yeah I've heard that too God don't do that I don't think they should do that either no you shouldn't do anything I mean obviously they they took the original casing Stones off but that's also his so now you can see like the new PAW well that's that seems like the difference between um buried and unburied yeah so like even when Napoleon came up like right there like isn't that restored mhm yeah because it was there was much more erosion than Napoleon Came Upon it it was

buried right I think so yeah I think that was the case like over time because you're dealing with these crazy sandstorms over time everything gets kind of buried oh so much of it is under sand for so long like the the Temple of uh the mortuary Temple of hatchepsut was mostly under sand for a long long time wow before they like uncovered in unfortunately like the the the aridness of Egypt preserves things like crazy yeah see that's what the paws look like now that's a that's a disaster that's so gross um when you know if

you do take that timeline the Robert shock timeline and you say okay so you're talking talking about thousands of years of rainfall you have to go back to when there was rainfall in the Nile Valley so now you're back like 9,000 years like one of the more interesting thing about hieroglyphs and the interpretations of it is that the ancient hieroglyphs that well the ancient uh versions of pharaohs rather like when they go back you know past the established dates of 2500 BC and before that you get to like 30,000 years ago and then they say

that these are myth and these are not this is not representative of an actual history this is some sort of a mythical history yeah numbers are tricky in ancient languages because it's not entirely clear whether numbers are meant to be representational or is that like why they said that Noah lives 600 years old yeah that's that's part of it I mean you have that you have the Sumerian king lists which have people living thousands of hundreds and thousands of years too and um I mean there are some interesting academic articles on uh like the probability

of the numbers that come up in those because we have a we have a base 10 counting system because we count our fingers um ancient near Eastern cultures like the Babylonians the acadians the Assyrians they had a base 12 counting system because they would count each um hinge or whatever you call these like spaces 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 the different joints of the finger yeah the joints that's word I was looking for um and so that's why we have 360° in a circle 365 days in a year

like this comes from the Mesopotamian counting conventions and you look at some of these lists and they're operational and and all divisible by like 12 and 60 and you're like what's going on here so not all of them but enough of them where it's statistically impossible and I don't totally know what to make of those things because you do have the genealogies I believe it's Genesis chapter 4 and Genesis chapter 11 where they're all divisible by these types of numbers that were very common in the anci and near East they're not random whereas if you

look at the the genealogies later in like Chronicles and kings of the the ages of the Israelite Kings they're random and so I it's just like what do we do with that right because numbers are also far more representational which is why we see numbers like 12 and 40 and seven come up in the Bible but also other ancient ear Eastern Literature Like there are certain numbers in Egyptian society that also were seen as like perfect numbers or like uh numbers that you wanted to incorporate so the what is what's the earliest uh interpretation of

calendars like what is what is the earliest where they did decide what a year was I have no idea cuz you got to imagine if you're you know the average life ipan wasn't so good back then a lot of people got infected died of War famine all these things it would take quite a long time for people to figure out what a year was right you have no you're mean we're going thousands and thousands of years ago we have to establish like okay a day is let's put this stick in the ground when the shadow

is here this is where we start when the shadow goes all the way around like that okay now maybe we can like Mark these off okay now we've got a Sund dial and there are different timekeeping conventions depending on society like ancient Jews had a different timekeeping convention than ancient Romans and so that's why you see like in Genesis chapter 1 it talks about there being evening and there being morning is because well Jews today right you start the Sabbath on Sundown the day before right so that's why it's because there's there's different cycles and

so we go on a 24-hour time system but ancient Jews had a different Convention of that ancient Romans had a different vention of that ancient you know Mesopotamian cultures had their own kind of conventions about these things and calendars were all over the place in in you know when you get to the Julian calendar and they're like we got to we got to standardize this thing because everybody's operating on a different you know the Julian calendar and the the Gregorian calendar um it ancient timekeeping is very inexact and very messy and so you kind of

got to take certain things with a grain of salt right in terms of that but yeah ancient calendar I don't even know I know that actually the talking about the Dead Sea squirrels the group in kumran who were like a they were a sectarian group of Jews who believed that the Jews in Jerusalem had basically capitulated and were not holy enough and part of their reasoning is that they believe they have a perfect calendar and so they use a different calendar that doesn't have to do things like incorporate an extra month every certain number of

years because you know their their thing is not perfect and um part of their reasoning as to why they're like the chosen is that they have a timekeeping system that they say is perfect um many cultures used a a 13mon calendar right like what was the logic behind that does that work I don't know the idea was 13 months 28 days each month and you wouldn't have to have leap years and all that [ __ ] yeah yeah archa okay there it is world oldest calendar 12 a thousand years old yeah that's wild so it

is on gockley tape oh the ancient carvings of the sun moon and various constellations sits on a pillar go Beckley tery uh 12,000 years old re researchers believe ancient people use a so-called Looney solar calendar to Mark the changing of the seasons right interesting so it was at least representative of the fact that we know when the days start getting shorter it starts getting colder and then okay and then and then it warms up again the days start getting longer this is why solstices are so key in like most of human history it's cuz you

got to figure out like what's a marker point right which is one of the things that's so fascinating about some of the constructions of the pyramid where on the summer solstice these pillars line up so perfectly that the light shines straight down these hallways and illuminates everything how did you guys nail that yeah I mean just because they're ancient doesn't mean they're stupid well they're just brilliant they weren't just stupid they were [ __ ] brilliant that's what's I mean weren't just ancient it's it's just so weird that people were so vastly more intelligent at

least in in terms of their ability to build things than anyone else anywhere around there that's what's so weird about Egypt to me it's like there's amazing pieces of like even ancient Greece is incredible but I can kind of believe you did it you know when you deal with 2,300,000 stones in the Great and some of them like 50 tons 60 tons from 500 miles away like what did you do how did how the hell did you do it I mean there have been a lot of things that have been lost we still as far

as I'm aware don't know how the Romans made their concrete that Roman concrete is like this thing that survives they they were able to make domes out of it well you know about Tera praa in the Amazon do you know about that no oh Tera praa is their uh particular rich soil that is man-made soil oh yes I did know I do know about that combination of charcoal and bacteria and it's incredible and it's unbelievably fertile in terms of your ability to grow food on it and they made it and we don't know how they

did it and it's man-made stuff yeah which is so bananas it's like a giant chunk of this stuff that is all over the Amazon was made by people specifically to encourage the growth of plants I mean this is why history gets me so excited oh it's so amazing and it's so uh it's so interesting too I was re watching something uh on YouTube yesterday about the Mind culture and uh the Aztecs it was I I went on a deep dive when I started getting into like getting ready for this but when you think about how

many people existed back then and then Europeans come and everybody dies H everybody dies of disease and it's like how many people died like millions millions of people died here millions of people died there like holy [ __ ] and you go through like the the the story of the the collapse of the Mayan civilization the collapse of the Aztec civilization like the accounts that these um priests had of visiting these uh Aztec markets and how incredible they were these people from Rome who' come to visit the mines they're like this is unbelievable or the

Aztecs rather like this is unbelievable how sophisticated they are and then gone everybody's dead dunzo just you you just got to go wow how many times has this happened in history yeah where people have visited places and brought their cooties and killed off a giant swath of the population and one of the things that they're discovering now in the Amazon which is so fascinating is through use of lidar you know they're discovering like oh my God this is like all populated this whole thing was populated yeah that's crazy Grand penetrating radar stuff and the trees

and all the the rainforest is mostly from man-made agriculture yeah that's wild not W and this is all recent that they're figuring this out which is also so fascinating about history is that is a constant and NeverEnding search and that even in today with as much information as we have you can pick up your phone and ask them you know when was Nero born it'll tell you like instantaneously we still don't have answers to a lot of really fascinating questions like thech or all these other civilizations like who where where did they come from why

why they look like this why they make these big stone stone heads you know or Stonehenge it's another one like Jesus what is this yeah there's so many versions of that all over the world and it just it the search for our Origins is one of the most human Endeavors one of the most because to to know that we are particularly unique we're so different We Stand Out from every other animal on this planet and there there's this crazy wild war of of biology where life is just eating life all around us and we just

got to some crazy place that far beyond any other creature that's on this planet yeah and we did it in a bunch of different ways we did in a bunch of different ways all over the place with different scribbles and different icons and different gods and different things and we're all wondering like which one where where did it start what was the origin of all this like what what was the need to write these things down what purpose did it serve to have these myths and legends and stories like was it just to keep Society

together or was it to retell a very important story that was a very unique thing that happened at the dawn of time and that's why you see I mean the the literary um literary comparison of ancient NE Eastern origin stories is like a really interesting thing to do because when you look at something like the enuma leash which was the Babylonian creation story and then you look at something like Genesis chapter 1 there are obvious crossovers with like I said before these ancient near Eastern conventions but then you can see that the author of Genesis

is making these points that are actually rebutting something like the origin stories of the surrounding cultures that largely believe that matter is like Eternal and the gods come out of the created world and that there's this narrative of the battle that takes place where um some Gods fight against other gods and the world around us that we see and like human beings are the end result of this battle and so they would read this on every Babylonian New Year and one of the main themes was basically that like it's all chance it's all a random

mistake you were created without purpose and intention because Tiamat gets destroyed and she is the god that you know you come from from and then you read Genesis chap 1 and it says in the beginning God creates the heavens and the Earth and he makes it good and there's this idea that like that's countercultural in the idea that the Babylonians did not think that the world was good and that like it every at the end of every refrain it's it's good it's good it's good it's good and then it's very good at the end and

that Humanity in particular is created in the image of God like that's a very not just like kings which a lot of ancient near Eastern cultures believed that kings were created in the image of God but that Humanity in general is created the image of God and this idea of the Imago day that you're that's why you're different like why are you different from all the animals because you're given something that exemplifies of a unique quality and then the an ancient your Eastern cultures um that believe that you know the planets are gods and that

there the sea is a God and that and and Genesis chapter 1 looks at that and it kind of subverts the expectations of the day and getting to this ultimate question of why are we here what are we supposed to do while we're here and how do we get out of here and it says that no there's purpose there's meaning there's intention and actually a lot of the things that you worship it's pretty stupid because God created them what is the original origin story or the the earliest I should say origin story of of humanity

I don't know be the Mesopotamians would it be the samarians like who who had the the the one that's the oldest I mean the newal is pretty old there are a number of different like variations the problem is that we're largely relying on like our complete copies are coming in uh languages like a Cadian where the ones in Sumerian are very fragmentary so like even the Epic of Gilgamesh the the copy that we have that kind of is the final if you go and you read a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh it's going to

be the one from in aadan from the library of ashra benipal um but the earlier versions in Sumerian don't even have the flood story in them and yeah so and they're they're more pieced together and we actually do have another flood story in the atrais which appears to have been influenced the Epic of gilgames story is influenced by the atrais but I in terms of like written language I guess it's the enuma leash I wouldn't actually I would actually know what like the oldest oldest one is but you get a lot of these origin stories

and they have these themes we see it in the Bible too the ancient new Eastern cultures were very preoccupied with Chaos and Order and so it's all about kind of creating order out of the chaos of the world and that's where I think you do see the parallels the establishment of society right yeah yeah and establishing chaos and certain things being represent represent ational of chaos within the created order uh like a the Bible included but a lot of other ancient cultures saw things like the ocean as the embodiment of unpredictability and chaos and and

so that's why you have um sea monsters are this very common depiction the the Leviathan in job which is this you know sea monster and it's representational in a way of CU it it appears actually in Babylonian literature too the Leviathan really yeah and it's it's encompassing chaos in the world and the point of God bringing it up to job in the Book of Job is like God has the ability to tame this thing and even in the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible it says that in the new heavens and new

earth there will be no sea and it's not because you know the I had a a friend who is Australian and we are kind of working through uh translating sections of Revelation and he's like hold on there will be no sea he's like I'm Australian I love the sea and um but but the point of that though is not necessarily that like the body of water is not going to exist it's that the ocean the sea is so unpredictable you go out there and storms you know can come out of nowhere and you die right

and so there are these like motifs that are representational in the ancient world and we see a lot of those in these creation stories so would it be that the dangers of the sea would no longer exist yeah oh yeah so the sea kind of working as um an analogy of that which is unpredictable and actually there's a lot of uh concepts of the the realm of the Dead being in the sea that we see throughout this literature if you read the Book of Jonah there's this kind of stylistic which you miss when you read

it in the English but it's very apparent in the Hebrew where Noah keeps going down he goes down from his town uh to the dock and then he goes down into the boat and then he goes down into you know the the inside of the boat and then the storm happens and then they throw him overboard down into the sea and down into the fish and he eventually the fish takes him down into the depths of the sea and when Jonah prays he says I cry out from the depths of shaol which is the realm

of the dead so there is actually a a form of Jewish interpretation where it argues that Jonah actually died and was resurrected when he was spit up by the fish and it could be because in the gospels Jesus says all the people are following him and they keep asking him for miracles because they're like we saw you do miracles do more miracles for us you know come on do a trick do a trick Jesus and Jesus says the only Miracle you're going to get is the sign of Jonah that just as Jonah was in the

belly of the fish three days and three nights I will be in the belly of the earth three days and three nights you know prediction of his own death and Resurrection but there is an argument within uh rabinal literature that when Jonah says that he's crying out from the depth of shol it's because he's actually dead and that's one interpretation but another interpretation could just be that he saw and understood as a person of his day the depths of the ocean as where the dead people ended up anyways like your soul gets goes down into

the chaos and the disorder of sha which is the realm of the Dead is that where they disposed of bodies in the ocean yeah no no no Vikings did right didn't they like light boats on fire and push them out there yeah yeah yeah but it wasn't a common practice amongst other civilizations not that I know of I mean um Jews would definitely I mean really ancient Jewish conventions of burial you would just bury someone in the earth and then by the time you get to Jesus's day you had like family tombs and stuff well

there was an an ancient hominid that's not human and one of the things that they were so fascinated about was that they buried their dead uh and that they did so in a cave do you remember that Jamie do you remember who was discussing that with us it was uh they did not think that this uh version of uh ancient primate was capable of these things and then um they seemed to have confirmation through these uh very extensive cave systems that there was at least one area where they would put their dead H yeah and

it was a difficult path to get to this too this is a very small hominid and I think people have tried to make their way through it and it's really hard like some of these caves you're like basically crawling on your stomach which is [ __ ] terrifying cuz people have died that way are you claustrophobic no I'm not claustrophobic not normal stuff just don't want to crawl in a c crawl in the middle of the earth into something that's like 11 in high squirming slowly that's what they're doing their body barely fits in there

and a guy died recently bries I think oh it was Brian yes that's right d I'll pull it up DTI chamber yeah so they've founded this ancient homed uh which you know didn't really look like us yeah was burying their dead yeah I mean burial conventions change over time the ways that they're burying like in the ancient Israelite days are very different in the conventions than when you get to Jesus K it's archaeologist uncover evidence of intentional burial cave Engravings by early human ancestor what did that sucker look like um so the denal chamber what

is the type of homon right homon you Google that see what they look like homon what we think they look like right whoa that's crazy that's crazy so as a Christian what do you think about all this stuff like what do you think about ancient hominids Australia pithecus neander tals like what do you what was God up to with all this yeah I mean I'm not a scientist so I got to stay in my Lane I ultimately would be an advocate for intelligent design where I would say that um that God purposefully created Humanity in

a way you had Steven Meyer on right yes yeah so I mean he's uh one of those guys who talks about kind of the the issues that he sees with right Evolution and I think I have some of those issues too my friend Jonathan mcache uh is a biologist and he does some really great presentations on the ways that he sees kind of um the intricacies of NE delanian evolution is not quite EXP explaining some of what what's going on with things like the fossil record and some of the gaps that we have in there

um when you talk about early hominids I mean ultimately I think that there are aspects of the fact that there are ancient cultures which I mean Humanity obviously looks very different today than it did you know if we're going tens of thousands of years ago right and so I think that there's a different kind of convention and understanding but ultimately I would ascribe to there being an original Adam and Eve and that those are our like if you want to call them like our first parents kind of thing but there are other Christians who I

would disagree with but I think have interesting articulations of that in terms of theistic evolution um I disagree with them but it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility to find explanations I don't think the Bible is trying to explain how people came into existence in the same way that maybe we want it to and a lot of people read the origin stories in Genesis as a scientific textbook and I think ultimately that misses the point of what Genesis is trying to say this goes back to what we were talking about with like how

would have the original audience understood this when they read Genesis chapter 1 do are they looking at that as um an exact prescription of what God did I mean in some ways maybe but in other ways that they they could see that as this like counter apologetic to the other ancient or Eastern stories like I explained so I I just think we need to be careful when we're looking at or even like counting up the genealogies and coming up with a you know how how old the Earth is I think that might be missing the

force for the trees in what we're actually looking at when we look at ancient documents and how we're trying to interpret them um but it is a big question right well the the question of evolution is a fascinating one right because there's obviously something happening particularly with us if we really are related to Hom naldi n n or there's there's something clearly is happening this is like process of change and if we don't completely understand all the factors in that process of change we might miss out the the equation might be incomplete it's like we're

I mean we know a lot now about Evolution that we did not know before but like all science new data comes in and you have to recalibrate things like have you been paying attention to this there's a new discussion about dark matter and dark energy no um the the new discussion is that it might not be a correct Theory and that what it might be is that time moves differently in the voids between galaxies and this is a a new Theory and you know like new enough and disgusted enough among people that really understand it

that it's getting to me right so I'm reading it right so see if you can find that it's yeah it's very it's a very complex and nuanced conversation but most of the universe is dark energy right it's a giant percentage of the universe's dark energy and dark matter and we don't really know what that stuff is and so this is proposing that there's an an additional possible theory that might explain it better I mean that area of of science is crazy nuts crazy and then you have the James web telescope that's giving us even more

data than never before and it's a and you have to look at all of it and go wait why are those things here how are they there so long ago like what are these red things at the beginning of time like what the [ __ ] is all the universe is Bonkers nuts yeah and I mean I think um we we get that in history too whereas we have these kind of what we think are established conventions and all of a sudden we discover something and it like completely overthrows the ideas that we have like

first yeah or go backe or actually good good segue that's the best one right so yeah I made one I made something for you oh so I make papy faximile oh my description is a little bit wonky here you fix that so you were talking about like what is our oldest manuscript evidence so this guy is p-52 John Ryland 457 so that is so that's a genuine Egyptian papy that I I made I cut it out for you and then I I transcribed the text on that manuscript so when we're talking about what is potentially

our oldest evidence for the New Testament this manuscript that most likely comes from Ox rinkus Egypt um is the one that usually is universally accepted as our oldest one and uh that contains John 18 where Jesus is on trial before Pilate and yeah so that's the one is in the John rylands library in Manchester England so this is a copy of that exactly this is exactly what it looks like yeah so I I cut that on out on the papy uh with a with a scalpel and then I transcribed the text on did a great

job dude and this is you nerd it out I know I'm you for real nerd it out this is a real nerding out of so that's actually yeah so that's someone else's faimily which is not as good as the one I me it's not as good um yours is better and where uh where Jesus is on trial before Pilate and Jesus says everyone who follows uh the truth who who is is following the truth follows me and on the back has the words of pilot saying what is truth wow but so part of my research

so the reason I bring this up is because before this was discovered by CH Roberts in the 1940s the convention was because of a guy named um CH Bower that the Gospel of John was second century and so he had this he was a student of Hegel have you ever heard of hegelian dialectic so you have like thesis synthesis and antithesis yes so so Hegel had this philosophical Theory and his student Bower takes that and incorporates this into history and he says you know the earliest gospel Mark has this very uh this very Jewish Jesus

and then um the later gospels have a very uh like the last of what are called the synoptic gospels Matthew Mark and Luke Luke has a very kind of more Divine Jesus and so he says based on this John is the last last written one and it combines these two where you get a very human and a very Divine Jesus together and So based on this he says that John has to be second century well we discover this guy CH Roberts is you know literally going through these piles of manuscripts in these drawers that are

being like stashed away and he finds this guy and he sees that it's written on both sides which is almost exclusively a Christian convention because in the ancient world they use Scrolls and the Christians for reasons were not entirely clear on they start to make codices books and so they write on both sides and so he says okay this is written on both sides it's probably a Christian manuscript so he sends it off to the leading uh paleographers or guys who date manuscripts and they all say this is the beginning of the the second century

and so there's still debate about the dating of this but the unanimous consensus is that it's comfortably second century second century potentially the beginning of the second century which means that this is found in Egypt Egypt John is probably writing his gospel in Ephesus so it has to be written by John spread around find his way to Egypt be copied and then end up in this manuscript which means that at minimum you've already pushed the Gospel of John back into the first century comfortably and potentially even like most likely into the lifetime of the eyewitnesses

of these events and so all of the literature up until that point from the scholarly consensus about the dating of the Gospel of John gets totally Rewritten wow and it's because of that guy and because of my academic work where I was telling you like in paratextual features when we look at these tiny manuscripts and you figure out okay well what does that look like on the page I also made you so this is I use two different variations of papy whoa so you have there where p52 would have been on the page and based

on the it's called Cod eological conventions the spacings of the words and the way that the size of the margin that we can see where it would have been on the page and how big the page would have actually been so this is like a a reconstruction and then I filled in the rest of the text in the same sort of style stylistic hand of the scribes at that time um what that page would have looked like so this would have come from what would have been essentially a like a pocket copy of the Gospel

of John wow that's unbelievable wow that's so fascinating so this is this is the kind of work that I do in terms of trying to figure out okay you have these fragments how big would have this codex actually been how big would have the document been and then um then you compare and you contrast them to say like uh non-Christian Literature Like thiddies or tacitus or plyy or Cicero or um CIO Dio those kind of guys and look at the differences between how these documents would have been put together and written in their day God

it's so beautiful it's just so bizarre to imagine these people writing this stuff down so so long ago you know what's Wild is when you actually get the chance which I have a number of times to actually handle o the original documents oh my God wear rubber gloves no you know why is that we used to do that but actually the oils in your hands are more abrasive than um latex or even cloth so the oils are more abrasive no no sorry I said that wrong they're less abrasive so it used to be that you

always had to handle things with you know gloves and nowadays we don't do that anymore oo that's wild she touching it with your actual fingers that's got to feel bizarre I was at the um two summers ago I was at the University of uh uh Pennsylvania and um I was looking at a manuscript called called uh P1 or P oxy 2 1.2 and it's a a beginning of the third Century copy of the the first page of Matthew's gospel and when I requested access to it uh they told me that the last person to request

it was when Pope John Paul II came and visited the states and they pulled it out for him so on the like you know the library when you used to like have to punch your name write your name on the cards yeah if there was a card yeah that guy so I made effect simil of that one too um and that one is the that's the genealogy of Jesus from from Matthew's gospel wow actually you know what you Jamie if you go up to the search bar and put csntm those letters CSN tm.org so this

is the center for the study of New Testament manuscripts so if you click digital manuscript collection so they go around the world and they try to uh digitize all the existing New Testament manuscripts to preserve them and so you can actually you see there on the side you can click oh I want to look at a papy and you can go uh the different conventions of you know the date um or the time and so you could read the translation and then go and look at the original source of it yeah so ideally you always

want to go look at the original but because of organizations like csntm M which is actually in Dallas um you you people like me don't have to go to Europe where a lot of these manuscripts are house we can look at them and um because these are such high high grade that you can uh figure these things out so actually um a guy I know Elijah Hixon he used that and uh he actually figured out that there was a a a prominent manuscript p50 which is a forgery and so he used that based on like

looking at the the the digital yeah he filled in the gaps within the rips and saw that the words didn't match up when you fill in the gaps and so when he's transcribing the text he's like wait a minute I don't think that word fits in there and based on that he's like yeah that's a that's a forgery because it someone has written the text in after that piece of Papi which is these forgeries are almost always a genuine piece of ancient papy someone gets it from like the black market Antiquities um and then just

writes on it afterwards yeah right there so p50 so if you fill in these holes they're called lacunas um the words a lot of the words don't fit ah so someone's come along and they've like written done a a really good job because at fooled Scholars and they've written in the text but not quite good enough to figure out that not all of the words fit in the gaps that you presented what what is your take on the voet manuscript I have no idea what to think of the voich manuscript but it's Middle Ages yeah

it's just a weird one it's a really weird one yeah yeah because people have been trying to crack that code forever and go what is this is it just gibberish is it just fake words yeah I mean that's and why is so much time and effort put into making this fake book it like a crazy schizophrenic person who made their own language I don't know they must have been a rich schizophrenic person well didn't JRR tolken didn't he create an entire language for Lord of the Rings so a lot of the languages cuz he was

a he was a linguist a lot of the languages are based on existing languages okay so combine them together to form his own version of it yeah like Elvish and dwarvish and like they're all based on like ancient Norse or Old English or so he would like take an like those languages and he'd actually he had I mean if there's anyone who's the best at World building right like he he you can learn Elvish it's a real language because he he developed the language that's so crazy that is crazy that is so the dedication that's

so bananas I mean he was a he was a genius guys like him and even Lewis they they were friends CS Lewis and Jr tolkin really yeah yeah tolken played a big part in um in uh Lewis's conversion because toen was Catholic and um I think I think Lewis was Irish and so he couldn't quite become a Catholic but he became a pro and agan um but yeah they were the inkling Society they would meet in Oxford at the uh uh oh what's the pub called people are going to listen to this and get mad

at me because um there's something in child um one of those UK pubs that's been around for a thousand years yeah right they would meet and talk they were called the inkling Society wow yeah what is Eagle and child yeah yeah wow yeah it's um it's funny when you read uh how tolken was tolken really didn't like lewis' stuff because he said was it was way too way too uh like straightforward he's like you got a Jesus lion good one like nobody no you're not not beating around the bush on anything when you got a

literal Jesus like who's sacrificed come on rises from the dead what are you doing here that's F so uh yeah but they were an interesting conversation to be a fly on the wall yeah tolken breaking down Lewis's yeah that would be fascinating apparently the guy wrote Dune sent a copy to tolken before he published it really and tolken didn't like it wow he sent it back and said like I got nothing good to say so I'm going to say nothing at all wow isn't that crazy that is crazy well he was wrong even Geniuses well

I mean some Geniuses are just like SE in their own head Different Strokes yeah and that that that's part of the problem I mean but it's also what makes them so great in the first place that they have this like singular vision and dedication so much so that they're writing an Elvish language and combining words for it yeah yeah Jamie did you find that thing about um the uh Dark Matter did you find what I was asking about well I sorry I stopped because I found a video and I saw some people explaining it uh

and it didn't it started saying that it was almost like they started off with a theory and that's how they do things and then they start working through the theory until someone has a better Theory there's there's such a giant problem today in that if you just post Fantastical claim in a headline like that the theory of dark matter has been debunked and then you get clicks yeah and so you can kind of get away with doing that now I felt like this explain like I'm five on Reddit had a pretty just a top comment

or 1% or so dark energy is a problem monor cosmology is most problems in science you start with a model you go out and make measurements you find your measurements don't fit your model this is a problem when this happens scientists go off and try to come up with new theories uh I think that's meant no models I think they meant new models new models which do fit the new data in the case of things like dark energy we get hundreds if not thousands of new theories acdm is the current best model of cosmology the

CDM stands for cold dark matter it's a model that includes certain theories to explain dark matter and the Lambda uh a is a cosm cosmological constant that's the Greek word Lambda or the Greek letter yeah uh which is used to model dark energy note this mathematical model doesn't explain what dark matter or dark energy are it just incorporates them to make the maths work so this is a long I don't know if this is exactly what they were saying about it was like a much more uh of a synopsis but what they were saying was

that it might be that time moves differently in between galaxies see if you could Google that physics and cosmology are just wild oh well it's just it's so insane because we were so separate from it because of light pollution that the most majestic thing that you could ever see we gave up so that we could drive at night it's really weird it's really weird because when you go to a place you know I've talked about it a bunch of times but I'll say it again I went to the kek observatory many years ago and we

got there on a perfect time where the uh the moon was not out at all and the sky was insane it was like you were in the cockpit of a spaceship and you know it was just like you were in a giant glass cockp pick which is essentially we are kind of in an organic spaceship hurling through the universe so it should look like that but it just doesn't because of the fact that we're constantly inundated by light pollution yeah and I think the ancient societies and ancient cultures didn't have that and because they didn't

have that I think they had a much more humble view of our place in the universe because you're just presented with something that's absolutely impossible impossible to imagine we definitely lose our sense of awe yeah when we can't see kind of ourselves in the grand scheme of the universe and you're right when you go somewhere where there's no light pollution you look up at the sky it's like even not at somewhere like the kek observatory where you can like get a crazy view of it yeah when you just go out in the country and look

up and you're like that's the Milky Way you can see the Milky Way Dark Energy debunk by lumpy Universe expansion uh yeah this is the one uh learn how the existence of dark energy is being challenge due to new evidence that the expanding universe is actually lumpy so what they mean by lumpy is this what they're talking about how time moves differently see if it it's has a synopsis of it it's like article I found gets into the explaining what dark energy is and then gets into the weed there probably a paragraph at the bottom

that what you're looking for what is a Timescape model this is it so Timescape model rejects the idea the dark energy the driving force of universe expansion improved an uh analysis of type la La Supernova uh has suggested that the acceleration based on light curves seen in 1998 was a case of misidentification the Timescape model amends this by considering differences of time in void and matter dense areas the model suggests that time moves much slower in matter dense areas like the Milky Way galaxies than in voids with more time passing in voids increased expansion takes

place making it seem like expansion is accelerating as the voids increasingly spread through the universe dark energy therefore is not needed to explain the expansion of the universe according to the researchers who [ __ ] knows it's too much it's too much like what are you even saying how how crazy is this you know like one of the more controversial aspects of the James web telescope was this theory that perhaps the universe was quite a bit older than 13 Point whatever billion years right and they were trying to push it back to 22 based on

the existence of galaxies and put like people are pushing back against that and there's a lot of debate about that but the bottom line is all of it is too many numbers for your brain to even register yeah that you know however many billions of years ago there was nothing yeah and then all of a sudden there was something and Terence McKenna had a great line that said that um science requires one Miracle H the Big Bang reques it requires a miracle well I always say that when people ask me about you know the Miracles

in the Bible and I say well you know if the first miracle happened if everything you know nothing became everything then you know Jesus turning water into wine that's a easy one well yeah that's a party trick yeah exactly it really is nothing compared to the birth of the universe but we're we're convinced at the creation of the universe and we're very skeptical at other Miracles very odd yeah Ian it's very odd I think there's an inconsist there and you do see when the Big Bang is first hypothesized that there are individuals who are uncomfortable

with that sounding like in the beginning because before that the idea was that the Universe was eternal and and if you propose a point in time where everything starts to exist well that for and you see some of these people are pushing back on it they they they say things like well that sounds too religious that sounds like a beginning point in time and at that point if there's a big bang you have to figure out okay well what's the big banger right and I mean that's ultimately it's an it's a it's it's a metaphysical

religious question how did that thing get kicked off Brian Cox was explaining to us that there was an actual environment that existed pre the Big Bang don't they call it the environment is that what the the term of it is is this like Lawrence Krauss having a definition for nothing I don't know it's not nothing I don't know I it was just like what are you even saying you know and then there's sir Roger Penrose who thinks there's a series of these things that happen and that it's just this constant birth of universes and death

of universes and birth of new and it's like big bang expansion heat death yeah contraction Big Bang like but we're almost like that's too much I don't want to I can kind of wrap my head around 14 billion years I can't wrap my head around eternity in in theology it's often described as the difference between understanding and comprehension which my wife tells me are synonyms and that's nonsense but um the idea is like you can understand eternity is a point in time you can't comprehend it it's like numbers you you can understand how many zeros

are in 14 billion years how much water's in the ocean right I can comprehend like it's like that's a lot of water but when you start talking about like tens of thousands of gallons I'm like lost me yeah I don't really know what that looks like I kind of do my brain's not set up for that yeah which is part of the the weird thing about people that our our brain is clearly set up differently than any every other creature that exists you know and if you have if if if evolution is the only thing

that created us is just Evolution how the [ __ ] did we get so far ahead of everybody else I mean not even just and we're the dest like weakest softest but also the smartest like we gave up that that was the trade-off and somehow or another by evolving into this particular form we figured out a way to uniquely uh change the environment in ways that no other creature has even come close to yeah and it's it's interesting to me that there are certain things that we think of in terms of like unexplained phenomena that

we'll accept because we have some sort of a scientific definition of what this unexplained phenomena is like the big bang I mean and you can say that there's theories it's not it's not completely unexplained they kind of get it but you kind of don't something that's smaller than the head of a pin that becomes the entire universe that we say is pretty [ __ ] crazy yeah you know and just to say that that just happened happened and you don't you don't really I know you don't want to say you don't know but you really

don't know there's no way you could know it's not really possible to know there's no like working Theory where you can convince me that the whole universe gets compressed into something smaller than the head of a pen and then instantaneously becomes everything that you see well I think that's why you see natural materialism being woefully inadequate to really explain the ultimate worldview questions that we have just the universe itself right just what we don't know enough maybe we one day will maybe these you know sensient AI systems that we're going to create with quantum computers

are going to be able to figure things out in a way that we can't but at the end of the day you have a one Miracle you have the big bang all of science agrees this happened that is so much crazier than anything that any religion is proposing that it's so interesting to me that we're because well we say we have Echoes of the Big Bang there's you know radio Echoes you can yeah but also if a miracle did take place like let's assume that there is actually a higher power that occasionally interacts with human

beings and if a miracle did take place and you were there you don't have a camera you don't have a cell phone you don't have a pen you you can't write things down maybe you can't even read and you have this thing that happens to you and this thing changes the course of human history this thing changes the direction that the ideology that the people subscribe to and the moral and ethical structure that they live their life by it changes Untold billions of human beings from that point on yeah pretty fascinating that in itself even

if this is just a revelation without a Divine interaction that's a [ __ ] miracle it's a miracle that it was created at all like the whole idea that Christianity when you're saying that the book of was it the book of Isaiah yeah that the same book is exact the same as like that's a miracle that's pretty [ __ ] crazy yeah that is crazy if you just imagine the sheer number of illiterate people the the sheer number of days that have to go by where people are telling the story exactly the same and that

it's entrusted in the hands of these very few people that are so dedicated to it that they get the exact words right A Thousand Years Later pretty bananas well I mean that is kind of the the crazy thing about Christianity where you have this Jewish itinerate guy who's walking around for Century Roman occupied Judea he's making some pretty audacious claims claims to be God himself and then he predicts his own death and resurrection and then his disciples are they think it's over like they're like he's dead we're done yeah and then they go from 11

you know scared men cuz Judas commits suicide they scared men in an upper room to completely overhauling the r Roman World in only a couple hundred years because of this claim that they say they saw Jesus resurrected like there's something different that goes on there that they're like this is a miracle right dead people don't usually rise from the dead so what is your personal belief when it comes to the resurrection what do you think ha do you have a belief or do you just try to interpret the text and try to see what is

the message well I think so as a historian I do think it is a historical question you have a guy who objectively lived he objectively died and then individuals close to his inner circle claim that they see him not dead right again this is a highly unusual activity highly unusual right so but it's hard when you're dealing with illiterate populations you're dealing with thousands of years of time you're deal dealing with an oral tradition and then you have us sitting here talking about it in 2024 trying to figure it at the end of 2024 trying

to figure this out literally the end yeah last couple days it's um it's very difficult for anybody who thinks of themselves as an intelligent person who's secular to even entertain the possibility that someone died and come back to life and I get that um but we've already talked about the fact that we don't think that the only thing that exists is matter and motion we as in you and I right like we believe that there's something else going on in this world that's a little bit crazy there's something else and and that to I think

exclude that I think excludes something that that you're kind of putting blinders on for and you do have I mean you're right in terms of all of the these ancient conventions and the ways that things were spread around and but the gospels are written in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses and they're written in this period of time where you have groups of individuals who could have fact checked those things so how do you fact check someone coming back from the dead well if you how many people saw his body right well Paul says that 400

people saw him all at once 400 people saw the crucifixion no saw the resurrect resurrected Jesus yeah 1 Corinthians 15 Paul says that Jesus appeared to the disciples and then he appeared to 400 people all at once I mean if we read the Gospel of Luke and the gospel of U or Gospel of Luke and acts so same author wrote These both documents uh he says that Jesus was walking around teaching them for 40 days after he was resurrected from the dead and so these are written within a time period when you have people who

would have seen Jesus's Ministry who were there say at something like the feeding of the 5000 who could have been able to verify or um debunk some of these things that are being said and you go from a bunch of scared guys who cuz Jesus wasn't the only mhm uh Messianic figure who arose and claimed to be the Messiah right there were a number of individuals both prior to and after Jesus but they die and the movement dies with them do you think it's possible that he didn't die and do you think it's possible that

they thought he was dead because that does happen um there was actually a case very recently where a guy was about to be harvested for organs uh the they thought he was dead and uh this guy started moving again and came back to life it's very very bizarre case because uh his family had been told that he was going to be harvested for organs they were prep preparing for that and this guy comes back yeah I mean we know a lot about Roman crucifixion and we know and and we know that they they did their

job well yeah and so in fact if you look at say very skeptical biblical Scholars like non-believing um atheist agnostic Christian Scholars they will say if we can know anything about Jesus like they'll cast a doubt on a lot of the things that we read about in the gospels in terms of the actual historical Jesus of Nazareth they'll say one thing we can be sure of is that he died by crucifixion under pontious pilot because we have not just multiple tested documents that we refer to as the New Testament but Roman and Greek and Jewish

writers refer to that claim afterwards and talk about the fact that you have this guy and it's mocked within earliest Christianity so one of our earliest in fact not one of the earliest depiction of Jesus on the cross is called the Alexa menos grafo and it's probably from the the end of the first century and it's a uh it it depicts a an individual with their arms raised in an act of worship worshiping a man with a donkey's head who's being crucified and right beside it it says Alexa menos worships his God in Greek whoa

and it's mocking right because crucifixion was for the lowest of the low it was for like slaves in fact if you were a Roman citizen you were banned from being crucified who wasn't that got crucified upside down Peter why was it because like regular crucifixion wasn't good enough for him or what was what didn't deserve it because Christ had gone through it well so the story is that they say we're going to crucify you and he says it's like too big of an honor to die like my Lord and they say well we can fix

that oh Jesus um shut your mouth buddy listen the RO were pretty brutal oh yeah but this is why we know like we have it's interesting we know a lot about crucifixion but crucifixion was seen as so disgusting um I believe it was Cicero who said that like the word crucifixion shouldn't even be on a Roman man's lips wow I mean the word excruciating right X is uh off of in Latin and Cru off the cross so that's where we get that word is because this was designed to humiliate and it was designed to be

as painful as possible there was actually a really uh good article done by jamama the Journal of the American Medical Association which was done by a number of um I think it was in the 70s or the early 80s it was done by a group of uh biblical Scholars and then medical professionals and so they looked at the conventions of what we do know about Roman crucifixion and then they looked at the descriptions in the gospel to try to figure out okay if we could diagnose how Jesus died how would he have died and so

they basically came up with this idea that it's he probably exfix to death um you kind of drown in your own blood um but the the chances of Jesus surviving the crucifixion I think are are narrow to none and the chance of him appearing 3 Days Later completely fine I mean you don't if the first thing you do if you survive a crucifixion and then you go and you find your disciples the first thing you say is not you know peace be with you it's get me to a hospital right do they have them back

then no not Al are we um entirely certain of their measurement of days um so this is an interesting question because of the differences uh between when uh when the Gospel of John says Jesus died compared to the synoptics because John appears to be using the Roman Convention of count counting time and uh the the other gospels when they describe the the timing appear to be using the Jewish ones and actually if you uh if if you correlate between the two they match up pretty well so the thing is with Jews any part of a

day was considered a day so three days and three nights becomes almost an idiom for any part of that day is the day so if on if Jesus and because they count evening and morning evening to morning is the day um it's very possible that it wasn't like how we would think of 3 24-hour days especially if he dies on Friday and wakes up on Sunday so that would actually make it less time than than more time yeah there so it's not like he had recovery time oh no he did not recovery time I'm saying

that's kind it's not like it was three days was actually three months oh no no no yeah not like that so the then 400 people saw him afterwards that's the claim that that Paul makes Paul makes his yeah yeah yeah and how many different people um have some sort of a recollection or a writing or or something that's attribute to them of being witness to his resurrection way of Peter Paul Jude James and Matthew Mark and Luke the thing with Matthew Mark and Luke is that Matthew and Luke or Matthew and John are attributed to

direct Disciples of Jesus uh Luke and Mark are not so they are not eyewitnesses within the Jesus community in fact Luke prefaces his gospel by saying that he he's right upfront about this he's like hey I'm not an eyewitness don't confuse me with an eyewitness but he he actually uses conventional writing um uh what's the term I'm looking for he uses writing conventions of the day that would fit within regular biography that was written within the Roman world so you have a guy named quintilian who is basically I mentioned him before with the um he

ex he's teaching people how to write and he says that if you're going to write biography you need to be interviewing eyewitnesses and you can't be too far away from the event to be able to write these things and um quintilian Lucian and Josephus who are all these very prominent ancient biographers and writers of history uh have a lot of crossover in the way they describe how you should write history with the words that Luke uses at the beginning of his gospel where he says I'm interviewing I went is and I'm writing up an orderly

account and so he's saying you know I'm going to use these methods that are expected as good history of my day I'm not an eyewitness so I'm going to try to find the people who are eyewitnesses and I'm going to try to encapsulate this within a document that communicates um what is being written so we have an account of the Resurrection do we have an account of the denial of the Resurrection is there an historical record of him just dying and this like a refal or rebuttal rather to what they're saying no the only ones

from the ancient world that deny his resurrection are groups that come on afterwards that sometimes are uh sometimes are described as gnostics and they're not necessarily just denying it for the reasons we might think they were they're denying it because they have incorporated ideas of uh Pagan philosophy where they believe that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad so if Jesus was crucified he if so let me back up if Jesus Is God he cannot have a physical body so they deny that he actually had a physicality to him um this is sometimes

called dotism because Doane in Greek means to seem so these groups that we describe as the do docs they are denying that Jesus had a physical body he only seemed to have a physical body and they they wrote documents later on so the gospel of Peter which comes around in you know second third fourth centuries are is being written and it has Jesus kind of chilling on the cross because he's not really physical because he's Divine and physical entities don't have physical bodies so we don't actually get like a concrete denial of his resurrection in

that way until you get things like um The Gospel of Barnabas in the Middle Ages which is a it's actually the document that that Billy brought up to me in the conversation we had is the evidence that that Jesus was never crucified the Gospel of Barnabas well Gospel of Barnabas is 15th century it paraphrases Dante's Inferno it's not an ancient document so but in the ancient world no nobody really had that big of a problem with these kind of Supernatural claims more the more of the kind of skepticism was why you would worship a crucified

individual to begin with wow so they were less surprised that he was resurrected or or that you would you would worship a crucified like teacher was just seen as silly because it's so humiliating to be crucified yeah yeah and and that like um a God would let himself go through this right like what what do you what do you talking about in fact uh the ancient world didn't really have a problem with Supernatural events um there is a an ancient writer who mocks Christianity and he particularly mocks Christianity in saying that of of course Jesus

did Miracles because Jesus had a childhood in Egypt and he goes all those Egyptians are magicians anyways so he just learned the magic when he was a child so he actually confirms incidentally two things that the narrative in the gospels where it says that the Holy Family fled to Egypt during the reign of Herod um he corroborates that he actually thinks that happened and that Jesus did Miracles he just attributes the Miracles to Jesus being a traveling magician anyways and you know anybody who lived in Egypt knows some magic that is what's really fascinating that

the mindset of the people that lived back then was that whatever was going on in Egypt was so crazy that they had to be magicians yeah yeah but everybody believed in Supernatural events like there's no such thing as like a secular work in the ancient world even Plutarch who's one of the most famous biographers in the ancient world he wrote 90 biographies of which 60 still survive today he was a priest of Apollo so like he's already assuming right that the gods exist that crazy things are going to happen in the world and um so

they they didn't have a problem with people doing Miracles or crazy things happening or well that's all also why it's so interesting trying to put your mind into the context of people that live back then when you try to interpret what these stories were all about because they did believe in things that weren't real so when they talk about this thing that we're supposed to believe is real when you have all this evidence that they believe things that aren't true yeah it's interesting right because like you're you're you're now saying yeah but this one really

was true right well there's so many different things that they thought of and believe that weren't true yeah so this historiographically is so when we do history it's an inference to the best explanation and so there are probabilities of things that have happened in history where we can say okay there's a higher probability of event a happening and a lower probability of event be happening so the example I often give is like Jonah being swallowed by the fish like that's low probabilistically not that it didn't happen but that like as a historian we got to

like say well there's no independent cross reference sources you don't have multiple attestation for this particular event the interesting thing about Jesus is that we have more evidence from different writings in the ancient world then we probably should have for someone of his stature because we have Matthew Mark and Luke and John these four biographies there's really only one other person in around that time that can claim to have that much kind of independent testimony of their life and it's the Roman Emperor tiberious so he has he also has four biographers he has cioo uh

suetonius tacitus and um uh vas uh pulus and so the Roman Emperor who's the most famous most powerful person at the time has a similar amount of historiographical evidence biographically for his you know the events of his lifetime that Jesus does what what is the interpretation of Jesus from non Jesus followers at the time like what what did they think he was or who he was he was a crucified traveling rabbi yeah I mean I mean you have you have so you have individuals like um Josephus mentions him end of first century beginning of second

century he was a uh he was a a Jewish Roman writer uh tdus mentions him who also wrote um about the emperor and you know you have a number of these individuals cassia or oronas but what they're doing mostly is describing what their what the followers of Christianity are saying about him so you do have to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt in that they're not saying things that they believe happened they're say they're talking about things that Christians believe happened and you Christians are this very unusual group because they're

monotheistic in a world that does not believe in monotheism and Jews are monotheistic in that time as well but there was this idea that your religion could be tied to your ethnicity and that was okay like the Jews believe in one God and that's weird but they're Jews whereas the Christians start to convert people who are of all different ethnic backgrounds and so they're like well what the heck is going on here because why why are you saying so the earliest criticisms of Christianity were actually that it was atheistic ah being the ne negative participle

and and Theos meaning God right because the ancient world was polytheistic right but more than that it was what's sometimes referred to as henotheism in that it's not that they believe in many gods it's that they believe in many gods and your Gods could be my gods right Jupiter could be Zeus just same God by a different name um and your cities could have Gods right Osiris and raw can live in Egypt and um Zeus and Athena can live here and that doesn't compromise anything but then the Christians are coming around and they're saying actually

no none of those gods exist if they exist then they're demons but they don't actually exist and this was a a big point of persecution within early Christianity is that a lot of physical events were tied to Supernatural events so um there's an ancient historian who has this line where he says if the Nile River is too high in Egypt or the Tyber river is too low in Rome the cry will ring out the Christians to the Lions because if you have a say a a famine in Athens and they're going okay what's the reason

for the famine well Athena's m because there's a bunch of people running around saying she doesn't exist okay well let's deal with them let's let's to the Lions yeah let's get rid of them and that'll solve our issue wow so Christians were this very Oddball group kind of crazy that it wound up taking over the area well that's part of I think the argument of well how do you explain that how do you explain it going from 11 scared disciples in an upper room to being willing to go go out and die for the proclamation

that you believe that Jesus rose from the dead and you saw him and you touched him and you ate with him and you know he wasn't a ghost you actually ate fish with the resurrected Jesus how does uh Constantine fit into this like what what is Constantine's education in Christianity yeah so Constantine is a pagan up until um a point in time when he converts so who educates him uh good question I don't know in terms of his education I know he does have some like Crossover with some prominent Christians later on he's a sun

worshipper but right right before right before Constantine you had a guy named Diocesan who is the Emperor who basically had the goal of wiping out Christianity entirely and so he the worst point of persecution was under the dioclesian rule he actually made it so that if you had to go into um like the equivalent of your town hall and you had to take a pinch of incense and offer it onto the the um altar of Caesar him right the king and say uh caesario Caesar is Lord and part of this was that they knew that

Christians say yesos Jesus is Lord and Christians wouldn't do that so here's how you outed them oh wow and if you didn't do this so if you did do it you were getting this given this piece of paper is called a lialo and a lialo allowed you to buy and sell if you didn't do it you didn't get a lialo which meant that you were not allowed to buy and sell wow and so you have this incredible era of persecution where Christians are are being like killed and and Christian literature in particular is being destroyed

because they're hunting it out so Constantine comes after this and um he knows that this is bad for Roman society and so him and linius get together they're both ruling the the Roman Empire empire at the time and in 313 they put out this Edict of uh tolerance which includes Christianity so it's called the Edict of Milan and it decriminalizes Christianity so it's no longer illegal to be a Christian what was their motivation um I think they just felt like in order to establish peace within the Empire you need to make sure that people aren't

Fe ing you constantly to that degree and so um it wasn't just Christianity that benefited from the Edict of Milan a number of religion you know religious uh uh minority groups were benefited from this particular event but this happens between 313 and 325 Constantine converts and so he becomes friendly to Christians he also so he um he commissions books of the Bible to be written and so this is where we first get our understanding like when we think of a Bible we think of it as like in a single bound volume um like because we

have the 66 books of the Bible and you know has a nice cover on the page and or on the front um but in the ancient world those existed independently so like p52 like that would be a separate copy of the Gospel of John and that's what it would have been understood as scripture while Constantine as like a peace offering commiss all of these documents to be brought together and published in one book and so we actually have what we think are some of these documents so the when I was talking with Billy Carson he

brought up the Sinai Bible codc catticus codc catticus is probably one of these documents the Constantine commissioned because it's one of our earliest examples of a cover to cover Genesis Revelation copy of the Bible and it comes from the 4th century and based on both its dating and based on the fact that this would have been incredibly expensive to make like it took 360 sheep just to put together wow which would have been the equivalent of like I don't know tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars today so the reason why we're

pretty sure that documents like codex anticus codex fanis potentially even codex alexandrus or codex washingtoni Anis are documents that could have been part of this commissioning is just because there's such giant uh giant projects in you know very few people would have had the ability to produce something like this other than an emperor and so we actually have some of these these documents that that survive today are there any books that were decide and and how do they pick the order that these these stories are in the Bible and are there any books that were

excluded where there's debate on it yeah great question so this is the issue of what's sometimes called the Canon of scripture right so very early on when you have Christians having these conversations um the four gospels Matthew Mark Luke and John are there's unanimous agreement about those uh particularly and that's not to say that there aren't other gospels that pop up um it's that you have this chain of custody that goes back to the earliest Jesus Community Jesus has disciples and there's a group of individuals who we call the apostolic fathers who are the Disciples

of Jesus's disciples and so they comment on the books that the Disciples of Jesus or that people within the community of the Disciples of Jesus wrote and so we actually have a very close connection to the time and we see early on that you have guys like um uh Ignatius of Antioch arguing that there are only four gospels he in the second century and there couldn't be any more than four or theophilos of Antioch makes the similar argument and they name Matthew Mark Luke and John now Ignatius of Antioch also talks about other gospels but

he specifically highlights the fact that the Gospel of Thomas Gospel of Truth Gospel of the Hebrews Gospel of you know these ones that we kind of hear about Mary Judas that the reason we know that they're not associated with the names that are attached to them is because they're being written in times when those people were dead and they have these rings of pagan philosophy that are incorporated into them which is completely foreign to first century Judaism so Jesus would not have so in the gospel of James Jesus is worshiping a goddess named Sophia it's

like okay well no for centur Jew is going to do that that's obviously paganism and so um we have these early conversations but when Christians are thinking about well what is and isn't scripture the earliest Christians are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah and the Jews had this idea that the promises of God are followed up by the writings the the the documents that established those so the word is often used as Covenant right God makes a covenant with people and that's always followed up by written text so this is why sometimes well

in the case of Moses it's literally inscribed on a tablet right and in the prophets sometimes you get this command write this on a scroll inscribe this on a tablet and that the Jewish scriptures in Jesus's day were seen as a or seen as a story in search of a conclusion because they were looking for this figure this Messiah the Messiah who would come and fulfill things like the the the reign of David so they they're talking about these things they're actually expecting them to happen and so the story in search of a conclusion in

the Christian understanding is that Jesus is that individual he comes and he does things like he says at the Last Supper right before his crucifixion that he's establishing a New Covenant in his blood and so the earliest Christians most mostly who are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah they see okay there's a new covenant which is actually promised in um Jer IIA 31:31 When God says that he's going to make a new covenant and inscribe the law on people's hearts that that Covenant has come okay the promises have come so the earliest Christians

very organically say okay where the where's the writing because we we expect this to happen promises are followed up by writings and so they start to have these conversations of what what are the writings and where can we find them and so very early on because the New Testament has 27 books in it very early on 24 of the 27 are unanimously accepted so by the time you get to the middle of the 2 Century we have lists uh in documents like there's a document called the moratorium fragment which there's debate on its dating but

it's probably like mid to late 2 century and it includes 24 of the 27 um and it gives reasoning why now the other books that are in our new testament that aren't in that 24 um are ones that were discussed because the earliest Christians were trying to figure out okay can we can we tie this to either an apostle or someone who knew an apostle because we have a lot of books flying around with the names of John and Peter on them so you have the acts of Peter and you have the revelation of Peter

and you have the gospels of Peter and you have so how do we do our due diligence to try to tie this back so there's two letters of Peter 1 and second Peter and the New Testament and the early Christians are like we got to make sure we can tie these to Peter or the book of Jude and the Book of James which are ascribed to the the brothers of Jesus they were like can we really say that those are written by those people and so there are some books that the dust kind of takes

time to settle on within the whole 27 Canon because these groups are debating And discussing you know well why what why do we have these ones and not other ones right um and so there are various Canon lists that come up throughout the ancient world where some people are hypothesizing well maybe you know this book is part of it or maybe this book is part of it but it's this ongoing conversation of people and and by basically the end of the second century we have more or less unanimous agreement of the 27 books being those

that encap slate scripture that can be tied to either someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who KN knew Jesus and so these books that were not included or any of them interesting I mean are they're all interesting but is does any of it seem like it belongs in the New Testament well so part of the problem with some of these other books is they appear to be almost completely reliant on the other books so you do have and some of them have an agenda to them so like uh the DOA gospel of

Peter seems to be uncomfortable with the fact that the biblical gospels Matthew Mark and Luke have women being the first witnesses to the empty tomb because in the ancient world women were not seen as good eyewitnesses so you almost have this apologetic trying to solve that problem by having all the right people be witness to the resurrection so you have all the Roman and Jewish officials camping out in front of the tomb which also gives away the fact that like no Jewish priest on the eve of past over is going to be camping out in

front of a dead body like they they didn't do that so it it betrays that the author of The Gospel of Peter has no understanding of Purity ritual rights within first century second temple Judaism um but is also clearly trying to remedy this embarrassing fact wow that's what's so interesting about trying to interpret this stuff so you you have to think about it in the terms of the the culture of the times yeah yeah and one of the most interesting ways that we figure out okay how can we tie say the gospel of Matthew to

the first century in Judea is um studies that have been done on uh name frequency so this is called onomastic congruence where we look at the most popular names within a particular geographical area and we compare it to uh how names are differentiated so the name Joe is pretty common so when you have a room and there's more than one Joe you differentiate okay that's Joe Rogan or you know that's MMA Joe you know we figure out a way to do it um and that's called a disambiguator and we see this in the New Testament

I mean you have lots of Peters right you have you have uh Simon Peter you have um uh Peter the Canan you have uh you know or or J the son of zebede or you have lots of Marys so you have these disambiguates you even have lots of Jesus's which is why Jesus is often described as the Lord Jesus or Jesus of Nazareth because um yahushua is a common Jewish name and so we can look at the popularity of names written in documents and actually pinpoint some of these documents to particular times and particular places

in fact Jamie are you able to if you go on apologetics Canada our YouTube page so the first episode of the can I trust the Bible series we did we made an animation about this where we looked at the data and then we actually compared it to one of these other gospels the Gospel of Judas and um so in the first episode of can I trust the Bible in the right books partway through it's near the end the last animation if you can find it we had a guy put this together for us where we

looked at the studies and there have been some really recent ones uh by uh a guy named Luke vanderway who published this in um I believe it was a Cambridge no no no Birmingham University he did PhD on it and he he narrowed the Gap within all of these literary bodies that talk about names and were able to pinpoint and actually show yeah so if you go to yeah right here particular decades that they're writing a series of scholarly studies has shown that that though Jews were located in many places across the Roman Empire people's

names often tended to be geographically located by observing literary and archaeological artifacts a list of common names can be clearly identified by narrowing down the most popular names in places that Jesus lived traveled and ministered and by comparing these to the list from the studies an interesting correlation can be seen just as we see today with popular names a qualifier or nickname is often used for example notice that when Matthew lists the disciples in his gospel certain names have a qualifier or nickname and others do not Simon called Peter and Andrew his brother and James

the son of Zebedee and John his brother Philip and Bartholomew Thomas and Matthew the tax collector James the son of alfus and Thaddius Simon the Zealot and Judas es scariot who also betrayed him as we would expect the most popular names are those that have an added description when we compare the most popular names in Judea and Galilee during the first century with names we see listed in key places in the biblical gospels we find that all the names with qualifiers match with what we'd assume if they were actually written in the time and place

they claim to be narrating in contrast the Gospel of Judas only has two names that would fit Jesus and Judas but contains a host of other characters whose names match not with first century Judea or Galilee like the biblical gospels but with names that were popular in Egypt during the 2 and 3rd centuries consider how difficult it would be for someone living outside of the locations and times that these events took place to get the right names with the right qualifiers we have four biblical gospels with four different authors and yet each gets this test

of naming frequency and attribution right every time a test in standard that the nonbi IAL gospels simply do not pass that's interesting so we can use that is so interesting is so this is that's so so totally makes sense too yeah so it's the levels of methodology that we can use to find internal accuracy if we really want to figure out okay where was this written and is it coming from early eyewitness testimony we look at something like the biblical gospels and they fit the bill for something that's written in first century Judea but if

we look at something like the other gospels they're doing things like the Gospel of Judas does where other characters are coming up with names that are almost either non-existent or like very unpopular in places like Judea and Galilee but are popular in third and fourth Century Egypt so what do we what what can we then conclude from that well this is being written in third or fourth Century Egypt right yeah wow that's that's really amazing it's such a complex and fascinating subject it really is and um I think it's because of the barrier to entry

is so it's so high there's so much to learn there's so much to dig D most people barely scratch the surface of the stuff right and it takes someone like you to really kind of because it's like real easy to lean into the fun stuff it's real easy to lean into the Anunnaki stuff and all but the actual real [ __ ] that we know is 100% the accounts of people that Liv back then yeah that that to me is as fascinating if not more than even we were made by aliens like all of it

is bizarre and the fact that we're still going over these texts thousands of years later is also fascinating yeah and lots of this stuff like the onomastic congruence is something that has really only been studied to the level that it has within the last like 50 years wow so we're constantly discovering ways that we can use different types of methodological analysis to figure out the historical validity of something so this is um we call it verisimilitude which is historians are looking for what can show us the appearance likelihood and probability of something being true and

so sometimes documents out themselves as being unreliable and not true because they inadvertently include these uh these Clues like so the Gospel of Barnabas which I mentioned before which Billy Carson has brought up as an evidence that he sees as denying the crucifixion it talks about Jesus getting in a boat and traveling to Nazareth but Nazareth is landlocked so that person clearly did not know anything about the geography of like first century Israel because you're not getting in a boat to go to Nazareth right so so but if you're writing you know I mean in

the case of the Gospel of Barnabas you're talking about like a thousand plus years later but if you've never in there and you don't understand it's like have you ever seen um middle-age paintings of lions yes yeah yeah they had no idea what they were well we brought that up the other day because uh I was in um rello okay and there's a church an ancient Church in rello and it has uh a depiction of the whale and the whale doesn't look anything like a whale like it has wings it looks like a lion's head

it's so weird yeah well a lot of the middleages throughout the Middle Ages yeah that's crazy I mean like a dragon yeah yeah crazy and and lions look a lot like dogs because they're like What's your frame of reference right right and also you're getting someone describing it to an artist you probably can't paint it yeah so you have to describe it yeah like yeah that's what it looked like yeah yeah tertiary secondary so um and and a lot of these writings kind of out themselves as that literarily within the things that they choose to

include names are a small example but ography or distances between places you know the biblical gospel is described going up to Jerusalem and we can kind of read that and not think anything about it but Jerusalem um on the elevation of sea level you do go up to it and so it's like these small clues that we as historians are looking for or in the parable of the Good Samaritan is going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and you literally you go down like an elevation in sea level to go to Jericho or the the story

of zakus who's the guy who climbs a tree to see Jesus he's he's a wee little man he's like like a is a he's short and he can't see over the crowd and he hears this miracle worker Jesus is coming so he climbs a sycamore tree and the gospel specifically say he climbs a sycamore tree well this can be like a detail we can pass over but we know based on kind of the um acidity of the soils that sycamore trees only grow in those areas is in that you know time frame so we can

look and see okay well Luke whoever Luke is getting this from he's adding this detail maybe he's not even even aware of the significance of it but whoever he's getting this from has been there because they actually know what tree would have been growing there and tell him that zakus climbs a camore tree and so it's like fauna and Flora and distance between locations things that actually other ancient writers get wrong sometimes have you ever had a debate with a snarky atheist yeah I think that would be fun like a like a a formal debate

no not even a formal debate just I think it would be a fascinating conversation because I'm sure well atheists um they vary just like Christians vary but uh the worst versions of them are essentially Believers in the religion of atheism right they they worship the concept of there being no God and this is it when you die nothing happens yeah and that to me is always so arrogant I just just the fact that you exist at all is so bizarre and so spectacular the idea that you know for sure that when the lights shut out

that that's a WAP like because there's no evidence of the contrary well okay kind of assuming your conclusion there absence of evidence is not evidence it's especially when you're talking about something that's as bizarre as death mhm and especially when you have people that have near-death experiences that are radically similar yeah those are re really weird they're really weird how how many similarities people have in these near-death experiences from accidents and all sorts of things that people you know come back from where their heart stops beating they see themselves above their body there's there's a

lot of weirdness to it that makes you I just see it thinks it's a little silly because how could you know what you don't know yeah you cannot know what you don't know and it the problem is that there's a cat a that there's a social credit amongst academics in particular that's um that's ascribed to a person who is atheist a person who is he's brilliant he's not silly he doesn't believe in myths he doesn't I get it I get why there's social pressure in that regard I get it but to not look at the

universe itself just the this creation engine of planets and Stellar nurseries just the right the bizar of the epicness of it all and then not wonder if maybe you're you have a very narrow perception of what this whole thing is all about yeah deny the Virgin birth but not the Virgin birth of the universe yeah well all of it like everything just the the the big ver there there's so many more impressive miracles than any of the things that people think of in the B it's just they're they're so weird in our day and age

that we're not willing to like if we want we we want to think that things are very clean and easy to measure and they often are not and you know I think most of what it means to be a human being in a in a a meaningful way is not measurable most of it love and friendship and Community these things are not very measurable they're very strange you know the the the bond that people have with their family and their loved ones and it's very strange that love connection whatever love is whatever good is it's

a very real thing and it seems to not exist certainly not in the volume in other animals that exist in us there's obviously nurturing in other animals they nurture their loved ones but their perception of life and death and all of it is very different than ours so it leads me to why why why is why is our version of life so much more rich and complicated than any other being that exists and why do we have this insatiable desire to learn and know more yeah what is it why does this you know however many

three pounds of gray matter in my brain why is that able to plummet the intricacies of the universe right right like and and I think that that's that's ultimately the questions that we should be asking in terms of you matter more than you are matter there's something going on there there's something going on with all of us we kind of know it and we don't know it you know but it's just you can't measure it and you can't put it on a scale and so people don't like that yeah they don't like that it makes

them feel dumb to believe in that it makes them feel dumb to even speculate you know to even just say what do you think happens when you die like even that conversation is like people don't like that nothing you go it goes dark and that's it it's over that's it you die like how the [ __ ] do you know have you died like you don't know like in all of this what do you think of Jesus like in terms of your own like journeying and trying to find answers to Ultimate questions what do you

think of the historical person of Jesus well it certainly seems like there's a lot of people that believe that there was this very exceptional human being that existed so the question is what does that mean does does it mean he was the son of God does it mean he was just some completely unique human being that had this vision of humanity and this way of educating people and spreading this ideology that would ultimately change the way human beings interact with each other forever so what is is is he the Son of God well are we

all that's another question right are do we all have that inside of us do we all have that ability to change everything around us inside of us do we all have that unique connection to the Divine and is he a representation of the best version of that or was he an actual person that was the son of God and is it important yeah I don't know I mean what does it mean it it's the just the fact that it's a question to ponder is a miracle in itself in a way just the fact that there's

this concept of this person that died for our sins that's a Son of God but you have to buy a bunch you have to believe in a bunch of stuff to go that way like just the concept of that is interesting to people because what it can do to people is offer them a very unique way to change the way they feel about the world itself and if you do follow that I know a lot of Christians are hardcore Christians are some of the nicest people you'll ever meet in your life so it does work

right like if you do live like a Christian and you do follow the principles of Christ you will have a richer more love-filled life so it is true right but you have to submit to this concept that this guy was the child of God who came down to earth let himself be crucified came back from the dead explained a bunch of stuff for people and then said all right see you when I come back and you don't know how you can wrap your head around that particular CL and if he came back here's the thing

if he came back who the [ __ ] would believe him today with all the fake news and all the CGI and AI like imagine that would be the most bizarre thing of all time if we get to a point where artificial reality is in discernable from regular reality and ju Jesus chooses to come back at that moment boy that's the ultimate test of faith right when it's impossible to discern if we really reach a point where virtual reality is indistinguishable from regular reality which we're probably a hundred years away from that or something like

how maybe not even that yeah I don't know I mean that's probably why Jesus came in the first century and not the 21st century but imagine imagine if that's the that's the big catch Like Jesus Does return but when he returns we're just so confused that we we can't even tell yeah or maybe that's how he returns in the first place maybe he returns through AI yeah maybe that's the portal to Jesus I don't know anything about that yeah I mean that scares the [ __ ] out of me I really appreciate I mean guys

that you're friends with right like the Jordan Peterson and the Douglas murres of the world or you know the Tom Holland not the Spider-Man actor the historian who talk about this stuff I think I really like the way that Jordan Peterson articulates it but I think he misses the force for the trees how so in that he sees Jesus as an archetype and I don't think actually even Jesus gives you the opportunity to see him as the archetype because I I both I have this LoveHate relationship with all of Peterson stuff because he's he seems

to get so much right where he walks up to the line but he doesn't want to cross over and is the crossover you think connected to a life in Academia or what do you think it is I I wonder and I'd love to talk to him about this like how do you uh remedy this issue that because he seems to think it that the concept of Jesus as an example is more important than the actual Flesh and Blood first century itinerate Jewish preacher who was crucified and rose from the dead physically which is the claim

of the gospels and the rest of the New Testament that that's that's an example for us to look on and live by but I I actually think that Jesus condemns moralism and ultimately what I see Peterson doing is looking at Jesus as a moral example and if Jesus is nothing but a moral example then you can save yourself and you don't actually need a savior and so I think actually Jesus would have critiqued that because Jesus was very against moralism and what how does he how do you define Jesus being against moralism like what do

you mean by that exactly well Jesus looks at the religiosity of his day with like particular groups like The es and the Sadducees who are these other like uh these other groups of Jews during his day so we talked about the essin actually aren't mentioned in the bible but there are other groups like the Pharisees who are like lay Scholars and the Sadducees who are professional priest Scholars and he's constantly critiquing the fact that they have this hypocritical religiosity to them where they're doing things like um tithing their mint leaves like to make sure that

they get all of this is where we get the idea of the letter of the law versus um the intention of the law like Jesus critiques them for that because he says you're trying to do everything right and you're missing the point so one of the things he says is like um uh if your donkey Falls in a ravine on the Sabbath do you pull it out or does that work like what's the point of the Sabbath is it to not do any work like is it to make sure that you're not working too hard

because he might be breaking the Sabbath or like what is the point he says like the Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath and that there's this intention this is the whole Sermon on the Mount um Matthew Chapter 5 is he keeps saying you have heard it said but I say and he refers to the Mosaic law and it looks like he's critiquing the Mosaic law but he's not actually he's getting back to the intention of the law so when he he says you know you have heard it said do not commit

murder but I say to you anybody who Harbors uh Harbors hate for their brother in their heart has already committed murder and and what he's getting to is like what's the intention what's the meaning of the law that God puts gives to you because the law is like a mirror it shows you how dirty you are but his critique is he's like you guys are trying to clean yourself with a mirror that's stupid it's just GNA if anything it's going to make you more messy like get in the shower the the law is not what

cleans you the law is what reveals that you're dirty and so in that sense I think you know if Jesus is a moral example it actually misses what I Think Jesus actually said about what his purpose was in that you can't do enough to actually live up to the standard that god holds you to and so if you keep striving you're you're actually going to wear yourself out and be exhausted like atheists I didn't say you did Joe a lot of them go crazy they go crazy when they get older yeah um listen Wes this

is such an awesome conversation and uh I'm sad that it went down the way it went down with you and Billy but the good thing out of it is that a lot of people became aware of your work and uh it's such exhaustive work it's it's really amazing what you've done thank you so much for these gifts we will find a great place for them on the wall here and uh thanks for and let's do it again and I would love to do it with you and someone who disagrees too I think it would be

a fascinating conversation yeah that' be great yeah I think it would be really cool this has been a pleasure my pleasure thank you very much oh tell everybody how to find you how to find um all of the different you have two different YouTube channels you have your own and you have this new one with apologetics Canada yeah so I work for a national not for-profit and in Canada that is an organization we want people to have an intellectually robust and a biblically grounded and a a um a faith we W want people to know

what they believe and why they believe believe it and so uh we produce materials like we played that clip from can I trust the Bible that's a series that's ongoing I you know I'm going to be traveling in 2025 to produce more of that content to try to you know get this stuff that's all up here out into people so that they can be able to access it do you have two of them that are on well there's more but there's the two I trust do can I trust the Bible versions one two I watch

both of those yeah awesome yeah so yeah Wesley huff.com is my website apologetics canada.com is uh where you know if you want to see where I'm speaking or what we're up to I'm part of a team that does a lot of this stuff so uh those are the two places all my social media handles can be found on Wesley hof.com all right beautiful thank you very much appreciate it thank you everybody bye [Music] [Applause] [Music]