Q&A

I'm going to get some water, and Landro is going to give me your questions and so on. All right. I want to thank a bunch of folks for the support they've been giving us. So, thanks to Gareth Mley, Gayen Dcasta, Diana Patterson, Sheldon Tyber, Charles Reynolds, Richard Hayata, Jonathan Golden, Kerman Wingfield, Sally Girka, Clifton Stucky, the American Legacy Construction, Jason Bishop, Kelly Higgins, Deborah Wells, Ron Wagner, Davius Tube, Imovski, and Fire Ever Living, just to name a few. Also, I want to thank Magic Mike for your support. Magic Mike says, "Curious if John has read the newly published article 'Josephus and Jesus' by TC Schmidt. He makes bold and solid arguments for the Testimonium Flavianum, saying the English translation was inaccurate."

I have not read that, Magic Mike, but that is very interesting. I'm going to look that up because I'm always interested in the Testimonium Flavianum, which I also agree is generally authentic, but I wouldn't mind having more bold and solid arguments for that. Okay, Landra, could you page down? Yes. Thank you.

Julie Bazooki says, "My favorite Stoic, Epictetus, views wealth as having few wants. Unlike Jesus' mendicants, people living ordinary lives can follow this advice to some extent." I think that's a great idea. So, right, that's exactly it.

None of us, unless we're supposed to be doing it in community—I guess people do it as hermits, as Christians, too—but let's say unless we're going to become Franciscans or Clare's or something like that, where we are in a community that takes vows of voluntary poverty, it's kind of like, to some extent, you're living an extreme choice in some ways to be able to do that.

You're definitely removing yourself from secular life to live in a spiritual order like that in Christianity. And so it's not everybody that can do that. But like you say, Epictetus says, if you modulate your wants, if you're not craving all of these possessions, if you're not materially oriented like that, that's something that we can all do, you know, and so, in terms of that being compatible with what Jesus says, you know, Jesus says, don't gather up material treasures where rust consumes and moths consume, but instead value the eternal, right? So if you are thinking of things that have these sort of eternal values like goodness and wanting to help others, charity, and so forth.

These, I'm drawing those from the Platonic forms, if we're thinking of those things as our wants, that's a more important want than these material ones. It's a little different from Epictetus, who was just saying, just don't want those things, don't want anything, you know, in other words, if you're content with all the things you have, then you are wealthy. So I think that those are the differences between Christianity and Stoicism, and it has a little bit different focus. But yes, Sophenoto says, "Does sacrifice in this context mean they didn't eat the sheep? Because that would be a lot of dead sheep lying around." So no.

A lot of times, people in modern times imagine that animal sacrifice in all of these pagan temples or in the Jerusalem temple means that they burn the whole sheep up and just destroy the property essentially and give it all to God. But that is very rare.

In the Judean context, that's actually what they call a holocaust sacrifice. That's where we get the word holocaust, which is to say where you are destroying the whole thing as a sacrifice. Most of the sacrifices are not. What they're burning is some of the gristle and some of the parts that are kind of inedible, and the rest of the meat is actually essentially being butchered and brought back, and people are able to eat it.

So almost all meat in the Roman Empire will have gone through this sacrificial process. And so this is why when Paul in his letters is talking to Christian communities and they're all thinking, well, you know, I'm being invited over to my pagan friend's house and they're all serving meat that has been part of a pagan sacrifice.

And since we think the gods are devils, isn't that a big hypocrisy for me to be eating that? And Paul's like, well, you know, don't ask where it came from, you know, we don't have to worry about that. But if you then start eating it and then they say, hey, this is a pagan thing, now you've eaten it.

That's a desecration or something like that, then don't eat it at that point is what he says. But he's trying to have a practical response to that. And so, yes, they are eating the meat. So the meat in general is not being totally burned up or something like that unless there's a very special ceremony happening. Paul Strange says, "Does Stoicism lend itself to supporting the status quo like injustice and oppression?" So, that is one of the criticisms that's leveled at it. So, I think that if you were a Stoic and you were a Stoic apologist, you would argue against that, that you're not trying to do that, that you're trying to live a virtuous life and modeling that. And so, that is teaching the unjust and the oppressors not to behave that way since as they are behaving, they are actually not living a good life. They're not actually happy.

They're not true in the Stoic understanding of those things. And you, by living that moral life, are actually hopefully leading them to that good behavior. But that might be the apologetic answer, but other external critics say yes indeed. The problem is if we're constantly just adjusting our attitude and giving in to the oppressor, then that does allow for unjust and oppressive systems to continue.

Thanks to Processa for your support. Normative asks to what extent is this overlap indicative of the thought of the historical Jesus and how much is Hellenized early Christian authors re-parsing the story. So here's the thing, I tried to differentiate that a little bit and so when I was talking about things that are indicative of the thought of the historical Jesus, when I'm pulling from the teachings part that I was drawing especially from the Sermon on the Mount and things, I didn't go through with that and say well which of these are the most authentic teachings

or that we can say are authentic but these are much more in keeping with the tradition that may be part of the oral tradition that gets us back to the historical Jesus in terms of Hellenized early Christian authors re-parsing the story.

So it's completely possible that there are already a lot of Hellenized ideas that are operating in Galilee. But as you say, one of the things that has happened by the time we get to the written gospels is that the original Aramaic teachings of Jesus have now been translated into Greek. And so they're written down in Greek for the first time.

And so as a result, we may well be getting Hellenized spins on all of this or more Hellenized spins since the authors are now even thinking in Greek and writing in Greek. And so there could be that re-parsing and whereas I started with kind of sayings of Jesus, I then went on to stories about how Jesus acts in the gospels and those are in a lot of cases the creation of those later first-century Hellenized Christian authors.

And the same thing would be true, you know, as I'm reading out what Paul and the author of Peter have to say on those kinds of things. These are once we're getting into in both cases, you know, Hellenized Judeans and their thoughts. So Paul is very trained in Greek rhetoric and things like that. So he's been exposed to these kinds of ideas.

And so then that may be where he's drawing them from. Although some of the sayings that he had, even those readings where he says pray for those who persecute you, he's not saying that he's quoting Jesus but it is in the tradition. Julie Bizooki says, "I think that John's portrait of Jesus would make him a perfect Stoic sage.

Miracles aside, do you agree?" So yeah. So, the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospel of John, as Julie is saying, is very different from the one in the synoptics. So, the Gospel of Mark has a much more human Jesus that is getting angry, who has all kinds of other different emotions and so on.

Whereas everything in the Gospel of John, Jesus is walking around as kind of a divine being who is always in control. He's never reacting based on passion or anything like that. He's, like you say, probably an echo of what the perfect Stoic sage might do if there was a gospel written about that sage running around and facing opposition in different ways.

Amovski says, "I think it was Chesterton or Tolkien who stated Jesus was either the son of God or nuts. Does John agree with this? And if so, which of the two does he agree with?" So, no. I don't agree with that. So, that perspective, let me see. So, Leandro is giving me a note here.

He says it was CS Lewis in "Mere Christianity" who argued that if a man was merely a man or the sort of thing Jesus said would be a great moral teacher, he would either be a lunatic or else he would be the devil of hell. So maybe it was CS Lewis as opposed to Chesterton or Tolkien.

But in either case, whoever it is who's saying that either Jesus is the son of God or he's nuts does not understand what the gospels are. So they imagine that the gospels are history books that are reporting what the actual Jesus said or did. And so that is not the case.

And so we've had a bunch of different lectures on the historical Jesus, but in a nutshell, the gospels are written by Christians who believe that Jesus is the son of God. And so the gospel accounts are written to portray that. And so what the gospels portray is that Jesus is the son of God. That is not how the historical Jesus acted.

And so it doesn't follow that the historical Jesus is either the son of God or nuts. Rather, he was acting in a way that differs substantially from how he's portrayed in the gospels. Julie Bazooki asks, "Was Spinoza's philosophy basically Stoic because I believe he saw nature as an all-encompassing god?" So, like you say, Spinoza's philosophy, I mean, sorry, Spinoza's a materialist like the Stoics and also sees God as an all-encompassing nature.

But I don't think that that means that he's basically a Stoic from all the rest of Spinoza's thought. That component of it, he may have been influenced by it and there's certainly the overlap there, but we actually need to do a whole lecture on Spinoza because it would be great to refresh on that.

Aman Pudama says, "Speaking very generally, did the church fathers and later theologians successfully amalgamate contrasting influences such as Platonism and Stoicism into one coherent system?" So I would say no in the sense that I don't think Christianity has ever achieved one coherent system.

So I'd say that Christians and different Christian thinkers, the church fathers, later theologians actually have a lot that they argue about. So just as an example, like what we would call salvation theory. So what's the whole reason why does Jesus have to die in order to defeat death or what, you know, exactly what is so there's actually multiple competing theological reasons for that just even what seems like a pretty basic part of what the Christian coherent system would be and so yeah I

think that there is a because Christianity ultimately is a vehicle that preserves and continues all of the Greco-Roman thought that got preserved and saved. It may be pulling it all together into, if not a system, into a big collection that Christians maintained and had access to.

But even at the beginning of when you mentioned the church fathers, there was a big debate like people like Origen who were using Platonism apologetically to show the opponents of Christianity that Christianity was a valid system. This is a philosophical system that makes sense within the framework of your philosophy.

Whereas other early theologians, church fathers like Athanasius were totally opposed to the idea of framing Christianity within a Greco-Roman philosophical structure, right? But even those ones like Tertullian and, you know, even the people who are saying, you know, what has Athens to do with Jerusalem, he says that but he is also trained in Greek philosophy and he uses Greek philosophy in order to do his own theology. So this is like that discussion that is even

happening in the book of Maccabees. It is not a fight between Greeks and Jews. It is a fight within the Judean people about how much of the Hellenized ideas that are current in philosophy should they take in? How many customs should they accept? How much of their traditions as they understand them should they preserve and cordon off? And so in that same way, that's the argument among Christianity too among Christian thinkers. And then they'll say things too like

Augustine will say, well, you know, the Platonists are wrong on all kinds of things, you know, as he takes as much from Plotinus as he can in order to make his theology, you know. Okay. Fire Ever Living says, "Do you think Christianity's focus on worrying about sin might have come from the Stoic practice of constantly examining oneself for non-sage-like behavior?" Well, I think not necessarily.

It certainly maybe has again one of those things where we have resonance where both of the things maybe are doing similar things but is really present right from the start in terms of this worrying about sin because of our earliest Christian writer again Paul whose writings survive this is just something that Jesus continuously worrying about and so I think that that also he also has derived that from his upbringing within Judaism, his training that he already had as a Pharisee. And so I think that that's also an inheritance from

the Judean side of the tradition too. ISKI says, "So why did early Christians believe Jesus was the son of God?" Well, one of the reasons I think is because the historical Jesus taught people to pray to God in a very kind of informal, personal way. So whereas one of the ways that people perceive God is being like God out of the whirlwind in the book of Job where God is so awesome and powerful and terrible that it's frightening to even contemplate being in connection with or having any relationship with that Moses sees God and his face is

forever changed that he has to wear a veil afterward because he's separated out from humanity. Whereas Jesus is saying pray to Abba, to your father, and to develop that relationship. And so because he uses that phrase because in an early formulation also within the inheritance of just in general thinking of the people of God as being God's children and because of the Christian formulation that God's children are no longer simply coming out of an ethnic group.

They're no longer simply people who are born Israelite, but they are becoming children of God after adopted after a covenant. So after you have come into a believing community of Christianity, we all become children of God.

So with that analogy of Jesus as, I mean all of us as children of God and thinking of God as the father, I think that's the initial basis for Jesus being God's son. We also have an early or very early tradition after Jesus' death of people having visions of Jesus being raised and sitting at the right hand of God.

So the idea of Jesus as the Messiah in that way and so all of these things come together when you're thinking about Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus therefore as being God's son, Jesus as being God's glory, God's word. All of these come together very early on in Christian Christology. And so these are already present as of the writings of Paul.

So within the first decades or so of Jesus's death. So it's very early and they understand what it means. So they don't have the theological tools to have what does it mean that he's the son of God? They have the phrase and the title before they come up with how they understand it. All right. Well, very good.

Next week, like I say, we're going to talk about why the Bible retells the Epic of Gilgamesh. The following week, we will ask, will Christianity survive the 21st century? And the week after that, a Leandro lecture. So, thank you very much.