,Study Aid

Which Sayings of Jesus Are Authentic?

(00:03) our topic this evening is which sayings of Jesus are authentic um and so I think when we talking about authenticity we also have to consider step back and consider on which Jesus we mean what would Jesus we're talking about when we're talking about the sayings being authentic um when we posted the preview for this um I think we had a um fervent believing Christian who wrote back and and said all of Jesus sayings are authentic and so the question is what which Jesus are we are we talking about so for Christians operating within the context

(00:47) of worship so the practice of their individual Faith communities it may be that all of the sayings of Jesus recorded in scripture are authentic for that religious and spiritual purpose so um when that is happening Christians are encountering the Jesus of scripture the Jesus of sacred story and that is possibly pointing them to the Christ of theology the lens through which Christians experience the Divine traditionally um but when they're doing that um a lot of Christians who uh aren't historians almost every very few

(01:34) of us are um just make the assumption that the texts probably are history books and these are this is talking about things as they happened um and this is an assumption that has existed a lot in the modern era when we prioritize historicity um we talk about this a lot we will say things like when people say a story and you telling some kind of a story and they say you know is that is that true and so the the true when that when you're asking that even just even that framework of true that's a historicity question did that happen

(02:13) exactly as narrated uh journalistically as opposed to you know which is kind of a weird actually modern bias about truth um you know truth could otherwise be applied uh not to whether something happened or not but whether um is that expressing a true principle is this is this narration have meaning and so I would like um people to consider stepping back from that um lens of historicity when we have these kinds of discussions and so we were just looking at this picture of the Christ panacor from St canine's

(02:57) Monastery on Mount cyani uh from late Antiquity the very uh end of antiquity the beginning of the Middle Ages and uh on the left here is the picture as it's painted and then as we know if you if our faces are all um kind of not mirror perfect with each other but what we find out is that this painting is especially not mirror perfect so if you take uh the next two images here that is not how the painting actually exists that's a digital uh mirroring where you take the left side and mirror it and then the

(03:36) right side and mirror it um so this picture um is a theological portrait it is not um a historical portrait there is um no particular reason to imagine that the historical Jesus looked anything like this but what uh the painter is trying to do is not do something about history they're talking about about a different kind of Truth a theological truth is what they're trying to express and this is uh the monk who painted this is profession that they believe um in a Jesus of worship a Jesus of scripture of theology who is fully

(04:24) human and fully Divine and they have artistically combined that not in any literal istic sense this is not literalistic how that would uh Express that principle but symbolically and artistically um and I think we're ready to believe in paintings as being artwork but we somehow have trouble with literature as being artwork and certainly um the gospels are artwork they are literature so they are representing theological portraiture again not historical portraiture and this just as clear as that portrait of Christ

(05:08) panacor the um the gospels uh make that very clear when you study them closely and you see how they are put together as literary Creations um it's very clear that they are artwork showing meaning showing truth but when you ask are they true and you mean does that mean are they history you are missing out on what the idea is about true so want to have that as our grounding here as we've seen in previous lectures all of these texts were written by uh Anonymous non- eyewitness uh Christians they were only later assigned by

(05:53) tradition uh the names Mark Matthew Luke and John and so when I'm on my toes and I'm saying it right I will always say the author of Luke says this but if I just use the word Luke as a shorthand I'm not intending to say it was a historical personage uh the companion of of Paul who um uh in other descriptions is called a doctor that um that historical figure um is almost certainly not the author of the text so um what I just say here is that each one of these Anonymous authors and then John has multiple authors probably I mean definitely uh is

(06:36) writing with uh a very different purpose and a different Focus than history Luke uh is the only one that gets close to uh considering history they're writing in the um in the literary genra of helenistic history but helenistic history is also very very different from as a literary art Artistry uh from Modern academic history it doesn't hurt uh to also consider again as we're talking about which Jesus we're talking about for the authenticity what we're trying to get at in this presentation is the historical

(07:21) Jesus but we have to look through the Jesus of scripture in order to get to that so many times like I say Christians when they're reading gospel accounts in the Bible they simply assume that they're effectively reading a biography or a history of things that happened they assume that yes I'm experiencing the historical Jesus in reading this text but actually they are reading and experiencing the Jesus christs of scripture um like I say you have that misimpression because there's a widespread Mis understanding of what the texts are and where they came from and

(08:05) so like I say each text individually the Evangelist who is writing it is painting a word portrait that is also a a religious testimony it is making um a theological pitch to you as opposed to Simply uh being some kind of a chronicler who is saying oh and this happened and then this happened you know a list of things that happened and don't have any meaning in particular uh it's rather a recounting of meaning a word portrait so even when there's that awareness um again some Christians will still assume U that the authors are basing their accounts directly on the

(08:49) historical Jesus as we've seen uh they're not um they're not iwitness accounts there is uh they are in fact written by Christians these Anonymous evangelists people who are part of Christian communities who already believe in the r risen Christ and though that belief is based on testimonies of uh Apostles and Prophets Christian Apostles and Prophets speaking in the spirit who have had visions of the Risen Christ who have that anchoring their testimony and who are also speaking and sharing teachings and proclaiming the good news based on those

(09:30) um spiritual and Visionary experiences now some of those um uh Apostles and Prophets at the very beginning did have a lot of experience with historical Jesus so there is uh memory and as we're talking about sayings there is also a bunch of teachings that the historical Jesus had that are floating around in oral tradition he didn't write any texts himself uh and many of those potentially have been passed around uh and then are ultimately written down and so that's what we're going to explore today um just as much though of a source is and actually more of a source for the content in the

(10:15) gospels uh is actually the suent Bible uh the uh Old Testament so want to do this what today we are talking about history and we want to separate history from religion so the Jesus christs of scripture uh are part of the religious experience of Christians that point Christians to the Risen Christ the historical Jesus though that we're looking for today can be accessed only through the academic disciplines of History literary criticism and other uh supporting um disciplines like Arch ology to some extent you know just for historical context and that kind of

(11:03) thing there's no artifacts of course so um the authenticity that we're seeking this presentation um is an academic exploration of which sayings out of all of the collection of sayings in every Source um Can potentially be traced to the historical Jesus um this is a uh exploration I think that is of interest to historians and historical enthusiasts um but I don't think it NE should necessarily be used um if you were coming to this and as a as a Christian or I guess only Christians really care so if you're coming to it religiously as a Christian um it

(11:49) shouldn't necessarily change any part of the religious authority of any part of the scripture because the scripture is not history anyway uh I've said a bunch of times that if Christians are even worried about this they should just take as a default assumption that it's not history and then you can put a point on things where we say okay this was history this happened that's what we should be or this likely happened as opposed to um making the other assumption likewise this exploration though is not an argument I'm making

(12:23) here designed to demonstrate the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth which I've attempted to make elsewhere we have a lecture on that so when you're doing that kind of an argument academic argument to demonstrate Jesus's historicity which um by far and way the all majority of um scholars in this field do but I mention this because it is such a popular idea um on the internet that U the alternate idea uh anyway that is not what I'm arguing about here we're already taking um that demonstration as a given so for all of you who that's your thing I just want

(13:05) you to step back from that and now what I'm trying to say is if we take this as a given not not everything I'm saying here is like proving that historical Jesus exists is not doing that at all it's once we've decided that which we can always go back and argue it at a different time once we've decided that what can we try to um build from that Foundation as we um now are able to look at the different sources and use disciplines like literary criticism um to sift through all of the different sayings which are so contradictory some of which are clearly anachronistic and other issues so that

(13:43) we can kind of see possibly which ones are most likely to go back to the historical Jesus um there are a w much wider Traditions um of Jesus sayings than most people are aware of so if we take the whole first Millennium uh of the Common Era the first Millennium ad there was a wide proliferation of texts that attribute sayings to Jesus so many of these are found in what are sometimes called the Lost Books of the Bible the Apocrypha the pseudepigrapha um uh texts that were once scripture to individual Christian communities or sects so all the different Gnostic

(14:37) Gospels uh the different ianite and uh Jewish Christian texts um the uh detic gospels in other words different ones that uh were scripture to their Community um but then were left out of the Canon when Proto Orthodox Christianity emerged sort of Victor ious and uh defined the other perspectives uh as illegitimate as heresy and so as a result um there are other texts and lots of these have sayings um and then outside of that variety of Christianity um Christianity's related Traditions the abrahamic Traditions Judaism and Islam um have mentions of

(15:28) Jesus and in the case of Islam especially um of sayings and teachings and understandings and um it's not always widely known how how rich that tradition is among Christians so this um picture here 16th century Persian miniature is showing Mary and then the little baby Jesus who's in this Divine uh Flames showing this kind of Madonna and child picture that is a fully Muslim uh picture so unfortunately um uh these TR Traditions from outside Christianity are too late uh to provide much of an independent witness in some cases um um

(16:13) Islamic ideas are based are inheritors of some of the uh ianite ideas um but but um probably don't represent an independent witness that goes all the way back and almost certainly doesn't go all the way back therefore to um uh the historical Jesus and you know we sometimes when we're talking about the historical Jesus we we turn to our old friend or not friend friend to history not not a friend certainly to his own people flavius Josephus uh the Jewish Roman historian we um use him as a key Source since he wrote so prolifically about uh

(16:53) the life of Jews and judeans in uh the first century of the Common Era um however you know in his very limited problematic mention of Jesus he doesn't attribute any sayings to Jesus so he's really useful for context but not for certainly the source we're looking at right now which is sayings and neither does any of the other non-Christian historians Pagan historians of the time like tacitus so there's no no preserved sayings of of Jesus in the in that scope and so that going to bring us back always and problematically uh to just the Christian sources and um and so

(17:33) therefore they have to be read when we were reading them for getting at the Historical Jesus we have to read them with the intention of the authors in mind they are fervent Believers in um a Christian theological proposition as they as they're talking um normally uh whenever we have one of these lectures you know Paul who's our first Christian writer who is a historical figure who had firsthand contact with Jesus brother and other disciples Peter and John normally uh Paul is the first stop on our list when

(18:12) we are making a connection to the historical Jesus uh but Paul's faith is primarily uh in the Risen Christ and his theological proposition really is that Christ which is a Greek word you know English of the Greek for messiah uh the the anointed one but the idea of it is his idea of it is Christ so uh Jesus the Risen Christ is also Lord which means um the unseeable unknowable god the Creator in Judaism who even who's not image but much less his name shouldn't be said aloud um what can be felt and seen is the glory of God

(19:02) and that's expressed throughout the um Hebrew Bible and that is expressed with the word Lord uh the glory of God which is in some way a hypostasis or hypothesis of God the seable the visible part God's love made manifest that is what Christ is or that is who Christ is and so Paul is really really excited about that and he's also excited about um his most his biggest interest in the historical Jesus is the idea that because the historical Jesus died and uh and now is the Risen Christ in Paul's Faith as Paul has had a vision to this effect um uh that means the end of the

(19:49) world is also coming and so Paul for Paul anyway who believes in a literal end of the world um he believes that uh he will also be resurrected and and Achieve uh life in a new spiritual world that um is with you know spiritualized World a kingdom of God on earth that is without Injustice that is full of peace and uh and where uh wickedness no longer exists pain and sorrow are all gone death is totally defeated and so yes is Paul aware that was Jesus was wandering around and teaching things and was a was a great teacher sure but he

(20:30) doesn't really care so he's not concerned with that at all um and that's perfectly fine when you have a you can understand that within a tradition people have very very different perspectives within a tradition so Paul is fixated on the kind of things that he's fixated on there were other um uh Christian communities Christian writers you we don't know their names but who were producing um saying gospels so for them in some cases they are totally dis interested with this idea that uh Jesus is resurrected According

(21:02) to some people who have seen a vision of him they don't that's not their thing they were excited about the teachings the sayings they have been sharing these uh orally and now at a certain point they're those communities value them so much that as um as they no longer have firsthand Witnesses they're writing down the teachings as they remember him um so that that's what's important to them uh and others have you know other other priorities within a very diverse uh religious community so one really rare instance of um Paul actually quoting

(21:40) Jesus uh is his quotation of Jesus at the Last Supper which he writes and Records to his um community at Corinth in his first letter letter to the Corinthians um and so this probably had already become part of a form for Christians sharing ritual or sacred meals together um kind of the origin for the sacramental practice of Eucharist or communion sacrament of the Lord's supper and so Paul says I received from the Lord what I also handed onto you that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was given and betrayed so again the Last Supper story took a

(22:27) loaf of bread and when he had given thanks he broke it and said this is my body that is for you do this in remembrance of me um and so there's a quotation um of Jesus in Paul you know the the historical Jesus or quotation of Jesus uh prior to his um uh death and Resurrection so not a Visionary statement um and so we this is a potential statement that we can look to to see how likely that is to go to the historical Jesus um that same saying of Jesus has a parallel in Luke 22:19 so Luke's version of The Last Supper Story the author of Luke is writing many decades later uh

(23:19) writing to a primarily um Gentile or formerly Pagan now you know Greek speaking um Christian who were not formerly Jewish audience um however and so in other words the kind of people that would be Luke's Community I'm sorry uh Paul's one of Paul's communities however since Luke does not seem to have had access to Paul's letters um if if Luke had access to Paul's letters we would imagine that those Luke made use of sources when Luke had the sources the author of Luke and so because the author of Luke is also the author of Acts uh if they had had

(23:59) all of these different um teachings and sayings and sermons and and admonitions from Paul those would probably have made their way into acts and also and that's that's kind of a negative uh argument because it's a argument from something that's not in a but it seems sensible and then uh and then the other thing is though that there are significant contradictions between the story as described in Acts and uh how Paul describes uh Paul's own Ministry in the in Paul's letters and we've talked about that very recently we had a lecture a month ago on uh why Paul's church is one it was a

(24:43) description of Paul and acts and that kind of thing so this uh parallel that we have in Luke um is very close to um what Paul had written in his letter to the Corinthians then he Jesus gave I'm sorry took a loaf of bread and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them saying this is my body which is given for you do this in remembrance of me so you can see how maybe this um same kind of saying is being transmitted orally and so it is already a formula that uh exists in Paul's time um and so that even though Paul had never met the historical Jesus and in fact hadn't spent a lot of time hanging

(25:32) out with the historical Jesus Apostles uh Paul says he met them on a couple of occasions but largely um he felt he had his own calling he had his own ideas and priorities and uh he went off and started founding churches on his own without a lot of uh uh local instruction or anything and so as a result he might not have been told by all of these guys all of these sayings that they found to be so important instead he had seen this ual he heard this ritual formula uh for uh what becomes a Sacrament the sacrament of communion sharing um a sacred meal in

(26:09) community um he knows that uh that this formula is said when you're doing it this is my body which is given for you do this in remembrance of me so as we're looking at what the possible independent Witnesses uh to gather uh or to evaluate um you know one to draw it from but then also then to evaluate the different sayings because we're going to want to see for example if different sources have multiple independent Witnesses so Paul's letters are our earliest but we're not going to get a lot of sayings out of Paul's letters um pretty much I showed you the best

(26:49) one um there's uh also uh the sayings gospel that I've talked about it's lost but it's hypothetically reconstructed uh the Q saying source which is one of the sources most Scholars agree uh for the gospels of M uh Matthew and Luke so that's an early say collection of sayings Mark the first um narrative gospel that's essentially telling a story of U the three years or so of Jesus ministry focusing especially uh attention on the last week the passion week Easter week but Mark also preserving um a bunch of sayings not

(27:35) anywhere near you know the the whole number that exists in Matthew or Luke because of the Q Source but preserving sayings as well then we have Matthew which includes all the material that we have it from q and also um almost all of Mark and then it includes additional material that exists only in Matthew so the methan source the M Source same same story again now for Luke so Luke's gospel contains all of q and a bunch of Mark Luke deletes some of Mark um but then has way more Lucan material that doesn't exist anywhere else and so that's our L

(28:25) Source um up outside of the uh um Proto Orthodox and Orthodox Christian communities uh the Gospel of Thomas which uh is another sayings gospel um it's sometimes considered a proton nostic gospel or a gsti gospel because it's later used by uh a gnostic community in Egypt and translated into uh Coptic the Egyptian language and um uh and so that all so um it's not not totally indisputed many scholars um though think that Thomas preserves an independent uh witness here and I'm pretty convinced of that um John uh the other of the

(29:15) canonical gospels um which though is although it has lots and lots of sayings of Jesus um they are uh kind of problematic in terms of whether or not they any of them go back much or which ones of them go back to a historical Jesus and we'll explain kind of why as we're going through this then beyond those we have other New Testament Traditions so we've talked about the uh the the Jacob and church the church of uh Jesus's brother James so there are um test uh writings in the New Testament that reflect that tradition including the Epistle of James the Epistles of 1

(29:57) and second Peter the the Epistle of Jude the um possibly The Apocalypse of John some of those have some sayings of Jesus embeded in them others like James have sayings that we would otherwise attribute to Jesus that James just says them and so it's like they have a shared wisdom and whether or not you know John the Baptist was the first guy that says that or Jesus or James or somebody else um it is now just part of the common wisdom within that group is what it seems like uh also then we have Beyond The Gospel of Thomas there are other early

(30:36) apocryphal books maybe the fragment of the Gospel of Peter um some Scholars anyway think that that preserves an independent uh witness and then there may be within the traditions of other very early Christian writers like polycarp and Clement Who quote Jesus and and um uh and and they quote Jesus with sayings for example that sometimes are found in all the rest of these sources but other times um are not in any other source maybe they have Traditions that are going back as well to the historical Jesus so I think this is kind of our

(31:16) kind of broad categories but I'm going to um focus in mostly on the the ones that have put in colors here and acknowledging that there's other um possibilities um this is a this is not going to be this is not a comprehensive presentation but it's one that is just giving us a sense of how we can approach this topic so so we're just putting this um into our timeline context um so we're just starting here uh at the you know left and moving to the right in the 20s and 30s the ministries of John the Baptist and Jesus the beginnings of this uh group uh the group continuing uh to

(32:00) be led by Jesus's brother James who is located in Jerusalem until uh his execution so all of that um those groups speaking primarily their language Aramaic not producing texts it seems if they did produce a text that hasn't uh survived but they maybe didn't think that see the need for it as they were actively all engaged uh together at the time and and had um immediate memory of of the past teachers so James continued to be alive for a whole long time um during the course of that you can kind of see here in the um uh 30s Paul

(32:43) converting and then at a certain point um uh because of uh anyway his ministry changed and he started needing to or feeling the need um to start writing to the various churches that he had found in order to to give them instruction in a lot of cases because um he was being challenged by other Christian groups we've suggested that that's especially maybe James's Church uh and Peter and so on James and John U but other others to people that um Paul calls the circumcision faction or the super Apostles um um Paul starts uh writing

(33:25) instructions to justify his teachings there's only one of him and he has Companions and things like that but he wants to make sure all of these churches that he's planted continue to understand what he thinks is the most important parts of Christianity so those are all going on you can kind of see there in the 50s the authentic letters of Paul um in the ' 50s also maybe when this sayings gospel Q could have been written um again it's been lost it's only hypothetical in has been reconstructed out of um the gospels of

(34:01) Matthew and Luke it's our best explanation for why they have this overlap what seems to be um a quotation from a lost Source in addition to the fact that they're quoting the gospel of Mark and so though this that no matter how early it is uh the the sayings that are in cu no matter how much those also seem to reflect a very earlier stage of Christianity um and talk more about the environment of Galilee which is where the historical Jesus was from and tell teachings that are really focused on um the principles and things that you're experiencing in in rural life so less

(34:46) teachings that are about uh things that are going on in the city more teachings that are going on out on the farm um uh you know all the sers and all of the other kinds of um you know Vineyard Parables and all these kind of things are are are embedded into that so there's a lot of reasons why um these all these Q sayings seem to be getting us closer to the historical Jesus but there's still a a distance because again you can see how it's still um whatever that is 20 years at the early at the least um from the historical Jesus and there's a language

(35:24) jump um then we have the Cal it from the standpoint of uh Judea of the um Roman Jewish war from 66 to 73 which upends everything uh and so that has um sees the end of the jamesian church existing in Jerusalem they flee to uh the city of pal uh in the region but no longer based in Jerusalem which is destroyed um these apocalyptic events make uh the author of Mark uh confirm to the author of Mark that the world is coming to an end and so the author of Mark decides to uh compose the first narrative gospel within that context U within the context

(36:16) that the Evangelist who was composing it it is very uh uh confident that the uh world will literally end within 3 or 4 years uh that doesn't happen um but uh people like the they like the idea of Mark's gospel they like the idea of Mark's gospel a lot more than they like Mark's gospel Mark's gospel has a lot of really weird ideas uh from as far as all the rest of Christians are concerned so many of the rest of Christians um have been influenced by Paul and Paul's writings and they're all about the Risen Christ The Gospel of Mark as written um

(36:58) has essentially the theological proposition that Christ hasn't come back yet he's about to come back uh and so um the uh authors of Matthew and Luke get a hold of this uh the author of Luke is especially critical of the sources and say so many people have tried to write these events and they've done kind of a terrible job therefore I'm going to try my hand at it uh and that is um uh where how we are hypothesizing that independently the authors of Matthew and Luke are each have in front of them q and Mark and they each compose their own

(37:37) uh new gospel which they think is going to supersede all the other gospels and it'll be the only gospel and nobody will ever read Mark again and nobody will ever read Q again and that almost happened for Mark but it did happen for Q meanwhile in the johanan community another entire tradition um there are various stages of the Gospel leading to the Gospel of John as we have it by the end of the first century so that's our kind of General context and timeline for these um earliest sources for considering these

(38:17) sayings so as we're going to now look at um which of these back to the historical Jesus or not all the way but just most likely to be um what are some of the tools so of the trade here in literary criticism so one of them is multiple attestation so do we find multiple unique sources um and it's always nice when the sources contradict or have a different perspective than each other so if you have one that uh doesn't agree with uh the other are the sayings um contrary to a later Christian understanding and so you know we have I've told you this um very

(39:04) elaborate um Christ theology that Paul develops um if that is when that is let's say retroed to the historical Jesus um and Jesus talks like Paul ever you know that kind of a thing or um or for example if uh we're talking about um developments in the Christian Community or arguments that Christians are having with each other like the argument between Paul's church and the jamesian church over whether or not adherence to je Jewish law is still necessary then that is a again an anachronism it is coming from the

(39:44) time uh when people are caring about that not from the time of the historical Jesus which who wouldn't have worried about that or had those kind of concerns then there's the Criterion of embarrassment so were later Christians embarrassed by this kind of detail um and so uh you know one of the sayings has Jesus saying that um John came you fasting and you didn't listen to him uh the son of man Jesus here has come uh drinking and eating and and you don't um you also reject him um this is kind of a uh a a criticism the criticism is that's

(40:32) being uh waged on Jesus here is that he hasn't been doing all this fasting yes there's a story of him fasting in the wilderness um you know before the beginning of his ministry but that his public Ministry thereafter did not involve uh the discipline aesthetic disciplines of fasting the way John the Baptist was such an aesthetic and so that was potentially embarrassing um for later Christians and so they wouldn't make that up because they found it embarrassing and they tried to explain it away they said

(41:03) things like well um this time of fasting will come after the son of man is taken from you so there would be like a again a Christian apologetic to explain away a detail of the historical Jesus maybe's uh life and actual Ministry that is embarrassing okay so another tool always is you know is this you know consistent with the rest of the historical record um are there just anachronisms that you know couldn't couldn't be the case if Jesus is talking about something uh that doesn't exist yet that kind of a thing uh finally when we're talking about say

(41:47) that have to um that aren't immediately written down after Jesus said them they are sayings that have to be able to survive through an oral transmission process so Jesus left no writings uh none of our sayings are eyewitness they're not in the language he spoke Aramaic so the transmission is oral so when you have an oral transmission transmission yeah you need especially um if you have like a a short uh you know a piffy saying something that is you know rolls off the tongue uh and is easy to remember uh you

(42:27) know bless are the poor it's very easy to have um something like that that is not you know not hard to remember because it's short and piy otherwise meem otherwise you can also do memorable uh sayings and teachings that are a little longer when they have a teaching tool so when you're telling a a story like a parable Parable will often have a um a a normal a memor memorizable oral narrative structure where you'll have like three parts and then a conclusion um those are things that can survive through an oral transmission uh process that's different

(43:07) than if you have like um let's say Jesus going back and forth in a in a conversation or Jesus making a big U long speech um big long speeches uh in in Greek writing of the time those are almost always the uh composition of an author whoever the author is that's writing it's not likely that the um even the ancient historian who was trying to um you know record what a general is saying before a big war and they give the whole big speech that the General Uses to to rally the troops that's what the historian the ancient historian felt like should have been said on that

(43:52) occasion as opposed to anybody was taking notes or remembers or anything like that that they have a witness in any way and the same thing would be true for um long speeches especially the kind that we find uh in the Gospel of John so those would be less likely as opposed to things that can survive through an oral transmission process so we've said it a couple times but it's nice to visualize it Jesus spoken uh teachings are in Aramaic there's 20 to 40 Years of oral tradition where uh people who heard him

(44:28) continue to say the things and repeat the teachings that he said sometimes attributing them back to him because of uh valuing him as an authority other times just valuing the wisdom itself and just passing it on without attribution even but also in the middle of a um a spiritual process um the people who are speaking are also um Apostles and prophets who are themselves speaking in the spirit and they might have uh they might have a new Twist on the teaching and so the teaching can change in an oral tradition too um at some point or other as uh so many Greek speakers are

(45:13) converted um there is a oral transmission where um bilingual people are essentially who know the Aramaic version are saying the Aramaic things to greek-speaking people and so now those sayings are being known in Greek and then um the Greek speaking Greek versions of the sayings uh began to be written down in sources like q and Mark and then the other subsequent sources that are written in Greek we don't have the independent uh transmission into Aramaic most of our oldest Aramaic uh fully Aramaic sources are actually in return brought back from

(45:59) the Greek so they're being based on the Greek sources so let's examine with all of that kind of background and tools let's examine some of the sayings of Jesus this is not going to be there are too many sayings of Jesus for me to go through and give you all a list this one's authentic this one's not that's not what we're doing I just want to give you these tools so that we can consider them and you can um apply these kinds of tools yourself as uh uh with I'm going to give you some resources as well or or recommend some resources um so that we can consider whether they might be more authentic or

(46:37) less authentic again to the historical Jesus so um you know here we have uh Jesus saying blessed are the poor in spirit in The Sermon on the Mount and our skeptical guy in this famous now meme saying if the author of Matthew compiled all the sayings together to create The Sermon on the Mount in other words that is not a historical sermon it is a collection of sayings that are organized specifically by the author of Matthew in order to um make a particular Point did you know this guy wonder the historical Jesus say any of this uh our

(47:15) skeptic behind is as wondering about this B is it really blessed of the poor in spirit like we have it in Matthew so um multiple attestations not our only Criterion um it exists where it exists it illustrates that a teaching is circulating in the oral tradition of Christianity and more than one Community has access to it and they have written it down and they often write down different variants of it and that helps us when we have more than one variant then we can look at them and weigh them and try to see well which one of those is more likely to go back and so that's

(47:50) always helpful if you only ever have you know One Source you have so fewer tools to decide um you know authenticity or historical authenticity historicity uh and so we've talked about that we the fact that we have four canonical gospels um covering the period that they cover gives us so much more insight to that period than we have for unfortunately the book of Acts where we really only have acts and then what what Paul writes um if we had had if we had three books of Acts we would know so much more about early Christianity uh especially if they contradicted each other a lot which I I

(48:30) think they would so um there's an example here uh of one of these sayings that have multiple attestation the complaint that Jesus gives when his ministry is rejected by the people of Nazareth his home uh town which is found in Mark John and Thomas and then we also have variant in Matthew and Luke but of course um those are literarily dependent on Mark so those two evangelists are using Mark so the independent sources are Mark Luke and Thomas so Mark says writes that Jesus said to them prophets are not without honor except in their Hometown and among their own kin

(49:20) and in their own house so um his family as we're saying here and his own house and his Hometown uh when they're in Nazareth here are all um against uh Jesus's claims to be a prophet Luke and Matthew's versions elaborate on that Markin version because like I say they are dependent on it the version in Thomas keeps the aphorism maybe even more simple so the simpler the aphorism the easier it is to transmit orally and so maybe um maybe this is more close to what it originally would have been uh less elaborated

(49:57) Jesus said no Prophet is accepted in his own Village um in Thomas 31 the Gospel of John it's interesting whenever you have a um uh whenever you have a a a a buttress a a separate attestation from John because the Gospel of John is normally so different from the synoptics almost everything that Jesus says in John is um only found in John in the Janine Community but it provides a rare support for this uh saying of Jesus via a paraphrase so in John 4:44 we read Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in the prophet's own country and so he

(50:41) again had gone to Nazareth and uh and has no honor there so um there's nothing implausible or anachronistic about this saying I think the variance and even that paraphrase report of the saying in John suggests that there's a saying here that is moving around through an oral tradition and different competing communities actually have access to it um like I say for the historical Jesus um who may have considered himself a prophet and who almost certainly considered his hometown to be Nazareth the town at the

(51:23) Village of Nazareth in the Galilee uh north of Aria north of Judea um there's nothing implausible that's not anachronistic uh to have to imagine that the historical Jesus would feel that way but interestingly though and so this is this is actually giving it a plus in terms of connection to the historical Jesus it is not fully aligned with what you might expect a later Christian apologist to do so later Christians who have um become conv inced and who are test convinced by Paul's ideas uh Paul's christology they probably and other

(52:05) there are other Christians too have different ideas of uh the messiahship of Jesus they may want to emphasize their understanding of Jesus as the Messiah Jesus as the Christ um and rather than just being a general Prophet who is uh not respected in his village I mean there's nothing that says Jesus can't be a prophet and the Messiah but in any event this is a not the emphasis that you would make later when we're really focusing on Jesus is uh the Christ also um we've talked before when we have uh uh done our um lecture on The Christmas

(52:44) Stories the stories that the uh evangelists who are the authors of Matthew and Luke make when they independently um say that Jesus uh was born in Bethlehem and have to go to Great Lengths to explain why a guy who is called Jesus of Nazareth could how he could possibly have been born in Bethlehem and why did they do that independently of each other and create two totally contradictory accounts of how Jesus could have been born in Bethlehem it's because there is a um Old Testament Prophecy in the Book of Micah that is widely regarded was widely

(53:25) regarded by early Christians as Messianic prophecy so in other words a prophecy of what would happen to the Messiah you know but you oh Bethlehem you know uh not not you you are not the least of all the towns because um uh a prince is going to be born to you and that kind of thing so in other words the Messiah will be born there differences from later Christ there are differences then whenever we have these kind of differences from later Christian understanding um that means it is less likely that later Christians would have made uh those those things up so they

(54:05) might not have ever come up with a um you know a story that uh that Jesus is not a prophet who's not respected in his hometown that also seems kind of embarrassing why would you make up that detail so so that that this um because later Christians would presumably be embarrassed that to say Nazareth is jesus' Hometown because he's from uh um they're not that embarrassed because they have they have explanations for it but they would rather have him be from Bethlehem as we know um that they would rather have him be talking about himself as a prophet and they probably would rather have him not be disrespected by

(54:41) anybody anyway that you wouldn't that there's less likelihood to make that up so these are criteria that make us say well maybe maybe this one um has um some reasons to connect it to the historical Jesus for us lots of different criteria let's look at um the saying uh of that is recorded in very again multiple at U attestations so it's recorded in multiple different places that Jesus says regarding the first and the last so Jesus teaching about the first and the last uh is also in many sources in this case Mark q and Thomas

(55:26) so again not John it's very rare that John has a um parallel U but there are some so we also have versions from Matthew and Luke who are drawing in this case from both Mark and from Q so we have um like I say an Mark version and a q version so the mark version is uh Jesus says but many who are first will be last and the last will be first so as we've been talking about uh you know with the D the two Source hypothesis that the authors of Matthew and Luke have both the text of Mark and Q in front of them because Q is lost it has to be reconstructed from

(56:16) Luke and Matthew because of that being the case the points where q and Mark overlap are very difficult to disentangle because again um we don't have the Q document to check what it would be like so in this case though Matthew gives us some confirmation of this whole Theory by presenting a dublet so we have maybe if how do doublets work so Jesus has this original aphorism this original teaching uh the last will be first the first will be last whatever the original would be like in Aramaic that goes through that oral

(56:54) tradition a version of it gets written down in Greek in the gospel of Mark a version of it gets written down in Greek in the gospel uh of Q which is now lost but the author of Matthew has both those texts and rather than editing them together and just using this at once Matthew actually takes the two variations and includes both of them because Matthew um has uh is much more interested as a harmonizer and he Matthew doesn't likes prefers to not delete anything of Mark if Matthew can and not to delete anything of Q because Matthew even though Matthew would prefer to tell the story differently and wants

(57:41) to include a different spin on things um he still kind of clearly thinks of these two Source texts as being authoritative so he doesn't want to fully change them or delete things and so in this case we have two variants that are not the same as each other preserved in Matthew so Matthew 19:30 repeats that saying that is found in Mark which makes sense because Matthew has that text of Mark and we can check it against mark But many who are first will be last and the last will be first but then there's this doublet variant in the next chapter of Matthew which is drawn we can presume

(58:26) from Q or we are presuming anyway from Q or hypo hypo hypothesizing and it is though a less comfortable but a more memorable saying so in this version it's also in Matthew it says so the last will be first and the first will be last it's not many of the last will be first it's the last will be first and the first will be last so we can presume then working independently and having access to both of those two sources the one that is Mark and the way it's Q um Luke has Preferred because Luke actually is a

(59:01) pretty amazing uh synthesizer and writer and gets rid of all the seams and so Luke does like to edit and Luke will delete Mark so Luke thinks more highly of Luke's self than the sources that Luke has Which is less true of Matthew at least we can tell from the editorial um ways that Mark is edited by Luke compared to Matthew and so that we only have a single teaching which is indeed some are last some are last who will be first and some are first who will be last so so that considerably softens the teaching right so it's not everybody who is um is poor and is on

(59:44) the ground and is on the bottom of the social hierarchy is going to be on the top and everybody at the top is going to be on the bottom it's it's now been softed to some of the last will be first and some of the first uh some are the first who will be last um so a much less provocative teaching and it also um rolls way less off the tongue and so we can see presumably how Luke has has edited that to um not have such an uncomfortable teaching maybe we also have a variant in the Gospel of Thomas and this kind of follows the

(1:00:19) thomasine community's theme of achieving a kind of a spiritual Oneness and so we have many for many who are first will become last and they will become one and the same and so Oneness and sameness is um the achieving Oneness achieving true the true spiritual Insight is a is a theme of the Thomas community so of all of these then the Q version that is preserved in Matthew so the last will be first and the first will be last that's the shortest it's the strong strongest most memorable version it's the least

(1:00:59) comfortable version it's not a teaching it's a teaching that would challenge you and provoke you um if you're not doing that bad if you're kind of a rich person you don't like this even though you're you like Christianity or this you're you're attracted to this religion this is maybe a a um this is maybe a harsh prediction and so anyway it might be therefore that this is the most most authentic version to the historical Jesus like I say other variants either soften the teaching or also add concerns that

(1:01:32) are um part of the later uh individual communities like uh the concern for Spiritual Oneness that is here in the Thomas version um and again it's not a there's no it's a it's a now it's become a kind of hybrid saying right so the one is last will be first the first will be last by adding this they'll become one and the same that um makes the saying less piy less memorable um it seems to have been a saying that has been altered right so although we have a lot of the sayings with multiple attestation that's

(1:02:11) not our only um criteria and and we've kind of I've kind of even shown how um we're using all of these in uh in tandem even when we have uh that multiple attestation more often multiple attestation is lacking uh and so you know yes and almost everything that is in Mark is also in Matthew and Luke but that's not an independent Source right so the Matthew and Luke are pulling that with Mark as a source so in The Sermon on the Mount for example in the gospel of Matthew Jesus says do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets I have

(1:02:54) not come to abolish them but to fulfill them for truly I tell you until Heaven and Earth disappear not the smallest letter nor the least stroke of a pen will by any means disappear from the law until everything is accomplished therefore anyone who sets aside the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven for I tell you unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of law you

(1:03:34) will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven so I mean the Pharisees and the teachers of law are very much about adherence to uh Jewish law the Pharisee movement will ultimately evolve into rinic Judaism um and then we'll have identified entire practice of uh legal observation that um has existed now since late Antiquity and through the Middle Ages into um modern rabic Judaism um it won't have been developed that way yet not not all of those rules and everything like that it's just a a new emerging thing in the first century um but um this is a pretty strong

(1:04:21) um uh statement from Jesus here or put into Jesus J's mouth this is as a saying of Jesus that Christians have to adhere to um Jewish law and if you teach otherwise you are leased and you're not going to get into the Kingdom of Heaven if you if you teach against that so so we've argued in our um lecture that we had last month on on the Pauline Church uh where Paul teaches exactly the opposite of this um that the Maan Community the here where this saying or this gospel is being um written is writing uh to

(1:05:02) express their view that no we have to maintain adherence to Jewish law everything that Paul is telling you about that is wrong so these sayings um from the author of ma are from the author of Matthew's independent tradition the methan community material they are not supported by multiple attestation in other words there is no parallel teaching in any other or any other independent witness uh of this saying that not one jot or one tit not one stroke of the pen will be changed it is only found here so that doesn't mean all by itself

(1:05:39) that the teaching is inauthentic to the historical Jesus but there are a lot of other considerations so I was just talking about uh the why Paul's Church's one lecture and so this is a core of the debate between uh in early Christianity between Paul and his Rivals so it is at the core of the debate in the 50s and 60s and 70s let's say especially 50s anyway all the way up through 70s anyway the middle of the first century of the Common Era that is what Christians are fighting about and so um Matthew's inclusion of

(1:06:16) this teaching the author of Matthew uh about the need for this shows how you know strongly um uh they support uh adherence to law as opposed to Paul and so I'm going to say that this is a anachronism so the historical Jesus uh lived before Paul he became Christian Paul was alive but he hadn't he wasn't part of the movement um and it was long before Paul's uh decision and insight uh that the new Gentile converts to the movement uh did not have to adhere to Jewish law and in fact that Christ uh sacrifice had made had fulfilled the law and that that meant that adherence uh

(1:06:59) was no longer incumbent and in fact ultimately after he was fighting a lot as we saw that it was actually um denigrating to what Christ did if you continued to adhere to law you're being not Christian anymore for Paul so because this uh statement of that is attributed to Jesus the saying um is so contextualized for a time period after the historical Jesus nobody in the historical Jesus's Community was arguing this they were all um they were all Jewish Christian they're not Christians yet even they're all part of this movement and they all consider themselves Jewish they're a sect of Judaism and they would have all been

(1:07:41) adhering to the level of Jewish law adherence that uh people in their time and place uh were doing it is only later that people have this argument and that the Maan Community needs to put these words in to um their scripture the Jesus Christ of their scripture not the historical Jesus so I my my judgment here is very likely to be inauthentic because of this anachronism um you know if we're going to do though can't rely only on multiple attestation because there are some of um um Jesus most famous teachings that lack

(1:08:23) multiple a testation including things like The Parables of the Good Samaritan and the prodigal son so probably probably these two are the number one Parable that anybody would say if you say what are The Parables of Jesus we probably these are there might be something else that's the top in the top three but I think maybe these are the top two these exist only uh in Luke and so um there how are however um even so the fite that they they don't have any other um uh attestation there's no other witness of them in another

(1:09:02) Community they are not problematic in the sense of there's no anachronisms the parable I'm sorry the characters in the parable for example of the Samaritan the levite the priest the Samaritan himself those all fit into the Galilean Jewish context of the historical Jesus that's not something that the historical Jesus wouldn't have known about or that existed after his time those are all stock characters in the historical context of his time in addition as Parables um these stories have a memorable structure they are the kind of thing that can survive oral

(1:09:40) transmission you can learn this story um in an oral transmission Society especially we don't have this capacity we have to look everything up that's why I have such trouble even doing basic quotes when I'm trying to pull them out of my head I don't I don't memorize word for word things anymore memorize you know sort of themes uh and that's why I'm able to pull pull a lot out of my brain but I can't pull everything out of my brain that way uh people in ancient societies which they had so much less access to

(1:10:09) information and books they were way more likely to just be able to memorize huge amounts of of um texts that are written I'm sorry that's not written texts that are com it's not texts words that are composed you know to be repeated and memor memorized and competed repeated so one of the ways you can have that is for example like a three-fold structure so in the parable of the Samaritan you know we have a levite come past him then a priest and then the Samaritan himself so that's a threefold thing and so when you do that kind of literary um uh in this

(1:10:46) case oral tradition uh forms they just naturally speak to how the human brain works and so they're easier to uh recall and repeat um that said because we lack I mean I think almost I think I think everybody who is a Christian scholar would want these to go back to the historical Jesus and I think most Scholars probably I think most Scholars probably do see them as going back to the historical Jesus you have to be a real minimalist uh which is possible to not however because we lack multiple attestation to confirm that they were

(1:11:26) being transmitted in the oral tradition the case can very much be made that both of these are the creation of the author of Luke or the Lucan Community because we don't have the multiple attestation to show otherwise um some controversial uh statements of Jesus lack multiple attestation as with Matthew 19 12 11- 12 he said to them not everyone can accept this teaching but only those to whom it is given for there are Unix who have been so from birth and there are Unix who have been made Unix by others and

(1:12:07) there are Unix who have made themselves Unix for the Kingdom of Heaven let anyone accept this who can so this is a um weird teaching it is a teaching that um I think most uh any Christian who wants to you know think about this would prefer to think about it entirely symbolically rather than literally you know and not as a not a commandment to uh to become a unic um but rather it has a symbolic idea but that's that said the fact that it's actually troubling and it's difficult um is actually one of our criteria that says well maybe it does go back likewise um you know we have this

(1:12:56) three-fold structure so um you it would be easy to transmit this kind of an idea uh that could survive oral tradition and so you know I I feel like we have to remember when we're doing this we can't just put our thumb on the scale and say oh well the the the the sayings that we really like are the ones that are authentic and the ones that we' think are weird or that we really don't like aren't um we have to uh use all of these criteria um uh dispassionately they're going to use them validly um so like I say there's also

(1:13:36) should be a a caution to avoid any kind of partisan temp Temptation um and so there's for example a um declaration that Jesus makes in Matthew 16 um uh that has long been used to justify the idea of papal Primacy and Supremacy uh and so for those of us who are not um in favor of that uh proposition are not uh Catholic as a result um probably would prefer the fact that uh you know that it doesn't have multiple attestation so on so we read this uh text it says uh Jesus is saying to Peter blessed are you Simon son of Jonah for this was not revealed to you

(1:14:24) by flesh and blood but my but my Father in heaven so he's responding to um just before that Peter Peter has given his testimony that Jesus is the Messiah and Jesus continues I tell you that you are Peter so this is a um uh Simon his disciple Simon's nickname which we do know through U multiple attestation that there is this name change where um there's a nickname uh where Jesus calls this particular disciple Rocky in the different languages The Rock therefore you are Peter you are the Rock and Upon This Rock I will build my

(1:15:07) church and the gates of Hades will not overcome it I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind on Earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on Earth will be loosed in heaven so um uh so in this case uh even though like I say there's a caution to be partisan on any of these in this particular case um it it would weigh into the direction that people who uh would like to argue against uh Primacy it's get on their side so there are anachronisms here so Jesus is talking about founding a church but really

(1:15:45) Church idea of the church really only emerged after his death um when and even there we're actually consisting of actual different communities with very rival interpretations of what the qualities essential to Christianity are um each of them are claiming rival Apostolic Authority and because the Maan Community here is uh essentially claiming Peter's Authority this seems to be a argument that they are making that Peter is the lead Apostle and he is backing them up and all the things they're saying about law and observance

(1:16:25) whereas for example um the Gnostic communities uh down the street uh who are claiming that Thomas and um uh and Mary Magdalene are Jesus Chief Apostles they are writing uh stories that denigrate Peter and that are saying that Jesus is giving um uh the secret teachings uh the true teachings only to um Thomas or only to Mary so anyway as pleased as non Catholics might be to in authenticate this particular teaching we had to be very fair and nonpartisan so we would actually if um using of all these criteria also cleave away many other teachings that um partisans would be loathed to give up and it would also

(1:17:11) include ones that we maybe would be less likely to keep so this is actually why I'm suggesting that all of this should be an academic historical exercise and not a theological religious one uh by that I mean what's important really to Christianity is not the historical Jesus it's the Jesus Christ of scripture anyway this is a different exercise this is an academic exercise okay uh the saying to love one another um we've been talking about how uh the Gospel of John preserves a very different uh tradition um and so during

(1:17:49) the gospel of John's version of The Last Supper recorded in Chapter 13 Jesus says my children I will be with you only a little longer you will look for me and just as I told the Jews so I will tell you now where I am going you cannot come a new command I give you love one another as I have loved you so you must love one another by this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another um so once again this famous teaching is preserved only here so it lacks any multiple attestation and independent Witnesses um this is obviously a teaching I think that Christians would

(1:18:36) like to say oh this should be authentic to the historical Jesus as I've loved you love one another this new commandment uh love one another um is a a very beloved um just as but just and just as the methan community as we've talked about has this affinity for Jewish law love is really a Core theme in the Johan community so for example and the first Epistle of John which is by another author in this same though Community it teaches God is love and so we read in chapter 4 dear friends let us love one another for love comes from God everyone who loves has been born of God and knows

(1:19:24) God whoever does not love does not know God because God is love this is how God showed his love Among Us he sent his one and only son into the world that we might live through him um so the variance and even wait n that's we've already had that slide uh oh well so a slide got uh replaced and I have the wrong slide there for this so what do we say about this unfortunately um uh there is let me just make sure I don't have it I don't have it so I'll explain what it is without the slide so don't look at the

(1:20:10) slides so when we go back to this and we were just talking about this you know um my children I will be with you only a little longer so um this is written in retrospect it's not likely the kind of thing that uh the historical Jesus was saying um it's it's written by the community in retrospect the community was very confused um when Jesus was um uh was crucified and and and a more more clear anachronism he says and just as I told the Jews so I tell you now so the historical Jesus in no way and on no

(1:20:49) occasion would have ever talked to anybody as described a group as the Jews because again he and all of his disciples were Jews they are a sect of Judaism during the time period of the historical Jesus by the time um by the time this story is written by the time these um these Traditions are written in the Jan Community the Jan Community has been kicked out of the synagogues and now they feel themselves as having totally separated and they're their own uh emerging religion the Christian religion uh and they are looking at their former co-religionists formerly of a

(1:21:34) different sect now of a totally different religion and they are calling them the Jews and they're seeing them as Rivals and so um words like this where uh Jesus is is talking about the Jews are being put on his lips but this is an anachronism that would therefore not go back to the historical Jesus no matter how much the the rest of it you'd like uh to be okay so there is a natural tendency to want to soften heart harsh teachings we saw that before in some of the um uh in some of the variants that we've had and so that likely also

(1:22:17) explains the difference between Luke's and Matthew's variations of the Beatitudes both of which are likely drawn from the saying source and so we kind of teed this up when we were talking about that Meme so in Luke's version it we read blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God but in Matthew we have the soften teaching it's a very harsh teaching it's with the poor who get the kingdom of God um here in Matthew that teaching is spiritualized blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven um and that's a special phrasing

(1:22:58) the author of Matthew um always deletes God and puts in heaven because that's the how they call it in in their community so um even though I have these two variations uh this really important teaching the Beatitudes actually is dependent on the same Source Q so it lacks uh multiple attestation uh another one of the um criteria that we've mentioned as a disqualifying are apologetic statements they have less likelihood to reach to the um historical Jesus and so many times we've talked about how the connection of Jesus and John the Baptist

(1:23:41) is one of the things that has lots of multiple attestation so we have it in Q and Mark and John but it's also a source of embarrassment for early Christians due to the implication that it must mean that if John was doing the baptizing of Jesus that Jesus is looking to John for Authority that's an implication and also since John is performing a ritual for re uh for redemp redeeming sins for remiss remitting sins uh then the implication is that Jesus has lived a sinful life um neither of which are the kind of things that later Christians would have um made up

(1:24:25) and indeed we can just see again and again and again in the gospels how they are trying to say no no no and that maybe if you're a Christian and you're listening to me and you say oh no no no John didn't have authority because we have all of these statements that say otherwise John put into John's lips uh you are greater than I and that kind of thing um I'm not fit to uh unclasp your sandle so sayings of Jesus though those are sayings that are Christians have put into John's mouth sayings of Jesus that make Christian apologetic arguments such

(1:24:59) as Jesus words to John are therefore very unlikely to be authentic so at the time of the baptism in Matthew's version Jesus says to John when John's like why why on Earth would you need to be baptized if anything you should be baptizing me you know you don't need to be baptized but Jesus said to John let it be so now for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness so uh they're very law abiding in the Maan community and so that is their excuse for why um this ritual needed to happen uh in other words this thing that was a well-known story going back to the

(1:25:41) um uh historical Jesus that John the Baptist had baptized Jesus and so now this saying of Jesus is therefore very very unlikely to be authentic to the historical Jesus um one other uh category I guess I want to consider is um apocalyptic prophecy so we've done a lot of lectures on apocalypses and uh Apocrypha uh supha other texts that are floating around in this time period the second temple period of Judaism and it is a time where we have a flourishing of apocalyptic prophecy which often takes the form of

(1:26:27) pseudonymous writing which is to say writing in the name of a prophet in the past pretending that you are that Prophet you're writing the uh The Apocalypse of Abraham what Abraham is having a vision of in the future and that future that Abraham is seeing is your future I mean it's your time and so Abraham is able to predict all the things that you are are your past and then it gets to your time and then Abraham predicts your your immediate future and then that has influence on your community because that is that is

(1:26:59) telling them of what they need to know in their time and so a huge component of apocalyptic prophecy is retro predictions so uh most of it is not a prediction they're going through and telling the past from the perspective of the author but from the perspective of the pretend author it is in that author's future and then that is used to give the text legitimacy wow they've been getting it spoton they predicted all those things all those things happened and now it's continuing to predict things that are going to

(1:27:32) happen right in our immediate future and so the community takes that as authoritative but um has is want to happen in actual history now that we living past all of those times it turns out that all of the future predictions all did not come true so in other lectures we have seen for examp example how the author of The Book of Daniel does exactly this accur accurately predicting the events of his recent past so everything from when uh the character of Daniel would have existed all the way up until when the

(1:28:10) author lived which is somewhere between the year 167 and 163 BCE based on Bullseye predictions of very particular predictions that are going all the way up until that moment and then completely catastrophic failing after that um including the prediction that the world was about to end in their own near future uh a prophecy which very importantly did failed so the son of man did not come in clouds hailing the end of the world um anytime in the 160s OR 150s BCE but just because the um prophecy failed that hasn't stopped people from

(1:28:54) wanting to recalculate and um and re- uh interpret the text interpret the text incorrectly in order to make a new um false prediction of the end of the world the end times one such um person who loved Daniel and felt that he had actually now had access to the new um he knew what the what it what it really meant it wasn't going to happen back in one the 160s or 150s um the Daniel as he understood it you know it wasn't really Daniel as a guy in the 160s but Daniel was predicting his time and and he has got all the signs he needs because there is nothing that could be worse than the Roman uh Jewish

(1:29:42) War which resulted in the total Destruction of Jerusalem killing everybody the inhabitants uh destroying the temple itself taking every all of the artifact backs uh all of the relics back to Rome uh for the uh U Triumph the Roman Triumph so the author of Mark then seeing those as signs reinterpreting all the things in Daniel um retroject his own apocalyptic predictions by putting them into Jesus lips when he is writing um the gospel of Mark so updating um the sign of the end of times in Daniel the author of Mark has Jesus predict when

(1:30:31) you when people in the future here when people in Mark's time when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it not ought not to be let the reader understand what am I meaning by that this is the desolating sacrilege this is something that is also talked about in Daniel where it is referring to the temple being uh desecrated in that case by the seusd king Antiochus the 4th epiphanies now it's been updated here so that it's the Roman general setting up the uh their legionary uh symbols in the time uh the destruction of the temple

(1:31:06) when you see the desecrating sacri sacrilege set up where it ought not to be the temple let the reader understand then those in Judea must flee to the mountains so the Christian Community fled uh which is what happened too the one on the housetop must not go down or enter into or take anything from the house the one in the field must not turn back to get a coat woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days pray that it may not be in Winter for in those days there would be suffering such as not been given uh from the beginning of the creation that God created until now and

(1:31:45) never will be this is it this is the bit end times um and it was of course a horrific time of suffering uh that the author of Marcus reacted to this will then lead after a bunch of signs importance this leads swiftly to the end of the world um sometime in the 70s uh uh CE then they will see the son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory and that will signal the literal end of the world um in case uh all of my decoding of this cryptic sign the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be let the reader understand that's a

(1:32:23) thing that is taken from The Book of Daniel Luke who is writing to um a less informed Gentile audience just edits Mark when it comes into Luke and makes it clear luke says when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies then know that its desolation has come near so you know you don't have to have this coded phrase Luke is just fixing it when the Roman Armies come that's going to be the end time is coming near so apocalyptic predictions like this uh like I say are written by Anonymous authors to explain their

(1:33:00) understanding which they really believe um of their own time and place uh however there also failed prophecies because um as we know now 2,000 years later the Roman destruction of Jerusalem did not lead to uh the immediate literal end of the world uh that didn't happen before this generation passed away didn't happen in a space of a little time uh the the little time left generation passed away the son of man did not come in the clouds with power and glory in any literal sense so when I say failed prophecy I just mean a literalistic interpretation of the prophecy failed so

(1:33:39) like I say because of this information about these events in the 70s of the Common Era that's something that is very um on the mind of the author of Mark but it is totally anachronistic to the era of the hisor IAL Jesus and so again this kind of teachings are not uh authentic from the historical Jesus they are authentically part of the Jesus of scripture tradition uh and can be and can be used that way so uh just to conclude then as we are doing this um when people are reading the scriptures they are seeing um and experiencing the Jesus

(1:34:25) Christ of scripture and if they're doing that in a religious sense that can point them to the Risen Christ but the Jesus Christ of scripture is not the Jesus Christ uh not the Jesus of Nazareth of History the historical Jesus it's the different component art pieces um the same way that we had uh that artistic theological portrait these are an artistic literary portrait that were written by Christians who already believed in the Risen Christ and whose uh beliefs informed what they were writing the picture that they were painting that also informed them in their beliefs and also the gospel

(1:35:05) writers uh is the Hebrew Bible as translated into Greek the suant um there are is a memory and teachings of the historical Jesus that's preserved some of the details like his um baptism by John some of these sayings um do seem to and most likely seem to go back to him for various reasons as we've kind of assessed but really the way we're accessing the historical Jesus is through these academic disciplines and so um we'll go ahead and start getting questions and I also have a bunch of resources that maybe I'm going to um recommend to you as we're doing

(1:35:51) this putting questions in the queue landra I'm seeing the queue but I'm not seeing any questions okay well I want Begin by thanking people for their support so much Ron Wagner uh Jay lung Mark J Jun L Jung I'm sorry not Jay L J L Jung Mark long Aries orelon Andre UC uh F Daryl Scott Mike R um Tina um Tina writes usually I have lots to say but tonight I just want to support uh Community of Christ respect your hearts and appre John appreciate John's scholarship thank you Tina so much uh Tommy uh schmeer and maias uh who wants to express his appreciation for John hi

(1:37:03) from Austria to you all Hello uh from in a to everybody in Austria had a lot of of fond memories of travel to Austria was the first going to Vienna when I was a kid in with the Minnesota Boy Choir was uh the first overseas destination I've always loved um Austria and Vienna since uh and thank you JM um let me mention so we have kind of I don't always remember to bring um resources uh and let me you give you guys a few of these this time so I went through a lot of these uh details with criteria uh of how how are we finding these tools and so I want to recommend a

(1:37:44) few books uh quickly and we'll put these later in comments forgot to give these to landro ahead of time to do that uh there's a whole series by John P Meyer called a marginal Jew and he goes through and discusses um essentially can I do it this way yeah he discusses all of these criteria in kind of exhausting details and um if you I'm pretty minimalist he is way more maximalist um I'm a pretty uh I would say I'm a pretty um you know kind of far Progressive uh scholar he's be about as conservative in terms of maintaining stuff uh for a Christian

(1:38:30) audience as you can do and still be a scholar as far as I'm concerned so this would be might be a book for you if you uh find me upsetting sometimes so um another book that is amazing there's Professor here John kloppenborg and and he is one of the leading uh professors on Q and this book Excavating Q um is is also an amazing summary of the entire historiography which is to say the history of the Quest for the historical Jesus all of this academic background so it doesn't only just tell us anything you'd ever want to learn about um the Q hypothesis it tells you

(1:39:11) everything more I mean it is it is such a thorough book so I couldn't recommend this more it is um these two books are very dense though and so they are well I'll give you one more that's dense and then I'll and I'll tell you one that uh a couple here that are or one that's easier and more accessible two that are more accessible so um John Dominic crosson I've mentioned before as one of my favorite uh Scholars of the historical Jesus and this book is the historical Jesus the life of a Mediterranean Jewish

(1:39:44) peasant um when I was saying you can't put your thumb on the scales and um and use these criteria to to kind of bring in the the uh the U the sayings and things that you like while trying to get rid of the ones you don't um this is in my view the book that is so methodologically sound where uh John crosson really um really adheres to that so it's really good um in terms of um now those are very dense books those are academically less approachable all the ones I've just mentioned you know Bart armman is amazing on all this and

(1:40:24) so uh accessible as well so he is a great teacher and a great writer and he has Mis quoting Jesus as one of them U but he has a lot of uh texts that are on this topic and then I also going to mention um if you like this kind of comparison um the five gospels this is a book by the um Jesus seminar so Funk is the um leading editor um this is interesting because it's a whole collection of Scholars uh who are looking into these questions I'm I'm not I'm not fully convinced of their methodology and how they vote and so I wouldn't take the they have a but it's

(1:41:04) very approachable so I wouldn't take their color coding as Canon but it is very interesting and more more important to me is the um as a reference where it's showing uh uh where where all the attribute where the where the sources are coming where there's multiple attestation uh and different and the and the different commentary so anyway those are different ways that you can follow up on this in no way did I give you a comprehensive list of uh like authentic which sayings are authentic it wasn't my goal here my goal was to give you a sense of how um how Scholars approach

(1:41:44) this and to also give you some uh further further resources for um for teaching so some of the questions or comments Ricky palasio says I once came across a letters in red Edition when I asked what made this d uh addition different I was told that all the words in red were all the things that Jesus said um how did how do they determine which saying of Jesus were authentic and which were not so so Ricky in a Red Letter Bible they assume that anything that is attributed to Jesus is said by Jesus so and that is true in terms of

(1:42:23) the Jesus of scripture so everything in the scriptures where it says Jesus said and then and then it's in red that is what the Jesus of scripture says and that is authentic to scripture but uh that is how they determine it because it's in the scriptures and it's as he said it that is not though the same as history videos for Stuff said do you think the historical Jesus had a strong belief in lasting life uh would that have been strange for a person in his time and place um I think he did have that I think he has teachings about that I don't think that would have been a strange belief at all

(1:43:07) um I think that was so there it was a thing that was definitely in question so um the different different Jewish sects had different ideas and so um uh the most conservative sect the Sadducees didn't believe uh in everlasting life because they were holded more towards um you know just the Torah uh texts that had been from the very earliest edited together in the very earliest part of the first temple period before there was a lot of uh Greek and Persian influence and so the Greek and Persian influence though had had blown that all up and so now you have books like Daniel that um

(1:43:47) uh that are really important to people in the Jesus movement um and maybe also probably also to Jesus himself self so yes I think he would have um had a strong belief in that the historical Jesus and I think that was not strange because uh that was also true for the the Pharisees for example and the Essen too um so lots of sects did believe that Patrick Kish um did Jesus and I'm presuming you mean the just historical Jesus did uh does the historical Jesus believe that he himself is a piece of bread of Christ to be shared with us all in communion metaphorically speaking of course

(1:44:29) um so so I guess it depends what we're thinking so so when it when we have even that saying that's a very early saying that is in Paul that we have um you know this is my my you know this is uh this is U my um body and but then it also says do this in remembrance of me so even though though that's an early saying um uh it doesn't necessarily uh go back to the historical Jesus because there's uh an anachronism there so it's written in retrospect you can make the case and and there's no doubt I mean I'll tell you that

(1:45:12) uh you know you know uh Meyer here was going to make the case that yes that would that the historical Jesus would have think that I would tend to think no I would tend to think that that's an anachronism but I'm like I say a minimalist but you um but scripturally that is the case yes that is what um that is the teaching theologically and that's the teaching of scripture religiously Aries aelan says how literate were people 2,000 years ago I find all these Works incredible and a snapshot of life and living in that time people weren't that literate um so there

(1:45:52) was a more um we think that uh the Judean population was somewhat more literate than some other populations because they were so interested in text but they were still largely um beholden to a special class of um literate people so that's why we are always talking about the scribes uh in these texts so there are official people that um people whose uh job it is specialized to be able to read and write and so um um even so for example in the Christian communities uh when Paul is writing these letters to the Corinthians there's a couple people in the Corinthian Community Christian

(1:46:31) Community that are able to read those and then they sit up in the front and they read for you and so reading was more of a community activity by far than it is now um it's really only centuries later that the practice of individual private reading and reading without talking out loud um starts to become a common practice uh and so this would have been so reading would have been itself a more oral process because it's a public and Community process and the texts not only is it hard to read them they're hard to read and write you have to be quite specialized and know them so

(1:47:12) it's a specialized skill that is more difficult back then too so it's not particularly widespread uh El Jung says um or you have to tell me later sometimes how to say that I've always wondered about um John 8:44 uh was Jesus saying that Yahweh is the devil so I don't have the John 8:44 in front of me do you want to past that for me landro you uh and so let John 8:44 says yet you belong to your father uh the devil and you want to carry out your father's desires he was a murderer from the beginning not holding to the truth

(1:48:08) uh for there is not truth in him when he lies uh he speaks his native language for he is the father he is a liar and the father of Lies so land you're going to have to give me more context before that what is who is he he didn't say who I have to say I'm not as focused on John when I was doing this because again most things in the in the Gospel of John are not um uh they're not are usually not traceable to the historical Jesus so okay okay we're going to skip this and go back it's too much to read I'm sorry I can't answer this we can I'll

(1:48:48) I'll we'll go back to it uh er no don't don't don't delete okay never mind Kwan uh Kwan f8 wrote is it possible that it was James who was divinely inspired uh and his uh brother got set up as it were for martyrdom um so so sometimes Kwan when we have these kinds of you know kind of elaborate you know you know is something possible hypotheses there is not any um we don't have any uh so that's that's not how history works so you know history doesn't go through where we have a a hypothesis that doesn't isn't grounded in in sources and we are just trying to explain things we have to work

(1:49:34) from you know when we have actual evidence for anything we have an existing narrative we're able trying to um describe all of those things all kinds of any number of things about the past are possible none of those things are knowable because we can only access um the past through uh the sources and what remains behind us are people um I think tend to approach the past by uh you know thinking well anything is possible which it is you know lots of things are possible um but um but history is not about uh arguing against um counterfactuals

(1:50:16) because you know or what might have been because there's no there's no evidence for them so we have to work with what the evidence is um John Phelps says since Jesus lived near Greek settlements was there much of a uh literary tradition in Aramaic or was it considered a lower status language there is a literary tradition in Aramaic um and so that's one of the reasons why uh uh the um local Jewish people had all switched from speaking uh Hebrew to speaking Aramaic it was higher status language because it had been a um uh a language of administration uh under the

(1:50:59) Persian Empire and and continued to be a language of administration under the uh helenistic Empire even though the helenistic empires were busily promoting Greek so Greek would have been a higher status language but Aramaic was still uh having a live literary tradition and so for example uh when I was mentioning The Book of Daniel that is written partially in Aramaic so it is a um um it was even a language of scripture and some of the um other apocalyptic gospels were also being written in in scripture so um so no it was not a it was not a fully lower

(1:51:35) status language that doesn't have any writing it is a a lesser status High status language um Kwan says is it possible the name of the Q gospel was the inspiration for the character in Star Trek the Next Generation no I don't think it is um the letter Q is is a cool letter people like it um I really don't think that Gene Roddenberry famously an atheist he's not um uh he's generally an atheist and he was not too much of a Biblical scholar so and so I don't think that's what he's drawing from in the same way that um qanon has nothing to do with the Q

(1:52:19) Source um Q you know as uh as as a an initial for queer culture is not related to the Q Source it's just that Q is a letter that we don't use in too many words it's kind of a cool letter and so Q gets used for a bunch of things um so Alpha's Cav so would John put the majority of Jesus sayings as Pious frauds so no because um so for it to be a Pious fraud uh the person has to be consciously um consciously being a Pious fraud so so for example um like the mark and uh the sayings that Mark is putting into the author of Mark is putting into Jesus lips about the apocalypse about his own day that he isn't getting from

(1:53:14) anybody in any kind of a tradition around him because it is contemporary to him as he's writing that down and so that I would consider that to be a Pious fraud um I would say the majority um so then then there's a huge component of uh of the texts and the sayings things that are happening in the in the gospels where Jesus is just talking like a literary character you know and so he comes up and he meets a a person and they they say something to him and you say something to him that is a um that was considered to be a a

(1:53:47) legitimate literary device so they are not intending to say this some is a conversation that really happened this is just uh how we understood the character will have talked so that is not that's not attempting to be a fraud they're not pretending that they're Jesus and they're not pretending in any way that um uh that they know an eyewitness account of some conversation that people had um and then a huge component of the other um uh um sayings are sayings that are coming out of an oral tradition uh that that people through the of that tradition um understood that

(1:54:25) that's what Jesus said so I would say the majority are not um Pious frauds the majority of the sayings have um excuses that are you know that we would they're not excuses they have reasons that are not uh fraudulent at the time uh but then there are some people who are making up sayings and putting them on Jesus's lips so yeah so even even in the methan community you know when I was talking about how they have the um how they have a um tradition of of wanting to adhere to Jewish law um it doesn't necessarily

(1:55:05) mean that those statements the jot and title saying is a Pious fraud at some point or other a um an apostle or Prophet speaking by the spirit in their Community um might have said that that had become a famous saying in their uh Community uh and then at a certain point when they're writing this down they attribute that to Jesus and so I don't know that that means that um they they think it they don't realize anymore that it didn't come from him so uh Todd rad maker says uh was Paul aware of anything that Jesus

(1:55:45) said um I think if so again he thinks that Jesus said um that formula incantation uh of of the that we use in in the in the sacrament right in the Eucharist in communion so he um this is my um body do this in remembrance of me this is my blood do this and remembers of me so um Paul uh believes Jesus said those things uh normative asks Bart ER talks about some sayings attributed Jesus making more sense in AR AIC while some are basically word plays that work only in Greek how useful is linguistic analysis very useful so that's a those are strong you know again arguments that would be another whole um tool and

(1:56:36) criteria that I didn't even list so so yeah if we can say that um this saying that we have um and we only have the Greek formulation but if it if we then speculate what that what the translation would look like in Aramaic and say oh in Aramaic here this is a pun or oh in Aramaic this would have actually been a stronger saying um then we can see that that that is an argument of that that saying has a more more sense across the linguistic divide to back to where the historical Jesus would have been speaking it so I think it's very useful it's just difficult to do um

(1:57:14) so uh alfas scav says um can we also just ask you about mandans in general I'm struggling to find historically centered text to read on them at all and suggestions would be amazing so we had a um a lecture maybe a half a year ago who was John the Baptist and I talk about the mandans there and I talk about um some of their texts which have only recently I think been available you know broadly anyway in Translation um their own texts uh don't to me seem to um represent uh an independent tradition that goes all the

(1:58:02) way back I think that they might um at a certain point they that doesn't mean their tradition doesn't go all the way back they could be the actual erors of John's disciples um but they at a certain point are responding to Maybe Christian um anti- John apologetics or apologetics that that diminish John and then they are Maybe writing um they in response writing their own Mandan apologetics and so um but yeah there's just less that's been done on them I don't have um a good history book to recommend uh to you on that um oh Kelly

(1:58:39) Haggins thank you so much for your support um Paco uh vs says the talet has a saying about Jesus about using prostitute taxes to build bathrooms in the temple does this have any credibility or is it just another attack on Christians so so yeah the talmid sayings um are all late so I think that essentially this is no it's not an independent witness it's a um the break has happened uh there have been sayings that have been you know we have sayings that are very anti-jewish in the early Christian um scriptures because when you break apart and go into sism um one of the things that you do to to to defend your own

(1:59:24) boundaries is you you you have an US versus them and you denigrate the other group and so um the early Christians are doing that the early uh je uh rabic Jews are doing that too and so uh no I don't think any we've looked at all of the different um I think sayings in that tradition and I don't um and they they don't go back as far as the the Christian ones um Scott woran is it still a scholarly Fringe idea to attribute the Q source to Jesus uh Greek written stump stump speech to be said aloud in whatever local Aramaic

(2:00:07) uh in whatever local Aramaic place he found himself in yes that would be a fringe Theory so the Q source is um may be the closest to the historical Jesus but it is it is not from the historical Jesus it's not uh written in his lifetime it's later so it includes uh things that are anachronistic to the historical Jesus so even though um sometimes I think Scholars are give like too much you know like if it's a q thing it's like that's gold and that makes it the historical Jesus that's um uh it still has to be read as its own um it had its own authors and compilers and

(2:00:49) editors uh that are not U that are are still separating us from the historical Jesus Aries aelian says uh was James the prot protector of the poor and meek in Jerusalem if so he was an incredible individual worthy of worship um well so that can be your profession of of Faith Aries AEL and um um and some some early Christian communities I think probably did have a a a a sense of maybe a broader broader space of divinity um there's some very very strong a very strong statement on on the importance of James in uh the Gospel of Thomas for for

(2:01:34) example uh for in his for for for his sake the Heaven and Earth was created or something so so in that case you might be able to attribute the formula worthy of worship to him um in nor for normally for um in the mainline Christian Community uh um worthy of worship as a formula that is defi defined only for God so only God is worthy of worship um but of course Christians in the main line interpret God through the lens of and prism of Trinity but um like I say I'm not telling you how um how to worship so um

(2:02:12) that you're like so you can be your profession of worship and sure absolutely and so yes he was the protector of the poor and meek in Jerusalem that was what he was doing um from what we can tell and Empress uh God of spiritual says why weren't the Gnostic text added to the cannon so we just had a lecture on canonization so you might want to uh watch that whole and it'll be fun um in general it's because um uh the proton nostics not the prootics the Proto Orthodox group ended up ended up winning and they uh were anti-os and so any texts that uh hados

(2:02:52) IC ideas which were the people who were deciding what gets in the cannon uh were opposing those ideas and so they wrote big long um books against them you know so they wrote a whole lists of what heresies are and why those are all heresy and that caused all the other leaders who were on their team to reject those from the cannon uh and so that's the primary reason why they weren't added um in some cases it wasn't added because uh other criteria were not met so some of them very clearly are are late and so the Canon the people one of the criteria for the Canon is that um

(2:03:32) texts that are more obviously uh the oldest texts are the ones that they preferred uh unrecognized Talent thank you so much for your support oh here's the context of the question back from El Yung I'm sorry we I didn't have this before so um so in in this question you were asking about John 8:44 was Jesus saying Yahweh is the devil you are from your father the devil and you choose your father's desires so Jesus is speaking to a group of Pharisees who change uh challenged his teachings and question his authorities so his confrontation is part of a longer

(2:04:12) discourse um which where he's defending where Jesus is defending his own identi identity as um as Son of God um which is you know part of the unique um idea of the you know the gospel of John's completely different narrative so by the time the way that the Gospel of John is operating um we're no longer really um it's no longer even in memory of a historical Jesus nor is the character of Jesus in The Gospel of John walking around as if he was a human he is walking around as if he is God on Earth so he's already the Son of God and all those kind of things and that is affecting the um uh the people who are the Jews who

(2:04:56) for whom this is blasphemy and so it's really what it is actually doing here is retro the um the fight that is happening between the Johan Christians and their Jewish um neighbors who have have split apart from them so the the in this dialogue that you're referencing the Pharisees are saying Abraham is um is our father um and and then Jesus says if you are Abraham's children you would uh do what Abraham did U but 40 of you uh I'm sorry that's next 40 is the verse but now you're trying to kill me and Jesus says if you were uh if if God were

(2:05:36) your father you would love me because I came from God and so um and so no they're not saying he's not saying that Yahweh is the Devil he's saying that the that he represents the true devil and now that the Johan and Christians have separated themselves out from their um their enemies people who had been the same religion from them so the Jews as they're calling them now um they are saying you're not even you're not worshiping God and God's son you are um you know you're you're you've rejected God you're worshiping the devil and they're not saying that Yahweh is the devil they're saying that um uh that

(2:06:13) their true father now spiritually is the devil so this is an example of you know we were talking about a second ago with some sayings of Jesus that are in the talmid that are anti-christian um this is one of the sayings uh in the Gospel of John that is anti-Semitic um or he ends up being anti-semitic or as a basis for a lot of anti-Semitism uh Alphas scav does John believe uh parts of History are just inherently unknowable then if the sources don't make it to modern times yes yeah so almost everything in history is inherently unknowable um because

(2:06:52) uh we just don't have the sources to say so we can talk about all you know we you know and we can regret that I always don't people always ask me this question um you know what what books do you wish had survived that we don't have or if you could go back in time and ask somebody a question what would you ask them like you know I don't have time to study all the history that we have you know so so I regret it a little bit there's parts of ancient of history that are unknowable because we don't have the sources and yet we don't have enough time any one of us to to really um study

(2:07:23) what we do have and so we have a just this amazing treasure and I just love learning about all of what we can know um and so but yeah we there's lots the overwhelming majority of everything that has ever happened there's nothing we can ever say about it almost all the people that have ever lived uh we can't know their names or anything about them because they've left no record so uh Katherine's World um The Mustard Seed Jesus quote um did he really know that the mustard seeds don't grow into big trees is that anachronism

(2:07:53) inauthentic symbolic from the start not literal so um so Katherine World um that's a again a say saying that has um I think it does have multiple attestation but it's also a um the part yeah it is because it's a saying that we have in Mark and it's also a saying where we have a Q variant and so then we have a variant that is uh of Matthew's version of that and a Luke version of that and so um so no um it's not it's not literally about knowing that it's a a mustard seed growing into a trees in the earliest uh version of that uh or the the best version of that the most authentic version of that um it's saying

(2:08:36) that um it's a tiny seed and it grows into a crazy big weed not a giant tree and so and so this is one probably one of the cases where the historical Jesus has this um this kind of sense of ir about the kingdom the historical Jesus is saying here um the kingdom of God is like a weed once you once you start once you guys all uh Start Spreading this around it's going to be a you can't get mustard out of your garden once you start growing it it's like mint or something you know and so the question is not whether it's going to go big for

(2:09:12) the original saying uh the authentic saying the question is that it's spreading like crazy and then it provides refuge for birds and other little animals that'll be in there so um Kingdom will will do that in other words it provides inclusive refuge for the the Le the less and least and so that's an ironic um or a clever or a smart take on on um a cosmic symbol symbology that had been around since all Pagan times you know so so uh God has always been like worshiped in through trees and so the you know so

(2:09:48) trees are associated with the Divine because they stand so tall they live mult multiple generations of humans they uh they connect the underworld with those the world we live on with the heavens and so normally you would be talking about the kingdom of God being a huge tree and um the historical Jesus here is probably making a an ironic twist to his his upside down kingdom of made up of all of these um poor people who uh who aren't the elites you know the last or the first and the first or the last so not understanding that then

(2:10:20) the author of Matthew doesn't like the fact that uh that Jesus is Calling the kingdom of God this weed and so he says no it grows into the tallest of all trees um and so it's definitely not literal it's not inauthentic or from the beginning it's it's the problem when the transmission starts happening um authors don't understand the intent and they also they also were embarrassed by it they're like I want my I want my religion and my kingdom to be this lofty tree I don't want to be a weed you know and that kind of a thing so um a lot of times what happens is the uh people are

(2:10:54) embarrassed by things the founder said and they want to clean it up um Katherine's world says um was Jesus a reformer trying to replace uh warlike judgmental Yahweh ISM with uh Elohim ISM uh notion of 100% love 100% good benevolent loving God maybe to save Judea from Rome due to the uprising so well the uprising is later um and so but you know he there the the Rome Rome is in the immediate context of what he's talking about um and so he is seeing I think the um uh the Roman administration of of the lands to be part of an an oppressive

(2:11:48) system uh and he wants to um reform that I think yes um in terms of uh by by building this uh inclusive community where the last are first and the first or last where the poor are the ones that are granted the kingdom uh and the the rich can't get in because they can't go through the you know like a camel to go through the eye of a needle kind of thing um I don't know that I don't think that um you know as you're associating this between Yahweh ISM and Elohim ISM I um I don't think that um I don't think that the historical Jesus would have

(2:12:28) interpreted um those two names differently so I think that um those would have been read as synonyms for God Yahweh and Elohim and I don't think that um it wouldn't have had um the division that you're making which which for him but I mean you can be a perfectly legitimate Division division for you in your in your theology uh Mel angel I always say Michelangelo anyway thank you U he says um I recently finished reading the consolation of philosophy and I loved it thank you John for the recommendation I'm glad you loved it um

(2:13:05) it's a really important book um I appreciate in I appreciate yesterday when uh you recommended it back to me it made me reminded me yeah that's a that's a good book for me to read again right now so thank you so much um um so let's find out asks if I have any overlap with Jordan Peterson's yungan um psychological point of view on God uh I I haven't I haven't read that so I don't I can't tell you I'm sorry uh K Tempest Bradford asks when the Gospel of Thomas was first discovered some people thought it might be q and I know it's not but do

(2:13:43) you know if any of the sayings um are in part of it authenticating saying so yes um uh so K temp we actually have a lecture on comparing uh the gospel the sayings in the gospel of Q to the sayings of the Gospel of Thomas so I think you're going to find that super interesting you don't even have to ask me for let's do a new lecture on that because we've already done a lecture on it um let's find out says uh why do you think Jesus Socrates and Buddha didn't write themselves um so we can't know for the Buddha at

(2:14:21) all um the you know the Buddha to get back to the historical Buddha is almost impossible everything that we have about the Buddha is essentially myths about Buddha that doesn't mean there was no historical Buddha it just means that we don't I think it's very very difficult to recover anything um in terms of Socrates Socrates had an actual philosophy against um writing so Socrates believed that truth was had through dialogue and dial diog for him was not a written dialogue the way his student Plato made it into writing and it and that's a a wonderful thing for

(2:14:58) all of uh us for the rest of time because we can't all debate with Socrates because he has been gone you know um but that was um Socrates um proposition that um that truth is actually going to be had through engaging in dialogue with with everybody around him not writing something down and you can never ask a person who wrote it down a question you can't tell hey why do you think that you can't you can't ask them a follow-up question they're they're in control of the dialogue because they've they've written

(2:15:28) it down um so Socrates was against that in terms of Jesus um I think he didn't write anything down because the historical Jesus because uh uh his community was a a very poor people who were illiterate probably uh and who didn't have need for those kind of texts and were not focus on property they were uh and the text would been very costly being able to write it um would have been very ult instead they were um um sharing teachings orally and then they were um preaching good news doing healings and uh Faith healings kind of thing and and and helping others helping

(2:16:08) the poor through um uh direct direct action as opposed to concerning themselves about text uh miguelangelo again you ask uh do you think the Jesus of scripture as a literary character um has a lot of in inspiration from sages like Pythagoras and Socrates since it was written in Greek um think so so some of the uh yeah some of so some there's always going to be some potential for yeah some literary um a literary stock figure right and so you have to if you're going to write about somebody who is sage and you're P portraying him as a

(2:16:53) sage a great teacher um then some of the you know let's say some of the you might convey him through those same same same feelings um I think that the reason why I think that if if let's say um Luke had been writing from scratch if Mark hadn't written what Mark wrote um Luke might have uh used like a a somebody like Pythagoras or Socrates way more as a model um instead though because the person who got in there first and wrote um the first kind of narrative and created kind of the um the the sense of

(2:17:34) how the the literary character of Jesus uh is portrayed um I think that that maybe wasn't as much of um as the author of Mark's model so it could have happened more like that and I think it maybe has to play some kind of an influence but um but not as much as it might have happened okay so do not forget to like and share this video I am super tired subscribe to our Channel if you're able thank you for everybody who's supported and we uh we appreciate your donations if you're able Centerplace .c donate next week we're going to talk about

(2:18:14) Ecclesiastes uh the agnostic B book of the Bible good night