Transcript v2 theBrain AI

Porphyry’s Against the Christians: Feared by the Church, Burned by Emperors - M. David Litwa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt-gEbRqaAM

Transcript:

(00:01) [Music] Christians successfully destroyed the book. That's what this book is about. All that hard work of scholarship to recover a book that the Christians burned. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to cover Porphyry with an expert, Dr. M. David Litwa, who is literally patching together and reconstructing Porphyry. Earlier versions of this have been done, I believe it's R.J. Hoffman, am I correct on that, Dr.

(00:40) Litwa? R.J. Hoffman, yeah, R.J. Hoffman kind of butchered it, okay, and Dr. Louis can explain why, but he actually has written a book that everyone needs to have on their bookshelf. Look, it's going to sound a bit sensational here, but I'm going to keep it real with you. As you can see, Dr. Litwa was holding up this paperback book. This gentleman, Dr.

(01:04) Porphyry, if we can call him, was an expert. This guy was above Celsus in terms of his critique and education in the ancient world. He was so critical of Christianity and, of course, Christians that three emperors condemned him, and there were book burnings, I imagine, funding efforts to hunt down this material to eradicate it.

(01:32) The only thing we have left, think about how dangerous this guy was to Christians. The only thing we have left is we can't touch the saints. We can't touch Jerome. They comment about this. Let's keep the Christians' words. But this is the only way he exists, through these other sources. And Dr.

(01:56) Litwa has put together legitimate sources of Porphyry in his arguments, and we're going to discuss those today. So before we get into those, shameless plug, a lot of hard work goes into this. Go to mdavidlitwa.com right now in the description, and then you can continue right after. Sign up on the email list and be sure to go to his courses at the top.

(02:16) You can see it highlighted in blue. Take his courses, sign up for free on the email list, and get notified when upcoming courses or when he's doing reviews of books, YouTube videos launch out. He has a YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe and hit the bell so you're notified. And in the future, he's going to have many, many other courses.

(02:35) He's actually taking a trip to Egypt soon, a tour, so I imagine future endeavors like that. You may want to join him on that. Go to the website mdavidlitwa.com. Dr. Litwa, let me not hog the space here, but you're the expert here who's actually dug into this. You've read other academics pertaining to Porphyry. Please tell us who Porphyry is, why he was a bad mama jama to the Christians, and let's have some fun. Well, thank you, Derek. I really appreciate that intro.

(03:04) So, Porphyry was the most educated philosopher of his time, a student of Plotinus and one of the most prolific and greatest thinkers of all time. Not all of his works were destroyed. We have some full surviving works, but this work, Against the Christians, was the paradigmatic work that got burned by the Christians quite literally.

(03:45) It is the first book that I know of that Christian emperors deliberately mentioned in their edicts and in their decrees as dangerous and as needing to be burned. And these Christian emperors started a very dangerous precedent that was continued by the Roman Catholic Church of putting certain books on a list of unaccepted and rejected literature that was to be burned.

(04:25) And so I've actually dedicated the book, I don't know if you can see that, to all those people for whom their books have been burned because we know that in the thousand years of the Christian Empire that went after Porphyry, that attempt to destroy this monument of learning because it was perceived as anti-Christian was something repeated throughout time. And so the question is why did they think that it was so dangerous? And in the introduction, I try to tell you a little bit about Porphyry's life.

(05:09) So he's a student of Plotinus. Some say that he was himself a Christian in his early days, born in what is today modern Lebanon, but went to the very finest of teachers and eventually made it to Rome, and he was a student of Origen of Alexandria. So he knew the Christians very well inside and out. He knew the Bible very well. He would have known a Semitic language, some form of Phoenician.

(05:47) His name is actually Phoenician. It means Malchus. But he was called Porphyry, which means purple because that was the color of kings. And Malchus, if you know that, it means king. Wow. Why did I write this book? Well, because the other books claiming to reconstruct Porphyry either do too little or do too much.

(06:22) So in Hoffman's case, he said that he was giving you the literary remains of Porphyry, but what he actually did was give you excerpts from a 4th-century book called the Apocriticus written by a somewhat mysterious person called Macarius Magnes. And Macarius Magnes never says that he's quoting Porphyry or even using Porphyry. Not a single time. But what Hoffman does is he gives you excerpts from this book which he thinks come ultimately from Porphyry.

(06:56) And although there is some reason to think that yes, some of that material might come from Porphyry, it's really unknown. And in 2002 we had another very expensive sorry 2005 we had another very very extensive attempt to reconstruct Against the Christians by Robert Birchman. This book is published by Brill. So even if you wanted it you couldn't afford it.

(07:26) But there's no reason to want it because it also fails in its endeavor by collecting basically everything nasty said about the Christians in Christian sources and attributing it to Porphyry. Well, that's not Porphyry in about 70% of those cases. So if we're going to reconstruct what Porphyry wrote, we need to reconstruct it from people who actually say that they are quoting from Porphyry.

(08:02) And so that is what the German scholar Matthias Becker did in 2016. And it's that German scholarship that I'm now bringing into the English language with my own commentary and reconstruction. So I mean unless you read German, you're not able to read that book. But in addition to that work in German, I'm giving you a full reconstruction of what I think Porphyry wrote based on the fragments.

(08:40) And what Becker did in a much more careful way was to go through the sources once again fresh and to collect 81 fragments and testimonies from people who actually say that they are quoting or using Porphyry. And then what he did is he collected much more than that. He collected a total of if I can get the number here. He collected a total of about 130 is it 132 fragments.

(09:11) But the last 50 of those fragments are considered doubtful. And the reason why they're considered doubtful is because there's no explicit mention of Porphyry, but they sound a lot like Porphyry and they have connections to the 81 authentic fragments. So that's substantial. 81 fragments is very substantial.

(09:37) And what we're able to reconstruct out of that material is also substantial. So in my reconstruction, let's see, I started on page 178 and it goes for just to give you, you know, the length of it. It goes from 178 until 210. So it's a substantial chunk and it gives you the flavor or the gist for what Porphyry wrote.

(10:07) I'm not claiming that I'm giving you the exact words of Porphyry. We'd have to have a seance for that because yes, it's true. The Christians successfully destroyed the book. And so we're reconstructing it from quotations. And that's what we have to do. And that takes a lot of hard work.

(10:30) There were probably over a hundred people who quoted Porphyry from antiquity to the Middle Ages. And finding all those quotes has taken the better part of 150 years. And we are standing in 2025 at the culmination of that scholarship which continues to develop. I mean, you know, even today someone might find a new fragment of Porphyry that we've just never found before. We've just never looked at.

(11:03) But I'm pretty convinced that of the 135 fragments that we have, again 50 that are doubtful, we've pretty much gleaned all that we can. And so on one level he's you know with Celsus it was a little bit easier because all those quotations from Celsus come from one single source and that is Origen. Whereas in the case of Porphyry, we have dozens of authors, not just one.

(11:29) And we have to do the hard work of collecting that. And so that's what this book is about. All that hard work of scholarship to recover a book that the Christians burned. And why did they burn it? Well, it's because Porphyry talks about everything. He's just so well informed. Unlike Celsus, Porphyry knows the Bible better than most Christians. He's a bit like Marcion in that respect.

(11:55) So Porphyry knows the Old Testament like the back of his hand. He is the first to identify the book of Daniel as a forgery of the Maccabean period, which is a position held by all critical scholars today. The Christians, you know, the really conservative Christians today still think Daniel's a sixth-century prophet and governor of Babylon despite the fact that no Babylonian or any other source mentions Daniel.

(12:26) And I know Derek has done a nice video on Daniel as that fictional mythological character, but what Porphyry is the first to show not only that he's a mythological character. He's the very first person to show that, but that the entire book can be dated fairly securely to a very specific time based on the prophecies within the book.

(12:52) And so Porphyry is the very first person who had a thoroughgoing historical critical view of the Bible. Why is that significant? Because we have to wait another thousand years until Spinoza to get the birth of historical criticism. The Christians buried and destroyed Porphyry. And so they in a sense delayed the outbreak of historical critical scholarship for over a thousand years. Is it safe to say Dr.

(13:25) Litwa that and I don't want to get waded into this like deeply but this is why people coined the term dark ages that there was so much anti-intellectualism it seems going on a lot. Yeah. I mean I would avoid huge generalizations but I think there is there definitely in the case of Porphyry if Porphyry had survived we might have seen the birth of historical criticism in the 3rd century rather than the 17th century right like that's how bad it was that's how long they suppressed the truth and you know it's interesting because in in the book of Romans itself Paul blamed people for suppressing the truth in

(14:13) their ungodliness. Well, in the case of Porphyry, it's the Christians who've been suppressing the truth of his historical critical conclusions that all historical critical scholars believe they take Porphyry's position. And if we had listened to Porphyry, we could have come to the same positions over a thousand years before the Enlightenment.

(14:40) But as history would have it, in the very century after Porphyry, the Christians would take control of the empire and destroy all of that learning which was perceived as anti-Christian which included basic things like chronology and genealogies. Porphyry has a lot to say about the genealogies of Jesus. He's quite good at that material.

(15:09) He likes exposing contradictions. He talks a lot about the book of Acts in contradiction to the book of Galatians, which is again if you go to, you know, not to a seminary, but if you go to a religion department today, they're still talking about reconstructing the life of Paul and the contradictions between Acts and Galatians. All that was hit by Porphyry in the late third century.

(15:35) So I mean it's a very old thing but you know that got buried for a very very long time. Porphyry talks about so many other things not just Peter and Paul but miracles. He talks about the relation of the gospels. He talks about how the gospel writers misidentify the prophecies that they quote.

(16:00) So the famous example being from the gospel of Mark where he opens it with you know thus was said by the prophet Isaiah whereas he then goes on to quote Malachi. Porphyry was so good in terms of his knowledge of the Old Testament. He could pinpoint exactly where the error was and make hay out of that. And Christians were very very concerned about that because the point is a historical critical point.

(16:30) They couldn't say, right, that they couldn't just look away, right? Mark is actually wrong. He quotes from Isaiah. He says that Isaiah said this and then he goes on along with Isaiah to quote from the book of Malachi. So, he's factually wrong, right? And there was no way to get around that, right? They couldn't just wave their hands and get rid of that. That kind of thing really bothered the Christians.

(17:01) Augustine in his letter 102 also deals with a number of questions that Porphyry raised. Let me just give you a taste for this. So number one, will the future resurrection be as the resurrection of Lazarus or as the resurrection of Christ? Two, what about all the nations who lived and died before Christ's coming? Three, why do Christians reject sacrifices when this is what the Jewish God, also the Christian God, supposedly desires? Four, why does Jesus contradict himself when he threatens people with everlasting and measured punishment?

(17:40) And skipping to five, did Solomon really say that God has no son? And six, finally, how can the story of Jonah who spent three days in the belly of a large fish and sat under a magically grown gourd be true? So these are the kinds of questions that Porphyry would raise. And it's quite good.

(18:05) I mean, I would say the quality of the writing is quite good. Porphyry was also a philosopher. So he could engage with Christian theology in a way that Celsus wasn't prepared to do. So Celsus had read some of Christian literature but really hadn't done so very deeply. Celsus was dependent on a lot of Marcionite attacks of Christianity and he mostly dealt with the kind of social structure of Christianity whereas Porphyry is really focused on texts. He's a textualist. He's a literary critic. And so he takes on

(18:46) Christian allegory. Like he shows why it's wrong for Christians to kind of clean up try to clean up the Old Testament with allegory. Allegory being that method of saying, well, the text doesn't really mean that. I mean, it has a spiritual meaning. So he goes after that technique.

(19:08) And then another thing that he does is he tries to involve Christians in logical and theological debates. And one of them, for instance, if I can find the passage here, one of them deals with the idea of the logos of God.

(19:38) So if the logos of God is something that is separate from God, then it's no longer God. And if the logos of God is something that's inside God, then it's not distinguished from God. And therefore, there is no logos. Those are the kinds of logical dilemmas he would try to raise. His critiques against the apostles are some of the best that have ever been made.

(20:00) He goes after Peter and Paul with extreme acuity and he goes after you know he why is that important? Because Peter and Paul are the founders of Roman Catholicism. Rome claimed those two apostles and it seems that Porphyry spent most of his adult life in Rome. So he would have been very concerned about that. I'm just wondering if I can quote a little bit from one of the fragments here just to give you a sense of this.

(20:31) But maybe the best thing I can do is just quote what we think is a fragment from book one and just to give you a taste of this. So I'm reading from page 181 of the text. So according to his letter to the Galatians, Paul did not immediately confer with flesh and blood. This is a quotation of Galatians 1:16.

(21:03) After he claimed a revelation of Christ, Paul did not consider it worthy to go to human beings and confer in speech, lest after receiving the doctrine of God, he might be instructed by flesh and blood. Paul then condemned Peter, saying, "For before some people came from James, he ate with the Gentiles.

(21:21) But when they came, he separated himself, fearing those of the circumcision, and many Jews joined him. So Peter forced uncircumcised Gentile believers to comply with the burdensome requirements of the law. And then Paul rebuked Peter because he did not walk correctly in the truth of the gospel. But with this remark, there is a major and serious condemnation that a man who was an interpreter of the divine mouth should live in hypocrisy and act so as to please people.

(21:53) If then Peter is reported to have been involved in such vices, how can one not shudder to think that he who was choked with myriad absurdities, as it were, possesses the keys of heaven, both to loose and to bind? Paul says that he acted as a Jew among Jews to win them to Christ. To a Jew, he became a Jew. Thus, he was guilty of dissimulation as in the case when he shaved his head at Cenchrea. This is from Acts.

(22:17) Or when he made an offering in Jerusalem, also in Acts, or when he circumcised Timothy, also in Acts. This is the man who in his letter to the Philippians called circumcision mutilation. So Paul was impudent in so far as he dared to rebuke Peter, censuring him to his face and compelling him by logic to confess his wrongdoing.

(22:43) But on what authority did Paul dare to rebuke Peter, the apostle of the circumcised, for the very thing that he, as apostle of the uncircumcised, had done? Paul opposed Peter and the rest so that as far as public appearances were concerned, their hypocrisy in observing the law which was harmful to Gentile believers might be corrected by his own hypocrisy in reproaching Peter. And it goes on, you know, so he's quite rhetorically proficient anyway. He's good.

(23:09) I love that he's sharp. He noticed for the viewer who may not have caught all of that, what the takeaway is that literally Paul rebukes Peter for acting one way in front of the Jews and then another in front of the Gentiles. Right? Technically Peter had become all things to all men. First to the Gentile and to the Jew.

(23:32) And here's Paul who says literally the same. I become a Jew to a Jew and I act like a Greek to a Greek. And it's like dude you just literally slap publicly by the way that's the other problem too that he mentions that the teachings of the Lord in the gospels is that listen we need don't you do it in private you don't publicly shame your brethren and literally he does the very thing he's not supposed to do according to the teachings of Jesus and so like man this is what we do today we who have left and find holes who thought We

(24:07) do it because we believe the Bible was perfect, inerrant, infallible. The text is like spirit-filled. There's no error. It's like the true teaching, right? So, it's easy to poke holes in that when you finally realize, oh my gosh, this balloon, you know, isn't what I thought. Please continue. Sorry, I just wanted to emphasize that.

(24:27) Yeah, absolutely. One other thing that Porphyry does is he lets us know about sources which also don't exist. And I know Derek is particularly interested in this. So it's Porphyry who actually has access to a book called the Phoenician History by a gentleman named Philo of Byblos. And Byblos is not far from where Porphyry grew up.

(24:53) And since Porphyry himself is Phoenician then he would have been very interested in a book called Phoenician History. But he has this book on his shelves. It has since been lost and it's probably the case that our only access to this book Phoenician history comes through stuff that Porphyry himself quotes and deals with.

(25:18) What happens in later history is that as is so common Christians will try to attack Porphyry but also basically use Porphyry's library. That is they will cannibalize the quotes from Porphyry in order to fight against Porphyry which is kind of ironic because Porphyry is the scholarly writer who's saying okay I know you have a version of Jewish history that you find in the Hebrew Bible but I'm Phoenician you know I'm your neighbor right and we've got this Phoenician history which tells the history of the Jews in a seriously different way than your little myth basically about Moses, Abraham, and the boys. And so this is really

(26:03) important stuff. So Porphyry gives all these quotes from Philo's the Phoenician history and there's a lot of juicy material in this book that doesn't later appear until we find the actual Phoenician tablets in Ras Shamra which you know was early early 20th century where we found the Ugaritic material right so what's fascinating about this is that you know Porphyry is writing at a time and where he has access to this Phoenician history that is right around the time that the New Testament is written as well. Right? And

(26:53) it gives a different version of the history of the Jews. He gives a different version of the theology of the Jews as well. And what Philo says is that he got his records from a priest of the God Yahwo. And that is apparently Yahweh. And so that's very interesting.

(27:26) And you know what what are some of the things that he says? Well, he's got this story of El, who is imagined to be an ancient Phoenician king, but his name just means God in both Hebrew and Phoenician. And he says that there was a tradition in Phoenicia where El the king sacrificed his beloved son called Ye on an altar. And that was very interesting to Porphyry because it seemed to be like the message of Christianity a thousand years before Christianity borrowed that particular myth.

(28:10) So the fact that he was able to pinpoint that source is so important for us because again 95% of ancient literature has been lost and what specifically has been lost everything that either threatened or didn't interest the Christians because for a thousand years of copying right only Christians were doing the copying right like what's going to survive that gauntlet right where the Christians do the copying for a thousand years right so we have all this antique literature you know the library of Alexandria a million volumes and then it has to go through the bottleneck

(28:54) of that middle ages late into the middle ages where only Christians are copying books and then what do we get out of that 5 to 10% five to 10% of the literature that was so important for reconstructing our own history. Wow. So there's Porphyry. Yeah. So, okay, I just to dive a little bit more into this you know what what did we lose here, right? Because as you said, for the viewer who may not have caught it, what Porphyry has whatever it is, even if Sanchuniathon the priest, this Phoenician priest was fictional. The Philo

(29:38) guy, he's real, he claims he's translating this old myth. Correct. that Philo of Byblos translated it and that Porphyry's got his hands on this as well. Exactly. Yeah. So the claim is that the material in the Phoenician history goes back to very old Phoenician sources, right? And Porphyry accepts that claim and I think actually that claim is perfectly acceptable, right? You know like in the sense that if someone came you know with the Old Testament and said you know this goes back to very old Jewish sources well of course it does

(30:21) but you know the debate is is the Septuagint of the year 300 or 1300 you know like that makes a big difference so what Porphyry is saying is that the Phoenician history goes back to Sanchuniathon who might have lived you know in the era of Moses. That claim might be wrong.

(30:44) Sanchuniathon might be Hellenistic for all that we know, but he is still a Phoenician source. And the reason why we know that that's basically accurate is because a lot of the material, the Ugaritic material does overlap with the things that Philo says. So that's the check that we can make. A check that we don't have in the case of the Old Testament.

(31:10) Like we can't go and like check on whether the Israelites went through the Red Sea because the Babylonians talked about it. No, they don't. Well, we can check things like the great flood, right? So, the Babylonians would talk about a big flood. So, we can check on that one. But most of what we would call Jewish mythology or lore in the Old Testament, like the stories of Solomon and David and you know the prophets, nobody else talks about that.

(31:35) So there's no way to check up on that literature. Only in very small respects can archaeology come in as a help. But basically yeah the Jewish material it has it is free reign. It's kind of like self-authenticating. It's like the revelation of God. There you go. You think that's what Porphyry saw and Porphyry said, "Listen, I have an alternative history and in fact I've got sources kind of doing the historical work of saying I got this guy and I'm working off of real legitimate stuff because I actually read somewhere on this a while back. That's why it was so it piqued my interest with your book." Again,

(32:11) shameless plug. Get Dr. Litwa's book here. You want it not just to read one time. You need it on your bookshelf. This is one of those reference tools you're going to need and it's super affordable on a Strive card. So, it was something that rang a bell in my head with so many studies. There's a scholar named Giovanni Garbini who wrote an interesting very very critical minimalist kind of take.

(32:41) But he actually argues that Yahweh was originally in the north that he doesn't take the southern hypothesis. He thinks that Yahweh was even in the Canaanite material. And he argues that there's a text in the Ugaritic tablets in the Baal cycle that says that the god El says that the name of my son is Yah. And you know that alone scholars contend and say no that's Yam, right? There's a debate over is it Yam because Yam's also El's son or is this Yahweh? Yah.

(33:13) And what his evidence he pointed out in his book other than going to other areas as well to point out this theophoric term he says in Philo or really in he in he says Porphyry in Eusebius right quotes and says to this day they still in this same region are using the same name for this god yet how you pronounce this god that is Yahweh Okay. In the Phoenician region in this particular area a millennium later.

(33:44) So he's referring back to this material and I read somewhere else last comment on this but just to get your two cents that archaeology like you said with Ras Shamra literally does fact check a lot of the material. Not everything.

(34:01) It's not like he exhausted every bit of sources that there were in antiquity but there is this overlap that actually vindicates whatever this source was. And so I guess my last question and any comments that you'd like to make on this because this really piques my interest. You know, I like to find those older myths. I like to find those alternative histories.

(34:20) I like to see shared cultural material in some way that may not be genetic like direct but influential in the milieu in the air they're breathing in some way shape or form whether it's literary, whether it's cultural, custom, trade, you name it. because they're geographically so close.

(34:41) So the question I have is what was this alternative history that we lost that was the Phoenician history and would it have looked not like the Bible necessarily but imagine if we could just read that primary source what that might freakishly look like similar to the biblical tales.

(34:59) I don't know what are your thoughts? Well I think it might have looked a lot like the Old Testament. It might have mentioned characters like Moses and Abraham but have given alternative stories about them because you have to imagine that Porphyry is very savvy. Porphyry himself is a book collector, a book hunter and the greatest scholar of his time.

(35:19) So in the late third century he still had available to him all of ancient literature and he knew the name of the Jewish god and he was looking for an alternative history of that god and of the Jewish people. So when he read in the Phoenician history that it goes back to the records of a priest of the god Yo or Yuo or however you want to pronounce it. He really picked up his ears there.

(35:47) I mean, that pricked up his ears like he was on the hunt for an alternative history of the Jews. And that's exactly what he says. Like I'll just read the quote here from page 31 of my book. Porphyry is quoting Sanchuniathon and saying that he recounts the history of the Jews most truthfully in deep agreement with their places and their names.

(36:19) He obtained his records from Hiramalis, priest of the god Yo. And this Hiramalis dedicated his history to Avivalis the priest or sorry the king of the people of Beirut and Hiramalis had been accepted by the king and by contemporary examiners of historical veracity. The times of these people fall even before the times of the Trojan War and they closely approximate the times of Moses as the succession lists of the kings of Phoenicia show.

(36:58) So from what we can reconstruct what the Phoenician history told was mainly the story of Phoenicians which Porphyry took to be contemporaneous with Moses. But he also thinks that the Phoenician history threw a lot of light onto Jewish history. And of course it would, right? Because they are so close.

(37:24) You know, barely, you know, an hour's drive. I mean, if you're in Galilee, you can be in Lebanon in an hour's drive. Not that there's a lot of travel between Galilee and Lebanon these days, but it's literally next door. So basically what I would speculate here is that Porphyry really enjoyed this book because it gave an alternative history of Moses. It might have talked about an alternative history of David and of Solomon.

(37:55) Remember that even in the Old Testament, the Jews acknowledge that Solomon had a very close relationship with the local king of Phoenicia. And it was actually the local king of Phoenicia is where they got the materials, possibly even the building design for the first temple. Those big cedars of Lebanon, you know, that's where they got the material.

(38:18) And yes, it's true that in the Jewish counterhistory, kings like you know, northern kings are blamed because they're too close to Phoenicia. That is, you know, the Lady Jezebel, for instance, she's Phoenician. She's a Phoenician queen and she marries an Israelite king and they're just too close theologically for the southern writer of the book of Kings to be comfortable with.

(38:59) And so she gets essentially I mean some very misogynistic things are said about that lady. But you know, look where she's from. They didn't like her because where she was from, you know, they didn't like her theologically. She might have been the greatest queen of Israel that Israel ever knew, but you would never know that reading the Old Testament, but you might get a different version of that from a book called the Phoenician History.

(39:29) Why didn't the Phoenician history survive? It must have had a lot of stuff that Christians didn't like. And neither Jews nor Christians would be really happy to have an alternative history of their nation. They want to keep the Old Testament on its own, you know. So that book didn't survive. It wasn't burned as far as we know, but Christians never bothered to copy it, right? except in these portions that Eusebius quotes which he thinks he can selectively use in order to support Christianity. And that's really the deadly poison here. It's not that Eusebius and the church fathers are always

(40:09) wrong in how they quote. It's that they are so selective, right? only picking and choosing 1% but the stuff that they think that supports them and then not giving you the context right because Porphyry tells you this is an alternative history for the Jews and it's accurate but Eusebius only takes stuff like this confirms when Moses lives you know it's so he's it's dishonest in the sense that it's robbed of context and Eusebius is very clear about this. He's like Porphyry made hell of Jewish history and I don't like that. And what were his

(40:56) sources? Philo's texts of antiquity. So powerful. This is such a thread I want to pull on it. It seems like the difference between Porphyry and Celsus, Kelsus for those who prefer that K sound is Celsus seems to be dependent on Jewish I don't I don't want to say theology or propaganda.

(41:27) I don't know what the proper term is, but it also seems to be depending on Jewish ideas pertaining to them being antagonistic toward Christians, which is also I'm thankful for, don't get me wrong, because you can then get another angle kind of preserved within a non-Jewish source using Jewish kind of anti-apologetic arguments against Christians. And it helps in so many ways, which by the way, I recommend your course and your book on this because it actually covers all of this cool stuff.

(41:56) But it sounds to me Porphyry actually is being I almost want to say at least within his philosophy more consistent. He's willing to jab at the Jews and the Christians. He's saying across the board where Celsus I feel is trying to be somewhat compatible. Am I correct in that? With both the with Jews and himself, yet he condemns Christians. My reading of Celsus is he's just as much anti-Jewish as he is Christian.

(42:23) As he is anti-Christian. He actually, what's interesting about Celsus is I think he's from Alexandria and he uses native Alexandrian sources to talk about the Jews. He doesn't want to use the Old Testament. In fact, he's generally ignorant of the Old Testament. So, he uses the Egyptian myth.

(42:49) It might be history, but according to the Egyptian myth, the Jews are actually Egyptians who were rebels and they followed a leprous priest called Osarseph Moses out of Egypt and formed their own nation in the northeast. So Celsus is no friend of the Jews. But I would on that score I would recommend reading Celsus and Porphyry together.

(43:19) Again, my translations of Celsus and Porphyry, they are sister volumes. So, you know, read them together. And obviously in the case of Celsus, you can take my course. Just go on the website. It's an online course. It's all pre-recorded. You can take the course and yeah so go to town with that I'm hoping someday there'll be a Porphyry course but not yet but trust me the book is you know more than enough to get your feet wet I really hope everybody will go down below I am an affiliate of Dr. Litwa's courses and I hope that people will

(43:57) sign in through that link it helps me out helps us continue doing this also brings Dr. Litwa back to this channel to provide education to the audience out there. And I sincerely appreciate your time, Dr. Litwa. I'm sure we can cover a lot more, but for the in the meantime right now, I think we've chewed on some of this pretty deep, insightful stuff, food for thought, and I'm sure the audience will enjoy. So, comment down below.

(44:23) What were your thoughts? What would you like to know? Just tell us a little bit about where you're at and what you think about this. I think that if you're going to be a critical person toward Christianity in the modern period, why aren't you speaking or reading the history of your ancestry, the tradition of being critical? This guy right here, Porphyry is your grandfather in this, if you will.

(44:48) And you really need to know because he's seeing stuff that I was actually reading today in Litwa's book here, Dr. that I didn't even think through in such precise ways. Like I didn't realize Paul contradicted himself by I'm a Jew to Jews. I'm a Greek to Greeks. And then I never thought about relating that to him accusing Peter of the very thing he says elsewhere he's doing.

(45:19) I never like and here I am always looking for holes and doing all that kind of stuff. I just did not see that. And this guy had just precision sharp 2020 eye vision on this. So, any final words from you, Dr. Litwa, that people should know or how can they get the course, all these kinds of things? Yep, just head over to the website. There's courses in the main tab.

(45:38) I've got about a dozen courses there. If you join the Gnosis Academy, which is on top, you'll get access to seven courses at once. It's a subscription payment but it's seven courses at once and then a monthly hangout where we hang out together at the end of the month.

(46:01) So don't miss that if you want all the courses kind of combined. So, just go into the Gnosis Academy and or go to courses and then press the picture click the thumbnail the Gnosis Academy and then that'll give you access to seven of my full courses plus the monthly hangout. So, I think that's actually most economically reasonable at this point.

(46:34) You'll get an additional course every two months and yeah so go to town. Celsus is not in there yet but he will be soon. So just to let you know. And a final thing if I can I'm going to Egypt this November 4th to 12th. I hope all of you know about that. And if you have any interest at all in really seeing the ancient world with an expert, you know, on a fantastic tour with an amazing tour company, this is your opportunity.

(47:15) I don't know when Derek is releasing this video, but you save $500 by signing up before August 25th. The registration is only open until September 15th. So, do not miss this opportunity. I truly mean this. There are so many people who have emailed me and said, "I really, really want to go and spots are filling up. I want everyone to know. This is it. I'm not going again. So, please join.

(47:40) " Ladies and gentlemen, you heard it. Go sign up right now. Maybe you can get me a link to that as well. We'll add it in the description. I sincerely hope you continue to seek, study, learn. We're all on a path.

(47:59) We're all on a path and I love learning about these little things that the ancient world has for us especially keeps us distracted from some of the more chaotic things that happen all the time. So thank you so much Dr. Litwa for your time and ladies and gentlemen I hope you never forget we are myth vision.