Transcript

Is Easter Historical?

(00:04) good evening wherever eat this livestream is finding you I'm John Hamer as you see I've finally been released from my self-imposed quarantine after coming back to Canada from my trip to Australia and I'm here at centre place although we are of course still exercising all kinds of self isolation and different types of disinfecting and things like that as we are traveling and and continuing to be safe in this very you know trying time for everybody and during the pandemic normally on Tuesday evenings our history

(00:45) theology and philosophy group would gather here and we would have a lecture on the kind of topics which we'd also livestream for audiences wherever you are around the world but of course now when we have canceled in-person meetings we are gonna continue to do our lectures and livestream them and so tonight in honor of Holy Week in the Christian calendar in honor of the upcoming celebration of Easter at least according to the Western calendar in the Western Christian tradition this Sunday we are going to have a topic tonight looking at

(01:29) the question how much of the eastern narrative as it's traditionally retold and celebrated in the Christian tradition how much of that is perhaps historical and how much isn't there's going to be a minimum historical consensus among academics that there was a historical Jesus who was crucified so we're not really that part of it's not in question but all of the other details that happen we're gonna look at what the academic disciplines of history and literary criticism can tell us and what they can't tell us about the rest of the narrative this of course is our history

(02:12) theology and philosophy eat up my name is John Hamer and I serve as the coordinator of the meet up my background is as a historian I've also been a map maker and a theologian and I serve as pastor of the Toronto Congregation of Community of Christ here at the center place we always begin with our mission in our congregation which is to invite everyone into community to continually learn and grow to abolish poverty and end needless suffering to promote peace and justice and to live life meaningfully together and all of that is really vital I think and these

(02:53) kind of trying times so even though we aren't able to be in physical presence with each other we nevertheless are reaching out and trying to find ways that we can connect with via live streams and the different discussions here and hopefully as you're joining in if you have questions we'll do like we always do be open to the questions Landro will relay them to me and I will endeavor to answer them here in the live stream when I mentioned that next Tuesday we're going to have Leandro giving a lecture it's one that he first

(03:32) gave several years ago and has approved just amazingly popular on YouTube I think there's like 15,000 people of what you didn't watch through this lecture and so he's more experienced and he's going to updated it and give it in a new way but this is the topic before God was God and so we're going to look at or he's going to look at the what history can tell us and what literary criticism can tell us about the earliest understandings of the god of the Israelites and how they understood him prior to the modern that's a more recent

(04:14) let's say not modern but anyway fun brought be prior to the development of monotheism we want to invite you to if you are so inclined to come to our Easter service we do also livestream our Sunday inclusive church services and it's growing has been a growing communion as there isn't in person Church and so for Easter which is really the central celebration of the Christian calendar this Sunday at noon Eastern 11:00 central 10 Mountain 9 Pacific we will have a live stream broadcast of a service um we're gonna have a whole host of amazing

(05:04) ministers from around the world who will be participating than this including Scott Murphy of the First Presidency of community price who will give the disciples generous response apostle Lachlan Makai who will give the prayer for peace fossil robbing link heart will be presiding and my different John delenn who is the host of the Mormon stories podcast is going to come on and he's going to give us our peace lesson there's going to be a whole bunch of other really amazing ministers and ministry of music and so we invite you to come it's gonna be a pretty special service but our topic

(05:42) tonight is is Easter historical and so we want to kind of open up that and see what we're actually talking about in terms of all these questions I'm from Minnesota and I've referenced this a couple times that there's a great series that the Coen brothers who grew up in the suburb right next to mine in Minnesota Fargo and they made a movie and there's a TV series about it and wherever this TV series starts it begins with this statement this is a true story this at the request of the survivors the names have been changed out of respect for the dead the rest is told is that exactly as it occurred and of course

(06:26) although that's the header the conceit the beginning of the show how the show's credits start the reality is that this is it may well be a true story but it's not a story that's historic or had right so this is a story that's either the Coen brothers or one of the other screenwriters for the series have crafted but Fargo is not in fact something that happened it's not something that historians have written there's a difference here that they're making either literary or however they're making this conceit between history and truth so I think in our

(07:03) modern bias we have a lot of confusion between historicity and truth so for a lot of people when they hear this is a true story they they take that to mean okay well that means it actually happened that way in history but I think the more that we now are aware of history and the more that we have a heightened understanding of historicity we are coming to realize that the fact that something happened doesn't necessarily mean that it expresses anyth truth something's just happened some things could have happened and it doesn't necessarily mean anything and you can learn from history if you if you

(07:45) analyze it but it doesn't necessarily mean that just because things happen that there's anything to learn and conversely this here is a picture that we've used a bunch of times to to illustrate Plato the founder essentially of western philosophies very famous allegory of the cave which expresses Plato's central philosophical conception of truth and reality so the allegory of the cave that's a allegory that has no historicity it's specifically called an allegory and yet for all sorts of people who are plate inist s-- who have been influenced by Plato this thing which is

(08:31) not historical but is a narrative nevertheless expresses profound truths and will be familiar with all sorts of stories that we tell in the case of Christianity parables like the parable of the Good Samaritan or any another the prodigal son there was all sorts of stories and narratives that we talk about that maybe speak to us that express real truths and there is a difference between that and that truth and the fact that it's historical or not historical nevertheless because we have this modern focus on historicity and this bias in

(09:12) fact there is become also I think a kind of a collective bias against the word myth and so a lot of times people will dismiss things and say well that's just a myth that's just a fable that never happened and so therefore it has no meaning or value you know we're sort of bias but when I think is that in the recent generation anyway we've started to get pull back from this bias of modernity and begun to recover our awareness of the importance of narrative and so in the case of religious narrative you can call what the Greeks here had for ancient Greeks since since paganism is no longer an active religion

(09:55) and so you're not abusing anybody's belief system to call it a myth and to be quite negative about it nevertheless if there were active pagans who were talking about this story of theseus and the minotaur as as identity forming as part of their narrative as speaking to who they are as a people and how they understand them we might call that a sacred story now as opposed to in a war we could recover the word myth it depends on how open we are to not having all of those biases or Laden in those kinds of words of myth so what I want to try to do tonight is to kind of even

(10:40) though my background is as a historian and I'm interested in history to not privilege historicity and not to decide well what's historical or what actually happened is the most important thing but rather to suggest that meaning and purpose are going to be more important and and conveying them through narrative conveying that meaning through narrative is actually more important in any event so the eastern narrative is Christianity's core sacred story and so in my view it that its value derives from the meaning and it's also derived from its annual retelling and not from

(11:23) whether the different events as we may be collectively recall them or collectively retell them happened in actual history in any way that we can tell for sure so that's my bias to do this I think it's also important we have sometimes have when we're thinking about this idea of Jesus Christ and this is going to be true whether you're Christian or not Christian many people have more than one thing in mind when we think okay Jesus Christ and so we're going to separate out the historical Jesus from our Blob concept that we just have rolled up together in Jesus Christ

(12:10) I want to say you know as a distinction the historical Jesus is something that can only be approached through the academic disciplines of history and literary criticism helped with other disciplines like archaeology and things like that we can never experience the historical Jesus because it's the past and we aren't in that past we're taking 2000 years ago and so all we have are these tools and these tools don't tell us truth or false or anything like that but rather these tools are giving us our best and most likely approximation of what historians feel happened given the

(12:53) sources that we have given anachronism and other kinds of things that are in the sources and what therefore is the most likely scenario and indeed with the historical Jesus and we'll do lectures we've done lectures before we've pointed out that in fact the evidence is such that multiple academically defensible positions and constructs of the historical Jesus are possible in other words different scholars can make cases academically for different pictures that they create of the historical Jesus which are academically defensible but cannot be conclusively

(13:34) proven because the evidence simply doesn't allow for us to get to historical conclusiveness like that okay that's the historical Jesus but I also want to separate Jesus Christ into two other components that are critically important here so the first is the Jesus Christ of Scripture and indeed there's actually multiple Jesus Christ's of Scripture so we have not only the four separate canonical accounts of Jesus Christ in the Christian New Testament so the four Gospels but we also have descriptions and visions and understandings of Jesus

(14:16) Christ from our other canonized scriptural writers writers like Paul who don't provide us with a complete gospel but who don't necessarily agree in his conception say then let's say maybe what the conception is of the Gospel writers of the Gospel of John and so we tend to think of the canonical Jesus Christ of scriptures by lumping them all together ironing out contradictions and kind of creating a composite vision in our head and that's completely fine that's how but that's we have to understand is our

(14:58) own composite interpretation that we've created in our minds and the individual writers of these texts each have their own authorial vision that they are portraying and we will understand their portrait better if we understand it in isolation and think of the individual writer and their own community that they're speaking to as always with text the text is important not so much the context of if let's say 30 ad or whenever the historical Jesus might have been around it's more important to be thinking about the context of the writer so if the principal author of the Gospel

(15:43) of John is writing around the Year 90 it's more important to understand that author's context in order to understand what that author is trying to convey and so that's how we understand anyway the concept context of the many historical I'm sorry that many Jesus Christ's of Scripture and all of those are going to be distinct I would argue from the Christ of theology the Christ and is more than one of these as well but the idea that theologians in the Christian tradition have developed over time the insights that they've gained where they

(16:22) now have understood God through this additional lens of the second person of this what has emerged as a doctrine of Trinity and an understanding therefore that Christ of theology understanding understanding God through that lens as again is a distinct from the narrative pictures that emerge in Scripture and especially distinct from what historians are able to tell us about the figure of Jesus in history so they're not the same and they have to be approached using different disciplines and they're gonna yield very different results and so when we are doing look into the historical

(17:08) Jesus like we're doing now and we are using tools like history and literary criticism we're gonna have a very different end result and a very different vision emerge then if we're going to use the tools of theology to understand the second person of the Trinity through a theological lens alright so for that let's go to the eastern narrative the passion narrative and take a look at it in our canonical accounts the Gospel accounts so one of the things we find when we look at the four canonical Gospels fools these are actually anonymous

(17:50) Gospels they've been attributed by Christian tradition to Matthew Mark Luke and John and we call them by those names and when we look at them and we look at the overall proportion of their texts we find that even though the passion story what we call Holy Week is only one week of Jesus's life nevertheless it takes a lot more of the time period of the actual gospel narrative so not as much just of Matthew's 15 percent though of Matthew's Gospel is devoted to that week twenty percent of Mark's Gospel 20

(18:31) percent of Luke's Gospel and a full 40 percent of John's Gospel is devoted to narrating the events of this one week out of Jesus's life so in other words it's very important in all of the Gospel writers Minds we had a whole lecture last week about literary dependence among the first three Gospels the synoptic Gospels and we talked about how the most likely scenario that explains literary dependence is that the authors of Matthew and Luke both had access to Mark's texts when they are composing their own narratives and so it's

(19:16) therefore it very normal that we could expect that in the in the passion narrative Matthew and Luke are going to follow mark pretty closely they both had access to it they're both editing Mark's texts and expanding Mark's text and so there is very strong agreement between those three accounts as we'd expect but what sort of unusual comparatively is that there's actually also a lot of overlap in the passion portion of the story between Mark and John and whereas we don't see that same indications of literary dependence a

(19:56) which is to mean if the author of the principal authors of John don't Mark's text open in front of them and they are actively editing it or including some things we're changing some things what might be true though is that the author of John is aware of the story that as its told in mark's text and so maybe what's happened is they have gone somewhere they've heard it read or it's been told they've found the story very familiar and without having it in front of them as they are writing their text there perhaps responding to

(20:33) it and following some of the things that there's agreement about but maybe rejecting other components of it and so there is some kind of awareness here even if it's not a situation of literary dependence which is quite interesting okay I want to look at just what the text is what is the details of this story if you're Christian you probably are fairly aware of this but you may have conflated all of the additional details that Matthew Luke and John add so on a look at how the story is told with in Mark's Gospel so what's the

(21:11) bare-bones part of the original narrative as we have it so in mark's account beginning in chapter 11 of Mark on Sunday Palm Sunday Jesus enters Jerusalem riding a donkey colt to the acclamation of the crowds who cover the way ahead of him with palm fronds mark represents this as a royal act the crowd shout blessed is the coming kingdom of our Father David so the house of David is being restored here this is a royal entry as described in mark the next day Monday in mark's account jesus goes into the marketplace

(21:53) that is on the temple mount and there overturns the tables of the moneychangers and so when this is described mark the author of mark here presents the local authorities as being way too worried about jesus's popularity with the crowds in to be able to respond publicly the next day in marks account on Tuesday Jesus teaches in the temple and on the Mount of Olives and so this is a sort of a you know anyway from a historical standpoint is sort of a strange idea that if after Jesus has caused this very serious

(22:34) disruption that you know would have you know caused maybe a big response that was if he actually did overturn money changers tables it's sort of remarkable here that mark records that Jesus is able to teach in the temple the next day as if nothing had happened to the day before his teaching on the Mount of Olives conveys marks apocalyptic prophecies what sometimes called the little apocalypse which is kind of at the heart we'll see of Mark's understanding of Christianity and indeed the coming end-times which the author of mark feels that he's a part of considering he is writing at

(23:16) the time that the Roman Jewish war is happening after immediately after the destruction of Jerusalem when he's concerned that the end of the world is upon him and his fellow Christians and Jews the next day in mark's account wednesday an unnamed woman anoint Jesus feet at Bethany with expensive myrrh which is prefiguring his impending death so in mark's account as usual the disciples I usually don't understand what's going on and they don't understand here the significance of an anointing that would normally be done in the case of a body that is being anointed with myrrh for burial

(24:02) this woman is sometimes now it's conflated with with Mary Magdalene and things like this this is simply a traditional conflation that happens later that day on that Wednesday the ranking priests according to Mark's account conspire with one of Jesus disciples named Judas Iscariot to turn Jesus over to them and according to mark the priests are worried that the crowds are gonna riot during the Passover festival if they publicly arrest Jesus while he's teaching and before a crowd that's why he needs to be turned over in private on Thursday is when according to marks

(24:44) account Jesus and His disciples prepare a Passover meal and during that meal Jesus calls the bread his body and the wine his blood so he Institute's the Christian later Christian tradition and and practice of Communion and he also predicts his betrayal and he predicts that even Peter will deny him later that night in mark's account jesus goes to a garden and prays father take this cup from me but resigns himself to the will of the creator meanwhile the disciples who are never never very heroic in mark's account are unable to even stay awake on watch duty and then when Jesus

(25:33) comes back and comes back about among the disciples Judas shows up with a body of armed men who are working for the high priest and betrays Jesus with a kiss he's taken into custody then late into the night Jesus is tried before the Sanhedrin which is a priestly Council and is convicted when he admits to being the Christ so when he anyway calls himself that and so mark deliberately portrays this trial portrays a trial that is illegal on several accounts so many commentators have noted that no such trial would be held on the Passover

(26:13) and and the charges of heresy or tried on charges of heresy when there's conflicting accounts from the witnesses nevertheless what Mark is portraying here is an illegal trial the next day I'm sorry I guess wait into the night of the Thursday outside Peter did not denies that he knows Jesus three times just as Jesus had predicted and so as is in that level of you know self tragedy on the on the Friday Good Friday Jesus has tried before the Roman procurator Pilate who asks if Jesus is king at the Judeans to which Jesus only answers if you say so thou has said it and so Pilate only

(27:00) reluctantly sends Jesus to be crucified later that Friday the Romans crucified Jesus at Golgotha and between two different rebels and they mock him with the sign the King of the Judeans as Jesus after Jesus's death that Friday his body is gotten from Pilate from joe by joseph of arimathea otherwise unknown in the text who has the body placed in his own tomb and the entrance to the tomb is closed with a large rock we the narrative skips Saturday but on Sunday Mary Magdalene Mary the mother of James and Salome go to the tomb and find it empty and angel appears and tells them

(27:50) that Jesus has been raised and so and that's the passion story just briefly summarized I've gone into a little bit of detail but anyway summarized as told in Mark's Gospel and in fact Mark's Gospel originally ends with the women at the tomb without any stories of the risen Christ that are found in later Gospels so many early Christians found Mark's Gospel to be unsatisfactory I mean we understand that for example the authors of Matthew the author of Luke found it so unsatisfactory that they took it and expanded it and made a much

(28:25) bigger gospel text of their own but other scribes who just got a hold of Mark's text and had it on their own there's at least two continuations there's the short ending and the longer ending that early Christians added to it because they were so dissatisfied with the ending of mark's account but mark's account ends probably at this point for the very good reason in mark's view that that Christ actually hasn't come back the way the other Christians understood and instead is about to come back because mark has foreseen all of

(29:05) these particular signs like the destruction of Jerusalem that are happening in real time in his immediate contemporary life and he's reading that to mean oh wait Christ actually hasn't come back on Pentecost or any of those things Christ is about to come back now and so all of the different visionary stories of which mark is aware stories of different disciples seeing the risen Christ perhaps seeing the risen Christ having walked on water or on a Mount of Transfiguration where they have a vision of Christ between Moses and Elijah the risen Christ mark has probably taken

(29:51) those accounts of a risen Christ who has come back and has retro ejected them in his narrative to put them as a taking place during Jesus's lifetime because mark knows those stories but does not believe that Jesus has come back yet anyway that's completely one possibility of why Mark's narrative works the way it does so I want to look a little bit at a time line to try to just get our handle on on how this all fits together so I have here a kind of a map of the first century of the Common Era the first century AD at the beginning here at the

(30:38) top I'm highlighting John the Baptist's ministry John the Baptist then is beheaded by Herod Antipas and Jesus ministry where Jesus is baptized first by John and then later crucified by Pontius Pilate I'm always doing these dates with Circa because we don't know what the exact date of any of these things would be but let's say circa 30 meanwhile then we understand his successor from New Testament accounts and also from Josephus is Jesus's brother James who leads a group called the poor of Jerusalem and but then many more decades he is in charge of that

(31:23) group these Jesus people this group of the poor of Jerusalem when James is stoned in the year 62 so he is also executed meanwhile James's ministry overlaps with the ministry of Paul who according tradition anyway is executed by the Emperor Nero and it is only in this time period that we start having our first Christian writings that survived so the first of Paul's letters around the Year 50 he's our first Christian writer for sure and then we have we talked about last week the lost sayings gospel Q which is a source for both the Matthew and Luke's Gospels that

(32:07) could have emerged as early as the 50s we don't know how early that would have been anyway sometime though probably before Mark certainly before Matthew and Luke and John are creating their accounts so the Roman Jewish war that we've been talking about that is the contemporary backdrop for Marx accounts that's alway here so again decades after anybody's having personal contacts with the historical Jesus so I want to look at these earliest group of people that we can kind of see around Jesus and the different leaders that they have and although we tend to think of this as being that Jesus being the center of

(32:58) them there's reasons why this group that's we call the poor of Jerusalem or the congregation of the unclean the Jesus people this group actually has more than one privileged leader and Jesus isn't it's not essentially at Jesus focused movement quite the way Paul's later group of Christians is so one of the early leaders John the Baptist is an ascetic who's in the wilderness near the Jordan River he introduces the idea of baptism and calls for repentance he's predicting an apocalypse according to Josephus he's beheaded by Herod Antipas we also have multiple

(33:41) traditions that say that he baptized Jesus and so this is actually a criterion of embarrassment early Christians in each successive Gospel accounts make less and less and less a big deal of the idea that John the Baptist baptized Jesus because the idea is if he's baptizing people because they've sinned and later Christians are understanding Jesus to have lived a sinless life how is it possible that that John is baptizing Jesus likewise it implies that John has authority over Jesus and that Jesus's in fact his initial disciple which may well be the case in the historical sense but over

(34:24) time the different gospel writers increasingly create apologetic answers to that and ultimately John is saying things like oh I you shouldn't be why are you coming I should be being asking for baptism from you and this kind of a thing and so those are how the accounts have come down to us so that's an early leader a next leader we have of course Jesus who's a teacher and miracle worker in Galilee one of the things that we can say about him is that he's introduced a shared meal and he definitely is has a

(34:55) an idea of embracing people who are ritually unclean who might otherwise be denied entry into the synagogue into the the the community right of that so tax collectors lepers prostitutes etc he's crucified by Pilate next we have James the just who's also called James the brother of Jesus we know for him as the leader of a mendicant community the poor of Jerusalem he seeks and fails to reform synagogues so that dogs will allow into them they have ritually unclean and again according to Josephus he is stoned by a priestly leader in Jerusalem and next in the

(35:42) Bible we have Jude in the and in the book of Jude he's called the brother of James and that already is kind of a strange moniker because if he's brother of James and James's brother of Jesus he's technically also brother of Jesus and you'd think that if everybody was only looking to Jesus as the leader of this whole movement you might say well I'm Jude the brother of Jesus and just leave it at that so after James is execution it seems that Jude may have been the leader of this community and when Jerusalem itself is destroyed he

(36:21) possibly led that community to Pella according to tradition which is a nearby town there in Palestine and so he continues and he's part of the early Christian leadership who continued to insist that Christians should be observing Jewish law which is to say they have taken the opposite position to that of Paul according tradition anyway according to Eusebius who is a much later Christian historian he may what may have been martyred under the Emperor Trajan in the 70s okay so let's look at this we talked

(36:57) last week about the fact that although all of these early leaders John the Baptist Jesus James Jude they would have all been native Aramaic speakers which is to say the the language that was spoken in Judea at the time of Jesus ancient Syrian Aramaic none of the texts no texts survived in in that language instead all of our earliest sources are in Greek and some of the earliest then have been coming from the earliest are coming from Paul and Paul's Greek speaking Christian churches nevertheless there have made it into both our Canon

(37:40) and outside of the Canon writings that may have been traced to this other community the non Paul community the community that's led by James the just and so those include those include the Epistle of James it's not written by James but it's written in James's name that makes it into the New Testament the same thing the Epistle first and second epistles of Peter again they are not written by Peter but they are written in Peters name and convey the same kind of ideas and perspective of the James Ian church and it does seem that the apocalypse of John the book of Revelation also is being written with

(38:28) this sort of James Ian Church perspective along with Jude again written by according not written by but attributed to Jude the brother of James the brother of Jesus and it does seem I argue that the and many many scholars do anyway that Q and possibly the source in Thomas the earliest source within Thomas of sayings seemed to have the perspective of this Aramaic James II in church so last week when we looked at the two source hypothesis just to get at what Q was we suggested that the most accepted hypothesis with variations is the idea that Luke and Matthew both had

(39:11) access to and we're expanding upon mark but they also had access to this otherwise unknown lost gospel that mostly consisted of sayings and we showed how for example the text of Mark is sort of split up chronologically into different chunks and ordered within Matthew and it split up into different chunks but in the same general order in Luke but then there is a bunch of different non marking material in found in Luke and Matthew and that some of this overlaps again but this overlapping is not in any particular order and it makes sense that it wouldn't need to be in any particular order because this

(39:54) blue stuff the sayings gospel QED is complete teachings and so it's not telling any stories per se and so Matthew combines these sayings into creating things like the Sermon on the Mount Luke combines them a little differently and creates the Sermon on the plane as it's called but it's taking essentially cue material and reordering it and bringing it into their own kind of sermons that are created by the authors of Matthew and Luke so what is Q primarily a collection of sayings it's not just of Jesus there's also sayings

(40:28) that are attributed to John the Baptist it especially focuses on teachings about the kingdom of God where the poor and the ritually unclean are included and the rich are brought down so it includes sayings like blessed are you poor for God's kingdom is for you the last shall be first and the first shall be last and even the woe is woe unto you that are rich so it's definitely having those kind of focus on on the poor and on mendicants on getting rid of property and focusing on spiritual life what does

(41:07) Q say about the passion so we talked last week about how there's almost no narrative in Q and there is no passion narrative at all there's no talk about Jesus's death or a resurrection or how that has any meaning or relevance the author of the sayings gospel q apparently did not feel that that was the relevance of what Jesus's ministry was about at all nevertheless it the author may be aware of Jesus's crucifixion because there is a saying attributed to Jesus and Q the one who does not take one's cross and

(41:46) follow after me cannot be my disciple so it seems to understand that Jesus is crucified or in other words it has that story within it that Jesus has been crucified but that that's a model for the kind of of sacrifice that all disciples are supposed to take as opposed to an understanding that this is somehow leads to salvation or any other kind of Christology that we have coming to us from Paul and Paul's idea so there's no passion narrative and there's no sense in cue that Jesus death is a sacrifice or atonement for sin

(42:26) rather the cue author seems to see that martyrdom the martyrdom of prophets is an example for all to follow and it also actually explains the fact that the Prophet is rejected and killed for the prophets beliefs as indeed John the Baptist Jesus Jesus's brother James and ultimately Jude James and Jesus's brother are all killed and martyred and which is sanctifying their testimony so how does Q understand John and Jesus who sayings Q includes so Q sees both John and Jesus as heralds of God's coming Kingdom according to the Q author both

(43:19) of them John and Jesus are called children of Sophia and Sophia if you know the great Church in in Istanbul in Constantinople Hagia Sophia in Greek Sophia means wisdom and Holy wisdom is one way of understanding God in the Hebrew Bible so wisdom in fact in the book of Proverbs in in other wisdom books of the Canon Hebrew Bible as it was translated into Greek the sub-2 again talks about Sophia as essentially an embodied divinity so in other words a way or a person of God and this is also included in Q so there's a text in Hue

(44:01) which is chapter 7 33 to 35 John came neither eating nor drinking and you say he has a demon so this isn't Jesus's words the son of man came eating and drinking and you say look a person who is a drunkard and a glutton a friend of tax collectors and sinners so this is a answer that Jesus is making to a charge that he doesn't he's not an ascetic like John the Baptist he's not following John's practice of obstinacy and instead he's eating and drinking and also including in his community tax collectors and sinners so he's anyway this is an apologetic

(44:50) answer to a different style of ministry the last line here is wisdom is vindicated by her children so in other words John and Jesus according to the author of Q our children blessed children of holy wisdom so again named for the Divine Feminine Q sees Jesus as the Son of Man but that doesn't necessarily mean God's divine son so it's not actually clear if the historical Jesus and we have multiple attestation for the use of the phrase son of man which could also be since man and Adam are the same in in Hebrew it

(45:39) could simply mean the human one so a son of man what is that so it could just mean the human one however in Q there is already an equation of this phrase or title son of man as an apocalyptic figure that is predicted in the Book of Daniel chapter 7 and that appearance when when bit Daniel has a vision of one coming as a son of man in the clouds that signals the end times in that vision and so many of the Jesus people and any of these early Aramaic speakers who followed John the Baptist Jesus James and Jude

(46:24) expected to see this figure in the head that come in the heavens in their own lifetime that's probably you know what they mean by man or sometimes that's what's meant nevertheless son of man for these folks doesn't necessarily mean son of God which is perhaps a different title so it doesn't necessarily mean that any of them have this full later Christian conception of the Trinity God in three persons creator Christ and spirit rather it may be that they are expecting Jesus resurrected Jesus will appear as a son

(47:05) of man as a heavenly figure that is a precursor of an literal apocalypse so even if they believed that Jesus had a special role in a coming literal apocalypse this is different from the later Christology that emerges within proto orthodoxy and Catholicism one of the ways we can kind of see this is that in the James II and writing and the writing of the Jacobin Church James is just our English word for Jacob so sometimes we'll say Jacob in often what we have in the canonical Gospels where we have a saying of Jesus in in the James Ian's writings the same exact

(47:52) saying will simply be attributed to James and you think well why wouldn't that writer say the Lord said and then attributed to Jesus instead they just are attributing that same teaching to James and that also so it speaks to anyway Jean which Jesus not being the sole focus of these guys and their teachings so sayings attributed to Jesus in Q are attributed to James in the Epistle of James so anyway James is here shown here next to Jesus and this icon and their brothers today look similar so for example there is a an ask give series of

(48:38) quotations that in Q and in our other early Christian sources are attributed to Jesus but in James they're attributed to James and so in the queue version we have I tell you ask and it will be given you search and you will find knock and it will be open to you for everyone who asks receives and the one who searches finds and to the one who knocks it will be opened and we have then in James a similar saying if someone lacks wisdom let him ask from God who gives to all simply and without reproach and it will

(49:17) be given to him and so we can kind of see I've also included here some of the Greeks and so it's using the same words here for ask and also for it will be given to him right and so there's something a central phrase here that on the one hand the few people are attributing to Jesus but in James II in church they're going ahead and just saying it as if James taught it also we have just very interestingly in the sayings Gospel of Thomas this previously lost gospel that was recovered at nag Hammadi in the middle of the 20th century when it was dug up from the

(49:59) Egyptian desert we have this description that's included in Thomas verse 12 or chapter 12 so it's section 12 anyway of Thomas the disciples said to Jesus we know that you are going to leave us who will be our leader jesus said to them no matter where you are you are to go to James the just for whose sake heaven and earth came into being so that's kind of a crazy saying for Christians to have so heaven and earth came into being on account of James the just we do have from multiple different accounts within and without the New Testament so both

(50:46) Josephus and also acts and also from Paul's descriptions James does take over local leadership of the church this group the poor of Jerusalem so he's the leader in Jerusalem and this is just another account that suggests that James is the leader of the group that Jesus led in Jerusalem immediately afterwards but it also is attributing some sort of amazing supernatural importance to James it makes sense then if for example you believe heaven and earth came into being for the sake of James it would make

(51:22) sense why Jude then would want to describe himself as James's brother and just ignoring the fact that he was also Jesus's brother so although he has an important role as the son of man in this tradition Jesus also shares the spotlight with people like James John the Baptist and Jude in the James Ian tradition okay so we have here that John the Baptist Jesus James the brother of Jesus and then Jude - the brother of James for the Jesus people the teachings and practices were more important than reverence for anyone particularly der all the leaders met with martyrdom as a

(52:01) sign of the end times and also to prove their testimony because according to their sayings and teachings Jerusalem always kills true prophets and they are doing that as an example to followers but Jesus's particular martyrdom Easter didn't cause any focus or special significance over and above John's James or choos so Paul initially named saul of tarsus of course had a very opposite take on Jesus so so Paul if we read all of his writings he's relatively unconcerned with the teachings of Jesus or of John or of James he's absolutely

(52:40) focused on the significance of Jesus's death and resurrection that's what really at the heart of Paul's faith in this emerging religion and so although Paul converts initially is a Pharisee he's from the Pharisaic school of Judaism and he does that after the executions of both John and Jesus he becomes the first the movements earliest author depending on when q was written we just can't tell so Paul has a conflict with James and Peter that we can tell very clearly from the New Testament the author of Luke and acts so there's the same author that is behind the part 1

(53:27) and part 2 of that account it's split up in our canon as Luke and acts but it's two parts of the same book the author of Luke acts later minimizes the conflict between Paul and the James II in church but that conflict is really apparent in Paul's own writings so whereas James the brother of Jesus saw the movement as an additional teaching of Judaism Paul very much believed that Jesus resurrection showed that he was a divine Christ a divine Messiah who was heralding a new covenant and era which meant that all of

(54:04) the converts to this emerging religion does don't need to practice Mosaic law so this is the major conflict between the two leaders in the early and the emerging anyway early tradition although Paul saw then great significance in the death and resurrection of Jesus as the divine Messiah and so Messiah is our word Messiah is English for the Hebrew Messiah mashiac and the Greek Christos is the same word and so that's Christ Paul's experience with Christ was visionary so he had a vision of Christ and that is that the basis of his calling as opposed to ever having met he

(54:46) didn't had never met the historical Jesus the Jesus who had been alive and teaching in the years prior to this nevertheless Paul whose actual writings we have claims to have personally met James the brother of Jesus and also Jesus's immediate disciples of John and Peter and so because of the fact that he himself is a eyewitness to anyway Jesus his own brother and his immediate disciples that really confirms for us the existence of the historical Jesus nevertheless Paul has very little to say about the historical Jesus which means we can actually confirm very little of the historical Jesus's life

(55:29) so this again we had that time line and it's brought it back so we can kind of see that you know Jesus here is killed before our Paul's conversion Paul's ministry is taking place simultaneously to James's leadership at the church in Jerusalem and Christianity is growing vastly in all of the areas outside of it and indeed then when Jerusalem is destroyed in marks time this church ceases to be of much significance and dies out in the net following centuries and ultimately it's really the followers the greek-speaking followers of Paul and other Greek speaking missionaries that

(56:11) Christianity descends from so what does Paul had to say about the passion what does he have to say about the the historical Jesus or what he understands the importance or significance of Jesus so in his letter first Corinthians chapter 15 verses 3 to 5 he has what's what anyway theologians called Vickery Jima which is the central kind of gospel message according to Paul which is that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures that he was buried that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures and that he appeared to Peter and then to the Apostles and

(57:00) then to so on and so forth all the other people and lastly to Paul he says that being least of the Apostles he saw him vision airily and so the operative phrase really here is well he's one explaining Christ's death theologically here but he's also and also resurrection and his appearance of the risen Christ vision airily but the other relevance here is that it's all according to scriptures and by scriptures Paul doesn't mean it's according to the New Testament he's writing before there's any New Testament writings at all it's just his writings here are the earliest

(57:40) and so instead when he's talked about scriptures he's talking about the Hebrew Bible and specifically he's talking about the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible the Septuagint and so what Paul really is saying here is that everything that happens in Jesus's life happened according to scriptures including his death and also his resurrection so there will all be consistent with the scriptures we have a couple other things so Paul also describes the initiation of the Lord's Supper by Jesus and he says that he

(58:19) received this from the Lord he delivers to you the Corinthians he says I received from the Lord and what I also delivered to you that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was handed over took and so that's giving us a little bit of narrative insight into again this as a Last Supper and the idea of Jesus's execution on the night that he was handed over took bread and when he had given thanks broke it and said this is my body which is for you do this in remembrance of me in the same way also the cup after supper so again it was a supper on the night that he was handed

(58:57) over saying this cup is the New Covenant in my blood do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me for as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes and so he also has here a an idea of a of a second coming and so these are central to Paul's understanding of a narrative of what's important in Jesus's life okay so what's the origin then of the passion story as we have it so I recounted it to you in some detail at the beginning of this lecture and now that we're getting kind of at the end I want to look at it so we saw in Q there is no passion story at

(59:43) all we have one saying about taking up your cross and following Jesus we also have Paul's letters we also have Paul's letters we recorded as I just read the charisma and the Lord's Supper formulas and so that is a very minimally recorded passion story so the answer really is that the passion story as we have it actually comes from mark and so that's a very detailed account as I went through and it takes up approximately 20% of marks total gospel okay so that's why we should look now at mark in kind of serious detail as much as we can do the conclusion here so

(1:00:32) who is the author of mark so although it's traditionally attributed to an evangelist named John Mark who is said to be anyway this guy named who said to be the cousin of Barnabas it was a companion of Peter and a deed is thought of as being the founder of the Church in Alexandria and and to this day the the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt the Pope of Alexander considers himself to be the successor of st.

(1:01:05) mark the authorship of the gospel is actually anonymous and is unknown the Gospels author does not in any way ever claim to be an eyewitness and and and scholars don't believe that the author was an eyewitness and indeed many of the episodes as narrated in mark such as the story of Jesus going into the wilderness or Jesus praying alone at Gethsemane these are where Jesus is alone so there can be no witnesses to these sort of literary stories non eyewitness account here's the consensus from the internal clues in the text so

(1:01:42) the text is composed in relatively simplistic Greek with view few subordinate clauses there is the overuse of the conjunction and as opposed to writing anything with complex tenses and these kind of things and so as a result of not necessarily being as good at Greek as for example the author of Luke who's just an amazing Greek speaker it's been theorized that the that we have here with the author of Mark someone who is a native Aramaic speaker a Syrian speaker who was nevertheless writing in Greek so someone who's

(1:02:20) bilingual but whose native Syrian speaker the way Jesus would have been the author here makes errors regarding Judyann geography and is able to write during the Jewish War so the Romans are busily destroying the country at the time that mark is writing in seventy and so the author of mark is probably not in Palestine not in Judea itself a certain land in Jerusalem being destroyed you have other things to do than to write a gospel maybe while the war is happening the author is aware of Paul but disagrees with Paul's formulation and so therefore it probably isn't at Antioch

(1:03:04) which is one of the areas where Paul had been very active in creating a church the author is aware of q and so is possibly from this what we've been calling this Jesus movements maybe in somewhere in Syria but not necessarily Antioch so that's kind of the best guess of from the internal clues so where then is Mark getting when we get to and read mark as our kind of earliest passion narrative where is that coming from and so there's a couple possible possibilities here so one may be there's witnesses and or some kind of an oral tradition that is being told or has been

(1:03:44) told to the author of mark another possibility is that witnesses or an oral tradition we're told to an author of a lost gospel that there may have been a passion gospel that Mark has access to that mark is expanding in order to create marks overall gospel finally is a possibility that mark is taking the sub to againt is taking the the Hebrew Scriptures that have been now translated into the Greek and is looking at all of the different predictions about what is supposed to have happened in the Messiah's life and death and

(1:04:28) resurrection and is using those verses in order to craft the account because we have the testimony from Paul that everything that Christ did was according to scriptures so therefore by that understanding of belief we would understand that everything that should go in the narrative can be found in that source okay well look just briefly here at this idea of a lost passion gospel I think that would probably want to look at this I might do this next Easter as a lecture because this is an interesting idea so

(1:05:08) many scholars believe that Mark had a source for a passion account and that this is a another one of these lost texts it was it's harder to discern this one one of the one of the advantages that we have with the piecing together the cue narrative or the cue hypothesis is that we have two different texts that are seeming to make use of this lost text in this case we have pretty much only mark that would be expanding it and so it's harder to find the seams and decide well which Parshin of this is the lost passion gospel what is Mark's expansion it's certainly possible

(1:05:47) because the number of independently circulating texts that are expanded at an absorbed to create the text we now have for example Matthew and Luke as we said both absorbing Q or as we talked before second Peter absorbing Annex being absorbed expansion of the book of Jude that just happens very frequently with ancient texts and so it's completely possible the problem with the hypothesis overall is that there is really a lack of seams and indeed there's a pretty serious coherence of the narrative of the passion story which all pretty well jives with how Mark's overall authorial

(1:06:26) style goes it's not that we somehow at some point get to a place where mark who's not a great Greek speaker let's say has found a different Greek text that is written in a more florid style or that emphasizes different theological points than mark instead it's all pretty marking and so that's a problem with the thesis that there's a lost passion gospel witnesses so although mark doesn't actually indicate witnesses as a source the way that the Gospel attributed to John asserts that there's a testimony of a beloved disciple it's possible that a contemporary of Jesus

(1:07:05) survived immigrated to Syria and was still alive 40 years after Jesus's ministry and death and and is now living in Mark's community and so we don't know so whether or not there's input from one or more witnesses some of the episodes have to be extrapolations as we mentioned since no witnesses would have been able to be present if all of the disciples abandoned Jesus there's nobody to be there to see what happens anymore for those components of the of the narrative and so for those components of the narrative at the very least mark is going to have to be looking to either revelation or actually was we might

(1:07:44) understand revelation as it would exist in text this thesis that the that the Scriptures hold the source for all of these things and so Burton Mack who wrote a book the myth of innocence mark and Christian origins I've been following that book pretty closely and so he makes the case that actually the passion narrative is largely Mark's creation drawing from biblical predictions and so his idea here is that building on the limited things that mark knows from Paul's writings along with Paul's testimony that everything that Jesus did everything that Christ did was

(1:08:30) according to scriptures Mark's texts then create a creates a gospel narrative based on that content in order to create the narrative stories including interlaced predictions and fulfillments of all the various events that place within the gospel so we'll just remember anyway the charisma with Paul was Christ died for our sins according to scriptures he was buried he was raised on the third day according to scriptures and that he appeared the risen Christ appeared in visions to Peter and the Apostles so mark within the passion narrative has Jesus make

(1:09:10) three predictions of his passion of his death and resurrection and so in the first of these which takes place in mark 831 he soon began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again so again its Son of Man and then the same prediction that we find in in Paul's writing and the second of these that occurs in mark 9:31 he was teaching the disciples saying to them the Son of Man will be delivered into the hands of men and they will kill him and when he is

(1:09:51) killed after three days he will rise so that same Pauline prediction and then finally the third one of these in mark 10 33 to 34 he began to tell them what was going to happen to him saying behold we are going up to Jerusalem and the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes they will condemn him to death and deliver him to the Gentiles and they will mock him and spit on him and scourge him and kill him and after three days he will rise so that same literary prediction occurs

(1:10:25) three times in mark's texts paralleling that very brief christian gospel about jesus' life in paul we also looked at one of the only other episodes in paul's writings about jesus the historical jesus was that on the night he says when he was handed over so the last supper night that the Lord Jesus took bread and broke it and said this is my body which is for you do this in remembrance of me and there's some pretty strong parallels in the Last Supper account in mark when they were eating he took bread and blessed it and broke it and gave it

(1:11:06) to them and said take it this is my body and then that continues on in the same way and Paul's writings in the same way also the cup after supper saying this is the I'm sorry this cup is the New Covenant in my blood do this whenever you drink it in remember for as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes and so then in mark we have the parallel he took a cup and we and he had given them thanks he gave it to them and they all drank of it and he said to them

(1:11:41) this is my blood of the Covenant which is poured out for many truly I say sir truly I say to you I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it in the new I drink it new in the kingdom of God so anyway very close parallels from the little bit that we have of Jesus's life in Paul and then has the later gospel writer mark constructs those components of the passion narrative so beyond that though beyond that little bit that you could pull from Paul if you had that as your source a huge proportion of the rest of

(1:12:22) the passion narrative parallels parallels Hebrew biblical texts so we just barely did Palm Sunday and so the Palm Sunday procession of Jesus coming in riding on a Colt the the Colt of a donkey is is paralleled it it comes from Mark's account and is is a recapitulation almost word-for-word from a prophecy in in Zacharias and then in general there is the idea of a figure called the innocent sufferer found both in the Psalms and also the prophetic writings of the Hebrew Bible the Greek version of it and these are also

(1:13:12) paralleled in incredibly closely in marks account of Jesus The Passion of Jesus so for example in Psalm 22 verse 1 we have the phrase my God my God why have you forsaken me so that's very famous right and so in Mark's accounts of the crucifixion at 3 o clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice Eloi Eloi Lema sabachthani which means my God my God why have you forsaken me so obviously it's a quotation and this is an example of the psalm coming first Soviet of course it's possible that the historical Jesus is quoting a psalm it's also possible again that the author

(1:13:55) of the Gospel of Mark is looking believes very strongly that everything that happened in Jesus's life would have happened according to Scripture and is looking in scripture for what would have happened so likewise in Psalm 69 21 the innocent sufferer of the innocent sufferer we are here they gave me poison for food and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink and in mark's passion account we have that someone filled and ran sorry someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine put it on a stick and gave it to him to Jesus to drink

(1:14:35) saying wait let us see whether Elijah will come and take him down so same thing sour vinegar for food and wine likewise in psalm 41 a venus and suffer we read even my bosom friend in whom i trusted who ate my bread has lifted this heel against me and in mark's account us to remember we had and when they had taken their places and we're eating jesus said truly i tell you one of you will betray me one who is eating with me in Psalm 22 about the innocent sufferer we read they divided my clothes among themselves and for my clothing they cast lots in in mark's account of the

(1:15:21) crucifixion the roman guards crucified him they divided his clothes among them casting Lots to decide what each should take so what we can say anyway of all of these things is Mark's account for sure draws upon dozens and dozens of illusions from Psalms and Isaiah of the indignant innocent sufferer and they appear in mark's passion narrative the characteristics of the innocent sufferer that are recommitted in both anyway they come from the Old Testament that are lived in the marks account of the passion include the conspiracy to kill

(1:16:09) the sufferer false witnesses the sufferer silence before his accusers as Jesus is silent before Pilate being mocked by tormentors the derision of the onlookers the sufferer praying his obedience and trust in God etc etc so there is so much anyway that is parallel between the two accounts that anyway some scholars have drawn the argument that in fact the account as we have it is largely a construction of you know out of the source for it is largely a construction that from the Old Testament so so what does it say what does it

(1:16:50) necessarily matter I'm not saying that we can we can prove that I'm not saying that we can prove that what I'm saying is that that case is able to be made and and it's an interesting it's an interesting one but it isn't really what's important to us anyway these in at this point in time so it's not possible it's not possible for historians to say one way or the other what happened and which components of this account as we have it are historical or not what we definitely I think know is that there was the leader of a movement Jesus who we can say had

(1:17:37) many different teachings that some of which have survived cos some of which we don't necessarily date to the historical figure and that that figure was crucified and probably most importantly his disciples including both male and female had visionary experiences of a risen Christ for whom that became the basis for a faith tradition that has lived on to this time and so what we doing as Christians anyway through Holy Week is not so much working as historians to try to discover the ins and outs of history but rather

(1:18:29) to look at the narrative and to talk about its actual meaning to share it and recapitulate it and to live the narrative and experience the living Christ in a important and meaningful way in Holy Week in our lifes now regardless of what happened 2,000 years ago and if you're inclined to do that with us this Sunday at Easter I invite you to do so otherwise I hope you found that this exploration was interesting as we kind of looked into the kind of nuts and bolts of the accounts we have the earliest account we

(1:19:09) have of the passion story huh and so that went a little long but they hopefully if you folks are still with us and they have questions vilandra maybe we'll relay them to me and I'll be able to answer some questions otherwise I find that I've been standing here a long time I'm gonna have to put we have John one question that came on YouTube okay by Nathan Gayle okay he says I would like to know how historians characterized Pilate and Caiaphas participation and Jesus is crucified are there any Imperial records addressing this specifically are there

(1:19:59) records of the San hand ring conspiring to kill Jesus as the Gospels indicate so the answer to that question is no we have no no such records at all we wouldn't anticipate that we would frankly we do have records that the the actual those actual historical figures existed so both the Roman and the Jewish leaders at the time but there is no external confirmation that either of them would have had anything to do with that there would there's no confirmation we would have of a trial of Jesus at all and it's completely possible as Mac and other scholars have have made that that

(1:20:49) the whole account that we have in Mark's Gospel which is the source of our idea of a trial is actually derived not from an actual trial having taken place but rather is because the figure of the innocent sufferer undergoes a such a false trial like that in in the Old Testament sources so we don't have historians don't have any way to confirm that a trial like that would have taken place the idea of a Jewish conspiracy for example is almost certainly post dating the the time period so this idea is emerging after we getting to the time of the authorship of the a these authors

(1:21:36) of the Gospels where the Christian community is diverging from the Jewish community and they're seeing themselves as distinct there is this time period when Christians and the congregation of the unclean the people who are following the site this idea of that everybody tax collectors and so on and so forth should all be included our are kicked out of the synagogue so the more orthodox jewish leaders are tired of these people saying that jesus is the messiah and that sort of thing and so now there has become distinct groups and as a result of this differentiation

(1:22:12) unfortunately in the first generations when we're getting our Christian texts there is some anti-jewish boundary maintenance that happens between the two which has led to an unfortunate tradition of anti-semitism in Western civilization subsequently and so we shouldn't take that as historical at all I would say we have another question coming from Facebook from Brighton Raymond Ortiz yes this is back when you were talking about the Gospel of Thomas yes by the way Raymond I'm glad to hear that your husband is recovering so Raymond wonders how come only four Gospels out of many

(1:23:01) made it to the New Testaments yeah so so what happened what would have happened is that although a lot of these other Gospels are circulating the the bishops and the other early leaders of what's becoming the what we sometimes called the proto Orthodox what ultimately emerges as the the Roman state religion under Constantine the which means Monty call it the Orthodox Church of the Catholic Church or anyway the Christian Church as that becomes the state religion and ultimately is the Catholic Orthodox state religion when those

(1:23:45) leaders for whom emerge into that kind of consensus they look at some of the teachings and some of the ideas of the other early communities including the the writings of several of these Gospels and they dispute them and and so a lot of them they argue pretty strongly this shouldn't be followed you shouldn't be following the this Gospel of Thomas because it has Gnostic ideas in it and it will lead people to Gnostic heresy or you shouldn't be watching and listening to the gospel of the ebee nights because it's recording teachings about the needs to practice Jewish law

(1:24:25) that are not consistent with the proto Orthodox understanding and so suppression of what's the early prototypes all the different groups consider the other groups too that are not their own group to be heretics of each other right and so suppression of what is viewed as alternate adorn her heretical views occurs within the movement and so they're they're purged we have Elizabeth with us hi Alyssa PI Elizabeth had a friend she says who was the professor at U of T of church history I used to go to him when I had a question requiring some

(1:25:05) erudition I once asked him about Pilate I said wasn't his behavior giving into the mob rather on Roman and he said that Judea was a place where failures were sent if you had messed up somewhere else you were sent to a place where you were almost certain to mess up again since it was so difficult yeah yeah so so to that point Pilate would not have been the you know the best or the brightest the Roman administration there was clearly bad they they spent a century or and a half of just complete and obviously blatant

(1:25:45) bad rule because it resulted in multiple very serious revolts so when this revolt that we're talking about that it's taking place at the time that mark is composing this text that results in the destruction of Jerusalem they end of the Second Temple period the expulsion of all Jewish people from from the city of Jerusalem they're not allowed to go back there ultimately the Romans and the next Jewish revolt in the next war that they have to fight over this refound it and name it Aelia Capitolina so it's a pagan city no Jews are allowed

(1:26:27) back into it no Christians so as a result of it speaks to a miss administration right now so if maybe it's not easy to rule and no matter what and maybe people are likely to want to be independent and might revolt under any circumstances but ultimately the the revolt requires the Romans to sent something like to 3540 percent of all of their troops from their entire vast empire to Judea to suppress the rebellion and so to your point Pilate would not have been the cream of the crop he's actually not even the status of a governor it's a it's a

(1:27:07) lower status official still at this point that's running the place and most likely although we have this this trial account I think it's it's quite likely that Jesus was not important enough to have merited any such thing as a trial and that it would been more likely for someone even at Pilots level when just to crucify a whole bunch of people so Jesus would just be on the list of everybody that they just don't gather up and and crucify and they wouldn't have to go through a whole bag thing where Pilate is philosophically asking things like what is truth and and washing his

(1:27:44) hands of it and all this kind of thing more likely it would have been a just orders to crucify Jesus along with a whole bunch of other people that they're just doing that other rebels we have Leon de Burgh hey Leon Leon are you there okay Leon you're a mutant if you want to ask a question otherwise we can probably just say goodbye cuz I don't see any other questions tonight okay I guess okay Leona's not here okay well very good hey guys thanks for joining us and like I say one of the ways that we approach

(1:28:32) this kind of text and things like that is academically through studies of history and literary criticism but another way that we experienced the text and also the tradition sacred story and the Christian tradition is through the living experience of it and so once again I invite you to join us on Sunday for Easter we're gonna have a pretty amazing service and so if you're so inclined to just see what it's all about please do it just one last comment comes on facebook from suzanne Scribner coach on put out a bibliography for people who might want to learn more

(1:29:14) perhaps some introductions or just first-level that aren't overly scholarly yes yes so I mentioned the one book but I will post it to the event alright very good thank you