Transcript — Does the Gospel of Mark Give Us a Radically Different Jesus Than the Gospel of John?

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00:00 Live here, and I have a very, very special guest with us today, the one and only Father Stephen DeYoung. Thanks for joining us, Father. My pleasure. Always great to spend time with you. This is much earlier than the day that I’m used to. I’m normally with you at 10 o’clock at night. So I’m like, is it 10 o’clock at night or is it 1 o’clock Eastern Standard Time? This is early morning for me. This is. That’s right. That’s right. Well, game. We’ll put you to the test because today we’ve got a very exciting topic. We’re going to be talking about the two different Christ.

00:46 There’s the the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark and the Jesus of the Gospel of John. Are these contradictory? Are these two different Jesuses that that are being presented? Are they the one and same Jesus Christ? Are there any quick thoughts on that, Father Stephen? Well, the answer is that they’re the same. So yeah, now everyone is tuned out if they TLDR. That’s yeah, I’m excited about this episode because I used to be really into like historical Jesus studies like, I don’t know, 10, 15 years ago, and it’s going to be a fun episode to kind of get a refresher on like what’s what’s been going on in this kind of conversation. And I want to present a little clip. I actually presented this in my very first episode on the Orthodox Apologetics podcast. And it’s it’s Rhett and Link talking about their deconstruction process and leaving Christianity

01:35 behind. And they talk about actually the scholarship of the Gospels. And so I’m going to play that little clip, I think Rhett talking about the Gospel of Mark and then and then and John for our audience. And then we can talk about it in today’s episode. And what we understood about Jesus, even when we think about the central claim of Christianity, which is the death and resurrection of Jesus. Right. And you think about what we have in the four Gospels. Well, Mark, the earliest Gospel, we don’t have any post resurrection appearances. But you know, then we have Matthew and we have Luke. And then finally, we have John written most recently. And in this Gospel, we have the Jesus claiming to be God. If that if Jesus claiming to be God in the flesh is such a central element of Christianity,

02:23 how come the three other guys didn’t decide to talk? So you’re saying that. OK, so there is Rhett saying, hey, if Gospel of John’s claiming Jesus is God, but the other three Gospels don’t, what’s going on here? If this is such a central claim, Christianity, other Stephen. Yeah. Well, yeah, the first thing is 1986 called and they want their scholarship back. But. But yeah, that trickle down economics, Father trickle down. It takes a long time to reach people. Well, that’s true. That’s true. Right. Before, you know, just the average right person on the Internet hears about these things. They’re usually because it takes time to make those documentaries and all those things. Right. So this this was a scholarly consensus.

03:12 He was kind of improbable even at the time. Because, you know. Like he talks about St. John’s Gospel being written the most recently. Like we’re talking about sometime in the 90s, a D versus like 69 A.D. for St. Mark’s Gospel. So we’re talking about like maybe 30 years. At the outside for this. Massive doctrinal development to happen. So that was that was already sort of an issue, but this was very much. Despite the unlikelihood of it, how people talked, probably the the magisterial statement of this view, which the author no longer holds was.

04:03 Friend of my other show, Bart Ehrman’s book, How Jesus Became God. Which was very much laying this out now, he now holds a different position. Oh, OK. But one of one of the things I respect about Bart Ehrman a lot is that he is one of the only scholars I know of who has publicly changed his position. On major issues. Normally, most scholars publicly will go to the mat and fight that something they wrote 50 years ago when they were still working on their Ph.D. is still just as valid as it was then. But he won’t. He will come out and say, no, I changed my position. I think I was wrong.

04:51 And and it was that theory was really based on a set of of presuppositions. One of those that now seems totally weird, but until the 1980s was held by pretty much everyone in the field of New Testament studies. Was that the only relevant data to early Christianity was the New Testament itself. And. You can see where that comes from. That’s that’s a deeply Protestant presupposition, right? Grounded in Sola Scriptura. Where? That’s been watered down because most of the people we’re talking about who held this were not

05:37 pious Protestants by any means, right? But that sort of presupposition that started with with Sola Scriptura, that. The only thing starts out as the only thing that’s an infallible rule is what’s the New Testament, then got watered down popularly to the only thing that’s worth reading or worthwhile or spiritually valid is what’s in the New Testament. And then watered down further to this is the only relevant scholarly data. So the idea of reading like Second Temple Jewish literature, even other Jewish literature and studying the Jewish world in the first century, that that had any relevance to interpreting the New Testament is something crazy.

06:23 NT Wright came out of the woods and said in the 80s. And everyone thought he was nuts, and now everyone’s come around to be like, oh, yeah, that makes that makes a lot of sense. So they were restricting their data to just the text within the New Testament. And then they also had this presupposition mostly from German scholarship. In general, that there’s this evolution of ideas over time. Right. And evolutionary theory is like that’s what’s being applied to Mark, to John. Yeah, right. And so in the absence of other data, which has been ruled irrelevant,

07:08 you use your presupposition that everything evolves from simpler to more complex over time. And therefore, the idea was, well, you have Jesus, they encounter him, they encounter him as a human. We have a presupposition that he’s just a human. There’s also a sort of presupposition in there that everything we have in the New Testament is people’s opinions of Jesus and this kind of thing. None of it comes from, almost none of it comes from Jesus himself, which is where you get the whole historical Jesus thing. We need to find out about the actual Jesus because the New Testament doesn’t tell us anything about the actual Jesus.

07:55 Yeah, like the Jesus seminar, like voting on, on like the the how much does this verse, like how authentic could it be? And they’re all like voting on each verse of the Bible. Yeah, that was how confident they were that it came from Jesus. Yes. Yeah. And if you look at they put out a book called The Five Gospels because they threw in the Gospel of Thomas and they were all way more confident about everything in the Gospel of Thomas than they were about any of the canonical gospels somehow. Well, because a huge amount of subjectivity that enters into this, you sort of reconstruct your historical Jesus. And then you try to match the sayings up with that reconstruction. Right, like like Jesus, the peasant or Jesus, the eschatological prophet or Jesus, you know, X, Y, Z. Yeah, right, right. Does this sound like the Jesus I’ve constructed in my head?

08:45 And they don’t realize how circular that whole process is, right? But although, to be fair to people, a lot of them now that that sort of third quest for the historical Jesus is over, a lot of the people involved in it, like John Dominic Cross and stuff who have moved on now look back at it and basically admit, yeah, everybody who went looking for the historical Jesus ended up looking at a mirror. And it was sort of them casting, you know, a heroic version of themselves as a scholar or whatever as as Jesus. So if we’re just reading people’s ideas about Jesus, then and things have all from simple to complex.

09:32 Well, then Jesus just being a human teacher, we’re going to say that simple and Jesus being God, especially in some kind of Nicene Trinitarianism, in the Nicene Trinitarian context, that’s very complex. And so we’ll just chart in evolution and that not only going from the New Testament to Nicaea, but within the New Testament itself, right within the Gospels themselves. There’s this move from even though again, we’ve got 30 years for all this evolution. Although again, to be fair, they used to argue that that St. John’s Gospel was was written in like the 120s or 130s AD. So that would give them 5060 years. Still not a lot of time.

10:22 But we have found the Bodmer Papyrus, which is a fragment of the Gospel of John that the fragment is that copy dates to the 120s AD and was found in Egypt. So that means it can’t possibly have been written that late. And so that’s why, you know, the 90s at the outside. So is that is that your preferred date like the 90s? Because I know some people are trying to push. I mean, I don’t know, in the evangelical world that I was a part of long ago, it seemed like a lot of them were trying to push John to like the 60s. Yeah, I was always comfortable with the 90s personally. Yeah, so there’s part of the problem is, is that since.

11:13 End of the 19th beginning of the 20th century, a lot of evangelical scholarship has become reactionary. So you have within evangelical scholarship, which is most of Bible scholarship to this day, you go to the society for biblical literature. And if we we take out, you know, the atheist, the secular scholars, you know. She by a huge margin, Protestants. Predominate, right? So it is it is primarily Protestant scholarship. But so there was this. In the modernist fundamentalist controversy of the early 20th century, you had particularly.

11:58 Germany being the epicenter for this, because, to be fair, it was the epicenter for learning and scholarship in Europe for the 19th century. The. So they had moved in a very quote unquote liberal direction, meaning they had moved from trying to sort of rationalize and desupernation to the idea of the. They had moved from trying to sort of rationalize and desupernaturalize the miracles of scripture to just saying, OK, this isn’t true to even a hermeneutic of suspicion that said. These texts are written to cover up the truth of what actually happened.

12:43 And and started to make these reconstructions. And what happened was American pastors were going and studying in Europe, sort of the best of the brightest from America would go to Europe to study. And they’d come back having imbibed all of these liberal ideas. And that’s really what touched off the modernist fundamentalist controversy in the U.S. And so the series of basically tracks pamphlets that later got collected into books called the Fundamentals. That’s where fundamentalism gets its name was published, say, arguing for at first in a very scholarly way, arguing for things like the Virgin birth of Christ, the crucifixion, the resurrection, all of these things. But it became sort of more over the course of the 20th century became sort of more radicalized and also in some ways dumbed down, to be honest, right?

13:35 Where rather than saying your approach, your methodology, your whole way of approaching the scriptures is wrong. Trying to read it through the lens of modern science and demythologize it and all this rather than saying that methodology is wrong. They just said, no, your conclusions are wrong. And proceeded to try to use the same methodology to prove the opposite conclusions. So that’s where you get like creation science. Right. You’re not young earth creationism in the sense that you think the earth is only a certain number of years old. But you’re with creationism in the sense that I’m going to use modern science to prove that the earth is only a certain number of years old. Right. And all of this kind of thing. The impulse, I think, is at work. And some of those evangelical circles to, oh, you’re going to try to date all of these texts as late as possible.

14:24 Well, I’m going to date them as early as possible. They were all written before 50. I mean, I definitely sense that when I was reading this kind of stuff, too. I mean, I guess it would be similar to kind of the Protestant. The The Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, they’re like defying each other off of one another. And so, now you fast forward to biblical scholarship in the 20th century, you’ve got fundamentalism reacting against liberalism and they’re just picking earlier and earlier dates. Does it respond to those super late dates? And what a lot of people don’t know is that these traditional dates are based on things, for example, in the church fathers,

15:10 right? So, for example, the reason we’ve traditionally dated St. Mark’s Gospel to AD 69 is that our earliest accounts of it say that St. Mark wrote down St. Peter’s testimony after his martyrdom, right? And so, we know when, at least roughly, right, when St. Peter was martyred, in the mid-60s under Nero, right? And so, that’s the basis for where we dated St. Mark’s Gospel. And the traditional date for putting St. John’s Gospel in the 90s is based on the fact that that’s when St. Irenaeus says he received the vision that became the Book of Revelation, right? So, St. John’s writing activities are going on in the 90s. We have a date pegged.

15:58 And I don’t feel the need to out-conservative the church fathers, right? I will just accept their early testimony as to when these things were written. And I don’t think that, while there are people still out there who will try to act like, oh, this was written decades after Christ lived, I mean, I think, for example, right now today, if you wanted to go and write a history of the Vietnam War based on eyewitness accounts, I think you could do a pretty good job of that right now. Yeah, 50 years after the fact. Yeah, you still could. Yeah. Yeah, you still could. Whereas if you were trying to do that with World War II, it would be a lot harder now. And World War I, it would be almost impossible, right? So,

16:46 the amount of time we’re talking about is not such a span of time that, you know, wild things start happening, right? I mean, my grandfather died more than 30 years ago. No one thinks he’s God, like, that’s a big move, right, to make, right? From just thinking someone is human to believing them to be God, right? And that’s the biggest thing that I think is happening. To believing them to be God in that, you know, short, short window in the first place. You could be an old man writing about Jesus in the 80s and 90s, and that’s actually not far-fetched. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, which is, of course, the tradition about St. John was that he was very young

17:34 as one of the disciples. That’s why when you see him depicted among the disciples, he doesn’t have a beard. That’s trying to convey his youth, right? And then when you see him writing, right, when he’s depicted among the four evangelists writing, you notice he has the long gray beard to show advanced old age, right? And so even our iconography kind of has the 90s date, if you track with it. Yeah. And so there are obvious, aside from that short window of time, there’s a bunch of obvious problems with this theory. One of the big ones is that there was this massive cognitive dissonance because at the same time scholars were holding to this as the scholarly consensus, the Bauer thesis was also the scholarly consensus, which the Bauer thesis is the

18:24 argument that what became the orthodox view was not the earliest view. That because, again, they have this presupposition that Christ’s direct teachings were not preserved, right? And these are ideas about, they want to argue that already in the first century, there’s all this diversity of views. And as we mentioned with the five gospels, they especially wanted to take the gospel of Thomas into the first century and therefore Gnosticism into the first century. Right. Gnosticism, of course, does not believe in a human Jesus at all. Right. Right. It purely has

19:11 Jesus as a divine figure, right? It has this sort of the set of Christology where he’s just some kind of appearance of an emanation of the divine, right? Which Saint Ignatius of Antioch seems to be responding to Docetism in the late, early second century, it seems. Yeah. Well, and Docetism is a real problem for them when you dig into it, because Saint Ignatius points out that they also kept the Torah. So they were also Judaizers, which again, this confounds both there. So you have this contradictory narrative that there’s this Gnostic Christology that’s just as old or older as the Orthodox

19:57 Christology while saying that the Orthodox Christology developed from a purely human Jesus at the same time. Right. So that doesn’t make sense together, even if you want to argue for one of those individually. But the way they would get around that, if you read like von Harnack, is they say, well, there’s sort of Jewish Christianity. And they point to the Ebonites. And then some modern folks even try to connect the Ebonites to Islam. Right. And this kind of thing. Right. Yeah. That sees that sees Jesus as just a prophet. Right. And then the Gnosticism stuff is coming out of Greek Christianity. Right. And so there, because remember, these Christianities are just

20:49 things about Jesus. None of them come from Jesus. So the Greeks look at Jesus and create this Gnostic thing. And the Jewish folks look at Jesus and it’s this prophetic thing. And then some of them even go full Hegel and say that the doctrine of the Trinity is sort of an attempt to reconcile those two. Right. And that compromise. So sort of a synthesis of these two, two contradictory views. But as I mentioned, one of the big problems with that is Docetism causes them a huge problem with that, because you have these people very early who believe that Christ is some sort of theophany and not human in the flesh, but also are Torah observant. Which means that would be related to Jewish Christianity, not Greek Christianity. Right. And

21:44 so this is one of those things where these reconstructions all sort of sound good at the systemic abstract level. But as soon as you bring them close to the actual historical data, they kind of all fall apart. They don’t actually make sense of the reality, the reality on the ground. It sounds like you’re diagnosing the issue of most documentaries you would see on TV or on YouTube. You see all these scholars being interviewed and they’ll talk about Christianity’s and this kind of swirling mess in the first century and how one just kind of survived because of the empire, kind of a survival of the fittest kind of narrative. And so you’re pushing back against that. Yes. Yeah. Because it seems bizarre to me to assume that

22:35 either Christ taught nothing or as early as disciples didn’t remember it. Right. But there have been a couple, in both those theories, there have been a couple big holes blown through it that have caused the scholarly consensus to change and even Bart Ehrman’s mind to change. One of those is just, as we mentioned already, then T. Wright and other scholars like him bringing to bear, hey, we actually know a lot now about Second Temple Judaism and the Judaism of the first century and the surrounding world and the environment and what was going on. Right. Maybe we should read the texts in light of that,

23:25 which again seems obvious now. Yeah. Did the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and slowly translating a lot of these texts and fragments, did that help propel this movement to respond to the earlier sort of German wave? I mean, it did help, but I mean, there were texts around before the Dead Sea Scrolls, right? They had the Book of Enoch. They had these things. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls in particular is kind of what triggered NT Wright, 4QMMT. With Dead Sea Scrolls, Q is for Qumran, where they were found. The number before that is which cave it was found in. So 4QMT came from the fourth cave at Qumran. And it’s a document. It’s the leaders of the Qumran community

24:15 corresponding with basically some Pharisees. That particular document and the way it talks about justification kind of triggered NT Wright to say, hey, maybe this is relevant to the Bible. Right. And as people were one over to that, that reshaped a lot of things because a lot of these, that brought a lot more data into the picture. Right. And it was sort of you couldn’t ignore it now. Even if you didn’t agree with NT Wright, you sort of couldn’t ignore all that stuff. You went to present a paper or publish a journal article and you just ignored all these other texts, you get immediate peer pushback. Right. So you had to start accounting for it.

25:02 That crippled a lot of these theories. But then relatedly, this caused a big rereading of Saint Paul where Saint Paul had been read in a very Lutheran way previous to that by scholarship, where he sort of opposing Judaism, the Judaism of his day. If you’re watching on YouTube, you’ll see this, but if you’re just listening on the ancient faith radio, I’m pulling up a copy of father Stephen D. Young’s book, Saint Paul, the Pharisee. Yeah. The apostle to all the nations. Yeah. So he was read very much against the Judaism of his time. And now he is read very much within the Judaism of his time to condense a lot of

25:48 things there. But that rereading of Saint Paul also had an effect on this issue, because of course, Saint Paul has a Christology. And everyone has agreed, even all the sort of wild liberal theorists we’ve been talking about all agree that Saint Paul’s epistles were written before any of the gospels. And so if Saint Paul’s Christology, and one of the important texts here is Philippians 2, right? If Saint Paul has a Christology where it gets really tricky to argue, especially when you read it in the context of other Jewish literature of the time, that he believes that Christ is a pre-existent, at least pre-existent

26:38 divine being. And he’s argued that before Saint Mark, the first gospel was written, arguing that now Saint Mark goes back to just a human Jesus becomes weird, becomes very difficult. If you’ve got like Saint Paul giving us this picture of a cosmic Christ, you know, pre-existent in the 40s, 50s and 60s, then the gospel of Mark just dropping to a human Jesus and then gospel of John later on jumping back up to a cosmic high Christology. It doesn’t match the narrative of what they’re trying to do with this evolutionary theory. Yeah. Yeah. And so that was really, and that’s what, from what I could tell, I haven’t heard Bart Urban speak to this directly, but I’ve heard him, I’ve read how Jesus became God, and I’ve

27:27 heard him talk about his view of Saint Paul now. And he’s not saying, don’t get me wrong, Bart Urban is not saying that Saint Paul taught Nicene or Chalcedonian Christology, right? He’s not saying that, but he is saying that Saint Paul believed that Jesus was the incarnation of a pre-existing divine being. So we’ve got Bart Urban to arguing Saint Paul is an Aryan, which is not ideal, but major progress from what he used to think, right? He’s at least an Aryan or a Jehovah Witness or something. Yeah. Yeah. He’s not correct, but he’s moving in the right direction. Right. So, yeah. And so that kind of confounds the whole

28:20 theory, but there are even within Saint Mark’s Gospel now, if you have an eye for it, right? So if you set aside the hypothesis, so you’re not reading Saint Mark’s Gospel through the hypothesis. Right. The low Christology versus like super high Christology. I mean, I can give an example before you get started talking about that. Like real quick, a kind of devil’s advocate question would be, why is Jesus and Mark saying that he doesn’t know when he’s going to return, not the angels, not the son, only the father, but then you fast forward to the Gospel of John, and then you see Jesus saying several I am statements that are just very in your face.

29:09 That sounds like God on Mount Sinai talking to Moses. So you just, sometimes people just kind of pick up on those kinds of things and then they patch a theory together. Right. Right. Or vice versa. Or they start with the theory and they go looking for evidence and it’s like, okay, well, here’s my quote mine from Saint Mark’s Gospel of everything I could find that makes it sound like Jesus is a God. And then a corresponding quote by it from Saint John, right? Of here’s all the high Christology I can find. Right. So, yeah. So, we could talk about the particular issue of him not knowing when he’s going to return. I’m sure that’ll show up in the Q&A too again. I’m sure people. Yeah. Cause there’s something interesting going on with the verb to know there. But,

30:00 and the church fathers pointed this out already. But if you do a close read of Saint Mark’s Gospel and you read for details, right? And especially when there are details that he doesn’t have in common with the other gospels, right? When you have a story that he tells and other gospels tell, right? There’s this bad tendency again from that reactionary strain, right? To try to just, well, we just harmonize everything, right? But actually those different details are important. And that’s what reflects the differences of the vision of that author,

30:48 which are not theological differences necessarily, right? You can have things coexist, right? Kind of different icons saying the same thing, but the icons can look a little bit differently. Right. And the mystery of Christ is, you know, a mystery and infinitely complex. You could have a hundred different trajectories, right? To talk about Christ in different ways that are all true, even though they’re different, right? And none of them is exhaustive, right? But so what are these little details that I think is interesting in Saint Mark’s Gospel is that when he describes Christ walking out to the disciples in their boat on the water in the storm, right? He says he has this little line that he drops in there. He looked as if he was going to

31:41 pass them by, which is not the other gospels, is kind of extraneous, right? And kind of weird, right? Like what he was just going to walk past their boat and keep going. Like, what does that mean? But if you dig a little into the Greek of it, the Greek there for passing them by is the same Greek that occurs in the Greek version of Job, where Job in one of his laments, when he’s talking about he’s in this situation of trouble, right? And even compares it to a storm, right? Says, the Lord has passed me by.

32:30 Wow. Meaning like he walked past and didn’t help me, right? Was the idea. And so that same Greek is in this sort of weird phrase as the disciples are out there caught in this storm, right? And even though they see Christ coming to them by the water, this great miraculous thing, they’re scared he’s not going to help them, right? But that also is identifying Christ with God intertextually, right? When you see that connection. And it’s hard to argue that that phrase is insignificant, because if it’s insignificant, why is it even there? Right? If that’s just. And the other gospels leave that out. So they didn’t seem to, right?

33:22 So you’re saying this is like a theophany of God, like this language is invoking that. Yeah, it’s doing an intertextual thing with Job, right? To identify Christ. And so understanding and interpreting the gospel, if you’re going to try to drive theology from the gospels, right, the gospels, of course, aren’t going to make these sort of objective. The narrator doesn’t sort of turn to the camera and say, so you see, Jesus is both God and man, right? You don’t get that in one of the gospels, right? You get a depiction of the gospel, right? You don’t get that in one of the gospels, right? You get a depiction, right? So like Saint Luke’s gospel, if you read it closely, he, for example, shows Jesus doing God things and Jesus doing human

34:13 things. Without turning to the camera and saying Christ has two energies, right? He just shows it, right? It’s show, don’t tell, right? And so that example is an example of Saint Mark showing, rather than telling, right? If you’re deeply immersed in the scriptures. And we have to remember a lot, scholarship still to this day too much, but in the 18th and 19th centuries, way worse. There are these big partitions between different fields of scholarship. So like Old Testament and New Testament scholars don’t communicate. And New Testament scholars and Patristic scholars don’t communicate. And so you find New Testament scholars saying things that are

35:01 absurd from the perspective of an Old Testament scholar or the apostolic fathers, but there’s no interdisciplinary connection. And so that’s why a lot of things like that just went unseen, because New Testament scholars weren’t reading Greek Job. They weren’t looking for that kind of intertextual thing. And that’s, this is, if you look at biblical studies, dissertations from the last 20 years, they’re almost all on intertextuality. I mean, I would guesstimate 75 or 80% involves some kind of intertextuality. It’s just taking a New Testament text and an

35:47 Old Testament text and showing how they’re connected. Right. I mean, Isaiah is just all throughout the New Testament. And I remember trying, I mean, I got a degree in New Testament studies and I was very tempted to do that, run off and just kind of isolate myself from the Old Testament. And I just realized how big of a failure I would be if I didn’t have that experience. I would be so frustrated. I would be so frustrated by how big of a failure I would be by neglecting, just spending time with Isaiah and all the prophets, because there’s just so much, there’s just reference so much in the New Testament. Yeah. Yeah. But it’s sort of amazing that, you know, 2000 years into Christianity and 200 plus years into modern scholarship,

36:33 that is just, how are the Old and New Testaments connected? It seems so obvious that you think we would have taken care of all this, you know, pretty early on, but no. And then the same thing with people doing things with the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers, or the New Testament and Second Temple Jewish literature. That’s the whole, almost the whole field now is just, oh, hey, these texts are all connected. Huh. Go figure. What do you do about the Gospel of John with its style? You know, it just kind of reads differently when you read it, the style, you know, it sounds like someone’s preaching you a sermon or a homily when you’re reading it versus maybe when you’re reading the other Gospels. Why does it sound

37:22 like that? And then I think, you know, some of the pushback that people would give that I’ve heard is okay, this is probably just some kind of preaching of the early church, but not by someone who knew Jesus. Like there’s not, there aren’t enough authentic details to say that this is actually someone who knew Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s an assumption, right? Because what are authentic details, right? And so there’s a couple things going on there. There’s a Renaissance, again, going on right now. And this is because of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And there are particular scholars doing it. My dissertation was even a piece of this, which is in that paradigm we

38:08 talked about where there’s sort of Jewish Christianity and Greek Christianity. St. John’s Gospel got put in the Greek Christianity category. And that went, that sort of reached its apex with Rudolf Boltmann in the early 20th century, who basically argued that all the Johannian literature was Gnostic. Just straight out. Wow. Right. And so the, that was, it had no connection, right, to anything Jewish. You argued there are no sacraments in it. The on and on. I was going to say, if you’re just going a Gnostic direction, then what,

38:55 you don’t, you don’t see the sacramental connections all throughout John. Right. Right. And, and though they don’t know it, a lot of conservative evangelicals who their arguments for why John six isn’t the Eucharist actually come from people like Boltman for these very liberal scholars. But, and a lot of the language he used about light and darkness and all of this stuff, they argued, Oh, this is stereotypical Gnostic language and da da da. Right. But now that we have the Dead Sea Scrolls, Dead Sea Scrolls, very Jewish, obviously, from a fundamentalist Jewish sect that thought the Pharisees were too liberal. Those, those texts use a lot of that same language about light and darkness,

39:45 a lot of the same language St. John does. And so now people are arguing, including me, that St. The Johannian literature is actually the most Jewish, some of the most Jewish literature in the New Testament. Quite the opposite. And if you look at, even though I don’t buy the arguments about St. John’s gospel being written before 70, before AD 70, if you look at their arguments and you look at the details they point to St. John actually has a lot of details about the setup of the temple complex about Judea itself, right? That date to the time when the temple was still standing. Right. And that’s why they make that argument. Right. That’s

40:32 definitely something that’s been being talked, it’s definitely being talked about a lot more recently. I’ve noticed over kind of last decade, it’s just the geography and landscape of John, like he’s so detailed with where he is in Jerusalem at the moment. And how could anyone who’s not familiar with Jerusalem be able to be that detailed? Yeah. Yeah. And the, the current scholarship, then the other big piece of this is that we have a fundamentally different view now in scholarship of the relationship between the gospels. So there was the old theory, and again, it takes a while to filter down. So you still get this on your documentaries and stuff is that you have Mark and then you have Q and Matthew and Luke sort of incorporate chunks of Q

41:23 into Mark’s narrative. And then John is sort of off the reservation, right? Doing its own thing. Right. Like you said, that’s not what anybody holds to anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Because Q is basically Matthew and Mark both say together at the same time, but it’s not found in Mark. Yes. Right. Yeah. Yes. And then they argued that that was an actual existing text. They even published a critical edition of this text that we have no copies of. Just on this assumption. So almost, I mean, there are still old timers who hold to that, but most people don’t. Most people now, and there’s different variations of this, the Griezbach hypothesis and stuff, in what order they are, but the arguments are all

42:11 that the gospels are mutually independent. So the most common one is that Mark is still first, but then Matthew had Mark and Luke had Matthew and Mark. Right. And St. Luke says at the beginning of his gospel that many people had written, right? And that he is using texts, right? So that fits what’s in the gospel itself. And so there, but there’s also in Johannian literature now, there’s a growing consensus that St. John had all three of the other gospels, not just the time of writing, but that it wasn’t written in a vacuum, right? That he had access to the other gospels. That’s fascinating. What’s the evidence that shows up that he is familiar with the other three gospels? So a lot of that evidence is that he

43:02 fills in gaps. He takes time to explain things that kind of imply that, you know, someone reading one of the other gospels would have a particular question. So what are the most obvious of these is the triumphal entry kind of comes out of the blue, right? Palm Sunday, right? In the synoptic gospels, uh, crisis preaching. He comes to Bethany, right? And then all of a sudden there’s this big, huge excitement and parade. He’s just been preaching in Galilee. So you’re like, where does all this sort of fanfare come from? Right? You don’t know. And St. John takes the time. He reiterates it like three times that the reason for all the excitement was the raising of Lazarus,

43:50 which is a story only he tells. Right? So St. Mary and Martha in Bethany appear in the other gospels, right? But their brother Lazarus had been raised from the dead. That leading to all of this excitement that Jesus is the Messiah and the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. That’s only spelled out in St. John’s gospel. And it’s not just that he tells the story and they don’t, he reiterates. They were enthusiastic because they had seen Lazarus raised from the dead, right? The authorities conspired not just to kill Jesus, but also to kill Lazarus to cover up, right? The raising of Lazarus. So there are a number of places like that where he sort of gives these explanations, right? So, or how, how did anybody know what was going on with the trial of Jesus? We’ll say John

44:38 says he was, he’s related to somebody right in those circles. And so he was able to, you know, there’s a whole bunch of those explanatory notes, right? That seemed to be a function of, I’m consciously filling in a gap in the other written accounts. Right? Yeah. Like, like Peter’s access, uh, uh, Peter’s access is the right, the raising of Lazarus. There’s, there are a lot of details in John. It’s funny though, but people like Bart Ehrman will say, and others will say even recently, cause they’ve been captured on YouTube the last year you’re doing so, um, stating that that’s actually these, these are actually, uh, it’s evidence that it’s inauthentic. Like it’s, they’re

45:27 just, just myth-making, just storytelling. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why, why would, why do we have to go that direction? Yeah. Correct early details, right? That he has about the geography and the landscape, right? Combined with, right, filling in those gaps and giving those explanations, right? So it’s sort of a composite case, right? Put together there, right? And so, and that also explains things like Boltman, when he’s trying to argue there’s no sacraments, pointing out, oh, well he, St. John’s gospel is the only gospel that doesn’t give the words of institution of the Eucharist, right? Where that just gets skipped and it talks about the foot washing, right? In, in St. John’s gospel. So we have it four times in scripture, but one of those is St.

46:17 Paul and first Corinthians, right? The words of institution and then the other three gospels. Well, St. John has access to those other gospels. Well, that explains why he doesn’t retread, right? The, the things that are already multiple times present and adds what wasn’t already present and talks about the Eucharist in John 6, right? In theological terms, right? The fact that the basic narrative has been spelled out multiple times by texts that were already becoming authoritative in Christian communities allows him then to theologize, allows him to be St. John the theologian and approach it from a different direction and take his time and expand these

47:05 things and fill in gaps and offer a sort of, this is a bad pun, but even he’s associated with the eagle, but a bird’s eye view, right? Of, of, of things, right? From this sort of higher perspective, right? Yeah. Well, what do you make of the theory that some have proposed someone like a, you know, a pretty conservative evangelical New Testament scholar like Dr. Ben Witherington, who proposes that John wasn’t the primary author, but it actually was the address. He’s the beloved disciple and he’s got a whole theory, theory on this. I mean, so you have that question, which of course you’ve already addressed the father’s testimony about John, but my, my kind of sub question really is much more related to, do you think even if Lazarus wasn’t the primary author, do you think

47:55 he contributed? Like, is this some kind, is there a Lazarus layer to this gospel since he does show up quite a bit in it? Well, I think, I think there are friend connections, right? There are, these are all people who were in the early Christian community, right? These are people who knew each other and formed a community. So I think, you know, St. John obviously knew the Theotokos, right? St. John knew Mary and Martha and Lazarus. He was there for the things that happened, right? I mean, I, I, you accept the you accept the early church tradition that St. Lazarus went on to become a bishop, right? I mean,

48:41 these are people who had an ongoing role. There’s sort of this weird presupposition that everybody sort of went their separate ways after the first few chapters of Acts, right? And the Pauline community and you’ve got Matthew’s community and a lot of this reconstruction scholarship is just trying to put all these communities against each other. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it’s also been proposed at St. John’s gospel is written by St. Mary Magdalene by some scholars. And it’s like, well, she went to Ephesus traditionally where St. John was. So they knew each other, right? So you could point to all this like, oh, this seems to be coming from her perspective. Only she would know. Well, yeah, St. John knew her, right? They, they talked and they, it didn’t all get written

49:28 down everything they said, right to each other. Yeah. So I think that’s accommodated by, and there’s just, there are, there are too many, when you look at first John and St. John’s gospel, and even the book of Revelation structurally, and the Greek and this kind of thing, it’s hard to, it’s really hard to argue they were written by different people. There’s just too much the same there. And so a lot of times, even when Eusebius tried to section off Revelation, you know, and say, oh, that’s John the Presbyter, that was because he didn’t accept Revelation as scripture, right? And so he wanted

50:16 to have it written by a different author. There’s sort of some special pleading going on. To try to separate them. But because Revelation was a disputed book for quite some time in the East. Yeah. But especially if you, if you look at it structurally, St. John’s gospel and his epistle, the first, first John, second and third John, it’s not that they’re by someone else or something. It’s just that they’re so short. It’s hard to talk about structure, you know, the structure of a paragraph, right? Yeah, I wrote, I wrote a 50 page paper on third John. So I tried to learn as much as I could, but it was a pretty short letter. Yeah. But it’s written with this sort of, sometimes it’s been described as cyclical,

51:01 but it’s actually more like a corkscrew in that there are a series of cycles, but they’re moving in one direction, like a spiral or a corkscrew, right? So it’s a little bit of a, you know, so it’s not purely just circling around, but it is circling around. And you see that with his chronology, the synoptic gospels are all structured as a through line, whereas his is structured around three cycles of the Jewish feasts. You see that with his placement of certain events in Christ’s life, like in the synoptic gospels, Christ cleanses the temple,

51:47 drives out the moneylenders in Holy week. And in St. John’s gospel, it’s like the first thing he does. Yeah. The chronology is really interesting when John, yeah. Yeah. And so it’s because he does these sort of thematic cycles. And once you see that it is gospel, and then you look at like the book of Revelation and how that the cycles of seven there, and then even in, in first John, first John structurally, if you try and look at it as, as like St. Paul’s epistles, he makes a linear argument from A to B, right? It’s actually a therefore be right. But with first John, he,

52:36 it seems like if you just try to read it straight through, he’s bouncing around topics back and forth, right? So like he mentions the evil one, like four times, and they’re in completely separate chapters, like preceded by nothing, like it’s not arranged topically. But if you approach it from that perspective of this is he writes in these cycles, you could see he follows through the same cycle of topics repeatedly sort of honing in on his point on all of those topics and bringing them together at the end. Kind of like iconography where you’re seeing like repeated themes throughout iconography in a way. Yeah. And so if, if someone other than St. John wrote one of those, right, it was a masterful forgery, because that’s not a typical way of, I mean, no other

53:30 texts in the New Testament are structured that way. So, Tanner Iskra So my linear, my linear map of my dispensationalist linear map of revelation isn’t, isn’t right? Or it’s just one thing after a bad news, bad news. Wall chart has to come down, or at least be drawn as a spiral. Paul I’ll just keep them in my museum of my, of my journey. Tanner Iskra This came before me, no longer relevant. Okay, so this has been a really fun topic to discuss two different Jesus. I feel like we’ve covered a lot. Is there anything else that you want to say about like the gospel of John and compared to the gospel of Mark before we get into Q&A? Paul Let me, let me just throw out one more thing, because I want to give an example of

54:17 something I talked about briefly or briefly earlier. I mentioned you can have these different sort of trajectories, these different perspectives on Christ that are all true, even though they’re not the same. So here’s another example between St. Mark and St. John. And this is, this is actually one of the examples that’s used to try to argue for the two different Jesuses. That’s why I think it’s a good example. So in St. Mark’s gospel, when Christ is being crucified, they go and they dip the sponge basically in a sedative and put it on a reed and offer it to him. And the idea there is that by giving him a sedative, when someone is being crucified, they die by asphyxiation usually,

55:05 because they have to use their legs to push themselves up to be able to take in a breath and eventually their legs give out. And so they sort of strangle because they can’t get enough air. That’s why Pilate ordered, in St. John’s gospel, orders the knees of the crucified people to be broken, because that would effectively cause them to die very quickly. And so by giving someone a sedative, you’re basically making them die more quickly. So the idea in St. Mark’s gospel is that they’re doing this out of spite, right? In St. John’s gospel, Christ says, I thirst, and they dutifully go over and get the sponge

55:50 and offer him something to drink. And so those who want to do that theory will say, ah, see, St. Mark’s gospel, Christ is this human victim of Roman oppression. And St. John’s gospel, he’s sort of above it all, even as he’s being crucified. But if you just read it for understanding, like what is, show, don’t tell again, what is the author trying to show? St. Mark’s gospel is trying to show that these people who are murdering Jesus are still filled with this spite and anger toward him, even as they’re murdering him. And what St. John is trying to show us is, as he had said

56:41 earlier in his gospel, Christ says, no one takes my life from me. I lay it down, I can take it up again, is that Christ is doing what he’s doing voluntarily. And so even as he’s being crucified, he’s still sort of in command of the situation. He’s there voluntarily. Both of those could be true. There’s no actual contradiction there. It’s two different presentations, but they don’t actually contradict each other. And you don’t even have to go to Great Links to harmonize them. And so this is an example, right? Any person, any human person is sort of infinitely complex.

57:29 Two people can encounter me on two different days in two different situations, and just going by that, conclude that I am two totally different people. And the way my wife knows me, the way my mother knows me, the way my parishioners know me, it’s all different, and they’re all going to give you different pictures. That doesn’t mean there’s not a real me. All of those could be true and could be aspects of who I am, good and bad. Now, in Christ’s case, being a divine person, how much more infinitely complex is Christ, as a divine person who’s taken on our human nature? And how much more is there to say? And how many more valid and real perspectives are there and things to communicate? And so having four

58:20 Gospels is therefore not a problem, it’s appropriate. And that’s the approach that the church has literally always taken. We have no evidence that at some very early period, there were churches just using Luke and other churches just using Mark and other churches just using John. The earliest accounts we have of the Gospels, other than Marcion, who only used his version of Luke, right? And so the people responding to him are all saying, we have four Gospels already. And they had read them, they knew they weren’t all identical. If they were identical, there’d be no reason to have four. And they were comfortable with that and thought that good and right and appropriate.

59:06 So the earliest communities all seem to be influenced by all four Gospels, like they’re receiving them all, not just isolating one. Right. As far as we can tell, there’s no evidence of anything else other than, like I said, Marcion isolates just the one. And the response to him in the early second century is, you can’t limit it to just the one. It’s not, you should be using this other one instead. And so, you know, that’s related to this topic on how Saint Ignatius of Antioch was influenced by the Gospel of John. At Psalm 22, underscore 16 writes, I noticed Ignatius constantly referred to Satan as the prince of this world, something only found in John’s Gospel. Does this show he knew the Gospel or Mere Jehoi 9 tradition as a

59:52 disciple? Well, yeah. So it’s hard to know when you’re dealing with Saint Ignatius because he’s so early. And so I think he’s frankly writing a couple of his epistles around the same time that Saint John’s Gospel is being written. So this is coming out of, I would say with Saint Ignatius, there’s a good likelihood this is coming out of the same oral, right, preaching this milieu, right, this apostolic milieu that Saint Ignatius is in, rather than being a quote from the text

1:00:44 itself. It could be, right, it could be. We don’t have super precision in terms of the exact year for either Saint John’s Gospel or each of Saint Ignatius’ epistles. We have ballparks on both, so it’s not impossible that he could have had an early copy of the Gospel of John. But even if he did, that would have been something that was in the oral, the sort of oral preaching. Again, there’s this idea that comes out of Protestantism and Sola Scriptura that sort of whatever else the apostles might have said that they didn’t write down is like this black box that we can’t peer into and we could never know, right, for sure. But if you look at their earliest disciples and what they wrote, I mean, that stuff is pretty good

1:01:33 for candidates. Right. It also seems that Saint Paul is using a very similar phrase as Prince of this world in Ephesians 2 when he says the Prince of the power of the air. Yeah, yeah, so potentially the God of this present world, although that’s debated exactly who he’s talking about there. Yeah. Right, so Saint Ignatius could just be receiving an oral tradition from the apostles and they’re all referencing him as the Prince of the air or Prince of this world. Yeah, very good. I had a quick question before we get into more of the Q&A. What do you think about the future of like basically biblical theology studies and what

1:02:20 role do Orthodox Christians play within it, if at all, right? You have first of all the academic community that has the Society of biblical literature. Should we as Orthodox Christians raise people up and send them to these kinds of societies, set up our own? Do we just critique them? What is your sort of vision for that kind of future when it comes, I think about my own kids and grandkids and biblical scholarship as Orthodox Christians? Yeah. No, I think we need to enter into it. I think we need to enter into it more fully. I think one of the advantages we have and one of the things that Orthodox scholars in particular can bring to the table on this is because we don’t

1:03:05 have any kind of Sola Scriptura tradition, we don’t have, we don’t and don’t need to have this sort of hermetic seal between the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers or the Old Testament and the New Testament. We don’t even have the big gap that Protestants have of the quote-unquote intertestamental period, right? We don’t have one. So there’s, we have a lot to bring to the table in terms of the continuity there and that’s frankly a lot of my written work has been about a lot of that continuity, right, between Old Testament, New Testament, second century, early second century Christianity, right, that whole sphere and I think

1:03:53 that continuity view breaks down a lot of these sort of bad theories that we would otherwise want to critique and I think it’s better to enter into the discussion and try and win people over to the truth than just to stand outside of it and critique the discussion for all of its flaws. Let’s see here, I got a question at L Wrong IntenMan007, these YouTube names are really funny, question, what about the modern scholars that say St. Paul didn’t write a lot of his epistles, right, maybe half of them, you know, people have different lists, like first and

1:04:38 second Timothy are not actually dictated or written by Paul at all. So what would you say about that? Yeah, so that’s starting to break down a little too. So yeah, everybody agrees that like St. Paul wrote Galatians, most of scholarship now agrees, so there’s some minority position that it’s first Thessalonians, that Galatians is the earliest text in the New Testament. But there are what are called the pastoral epistles, first and second, Timothy and Titus, and then some people will lump in Ephesians and Colossians, those are the ones that are breaking

1:05:27 down the fastest in terms of not being Pauline. But the reason for that, the whole reason for that was this sort of evolutionary hypothesis, right, this idea that, oh, those epistles talk about the church or structures of leadership in the church, that kind of thing in ways that St. Paul couldn’t have during his lifetime. Because those took time to develop. And so they had to be written after his after his death. Now, I like in my book on St. Paul, I argue that a lot of that is taken care of just by actually reading the text, because for example, some of them list St. Timothy as a

1:06:17 co author. So that would kind of explain things like why the Greek is a little different if there’s a co author, right. So there is there is some of that listed. And there are some people, there’s some scholars who try to split the difference by saying essentially, St. Timothy wrote them after St. Paul’s death, based on St. Paul’s preaching. And that’s why it says Paul and Timothy, because St. Timothy is the one actually doing the writing, but it’s based on what St. Paul taught him and preached in content. But I don’t I think it’s all it’s all Pauling. But the the this is another place where to me the key argument is just breaking down that evolutionary hypothesis. Because the idea of a presbyter is found, you know, in the Torah, with the elders of Israel,

1:07:12 right, and then the Sanhedrin, right. So in the early church, we have a council of presbyters. That’s not some new thing that had to develop. That’s a reappropriation, right of the way Jewish communities were governed into the Christian community. So it doesn’t say the nations of Antioch say that explicitly that the presbyters are the Sanhedrin. Yes, yes, around. So you don’t need but most New Testament scholars aren’t reading St. Ignatius, right. So that’s yeah, so you don’t need that. It isn’t that okay, Jesus comes and then okay, clean slate, we’re starting a new religion. And now it’s going to take time for

1:08:02 us to develop governmental structures, right? That’s not what happens. And so once you understand the continuity, once you understand that the structure St. Paul is describing in those epistles, are just appropriations of Old Testament leadership structures for the Christian community. Like they’re just adaptations of already existing authority structures from the synagogue and that kind of thing. Then there’s no reason to try to push them back in dating. So yeah. Another question coming in. Why do you, this is from at greenemperor3022. Why do you think Mark wrote his gospel shorter than the other ones? Why is it this quick moving

1:08:50 gospel? Yeah. Well, so yeah, there’s a couple things there. St. Mark’s Greek, I’m just blunt about this. St. Mark’s Greek is really bad. When you read commentaries, people try to be real polite about it. They’ll say like St. Mark’s Greek is rustic. He’s kind of trying to find these adjectives. And that’s not a put down to St. Mark. It’s just, he’s not a native Greek speaker. Right. And we’re told that several of the disciples and then apostles were not literate. Right. So that he’s literate at all in a second language puts them ahead of frankly, most Americans, for example. So this isn’t a huge

1:09:38 group. Just his literacy in his, in a second language is not, you know, he’s not super, you know, fluid. He tends to write like these big chains of participles. And when those get translated because it’s a chain of, or not parts of, yeah, of participles, because it’s just this big chain of participles. That’s what gives it that quick moving. Cause it’s like, if you translated it really literally, you’d have sentences like Jesus going, seeing, touching, looking right. Like it’s just for visible after participle. So that’s part of it is that he’s, you know, working with the Greek he has, right. And he’s just trying to set out St. Peter isn’t there to give his eyewitness

1:10:32 testimony anymore. And so he’s trying to put that in writing because you look at the amount of cost, the amount of effort that was required, everything involved in putting something into text form in the first century. So a text, the length of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans would cost the equivalent of like $5,000 for a copy. So, and St. Mark’s Gospel is 16 chapters, it’s roughly the same length, give or take, right. The, you look at all that, the reason it is written is such a powerful statement is that a text was sort of a monument, a literary monument, right. So by

1:11:24 writing down St. Peter’s testimony of Christ, he’s sort of enshrining it. St. Peter’s gone, but we’re going to put this down to be preserved until Christ returns, right. That’s really what’s in his mind, right. And so he’s, you know, recalling what St. Peter preached. And he’s what is, and you’ll notice the text is very blunt and honest about St. Peter and some of his failings during the life of Christ. But he’s, that’s his goal is to put that in writing and enshrine it. It’s not, he’s not trying to, and not qualified to write something super flowery or, right. He’s trying to just get this preserved.

1:12:12 ISKRA Yeah. Do you agree with some of the claims that showing St. Peter’s flaws actually is a sign of authenticity of the gospel? Yeah, I think so. I think that’s why a lot of that is included. So it’s not, it’s not this external figure for whom, St. Peter isn’t this external figure for whom I have reverence, right. And therefore, what, you know, be careful how I talk about him. If it’s St. Peter himself, he can be as blunt as he needs to be about his own life and thoughts and failures. ISKRA Yeah, that’s great. Have you also heard of the claim that the preaching of, by Peter in the book of Acts, the outline of his sermons is a very

1:13:02 similar outline that you find in the gospel of Mark? I’m pulling from you, Zach Wynn. ZACH Wynn Yeah, I’ve seen that. I don’t find it super persuasive because a lot of the outlines of the preaching in Acts look like each other. And there are external, like with St. Stephen and St. Paul, if you understand the church’s tradition that they were both disciples of Gamaliel, like it makes sense that they’d have similar approaches and structures to things. But St. Peter not being educated really at all. You wouldn’t expect it to match so closely. And you have to remember that all of the sermons and homilies that are recorded in scripture are not

1:13:52 recorded verbatim. It wasn’t someone writing them. They’re all summaries, right? They’re all essentially notes, right? And high points. And that’s even true of the Sermon on the Mount in St. Matthew’s gospel because you could go read the Sermon on the Mount at a nice slow pace. It takes about 45 minutes. And if you read in St. Matthew’s gospel, it says that by the time Christ was done preaching, like night had fallen. And it starts out with them having lunch. So it’s not recording every single word Christ spoke. And St. John tells us explicitly, nobody’s trying to record every single word Christ spoke, right? But everything that’s there is authentic, but not everything he said is there, right? And so the same thing is true with the

1:14:41 the sermons and acts, right? We’re getting the notes of someone who heard, right? The sermon, not the sort of full text, every individual word that was spoken. But I thought the Bible dropped out of the sky. Yeah. Yeah, that can make the statement that you just made can make some fundamentalist Protestants a little uncomfortable because it can ring a little bit of liberalism because there’s that kind of reaction. So like, how do you walk that? How do you walk that way of not being like hyper skeptical, but also having a little bit of leeway when it comes to these paraphrases or summaries? Yeah. Well, so because I believe the Holy Spirit

1:15:28 inspired the scriptures, I believe it’s not accidental what is recorded and what isn’t, right? I don’t think that just happened. I think the Holy Spirit was the one guiding people’s memories, guiding people to write what he wanted them to write. And one of the good things about being Orthodox is that we could just let the Bible be the Bible. We could let it be what it is, we could let it be what it is, right? Because there is so much Protestant dogma about the scriptures that it sort of creates some of its own problems. You say certain things about the scriptures and you create this round hole. And now the actual

1:16:15 scriptures are kind of a square peg sometimes. And you’ve got to try to hammer it through, right? Or deny. One of the big examples of this I have is when I was in my undergrad and I first started studying Greek, one of my friends was from like an IFB background, asked me, what’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned so far, right? Reading the New Testament in Greek. And I said, it’s really interesting how all the authors have different styles and different ways that they write. And he said, that’s not true. He just rejected the idea that that could possibly be true because for him, it has one author, God. God wrote the whole thing. When he reads his King James Bible,

1:17:02 it all speaks with the same voice, right? All the way through. And so that’s it. He just would not accept, right? And so if you have certain doctrinal commitments, you end up, you know, creating problems for yourself that don’t need to be there. We could just let the Bible be the Bible and be what it is and seek to understand and learn from it without having to try to make it something to fit our theology. Tanner Iskra Yeah, I’ve run into that at times. I think that was one of the very first things that my biblical studies department was trying to kind of get out of our minds was that the Bible was just this kind of dictated book dropped out of heaven and the

1:17:50 apostles and authors definitely have each of their own styles, for sure. Somebody asked the question, let’s see here. Oh, there it is. I finally found it. At Theo Andrew one father bless any advice for how to motivate scholars from different disciplines, patristics or liturgical studies to communicate better with one another. Godfrey Yeah. Well, I think part of that is already starting to happen. Like I talked about how all the dissertations now are about intertextuality, right? When you’re writing a dissertation or you’re trying to publish a journal article, you’ve got to try to come up with something new to say. So imagine in this day and age trying to come up with something

1:18:38 new to say about the text of the Bible. Well, we’ve got this one area thanks to people not communicating and that’s cross disciplinary stuff, right? And so the need to publish to keep your academic job and the need to find a dissertation topic for PhD students is helping motivate some of that now. But in my experience, with like the books I’ve published, and even with just my Bible study, my parish Bible study that gets circulated online, when people see these connections between things and start seeing how these things fit together, they get excited about that. They get

1:19:24 enthusiastic about that. That inspires them to start digging in and trying to find more of these things themselves, rather than just listening to me or other people point them out, right? And so I think the more discussion that happens publicly and in scholarly journals and at conferences and these kinds of things of these issues, I think gets more and more people excited about seeing those connections and seeing more continuity rather than evolution and development continuity and connections. What, just to follow up with that question, in what way do you see like Orthodox liturgical studies, like the things that we’ve preserved in worship over the centuries? How do you see that relating to biblical scholarship and even kind of the nature

1:20:15 of worship, like how the apostles worshiped? That’s a big barrier that still needs to get broken down, frankly. And that’s a barrier that’s internal to us as Orthodox scholars. I literally had an Orthodox liturgical scholar who was working on some liturgical translations tell me that he didn’t see why it was relevant that his translations have any parity with the biblical translations we use. And I’m like, so that people see the connections, right? Like, so that people understand that these are saying the same thing or similar things or building off each other. But that was counterintuitive, right? So in his mind, it was just about like, well,

1:21:02 we have to make it as chantable as possible and as accurate to the original as possible, and that’s it, right? And that I think is a huge, a huge mistake. And, you know, there are various Orthodox biblical translation efforts, different books, you know, epistle books and things that are used by different jurisdictions in liturgy. And the same can work the other way, right? If you have the option, biblical scholars, when they do translation work, have this bad habit of, you know, oh, I’m going to fix all my personal peccadilloes, right? Like, this should really be translated this way, right? All these English translations have it wrong.

1:21:53 Being less concerned about that, being like, oh, yeah, we sing that in the liturgy, maybe I should translate it so people make that connection, right? So that could go both ways, right? In terms of, in terms of our translations. So, yeah, I think that’s highly relevant, because there is a massive amount in our liturgics that connects directly to places in scripture. And I run into, I encounter all the time where it seems like the one or the other translator or both did everything possible to make sure you wouldn’t notice that they’re saying the same thing. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. They like, they go out of their way to make sure it’s not sounding the same. Yeah. I have a quick question. I’ve been going through the book, The First Christian

1:22:46 Himnal, and it’s basically the ancient Jerusalem chant book, and it’s just such a rich resource. But I’ve been discovering over the last kind of couple years that it definitely has a lot of direct quotes and allusions from the Deuterocanon. So, I mean, in the liturgy itself, there talking about, you know, the extended part of Daniel with the dew protecting the three holy youths. And there’s other references. Was it Nehemiah being transported? Is that one of them? Probably got my prophet wrong there. But it’s loaded with references in the liturgy about that, the Deuterocanonicals. What do you make of that showing up in such an ancient liturgy

1:23:38 in Jerusalem? I think Dr. Shoemaker dates the Jerusalem chant book to the late 300s, kind of 350 to 400. Yeah. Well, the whole idea of canon and Deuterocanon and all of that, and this iron wall surrounding what is scripture is a much later development. And, you know, you notice with St. Paul himself, he’ll say, you know, Israel had a rock that followed them in the wilderness, and that rock was Christ. And everybody glosses over that followed verb there. It’s like, that’s not in the Torah, right? Show me that in the Bible, right? And he’s just referring to it within a received tradition.

1:24:24 Right. And so you’re not going to find in any early liturgical text, including the biblical odes, this line drawn between the first part of the story of the three youths that’s canonical in Aramaic, and then the other part that’s in Greek that’s Deuterocanonical. No one makes that distinction in the early church. Right. So that’s it. It’s just sort of this later development. And they even, the more familiar you get with Second Temple Jewish tradition in general, you’ll find them referring to stuff that’s not even in the Deuterocanon. You’ll find them referencing stuff that’s in Jubilees, finding the referencing stuff that’s in these other texts that get labeled as Apocrypha, which just really just means books to be read privately, but that are

1:25:14 part of the, you know, the inheritance, just like the church fathers don’t have a problem referring to them. There’s no liturgical problem in referring to them. Wonderful. Well, I have a lot of follow-up questions about that, but that’ll have to be a different stream, but that’s a fun topic for sure. Well, I think we’ll just kind of wrap it up there. There’s been a lot of good questions today. Father Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a real joy. Yeah. My pleasure. My pleasure. We’ll have to have you come back on again, but is there anything that you would like to add to this, this like topic as we kind of close on the Gospels and the Orthodox approach to, to the Gospels? Just, I want to emphasize the, the particularity of the Gospels again, and particularly the

1:26:03 need to harmonize. I think it’s good sometimes to sit down and just read the Gospels individually, right? And just, and don’t go away from the Gospels, and just, and just, and just, to sit down and just read the Gospels individually, right? And just, and don’t correct it or add in the things that you remember the other Gospels say, but just read the one Gospel and focus in on, and you can read any of them in an afternoon if you just sit down and read it straight through. Focusing in on what it is, what it is saying. We did a, we did an episode of Lord of Spirits

1:26:54 where we went through the passion narratives in the four Gospels. Just went through each one separately. And I had clergy tell me that just from listening to them parallel like that, they noticed things they had never noticed before. And that’s not a problem with them or because I’m a genius. We just read them, right? Individually. But you could do that yourself. You could sit down and read individually, and you will notice things that you haven’t noticed before. And those details, those differences aren’t a problem to try to gloss over or get rid of. They’re important, right? And they’re communicating things that are important about Christ and about the Gospel.

1:27:42 Well, again, thank you so much, Father Stephen, for coming on the show. This has been a production of Ancient Faith Radio. Have a blessed day, everyone. Thank you.