welcome back to mythis podcast I'm your host Derek Lambert and today I am joined by the famous depending on who you ask Infamous Dr Bart D Airman welcome back thanks thanks for having me again do you like how I painted you depending on who it is uh well it's very much true it is I was talking to friends today about uh the problem of academic freedom and I was say man if it weren't for academic freedom I would have been fired 30 years ago b i always enjoy our conversations there you have a way about how you express when you teach and it's enjoyable you have a course that you're actually working on now that really pequs my interest as you know I'm a weirdo I like to get down under the weeds some of our conversations in the past show that what is this one about something to do with corruption scribal can you tell us about this yeah this one isn't just for weirdos this one so so um you know the um uh for a long time Scholars have recognized and now I think over the last 20 years uh lay people have recognized that we don't have the original writings of the New Testament um when somebody like you know Mark wrote his gospel he wrote something on probably with you know a pen on Papyrus and we don't have that thing and we don't have the copy that was first made of that or the copy of the copy the the copies we have of Mark are from much much later our first complete copy is 300 years later this CL this course it'll be a four lecture course that deals with how Mark and the other books of the New Testament were altered by copyists as they were copying them uh altered in many cases prior to our having any copies and so the question is how do we know what the uh what the authors of the New Testament originally wrote uh the course will be called the scribal uh Corruption of scripture and it there's so many questions that come from this so I don't want to give away too much of the uh main course maybe we can give people some popcorn or a little appetizer here teasing them as to why this course will be fun and what you'll be covering can you tell us some things that you think this course will hopefully answer for people and give us a little tease yeah so the you know a long time ago in 2005 I published a book called misquoting Jesus uh which is also you know the title of the the podcast I do and um it was um is by far the best selling book I've ever done and is a book that none of my academic friends thought anybody would want to buy because it was about you know scribes copying the New Testament in Greek I mean who wants to read about that but once people realize how interesting this is they said whoa and so um because you know we people you know PE people who are firmly committed to the Bible assume that when you're reading a verse you're just reading what the author wrote but what if it's the case as it is that there are lots of differences in lots of our manuscripts I mean we're not talking about like a dozen differences here and there within our surviving manuscripts there are hundreds of thousands of differences and so how do you deal with this and how do you know what the author originally wrote and why do you how do you know how a scribe changed it and why would a scribe Chang it and you know they didn't change the Quran they didn't change the the the Torah why are they changing the New Testament and so these are all questions I dealt with in my book and so um this this course will be related to that it's not going to just be my book I mean it's not going I'm not just going to repeat everything that in my book in fact I'm going to be talking about all sorts of examples that I've never talked about before and deal with all sorts of issues uh responses to this book by evangelicals um I had there were probably four or five books written against that book and so so I'll be talking about you know what others have said about it and try to show why this is a problem area for uh for New Testament scholarship now people can understand why I said Infamous famous Bart you know the thing is the things I say are said by biblical Scholars everywhere it's just they don't tell anybody except for themselves and so I'll repeat lines that my my mentor Bruce Meer who is a very very famous textual scholar said evangelic was love I'll repeat precisely the lines that he said and they get all over me for it but he they loved it when he said it same thing it is very interesting that's a whole another question of what is you know going on there but I'm I'm looking forward to because I imagine that there are textual variants or scribal changes that sometimes are going to be and I imagine we'll see this in the course extremely impactful doctrinally I'm not saying that most of them are you've said in your book before maybe you can elaborate on that to tease people but I imagine some of them are pretty significant yeah I mean and you know I talk about the the hugely significant ones in my book because I couldn't very well write a book about the scribes changing the text not mention ones that are real doozies but I but there are a lot that are really important that I don't don't mention but um well I mean uh the the doctrine of the Trinity is found in only one verse of the New Testament the explicit statement that you have the father and the Son and the spirit and that the three beings are are Divine but the three are one that that Doctrine so not not just mentioning that there is a father there is a spirit or there is a son but that the three are one that's the doctrine of the Trinity right it's found in only one verse and it's and it's in a verse that is found in the King James Bible but it's not in uh most modern translations except for fundamentalist translations will have it in it and it definitely absolutely was not there originally so uh you know who added it when did they add it why did well we know why they added it they wanted the biblical record to give the doctrine of the Trinity uh and so that so that makes sense uh but um so you know so you have you have things like that now I'm not saying by that that you know if that verse were gone then Christians would no longer belong believe in the Trinity of course they would Christians are going to believe whatever they want to believe and they're not you know they're not going to be dependent on a single verse but it's the reality without that verse it's not explicitly stated in the New Testament this makes me wonder if some of what you're describing here has overlap with what happened with marcian and I know there are several people who have different opinions in Academia about the order in which things happen did he did he dumb down and tweak a version of Luke or you know you know the back and forth when it comes to this but as far as scribal changes that would be a major example of like extreme changes to an earlier text if marcian let's say redacted a version of Luke or something to make his own version right yeah you see that yeah well yeah I mean it's a complicated issue uh it took me about 20 minutes to explain it to my class today about marcian so I'm not going to do that again right now but you know marcian is the second century Church Father who had one gospel in his new testament and um it was a gospel that was like Luke and it appears to have been different in many ways including uh it didn't probably didn't have what what is now chapters 1 and two and um and and he uh according to the church church fathers who opposed him trolan and epiphanius and others marcian had taken a copy of Luke and edited it in such a way uh as to make it more amendable to his own theology um and he may he may well have done that other Scholars have have argued that marcian inherited a form of Luke that was radically different from our form of Luke other Scholars like me think that both things are true he probably had a form of Luke that was was different in many ways from our Luke but he also touched it up a bit or or um you know took out bits that he didn't appreciate and so it's very hard to say because we don't have solid evidence for any of those views but it's quite whichever view you have it's quite clear that people were were playing with the text of Luke whether it was marcian or somebody else so that I think we don't have any manuscripts that lack chapters 1 and two that's those are the chapters that tell the Virgin birth story in Luke we don't have any copies of Luke without those chapters but I personally think that the first volume of Luke didn't have those chapters the first time it was published that those chapters were added later that wouldn't be a textual problem per se because we don't have any texts without them but it's related to a textual problem because it shows that people are changing these texts now this is in the weeds but I just want your opinion if you if you have a way of Li elaborating this without taking forever do you think or do you see anything in our modern version of Luke or let's just say post uh turlan and all these guys responding to Marian's heresy or responding to something you think is a marcian like I I I guess the way I put it is is like you know how you said both you're allowing both ideas to be true at the same time I I wonder if the textual um tradition is messy enough that what we've inherited finds little Creepin by these scribes who are reacting to Marian's theology in Luke so I have a um I have a the the first book I wrote for like a a broader scholarly audience not for a general audience but a scholarly audience was called the Orthodox Corruption of scripture and the entire thesis of the book was that second and third century Christian scribes copying the New Testament changed it in places in order to um to make the text less usable by Heretics and more usable by Orthodox people opposing Heretics and so um as an example marcian did not think that Jesus was fully human he thought that Jesus was a Divine being and that he couldn't be human uh because well for a variety of reasons so we won't get into so he didn't he didn't think Jesus really had flesh and blood and I show in this book the Orthodox Corruption of scripture what I'll be showing in this course that there are passages in Luke that that are intention look like they're intentionally changed I think they have to be intentionally changed because they there's no way these things happen by accident there are places that were changed uh that do counter that understanding of Jesus as as Divine but not human there are passages that elevate his Humanity uh in a way to show that he really is a human being and so um yeah so I mean an example of that is the there's a famous passage in Luke chapter 22 called the it's the passage about the bloody sweat this is where we get the idea that you're sweating blood from uh it's where Jesus Is In The Garden of Gethsemane and he's sweating great drops as if of blood uh because he's in such deep Agony um I argue and I try to show in my book that in fact those ver those two verses which are missing from many of our best and oldest manuscripts were not originally there but they were added by scribe to counter the kinds of views of Christ that people like marcian had this guy had a lot of blood in him that's the point meaning he's very human well he's swe he's in deep Agony and you know God's not in any Agony so this is it's it's trying to show the very Human Side of Jesus that's so interesting because Luke also projects Jesus to almost be without like fear at all facing death so there's this that's the point Luke does that and the scribes wanted to kind of w it up a bit I got to have a little Humanity here come on and so uh it takes a while to demonstrate that in other words you can't just kind of say it you've got to show what the evidence is what manuscripts have this that or the other thing why these verses don't fit into the context of Luke why the language in these verses isn't like Luke's language I mean Scholars have to deal with all of this stuff uh but in my course I'll be showing how they go about doing it how Scholars go about showing that something is a change rather than the original uh and so that's going to be one of the really interesting parts of the course is getting people to see what kind of logic and what kinds of evidence Scholars use Dr Erman how many lectures will this one be this will be four lectures it'll be all on one day it'll be on November 11th it's a one day four lectures of the lectures will be about 50 or 60 minutes each and there'll be an extended Q&A uh afterward uh and so it'll be be uh it it it's going to be good the thing is you can you can go for a long time on just like a little bit of this this this La you know when we did this this um this conference uh recently on new insights into the New Testament I gave a 50-minute lecture on a change of one word in Mark's gospel an entire 50 minute and there was nothing there was no fat in there at all I and I couldn't even cover the entire Waterfront so you can do a lot but not going to be going into that kind of detail here but I am going to be talking about a lot of examples that uh that most people would would not have heard before where sometimes even if you just change a single letter of a word you completely change what a passage means I hope everybody goes signs up check it out I love that the world is coming across this education like way faster now we're actually getting I call the scholars in in you know the big universities Ivory Tower Academia and we're finally coming down to Earth where a lot more people are accessing this stuff so you're playing a huge role in that Dr Airman and um I hope people will sign up now down in the description I'll see you there any final words from you pertaining to this course well it's just what you're saying I mean this is the kind of knowledge that Scholars have had for hundreds of years and it's only recently that anybody else has recognized it and so getting to know this kind of better is important not just for you know it's not just for Skeptics or or you know not just for mythicists or not just for uh atheists and agnostic it's for Christians too I mean this is important knowledge and whatever person a person's personal belief uh the Bible's really important and if you think the Bible's important you need to know more about it and this is a fundamental issue uh that that involves the Bible so I I hope I hope people of every persuasion comes comes to this to this course same here thank you Dr [Music] a Dr Bart D Airman welcome back to myth Vision how are you I'm doing well thanks thanks for having me I glad that you're here joining us again you have an upcoming course the scribal corruption of scripture tease us with that and then I have an anonymous supporter who absolutely loves what you do your work they're inspired by it they've learned so much and they've taught me a lot along the way who's trying to uh get some questions asked and so hopefully we can give them answers okay that sounds good yeah well the course is uh the course is on November uh 11th it's a Saturday it's a it's a four lecture course uh each lecture 50 to 60 minutes with a large Q&A afterwards it's called the scribal corruption of scripture and it's about this topic that people have gotten increasingly familiar with uh about how copyists of the New Testament often changed the text they were copying sometime a lot of times by accident but sometimes on purpose uh creating problems for us since we don't have the original copies of the New Testament or even early copies of the originals but only copies centuries later how do we know what the authors wrote how do we know how scribes changed the text how do we how do we know why they Chang the text how do we know anything about this like you're reading the Bible you want to know what the words were and what if you don't know the words and so it'll be that it's it's it's related to a um a book I wrote years ago called misquoting Jesus but it's going to be covering a lot of information not in that book and a lot of information probably that people generally haven't haven't heard before thank you so much I'm going to go ahead and dive into these questions just in case some might be a little more time consuming than others and uh thank you to the anonymous ghost I'll call you uh who helps make this possible who were BP grenfell and as hunt and what contributions did their archaeological discoveries make to New Testament scholarship hint for Derek oxy rinkus papy yeah right okay here I am back in my PhD exams once more right so uh Grell and Hunt were two British uh archaeologists uh who at the end of the 19th century uh wanted to discover manuscripts of from the ancient world they were classical Scholars and they wanted to find ancient manuscripts um you know for for many for many many centuries people didn't even think about trying to find old manuscripts but after the enlightenment Scholars got interested in works from Antiquity that no longer survived and so they started going through libraries and monasteries places where there would be books to find them but then eventually somebody thought well why don't we try to find some archaeologically and uh grandf and Hunt uh did that and they had this brilliant idea which was uh you know where how do you find a book um you know they they were thinking rightly that probably e the Sands of Egypt would be a good place to look because the humidity in the sand is uh constant throughout the centuries and so things don't don't have a variation of high humidity low humidity it's constant so things get preserved there so they say okay we're going to go to dig in Egypt but where do you dig you know you can't just go to the Wilderness and start digging and hope you find a manuscript and so they had the bright idea that you you go to a a something that you know as a city uh that's been covered up not been excavated and you find the garbage dump because where where are people going to throw away their used manuscripts when they get a new new copy of the something where do they throw the old one they throw it in the garbage dump so they go so they go to this place and it's called oxar rinkus um it's in Egypt and they it they knew the city was underneath the sand but they you know they didn't they found the garbage dump and the first thing they find the first manuscript they find they find this little scrap of paper Papyrus and it has a saying of Jesus on it that was not found in the New Testament this is the first thing oh my God you talking about striking gold right at the outset and they published it as an unknown saying of Jesus and uh it turns out so they found some manuscripts that had these unknown sayings on them and it turns out we found out uh about 50 years later uh when they discovered the uh the nag hamadi Library uh which has the Gospel of Thomas in it they disc they found that these fragments that grenfell and Hut found are were from from the Gospel of Thomas uh and so so it went from there they found thousands and thousands of documents there most of them not biblical of course there were things like um land deeds and divorce certificates and book and sale you know sale slips and thing receipts they found all sorts of stuff uh that immensely uh um grew our knowledge of uh of antiquity uh they found so many thousands of these things this starting the 1890s that uh that many many many of them have not been published yet they keep coming out they come out all the time and so they found you know they found a number of things including gospel fragments and V various other things in the in in this thing and so they were hugely important and so these are called the oxar rinkus papy so if somebody was interested in that they can just look up online the oxar rinkus papy and they can see it I was wondering about the recent discovery if that plays any role how shocking how interesting is that Discovery to you but of the Gospel fragment you mean yes yeah well another gospel fragment is turned up um and it is a uh it's not like you know just a copy of you know Luke chapter 3 it's it's a kind of thing where they have it looks like it's it's not a very complete it's just a fragment but it's pretty clear that it that it's uh it it involves things found in various gospels and so it's not we don't have enough of it to know exact actly what it is but it's uh it looks like one of these things like other other fragments that we have like Papyrus ederton 2 which is a collection of in that case it's a little bit longer we've got four stories um that are um that are you know not in the same gospel in the New Testament the question is are these authors who are like coming up with these gospels that seem to be combinations of things are they using the other gospels have they heard a bunch of stories that also made it into the other gospels is they you know how are are they getting this combination and are they making up their own stuff and so these part of the interesting things of archaeological discoveries of manuscripts thank you so much what was harm a practice employed allegedly by ancient Hebrews to justify the extermination of enemies by killing everyone with the possible exception of young female virgins does this not reflect badly on the alleged moral superiority of Yahweh since he commanded it um yeah so Haram is the um is a practice that in war um if you um that that some in in some cases you destroy everything connected with the Enemy and you don't keep anything for yourself um and so uh you know in in the Book of Joshua there'll be cases where uh a ro a sorry a an Israelite Soldier Will kind of keep a souvenir or something and when they find out they kill him they execute him because he's broken this thing because the idea is that Israel is to be distinct from all the other peoples that they're conquering and so you're not allowed to uh in these cases of har you're not you're not allowed to keep them and so there are some very ugly incidents in the uh in the Hebrew Bible um today in one of my classes I was talking about the destruction of the uh of the city of Jericho according to Joshua chapter 6 where everything was to be destroyed and um uh so they killed every man woman and child in the city they didn't take any of the uh women as sex slaves as they do in other places in the Hebrew Bible but they did take uh they killed everybody including the children and they and all the animals and they weren't allowed to take any souvenirs and so it's a complete destruction it's everything is dedicated to God as a destruction uh and so that was practice sometimes does that call yahweh's U uh sort of more moral Integrity into question well um I would say for most of us most of us don't think that the uh that the uh Divine being overall if if such a being exists probably is interested in killing innocent citizens and babies I mean so um but in in Israel this was a according to the Book of Joshua this was an occasional practice uh that they did that because the fear was that if you if you don't kill the children that they'll grow up and they'll you know they'll Foster a rebellion later so you kill them all um it didn't actually happen I mean these are stories but but they're not you know they're not sort of uplifting stories even though when I was in Sunday school we sang you know about the Battle of Jericho where the walls coming tumbling down we we didn't read what happened next in the story which is not good I I know exactly what you're talking about thank you for answering that what what is your opinion regarding the authenticity of Matthew 161 17-19 where Jesus chooses Peter to be the leader of the church it would be something a scribe would have added to support the claims of the Proto orthod Orthodox Church would Jesus have thought at that time he was beginning a church the content of these verses have been a a a bone of contention between Protestants and Catholic regarding the doctrine of Supremacy does the peros Petra word play found in the Greek word in Aramaic the language both would have spoken interestingly it was James sorry that was that was a question mark after both would have spoken interestingly it was James rather than Peter who was elected head of the Jerusalem Church after Jesus's departure I hope that's something you uh yeah yeah no that's a lot one of my professors in graduate school one of the most brilliant uh people I've ever known one of the most aidite learned people I know named carlfred Fick wrote his PhD dissertation on this in in Germany on this passage and so it's a very very important passage it is the passage where it's the passage where Jesus asks his disciples who do people say that I am and some of them say well some say you're John the Baptist come back from the dead or maybe you're Elijah one of the prophets and Jesus said who do you say that I am and then Peter replies you are the Messiah the Son of God and Jesus blesses Peter and he says his name at the point was his his actual name is Simon He blesses Simon and he says your name Shall be Called Petros uh because on this Petra I will build my church and so Petros is a p t r oos in it's so it's the Greek word and the word Petros in Greek uh means a a rock Like a Stone a stone he says upon this Petra which ends with an a instead of an o p t r a upon this Petra I will build my church now a Petra isn't like a a stone that you pick up in your hand a Petra is more like a like the the big mass of stone on a cliff face and um so it it could be a foundation stone and so he says upon this Petra I will build my church this was a huge source of uh debate during the Protestant Reformation and continues to be among some Protestant and Catholics about what Jesus means because he says upon the you'll be called Petros because upon this Petra I will build my church and in the Catholic interpretation that come down all the way for centuries and centuries is Peter is the one upon whom Christ will build build the church and that is a play on words your Petros I'll build the pet Church on the pet so Peter the first pope is the uh the bishop of of Rome the first pope is the beginning of the church and everything's built on Peter that's the Catholic interpretation Protestants in the 16th century started objecting to that view by pointing out for one thing they didn't think that Peter was the first pope who that everything's built on the Catholic church but also they point they pointed out just in terms of the interpretation of the passage that Jesus says you are Petros and upon this Petra I will build my church it's not the same word um and Protestants have frequently argued that the Petra the the foundation stone for the church is not the man Peter but the confession that he made you are the M you are the the Messiah the Son of God it's that confession that is the Petra and he's called Petros because he made the Petra and so so it's a play on play on words and so that's the debate so the question the initial question that this person was asking was is it authentic and I think I think the um the questioner had gave us two options that is he is it it authentic or was it added by scribes and uh my answer is neither uh I don't I certainly don't think that Jesus historically said that for the reasons that the questioner pointed out that the idea that Jesus was going to build a church in other words that when he died the Christian church was going to emerge I don't think that that's something that Jesus himself talked about during his ministry it's something that happened after his death when his followers came to think he got raised believe he got raised from the dead they started their own community and that grew and grew and grew and became the Christian church then later they said this is all planned by Jesus but I don't think in jesus' Ministry he said that uh this line about Upon This Rock I'll build my church is found only in Matthew Matthew's getting the story from Mark who doesn't say anything like that and it's not found in the other gospels and so I think this is Matthew's way of doing it years later it's not something Jesus said so I don't think it's a authentic but I also don't think it's something added by later scribes it's in all of our manuscripts of Matthew there's no question about its authenticity to Matthew so it's not authentic but it wasn't added by scribes it was put in there by Matthew or by somebody in Matthew's Community this is what Matthew himself thought either that he came up with it in his own head or it was the kind of thing being said in his christian community so just to put the ribbon on that uh on that uh present there that you built for us as far as the interpretation of what it meant in its context from your academic background instead of the tit fortat Protestant versus Catholic interpretation what do you think or what have the scholars that you're convinced make the most sense of this was intended here I think it's very difficult to say um this this variation between Petros p t r oos and Petra a is very interesting um I don't think that we can say that it can't be like something in Matthew like a I don't think we can say Well it cannot be very early because in fact James was the leader of the church we don't know how James eventually became the leader of the church we don't know if it was an election I I doubt it I think James probably Rose to prominence because he was the brother of Jesus and so he's got a blood linkage there and so he became more important but according to in the New Testament itself at least Peter is the first to be the leader of the church uh he's the in the New Testament he's portrayed as the closest disciple to Jesus and so it would make sense that after jesus' death he would initially be the leader there's there's pretty good evidence to suggest that Peter claimed he saw Jesus after his death whether he actually had a vision of some kind or he saw something or or whatever but it's pretty clear that he he he was if not the first one of the first to claim he had seen Jesus alive afterwards and since he had been the chief disciple he became the the the leader of the group after Jesus death and then it wasn't long before James came in James according to the New Testament was not a follower of Jesus during his life and so he would not have been the leader immediately after his death because he it was only later according to Paul James had a vision of Jesus too I don't I don't know how how or that happened or what it what it was so so what's going on with this Peter thing I think I think that Peter probably was the first founder was was the first leader of the church and I suspect what's going on is that somebody's trying to explain why Petros is the leader of the church and this saying gets devised in order to explain why Peter is the leader of the church but the thing is when you're when if you're doing this in Greek uh this appears to be a Greek formulation um you can't say you are Petros and on this Petros I will build this church because a Petros is a stone that you pick up in your hand you can't build a church on a stone you need a you know you need a foundation and um the foundation is called Petra but he couldn't have called Peter Petra because Petra is feminine and so to make the word play work you've got to have the the foundation stone be feminine but the man be masculine and so there was no option I think I think it's playing on the words but it's not meant to be um it was never meant to be that Petros is Petra because that doesn't work because of the masculine feminine thing thank you so much this kind of ties into to this idea about James what is your uh your opinion regarding the despi a desini something like this d p yni the term given to the blood relatives of Jesus in the Jerusalem Church after the death of Jesus's brother James in the 60s the leadership passed to Simon Simeon Jesus's cousin brother question mark according to tradition do you think the family of Jesus were considering establishing a dynasty a plan disrupted by the Jewish war of 66 to 70 it would have been better than returning to Subs sub subsidence or subsidence living in in Galilee either way you get the idea right so the question is you know so Jesus so in the New Testament Jesus has Brothers uh this is something denied in the Catholic tradition uh as you know the uh but the go the gospels are pretty clear that Jesus has brother James Jude uh Simon and well it's it's Jose Joseph it's a kind of a short form of Joseph Joseph so you have those four brothers and you've got a number of sisters and things and and um so the idea is that after Jesus um uh Jesus death James becomes one and then after that Simon and then you have this kind of this lineage and the question is was there an attempt at a dynasty I don't know our our sources of information are not um very very good about about this if I'm remembering correctly a lot of this information comes from heus who's not we don't have his writings but he's quoted by uus heus would be a second century Church Father youus is an early 4th Century Church Father who writes the church history where he quotes a lot of earlier figures and youus in places does talk about the brothers of of Jesus and their lineage um I don't think we know what happened to the Jerusalem Church um according to one tradition when the um that Jesus Jesus descendants are basically ruling this church for while and according to this tradition when the Jewish Uprising happened um the uh the Christian church had a revelation that they had to get out of Jerusalem or they'd be killed and they they they fled to Pella um and that and they kind of relocated there I don't know if that's true or not um the stories we have of Jesus descendants um I don't think can be verified they can't really be dis verified but there's not a lot going for them I think I mean another another very famous story actually is told by uus about the uh Emperor Dom mission who um who was concerned about um the um Brothers of Jesus and what they were doing and uh he had he uh found out that Jude jesus' brother had uh had you know descendants and he brought them in because he was wor they'd start up a riot or something and you know Christians were going to take over the world or whatever but he brought them in and they showed them his hand their hands their hands were all callous because they were Farm Workers and he realized man they're not going to be a problem they're not gonna Rouse an army and so you get these stories my point is you get these stories and um I don't think that we can credit uh very many of them I think the only thing we really know is that it does appear that James the brother of Jesus um became a leader of the church in Jerusalem that kind of answers the next question like what are your thoughts on what happened to the Jerusalem Church following the end of the Jewish war in 70 did it Linger on for centuries on the fringes of the Eastern Roman Empire before passing from the scene your answer is you don't know I don't know I don't think we really know I think um you know Jerusalem for a long time after uh especially after 135 um so for people who don't know how this works the first Jewish Uprising was in ' 66 and lasted till the year actually till the year 73 with with the fall of Mada when the Romans wiped out the opposition uh but then there was a second Uprising in the year 132 so about a hundred years after Jesus death there's another Uprising uh uh Revolt led by a figure named baroka uh and that so that's called the baroka Revolt that again the the uh Romans wiped them out in the and it was in the year 135 and at that point uh Jews were forbidden to enter into Jerusalem and so they converted Jerusalem uh uh into a pagan City IIA capitalina and um and built a pagan temple on the mount uh the Temple Mount and and the temple was had been destroyed for a long time and so after that point there weren't Jews allowed in Jerusalem and there wasn't really much of a Christian presence until the 4th Century uh and so it's not there's no recollection later of uh much of a Christian presence there um and it really isn't until the beginning of the 4th century when there's a um uh there begins to be a cult to Stephen the first martyr that arises in Jerusalem and then Jerusalem started becoming another point of Attraction for Christians when they started thinking about it is the place Jesus died and the place where Steven died and then it started becoming an important Christian place again but for hundreds of years it hadn't been thank you for that when do you believe a first version of the New Testament may have been compiled by the Proto Orthodox Church even if it differs from the one we have now scholar David tritz in his book the first edition of the New Testament has advanced the argument it may have been early as the second half of the 2 Century perhaps somewhere in Asia Minor as a response to the version produced by marcion in the 140s um so uh David Trish is a is a a an A A well- read and learned scholar I think his book is completely wrong and I think that the evidence that he uces for his view simply does not work um he I I think it's really it's not difficult to show why why the evidence he induces just look it just doesn't work um marcian is the first figure that we know about who compiled a uh something like a a collection of Christian scriptures there may have been people earlier than him could but we don't know marcian is this figure who is a um a a teacher who uh had a particular view of Christianity uh that he said was inspired by the Apostle Paul then maintained that the god of the Old Testament was literally a different God from the god of Jesus that there are two gods and that the god of Jesus was a god of love who is trying to save people from the god of wrath the god of the Old Testament um marsan believe that's what Paul taught and that uh and so he he collected a group of books that supported this view his his collection of Christian books excluded the Old Testament altogether because that was the book of the Jewish god the god of wrath it included uh 10 letters of Paul and uh and a gospel that very much like our Gospel of Luke um and so that was his collection of scriptures and the argument many people have made is that the um the Proto Orthodox Christians uh responded to that by expanding his gospel collection into four gospels and expanding his Pauline collection into 13 letters plus letters by Peter and by James and by John and and so forth and so the idea is that the Orthodox collection that we ended up with is in some part a response to marcian that may be right but I think that's o completely overly simplified um we don't know when there was a circulation of uh Proto Orthodox books what we can say is that there were collections of books people would um people certainly had collections of Paul's letters um already by the end of the first century and it's kind of makes sense it doesn't mean that they're collecting the New Testament but you know if you want to know what Paul said because he's important to you then you get as many letters of his as you can people collected gospels we know this because we have gospel manuscripts that have more than one gospel in them from around the year 200 and so they um so the people are collecting books when did somebody start collecting them and saying these are the authoritative texts that can't we don't have the evidence to say one way or the other I think there's no way it was happening at the end of the second century the evidence against that is so overwhelming that I think there's no way as as many people will know the first time we have our collection ction where you get um you know the 27 books and only those 27 books the first time anybody comes up with that is in the year 367 in a letter by the bishop of Alexandria athanasius but at that point he's saying what he thinks the correct collection is we know of collections already by the 180s by the 180s but they're not definitive collections they're like it's not like the Proto Orthodox collection it's the uh there were lots of prot Orthodox Christians who had lots of views of these things and so I hear that a lot by the way from a lot of apologist online if they can prove early on that people used certain books they somehow will try to make this argument that these are the ones and we already know this goes all the way back you know those kind of things well you could say that but the problem is you've got authors into the third and fourth Century who are saying that those books are not inspired they're not scriptural they're not authoritative I mean I mean in the the person I wrote my PhD dissertation on dius the blind who is living in the in the uh the middle of the 4th Century um said that second Peter is a forgery so I mean it's true that some people might be saying it's Canon but other people saying it's not canon so there's so it completely depends on what you mean uh you when you say when is their first Canon I mean depends what you mean by Canon there were of course most Christians probably who were reading had books that they thought were authoritative but that doesn't mean that there's something like a like a a recognized Cannon and even when athanasius um came up with his Canon his 27 books there were other Christians who still thought you know well actually The Apocalypse of Peter ought to be in there or you know the book of Hebrews really does not belong in there and so there were debates that went on and it wasn't we're we're so used to thinking of a Canon because when we go to the bookstore we buy a new testament it's always the same 27 books pick your translation and it just wasn't that way in Christianity for hundreds of years thank you what is the earliest extent manuscript of the Latin New Testament vgate based on Jerome's translation when is it dated does the Latin translation vary greatly in context from the Greek no content sorry vary in content from the Greek I don't know when the oldest uh Vulgate manuscript is I just don't know um The Vulgate does differ in many ways from uh in the Greek from the Greek New Testament um the it's not clear whether jome translated the entire uh Latin Bible into into Latin uh the situation is a little bit complicated there were Latin versions of uh the New Testament and uh before Jerome um uh so much so the Pope damus is the one who asked Jerome to make a uh a more less official translation the problem was there were so many translations that they were about it they all of them were different from each other and they wanted to have a kind of a standardized uh addition and so Drome apparently did did uh do the translation of the gospels but it's not clear at all that he did the rest of the New Testament it was probably followers of Jerome that did other books so Drome you know so probably some sometime in the early fifth century is when we start getting these but we have we have Latin manuscripts that IND that are cop they are translations done before Jerome and for those who are interested in what the oldest form of the New Testament was those old Latin manuscripts as they're called are more important than the than the Vulgate done by Jerome and his and his successors there are there are things um I mean for example the this passage that affirms the Trinity that there are three in heaven the Father the word and the spirit and these three are one um that is found in the Vulgate uh the Latin Vulgate even though it's not in the early Greek Greek manuscripts and so that something to think maybe it came into the the New Testament from from Latin sources for example but even when we say the Vulgate there are different manuscripts of the Vulgate there are many many thousand manuscripts of the Vulgate there are more there are far more manuscripts of the Vulgate Latin Vulgate than there are of the Greek New Testament um and these differ from each other so that there are different standard additions of the Vulgate these are not hugely different from each other but they they do differ from each other and so we don't even have you know we don't even have the Vulgate per se thank you so much when it comes to Luke and acts do you favor the western or alexandrian texts and and why why the differences On a related note do you have an opinion on whether Tans lost dieron included the long version of Mark 16: 9-20 based on the available surviving Ed evidence well so these are two different questions right um the um so to unpack that a little bit um the book of Acts um circulated in two different forms one of is 7 and a half% longer than the other more more words and so a few you know extra verses here and there and so the the question is about what's called the alexandrian text and the Western text the alexandrian text is a um so how do I explain this um when we when we look at Greek manuscripts of the New Testament since the 18th century Scholars have recognized IED that a lot of manuscripts have a lot of similarities to one another Whenever there are differences among the manuscripts and so suppose you've got a verse and some manuscripts read it one way and some have a different wording either a slightly different wording or major different wording or maybe some manuscripts have it some manuscripts don't have it something like that when you when you look at enough manuscripts after a while you realize that some manuscripts typically agree with each other a lot and other manuscripts typically agree with each other a lot and so Scholars came up with the idea in the 17th century of grouping manuscripts according to their similarities in places where they differ were the manuscript differences and so these became textual families and eventually they they came to be called text types types of text the alexandrian type of text is a uh is a form of it's a group of manuscripts that Scholars arrange together because they agree with each other so often Whenever there are differences among man manuscripts these tend to agree a lot and they're called alexandrian because they uh it appears that this form of the text these manuscripts seem to appear to descend from manuscripts that origin originated in Alexandria Egypt okay uh Western text manuscripts are uh have when there differences they tend to disagree with the alexandrian manuscripts but they agree with each other and they they're called Western which is a bit of a misnomer because they actually can't be located necessarily to Western Christendom but when they when people came up with these designations they thought that these were manuscripts for example that were connect with Rome or someplace in the west so with all that said the book of Acts is found differently in the alexandrian manuscripts than in these Western manuscripts and it's a big difference 7 and a half% difference and so the question is which one is the original form or the most original form most uh most Scholars would agree that what we call the alexandrian text is the most original form for the book of Acts the question is how do you get this this Western form and there have been a lot of interesting theories about that uh one interesting theory is that Luke the author whatever whoever he really was we call Luke that the author himself produced two versions of Acts that he produced the alexandrian version you know say that's the first one then later he decided to expand it a bit and that became the Western version or uh the alexandrian version was in circulation and some scribe or some some other person decided to make a new addition of it that expanded it significantly so that would account for the Western manuscripts so there there are lots of theories beone over the years and and people have these debates there entire books written on this I ain't going to solve it here but but most Scholars agree that that the alexandrian text is probably the older form of the text thank you and then uh I think uh was the idea about whether tti's diet tesron included a long version of Mark uh 169 through2 based on the available surviving evidence uh well I doubt it I mean but the so just to back up on that one um so the deeron um is the name of a uh of a form of the gospels produced by the mid 2nd Century uh Syrian Church Father um um tation tan was a uh uh a intellectual in the middle of the second century who was from Syria but he went to Rome to study with Justin uh later known as Justin Martyr martyr is not his last name he ended up being martyred and so they called him Justin Martyr who was a very prominent Christian intellectual in the middle of the second century tan went to study with uh with Justin and um after Justin died uh T produced an addition of the gospels that took the four gospels Matthew Mark Luke and John and put them together into one Consolidated Edition it's called the dieron because the DIA Dia means through and tesseron means four so through the four and so people call this the dieron and what he would do is if you have the same story in Matthew Mark and Luke you you conflate them and so you get a bigger story where the details in Mark and all the details in Matthew details Luke are all put together or if the same story is in John you throw that one in and you come up with the larger version of that story and the stories each one has of its own are all put in the gospel and so all the stories and all the gospels are together and the ones that they share are kind of smashed together into a larger version of it um this would have been produced in the middle of the 2 Century second early second half of the second century um and it um uh it no longer survives and it is it is very very difficult to figure out what was in it and what wasn't in it it would have been it was obviously a huge book but since we don't have it reconstructing it is arguably the biggest headache of New Testament studies people people I know I I have friends who have devoted their lives to try to figure out what's in the dest what was in the dest front and boy is it complicated um because of because the kind of evidence they have to look at uh and so um I don't know but I don't think there I don't I don't think it was there but I don't think we can say thank you rather than the four gospels the Codex F Denis contains a dieron although you mentioned in an earlier Q&A that the one compiled bation has not survived do you believe the version found in F Denis may be modeled on this lost text so fenus is a Latin manuscript that has a gospel Harmony uh and a gospel Harmony is when you take the four gospels and you put them together into a fuller text and some people have thought the f denus is closely related to the deeson um some people have claimed it is the deeson which seems unlikely very unlikely um uh so is it was it inspired by the deeson it's possible but the idea of putting the gospels together in together did not originate with tation um there are gospel harmonies before Tans um as an two examples one is it appears that Justin Martyr uh him his teacher may have had a gospel Harmony um based on an analysis of his quotations of the Gospels it may be that he himself is working from a from a Harmony um and there's an earlier account uh the gospel of the ebionites not a well-known book is a uh we have only fragments of it in quotations uh from uh a church father epiphanius and a fourth Century Church father but it appears to be an early gospel and in one of his quotations it's quite clear that it's a gospel Harmony and it's a pretty interesting case because in the gospels of uh of Matthew Mark and Luke you have Jesus being baptized uh so if you just read the individual gospels Jesus gets baptized but the voice that comes from Heaven as baptism says different things in the three gospels in Mark's gospel Jesus gets baptized and the voice comes from heaven and says you are my beloved Son in whom I'm well pleased in Matthew the voice comes from heaven and it says this is my beloved Son in whom I'm well pleased so in Mark it's speaking to Jesus and in Matthew it's speaking either to John the Baptist or the crowds not to Jesus but then when you get to Luke luk it looks like the oldest version of Luke this would be something I'm going to be talking about in my uh in my course on scripture corruption I'm probably I'm probably gonna talk about this verse in this it looks like in in Luke's gospel um the the oldest reading appears to be the voice says instead of saying this are you are my son my beloved Son whom I pleas it says you are my son today I have begotten you whoa uh huh Jesus became the Son of God at the baptism what but that looks like it's the oldest reading in the gospel of the ebonites the epiphanous quotes uh how does he if you're going to combine the gospels into one gospel what do you do with the fact that the voice says three different things well what the gospel the ebionites did is it it said that the voice came three times first Jesus is baptized and God says you are my beloved Son in whom I well pleased the second time uh The Voice then speaks to the crowd this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased and then the then the third time John the Baptist says who is this guy this this you are my son you know today I have begotten you it's like what and so it comes three times and so that's a gospel Harmony and so that's way that's probably before tation I think um and so uh yeah so so Fen fenus isn't necessarily dependent on TTI is the short answer it's really funny to see how far back harmonizing took place it's right there the gate um who was Manny and Monty Manny and the religion he founded did he did his doctrines have any impact on early Christianity um yeah so Mani was a so you've heard of manism Manny is the guy who started manism uh manism was a religion that um was very similar in many ways to Christianity um it had uh it had a large following St Augustine before he became became the Orthodox Theologian he was was a manakian um Manny was a prophet figure who declared that he was a uh a Divine being a Son of God and uh wrote wrote uh produced writings um the basic idea in the manakan religion is that there that the world is completely dualistic and that there are forces of Good and Evil that are doing battle with one another um it sounds kind of like Jewish apocalyptic thought but uh but it's more of an eternal struggle uh within manism and so everything is light or Darkness you know it's it's falsehood or truth and people side with one side or the other and so this was a um this was an important religion that uh that um probably uh you know probably starts out uh I mean it it becomes becomes an important religion in the third fourth fifth centuries um and uh started by this person Manny who unlike other sons of God actually wrote down his views and so he had a he had a large following and I'm I'm I suspect obviously pointed out some of his doctrines but he probably had a major impact in many ways do you think that those that impact trickled into and remained in certain versions of Christianity as time went by uh it's not clear to me that they did um the dualism um has long been a feature of Christianity um where we think of you know the devil and God on opposite sides the demons and the angels and you think of Truth and falsehood and you think of Heaven and Hell and all these things and most of that uh could be picked up from non- manakan sources I think a lot of Christian theology was being formulated independently of manism uh but the dualism still I think is attractive to people because I think for some reason people uh at least in in our world tend to think in dualistic terms thank you Dr armman what is the book of jubilees right uh so jubilees is a uh a Jewish writing it's not in the Hebrew Bible and it's not one of the Apocrypha it's usually designated as a pseudepigraph so it's a a pseudepigraphic work uh it is uh it's not part of the uh you know the Roman Catholic uh Canon let alone the Protestant Canon it is it actually is considered canonical in the ethiopic church uh as one of the scriptural books uh and also among ethiopic Jews uh it's a it's a 50 50 chapter book that claims to be a revelation from God to Moses and so it's a book of kind of like a book of laws explaining explaining parts of Genesis sometimes it's called the smaller or the Lesser Genesis uh and so it it was a a book that was pretty much on the margins of uh consideration except in in Ethiopia till the de discovery of the Dead Sea scr Scrolls uh it was a book that was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and so Scholars interest in the book was uh was reignited with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls so there's been a lot of scholarship on it uh so the basic answer is a it's a it's a Jewish book allegedly by Moses that uh is is not accepted as canonical what's interesting about this book just given a little tease of my conversation with uh Dead Sea scroll scholar Matthew Munger is he pointed out that if it's evidence that there was no like solid firm this is the Canon that they're still kind of molding and adapting ideas and stuff and it's a rewrite of Genesis in a way is what he said so it was just really interesting like to add to what you're saying how they did that it's fascinating well no that's right but it's I mean it's BEC I mean it is evidence of that and you know there's other other evidence of that's kind of the point of the Dey Scrolls and some ways is that you know that people people look at the Dead Sea Scrolls and they and you know Evangelical apologists say you know this proves you know that X Y and Z you know it it proves you know there's a cannon of scripture or something it proves this that or the other thing and in fact you have all these books uh among the Dey SCS including like first Enoch which are is hugely important among Jews uh in that community and jubilees is another one it's a book that's hugely important in that community and it is accepted as authoritative um and so the idea that you have this kind of Canon by the time of Jesus that all Jews agree on is simply not true and that's one of the virtues of the of the Dead Sea Scrolls for us as as Scholars today thank you so much thank you so much you keep telling us about these scribal corruption this course we opened up to this whole uh session with again what are we what are we looking at here Dr Amman well we're looking at a four- lecture course it's dealing with this kind of issue about how scribes who were copying their texts changed them and it's not going to be just the fact that they changed them I think a lot of people know that and a lot of people may know that we don't have the originals and we don't have you know the first copies of The Originals and they know things have been changed but in this course I'm going to go much deeper and to talk about things like how do you know how do you go about analyzing a text how do you know what the author wrote and why don't you have more examples of this in the English Bibles that we buy why is it that you have these really important changes that change the meaning of an entire passage and you don't even get a footnote about it and I'm going to be talking about places where that happens where there's there's a good deal of uncertainty including about passages that people are very familiar with where Scholars debate what they mean and one point I'll make is you know a lot of a lot of people who have opposed me Evangelical Christians have insisted no we've got we have so many manuscripts of the Bible that of course we can know what originally said and I'm going to show why it's just not true and why they will agree with me they will agree with me the reason they'll agree with me is because they know that they their Scholars of the New Testament and they know they disagree with some of their friends who are also evangelicals about what this verse originally said so if we can know why don't they agree I cannot wait everybody go sign up I can't wait to see you there Dr Erman you're it's always a pleasure to interview with you and you're always a blast so thank you for your time okay well thank you this has been fun you as well the Dead Sea Scrolls Dr James D tabore unravels them and discusses his historical experience with dealing with the Scrolls himself when I was working on my doctorate and then the first decade or two of teaching I was just in libraries that's how you do research I think I made one trip to the land of Israel or the Holy Land uh just like like a tourist or you know wanting to look it over but I wasn't working over there and what really drew me was the idea of the Dead Sea Scrolls I mean just imagine ancient books over 2,000 years old hidden in caves in the Judean desert and you know I work on Jesus but did you have you ever thought you open up Mark one earliest gospel where's the main guy just as you start the main story John the Baptist is out in the wilderness a lot of people think that's just oh he's out in the desert somewhere in the text it talks about the arova that's a specific desert Isaiah mentions it and he says I'm out fulfilling Isaiah I'm the voice crying in the wilderness so Arava is a geographical location it's the Dead Sea Valley that desert so he's actually out there so right away you're connected to Jesus and then he says the time is fulfilled and then Jesus comes along and gets baptized and so forth so I knew something about the Scrolls but to go to that desert I'm telling you and to be where they were found they were found in 1947 I started going in 1991 or two to the desert and it's just just drawn me like a magnet I've probably been back uh 802 100 times I've never been to the holy land or Israel or Palestine without going to the desert I've stayed in the desert for over a month before right at kran in a kabut there and you begin to feel it like at night the stars and so forth I don't know how many people know it's the lowest Spa on Earth it's just such a special place and why was this group there I got intrigued with it the caves I spent countless hours walking up and down those caves the first caves I went to were the caves where Dead Sea Scrolls were found I'll never forget the time I found cave 1 that's the one discovered by the Bim Shepherds by accident they threw a rock and it has a kind of upper hole now when you go it's been opened up because the archaeologists came and took everything out but back in 1947 it was just a lucky chance she throw a rock in a cave thinking maybe there's treasure in there and they heard they were disappointed broken pottery then they thought well maybe so they went in there and literally it's just like uh a kind of a mystery story out of a you know Aladdin or something you you go into a cave and there could be something there you picture candle light and so forth and there was 10 jars in that cave it changed history but nine of them were empty one of them had seven Scrolls in it this is just amazing one of the seven was a complete copy of the book of Isaiah you know our oldest copy of Isaiah at that time was 1,00 CE or ad once this was dated it's a thousand years earlier even more than a thousand years earlier it's back before the time of Jesus it is we're finally talking about books and Scrolls and physical objects that were around in the time of Jesus I work on early Christianity so John the Baptist is out in that area after Jesus is baptized I don't know if you recall what does he do immediately he goes out into the Wilderness that same Wilderness 40 days and 40 nights like Moses and like Elijah so that desert experience just fired me up from the start but then I started working there officially meaning going on Expeditions Excavating doing projects there and also studying the Dead Sea Scrolls so I've been studying the Dead Sea Scrolls for 30 years one of the things in this course that's just really amazing is we're going to talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls that weren't even available until the 1990s when they were finally released remember initially they're discovered in 1947 and 40% of them still had not been released to Scholars even much less the public and I got in right on the Heyday of this discovery so for me to even read a scroll in a photograph which I was finally able to obtain some of the original photographs through Robert Eiserman who got hold of them and he shared them with me that was exciting as finding them in a cave because no one had ever seen them except a small group of Scholars and they divided them all up and different Scholars took different Scrolls but other Scholars like me or isaman uh Hershel Shanks of bar magazine was a big campaigner where are the Scrolls 40% are not even out what's in them is there something to hide and they're all kinds of conspiracy series but I'll never forget I got the photograph of one we we number them 4 q that means K4 Q kumran kumran is the settlement where the group lived and it's and then it's numbered 521 guess what 4q 521 is I published it with Michael wi first time ever it was seen in the public in B biblical archaeology review later in an academic publication you know what the first line says the heavens and the Earth will obey his Messiah now normally you think uh Messiah would be a guy walking around and he's davidic and he's going to sit on a throne in Jerusalem and be king all of a sudden we have a cosmic Messiah talked about well I work on early Christianity and this idea that the Messiah would go to the heavens and Rule was a new idea uh not for Christians but you know when did Jews take this up and now we learn that this is pre-christian as I began to read it and translate it it also says the Messiah will heal the sick preach good news to the poor that's the word gospel right and raise the dead and I remembered the passage in Our Gospel it's in the Gospel of Luke it's part of the Q Source or the two Source Theory when John the Baptist asked Jesus are you the one or should we look for another because he's in prison and one of the things that says that the anointed of the spirit will do which Jesus claimed to be the one anointed of the spirit Isaiah 61 he's going to make the captives Go free John's in prison right then it goes on to say in this scroll that he will raise the dead that's exactly what Jesus said when he was asked by John's disciples you know are you going to do it or not he said go tell John the blind see the deaf hear the lame walk the dead are raised and the poor have the gospel so I'm not saying he read that scroll and tried to like copy it or something but he's reflecting the kind of messianism that we find in the Scrolls and there are countless examples of that if I told you this and you'd never heard of the Scrolls and I said what if there was a group out in the Wilderness preparing the way of the Lord they call themselves the people of the New Covenant they were apocalyptic they thought they were in the last days the time is at hand the kingdom of God is near they began to share their goods in common they told their followers sell what you have and give to the poor and let's band together they were preaching and teaching a message of judgment they also baptized that's the Christian word dipped in immersion not for Jewish rights of ritual cleansing but to initiate you into the movement I mean it have to be talking about the John the Baptist Jesus movement except I'm not yes John the Baptist and Jesus did those things New Covenant preaching in the wilderness and so forth baptism in the River Jordan a hundred years after the Dead Sea School so one of the things in this course that we look at not who came first the Dead Sea group came first people call them the essings that's fine with me I don't I would rather call them what they call themselves people of the way the new covenantor the Yad that means the the church basically the assembly they're a Brotherhood and they're banding together 100 years before Jesus preaching the same kind of message that we later get in the New Testament so when the Scrolls were discovered it was kind of to many people a bit threatening because it's like well let's see there was this group we never heard of because people say well we heard of the S scenes but the SC scenes described in Josephus don't even sound like this group he never says they're the people of the New Covenant they're preparing the way in the wilderness he doesn't mention any of that he makes some like a great philosophic iCal group because he wants to impress the emperor and his Roman friends and say oh we Jews hey we have Pharisees Sadducees essing but now that we have the Scrolls we know what they really believed are they a precursor of what we call the Jesus movement I don't think it's so much that the Jesus followers and John the Baptist like copied the group but I think they're part of that same stream of Judaism they're definitely not Pharisees I think everyone agree with that definitely not Sadducees who didn't even believe in life after death or Resurrection so here they are believing a set of a dozen doctrines that we associate uniquely with Christianity but they were practicing these 100 years before what I want to do in this course is have people read the Scrolls years ago when these Scrolls were released these unpublished Scrolls I remember I spoke to a crowd at a Jewish synagogue standing room only they had to open up the doors and put in more chairs it was over 500 people and I started telling them the excitement of of this new material that we had and afterwards this afterwards this very kind old lady came up Jewish woman and she said Dr D I'm so glad we finally have the Scrolls and I said oh I am too it's so exciting and I said have you read them yet she goes well I haven't really read them but I'm really happy we have them and I think that's where a lot of people are they've heard of the Scrolls I think it's amazing we have these books that are ancient thousand years older than our current copies of the Bible but uh what do they say so in this course you know what we do we read the Scrolls English translation of course and we go through all the main Scrolls so it's actually a thorough class in which we delve into the Scrolls I don't just lecture you and tell you what they are I literally have the Scrolls out not the rolled out Scrolls but a printed book and I say now notice in column one line two what is this and I point out you know we're this is the time for preparing the way in the wilderness we're reading a text that was written 150 years before Jesus said this is the time for preparing the way in the wilderness what we're doing is we're uncovering the real background of early Christianity people say well the background of Christianity and Jesus is Judaism Judaism Judaism is very very diverse know the background of early Christianity is the Dead Sea Scrolls and yet many many Christians who are very interested in Jesus also Jews who are interested in their Judaism don't really realize realiz or don't take the time or don't even have the opportunity to read the Scrolls themselves and see what kind of movement this was it's it's just amazing and there's so many things that we do in the course that are done in a classroom in a university or in a college in an in-depth course we really dive in it's got 10 lessons and by the time you finish the 10th lesson you know you're kind of a mini schroll expert I mean you really have read the scroll and it's just surprise after surprise uh I can't wait to share it with students and one of the things we're going to do this is unique I think uh we're going to have zoom meetings and I don't mean a webinar where people come and I talk and give another lecture that's you know they're doing that when they see the course no they come and We Gather everybody around that has you know taken the course and then we start talking together and answering questions and responding and you know it's just like in the University when I teach my classes I know all professors say this but I'm telling you it's true I sometimes learn as much from my students as I do from my teachers at Chicago or the graduate schools I went to because they're coming at it new and they say well what is what what is this phrase and what is that and why does it say this and that and so uh I I do this I I absolutely enjoy it and to see people that have studied the Bible whether they're Jews or Christians or even secular everybody's interested in ancient manuscripts everybody's interested in Old caves that hold treasures and in this case the treasures are just astounding uh just imagine unrolling a scroll and reading something it hasn't been looked at in 2,000 years it's it's amazing one of the things I'm going to reveal in the course and you know I'm going to be mysterious here but I did make a major archaeological Discovery while I was at kran Excavating and surveying and trying to figure out what was what I've excavated there three different times and I made a discovery now I tell you what it wasn't it wasn't a Jar full of Scrolls it wasn't a coin on on the ground I've done that many times at seven different excavations all over the country at kumran that's where the Dead Sea skoll Community lived I started thinking about where something might be I literally paced it off and mapped it out using the Scrolls and I found the place I was looking for I got an anthropologist I won't say his name now but it's all revealed in the course uh just trying to tantalize you a little bit here and we confirmed scientifically that I was right and it has to do with one of the most important things in the lives of this community it has to do with a certain kind of Holiness that they followed and we weren't really sure what it was or how they would work all this out uh but it has to do with observing the Torah and we figured it out so there's a mystery for you ladies and gentlemen I just edited a full course by Dr James D tabore on the Dead Sea Scrolls and today we're discussing what is it James the top four parallels to Jesus with the Dead Sea Scrolls yeah when whenever people even see the title of the course you know there's the Dead Sea Scrolls and there's Jesus but Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls we're not doing that I don't think that's actually a a valid position but why would you pair those and I was just going to give you the top four reasons and what do you think I'm excited I uh look I edited this thing and I know what kind of Masterpiece you've put into this in fact I'm rewatching it now James and it's remarkable how deep you go into the history and what are the implications of this so um first of all might ask the question why are we paralleling this to Jesus before we open this can of worms okay let me start by saying every one of these parallels these four we're going to cover now you could not say about any other groups that we know from ancient Judaism so everybody's heard of the Pharisees that's in the New Testament everybody's heard of the Sadducees the Sadducees and the Pharisees do not share any of these now if the essings is the group that wrote the Scrolls and there's a whole lecture on that it's we're not going to do that today but you know maybe you could parallel them partly from that but our only account of the essens is Josephus and he doesn't mention any of these four isn't other I'm going to give you the top four and Josephus describing the essenes that he doesn't mention any of these it doesn't mean he's not describing this group but it means that he doesn't want you to know because he's probably trying to protect them remember Josephus writes after the Jewish war total disaster for the country the temple the city of Jerusalem is brought down and this group is scattered and I think he likes them he admires them he says in his biography that when he was a teenager 17 18 years old that he went in the desert for three years and studied with a desert Prophet or figure so he probably has some sympathy although he's gone on in his life even though the emperor of Rome V bation and so forth so you know you're ready for the top four they can be in any order but I'm going to start with the one that I think shocked you the most because we were talking about this very recently when I say New Covenant and you hold up a Bible and it's got Old Testament New Testament and you open it up and the Apostle Paul talks about we are ministers of a New Covenant if you think about Jewish literature before the time of Jesus guess what there is no group that that I know of in any record say from the Exile 6th Century BC all the way down to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 there's no group that says oh the new covenants here we the people of the New Covenant this group calls themselves the new covenantor WoW think about that now we date them about 150 BCE we can't get an exact date on when their teacher and we're going to talk about their teacher flourished uh but you know basically I like to say 150 years before Jesus there's a group that is talking about we are the people of the New Covenant now that comes from Jeremiah 31:31 it's easy to remember 3131 and what does it say that God Will Make A New Covenant with the house of Israel in the house of Judah and then it goes on to describe this very ideal time putting the Torah on the heart and so forth Flash Forward and what do we get Jesus of Nazareth coming he takes a cup we're told and says this is the cup of the New Covenant at one of the ceremonial meals we read about that in the gospel of Mark I already mentioned Paul says we're the people of the New Covenant so I consider that one of the top you know among the top four that we want to cover today new covenantor so the groups are both saying that but it's not a matter I don't think of the Jesus movement or the John the Baptist Jesus movement I like to call it or the John the Baptist Jesus James movement copying you know my students always raise their hand and they go so Dr tab did did the Jesus folks copy the NY Scrolls you know like you know what I mean by copy yeah like oh my God that's not your idea you're doing what those people did like little kids you copied not like that at all but they are reading the same text they're calculating the time of the end lots of groups During the period before during and after Jesus and this goes back to the macbes about 150 BCE they think they're in the time of the end so we get these apocalyptic kinds of ideas in some of our literature so New Covenant wow they're both saying this is it this is the New Covenant which means the kingdom of God is very near now another one that connects to that if you open up the gospel of Mark and we've got a course on the gospel of Mark a lot of people have taken it that we'll be heing this video you'll remember this it opens with John the Baptist and you basically want to know well who are you or what are you doing it's the way the gospel of Mark opens and what does he say I'm the voice of one crying in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord so Christians know that it's in handles Messi and all kinds of literature and images and I heard it all my life growing up uh going to Sunday school I'm sure you heard it too when you had associations with the churches over the years you know John the Baptist preparing the way in the wilderness well that's a prophecy from the book of Isaiah so we open up the Dead Sea Scrolls and the first document we study in the course is the community rule that's what Scholars call it but you know what it's really called Sak kakad which means the way or the right way of the community the order literally of the community there this is what we're all about it's it's like saying what are you people all about what are you doing describe yourself to us and what do they say this is the time for preparing the way in the wilderness as it is written prepare the way in the wilderness and it says they've gone out by the Dead Sea and that's actually the technical word in Hebrew in Isaiah 40:3 it uses the word desert but it also uses AR of and RVA is geographical that Lit I could get in a taxi at Tel Aviv airport in Israel and tab driver could you take me to the Arava you know what he would say you want to go to the Dead Sea Dr Taber it's the Dead Sea so John the Baptist is up and down the Jordan River we see that in the gospel of Mark we open the very first scroll that tells us about this group and what they're all about like their Charter basically and they say it's time to prepare the way in the desert and so they've actually moved out there so what a parallel now the other two I'm going to mention are more broad but when I describe them to you you'll see they're still very very specific what about apocalyptic Messianic now we know that there are apocalyptic figures during the first century BC and the first century CE or ad Josephus lists 13 of them including Jesus that's one of the people we think he mentions it's not as though no one was apocalyptic they're figures that are apocalyptic but as far as the literature of a movement that you can actually study and say what are the texts that they covered and what is their idea the key is the word way there are a lot of Christians that have started reading the New Testament or maybe just growing up in the church and if I say the way the book of Acts uses it in a very strange manner I started to say a very strange way why because it'll say and so and so persecuted the way what do you mean what way it it's like it's used as a proper name for the group and guess what this group also says we are prepared preparing the way and other there's we the way preparers out in the desert and they have the same kind of idea that language in other words we're people of the way and the Jesus people are saying we're people of the way but they're separated by over a hundred years so various individuals might have been you know talking about the time is near the time is at hand surely we're near the kingdom because they are all reading the book of Daniel and there is a prophecy in the Book of Daniel that you really can't stretch out more than about 500 years literally it's a 490e period Daniel 9 and uh Christians try to trace it to Jesus and the Dead Sea School group traced it to their teacher which we'll talk about at some point but they're all kind of thinking this is the time Josephus even says in book six of the Jewish War when he's talking about the revolts that took place that he witnessed that he was even a part of initially till he went over with the Romans because he realized the Jews are going to get defeated and he didn't want more Bloodshed he says that what most incited them to revolt against the Romans was an Oracle in our holy books that about this time God would raise up a messiah a ruler an anointed one and so he's even witnessing that it it was these text expectations well let me tell you the Dead Sea scroll group are people of the book they are pouring over these prophecies and they are trying to figure them out and when we go to the New Testament what do we find it's written after in retrospect but they're going back to Jesus and they're saying oh this is the time for this this is the time for that look how this was fulfill look how that is near and finally Paul in one of his letters 1 Corinthians in chapter 7 he says the appointed time of the end has grown very short and he even tells people maybe you shouldn't even get married when Jesus covers that in Mark 13 we covered it in the mark course he says this generation will not pass till all these things are fulfilled so you get the idea as you're reading Mark that it's almost breathless you know immediately this and immediately that and it leads up to that climax that you're going to see the sun of man coming in the Clouds Of Heaven which is again Daniel 7 and that's when the kingdom of God is set up and all the kingdoms of the world are overthrown so this group expects to see that but guess what what they most expected never happen they thought they were going to defeat the Greeks and defeat the Romans and set up the kingdom of God and the Romans came in in 63 BC and for the next few centuries uh you know there's no Independence in fact there's no independent Jewish State until modern times so apocalyptic is one thing but when you separate it by 150 years and you got another group prior to the Jesus movement saying some of the same things so apocalyptic people of the way New Covenant Messianic you say what do you mean Messianic I mean that's just very generic well not for this group they believe in a teacher and two Messiahs that's not in the New Testament is it well do you remember in Mark again isn't it interesting how we keep quoting Mark here these are very related in the gospel of Mark two of the Apostles come up James and John the sons of Zebedee right they're the fishermen guys and they come up to Jesus and they're just headed for Jerusalem and they think the Kingdom's going to come and they're going to take over and later they look at the temple and they say look at all these buildings as if to say very soon we'll be occupying these things they're very excited you knew what they ask uh Lord we know you're the master but could one of us sit at your right hand and one at the left when we come into the kingdom and Jesus rebukes them because they're arguing already about you know am I on first are you on second who's on first this kind of thing and so you get this idea in the gospel of Mark that's very very similar okay you go to the Scrolls and what do we find the teacher as they call him and and pro it's usually translated teacher of righteousness but it really means the right teacher the correct teacher like there are a lot of teachers but this is the true teacher he's also called the unique teacher so their their teacher they believe will be eventually accomp by two other Messiahs one a priest and one davidic now the Christians later put all that together but in the gospel of Mark you can see that they're already thinking about three figures three Messiahs because the guy in the middle is Anointed of the spirit that's the teacher in the Dead Sea Scrolls and they talk about he's the teacher until the coming of the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel that's the priest and the King so apocalyptic Messianic expectations people of the way New Covenant in the course we thoroughly explain all of those we read the text this is a textually based course when we're studying this I don't just get up and talk to you and tell you all these things I'm summarizing it now we've got our nose in the book we read the Scrolls and I give you copies of the main things that we cover and also we recommend that you get the book that has all the Scrolls because I want this to be a springboard for everybody that takes it you know maybe You' never read the Scrolls have you heard of the Scrolls or you looked at them once but you wonder like well how would you even begin imagine somebody starting to study the New Testament and they barely even know who Jesus is maybe they've heard his name but they don't know anything about it how would you start where would you start that's kind of that's kind of how people are with the Dead Sea Scrolls it just seems so much you know it's a big thick book of 600 Pages we can't cover all 600 pages but we cover the main text this course will put you on your own feet so that you can go and do your own Advanced study because you'll have your orientation to the overall view the chronology the lay of the land what was going on and so forth so this is the springboard course I'm telling you maybe in the future we'll do like Dead Sea Scrolls too for the advanced people who know where we can do all kinds of things with that uh I've been working on these Scrolls for like 40 years and there's just so much and I put a lot of it into the course in a summary way this course is a college level course and don't let that scare you away if you think well I don't know about a college level course I don't mean some esoteric Ivory Tower course I'm talking about the level of material and the way we approach it in an academic historical way learning the facts learning the background and so on so just with those four Derek I think we've already got a pretty tight case you know here's the Dead Sea Scrolls I got my four fingers here and here's the Jesus movement so they're like this and we're putting them together and all of a sudden we go wow now are they the same we'll take the course because we're going to explore differences well and even differences that they understand some of these four slightly differently but the the pattern and the basic Matrix is there so that's the point of the course Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls compare and contrast try to sort it out I hope that people sign up because they have questions just from watching this I have questions talking with you now that I know that we could cover during a zoom call that's the other Advantage about taking the course is we'll be able to talk with you in a zoom call very personal one-on-one kind of thing well it's big group but you know what I mean like it's not just you lecturing and uh there's so many interesting questions that come just from that I really appreciate you giving us these little sneak peek tidbit uh tidbits I've been redoing the course myself it is very deep and when I say deep I don't mean it's so deep that you don't understand it no you're very thorough is my point and you explain what you mean and what you say and how you have books out you have text out you have IM that come up you're very very thorough so I hope people will take the course this also just on a fundamental level not only helps educate people um Dr tabore but I feel like it also encourages Scholars like you who have retired you know and who are still wanting to educate I think you're going to till the day you're gone uh want to teach and want to give people the knowledge you've learned all these years and so I hope people will take advantage of this opportunity to encourage you to keep teaching by taking your courses so thank you and you know what do I love the most and what do I miss the most about full-time teaching I taught for 43 years at three different major universities you know what I missed the most the students and I still have students all over the world and students you know that keep up with me and so on but I get excited about this and it's true of anything that you study when you really get excited and you're really into it what do you want to do most of all you want to share it and talk about it and I know from The Mark course Derek you were at some of those Zoom meetings and we might have 200 people because it's not a webinar like you said everybody can come into the room and you know we're polite we raise our hands and we talk and so forth but it's not just me giving another lecture we're meeting and we do fill your questions and you can have responses and so forth and the thing about that is that builds a community of people you know I I started feeling in the mark course like like I knew a couple of hundred people by name and you know then you have email contact with me you have all kinds of other ways of learning more people write me all the time and say well what's the next book I should read I took this but what about this and we'll be glad to guide you in that Derek you as a whole with your channel and that's why I like working with you you've created a amazing Community out in the world it's International it's worldwide it's all ages and you have brought to the public more than anyone I know on YouTube a chance to hear from various Scholars that have spent decades and decades working on this or that aspect with publishing books and so forth and these courses that you've been offering I just think it's a fantastic thing that you're doing doing and I'm honored to be part of it and I just love my students I really do I get such pleasure out of uh people learning and getting excited about these things and that's what I love about working with you is that a lot of Scholars are hesitant on going out having a showas some of them barely you got they got to drag themselves to go to a lecture at a university whereas you're trying to take the stuff that you know how hard it was to to learn and to gather and insight the languages the sources primary sources digging in dealing with the politics of the struggles of ideas and stuff you know better than anyone that I've ever talked to on how difficult that is to Traverse the world on those things and you're bringing them down to anyone and everyone who has the interest and wanting to know it I feel like we're having a new Reformation on scholarship here so I'm thankful to be part of it and I'm glad that you are as well and people can person get to know you through this so I hope people sign up yeah and one thing I'll add to that um there's a big move in the universities for what we're calling now public scholarship I was chair of a department for 10 years and it doesn't mean you go pop and you water down your standards or anything like that but more and more universities are encouraging faculty to go to the schol meetings to do the academic papers but to also speak to the public do radio interviews do television speak to large uh Community groups and I'm seeing that more and more with all of my colleagues and I think it's just a wonderful move and YouTube is part of that it's a big part of that there are a lot of amazing things on YouTube now that did not even exist 10 years ago I think it's really exciting and to keep that going people who are signing up are helping that so just thank you to the viewer as as well and James thank you for your time thank you Derek Professor James D tabore Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls course we really hit it off in this last top four parallels to Jesus and the Dead Sea scroll Community however you sent me this list with four more parallels and I said how did he say those are the top four and then these look like the top four I don't know which ones are the top four at this point can you can you help me I did that on purpose I do it all the time with my students you know here are the top four here are the top five and then I go uh actually there's some others and I guess we could vote on them at the end everybody that takes the course will decide what what are the main connections or Parallels between the Jesus movement and 150 years earlier the Dead Sea scroll group so let's look at another four and Derek I'm going to back up and say these are the top four okay I'm not going to say the others weren't the top four maybe we're going to have the top eight for all I know but anyway let's take four more look now listen to this this is amazing last time we did apocalyptic Messianic preparing the way in the wilderness and New Covenant I mean who would deny that those are pretty top right but listen to these and I'll give them to you one at a time children of light when this group writes about themselves and describes themselves they use this very unique phrase children of light they also talk about children of Darkness now it kind of you would think would be a common metaphor in the helenistic Greek Roman Jewish World it turns out that we don't have parallels to that phrasing anywhere else we have renic literature we have the Apocrypha the pseudepigrapha all sorts of Jewish Christian writings the only other parallel besides the Dead Sea scroll group is the Jesus movement Jesus says in the gospels to his followers you are children of light not children of darkness and just so you know that's just not a a one-off thing that never occurs again the Apostle Paul years later is writing to his followers and he says you are the children of light as well in first Thessalonians not the children of Darkness so this idea of being of the light not of the darkness is absolutely core to the two movements it's a huge parallel especially again like we did New Covenant last time it's a huge parallel these are things that stand out as unique like Pharisees and Sadducees two other groups that we know something about about they never said we're the children of light and you're the children of Darkness now they fought like crazy sometimes with one another but that phrasing is something unique to the Dead Sea scoll community and to the Jesus movement used in that way now when they use that that means they're a separatist sectarian group as we usually call it but if you open up our earliest gospel I'm going to mention the gospel of Mark again many of your viewers took the mark course and they know this very well what is John the Baptist doing as he preaches in the wilderness preparing the way is to separate out a group of people that are prepared for the end and those who don't prepare are going to be cast Into Darkness I know that's a little rough but it's all the way through the gospels there's this dichotomy after all John says things like this the axe is laid at the root of the tree you picture somebody cutting down a tree and every tree that is not bear fruit is cut down and cast Into the Fire that's our friend John the Baptist preaching out in the wilderness so that's certainly a major pallel but with that how do you become a Child of Light what do you do you have to change your inner self some people call it conversion but we use conversion more today like change religions but it's the original meaning it's Evangelical it's basically the idea that youve heard the good news of the kingdom of God is near and you respond to it and you repent of your sins that's how you join the group and then you undergo an initiation they don't call it baptism because that's a Greek word baptizo they're writing in Hebrew and Aramaic they use a Hebrew word word that means to dip or to plunge to immerse immerse is a good word so John the baptizer is John the immerser well this group is a water immersing group they're very near the river Jordan they also are at the Dead Sea and you can immerse yourself in the Dead Sea I think you've been in the Dead Sea Derek you got to keep your eyes shut but it qualifies as ritual Purity under the laws of Judaism any body of water in terms of fresh water flowing in which happens at the Dead Sea also any Lake but you know what you find at where the Dead Sea scroll group lived and hid their Scrolls in the caves around they have ritual pools of immersion they have more than half a dozen of these pools some are for collecting water because they're living in the desert huge reservoirs that are many many feet deep but also pools with the steps they call them step pools that you go down into the water you immerse yourself and come back up clean that is the normal immersion within Judaism it's called a Mikvah but this immersion that they talk about in the community rule that first document that we study in the course it talks about people repenting and changing their lives inwardly and then being immersed in water as an initiate cre ation right into the community there's before that you're a child of Darkness you repent of your sins you come into the group and you become a Child of Light so those two kind of go together you talk about children of light being immersed in water joining the group now this group's pretty strict you don't do this fast they are very very rigid with their rules and their interpretations of the Torah I'm not going to go into the differences too much because I want to do the similarities but you know Jesus did say in some of our texts come to me and take my yoke upon you which means my interpretations of the Torah the rabbis call it the Yoke of the Torah you're bearing the Torah you're practicing the Torah the Jewish law and he says my yoke is easy and my burden is light well this group is not easy and their burden is heavy and in fact Jesus probably probably is aware of this group because they last right up through his life until the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD and we're going to point out all these similarities but remember we're also going to do a comprehensive study and point out the differences but the fact that you get in the group by immersion you become a Child of Light that's the parallel now here's a huge one maybe we should make this number one at the end we can discuss what's number one they follow a teacher and they call him the teacher capital T and he's called the usually translated in English teacher of righteousness but you know what it really means the true teacher the unique teacher the right teacher not one of those other teachers that would lead you astray so this group believes their teacher is the one to listen to get these texts all the way through the New Testament chrisan s today read them as if it's about salvation and heaven and kind of the Christian faith but this is a Jewish thing when Jesus claims to be the way and the truth and the light of the world you see that he's using this language from the Dead Sea schulls and so the teacher that they follow they believe is the right teacher as well but once again he's 150 years G take a few years ahead of the time of Jesus what do they say about him here's the main thing they say about him that you will be saved saved in the day of God's judgment by your faith in the teacher of righteousness they actually say that and by your suffering talk about a parallel to have faith in your teacher and then they further say in the Scrolls this is in the habach the book habach in the Hebrew Bible they write a commentary on it and they explain all the things that they think it means for their day and their time and they talk about the teacher coming and they say to him God has revealed all the mysteries of the prophets and you go to the New Testament and what does Jesus say in several of the Gospels it is written of me and he gives these interpretations of prophecies like in the Gospel of Luke 4 he reads a text from Isaiah 61 and then he says this day this is fulfilled now whether that's a historical Jesus or not whether it's what Jesus followers said he said we don't have to worry about that in this course we're not trying to separate what is the historical Jesus and what it isn't what we're saying is we have literature from the Jesus movement in our new testament gospels and we have lit piure from the Dead Sea scroll group in our Scrolls and they're both describing their views and ideas about their teacher and it's very very similar they also say and this will really blow you away our teacher is a prophet like Moses a prophet like Moses how can you have a prophet like Moses Dr tore wait as you were talking about the teacher like Moses you had fireworks literally just glow I saw that and I thought you did it no I was you are not kidding me what I'm not playing I'm not pull like that literally randomly just happened Derek I think you're I think you're kidding me I'm not I swear this happened to me once before it was not a dramatic moment and I think it might have to do with these uh programs and the way my Bo voice kind of maybe bellowed out or something I don't know but I think it was a sound thing maybe you're using streamyard maybe streamyard does that I don't know maybe you're a prophet like Moses I don't know I'm just you that was pretty cool though I leave that in people will enjoy that okay I swear we did not do that when I saw it I kept talking but I thought what is Derek doing and dereck's singing and go what is tab doing W okay it was perfect a prophet like Moses what's a prophet like Moses someone who brings the Covenant to the people of Israel in the Hebrew Bible so if there's going to be another Prophet like Moses which Deuteronomy 15 can be understood to mean and we go to the New Testament and you go to the book of Acts chapter 7 and Stephen is preaching remember the first Christian martyr so-called I say so-called Christian because I think they're all Jews as followers of Jesus at this point I mean they're still part of Judaism interpreting the faith in terms of Judaism and what does he say God says that he'll bring a prophet like Moses and this Jesus is that prophet and we open up the Dead Sea Scrolls and they're also thinking their teacher is a new Moses and I really think that's a major parallel so that's three I'm going to add here a fourth might not seem as dramatic I don't know if I'll get the fireworks and the stars on this one maybe we will but they talk a lot about the Holy Spirit not just the holy spirit is out there or there might be a holy spirit or there was a holy spirit they believe that the holy spirit is with them they call it the spirit of Holiness and when they're meeting in their camps and in their assembly Halls you've been to Kuran you've been in the assembly all Derek that is a sacred place not like a church but it's the assembly the people that make it sacred and they believe that the holy spirit is just hovering over the group and remember in the New Testament Paul talks about when you get together and the spirit of the Lord is with you and my spirit is with you this group had that kind of spirituality I'll close with this in terms of these other four I'm going to still call them the top four so maybe we'll have the top eight but these top four that we've covered just now there's a prayer and it's at the end of the community Rule and I just want to show you the level of feeling that they Clos their document with the the rule of their Community here's how it starts before I move my hands and feet O Lord I praise you so you see it reads in a very devotional way and then it goes on for about two pages and you could take it right out of The Book of Psalms or something like that so they truly truly believe that they're the true people that they're The Remnant the children of light their teacher is the true teacher before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered we didn't know the details about this group Josephus doesn't tell us that they had a teacher that they thought was like Moses who was going to bring this New Covenant he doesn't use children of light and all of these things he presents some more as a philosophical group like the pythagoreans because he wants to impress his Roman readers but here we're getting the actual writings of the group itself the inside of the group and this is what we cover in the course so whether you have four whether you have eight maybe we can find some more but I'm telling you when we TI these off we're talking about big major points and I'm going to say again none of the other Jewish groups of the period that we know about shared any of these characteristics that I've mentioned so far I think that makes them stand out and when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 and up through the 1950s there was a lot of nervousness about this because the original editors and readers of the Scrolls could see these parallels even in the very first scroll they began to examine the community Rule and wondered is this a precursor of the Jesus movement or what's going on here and I think the fear was that it would Rob Christianity of its uniqueness and I know some people take it that way they say well what's the big deal about Jesus there were other movements like that well not many I don't know of any except this one but it doesn't Rob the Jesus movement of its uniqueness here's one why what it shows you is that the Jesus movement flows out of the same milu out of the same culture out of the same political and economic and social situation and the Jesus moment like the Dead Sea scroll group is waiting for God to intervene to send the Messiahs to bring about the kingdom of God and to overthrow the Romans so to me it just makes that period of History all the more interesting to know the parallels that existed in this prayor group I hope we can have everybody watching go sign up check out the course what do you think about these parallels which ones do you think are the most like significant to you which one do would you rank I'm curious to know in the chat down in the conversation in the comment section but also let us know if you signed up give us a shout out let us know what you think of the I think it's super high quality um we're also having a zoom call coming up so we I'm going to be there you're going to be there James and we get to dive deep and have conversations with students who sign up for this so yeah you know what we should do Derek I just thought of this here's what we should do for the first Zoom meeting we should have people send in their list of the top four because we're going to actually we should let out the secret we might find another for Derek or even another four after that well however many we find we should have the students send in emails before the meeting and give us their list and we can compile the list and kind of announce the winner wouldn't that be cool that would beol all the people that take the course and you know most of the people signing up for your courses they've studied religion and the Bible and Christianity and Judaism and the Hebrew Bible and everything for years many of them have been in movements and churches and groups and organizations so it would really be interesting to take a kind of a poll and see okay you studied all these you're going to get all of the main characteristics what do you think is the big one the explosive one I've already got one in my head but uh I'm going to keep an open mind and I love to hear from all the students that would be really cool and maybe we can make those fireworks go off again looking forward to it thank thank you so much James thank you Derek good to be with you we are live myth Vision podcast I'm your host Derek Lambert I have again special guest Dr James D Tabor joining us again how are you my friend well other than the horrible things going on in the Middle East for the last 19 days I'm doing okay so well I'm glad actually some of that relates to what we're going to talk about as you'll see yes want to talk about apocalyptic scenarios that arise out of biblical texts what people call Bible prophecy basically mainly Rel it to the Dead Sea Scrolls right right it's related to that let me go ahead and get that out of the way so people understand you have a course this course uh we put together here Dr tabore goes deep on the Dead Sea Scrolls gets into one of the topics we're going to talk about today but he does so uh extensively bringing up sources so you can actually wrap your head around what the Dead Sea Scrolls are teaching what's going on with this this movement 100 1502 200 years before Jesus of Jews who are in the wilderness that have a very similar idea in many ways uh to what we see in the New Testament I I wanted to ask you if that also applies to apocalypticism and what is meant by this so everybody um the link is pinned at the top it's also in the description go sign up for the course on Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls there's so much in common there's also some differences and wrap your head around what Dr tabore says here he has a Blog he has a YouTube channel I hope that any mods that are watching can plug his YouTube channel in the chat so people can go and subscribe to Dr tabore and just so you know James I know you already know this and by the way don't feel offended if you're watching James doesn't mind me calling him James um I get a lot of people who are super sensitive and saying he's Dr tab he's Dr you know trust me he'd yell at me if I kept doing how about your Royal Highness should we go exactly exactly so YouTubers out there YouTubers in the past I'll probably do some deep Dives dissecting some of the Sensational fear grabbing nonsense that I find among Christian ity and those online that are pushing the end times are happening now like is the Israel conflict a sign of the end times proof the end times is here what do you me is doing and of course if you just type in like Hamas Israel war Bible prophecy what do you know what is that 10 million was it 10 million six million six million yeah yeah it's just it it's never ending with the prophecies are this and this is that and then when Russia and then when China and then this and that this that and it's like okay so we need to ask first off Dr tabore Dead Sea Scrolls your course give us something um about the course and what is apocalypticism and is this movement in the Dead Sea scroll movement the the kumran sect we'll call them do they have what this in common with the Jesus movement okay so apocalypticism within a Biblical context refers to unveiling or pulling the curtain back and what you're pulling the curtain back on are the secrets of the End of the Age what's called eschatology but it's particular within a Jewish context apocalyptic Messianic eschatology because the key is a set of figures that show up most people think of one Messiah but actually even in the New Testament do you remember that Passage in Mark I think it's chapter 10 or so where two of the 12 disciples uh the fishermen the zebedy boys I call them James and John they say oh Lord when we come into the kingdom one of us maybe could sit at the right hand and one of the left that's the Priestly and davidic Messiah idea that the Messiah would be the teacher like Moses he's anointed of the spirit Isaiah 61 some people will know that text the Lord has anointed me his Spirit Jesus quotes that in Luke 4 in the Dead Sea Scrolls they have a figure we don't know his given name his proper name but they called him the right teacher the true teacher you'll usually see it translated as the teacher of righteousness but I I don't think it's so much what he teaches like I teach righteousness lots of teachers do that but who is the true teacher you know the ultimate teacher is what they're calling him and so within the Dead Sea Scrolls we learn that that there actually three figures there's a middle figure that is the main guy and then he has two assistants one a priest and one a davidic warrior and it comes up again of course in the New Testament so the reason you should study the Dead Sea Scrolls I mean because they're the oldest documents ever found that relate to Western biblical religions for one thing remember the Dead Sea Scrolls are over 2,000 years old the actual copies that we have whereas copies of the New Testament are from the four century CE or ad and our oldest copy of the Hebrew Bible believe it or not is 1,00 a or CE doesn't mean it's worthless or throw it out but to go back 2,000 years earlier and have texts that are before Jesus was even thought of or born you know as a human being in the earth and to be able to study that movement so sometimes when I teach this course to students in college and so forth I'll even title it the first Messiah and that's mainly an attention getter I have to explain that because I'm teaching to Christian students primarily or they come from Christian backgrounds but even if they don't they would go like uh you mean Jesus right because this is Western culture right so who is the first Messiah well actually the first Messiah technically was Aaron the priest that Moses anointed because to be a messiah is to be anointed either as a priest or a king and I guess the second after him would be King Saul Samuel anointed him as king of Israel but when we say the first Messiah and use the m word you know we're not just say unano one way back in the time of Moses or in the time of David and Saul we're talking about this anointed figure anointed of the spirit Isaiah 61 who's the gonna proclaim the final year of God's favor and bring in the end of the age he's going to usher in the kingdom of God and there are many texts in the Hebrew Bible in the prophets particularly some in the Psalms but mainly mainly the prophets phets in which this figure is described and identified in terms of what he's going to do and so forth and then you get candidates so I like to call it categories and candidates the categories come from the texts of the Hebrew Bible and then you get candidates coming along you know almost like I'll run uh could I be it right and so forth so if we look at the second temple period it's rich with candidates Jesus is among them our main source is the uh historian Josephus who many many of your viewers will know and probably have even read some of his works and at my last count he cataloges about 14 figures that come from basically the first century BCE all the way down to the baruka period now he doesn't live that far down but he begins he kind of stops around 70 AD but then we have other sources that kick in and actually Josephus does write way into the 90s with his Jewish Antiquities so we got categories the scriptures candidates what happens though and this is what you're going to learn in the course are these categories are scriptural categories I call them floating prophecies a good example would be Isaiah 2 well known the United Nations has actually put it outside on the Isaiah wall they call it and it says essentially that in the last days the Nations will come up to Jerusalem they'll learn the way of peace and Nations won't lift up sword against Nation there'll be no more war and so forth well H how how would I plot that if I was wanting to know are we near that are we getting near what are the signs that's the apocalyptic side well there's no way it's a floating prophecy you know how it begins in the last days well okay so that kind of Prophecy these kinds of prophecies that I would call kind of set pieces they often are just out there and when they when somebody thinks the end is near they kick in so to speak now some of them though get specific for example the day of the Lord is coming when I will gather all nations against Jerusalem okay that's not an exact quote but it's Zechariah 14 Joel 3 Zechariah 12 this idea Psalm 83 see I'm I'm clicking off these little set pieces isn't that a category though like in a way it's a category like uh assault of Jerusalem in the last days by surrounding Powers right now if you put it in the ancient world you see the surrounding Powers will be first of all the Greeks Alexander the Great Antiochus epiphanies right Hanukkah and all that mhm of the meban period if you go on down into the latter part of the first century it's the Kim they're called in the Dead Sea scolls that's the Romans Kim means those of the West literally from the from creit they come in from the area of creit the Kim if you move it on down to the time of Jesus the Kim are still in control and so they also are the ones being talked about and so notice you can go throughout history and then here's what happens this is why everyone listening should study the Dead Sea Scrolls right you need more than one example what people do is they go to the New Testament and they tend to think oh this is unusual this is unique Mark 13 you know I don't know of any other Jewish teacher who said this well you're right if you're talking about Pharisees and Sadducees they're The Establishment they're not into this thing but look with the Dead Sea Scrolls and and by the way we don't have any writings of Sadducees or Pharisees from this period we have later traditions and references to them primarily in the New Testament and then we have the mishna which is getting into third and fourth Century ad but imagine discovering the library of a Jewish apocalyptic Messianic sect 100 150 years before Jesus that did a let's call it a trial run because it did work out to be the end right they thought they're going to defeat the Kim but they quote all of the texts that the New Testament quotes having to do with this for example Jesus says in those days there will be Great Tribulation such as was not from the beginning of the creation and never will be again well it's quoting Daniel 12 verse one a lot of people know that that's your floating prophecy right okay we've had a lot of times of Great Tribulation in world history but if you make it very specific and you plug in the others oh that's when all the armies come and Conquer Jerusalem and that's when this happens and that happens you begin to plug all these in and you get what's called an apocalyptic scenario well guess what in the Dead Sea Scrolls enough of the pieces were on the chessboard of interpretation you might say that you could begin moving them around and go oh well the the Kim that's that must be the Romans and a king will come who's very evil that must be Pompei who conquered and was very cruel and and so forth and you going to set up their expectations the other thing you have is you have a timetable it's a floating Tim table it's a final 490e period when you start that clock it should the end should come within 490 years it's also 10 jubilees jubilees 49 years this group I mean imagine we have the library of a group that thought they were in the first week of the final Jubilee which means they've got like 40 years left so they think they're the final generation so to have their library from that time and to be reading these texts got a copy right here this is the book that we use Gaza verish it has a different cover now but it's the same book now we don't read all 683 Pages believe me but you know what we read we actually read a significant portion of the important Scrolls that particularly will relate to this question of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls so it's like you know a trial run a precursor uh well then you're going to learn from that because you're going to find out like let me just throw out a couple quotations and we could play a game now you will know this but lots of people want strike the shepherd and the Sheep will be scattered hm H that's Mark 14 I think when Jesus is walking in the Kidron Valley to the valley of Gethsemane and he's warning his disciples about the end really yeah it's there I can show you a text that has that 100 years before talking about the teacher of the Dead Sea Scrolls and it's in What's called the Damascus document they've lost their teacher he was killed by a wicked priest huh Jesus was killed by a wicked priest you know it's kind of surprised me Derek and this is just a footnote but it's funny that the myths haven't got on to this because they're always looking for a pattern like oh it's abalonus of Tiana or dfus and Khloe or it's one of these other you know kind of texts that I can go to and find the pattern well the general helenistic pattern of the Divine man that works but when you throw in this detailed apocalyptic eschatology coming from Hebrew scriptures these Greek guys aren't reading the Hebrew Bible we've got a group that's reading the Hebrew Bible and they quote that about their teacher this generation will not pass till all these things are fulfilled guess what I go to the Dead Sea Scrolls again they have a document called the community Rule and they say from the death of the teacher this is actually in the domesticus document sorry from the death of the teacher there will pass about 40 years see what they're saying there we're going to live to see the end yes we lost our teacher now normally when apocalyptic group loses their teacher you would think they would go into despair which they often do and they might even say we were wrong but we know about cognitive dissonance right yep and you know what happens sometimes they affirm it all the more and typically what they say is somebody has seen him or heard from him or a successor comes up with an interpretation that can adjust the the group in some way so that they can keep waiting and expecting now typically you can't do that for hundreds of years because the circumstances changed so much that I mean you're way past 490 years so Christians today right now during this war 67 during The Six Day War what do they do when that clock stopped ticking way back at least by the first century right fin 490 year period 10 jubilees uh they go oh the clock stopped and there's seven years left so at the end of the age when all this stuff kicks in and there are millions of people out there today on YouTube and everywhere else that are waiting for the the clock's like this here's midnight and and they're wait okay get ready oh it's ticking again oh my God it's moving uh the question they were doing that uh really it I'll tell you when it really begins to get ramped again is once Israel or the Jewish people have a Homeland again uh the balfor Declaration 1917 1920s and so forth uh when the British retook uh the Holy Land from the Ottoman Empire but then the sixth day war 48 when Israel was established there was a war 67 is the big one because Jerusalem is now once again in the hands of Jews so what do you do you open up your Bible and you go oh Jerusalem is going to be conquered by Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles is fulfilled so now it must be fulfilled this must be it again now all I say is caution lights flashing down the prophetic Highway okay caution C you know you come down a highway going too fast and you wait wait be careful there's a crash ahead there's you're going to go off a cliff so look who am I to say what the future is what I want people to do is study the past let's look at two examples where a Jewish apocalyptic Messianic group the Jesus movement and the teachers movement I like to call it we need to just say the teachers movement uh about 100 150 years apart because we can't exactly date the teacher but within 50 years we can date him I think and what could we learn from studying these two now I heard some evangelicals recently I've played around on YouTube trying to I watched mostly news about the war I have many friends in Israel trying to keep up uh and I have of I have you know Muslim friends Jewish friends uh Christian Arab friends I've been to the Holy Land 75 times I think so and uh know a lot of people over there so I'm trying to keep up with with it but also I was just cruising around on YouTube typing in some Search terms and I just couldn't believe it it's like oh it's getting replayed again I thought it was back in 1967 which I'm old enough to remember when the whole world thought well this is it you know and then Jerusalem was back in the hands of Israel and so forth so you can open these texts but what what this these particular people were saying is you know when Jesus died nobody expected him to come back like when a messiah dies that set right so you got Simon of peria Judas the galile and thas the shepherd King and so forth what happens the Herod Herod the Great Kills them or the Romans kill them and you never hear from them again right we don't have their writings if we had their writings let's take Judas the galileon what if we had documents from the Judas the Galilean movement who is a Revolt leader in 4 BC that we think about the year Jesus was born it maybe 5 BC was born but 4 BC he would have been a baby so his mother Mary certainly experienced this and it was centered in sephus which is the urban center of Galilee three miles from Nazareth where he grew up so she's right there on the apocalyptic 50 yard line if we had his writings of his followers they might have well said the same thing like I know he's dead but I feel like you know he's been Vindicated by God he's going to return again so this particular teacher they were saying no once they die it's over but with Jesus right we had the totally unexpected event he shows up again James real quick just I this is so you just brought back a memory I did an interview with um my buddy um uh Matthew heartkey he he's he's a you know non-academic but he Dives deep and so you can consider him like a miniature academic researcher and he was looking at uh in Wright and um some of the other claims mainly in Wright who was trying to make this point no one ever we hear this often no one ever they didn't think they were alive after they dead and they give these examples from acts you know we all know the famous Fist and this and that yeah right that's what this guy did too he quoted X he said that an early Church Father I can't remember if it's origin who who was one of the Church fathers they wrote in their commentary in the Gospel of John 4 with the Samaritan woman he wrote about and we only have this we have nothing else there's a section where he puts in the commentary about a me Messianic Samaritan claimant that we would not know about if it weren't for this mentioned by this church father who said that his followers said he's still alive to this day and most academics placed this guy a century earlier around the first century period And yet his claimants say he's still alive to the stage well look it I know it's the pattern what I guess what I study most I study ancient Judaism early Christianity right but my focus is apocalypticism and particularly biblical apocalypticism Through the Ages so the Dead Sea Scrolls is my springboard for getting into that and I can tell you that the pattern is the opposite of what these people are saying the pattern is when a charismatic leader dies the group almost invariably begins to believe that even though he's dead yet he lives now this can manifest itself in appearances in apparitions in dreams in Visions even in some cases claims that someone has encountered this person now this is universal I mean look at abalonus of tyana we always mentioned that as an example but the reason is because when you put all of your hopes and dreams into something like this this is like everything and you back it with scripture see you've been studying texts of scripture and they're all fitting so it has to happen and you kick in that prophetic clock and you don't have this little out that say oh the clock stops so now we can wait 2,000 years and start it again and play it again they didn't have that option they're living in the 490e period so once it's way past it like 80 years 100 years nobody's even referring to that clock anymore but guess what in the Dead Sea Scrolls we don't have to speculate we can actually find texts the teacher of righteousness in the Thanksgiving hymns that's a text we study we read the whole thing in the course together I take you through it I guide you just like I'm giving giving you a commentary like a a Bible teacher would do with the New Testament I take you through the Dead Sea Scrolls and it's hymns Thanksgiving hymns but number 10 through number 17 were actually written by the teacher you know what he says huh he applies Isaiah 53 to himself he does he now did the followers write that after and say that he said that that's possible some people think that about Jesus right you know when Matthew says he bore our sins and like a lamb led to the slaughter and so forth or Paul Christ Our Passover sacrifice for us and so forth but who we think the teacher wrote it because he's he's reading that text and he's thinking that's me I mean I'm the one who's who's like the suffering servant leading Israel back to God but what happens in Isaiah 53 he's despised rejected he made makes his grave with the wicked ones it's plural in the Dead Sea Scrolls by the way we have a different copy of Isaiah that they used and I will highly exalt him well if you highly exalt somebody guess what that sounds kind of like resurrection of the dead right I don't think in the early Christian Movement now this will surprise people who don't know my take on this I don't think anybody was reporting a resuscitated corpse for quite some time I think they were reporting sightings and Visions initially and I based that on the earliest and only first person account we have and that's the Apostle Paul and as you know in 1 Corinthians 9 and 1 Corinthians 15 when he's asked after saying he appeared to me I've seen the Lord but what kind of a body and he says well it's glorious it's Immortal it's Indescribable and all of you will have that body too when you're raised uh but he says he he he can't describe it in physical terms that it's God will will create this spiritual body that Jesus now has and so I think the corpse idea uh basically comes later we don't even get it in Mark and even in Matthew I'm not sure we get it because uh remember they're on a mountain in the Galilee and it's like an apparition yeah it sounds kind of like a misty I always pictured as a misty cloudy mountain and then it says he appeared to them even in some of the movies I've seen it's kind of like a light in the sky speaking to them have you noticed that in some of the Jesus movies they don't they because they want to make him kind of glorified and then they hear a voice and he says go into all the world and preach to go you know and they think and then but then Matthew has the honesty maybe to say but some doubted right right so that's among the 11 it's the 11 left after Judas is gone uh you know so by studying the Dead Sea Scrolls we can begin to see uh for example they say this is the time for preparing the way in the wilderness that's my favorite Isaiah 40:3 this is the time okay 150 years later John the Baptist this is the time for preparing the way in the wilderness qu the exact same verse now I'm not just saying oh look how stupid all these people were they keep applying this and they're all wrong that's not my point my point is an apocalyptic Messianic movement of any Tim or period that relies on these texts you need to say almost like buyer beware you know uh don't go for it necessarily until you've got a little history under your belt and I think we're in a time now of I mean look how the world is divided we've got Russia and China and the Ukraine and we've we've got the democracies against the totalitarian regimes we've got divisions in our country between the Republicans and Democrats I mean we're in apocalyptic times we've got climate change we've got all these things economic possibilities doomsday weapons so of course you can open these books and say well this has to be it but just remember people in the past also thought this has to be it yeah because they too could tick off the things that were happening so I would even if somebody's listening and they think um well Dr tab I think it fits more today and these people you know they they just thought it was and it wasn't well that could well be true but it still makes sense to learn from the past okay and we should look at how these have been interpreted and the two examples that we have and these are the only two examples we have from the ancient world the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jesus movement it's like we got the New Testament and we've got the Dead Sea Scrolls right let's compare them let's learn a lot before we before we get to my one big question that I'd like to tease the audience with I do want to give a a promo real quick about the course just for those who are viewing and and checking us out right now um this Sunday so if you sign up for Dr James D table Wars Dead Sea scroll Jesus in the Dead Sea scroll course you're going to learn a lot you did not know about the Dead Sea Scrolls there is so much material here it's all in 4k really high quality um you're getting several lectures we're 10 lectures bonus footage of us actually there in kumran we're in uh where what is the place that we are particularly at that we filmed that you were talking in kumran right at Cave 4 I think and also the cemetery I think you've got oh the well the Mikvah that's there we we kind of walk through the site right we've also got some bonus videos you you get a study packet that's about 40 pages PDF you get all of this other PDF download material it's over a 100 Pages it's really indepth uh the mark course I'm proud of it and it's wonderful and a lot of people uh watching will have taken and that but in terms of study that was only one text you understand we're doing like the Dead Sea Scrolls so this course actually has a lot more in it in terms of just content because of the nature of what we're studying now this suay we're doing a conf we're we're actually going to be doing a zoom call for all students who sign up for this course I will be there this Sunday with you Dr tabore and what can people before I get my one question ask of you okay uh the thing that I do I did it with the mark course too we met for six months uh the last Sunday of the month unless it's some special holiday or something and we we meet at noon on zoom and this is not a webinar I want to explain that because everybody does webinars that's where you sign in to a website on zoom and you hear a guy talking for 30 minutes and sometimes questions get passed on or something no this is like I call it a zoom room I taught on Zoom during coid so I know how to do this we get everybody together it's 50 people a screen so I remember on the mark course we had over 200 remember on that first meeting that you and I I was turning the screen there were several Pages yet as when somebody talks they pop to the front and so forth and I know you can't have a it's not the same as sitting around in a s semar with 12 people but you know what there is a personal touch wouldn't you say Derek you look at the people and people raise their hand and people can ask questions uh especially as we go on because we're going to keep doing this for several months uh but in the first one we're going to have prepared Q&A so if you sign up for the course you can message me and I I'll I don't know if my email is in the course but we'll put it in if it isn't but I send out an email to all the registered people it already went yesterday to the one so far yeah but that doesn't mean if you sign up today or all the way through Saturday night I'd say if you get wait till Sunday it's getting kind of close but theoretically we're going to put the link on the course page so even if you sign signed up at Sunday morning at noon you could jump into the zoom meeting you haven't even looked at the cour you know because the link will be there it's just for you as a student and I've already been getting questions great questions from people the course has been out over a month now and you're not going to believe Derek I haven't seen D Derrick's gonna be my MC on the question you're not going to believe the how good these students are really we have got some incredible students and they ask the best questions and what's so great is you're talking not just a general audience you're talking to a group that's read the Scrolls and studied the Scrolls or at least is in the process and then as we go through subsequent months I get to know you uh you know and people keep sending questions and we kind of form different kinds of the Dead Sea scroll called it the yaka a kind of a a group a community you know it's sort of a community of people studying the Dead Sea Scrolls I I don't know if anybody else does this but I I love doing it it's great yeah you you have a unique me and Ryan you know the queen of myth Vision we talk talk about it all the time you'll send these messages as me and her at the gym in the morning trying to get our exercise trying to look good and fit and and um and you'll me send these messages and I'm like James is very unique I mean we have several Scholars you know who who participate on MVP courses and you're unique you want to connect and stay connected keep the family tight so I really do appreciate that about you because I know a lot of people appreciate that it's something about having that sense of community and being connected and learning directly from a professor such as yourself who's been teaching over 40 years you know you've been doing this stuff for a long time and we have new Scrolls there are new Scrolls out and I'm actually now because of the war taking a look at some things about the Kim again that I want to bring out on Sunday because you know we don't live in a vacuum right and if there's a war going on in the Middle East and we're studying the first Messianic movement that thought their war was the war you can see how I'm going to be able to draw some relevant lessons even in terms of what's happening today so I think that's going to be really interesting for people and Derek as we go on later months having these Zoom meetings um and I know all teachers say this it's kind of lip service like oh I learned a lot from my students or I've heard I learn as much from my students as I do from my study well I don't know that that's true but guess what a lot of the people that follow you Derek do you don't have any religious experiences and traditions they've been through do you many you know how many books they've read how many articles how many YouTube videos I would say the average one has read hundreds of things don't you think yeah they don't just wander in like oh I guess I might look at some religion no they're speakers they've been digging a lot of them have read the whole new testament and tried to to figure stuff out and they've listened all this stuff so it's an honor for me to be with these students and I mean that sincerely because I like to meet with a group of historical Seekers that are trying to figure stuff out and you know what many eyes see things that two eyes never see just think about it somebody's going to spot something we're going through the Damascus document somebody goes but Dr tab look at column six line three and go you know I've never noticed that before happens all the time I want students to come in with me yeah and have a class so you know there's two things that you remind me of one is Steve Mason's remarks about myth Vision the first week he ever did a live stream he was just like man I've had more people voluntarily want to watch this 4our live stream I've talked to more people that way than I've ever taught teaching in college number one number two it reminded me of a debate that took place between Christine Hayes and an orthodox Rabbi about the mishna and talmud and the rabbi is like no you got to read this for like uh for for moral instruction don't read this for The Who what wi where and why and the way that Christine Hayes painted it I I I relate to what she said she said to the rabbi my friend listen your religious experience is through that I get what you could call a so-called religious experience that experience you get through the historical analysis through the who the what the why did the rabbis say that what did they mean when they said this there's something cool that goes beyond the the what I once thought even as a person who's not a Christian anymore like I still get an amazing experience exploring the historical relationship that humans had and why they did this and why these texts were written there's something cool about that it's called Enlightenment Derek right the lights go on and oh yeah maybe you've only studied the New Testament and then you're going to read these Scrolls and constantly you're going to say oh my God I had no idea this has already been thoroughly discussed now I'm not it it might sound like we're both saying the Scrolls the scroll movement and the Jesus movement are the same no we go into the differences no two apocalyptic groups are ever the same and even the Jesus movement I mean is it monolithic are you kidding me I'm not sure Paul even liked Peter in James uh you know he calls him the so-called pillars of the church that's not a real nice way to refer to scholar James what you know what I mean like you are as far as the thing about the students I know this sounds like I'm putting down my college students but my undergrads at UNCC Charlotte all the years I taught 33 years there if I'm in an advanced seminar they can get pretty good like I expect in this course you know they really study but the average class let's say have a class of 50 and we just do apocalypticism or whatever their main question is ready will that be on the test you've heard that that's a joke now will this be on the test and do we really have to read that and they don't ever say that because I tell them they have to but what they think is I'll just listen to tabber in class because he goes over it anyway see well I don't think the people that sign up for this course have that attitude if anything they're like I'm not going to fall for something I want to read you mentioned the Damascus doc I'm going to read the Damascus document so that when you talk about it I have read it and and it it's just tremendous there's there's just so many things I'm so excited about it as you can tell absolutely and so sign up today my one question and then if you don't mind James can we touch a few super chats if you have the time absolutely yeah okay try to try to make it relevant to this but uh I'm pretty good at answering questions I can always like Sid step it or whatever yeah let's do it why not uh one of the big questions I had was we're looking for commonality between these apocalyptic movements we've described apocalypticism as like the unveiling um you I don't even want to get into Jonathan Z Smith because obviously you know uh everything he put out when it comes to this he's what a God he was in the field in terms of uh the research on here but um as far as the End of the Age this term is used in the gospels describing the End of the Age what was meant by the Dead Sea scroll Community by end of the age can you tease us um and of course people should sign up for the course to get more in depth here but it's part of the challenge of the course is figuring out some of that because remember the movement goes over about a 50 to 100y year period so we see their development and just like in the New Testament if you ask Paul for example our earliest Source just to give you a parallel okay Paul Jesus is going to come back the dead will rise and meet him and the living will rise and then the kingdom is going to come uh describe that to me it's not real clear does he have a kind of millennial view is it the kingdom of God on Earth sitting on 12 Thrones judging the TW tribes of Israel that kind of thing like you get in the the two saying source of the gospels sometimes called Q you know what is the vision of the future uh but we do get hints they definitely are looking for the a fairly literal description of the prophetic fulfillment other words when they mentioned the Kim are going to come and uh invade and there'll be a time of trouble and the shepherd's going to be struck and so forth they they think that's happening and is going to happen even further so it's not a metaphor for like well evil is be setting us all the time so maybe you're cim or some of the Demons you're struggling with in your life no they they never go there no this is talking about armies this is talking about actual battles taking place now here's the part that begins to get slippery if I'm a Messianic figure like I Think Jesus of Nazareth was and I believe pretty literally in you know sitting on a throne and all the nations gathered in some sort of a judgment and so forth the way the prophets describe like Zechariah 14 and Jesus quotes sakar 14 in that day there will me no traitor in the house of the Lord t r a d r what does he do he cleans out the Traders right the people the money changers so that kind of fulfillment is pretty literal but he also says hold it don't fight you guys I can call 12 Legions of angels if I need them now I know that's a presentation of Matthew in that case remember he says that you live by the sword you'll die by the sword right uh so I don't want to confuse Matthew with historical Jesus but the ideas I think are also found in the lifetime of Jesus himself and that is how much does God do in a some kind of transcendent way and then what do humans experience as they try to follow the will of God so it's kind of something like there can be a real battle I mean battle with weapons and blood and corpses and burial like read Ezekiel 38 and9 that describe the wars of Gog and Magog and so forth Book of Revelation the blood is up to the bridal of the horses and so forth uh that sounds pretty real and I don't think that's talking about the uh threat of evil throughout history and some allegorization of that I don't think they I don't think the writers of the Book of Revelation meant it that way but on the other hand um Jesus probably expected in the future those Kim have to be defeated the Earth doesn't disappear right and the Romans just don't go away so there is this idea that the suffering that Jesus began to anticipate is a Redemptive suffering Paul had the same idea right and as you turn the other cheek it it's the ethic of uh not so much people call it being a pacifist it's it's really not a pacifist it's more Vengeance belongs to God not to me and my job or or my role is to submit to the will of God and that's what Jesus does according to the gospels In The Garden of Gethsemane so I think they are expecting a concrete real future and it's not end of the world end of the world is a terrible mistranslation of you know that phrase uh it's used in the Dead Sea Scrolls it's also used uh they they talk about this age and the age to come the close of the age the last days and so forth so they're reading things fairly literally but with God on their side if you know what I mean so maybe they thought like I get the idea there there's a scroll called The War of the sons of Light and the sons of Darkness okay that's the name of the scroll so it's a war but as you begin to read how that war is going to take place they get so much Supernatural help that it seems like it's not like a normal War because who could defeat the Romans give me a break you know 24 Legions you're really gonna beat them I don't think so but they believe God will give them the victory you see but it's still a war and they're preparing like they're getting their banners together and their weapons and so forth as they describe it so it's hard to know sometimes just like in any text you know how literal do you take the literal but I don't think it's ever Never Never Land I think it is here and now it is naming definite powers that they faced in their time just like the Book of Revelation talks about their 10 Kings five have fallen one is one is to come and so forth these are probably Roman emperors including Nero we think you know these are real people but they're going to get defeated by God so vvus would be a great example right 79 ad summer of 79 you get a volcano that they thought was going to destroy Rome plenty of the Elder is burnt up in the fire his nephew plenty of the younger is in a ship watching you know Pompei and herculanum go down and they probably thought you know this is it everybody's been predicting the final judgment read Revelation 19 Derek I think we did a show on this once Revelation 19 no I'm sorry Revelation 18 19's when it's all over read Revelation 18 the Ci's burning the ships are in the harbor they're crying oh great Babylon all of the trade in the whole world you know that kind of thing so imagine 911 or something like that being described and people that think the United States is Babylon they would be thinking yeah God's bringing them down through their own enemies or something like that but I mean you still have to wake up in the morning and decide whether to make coffee or not or what you're not in never Neverland so to speak so I don't know if that addresses it but there's a lot yeah there's a lot think there's eternal life they do they do talk about being back in an edenic state of some type but they never talk about flying off to heaven or anything like that so yeah that that was it's one of those interesting things you know I came from the Predator's background but let's get to Super chats cuz we'll I'll never get uh to people's questions here if I don't okay let's go for it okay constellation Pegasus thank you so much yesterday you super chatted us and we were tearing just like Jesus so um here we are today any topic ideas for any courses in the future the way I understood this question James is um we did Mark we did Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls so you want to tease a few of our like for future yeah I've got a bunch of ideas I think I'm going to do one I'm not sure if this will be the next one but I have two in mind one is discovering the real pole you know how we do historical Jesus I'd like to do historical Paul and that Paul's the figure I've worked on the most I've written two books on Paul you can put the links in the description just go to my blog has it all james.com but I I think I want to do that and that would be just like I'm teaching the Scrolls in mark look for years I've taken people verse by verse through the seven letters of poll the authentic letters of poll I don't know anybody that isn't in a college course that has a chance to do that and I think I'd like to do a course we we could do it probably in about 10 or 12 lessons and we just go through the letters of Paul I'd be really and I give you the benefit of what I've learned over the years and then we can touch on all the issues that people bring up in Pauline studies and I think that would be a course that a lot of people would want to take Sunday school with James tabber you yeah look the other one that really got me teased you know me I came from that kind of I thought the end of the world was going to happen as a Christian and then I started realizing hold on there's certain time statements in the New Testament that make it seem like it was supposed to happen soon then I rationalized and became a full predus for a while because I could not accept failure um so anyway later on I ended up realizing whoa there's a reason critical Scholars think that it didn't happen um and so the one that you really got me hype on thinking is going through history and documenting all of the apocalyptic movements that had an eschatology that failed and just tease everybody there's a 100% success rate on them all failing and so going through history documenting sabotage zevi you know millerites like going way way back in history apocalypticism Through the Ages yeah yeah I I teach that course already and that that's another one a third one is uh I think I would like an I'd like a group to attempt with me to restore an original primitive gospel that is recoverable from the text that we have in the synoptic gospels um I'm not going to call it Q although the Q material is part of it but how do you go about maybe reconstructing the earliest stage of of the Jesus story Mark's our earliest finished product and we did a course on that but uh what about all the teachings of Jesus that are like in Luke and Matthew and so forth so U and that this would be an experimental course where we try to do it together you know I would suggest things and we would explore them and so forth it it would have a little more of an interactive uh but kind of like restoring the original gospel all the things that people are doing on Marian's text we have several Scholars working on that Mark Bilby and Jason and others that are looking at some of that Jason De um that that could play into it but like Bert Mack wrote a book long ago called uh something like the Q the Q gospel restored or whatever different people have tried it uh McDon McDonald I think doesn't Dennis uh he has his idea of uh some original Q document I'd like to U synthesize those in some way and try to get it down to Method like what methods do do you use not just like well this is what I come up with and I'm going to stick with it know but more how do you decide these things those criteria of authenticity I think most of us agree that's not going to work they're too subjective yeah you know you you've talked about those before with other Scholars you know you think well there's four criteria will apply and crosson probably does the best job in trying to do it but he comes up with a non- apocalyptic Jesus so you know my buzzer is going to go wait wait that's what happened yeah Dale Alison is my favorite of all favorites I think he does the best job on reconstructing the historical Jesus Paula frickson I think does a tremendous job uh we might even take Scholars I hadn't thought of this Derek we might take a set of Scholars examine what each you had a course Dale gives a course and people maybe that took his course uh we would then do a Dale Allison segment or two why does he end up differing from crosson right and you know what we might even do is talk him into coming into a zoom later after we've all done the work wouldn't that be something and they would be they'd be so excited about it because there's there would be students that have actually studied their stuff you know yeah and then talking about oh wow how we do this you know so I know he'd be down absolutely yeah thank you uh Rochester Johnny thank you for the support my friend yesterday you were showing love and you super chatted in case you're here uh if you're not here you might see this later thank you so much constellation again says any book recommendations for this topic time period this hits the stage so I think it's the uh the topic of a Feld apocalypticism um the Dead Sea Scrolls and we compare it to the G I have I have a number of uh I'm I'm not sure if he or consulation Pegasus is that a guy or a girl I don't want to assume you know I I started to say he but right con I'll just say the name I know I know this person from many super chats in the past but anyway if the person means for the time period I would I would uh probably think of something like um let's see from the macbes to the mishna it's a study of Judaism and I'm trying to think who wrote it you might have to Google it for me to see it but that would be a good survey of the period and that takes you from the mccabes all the way through the mishna um but I can't remember now who wrote that offand haven't looked at it in a while because I usually don't go into survey books that much for the Dead Sea Scrolls I would say Michael wise the first Messiah tremendous book and uh so as far as prophecy Through the Ages uh there are quite a few probably the best thing is the Oxford handbook on millennialism which is a big thick encyclopedia type book but that covers not just biblical but you know Japanese uh Asian Buddhist and all kinds of views anybody that has a sort of future utopian hope and thinks there's some way to predict when it's coming um so but I do have a bibl there is a bibliography in the course pack with lots of further reading thank you thank you hope that JC has one of two super chats yesterday um as the presence of certain names on the Tate tomb aaries raises a statistical question what question is raised by the presence of saffron roset Rosetta on those aaries along with the presence of cognates to the roots of the names Joshua Ephraim ephr and Joseph in the ca form words that refer to the flower that is represented by the star David holy smokes you know that has to do with the um ornamentation some people call it decorations on aaries the best source for that and I don't know if it's going to tell you much about Cana for but it's eer good enough his name is actually good enough eer good enough the famous scholar at Yale he would be the Jonathan Smith of his day oh Jonathan Smith was my teacher on helenistic religions and he wrote the the big multivolume thing is probably too much to buy but there's a one volume Edition and it's on Jewish symbols he goes with the route that they're full of deep meaning symbolic meaning and it's not just you go to the ocer shop and you kind of like I like a one with that pattern and I kind of like that pattern that looks really pretty I'll take that you know something like that but but people are trying to say something very profound I tend to lean with both meaning some people might just go with the flow like you do funeral funerary practices in every culture have a certain pattern to them that people go with uh but if you when you're decorating the bone box for the deceased I don't think it tends to be halfhazard uh I think uh people there's a lot of uniformity to it but there're also a lot of anomalies but as far as the roots of the names um let's see should I read the first half again no Staal question what question I haven't studied I haven't studied that in terms of the canor words that refer to that saffron flower um clearly art history overlaps in various ways to me where like Josh are are pretty straightforward it it's form you know basically from the name Jehovah or God or Yahweh and to save so Jehovah saves yahushua literally means yahovah saves so uh so I don't get some deep meaning in there but not sure thank okay Rhonda has gained true salvation through myth Vision thanks for joining the member of PR program really appreciate it Rhonda thank you so much for joining the family doc plom you know when Doc's name comes up it's G have like some thesis how different would the Paradigm of early Dead Sea scroll scholarship be if the hak Scrolls Q4 mmt Etc were found first rather than doctrinal text were universally available and Jewish Scholars had access yeah we uh we tend in the course doc to look at the history of ideas you could call it doctrinal texts of because we're dealing with Charter membership and how you get in and how you stay in and what the beliefs are and so forth because I want to compare it to early Christianity the halakic Scrolls um are very very important because they help us to try to understand what the relationship ship was in interpreting the Torah particularly laws of Purity in the temple that to this group would be a very big deal uh in the course one of the things I cover is what do you do with the toilets or the latrines uh because the Torah says to put them outside the camp and bury your your waste your feces to bury it right okay and in city of Jerusalem they toilets you know and people have toilets in their home they don't all walk out of the city to go to the bathroom well that's a big deal to the Dead Sea skull Community because in the Torah It also says that God's presence cannot be in a place that has human waste it's not that human waste is ritually defiling because it isn't uh jod Magnus has a great article on this uh so if I touch a dead body that's ritually defiling if I have sexual intercourse that's ritually defiling doesn't mean it's dirty if I'm a woman and I have a period That's ritually defiling but the toilet thing is a different question it has to do with the Holiness that's in in the camp and what's appropriate for the presence of God during worship and what this group believes is that is that Angels hover over the assembly when they gather together on Shabbat the Sabbath and on the festivals also it has to be on the right day according to the calendar so if you're meeting on a yum kapor that's not really Yom kapor according to this group and the Pharisees are meeting in Jerusalem on another Yom kapor that comes up in the Scrolls because the wicked priest comes down on yum kapor for the teacher and it confronts him because he knows the teacher can't do anything on yum Kapur does that that recall the 1973 War when the Arabs attacked uh the Jews on yum Kapur now it's because not a holy day in Islam we can go kill Jews and if you've seen that new movie out Golda it's about 50 years ago to the day from the October uh attack was uh the attack of yam Kapur so sometimes halakic stuff can have to do not just with what Paul calls touch taste not handle not you know like oo ritual defilement I can't go to the temple it can also have to do with what allows the presence of God to come in so we think there a celibate community in cuman itself why because sexual intercourse can keep the presence of God away and the best way to keep the presence of the best way not to be defiled sexually is just don't have women in that Community but the group does allow marriage and having children and people who do get married so it's more like a kind of spiritual headquarters like a monastery you would go to you know a Buddhist Monastery and you could even be married but you're in the monastery for special devotion and uh spiritual discipline and so forth the problem with 4q mmt which is this hit docu that we have and there are others too that's not the only one is we're not sure who wrote it and to who is it actually addressing it's it's kind of a question because it both have been argued some have argued that it's it's a group writing to the scroll group telling them here's what we think most of us think it's the scroll group writing to the Jerusalem people and saying here's what you need to clean up in your own religious practices halakic by the way means The Way You observe the Torah in in very strict in a in a very strict way down to what regulations so let's say if you spit in the assembly uh you know like you're you got a cough and spit or let's say your robe comes open and your genitals are exposed in the assembly uh what what happens that's addressed in the Scrolls I really don't think the Pharisees would particularly probably even address something like that so uh it's a good question though the balance between Jewish observance just like today with Orthodox observant Jews and Jewish ideas that they hold and how those two go together there's such a thing as being orthoprax which means you follow the rules of your group but then your ideas could could range from reincarnation to no reincarnation to eschatology to this idea to that idea I think this group is pretty monolithic I get the idea that they run a tight ship they think that their teacher has all true Revelation he's the new Moses basically so thank you Mr brain a thank you for the super chat if K4 was a ganesa and the community were working from old Scrolls wouldn't that put them in the time of Jesus well whether it was a ganza or not is a question uh the way they've been found all on the floor of the cave it's been extensively discussed U might indicate that because in a ganesa a ganesa is where you put old worn out Scrolls but all of the K4 material doesn't look old and worn out it's been deteriorated by weather by moisture and most of all by varmints that have gotten in there and like chewed the stuff because leather is edible you know uh it is an organic substance and these are on leather primarily not parchment or papyri a parchment is like a cured leather that I guess a self-respecting mouse might not want to eat but leather we've had at our house here a couple of leather coats ruined by mice uh in an attic once and uh it's because you know they they like the Leather So or maybe they like the dye in the leather I don't know but uh so I'm not sure it is a ganesa but it doesn't put them uh well let me put it this way as far as being written in the time of Jesus I don't think but as far as them existing on down into the time of Jesus uh yes uh this group was active as far as we know right up until the year 70 and we think they were they fled the community uh when the 10th Legion had destroyed Jerusalem in the summer of 70 and came down and burnt the Palace of Jericho herod's Palace at Jericho and then came on down and ended up at Mada so the if the theory is right that they hid their Scrolls at that time uh and then it wasn't a gona then they would have hidden Scrolls that date back even earlier there has been carbon dating of some of the Scrolls and most of it comes out to be first century BCE I think there's one or two texts that are from the first century CE I'm not much convinced by the ganesa theory uh because it looks like there might be have been shelves or something remember scrolls are very light they're just rolls and that that maybe they all collapsed and everything then is just Topsy Turvy but you know I wish we had better records of the you know if we had photos what did K4 look like on the day that the uh Scholars first looked at it and before they removed anything and I believe westerners did discover K4 rather than the better one but you never know what the better one because sometimes they'll discover a cave and take some things out and then later the they these were Jordanian schols and some uh Catholic Scholars from Jerusalem who were coming down to find more Scrolls father devau and so forth uh but that's the kind of question we can discuss in the course we can talk I have articles on that whether where the Scrolls of ganesa we have whole articles on that thank you thank you JC has another few interesting questions um is donkey riding in the Bible an act of performative humility alongside the ancient near Eastern custom of deities Kings and their chariots as the burden of asses yeah that comes up a lot when there's a prophecy in Zechariah 9:9 I think about Lo your king comes to you humble and triumphant and he's riding on an ass and there is that text I believe it's Solomon who's anointed as king at the foot of the kid drawn by the guihan spring and I believe he's pictured his writing on a donkey I don't know if it's exactly humility not coming in riding a war horse like say Revelation chapter 19 the White Horse with somebody riding it I think it's in your trailer right of somebody riding a white horse yeah I'm not sure who that person is but I I I would never know I could never figure out who that person he has a white beard and white hair but I you know when we go to do the outro we'll play that for people play that people can decide who that is and be sure and look for Robin somewhere on one of those horses exactly exactly I do know that what I do find interesting about the whole riding on ases is dianis does the same thing so there's yeah there's an interesting something to do with asses JC also asks another question I think the sense of Salvation in the name of Yeshua is derived from the assu of assu puru healing Branch the root of Joshua is the assu of saffron yeah I don't know I mean my sense of Hebrew and Greek's my best language I majored in Greek my Hebrew is pretty good but um if you're going to take that kind of atmology or that kind of derivation of names you would have to it seems to me you'd have to leave behind what the words come to mean uh from at least fifth six 7th Century BC in the text that we have because clearly you've got the yod v as part of these names many of these names and then you've got verbs like to say and it's not any holy word or anything if I almost dropped this book in a fire and I'm speaking Hebrew anciently even and I and I grab it out and then Derek says to me in Hebrew oh my God you saved the book he would use the same word saved as you need to get your soul saved like a Christian Evangelical preacher might mean it so it just I'm not familiar with the kind of thing that JC is trying to do there in terms of the language um but most Hebrew names are pretty some of them aren't but most of them are pretty self-evident and they're made up of a couple of roots and Hebrews sometimes one or two put together and that's just what they mean so thank you okay Shameless plug here this Sunday we are doing a zoom call hope to see you there um obviously we'll be discussing what you learn in the dead SE Scrolls so you can sign up for the course now there's 10 lectures there's also bonus footage lots of information uh packets to read from you'll really walk away having a better grasp of the Dead Sea Scrolls and how to understand those from Dr tabore you can also go and sign up for his blog so you go over here and say I'm not a robot unless you are a robot if you're a robot you know don't click I'm not a robot but if you aren't a robot click I'm not a robot put your email in there and go ahead and subscribe over there he's always dropping some interesting stuff uh recently his uh the second largest interview on BART erman's uh podcast is the one with Dr Tabor so I usually I usually don't like to brag but I had to brag on that one so you had to brag on that one you also got the YouTube channel so people can go subscribe you're almost at 50,000 yeah like to hit it today pump those numbers up let's get those numbers up get it k um what was I when I met you I think I was 3,000 wasn't I something like that three or 4000 yeah it was really small really small and you've come so I thought that was big though back then thought 3,000 people want to hear me wow let me um yeah I have one video that has like 800,000 views and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be but did somebody just sit there all day as said I know I've paid my relatives to do it for hours but 800,000 that seems like a lot that was I'm starting a poll just giving people a few minutes just to be able to I'd like to know anyone in the chat who signed up for the Dead Sea scroll course so if you have if you haven't no judgment let us know where you're at on that if you've signed up for it and um I'm looking forward to it James because my hopes are people enjoy learning these things from you and then you're motivated in saying okay there's lots of students people really do want this I'll I'll make more courses we'll do more deep dives into several different Avenues of material that's my hope so we did get a super chat you want to hit that and then we can come back and see what the votes are at yeah okay here we go Atif benesh forgive me if I butchered your name I am a thief who came at night and stole his mother's heart that day storm tip came from the East it was October 12th 1979 who am I his kingdom is in the clouds soon to be revealed I don't know help me out I don't know anyone know the answer to this I mean it sounds very jesusyoutube that is a date a big date for uh I'm trying to think 79 someone said Jim Jones um I think Jim Jones was 79 maybe not sure Rion says that is a riddle I cannot solve help us out is Atif going to tell us or yeah tell us the answer have to pay him someone tell us the answer here all right um make sure you voted I'm giving you five seconds five four three you know there's a delay by the way two one did you vote how many people you got out there Derek I'm about to end the poll I just wanted people to be able to get their vote in to before because there's a small delay um all right let's go ahead and do it now so I hope everybody voted I see the the toll changing each second so all right here we go here we go in Poole sorry you didn't make it in the Kingdom now you're gonna be out the on the outside banging on the gate doors all right it says have you signed up for the for Jesus and the Dead Sea scroll course 62% said no um and 37% said yes uh there's only 27 votes so it wasn't a lot not voted so we'll see you Sunday it's noon Eastern um we had to pick a time it's never perfect for people uh you you could cynically say yeah what did you try to hit the church time this is when Christians go to lunch after Services right cafeterias or something but it really has to do with trying to pick a time that can fit people worldwide to some degree and Sunday is more likely a day off than Saturday for people so that was kind of how we chose that and it's worked pretty well how did James his Jewish movement disappeared and what happened to the je Jewish followers of Jesus oh yeah that's a great one well we can traced them for quite a while um they they they were across the Jordan on the east side for a while uh some church fathers that hate them uh track them for us jome particularly epiphanous uh fourth and fifth century fathers so they're considered Heretics they call them ebionites we think that they some of them end up in Arabia and had a tremendous influence on Islam um it makes Muslims very upset to mention this because if they're very fundamentalists they would say that the Quran and Muhammad have no historical influences whatsoever because the angel Gabriel doesn't go by what some ebionites believed right but we can find elements of uh ianite ideas within Islam particularly the idea of uh praying toward Jerusalem and the Sabbath being a holy day and we do know there were Jewish communities but they also some elements of Islam some of the tales and stories and the different kinds of traditions hadiths that have to do that seem to parallel the eeve nights if you know Robert eaman who's done so much on James uh his expertise is actually not early Christianity it's Islam his PhD is in Islamic Studies near Eastern studies and he's done a lot on that I think his dissertation might have even been on that and then he became a dead sea school scholar and worked on New Testament materials but isan's well known probably to your your audience but I think they mainly disappeared by a redefining of what it is to be part of Israel and We Know It starts with Paul uh from what we can tell James would say that to be part of Israel you uh undergo either birth or or some sort of a conversion and join the Jewish people or the Israelite people if you want to be broader uh whereas Paul would say no faith in Christ makes you of the Seed of Abraham and the country Abraham promised is a Heavenly country and so you can see what's happening here and then Augustine comes along and puts a cherry on the top of that cake by saying well actually the church is the kingdom then and the church is the new Israel and uh Isaiah is being fulfilled in the church right and you begin to allegorize everything and it's not that far from your prism Derek it's a more Catholic form of it but it essentially takes all of those elements that most people would read as referring to the nation of Israel and their history and reads that as applying quote quot spiritually it's a odd word to use because I'm not sure what that means you know I'm going to apply that spiritually first of all I object to the term because it implies uh superiority like you have a Earthly interpretation or a literal interpretation you know it's pejorative but I have a spiritual interpretation sounds like mine's higher or better right when actually creating a world of peace and justice would be pretty spiritual I think wouldn't mind having it right now where the wolf was with the lamb and The Lion and the bear were together and nobody harmed each other and the nations were not at war that could be right here on Earth and it would be pretty spiritual if it could ever happen it does seem to be the goal of of uh good people around the world it's what they say constantly you know why can't we have a world of peace and justice so uh anyway James I love you thank you so much for your time the hard work you're putting in I hope people will go sign up and join us for the upcoming Zoom this weekend um I'm trying to think of this October 1279 what happened in 79 there is some stuff that happened of course oh no no no you talking about the they were they were talking about like uh going back up up saying something about I am the servant um you will hear it appearing from New York City a sun will rise it will shine and you shall see just but who is saying this the the person who super chatted Atif does he think he's it or he wants us I don't know yeah it sounds like it oh I I have a file Derek or maybe I should teach a course on this Messiahs I have known I have a file on messiah's like people that have written me mhm I get five six page handwritten letters and uh they tell me everything I'm I'm Jesus I'm this I'm that right and as Jonathan Smith once said paraphrasing I think gersam sholam or somebody he said you know the study of magic is nonsense but the study of magic is scholarship so lots of these you get it so lots of lots of these crazy ideas I think are pretty crazy people in various mental places claim to be these different figures and so forth but there's actually a way to study those kinds of things to try to understand what are some of the psychological states of mind that lead to that and it actually can be quite enlightening not making fun of the people I'm not really really going to do a course on it but I've got a thick file I call my Messiah file I've got it over here in a box it's probably over 200 letters I've collected over the years from what we would call crazy people and that's not necessarily insulting remember Jesus the relatives go he's crazy get that guy out right right right it's just like somebody that thinks they're the person you know I my my list of engagements with people who have written are going to be they're going to pel in comparison to yours over the years but we kind of talked about this once offline but so you have quite a few oh yeah oh yeah lot I get look I very openly say I come at this kind of uh you know coming at it with a naturalist angle of understanding these religions I don't think there's any magic I think they're man-made I think that humans have conv you know made them and and adapted them and molded them and I think that a lot of this is in the mind that doesn't matter people see my heart they see that I'm a human who cares I get these emails about how I'm chosen um you know like like you're you're you'll see you know like there's just all these things and that there's some messenger and you know there's always something there and um I get this all the time from people and then sometimes I get these like like death threat type like I'm coming to crush you you enemy Serpent's head devil worshiper yeah I had a lot of those during Waco in fact one of them I had to turn into uh the FBI because it was a a package that was ticking and I had to go pick it up at the camp post office and they said Dr tab this is ticking do you want us to call the authorities and I said absolutely and somebody had made me a clock you know carved it out of wood and had you know the backup really nice I yeah I think I put it in my office for a while but they left it running so that when it arrived it's like and they didn't mean any they didn't mean anything by it now I had my favorite is uh I think this is harmless but I did turn it into the FBI at the time because I was getting a lot that was from helping work with David Kish on the wo stuff which I did you know trying to get him to surrender and so forth yeah and some people loved it helped you know some people love David Kish for his sort of militant anti-government stance right but other people of course say well you're a cult apologist you know you're trying to defend some crazy person like that and this one was um let's see something like uh you're definitely headed for the fires of hell and it's going to be hot and it's going to be forever and ever and I will do all I can to make sure your trip comes soon yeah that one I took is like I'm willing to face you know whatever judgment there might be but I'd rather not be hurried along before my time if you know what I mean so that one scared me a little bit I you ever if you ever want to laugh there's a video on YouTube to to Richard Dawkins as we all oh yeah it's called Love Letters From Christians yeah I've seen that that is I laugh so hard like they are so hateful it's it's like you gist like they call him a gist like all this they're trying to be derogatory I can't wait to see you cook in God's broth from my watchtower in heaven and it's like what is wrong oh anyway and yet so many people have been spiritually inspired and strengthened think of Albert schwitzer and people like that uh right right right by by uh studying religion so Absolut we had a couple more here people uh last minute fer Bo says why aren't more efforts made to hunt for the Copper Scroll Treasures seems important oh wow that's a good one yeah um there's some new material on that actually Shimon Gibson has a new article out that's just coming out I'll cover it in it's not covered in the course because I just got the article recently he wouldn't let me put it in the course but that's the archaeologist I work with in Israel and uh he he has a different interpretation I'm not going to go over it now but uh a lot of efforts have been made so far nothing has turned up I do take it as a serious treasure list and I think a couple of the Loc s I'm pretty sure uh we can pinpoint but the main one which is the Cave of the column it's called Uh that's up near Jericho that I think we can locate but unfortunately it's collapsed and the cave that it talks about with two entrances um it actually is so covered with rubble and it's remember it's in the occupied territory so you'd have to get unbelievable permission to do this and I don't know if the Israelis or the jordanians or the Palestinians are into some one going out with bulldozers and looking for buried treasure it's just it's just not going to happen right but um uh I I take it seriously it's a very very mysterious document and I think one of the what we could do in one of the zoom meetings in the future want people to get the main Scrolls under their belt so to speak first so we just don't go for the Exotic you know and then maybe we'll do a whole uh session because I can email students anytime and say hey we're going to meet next Zoom meeting we're going to talk about the Copper Scroll here are three articles Joan Taylor shiman Gibson whatever uh let's talk about it you know uh and I do I do that in my um patreon group my patreon group is kind of like a a Taber Club you might say right in the sense that it's it's not so much to raise money because you get the same thing even if you give a minimum amount uh but it's more to it's sort of like Bart charging to read his blog he's just trying to keep people away that are just surfing around like I'll trash this guy and I'll go here and trash this guy and that there's a lot of that so my patreon is more a segregating way of getting people together that really want to talk about this stuff with me and I meet with them also once a month and that group um we often take topics like that you know just take a topic do some readings and then talk about it we're we're right now we're doing DNA the new DNA studies that we've inaugurated of the bones in the different Jewish uar so pretty exciting stuff thank you it's gonna get delayed for a while but JC says love for Dr tabore thank you JC Atif said don't be scared you are my brothers I created a kingdom system in an app that's what's releasing in New York City oh okay so that feels a little bit less threatening uh thank you so he's a gamer maybe uh seems more like just created an app I don't know exactly what that all entails but I imagine an app on your phone kind of thing yeah and then gray says would you be okay with going to hell um yeah well I would say let's talk about the word hell and the word gayen the valley of henm and what it meant especially in the Roman period and it actually wouldn't be too bad because it's kind of where we all go anyway you don't torture garbage and bodies have to be either uh cremated or buried because they'll and in the older text that is hell did you know that uh when the King James was translated and the Apostles Creed during the Elizabethan period remember where it says Jesus descended into hell and on the third day rose right everybody like oh my God he went to hell and that's because the word hell in English was h like that which is our word whole and you have other texts of the period where somebody said I put my potatoes in h like they put them in the hole for the winter and it actually me meant the grave Bart irman has a book on this right talking about heaven and hell so the original meaning of hell even in English was a hole a grave shio is a grave basically and uh so I guess I am going to that hell because I I think humans die there two things I think about humans Derek and I'm going to apply this to you you were born of a mother and a father egg and an Noam or not an sperm and I said an egg and an Noom you'd be kind of weird I would look let me start over you were born of a mother and a father a sperm and an Noam and you're going to die someday mhm and I don't think those two affirmations take away anything from anybody including Jesus of Nazareth in fact I think those affirmations make us real so right I mean you do know you're gonna have an apotheosis right like that's that's for sure yeah well I have studied it enough I I wrote a book on Paul's descent to Paradise so yeah I've got it somewhere all my cha here uh they'll find it don't worry yeah go go to Amazon um constellation uh last one please everybody I gotta let James go because he's definitely got a day ahead of him I've got some work to go do too I'm cre I gotta go follow the news I'm in touch with so many friends in Israel and there's so much going on right now and question for another day was violence used between competing Christian groups after the death of Jesus murder tactics and confiscating plus destroying their literature well after the death of Jesus when you get I I certainly don't think there was any record of violence in the first few decades but when you get into the second and third Century the rhetoric becomes so violent that you have to wonder and then we do finally have Tales of uh competing Christian groups that are so damning each other to hell that you get that kind of idea that I mention where like you're going to hell and I'm going to speed it up a little bit right you know one of the if you think about it probably the craziest thing about Christianity that could have ever developed is after Constantine particularly that you could have a Christian Army think about that think about it it's it's just astounding a Christian Army that would go kill in the name of Christ and literally Slaughter masses of people men women and children you know the Muslims uh saladine was welcomed by the Jews why because the crusaders had killed all the Jews and all the Muslims so we think of Islam as oh it's a very militant religion which it can be of course but you should uh talk to Shaman Gibson he's an expert on the Crusades our site we're digging in Jerusalem we've uncovered really important Crusader ruins and what The Siege of Jerusalem was like during the Crusader period and uh the way Shimon puts it my my he's really my colleague my teacher on this stuff because he's an expert uh you can Google him Shimon Gibson he's amazing probably one of the best archaeologists in Israel and he says um he says nobody was spared like the local population in Jerusalem and the Crusades took over you kill them all uh because basically Muslims and Jews are unbelievers so it was a kind of a reverse thing but Jews had a hard time under certain periods of Muslim rule there's no doubt about it but generally they were allowed a minimum of Rights whereas Crusader Jerusalem they're they're Christ Killers so why convert or Die Why would you let a Christ killer live and why aren't they converting so yeah I remember I think it was a scholar named Shelly I can't remember her last name she wrote a she wrote like a deep commentary on acts and she actually pointed out fourth fifth century I can't remember the historical situation exactly but a group of Christians this is post you know they've become militant go and actually massacred a Jewish uh Community because they read axe axe is so clearly bent on every time a Christian is Accused it turns out to be a Jew's fault like a a non Christian Jew and so it's so bent on well Paul was actually innocent guess whose fault it was these lying Jews who keep instigating to try and like get them killed turns out it's them and so that that that propaganda in Acts is so powerful yeah they're very good books on Christian anti-Semitism that have been developed and you can find them easily they're they're pretty hard to read they're pretty hard to read but isn't it ironic that uh a religion that started with what we call Sermon on the Mount stuff you know love your enemies uh do good to those that persecute you would turn out to have armies that like chop heads off people or the Inquisition if anybody I mean we're just wandering here we got to go but yeah if anybody uh has read or seen the film The disputation which is a debate in Spain I believe it's in the 1400s between Pablo Christiana and the rabbi and the rabbi was forced to debate um the truth of Judaism over against Christianity and it was made by the BBC you can still find it like bootleg editions I think it's even on Amazon it's not real high quality because people keep copying it and but they showed it on the BBC and it caused such a stir they took it down because the the rabbi wins the debate basically for sure and Pablo Christian is the Christian and he used to be a Jew and converts to Christianity and anyone who watches these are transcripts of the actual trial called the disputation and when you watch it you just go like who wow the the Jewish guy won he like refutes everything that the Christian priests said so that's kind of tough check that out and then JC says eat some some raw saffron it will help oh wow the saffron coming out again there you go James any final words from you before we see this guy on well I hope to see people in the course and in subsequent courses and I want to commend you Derek uh flattery will get me everywhere maybe but or nowhere but I think you have created uh with your wife whom I know well and really appreciate for her amazing work yeah you've cre created and your family that supports you you've created a community on YouTube that is like no other and uh you're only starting really you're only starting I don't even know where you're going to go but you really have because I don't know anybody else that is brought together for the common person uh all of these amazing professors and researchers that usually usually would only be heard by people in their classrooms and you've had some of them on countless times so they become familiar and gotten them to offer courses and so forth so I guess what I'm saying is you're you're kind of the BART Airman of the uh people there's Bart as a scholar has represented at least a certain mainstream scholarship probably to a wider audience than anybody of Our Generation ation but I think you have done that with in your own way from the other side meaning you're in the audience listening right and you've said well I have a lot of people with me can we come in together and I think it's phenomenal I hope people will keep supporting you to do that's an amazing compliment I every possible thing well and you're always so fair with people you're so fair with people Thanks James I really do appreciate you and the courses that we've done I'm hoping more people sign up more people will continue to get your books and I always I want to push another course of Robin uh Faith Walsh's course you know Robin comes across sometimes as maybe even Shyer on assuming you know like she's a younger scholar and she said me once God you've written 10 books I've barely written one and you know you know so much and I think God you know as much as I do on a lot of things but uh she has a course I believe I'm not just trying to promote her course Ryan's getting her second course ready which is on the gospels yeah oh good yeah but Scholars like this too that like you've had the crossings and you had the Dale Allison and the Paula frickson Elaine Pagel should I go on you know people people that ever you've had Bart you've had just about but you also have had younger Scholars that otherwise would probably not even be heard and yet this new generation of Scholars um they're standing on on Miller is another one that you promoted a lot that don't get the attention that they need to get and yet the work that they're doing is just astounding and I don't know anywhere but where people can like you can't go to Florida and sit in Robin's classroom you can take a course from her James me and Ry amazing in her you're I love that I lived near you because you actually inspired MVP courses to even birth itself into something I was like how can we you were the first guy that I was like I had already started this weird thing that nobody was doing and that was get on a plane bring your backpack equipment for why do these people sit in their living room and look weird hey to their kids and go I'm going to spend eight hours harassing I love you sitting the couch with crosson to me cross and the wisdom and that and the goodness of his spirit and everything and the ethics and you got him talking about his story once and it's so funny because you're literally sitting on a couch his feet and you're here and he's here and it's so weird it's just amazing like fireside chat with dom cron wow well he was so cool we went and got you know coffee hung out he's a funny guy like but all of that evolved into hey James can I come to your office by the way for those who've never been to James's office it is like it's like a little Museum in a way and so I get into your office we're sitting there there's actuaries there's ancient this is not this is just the room at home I use uh cuz I don't want to drive to the office all the time but yeah it's a pretty cool office it was really cool you started that and I saw it and I went you know what um let's do this more and so then I flew to see Robin and then I flew to go see um uh dely Allison Jr up there at Princeton then I flew and I flew and it flew and now we're even flying scholars in Dennis McDonald and also Dennis uh Dennis uh Dennis and I go back a long way and we've had we had a couple of really good Encounters in Europe once at a conference where he my late son David who passed away four years ago was there with us and I have a picture of Dennis and David and I and my other son Nathan sitting around in Vienna Austria and my boys just loved him so much you know like oh it's one of dad's friends it'll probably be boring and so I got to know Dennis personally and then over the years I've studied his material I've got his big magnumopus over there on on the table which I haven't read yet completely my problem is just you know I'm 77 years old and I feel like I'm 30 and yes you do I really do and uh I'm very you out running me and Ryan when you were here I was like I can't keep up with you but anyway I just there's so many things I want to do still that I hope to do but have to really prioritize yeah like there are 20 books right now that I would die to read but I have to decide which to go first you know like what because I also have a certain track that I'm on in terms of like I have tons of Dead Sea scroll stuff that I want to read right I'm like here with the Dead Sea Scrolls but there's all this new material coming out so I can't just read all day so James this has been a wonderful little just having fun expressing ourselves okay I hope we didn't bore people and you know I hope nobody thinks God those two just sit and flatter each other for half an hour that's not very helpful but it's it's history though James What's happen it's gonna be on YouTube and I mean every word of it and I know you do too yeah and I got to meet your family too and so but Ryan I just want to brag on Ryan Ryan to me is almost like a tech genius I didn't know this side of her like she was working on Bart's courses a little bit helping him with some and I think like how would you know how to do that and she goes oh I just like click around and figure it out and this and that so I know Dereck always says the queen of myth Vision but believe me she's probably up I know right where you are now because I've said it that day yeah she's probably up the stairs there uh pecking away at that D she works at and doing just amazing things she's my look at look at this course look at this course the beautiful design The Heading yeah let me pull that up she she did all of that well actually I don't have the course open let me yeah she did all of that so we give her and you know the other thing sometimes people who aren't as Tex Savvy this is amazing to me with I'm going to brag on her they're not very techsavvy and they write things like um well I can't find I got the link to the course but and I tried it and it doesn't work or something like that yeah and then now don't show the zoom link somebody might copy it so okay I gotta Zoom okay there you go might not be there yet I'm just I'm just kidding but anyway uh and and somebody like well I made a password but it doesn't work now and you know people get mixed up on things like this right did you know that she you probably know that she will write like an individual student personally an email and say to them okay what did you do tell me exactly you know and help them get back on the course because people uh what kind of a personal service is that and I know she's very busy but I'm going tell you just to be very Frank there's no words that Express this I mean I'm saying them but they don't do justice I could not do what I do I would not have myth Vision we would not have our second Channel we wouldn't have courses if it weren't for her um yeah we do the edits like you said everything that Bart puts out from his YouTube to his courses to everything we edit those we we do all that for him as well as our own materials we are trying to grow that and if it weren't for her honestly I might could sit in front of this camera and talk about a book I read and that's about as much out of myth Vision you'd get if it weren't for her our children we have three boys I just wouldn't know what to do yeah well you guys are exercising trying to eat right stay healthy so this is all good okay everybody take care all right we'll see you thank you so much never forget we are myth vision [Music] [Music] e [Music] the