#2252 - Wesley Huff
en
January 07, 2025
TLDR: Wesley Huff is a Christian apologist and Central Canada Director for Apologetics Canada.

In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, host Joe Rogan sits down with Wesley Huff, a Christian apologist and the Central Canada Director for Apologetics Canada. Wesley discusses his expertise in biblical texts, his background, and the fascinating debates surrounding early Christianity and theological discourse.
Introduction to Wesley Huff
- Wesley Huff is a Christian apologist known for his extensive knowledge of the Bible and ancient texts.
- He gained recognition through his debate with Billy Carson, which highlighted discrepancies in understanding biblical texts and ancient history.
The Debate with Billy Carson
- Wesley recounts how he was asked to debated Billy Carson just 24 hours prior, indicating his preparedness through prior knowledge of Carson's work.
- The fallout from the debate included Carson issuing cease-and-desist letters after feeling embarrassed by the discussion.
- Wesley humorously notes the irony of trying to legally enforce silence when one is a public figure.
- The debate underscored the need for deep understanding of ancient documents and languages when discussing religious texts.
Background and Storytelling
- Wesley shares his personal journey, including his upbringing in a missionary family and how his health challenges led him to question and explore his faith.
- He suffered from a neurological condition that left him paralyzed but experienced a miraculous recovery that deepened his belief in divine intervention.
The Nature of Christianity and Evidence
- The conversation shifts to the historical existence of Jesus and the evidence surrounding his life and resurrection.
- Wesley argues that the Gospels, written in the timeframe of the eyewitnesses, provide strong evidence of Jesus’s actions and teachings.
- He discusses the methodological approaches in biblical scholarship that assess the reliability of the Gospels, including the study of names in ancient texts.
The Canon of Scripture
- Wesley explains the criteria for determining which texts were included in the New Testament canon, emphasizing the importance of apostolic authorship and historical context.
- He mentions that early Christians were keen to preserve the teachings linked to the events they experienced, reflecting on how texts relate back to eyewitness accounts.
Challenges and Controversies in Biblical Interpretation
- The episode discusses various books excluded from the canon, with Wesley noting that many were tied to agendas not representative of the early Christian community.
- Wesley expresses the need for understanding the original context and intent of biblical texts to grasp their meaning and significance fully.
The Future of Historical and Theological Discourse
- Rogan and Wesley conclude by discussing the evolution of understanding in both science and faith, highlighting the importance of inquiry and curiosity in these domains.
- They ponder on how modern advancements, such as AI, could further impact theological discussions.
Final Thoughts
- Wesley Huff's insights advocate for a deeper exploration of faith, the historical roots of Christianity, and the challenges in understanding ancient texts.
- The conversation serves as a reminder of the richness of theological inquiry and the need for robust engagement with ideas surrounding morality, purpose, and the nature of belief.
Overall, this episode offers a thoughtful examination of belief and the intricacies of biblical interpretation while showcasing the personal journey of Wesley Huff as he navigates the complexities of faith. Key takeaways include the importance of understanding historical context, the challenge of interpreting ancient texts, and the ongoing search for truth in faith and scholarship.
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The Joe Rogan experience
West, very nice to meet you. Joe, pleasure. So I, like many people, was introduced to you because of the debate that you had with Bill Carter. Quoting quote. You know, it's one of those things where it's very unfortunate when people get caught with their pants down. And I'm not an expert in many things. But the things that I am an expert on, you could wake me up at four o'clock in the morning and ask me about those things. And I go, oh, yeah, no. Yeah, this is what it is. Yeah. I know.
you know, like martial arts or comedy. I could tell you, I could give you an expert version of reality. It seems like he does not have that and he is a wonderful talker and it's a lot of fun. I like watching his videos. I love all that ancient history stuff and even the most
Ridiculous tinfoil hat aspects of ancient. It's fun. It's entertainment, but I know that there's a different like Andrew Schultz and I had a discussion about this like he said when he had Billy on the podcast he said we're not gonna fucking research anything. We're not gonna search anything. We're not gonna do anything. We'll just let him talk because it's fun. Yeah, Andrew's awesome.
But when he was on with you, it was quite apparent that you are an actual expert in the Bible and in many religious texts and that he didn't necessarily have the facts straight. What was the fallout of all of that?
Well, it's interesting you say the expert thing, because I literally was asked to do it 24 hours beforehand. So I had the least amount of preparation going into it. And I was OK with that because I'd listen to Billy Carson. Well, and I listened to this stuff he'd said. So I knew enough about the ways that he'd articulated things about the ancient Near East and the Bible and Christianity to know enough that
he his level is uh... is pretty surface but the fallout was that not only did he not one of us release the the conversation but then he started thrown out cease and assist letters and then he started you know uh... trying to sue people so i mean i was never worried because i'm a canadian and
Anybody who's tried to sue internationally knows that good luck. Yeah. Right. Yeah. As far as I understand it, he would have had to file a claim in a Canadian court that would have been reviewed to have legal precedents that he'd have to prove that he could win. What was his argument? Apart from the fact that he was embarrassed that he lost.
Well, yeah, that's not really an argument. We've all been there. You're hung over thinking about all the dumb stuff you did last night and wondering if anybody remembers. Unfortunately, someone does remember everything you do online and they've got receipts. I'm talking about your internet provider and data brokers and every shady marketing company that gets their greedy hands on your private activity. But this year is going to be different.
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Well, the cease and desist letter. Yeah, the cease and desist letter said, I don't want you to use my name or my face.
in anything going forward and anything you've used up until this point you need to remove and I was given 24 hours notice to do this. But if you're a public figure, he's clearly a public figure, is that even, can you actually say no? No, no, no, you can't do it. So what was the, does he have a lawyer that wrote this he's a disaster? Yeah, no. So he actually, it's interesting because he, Mark Menard, who was the guy who hosted this interaction, he sent Mark a handwritten one.
And then he eventually gave Mark an official one from his lawyer. So I actually was sent one by his lawyer, which I, you know, screenshotted, posted publicly online and said, I'm going to ignore this. And then, but he'd sent Mark, who was the podcast host. As far as I'm aware, numerous cease and desists and Anton, who was the media manager, he'd sent a number of cease and desists.
It's unfortunate. When you get caught with your pants down, you're supposed to say, I got caught with my pants down. That's what you're supposed to do. Especially if you're a public. It's very clear that you're incorrect. Well, the irony of this situation is if he just kind of left it,
probably wouldn't have made anywhere close to the splash that it's made. And we told him that. We said like, hey, Barbara Streisand effect is going to happen. Like you're a big enough personality that if I make a video and say like, hey, I had this conversation, didn't go well for Billy, and Billy doesn't want it released, that's gonna start to gain traction sooner or later.
Yeah. The problem is to really delve into these subjects. It takes a tremendous amount of research, years and years and years of research. You really have to know what you're talking about. Most of us don't.
Well, especially with languages, like we didn't get into it. I hoped to have in our initial conversation kind of press him a little bit more on the moral vert things he'd said about like Greek and Hebrew and Sumerian, because I've studied a number of ancient languages. And when you study the languages, you realize the complexities.
of these things. And so when someone hasn't and they're making statements that are obviously indicative of someone who hasn't studied them, it's super apparent. And so I think it's one thing to be making claims about say like Christian history or the Bible. But when you start to get into like linguistics and philology, it gets messy. And if you don't know what you're talking about, it gets really apparent really fast.
So the gentleman who brought the two of you together, what was his goal? Like what was he trying to do? And how did he approach you? Yeah, so he's friends, or I should say was friends. He was friends with Billy. They live in the same neighborhood. So it's actually become really, it's become pretty rough for him. So he released a video yesterday, which I think people should go and check out where he kind of gives his perspective.
He's been friends with Billy for years. He was at Billy's wedding. Billy had 15 people at his wedding. Mark was one of them. And they live in this community in Florida. Their sons are friends. Their wives would hang out. And Mark...
told me he's like, I've been hearing Billy say, you know, he wants to debate, nobody will debate him for years. And so as far as I think Mark was concerned, he was giving Billy the opportunity that Billy had told a lot of people he wanted. And so he, you know, this was set up in that Mark and Billy have been talking, they've been on each other's podcast in the past, and they've been friends, more like business colleagues, like Mark has come out and said,
I hadn't really gone into the stuff he'd said about Christianity or ancient religions or whatever that much. Mark is a he's a Christian. He has like a public profession of faith and he him and Billy had talked about the fact that they wanted to talk about like faith stuff and some of their differences and that that Mark was kind of prepping for this and his media manager Anton
had sent him some of my stuff and said, Wes has done some stuff on some things that Billy has talked about. And maybe you should look up some of this stuff, read into it. And Mark, very last minute, was like, well, I feel inadequate.
Do you think I could just ask Wes? And so he DM me on Instagram and just kind of laid this out like, Hey, I'm going to have Billy in my studio in 24 hours. I can tell him you're coming and tell him who you are. I can like give him your background, but would you be willing to come? And so that's what I did. And so that's how it got set up.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but was Billy aware that this was going to be a debate or did he think it was going to be just a discussion? Like what did he think it was going to be? No, he'd been given all of the prerequisites. Like he knew we're going to go over some of his stuff that he'd said about Christianity, that I was going to come in who I was, what my name was, some of my background, and that part of the conversation was going to be me kind of
asking him some clarifying questions and rebutting some of the things that he said. So he, you didn't watch the three-hour live stream that they did, did you? I watched chunks of it. Okay. I watched a little bit, I'm like, oof, I'm gonna shut it off, then I watched a little bit more, oof. Yeah. So unfortunately, Billy there says he had no idea going in.
And I mean, as Mark said in his video that he released yesterday, I mean, that's penalty false. He knew what it was going to be, who was going to be involved and even some of the things that we would be talking about. Okay. And he also was claiming that it wasn't a debate that he had been involved in debates before and that he would prepare for debates, but this is something he didn't prepare. But again,
It's like, if you ask me about things that I know about, you can wake me up out of a full sleep and give me a couple seconds. I'll go, okay, this is what it is. If you know, you know. And it wasn't a debate in one sense. It wasn't. We didn't do opening statements and cross-examination and then rebuttal. It really was a conversation. And it only kind of turned into a debate in the sense that
Billy, I think, got caught out. And so the things that we're talked about kind of showed that, you know, that he needed to go on the offense. Yes. Yeah. Well, again, it's all very unfortunate, but the good part of it is I was introduced to you and your work. And there you go.
very, very extensive and very fascinating. And the videos that you sent me on Instagram, I watched both of those today as well. So really, really interesting stuff and your knowledge of the history of the biblical texts and Codex, Sinaiticus and all these different things, very, very fascinating stuff. So let's just get into your background. Like how did you get started in your research and how did you get into this?
Yeah, so I grew up in a Christian home. My parents were missionaries. So I was born in Pakistan and spent a portion of my childhood in the Middle East with my parents working in Amman, Jordan. And then we came back from the Middle East when I was pretty young. And so I grew up in this very diverse home in the sense that my mom was a missionary kid who grew up in India. And so we had a lot of world view kind of perspectives
uh... represented in our home like i often say we had the bug of a gita and the book of mormon and on the shelf oh wow yeah and i think you know that always although my parents were never overt with this kind of stuff uh... they always had the perspective that you know we're christians we believe that this worldly perspective is true but hey this stuff isn't scary this stuff isn't you know off-limits
You know, we can investigate these things and they never said that outright, but that I always felt this kind of attitude of that kind of perspective and, you know, having been exposed in majority Muslim contexts and seeing that kind of stuff and my mom having like a pretty.
good knowledge growing up in India of things like Hinduism and Sikhism and that. And I don't know how much of the kind of testimony stuff you watched of mine, but just before my 12th birthday, I actually was diagnosed with their neurological condition that left me paralyzed from the waist. Yeah, I did see all that.
Yeah, so that's a condition that's called acute transverse myelitis, which I often say is a word you can forget as soon as you hear it, because it's a complicated one. But what happened was that I had the flu and my body's immune system attacked the nerve endings of the base of my spinal cord and caused swelling and cut off the communication between my brain and my legs.
And instantaneously, right? Yeah, basically, I'd gone down for a nap. I was camping out in the bathroom floor for flu reasons. And when I woke up, about 30 minutes later, I couldn't feel my legs. And so, yeah, that's the acute part of the acute transverse, myelitis, was that it was basically instantaneous. And that's what made the diagnosis
as severe as it was. Like they said, there's a 30% chance. It was like a small percentage of probability that I would recover, but a much higher percentage that there would be a lot of either complete paralysis for the rest of my life or some kind of
issues with walking. It's related to like diseases like multiple sclerosis in that it's neurological and it affects that kind of thing. And one month from the day that I woke up and couldn't feel my legs, I woke up on a Saturday morning, got out of bed, walked over to my wheelchair and sat down. One month. One month. Yeah. January 8th to February 8th, exactly. Very fortunate. You're telling me? Yeah. Yeah. What treatment did they give you?
So initially they gave me steroids to reduce the swelling. So I spent 11 days in the hospital being overseen by pediatric
neurologists and specialists in this because it's a very rare condition. And so they were studying me and they gave me steroids and they did some other tests. But really, there was no true kind of treatment in that. So I was doing physiotherapy. I would be pulled out of gym class in school.
But there's a little bit of a joke. Can you move your legs? Could you move anything? No, nothing. Could you feel anything? No. In fact, when I was in the hospital, I'd wake up and there'd be pinpricks in my legs because they'd be testing where the reactions were.
and that have used a syringe. And so I'd wake up and there'd be this tiny little pinpricks in my legs because they'd been testing while I was asleep to see what the kind of, whether it was registering neurologically with anything. But I couldn't feel anything. I was fully a paraplegic. But going back to that, so I experienced this, what I consider to be a true supernatural experience in that I walked into the hospital
to the doctors that had overseen me, and they were the first ones that used the word miracle. They said, we really don't have any type of medical explanation. And mainly because there was no atrophy because of the cut off of the communication, my muscles in those 30 days were fine. And a short amount of time, but they said there should be something and we're picking them nothing.
That's crazy. Because I've broken limbs before and had them in casts. And just in the six weeks that you have a cast on, you have massive atrophy. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the kind of predication for them using the word miracle. And so that's kind of it marks this what I do consider to be like this supernatural something happened.
And but did you feel like that was like a calling that led you to a very specific mindset after that? It's an interesting way of putting it. I mean, as much as you could at 12 years old, right? But it must have had a significant impact on your psyche and your perceptions.
Yeah, well, it definitely led to things like later in life, I got very involved in athletics and in track and field. And part of that was feeling a conviction that I knew what it was like to not be able to wake up and walk out of the room. And so taking that pretty seriously and competing competitively well into university. Because even though, you know, I wasn't the most naturally talented individual on the team,
I felt like a motivation to be able to, okay, I don't want to waste this. And then later on, in terms of your original question, the difference in that was that
I realized, okay, there's something out there. Something happened that I can't totally explain on naturalistic terms. But how do we go from that to saying, okay, well, then this worldview is correct. And so despite being raised in a Christian home, I felt like
My parents telling me what was true is not the worst reason to believe it, but it's also not the best. And so as a teenager, I did a lot of kind of soul searching. And like I said, you know, I was able to do that to a certain level of degree because of the openness within my household, where I did, I pulled the Quran off the shelf and I read it, you know, front to back, just trying to figure out, okay, what's going on here? What's all this about?
And it was through that period of like searching, and it wasn't a crisis of faith. That would be an over exaggerated term. But it was kind of an inspiration of faith, perhaps. Maybe, yeah, digging through, okay, well, what do these guys believe? What is this perspective for? And that was about a period of about a year and a half. And at the end of that, I did truly feel that, okay, well, I think
in the ways that I, in my limited ability as a teenager.
to investigate these things. I think the Christianity is true, but it wasn't until I went to university where I was engaging with people of other faith perspectives in Toronto at York University where I was talking to Muslims and Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and atheists, you know, from the gamut. And I was having these conversations and I was expressing kind of my perspective on what I believed.
And they would say things like, well, that sounds great West, but, you know, that's all the Bible. You can't trust that. And so that's where I started to take the... The Mormon say that to you? Well, yes. That's kind of crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in the sense that... The Mormon was the craziest one, because we know who wrote it. Yeah. And he's a shady dude. He is a shady dude.
Well, no, they did in the sense that the Book of Mormon trumps the Bible. So they would believe, I think it's the 10th article of the Mormon Church is that they believe the Bible insofar as it is translated. And so they have this perspective that there's been things that have been affected. I mean, Joseph Smith made his own translation of the Bible and it's rough. And when he was 14.
Well, I think it was later on that he made the Joseph Smith translation. But I don't even know if the official LDS church ascribes to the Joseph Smith translation because I think they even see like, ugh, this is... We know what the Greek and the Hebrew looks like and this is not even. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, he was a legitimate con man, which is fascinating. People have such a deep search for meaning and truth that if you are confident, which is what a con man is, a confidence man, if you are really good at expressing yourself and really like you show confidence in your convictions, you can persuade a lot of people.
Yeah, confidence is not competency. Yeah. And unfortunately, those things get confused a lot. Well, it covers up for competency sometimes. Yeah. In religion and politics and like all sorts of things, right? And everything. Yeah, and everything. I mean, I think it's, I think because people want to, like it's very difficult to be an expert in a subject. And I think people want to believe that they are and they don't want to do the work. Right.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that's why, um, you know, experts themselves feel a lot of inadequacy is because they study a subject and realize like, I'm never going to get to the bottom of this hole. Right. So unfortunately, subjects are very, very nuanced and very deep. Yeah. Especially when you're talking about ancient religion. Yeah. I mean, you're, you're, you're talking about things that were a oral tradition for a long time before they're even written down.
It's a long, long, trudge to get to the bottom of things. Yeah, and part of the whole, what I was trying to get Billy in that conversation that I had with him to get to the bottom of partly was a question of methodology. I think he got frustrated at me at one point because I kept asking, what are the criteria that you're using
when you're looking at one source versus another source and coming up with a conclusion, because in historiography, it's the inference to the best explanation. And so there are different ways that you go about that, different methodologies.
And historians very rarely disagree on the data and evidence. It's the conclusions that you draw from that. But then there are some things that are just out and out false. And I don't think Billy totally knew what I was talking about, but it's those criteria that we look at when we look at something that does come from like an oral tradition and eventually gets written down and becomes a literary text.
And then you analyze that on the basis of it being a literary text. This is sort of the problem between with being self-taught rather than conventionally academically trained. Definitely. Where you're trained in very specific disciplines and you're taught to understand the foundation before you understand like how to put a window in.
Yeah, there's a lot of things that you have to know from the base from the beginning. Do you have a water line? Do you have power? There's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of things going on when you're trying to construct an expertise in something, especially something that is so complicated. And one of the things that I've gotten out of, I've probably watched probably 20 hours of your stuff over the last couple of weeks.
And you've spent a lot of time on this. This is not a casual cursory examination of these texts and of religion. This is a long, long journey. And that's what's particularly exceptional and really interesting to me. Because I'm always fascinated by people that have really gone down the road, like really, really, really gone down the road because you don't meet
a whole lot of them. You know, I know a lot of Christians that can quote you some, you know, some versions of the New Testament, you know, some Psalms, some, but the real, all the way to the back. Way, way, way, way, way. And that's what you've done that's very interesting. So this is like, how old are you? I'm 33.
Which is very young for someone who has the depth of knowledge that you have. So you've been doing this essentially from that miraculous moment. That ignited this spark even though you came from a missionary background and then from then on. So for the past 11 years.
12 years or 20 years, 30 years. Your whole life, essentially. It's all been this. To a certain degree, I went to university with full intention of going into the police force. I did my undergraduate studies and then I mapped out this plan that I was going to become a police detective, and that was my goal. And I think I realized... Why not?
Did you like getting to the bottom of things? It could be. Because you do, right? Well, someone who spends 21 years like getting to the bottom of a religion, you know, you'd probably be pretty good at cracking cases. I hope so. I think that might have been part of it. I also, there was an aspect of when I was in high school where they were like, you got to figure out what you're doing. You're going to be homeless and you're going to die. Yeah, I felt that most terrifying moment in life. Man, I always tell people when they're in high school, like, you can chill out.
Like it's going to be OK. I don't think so. You don't think so? I wonder if it's different now because I think you should have a certain amount of desperation because I think that it ignites a fire within you to do something. There's probably something to that. Yeah. Yeah. The people that I know that have been too pampered and taken care of and didn't have a fear of everything going completely sideways. They never really get the momentum that's necessary to accomplish things in life.
Yeah, there's probably something to that. I mean, desperation. Little desperation fear, I think is good for you. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody wants to be comfortable, I don't think.
I don't think that's necessarily a good path. I mean, I think you should have perspective and you should enjoy your life as a young person and have those. But you should also realize you got work to do. Well, stress is good, right? Stress creates perseverance and creates patterns that allow you to succeed. I mean, this is like athletics 101, right? I think that's very important. You got to push yourself. And I think actually part of that also led in like I'm a big believer in athletic discipline.
Needs to go hand in hand. I mean, I know you are too. Needs to go hand in hand with any other type of like, whether it's an intellectual endeavor or like, because it trains you to be able to go into places that are uncomfortable. And that uncomfortability allows you to then become stronger. You know, realize where your inadequacies are. And especially when you're with people who are better than you. I mean, when I was running at York University,
there were two guys on our team who uh... because i i i was okay individually but i ran for the uh... relay team as i was a sprinter and um... one of the guys was part of the uh... he he they meddled when canada meddled at worlds he was part of that relay team and then my other training partner busy who um... he ended up competing in tokyo for canada and when you're beside someone who is like
just a genetic freak, you're like, oh, okay. That's different. And it both pushes you, but it also reveals your limitations, where that doesn't inhibit you. That shouldn't discourage you to go up to that line of being able to push yourself. But at the exact same time, it creates a realism that like, I can train
as much as I want to, I'm not going to run like that, right? And so yeah, but going back to what you were asking, like, I think there was part of that in wanting to go into the police force, but then realizing like around my third year of university that my passions and motivations were very, very different and that I didn't know how to
go about that or where the proper place to do that was, but I knew that I needed to lean into that to some degree, particularly with the Bible, because I was claiming that this Bible talks about this guy, Jesus, and I'm a Christian. So I have a friend, Andy Banister, he's out in the UK, and he says, if you take Christ out of Christian, all you're left with is Ian.
Anion's a great guy who's not going to save you from your sins. And so, like, if I'm wrong about the Bible, those people who push back on me, right, those skeptics of various worldviews, if the things they were saying about the Bible were true, then it did actually legitimately undermine what I believed. And so I needed to take that seriously. I had an obligation to actually investigate those things as far as I could.
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For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see DKNG.co. What is the oldest version of the Bible or the stories in the Bible? Is it the Dead Sea Scrolls or are there older versions?
The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest of the Old Testament. So when they were discovered, I mean, so they were discovered 1946 to 1957. And at that point, during their discovery, they pushed back a lot of our previous oldest manuscripts, a thousand years, which was a big deal. How old are they?
They're anywhere between the third century BC and the first century BC, so it's kind of tricky because the Dead Sea Scrolls are, they're like a library that we refer to, so it's approximately 970 documents, but it's distributed out between 10,000 and 11,000 fragments.
So there's a lot going on there, right? So in some of these, I mean, are so fragmentary that you look at them and it's like confetti. Cause they're, I mean, 3000 years old, but not quite that. They're like 2000 plus years old animals.
Well, all sorts of things, animal skins, papayri, and then some of them are actually done on copper, like inscribed in copper. Oh, wow. Yeah, one of the coolest ones, actually, this relates because I know you're a Marco Allegro guy. The first time I was introduced to Marco Allegro was not his sacred mushroom in the cross stuff, but he published a book on what's called the copper scroll because part of the Dead Sea scroll fragments is this inscribed document on copper, which is an ancient treasure map.
Can you see it? A little online? Yeah, Jamie, pull up the, hey. There it is, wow. Yeah. So it's in Hebrew, and it is wild. So it has these sites where it says buried treasure is found. And there have been a number of guys who have tried to look for it. And so does it say what the treasure is? You know what? Off the top of my head, I don't know. But look how crazy that language is. I know, right?
And so, but the Dead Sea Scrolls, so it's like stuff like this, it's papayri, it's animal skins, and it's a number of different languages. So the vast majority of it is in Hebrew, but there's also a lot in Aramaic and then Greek and in Nabataean. So it's like a...
an umbrella term to describe a whole bunch of literature. So a lot of it is biblical, because it was written by this group out in the desert called the Essenes, who lived at Qumran. But then other stuff of it is just, it's just Jewish literature of various stripes that were hidden in caves all around the Dead Sea.
So the scrolls, as it were, aren't all biblical. Some of them is just accounting of the times. Yeah. Oh, Jamie, look at that. 65 tons of gold and 26 tons of silver. 65 tons. That's a lot. That's a lot. How many Cuban links can you make out of that? You can see why someone would try to track that down. Boy. Yeah.
Wow. And when we're talking about the Destiny Scrolls, you have ones like the Great Isaiah Scroll, which is fully complete. It's a copy of the book of Isaiah, and it's a full complete scroll. But then other ones are so fragmentary that we think they're written in Hebrew, but we can't actually tell. Oh, wow. Because no one's willing to piece these. And this is true for a lot of stuff. So the largest grouping of
papayri literature in the world is the ox rinkus collection, which we get a good portion of our oldest manuscripts of the New Testament from. But if you go to Oxford and you look at the ox or the ox rinkus collection and you pull out that drawer, it's like a jigsaw puzzle and you're like,
Right. Like most of it is untranslated, untranscribed, because the amount of man hours that it would just take to even put it together, never mind, then go to the effort of transcribing and translating it. Most people are not willing to do that. And if you're missing chunks, how do you even make that puzzle connect?
Well, that's part of, so part of my area of speciality and research is in regards to that, is so I study paratextual features. We're really gonna get nerdy today. Let's get nerdy. So you look at the features of the manuscripts, not necessarily the words, but things like the spaces between the words, the development of punctuation, indentation or outdentation, and I look at the margins.
And I try to, based on the average size of manuscripts in and around that time, and also the average spacing of words and the margins on top, bottom and the side, recreate what the manuscript could have possibly looked like.
Wow. Yeah. So when you say the book of Isaiah is intact, how similar is it to the book of Isaiah that's in the Bible? So that one is fascinating. So this isn't true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but when we discovered the Great Isaiah Scroll, previous to that, the earliest copy of Isaiah that we had was in the Masoretic text, which is in the Middle Ages.
Whoa. Yeah, so it was literally a thousand years. We literally pushed back our understanding of Isaiah a thousand years. And the thing that really shocked scholars, like I said, this isn't true for all the Dead Sea Scrolls, but one of the things that shocked them about Isaiah was that it was word for word identical to the Masoretic text. Word for word. Word for word.
Yeah. So this is the great Isaiah scroll. So if you go to Israel and you go that papyrus. Yes. No, I think that one is vellum. What is vellum? So I should be more specific. So parchment is animal skin. Vellum can be used synonymously with the term parchment. Technically parchment is
like baby animal skin, like calves or lambs. But this is the great Isaiah scroll and you can see like they stitch together the parchment because it's so long. God, it's so beautiful. The way they wrote back then was so beautiful. I mean, maybe it's because I can't read it. That's so fat. Maybe if I saw English, I would think that's beautiful too.
Yeah, especially script like cursive cursive is very beautiful, but that is so fascinating because the I mean obviously coming from a point of ignorance the letters look so similar like so many of this is the what I always got about cuneiform when I look at that I'm like
It's just one particular sort of character that's this way and that way and up and down. Oh, Canadian form is wild. Weird. It's really, really tricky. And that's the thing when, like, if you're studying ancient languages and you start to study Greek, like Greek, the Greek alphabet is similar enough that you're like, okay, alpha.
Looks like an A, right? Delta looks like a D. So you can figure it out. And so it tricks you because you start off and you're like, oh, this is phobias, fear. I know what phobia is. And you get this false sense of encouragement. And then the further you go down the rabbit hole, you're like, oh, I'm screwed. But Hebrew is completely the opposite because the writing system is so different.
The learning curve is hard at the beginning, and then you're like, everything is just three letters with a suffix added to it. And so it feels like whereas the opposite is true with Greek. Greek, you're like, I get this. And then when you really go down the rabbit hole, you're like, oh crap, none of the things that I learned about that are supposed to be standard, all of them have exceptions.
Wow. But, yeah, Kunea forms a wild one. Do you know Rick Strassman is? No. He's a scholar and he did a lot of work, early work, FDA approved work on psychedelics. And he spent 16 years teaching himself to read ancient Hebrew.
Nice. Yeah, so because he wanted to really understand the Bible from the original source of ancient Hebrew and to understand it in context. It was because ancient Hebrew, the way the words are structured, is so different than English and that something must be lost in translation. So he spent 16 years teaching himself how to read ancient Hebrews. That is so great. That is such dedication, 16 years. It's a long time. That seems too long.
Well, you're self-taught. I mean, he's doing it himself. Yeah. Self-teaching. Yeah. I self-taught myself Greek at first, and then when I started learning it formally, I realized how much you miss when you self-teach yourself. Oh, I'm sure. Well, how many people can teach you ancient Hebrew? How many courses are available? Oh, you can take it at any graduate college. Yeah. And is it... It's not something that we know what it sounded like, correct?
Yeah, I mean this is the big debate with ancient languages right like Same thing with yeah, arguably we don't know how any of this was pronounced right I mean modern Greek speakers get really mad at me when I say that because they're like of course We know how it's pronounced pronounced like we pronounce it right and and on all my videos where I'm like Tran site translating Greek manuscripts All like there's so many comments of modern Greek speakers getting mad at how I'm pronouncing things
But realistically, yeah, we don't really know how most of the things are pronounced with anything. But isn't that very bizarre when you're translate, like if you go back to, like say, the Epic of Gilgamesh.
We don't even know what the word sounded like. We kind of know what they represent and then we do a literal translation of what they represent. But if you've never heard, no one can speak ancient Sumerian. Sumerians are wild one because it's a language isolate. What does it mean? So Hebrew is an Afro-Semitic language.
So Hebrew is related to all of these other languages like Aramaic and Akkadian. But language isolates have no adjacent comparisons. So because I tried to teach myself Sumerian and I failed and I just gave up because I couldn't do it because I had nothing to really compare it to. So Sumerologists are very like
They're a field of their own because I learned a little bit of Acadian because I had studied Semitic languages and there's enough crossover between things like Hebrew and Aramaic and Acadian, but Sumerian, you have nothing to compare it to.
What did it eventually become? It just died. It just died. How do we know? I mean, the Sumerians lost to the Assyrians and the Assyrians got taken over by the Babylonians. I mean, it's just the course of history where things happen. But there are a number of ancient languages that are language isolates, like linear elamite.
We had no idea what linear Elamite even said until 2021. Well, I never even heard it until five seconds ago. I know, there you go. Jamie, if you pull up, if you look up, what's it called? There's a silver cup. It'll come up if you Google image linear Elamite, because you think Cuneiform looks wild. Linear Elamite is completely different than that too. And there's a silver cup, which we had no idea what it said, and then a bunch of researchers
ancient Near Eastern researchers developed what, so let's, in the corner there, that one on far left corner. Oh no, no, no, here, now it's moved, because he clicked it. That one, yeah, yeah, click that. So that's linear elamite. And so that's in and around the same time that languages like Sumerian. So there's this very interesting kind of, if we're talking about the story in the Bible, like the Tower Babble, where it says that God confused their languages,
And everybody started speaking different languages. You have these languages that just pop up and out of nowhere and have no relation to one another. So Acadian starts to adopt certain words in Sumerian, but they're still Sumerian. It's like pizza is Italian, right? Or like kayak is inuit. But when you're looking at
the words that carry over, it's not because there's a relationship between Acadian and Sumerian, it's because you have these cultures that live side by side, and eventually Acadian starts to adopt these things, but Sumerian is, so that's why
When I see people like Billy Carson talk about being able to read Sumerian, I'm like, dude, I read ancient languages and I've tried and I can't make heads or tails of Sumerian. So that's a tell. Unfortunately, it gives away. This isn't, I like Billy. He was a nice guy. I really enjoy talking to him. I really do. I think his videos are fun, but I also think truth is important. I have no problem with him as an individual.
He just needs to course correct. Yeah. Yeah. Course correct and recognize what you know and what you don't know and that you're not doing people a service, especially people like myself that aren't educated in this. Like we return to others who claim to have a vast knowledge of this to help me out. Tell me what's going on when I sit down and talk to you. Tell me what's going on. And if you don't really know,
You're fucking over a lot of people, unfortunately, for yourself. Yeah. How do you say it again? Linear. Linear. Linear. Elamite. Can you put that back up again, Jamie?
So this was, can you show me that image that you'd showed me before? Actually, see if you can find the cup. It's pretty dope right there. If you scroll, there should be a cup. I think it's called the dashed. Is that it? In the lower corner, is that the cup? No. No, if you guys, it's got, yeah, if you look up cup, yeah, that guy. So see that inscription at the top, beside the face? Yeah. So that's the one, so it goes around the top of the cup and they crack back. Look at that dude's honker.
That's not a big nose, isn't it? That's a hell of a nose. Yeah, he can smell that linear real might. And so when... So actually, interestingly enough, if you pull back, Jamie, that's my... So there's an infographic that I made that just popped up. So if you click that, that's the one I made. Why is it coming up like that? Someone else reposted it. Okay. So is it just bad resolution, is it what you're saying?
Oh, there it is. Oh, no, it is mine. Actually, here, I'll be self-serving. If you go to WesleyHuff.com, can we just look at that for a second? That is so cool. And how old is this? 20th century BC. Wow. Yeah. So 4,000 plus years ago. Yeah. So if you go, Jamie, to WesleyHuff.com, and then click my infographics tab at the top. So I started making these things for the graduate students I was teaching.
And yeah, so if you go down, there should be an archaeology section. And in the archaeology section, I have that one on, I'm blanking on what is called. I make ones for manuscripts too. What a great website you've got. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. This is awesome. It's so detailed.
Yeah, so there's a linear Elamite one. What a fucking phenomenal resources is. Right there. Oh, there it is. Yeah, Mark Dash, that's what it's called. So yeah, you see this. So I have Sumerian linear Elamite Acadian and Paleo-Heber there at the bottom, the comparisons. And these are languages that operated alongside one another, but are almost completely foreign to one another. So there is crossover between Acadian and Paleo-Hebero.
So that's interesting. Sumerian, when I'm thinking of cuneiform, I'm not thinking of that. That looks different than some of the clay scrolls, the imprintations that they make with a clay wheel.
Yeah, what's all done with the stylus. So it's like a little wedge stylus. So there are different variations of it. But ultimately, it's done with the stylus. The thing that's interesting, like you're probably thinking more of what that later Acadian looks like, right? Yeah, the wedges. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Acadian basically borrowed the writing system.
And it had development over time, but it was very close. When they conquered them, did they have their own writing system initially and just incorporated Sumerian writing to theirs? That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that one. But God, I'd like to know. I know, right? I mean, it's so long ago, but not, you know?
Yeah. I mean, it's so long ago in terms of a human life. Yeah. But it's not that long when you think, like, we went from 4,000 years ago to that to large language models. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. Yeah, quantum computing. Yeah. Well, even if you look at the, I mean, language systems develop, paleo Hebrew turns into what we saw in the Dead Sea Scrolls, whereas paleo Hebrew is a little bit different than what we eventually see in the Dead Sea Scrolls, because there's like a development within the language. And then modern Hebrew adopts
the Hebrew in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but modern Hebrew, it has vowels that were developed in the Middle Ages to
to figure out how to pronounce it. Because basically, ancient Hebrew doesn't have a vowel system in its writing that's overly comprehensive. And so in the Middle Ages, when you have these groups of Jews who are copying these Hebrew scriptures, who aren't speaking it as much as they're reading it, you got to figure out how to pronounce it because vowels make a difference. But if you took all the vowels out of English, if you're a natural
English reader, you could probably figure out what was what if you're looking at the page. And so in the Middle Ages, the Masoretic scribes come up with these vowel pointing systems. And that's what you see when you look at a Hebrew Bible today, as you see these vowels. And sometimes the introduction or removal of the vowel is significant in the changing of the words.
It's also interesting and we're kind of seeing language change, written language, while right now in this current era because of the, because we've kind of abandoned cursive. So if people in the future go to read ancient scripts of human beings that lived in the 20th century,
They'll be like, what is this shit? Yeah. And then, you know, if there wasn't a lot of it, like there's no cursive on the internet. I mean, there's cursive on the internet, but I mean, no websites are written in cursive or very few at least. It's all printed. Yeah. And so they've essentially in school stopped teaching. Most classes don't teach cursive. Like we all learned cursive as children. It was the way you could write things quicker. Yeah. And then once printing and typewriters and computers became ubiquitous, like it's gone. Yeah. And everybody's just texting.
Well, let's hope people in the future are still able to read the Declaration of Independence. Because that's what it was written in, right? That's really interesting, right? Because if you were not taught that and then you went to read that and you said, this is English, what are you talking about? I recognize a few of these letters, but it's so vastly different than the printed text.
Yeah. Language models are wild. Yeah. The whole thing is wild that people figured out how to associate sounds with little symbols, and then they did completely different shit in Korea, with completely different shit in Russia. Yeah. It's so fascinating.
And then you have to have these experts who can translate these things, and you're dependent upon them forever, which that was what Lutheranism was all about, right? Like Martin Luther wanted to have phonetic translations of the Bible, and there was a lot of resistance to that, because the people that knew how to read Latin were like, hey, hey, slow down. Yeah, partly. I mean, there were proto reformers before Luther. We were guys like Wycliffe.
So John Wickliffe and William Tyndale both translated the Bible, parts of the Bible into English, and they predated. I mean, they weren't very popular for it either. I mean, Wickliffe was declared a heretic and then his body was exhumed and burned because of the work that he did. But yeah. Burn them after he was already dead.
Yeah, well, Tyndale's line was that he wanted, I believe it was Tyndale. It was either Wycliffe or Tyndale, my friends who are specialists in this are going to get mad at me for this. But one of those two guys said that they wanted the plowboy to be able to read the Bible and know it as well as the priests.
And so that was their motivation is that they're like, you know, public education for literacy in these areas was largely because they just wanted people to read the Bible. But that was a big motivation behind Luther was he's like, I'm going to translate this thing into German. Because part of his kind of kicking off of the, what we call the Protestant Reformation was that he read the Bible in Greek.
because there was a guy named Desiderus Erasmus, who was a, they call him humanists, but it means something different than now. Humanists were like scholars who were trying to figure out the entirety of human knowledge up until that point, like Renaissance men kind of, right? So Desiderus Erasmus is like one of the last Renaissance men, but he was compiling, and he produced the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament.
And so he comes out with this printed edition of the Greek New Testament and Luther gets his hands on it. And so he's reading that and he notices that in Matthew's gospel, the word that's in the Latin is penitentium agate, do penance in Greek is metanoiate, which is repentance.
And the church was using this as like, you need to do penance. You need to, you know, do all of this stuff to show that you're sorry. And part of that was, you know, paying the church. And Luther reads this and he goes, Hey, guys, this means something different. This means repentance. It means changing your mind. It doesn't mean like to actually do things. And so part of his motivation is like the Latin isn't
reflecting, at least at the point that Latin had developed in that day, like maybe when Jerome translates the Latin Vulgate back in the 4th century, and it's called the Vulgate because Vulgata means like regular. Like you think of vulgar, right? It's just the regular people language. Part of the reason was that in the 4th century, very few people were reading Greek.
They were reading Latin, and so they're like, hey Jerome, you need to produce a Bible in Latin, because nobody can read the Bible anymore. And so he produces the Latin Vulgate, and ironically, by the time you get to Luther, a thousand years later, no one can read Latin, and they're all using the Vulgate. Wow, that is fascinating. Wow. And even Erasmus was, so he dedicates his first few additions to the Pope,
Because he knows that the pope is going to get wind, that he's producing Greek New Testaments, and the church is using the Latin, and he's risking his life. So if he dedicates it to the pope, maybe the pope will take it easy on him.
Did it work? Yeah, it did. Nice, a little flattery. Yeah, it goes a long way. Well, that's part of the problem, right? Is that you're dealing with these priests, you're dealing with human beings. And when human beings are the sole purveyors of truth, that becomes a problem. It's power, it's too much power.
most people suck at power. It just makes them drunk with it, and they abuse it, and you see that in many, many religions. You see that in cults, for instance, is the best example of it, because when you know the person who created this thing, and you know this person is fucking insane, and you have a bunch of people that follow them,
They're just looking out for your best interest. Yeah, right. They just want to make sure you're doing the right thing. Did you see why wild country? Oh, yes. It's fucking awesome. It's so good. It's so crazy. I mean, I'm so glad I wasn't there and a part of it, but it.
They all look good in the beginning. That's what's really wild. All these cult documentaries, all these exposés in the beginning, like these people haven't made. They're all eating together, and they're communicating, they're praying together, and they seem more likely happy. They're just seeking enlightenment. Yeah. One of the ways my wife and I bond, we have very different tastes in movies, but there's enough crossover that our guilty pleasure is cult documentaries. I love them. They're so interesting.
I love them because there's something about people like absolutely believing things that's so appealing to me. I don't know why that is. I like watching Islamic scholars speak with full confidence that their version of truth is truth.
I'm just interested in that mindset. I think it's a very deeply cut groove in the human psyche that people can fall into. When there's a cult, it's like, God, it's so obvious. There's the guy. Here's a good example. There's a documentary called Holy Hell. Oh, yeah, of course. I bought the building.
that holy hell was like the actual theater that this guy had built. It's a beautiful theater that he had its followers built so he can dance in front of them. That was going to be the comedy mothership, the first version of it. So I was under contract for that building, but it fell apart. Thank the baby Jesus.
Thank Allah, thank somebody. And then we found this new place on Sixth Street. But that documentary is so fascinating because you can see this guy who is a gay porn star and a hypnotist. So wild. Take a bunch of really lost people and send them down this crazy road and then eventually it all falls apart.
You know, what's interesting about that is I have less of a problem with the objective truth claims and more of a problem with them saying, but don't look into it. Like don't test it. Like what I say goes and you're not allowed to explore it. Like talking about the Mormon church, they recently did this thing where they're like,
You don't need to go on the internet, and you don't need to. Don't watch the Book of Mormon. I don't think you realize what you're sounding like when you come across in that way. Mormons are the nicest cult members. They're the nicest people. They really are so nice. I love them.
I mean, Mormons that I met have been so friendly. They're so family oriented. That's true. It's like really easy to think these are great people. I'll join them. We know why they're family oriented, right? Why? It's because in what Joseph Smith wrote, there's an idea that everybody's soul pre-exists and you were born as a spirit child in a previous life. And the reason you need to have children is you need to bring those people's souls into existence.
And so there's like, because you have a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother, and you're all children of God in the actual like physical sense, and that the pursuit is exaltation where you will be a God on your own planet, if you've done everything right. You get your own planet, which is pretty dope.
And this is Joseph Smith in the King's Fall of Funeral Discourse. This is what he wrote. This is where he formulated this idea where God, the father, has a body as tangible as ours, of flesh and blood, and that he lived on another planet. And he circled around the star, called Colab, and that if you do everything right,
you will also be the God on your own planet. And so you got to encourage people to have kids because you're pulling those spear babies out of the spiritual realm. But you're right, they are. They're incredibly nice people. The nicest. The nicest. Yeah, it's a really great cult. You know, I mean, or religion, whatever. I mean, I used to have a joke in my act that
Occult is is fake and it's made by one guy that guy invented it in a religion that guy's dead Hmm There might be something to do that yeah, and some for sure but the question to me is always
what were they originally trying to do? What was it based on? In the beginning, there was light. What is all of that? What are those stories? And when you take these stories and you are telling them for so long, that's why the book of Isaiah, what you were telling me is so fascinating. That a thousand years later, you have the exact translation of this. At a time where most people were illiterate,
Yeah, definitely. It's only really been recently that we have the levels of literacy that we have today. This is part of the reason why you have these long spans of time between when people live and then the ancient biographies that start to pop up about them is because most people are just illiterate. But to imagine how crazy that is, that something in a time where there's no printed press,
and something that had been passed on for so long as an oral tradition is exact word for word, right? You find in a cave in Qumran. And then the same thing you get in the English translation of the Bible today. That's nuts. I mean, up until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament manuscripts predated the Old Testament manuscripts by a long shot. Really? Yeah. Because the Christians were
The Christians were less discerning in their proliferation of written documents. So the Jews had this whole system where you had to be a trained scribe, and they were very, very careful with the procedures that you went through. Whereas the Christians were like, we want to get this thing out as fast as we can, as often as we can, which had a lot of benefits in that like their goal was
a proselytization and evangelism, and that worked. But the downside of it was that you get really messy copies, where you have copies all over the place, but human error gets involved with spelling differences and additions deletions, mostly for completely understandable reasons. But we actually have manuscripts where we know the person copied it, and they didn't know how to read it because they make mistakes that you wouldn't make if you
We knew how to copy. There's this really great example of a guy who copies. I believe it's the genealogy of Matthew and he he's looking at a manuscript that has two columns and he's copying it from left to right and he's copying it like this.
Whereas it's like the column you go down and then the next column. So in the genealogy of Jesus, he's got all the wrong people be getting all the wrong people. And you're like, you wouldn't do this, you know, read because God is in the middle of the genealogy. So like that kind of thing.
That is a real problem. That is a real problem. But ironically, with the Christian manuscripts, because we have so many, it's actually because of the mistakes that we're able to trace the text back with a high degree of confidence. Because if you have copies that are floating around North Africa and places like Egypt and then you have copies in Syria and you have copies out into Asia and into Europe and the British Isles, when mistakes pop up, they're geographically located.
And because you have so many, you can compare and contrast them and figure out, OK, well, this obviously happened here at this time. And you can pinpoint those things. So this is a field called textual criticism, where you and we do this with all ancient documents, like the Bible is a.
a more kind of, um, uh, fleshed out, um, field of textual criticism because we have so many manuscripts, but we do it with, you know, Marcus Aurelius. Um, we even do it with Shakespeare with the different copies because if you only have one copy, you have to trust that the person who copied that got it right. Right. Yeah. Which is the issue that we have for, um, the, um, Beowulf. We only have one copy of Beowulf.
And so we don't know what it looked like prior to that. So we just kind of accept that, okay, this is Beowulf. Like there's no way to compare and contrast the tradition of the manuscripts of Beowulf. God, when you're saying this about taking copied versions of it and comparing errors and going back and like you're talking about so much time. Yeah. So much research. It's legwork. So much legwork.
Yeah. And fortunately, in the modern era, we get computers involved, and that cuts out a lot of just manpower. I would like to see AI get to the bottom of all this. Well, there's an interesting show in Germany at the Center for the Study of New Testament Research in Munster. It's called CBGM, the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method.
And it's tracing not manuscripts, but readings within manuscripts and finding the relationships between the different ones by like computer models. And so they are actually get so this is actually the way that like modern era textual criticism is being done is with these, these language models that operate on tracing readings.
and how certain readings are related to one another, which has allowed us to do things like look at 4th century manuscripts and actually see that their readings come hundreds of years earlier in other manuscripts that we have in collections. So one of the clearest examples of this is there's a manuscript in the 4th century called Codex Vaticanus because it happens to be in the Vatican right now.
And there is a manuscript from the second century, which has the exact same scribal conventions that Codex Vaticanus does in particular readings. And so we know for a fact that the scribes who created Vaticanus did not have, I think it's P-75, which is a papyrus 75, but they had some sort of collection of manuscripts that were similar.
And so we can have confidence that the readings, although they're fourth century in particular areas of Codex Vaticanus, are actually second century in their origination. And a large part of this is because of these models that the computer has got involved in. Wow, that is so fascinating.
Now, when they're going over things like ancient Sumerian and they're reading things like the epoch of Gilgamesh, if we don't know how to make those words, we don't know what they sounded like.
How are they translating it into an English version? One of the things that's been compared quite a bit is the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of No in the Ark. The Great Flood. There seems to be some parallels. How close is it?
In some ways it's very close and in other ways it's not. So that's the story of Upnupeshthim, which is kind of a side story in the epoch of Gilgamesh where Gilgamesh is, he realizes his mortality and he's trying to find eternal life and there's this guy Upnupeshthim who he runs into, who tells him the story of the gods gifted him with eternal life because he saved all the animals on a boat.
And so there are actually parallels between that and say the Genesis 6 Noah arc story in like making a big boat, putting all the animals on it, and then they get off and they make a sacrifice to, in his case, the gods and in the Bible God. And I think what you're looking at there is probably a cultural remembrance of something that did take place.
And so you have these adjacent cultures who, they're existing within this framework of the ancient Near East, and you're seeing these kind of parallel echoes of things that actually did happen. So there are definite parallels, but I think sometimes people look at those and they overplay that. So one of the examples I often give is Advil and Arsenic both come in pill form and have an A on the bottle.
But it's not the similarities that matter in that case, it's the differences. And so if you look at the differences, there are significant differences in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Open Upishtim story and the Genesis 6 story. If for another reason, then the Noah arc story is a very small part of the book of Genesis.
and the story of Upanisham in the Epic of Gilgamesh is a little bit more stretched out, it has more to do with the theme of what Gilgamesh is doing in his epic. But there are obviously parallels between that because these are both ancient Near Eastern stories and they're products of their day.
In the same way that I think you see parallels between some of the New Testament gospels and other ancient Greco-Roman biography.
in that these are products of ancient history, and so they're gonna look like other ancient historical writings that kind of parallel around that. Does that make sense? No, it does make sense. It's just when you're talking about the oldest of old stories, it's always so interesting to wonder when they're taking these oral traditions,
Socrates is famous for saying that he didn't believe that you should write things. Make people lazy. You need to learn how to remember things. You need to exercise your memory, which is so fascinating when you think that there must have been people that were in charge of memorizing these oral traditions. When you're talking about, particularly if you're talking about the Old Testament, the series of writings
Like, these are long stories that someone had to remember and pass on to generations. So the thing with me was always like, well, what was the origin of all this? Like, what was the first version of it? And where the hell did it come from? And what was it? What was going on where these people felt like in this time of incredibly difficult survival, right? You're essentially your hunter-gatherers, right? We're talking about thousands of years ago.
And these people took great time and made great effort to preserve these stories.
And then there's always human error, right? There's human error, as you were saying, with transcription and trying to decipher things and writing things down where you don't really speak the language. You got to wonder, like, how much did we lose in this oral tradition? Like, what was the original story? And what were they trying to convey? Yeah, and I think that there's an aspect of, like,
a message that's trying to be communicated. I mean, we are modern people of the Enlightenment. So we almost have a perspective where we want something to be very exhaustive, that ancient writers didn't have those same sort of conventions. Or so they're going to capitalize on certain
ideas and concepts for the purpose of when someone tells you a story, you don't memorize everything. You go to university, write notes. The people who are writing everything, the professor is saying word for word. Probably not the people who are going to remember what the professor says as well as the people who write down the main things.
And when you write down the main things, the main points without all of the other stuff that kind of is just, it's icing, then you get the main idea more. Ancient writers talk about this. So there's a guy named Quintillion who exists in the first century BC. And there's this series of writings that we call
Projim Nazmada, which are basically like, how do you do good writing? So he's training people, maybe even individuals like Plutarch, who is one of the best known ancient biographers.
and saying like it's just as important what you don't say as to what you do say because you don't want to a writing in the ancient world is expensive really expensive and b you want to make sure that
your audience is actually getting the message that you want to convey. And so this is something that when you read like German scholars, biblical scholars of the 19th and 20th century, or even prior to that, like 18th, 19th century,
They look at the gospels and they're like, this isn't biography, because it's not capitalizing on Jesus' childhood. And we all know that good biographies tell about your childhood and psychology and these sorts of things. Whereas if you look at some of these ancient writers who are talking about how you should write biography, they say, if there's nothing in their childhood that's that significant,
Don't write it. It's gonna distract from, like if there is something, say like Jesus' birth or Luke tells a story when he's 12 of Jesus, when he goes with Mary and Joseph and Mary and Joseph lose the Son of God and they start going home without him and they're like, where's Jesus? And they gotta go back to Jerusalem. That's a significant story. And so it appears that Luke includes it because there's a significant reason to include that. But they wouldn't have had any
problem with leaving out large portions of someone's life if it didn't contribute to what the ultimate goal of telling that person's life was.
I think what's also what's important is we have to try as difficult as it might be to put our minds in the context of people who lived in a time where most people were illiterate and you're telling these parables, you're telling these stories as an oral tradition and that they have a different mindset in terms of the distribution of information and what the significance of these things are.
Yeah, these are documents. Well, in terms of the Bible, as someone who identifies as a Christian, I would say that the Bible is written for you, but it wasn't written to you. It had a completely different original audience. But you should do your best at figuring out who it was written to and how that made a difference to them, because then the application is going to come out even clearer for you.
And that should be ultimately the goal of everyone who's looking at ancient documents. Who was the original audience? How would they have understood it? Because you can read all sorts of things because of your modern conventions into what someone is talking about in the ancient world and completely bypass what they're actually trying to convey in their intention.
And again, it's almost impossible to put your mind completely into the context of these people that were living then. It's almost impossible to imagine the way they viewed the world and the way they communicated. And when you're dealing with really old stuff, like the Sumerian text, and then people have translations of it, which can be fantastical, like the Zechariah's Hitchin stuff.
You have to be a scholar in ancient Sumerian and understand the origins of language, and you have to... And then still, there's massive debate. I mean, there's a whole website called sitchiniswrong.com. Yeah. But he's the most fun. He's fun. I'm not convinced he could read Sumerian either. Really? Yeah. I think he was bullshitting.
I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt. He just, he takes so many liberties with the stuff he's commenting on that I have a hard time getting my head around.
So if he couldn't read it, where would he be getting his translations? From actual translations. Okay, so he would take these translations and then make his own assumptions and his own interpretation. Is that what it is? Yeah, I think to a certain degree, I mean, even something like Nibiru is not a Sumerian word. It's an Akkadian word. But he makes a big deal about it being related to Sumerian. And it is a word that appears within Akkadian.
And Acadian is what time period? Acadian is just after. So it exists kind of in a crossover where Sumerian predates Acadian, but Acadian develops alongside. And then as cultures like the Assyrians come into power and kind of subvert the Sumerians. So all this Sumerian writing is what was the oldest timeline?
Like 5,000? Yeah, around that. I think like four to 5,000 years ago. Okay. And then Akkadian is when? There's some overlap, but it develops into a language like just after, like the rise. And Akkadian develops into like, it has stages. And then you have like,
Babylonian, proto-Babylonian, Persian, old Persian. We don't have it. There's no writing at all. Go back to Tepe, correct? It's all just iconography. Yeah. Or at least that we've figured out that that looks like writing. Yeah. I'm really hoping to go back to Tepe.
What's your take on this whole reluctance to further excavate and how they have such a small amount of the site? It's only 5% that's been uncovered, but through LIDAR, they're aware there's a bunch more. Yeah, I mean, I'm not an archaeologist. I have friends who are archaeologists, and I think it's
Archaeology is tricky because so much of archaeology is dependent on governments and institutions and funding. That getting mad at archaeologists for not excavating is kind of like getting mad at construction workers for not fixing your potholes.
where they're doing the last stage. I think there's certainly incentive by the Turkish government to want to capitalize on that being a tourist destination. You really need to safeguard archeological
excavations because otherwise it's it's being compromised. Right. And like pillaging and and stuff like that. It happens. I mean, when I was in Egypt two summers ago and you go to the Valley of the Kings, they've got security cameras up everywhere because there are tunes there that we still haven't discovered. And so they're like, we don't want people digging around in here looking for. Well, they've lost so much over the history.
Oh, we've only discovered 1% of ancient Egypt. That's so nuts. 1%. Isn't that crazy? That is the nuttiest part of all of history is Egypt to me. I still have not been. You've got to go. I know. I almost went in December. I just couldn't find the time. I'm just too damn busy. I will though. I definitely will. But it is to me the nuttiest time in history because good luck explaining.
the great pyramid. Good luck. And it's such a big time frame. Like there's a thousand years between the pyramids being built and toon common in the Valley of the Kings. Yeah. A thousand years. Yeah. Nuts. It's so crazy. Egypt is one of the wildest places you'll ever go. Well, it just doesn't make sense. It's like how? What were you guys using? What were you doing? How'd you do it? How'd you measure it? How'd you figure it out? Yeah. You've been to Greece, right? Yes. Have you been to Jordan? No. Oh, you got to go see Petra. Yeah. Petra's phenomenal.
Jordan was, I mean, Greece rather was fantastic. They're all crazy. God, it's just like when you're just there in the presence of these things and just trying to put your brain back thousands of years and imagine what society was like back then.
It's crazy. Egypt was crazy because Egypt is like grace in that you have like, you can go to Pantheon and you see that kind of stuff, right? But you go to Egypt and there's 4,000 year old paint on the walls.
And you're like, what? I can't get paint to stand my wall for 10 years. And it's almost exclusively because of the climate. And it got buried in sand. But it's so wild. So wild. When you say that 1% of ancient Egypt has been discovered, what do you really mean by that?
of the percentage of what we know that happened in Egyptian history, 1% has been excavated in terms of what we can actually pull out of the ground and look at artifacts. So there's whole eras of pharaohs that we just, we don't know where they're buried. We, like even when Thune Common was discovered, he was kind of a footnote.
in the pharaohs that we knew about at that time. And we didn't know he was as extravagant, as rich, as until we discovered his actual tomb. A lot of people at that time didn't even think it was he was worth looking into because we have these lists of pharaohs. And the thing with the pharaohs is that they're always trying to, the next pharaoh is always trying to prove that he's the better one.
And this is why you go to Egypt and you find statues of Ramses everywhere. And part of it was because Ramses, I think it was Ramses II, was he commissioned so many statues of himself, because he's like, oh, I'm the best, I'm the greatest. And what they actually, they couldn't keep up with the commissioning and they started actually rubbing off the names of previous pharaohs on statues and just putting Ramses on it. Really? Wow. Because he was just, so you go like,
from the top of Egypt to the bottom of Egypt, and you're gonna find statues of Ramses. He wanted to leave his mark. He wanted to leave, and he did, right? Like it worked. We're talking about it now in 2024. I know. Yeah, that is nuts. So when you go there and you're in the presence of these things, and you try to put yourself back into that time period, like, have you ever tried to think, like, what was the motivation to make something as great as the pyramid of Giza, the great pyramid?
People definitely want to make their mark, right? Well, but that's a mark that just doesn't even make sense. There's something to that. I mean, if you think you're a god, right, and you have this whole kind of worldview perspective of and theology that you need to make something that and bear yourself with all this crap because that's going to make a difference in your afterlife, then you're going to go big rather than going home, right?
The perceptions of people in the ancient world are just so different. We got it so good right now. Like longevity, health, food is just on a completely different scale. And so the conventions of needing to make sure that, especially if you're like the richest guy around, that you tick off all the boxes
Because you know you're going to die, and you're probably going to die sooner than you want to, sooner rather than later. And you have this whole perception of, well, if I bury myself with all this stuff and maybe even some of the people, we're just going to kill them and include them too. Because they're going to help me out. That's going to help me out in the afterlife. It is slaves in the afterlife, if you're fair. Yeah, of course you do. Why not? That's ridiculous.
Yeah. So, Kufu's pyramid, what's the timeline that he was even in power? I don't know. I'm not an Egyptologist or an archaeologist necessarily, but he was, I think that was a, what, like 4,000 years ago. We only really have a tiny little statue of him. That's much of that much about him. I guess he was busy making a pyramid.
So they say, right? So they say things different, but a lot of people think different. You know, that's what's interesting about it is the, like the archeological argument that like Dr. Robert Shock makes about the water erosion in the temple of the Sphinx. Yeah. That's a fascinating argument because it does appear like that's water erosion. And that would put the timeline way, way back.
Yeah, I think even just looking at the sphinx you can tell that, no matter what your perspective is, you should entertain the idea at minimum that the head was built later. Yeah, for sure. Because it doesn't fit the body.
It has much less erosion, but you could also attribute that to the different densities of the stone. Like that's one of the things about these layers of limestone. It's like some of them are much more porous and some they are road easier. Yeah. You do see that. Yeah. You know, and I think they're doing a terrible disservice by covering the Sphinx with like new stones and, you know, they redid the pause and they're doing all that. Like my God, people like leave it alone, like leave it the way it is.
Yeah, it's this tricky balance between restoration and recreation. Yeah. Because they're in a recreation stage. Yeah. And it was obviously, they're doing it with smaller stones and it looks different. It's not the same thing. It's not what it initially was. It was carved from one piece of stone.
Have you seen some of the restoration stuff that Saddam Hussein did in Iraq? Jamie, you gotta pull up the ziggurat at Ur. Oh no. So Saddam Hussein was a bit of a nut job, but he believed, as far as I understand it, that he was the recreation of Nebuchadnezzar. So he did all of this restorative work in Iraq on things like the walls of Babylon. And in Ur, he rebuilt the ziggurat.
So if you look at that picture over there, this is 1932 and 2022, that's what he did, is he basically tried to rebuild this entire thing.
And it's amazing. I am trying hard to get to Iraq. Because I want to see this thing. Interestingly enough. Don't die. Yeah. Don't die, dude. Don't go over there. So that's actually... I'm sorry. So this is the modern version with the small bricks. The original version, was it all carved from one piece? No, it would have been clay bricks. So these were clay bricks. Jamie, can you go back to the 1930 image, please, so we could see what it looked like?
God, I would rather just have that. You know, I mean, I want to see what it looked like and what it looks like all these years later. I don't want to see a recreation, which is very similar to what they've done to the Sphinx. Yeah, the Sphinx, even when I was in Egypt, they were doing some work in like...
Can you watch, Jamie, can you go to the rehabilitation of the Sphinx or whatever they would call it? Yeah, they clicked on the ruins of it. I was going back to 30s or 40s or something. Well, the restoration part is the interesting part. You can see the restoration. If you go to just Google restoration of the Sphinx pause. Well, they're talking about putting encasing stones on the pyramid.
Yeah, I've heard that too. God, don't do that. I don't think they should do that. No, you shouldn't do anything. I mean, obviously they took the original Casing Stones off, but that's also history. So now you can see like the new pause. Well, that's that seems like the difference between buried and unburied. Yeah. So like even when Napoleon came upon like right there, like, isn't that restored? Mm hmm.
Yeah, because there was much more erosion than Napoleon came upon it. It was buried, right? I think so. I think that was the case. Over time, because you're dealing with these crazy sandstorms, over time, everything gets kind of buried. Oh, so much of it is under sand for so long. Like the temple of the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut was mostly under sand for a long, long time. Wow. Before they uncovered it. And fortunately, the aridness of Egypt
Preserves things like crazy. Yeah, see that's what the paws look like. That's a that's a disaster. Yeah, that's so gross. Um when you know
If you do take that timeline, the Robert Shock timeline, and you say, okay, so you're talking about thousands of years of rainfall, you have to go back to when there was rainfall in the Nile Valley. So now you're back like 9,000 years. One of the more interesting things about hieroglyphs and the interpretations of it is that the ancient hieroglyphs, well, the ancient versions of pharaohs rather, like when they go back past the established dates of 2500 BC and before that,
you get to like 30,000 years ago. And then they say that these are myth. These are not, this is not representative of an actual history. This is some sort of a mythical history. Yeah. Numbers are tricky in ancient languages because
It's not entirely clear whether numbers are meant to be representational. Is that like why they said that Noah lives 600 years old? Yeah, that's part of it. I mean, you have that. You have the Sumerian King lists, which have people living thousands of you, hundreds and thousands of years too. And I mean, there are some interesting academic articles on like the probability of the numbers that come up in those because we have a base 10 counting system because we count our fingers.
ancient Near Eastern cultures like the Babylonians, the Acadians, the Assyrians, they had a base 12 counting system because they would count each hinge or whatever you call these like spaces, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. There's different joints of the thing. Yeah, the joints, that's what I was looking for.
And so that's why we have 360 degrees in a circle, 365 days in a year. Like this comes from the Mesopotamian counting conventions. And you look at some of these lists and their operational and all divisible by like 12 and 60. And you're like, what's going on here? So not all of them, but enough of them where it's statistically impossible. And
I don't totally know what to make of those things because you do have the genealogies, I believe it's Genesis 4 and Genesis 11, where they're all divisible by these types of numbers that were very common in the ancient Near East. They're not random. Whereas if we look at the genealogies later in like Chronicles and Kings of the ages of the Israelite kings, they're random.
And so it's just like, what do we do with that? Because numbers are also far more representational, which is why we see numbers like 12 and 40 and seven come up in the Bible, but also other ancient Near Eastern literature. Like there are certain numbers in Egyptian society that also we're seeing as like perfect numbers or like numbers that you wanted to incorporate.
What's the earliest interpretation of calendars? What is the earliest where they did decide what a year was? I have no idea. Because you've got to imagine if the average lifespan wasn't so good back then. A lot of people got infected, died of war, famine, all these things.
It would take quite a long time for people to figure out what a year was. We're going thousands and thousands of years ago. We have to establish, okay, a day is, let's put this stick in the ground. When the shadow is here, this is where we start. When the shadow goes all the way around like that, okay, maybe we can mark these off, okay, now we've got a sundial. And there are different timekeeping conventions, depending on society. Ancient Jews had a different timekeeping convention than ancient Romans.
And so that's why you see like in Genesis chapter one, it talks about there being evening and there being morning is because, well, Jews today, right? You start the Sabbath on sundown the day before, right? So that's why it's because there's different cycles.
And so we go on a 24-hour time system. But ancient Jews had a different convention of that, ancient Romans had a different convention of that, ancient Mesopotamian cultures had their own kind of conventions about these things. And calendars were all over the place. And when you get to the Julian calendar and they're like, we've got to standardize this thing because everybody's operating on a different, the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar.
Um, ancient timekeeping is very inexact and very messy. And so you kind of got to take certain things with a grain of salt in terms of that. But yeah, ancient calendars, I don't even know. I know that actually the, talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the group in Qumran, who were like a, they were a sectarian group of Jews.
who believed that the Jews in Jerusalem had basically capitulated and were not holy enough. And part of their reasoning is that they believe they have a perfect calendar. And so they use a different calendar that doesn't have to do things like incorporate an extra month every certain number of years because their thing is not perfect. And part of their reasoning is to why they're like the chosen is that they have a timekeeping system that they say is perfect.
Um, many cultures used a 13 month calendar, right? Like what was the logic behind that? Does that work? I don't know. The idea was 13 months, 28 days each month and you wouldn't have to have leap years and all that shit. Yeah. Yeah.
archaeologist okay there it is world oldest counter 12,000 years old that's wild whoo so it is on go back to the tapi of ancient carvings of the sun moon and various constellations sits in a pillar go back to tapi on 12,000 years old reaches researchers believe agent people use a so-called
loony solar calendar to mark the changing of the seasons right interesting so it was at least representative of the fact that we know when the day start getting shorter it starts getting colder and then okay and then and then warms up again the day start getting longer
This is why solstice is so key in most of human history. It's because you got to figure out what's a marker point, which is one of the things that's so fascinating about some of the constructions of the pyramid where on the summer solstice, these pillars line up so perfectly that the light shines straight down these hallways and illuminates everything. How did you nail that?
Yeah, I mean, just because they're ancient doesn't mean they're stupid. Well, they're just brilliant. Yeah. They weren't just stupid. They were fucking brilliant. That's what's, I mean, we're just ancient. It's just so weird that people were so vastly more intelligent, at least in terms of their ability to build things than anyone else, anywhere around there.
That's what's so weird about Egypt to me. It's like there's amazing pieces of, like even ancient Greece is incredible, but I can kind of believe you did it, you know? When you deal with 2,300,000 stones in the Great Pyramid and some of them, like 50 tons, 60 tons. That's pretty crazy. From 500 miles away, like, what did you do? How the hell did you do it? I mean, there have been a lot of things that have been lost. We still, as far as I'm aware, don't know how the Romans made their concrete.
That Roman concrete is like this thing that survives. They were able to make domes out of it. Well, you know about terra praeta in the Amazon. Do you know about that? No. Oh, terra praeta is their particular rich soil that is man-made soil. Oh, yes, I didn't. I do know about that. Combination of charcoal and bacteria, and it's incredible. Yeah. And it's unbelievably fertile in terms of your ability to grow food on it.
and they made it and we don't know how they did it. And it's man-made stuff, which is so bananas. It's like a giant chunk of this stuff that is all over the Amazon was made by people specifically to encourage the growth of plants.
I mean, this is why history gets me so excited. Oh, it's so amazing. And it's so interesting too. I was watching something on YouTube yesterday about the mine culture and the Aztecs. I went on a deep dive when I started getting ready for this. But when you think about how many people existed back then and then Europeans come and everybody dies.
everybody dies of disease and it's like how many people died like millions millions of people died here millions of people died there like holy shit and you go through like the the the story of the the the collapse of the mind civilization the collapse of the Aztec civilization like the accounts that these priests had of visiting
these Aztec markets and how incredible they were. These people from Rome, who'd come to visit the mines, they're like, this is unbelievable, or the Aztecs, rather, like this is unbelievable how sophisticated they are. And then, everybody's dead. Done, though. You just gotta go, wow.
How many times has this happened in history where people have visited places and brought their cooties and killed off a giant swath of the population. And one of the things that they're discovering now in the Amazon, which is so fascinating is through use of LiDAR discovering like, Oh my God, this is like all populated. This whole thing was popular. Yeah, that's crazy. The grand penetrating radar stuff.
And the trees and all the rainforest is mostly from man-made agriculture. Yeah, that's wild. Nuts! And this is all recent, that they're figuring this out, which is also so fascinating about history, is that it is a constant and never-ending search.
And that even in today, with as much information as we have, you can pick up your phone and ask them, you know, when was Nero born? It'll tell you, like instantaneously, we still don't have answers to a lot of really fascinating questions, like the Olmecs or all these other civilizations, like, who, where? Where did they come from? Why do they look like this? Why do they make these big stone heads? Stone heads, you know, or stone hench? It's another one, like, Jesus, what is this?
Yeah. There's so many versions of that all over the world and it just, the search for our origins is one of the most human endeavors, one of the most, because to know that we are particularly unique.
We're so different. We stand out from every other animal on this planet. And there's this crazy, wild war of biology where life is just eating life all around us. And we just got to some crazy place that far beyond any other creature that's on this planet. And we did it in a bunch of different ways. We did it in a bunch of different ways all over the place with different scribbles and different icons and different gods and different things.
And we're all wondering, like, which one, where did it start? What was the origin of all this? Like, what was the need to write these things down? What purpose did it serve to have these myths and legends and stories? Like, was it just to keep society together or was it to retell a very important story that was a very unique thing that happened at the dawn of time?
And that's why you see, I mean, the literary comparison of ancient Near Eastern origin stories is like a really interesting thing to do. Because when you look at something like the Enoma leash, which was the Babylonian creation story, and then you look at something like Genesis chapter one, there are obvious crossovers with, like I said before, these ancient Near Eastern conventions.
But then you can see that the author of Genesis is making these points that are actually rebutting something like the origin stories of the surrounding cultures that largely believe that matter is like eternal and the gods come out of the created world and that there's this narrative of the battle that takes place.
where some gods fight against other gods and the world around us that we see and like human beings are the end result of this battle.
And so they would read this on every Babylonian New Year. And one of the main themes was basically that it's all chance. It's all a random mistake. You were created without purpose and intention because Tiamat gets destroyed. And she's the God that you come from. And then you read Genesis chapter 1 and it says, in the beginning, God creates the heavens and the earth.
and he makes it good. And there's this idea that that's counter-cultural in the idea that the Babylonians did not think that the world was good, and that at the end of every refrain, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good, and then it's very good at the end, and that humanity in particular is created in the image of God.
Like, that's a very, not just like kings, which a lot of ancient Near Eastern cultures believe, that kings were created in the image of God, but that humanity in general is created in the image of God. And this idea of the Imago day, that's why you're different. Like, why are you different from all the animals? Because you're given something that exemplifies a unique quality
And then the ancient Eucharistian cultures that believe that the planets are gods and that the sea is a god. And then at Genesis chapter one looks at that and it kind of subverts the expectations of the day in getting to this ultimate question of why are we here
What are we supposed to do while we're here and how do we get out of here? And it says that, no, there's purpose, there's meaning, there's intention. And actually, a lot of the things that you worship, it's pretty stupid because God created them. What is the original origin story or the earliest, I should say, origin story of humanity? I don't know. Would it be the Mesopotamians? Would it be the Sumerians? Like who had the one that's the oldest?
I mean, the enumeration is pretty old. There are a number of different variations. The problem is that we're largely relying on like our complete copies are coming in languages like Acadian where the ones in Sumerian are very fragmentary. So like even the Epic of Gilgamesh, the copy that we have that kind of is the final, if you go and you read a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's going to be the one from, in Acadian from the library of Ashurbanipal.
Um, but the earlier versions in Sumerian don't even have the flood story in them. And yeah, so, and they're, they're more pieced together. And we actually do have another flood story in the Atrasis, which appears to have been influenced, the Epic of Gilgamesh stories influenced by the Atrasis, but I
In terms of like written language, I guess it's the Anumalish. I wouldn't actually know what like the oldest, oldest one is. But you get a lot of these origin stories and they have these themes. We see it in the Bible too. The ancient Near Eastern cultures were very preoccupied with chaos and order.
And so it's all about kind of creating order out of the chaos of the world. And that's where I think you do see the parallels between- Well, that's the establishment of society, right? Yeah, yeah, and establishing chaos and certain things being representational of chaos within the created order, like the Bible included, but a lot of other ancient cultures saw things like the ocean
as the embodiment of unpredictability and chaos. And so that's why you have sea monsters are this very common depiction, the Leviathan in Job, which is this sea monster and it's representational in a way of, because it appears actually in Babylonian literature to the Leviathan.
Really? Yeah, and it's encompassing chaos in the world. And the point of God bringing it up to Job in the book of Job is like God has the ability to tame this thing. And even in the book of Revelation at the end of the Bible, it says that in the new heavens and new earth, there will be no sea.
And it's not because the Ida, a friend who is Australian, and we're kind of working through translating sections of Revelation, and he's like, hold on, there will be no sea. It's like, I'm Australian, I love the sea. But the point of that though is not necessarily that the body of water is not going to exist. It's that the ocean, the sea, is so unpredictable.
You go out there and storms can come out of nowhere and you die. And so there are these motifs that are representational in the ancient world. And we see a lot of those in these creation stories. So would it be that the dangers of the sea would no longer exist?
Yeah, so the sea kind of working as an analogy of that which is unpredictable. And actually, there's a lot of concepts of the realm of the dead being in the sea that we see throughout this literature. If you read the book of Jonah,
There's this kind of stylistic, which you miss when you read it in the English, but it's very apparent in the Hebrew, where Noah keeps going down. He goes down from his town to the dock, and then he goes down into the boat, and then he goes down into the
inside of the boat, and then the storm happens, and then they throw him overboard down into the sea and down into the fish. And he eventually, the fish takes him down into the depths of the sea. And when Jonah prays, he says, I cry out from the depths of shale, which is the realm of the dead. So there is actually a form of Jewish interpretation where it argues that Joan actually died and was resurrected when he was split up by the fish.
And it could be, because in the gospels, Jesus says, the people are following him and they keep asking him for miracles. Because they're like, we saw you do miracles, do more miracles for us. Come on, do a trick, do a trick, Jesus. And Jesus says, the only miracle you're going to get is the sign of Jonah, that just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, I will be in the belly of the earth three days and three nights, a prediction of his own death and resurrection.
But there is an argument within rabbinical literature that when Jonah says that he's crying out from the depths of shales, because he's actually dead, and that's one interpretation. But another interpretation could just be that he saw and understood as a person of his day the depths of the ocean as where the dead people ended up anyways. Like your soul goes down into the chaos and the disorder of shale, which is the realm of the dead.
Is that where they disposed of bodies? In the ocean? Yeah. No. Vikings did, right? Didn't they like light boats on fire and push them out there? Yeah. Yeah. But it wasn't a common practice amongst other civilizations. Not that I know of. I mean, Jews were definitely, I mean, really ancient Jewish conventions of
burial. You would just bury someone in the earth. And then by the time you got to Jesus' day, you had like family tombs and stuff. Well, there was an ancient hominid that's not human. And one of the things that they were so fascinated about was that they buried their dead and that they did so in a cave. Do you remember that, Jamie? Do you remember who was discussing that with us?
It was they did not think that this version of ancient primate was capable of these things. And then they seemed to have confirmation through these very extensive cave systems that there was at least one area where they would put their dead.
Yeah, and it was a difficult path to get to this too. I think this is a very small hominid, and I think people have tried to make their way through it, and it's really hard. Like some of these caves, you're like basically crawling on your stomach, which is fucking terrifying.
Because people have died that way. Are you claustrophobic? No, I'm not claustrophobic. It's just normal stuff. You just don't want to crawl in a cave. I don't want to crawl in the middle of the earth into something that's like 11 inches high. It looks squirming, slowly. Because that's what they're doing. The body barely fits in there. And the guy died recently. Primer rescue, I think.
Oh, it was Brian. Yes. That's right. And I'll pull it up. Dentaletti chamber. Yeah. So they've founded this ancient homodid, which, you know, didn't really look like us. Yeah. Was a burning their dead. Yeah. I mean, burial conventions change over time. The ways that they're burying like in the ancient Israelite days are very different in the conventions than when you get to Jesus.
It's archaeologist some kind of evidence of intentional burial caving gravings by early human ancestor. What does that sucker look like? So the Denaldi chamber, what is the type of homo-na-na-na-na-na lady, right? Homo-na-na-lady, goo-na-na-lady, goo-na-na-lady, see what they look like? Homo-na-lady, what we think they look like, right? Whoa, that's crazy.
That's crazy. So as a Christian, what do you think about all this stuff? What do you think about ancient hominids, Australopithecus, Neanderthals, what was God up to with all this? Yeah, I mean, I'm not a scientist, so I gotta stay in my lane. I ultimately would be an advocate for intelligent design, where I would say that God purposefully created humanity.
in a way, you had Steven Meyer on, right? Yes. Yeah, so I mean, he's one of those guys who talks about kind of the issues that he sees with evolution. And I think I have some of those issues too. My friend, Jonathan McClatchy is a biologist and he does some really great presentations on the ways that he sees kind of the intricacies of new Doranian evolution is not quite explaining some of what's going on with
things like the fossil record and some of the gaps that we have in there. When you talk about early hominids, I mean, ultimately, I think that there are aspects of the fact that there are ancient cultures, which, I mean, humanity obviously looks very different today than it did if we're going tens of thousands of years ago. And so, I think that there's a different kind of convention in understanding. But I ultimately, I would describe to there being an original Adam and Eve
and that those are our first parents kind of thing. But there are other Christians who I would disagree with, but I think have interesting articulations of that in terms of theistic evolution. I disagree with them, but it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility to find explanations. I don't think the Bible
is trying to explain how people came into existence in the same way that maybe we want it to. And a lot of people read the origin stories in Genesis as a scientific textbook. And I think ultimately that misses the point of what Genesis is trying to say. This goes back to what we were talking about with like, how did the original audience understood this? When they read Genesis chapter one, are they looking at that as
an exact prescription of what God did. I mean, in some ways maybe, but in other ways, they could see that as this like counter-apologetic to the other ancient Near Eastern stories like I explained. So I just think we need to be careful when we're looking at, or even like counting up the genealogies and coming up with a, you know, how old the earth is. I think that might be missing the forest for the trees.
in what we're actually looking at when we look at ancient documents and how we're trying to interpret them. But it is a big question, right? Well, the question of evolution is a fascinating one, right? Because there's obviously something happening, particularly with us, if we really are related to homelands, a daldi, nullity, or
There's something clearly is happening. This is like process of change. And if we don't completely understand all the factors in that process of change, we might miss out. The equation might be incomplete.
I mean, we know a lot now about evolution that we did not know before, but like all sciences, new data comes in and you have to recalibrate things. Have you been paying attention to this? There's a new discussion about dark matter and dark energy. The new discussion is that it might not be a correct theory and that
What it might be is that time moves differently in the voids between galaxies. And this is a new theory. Like new enough and disgust enough among people that really understand it that it's getting to me. So I'm reading it. So see if you can find that.
Yeah, it's a very complex and nuanced conversation, but most of the universe is dark energy, right? It's a giant percentage of the universe is dark energy and dark matter. And we don't really know what that stuff is. And so this is proposing that there's an additional possible theory that might explain it better.
I mean, that area of science is crazy. And then you have the James Webb telescope that's giving us even more data than ever before. And you have to look at all of it and go, wait, why are those things here? How are they there so long ago? Like, what are these red things at the beginning of time? Like, what the fuck is all? The universe is bonkers.
Yeah, and I mean, I think we get that in history too, whereas we have these kind of what we think are established conventions and then all of a sudden we discover something and like completely overthrows the ideas that we have. Like Clovis first. Yeah, or go back to Tepe or actually good segue. That's the best one. Yeah, I made one. I made something for you. So.
I make papayri facsimiles. My description is a little bit wonky here and fix that. So you were talking about like, what is our oldest manuscript evidence? So this guy is P-52, John Ryland's 457. So that's a genuine Egyptian papayri that I made. I cut it out for you. And then I transcribed the text on
that manuscript. So when we're talking about what is potentially our oldest evidence for the New Testament, this manuscript that most likely comes from Oxford, because Egypt is the one that usually is universally accepted as our oldest one. And that contains John 18, where Jesus is on trial before Pilate. And yeah, so that's the one is in the John Ryland's Library in Manchester, England. So this is a copy of that exactly. This is exactly what it looks like.
Yeah, so I cut that out on the papayri with a scalpel, and then I transcribed the text on. You did a great job, dude. And this is, you nerd it out. I know. For real nerd it out. Listen, this is a real nerding out of... So that's actually, yeah, so that's someone else's facsimile, which is not as good as the one I mean. It's not as good. Yours is better. And where Jesus is on trial before Pilate, and Jesus says, everyone who follows
uh... the true who is is following the truth follows me and on the back has the words of pilot saying what is true
But so part of my research, so the reason I bring this up is because before this was discovered by C.H. Roberts in the 1940s, the convention was, because of a guy named C.H. Bauer, that the Gospel of John was second century. And so he had this, he was a student of Hegel. Have you ever heard of Hegelian dialectic? So you have like thesis, synthesis, and antithesis? Yes. So Hegel
had this philosophical theory and his student Bauer takes that and he incorporates this into history and he says, you know, the earliest gospel Mark has this very Jewish Jesus and then the later Gospels have a very like the last of what I call the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Luke has a very kind of more divine Jesus. And so he says, based on this, John is the last last written one. And it combines these two where you get a very human and a very divine Jesus together. And so based on this, he says that John has to be second century. Well, we discover this guy. See, Robert says, you know, literally going through these piles of manuscripts in these drawers that are being like stashed away. And he finds this guy and he sees that it's written on both sides, which is almost exclusively a Christian convention. Because in the ancient world, they use scrolls.
And the Christians, for reasons we're not entirely clear on, they start to make codices, books. And so they write on both sides. And so he says, okay, this is written on both sides. It's probably a Christian manuscript. So he sends it off to the leading paleographers, or guys who date manuscripts. And they all say, this is the beginning of the second century.
And so there's still debate about the dating of this, but the unanimous consensus is that it's comfortably second century, potentially the beginning of the second century, which means that this is found in Egypt. John is probably writing his gospel in Ephesus.
So it has to be written by John, spread around, find his way to Egypt, be copied, and then end up in this manuscript, which means that at minimum, you've already pushed the Gospel of John back into the first century comfortably, and potentially even most likely into the lifetime of the eyewitnesses of these events. And so all of the literature up until that point from the scholarly consensus about the dating of the Gospel of John gets totally rewritten.
And it's because of that guy, and because of my academic work where I was telling you like in Peritectural features, when we look at these tiny manuscripts and you figure out, okay, well, what does that look like on the page? I also made you. So this is, I use two different variations of papayri.
So, you have there, where P52 would have been on the page, and based on the, it's called codicological conventions, the spacings of the words, and the way that the size of the margin that we can see, where it would have been on the page, and how big the page would have actually been.
So this is like a reconstruction. And then I filled in the rest of the text in the same sort of style, stylistic hand of the scribes at that time, what that page would have looked like. So this would have come from what would have been essentially a like a pocket copy of the gospel of John. Wow. That's unbelievable. Wow. That's so fascinating.
So this is the kind of work that I do in terms of trying to figure out, okay, you have these fragments. How big would have this Codex actually been? How big would have the document been? And then you compare and you contrast them to, say, like non-Christian literature, like Thucydides, or Tacitus, or Pliny, or Cicero, or Cassio Dio, those kind of guys. And look at the differences between how these documents would have been put together and written in their day. God, so beautiful.
It's just so bizarre to imagine these people writing this stuff down so, so long ago.
You know what's wild is when you actually get the chance, which I have a number of times to actually handle the original documents. Oh, my God. And where rubber gloves? No, you know why is that we used to do that, but actually the oils in your hands are more abrasive than latex or even cloth. So the oils are more. No, sorry. I said that wrong. That's abrasive. So it used to be that you always had to handle things with, you know, gloves. And nowadays we don't do that anymore.
Ooh, that's wild. And it's touching it with your actual fingers. That's gonna feel bizarre. I was at the two summers ago, I was at the University of Pennsylvania, and I was looking at a manuscript called P1, or Poxy 2, 1.2, and it's a beginning of the third century copy of the first page of Matthew's Gospel.
And when I requested access to it, they told me that the last person to request it was when Pope John Paul II came and visited the States, and they pulled it out for him. So on the library, when you said, like, have to punch your name on the cards, if there was a card, yeah, that guy. So I made a facsimile of that one too. And that one is the, that's the genealogy of Jesus from Matthew's gospel.