Speaker 1: Understand the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea.
Speaker 2: The population of atheists this country is going through.
Speaker 1: The rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If
I tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth,
not because I put my hand on a book and
made a wish and working together for a more rational world.
Speaker 2: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness.
Truth Usian wisdom will come to you that way.
Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 2: What you are about to hear is one of the
most compelling, fascinating, entertaining conversations about the Bible that I
have ever been a part of. And I've been doing
this for eight hundred sum shows over sixteen whatever years,
and I mean seriously, so freaking good. I was going
to go an hour and it turned out to be
double that. So I've divided the show into two halves.
This is part one, with Part two releasing in just
a few days. Coming through the Old Testament, often bouncing
into the New Testament and back, we are deconstructing, debunking,
and just learning about what the Bible is and what
it isn't, So buckle up. We've talked so much recently
about politics, christian nationalism, brain psychology, smart technology. Today I
want to get back to basics. I want to talk
about the Bible or the bump in the Bible. Who
better to do that than Justin DZ Deconstruction Zone. Hi,
justin first time on the show man. I'm glad to
have you, Seth.
Speaker 3: I'm thrilled to be here. You're a household name in
these circles, so I'm happy to you said something about
schlepping at some point, you're schlepping with me. At this point, I.
Speaker 2: Was thanking you for, like, you know, joining me on
the broadcast when I have hosted or co hosted the
line with you, I said back, and I'm you know,
I thought I had a pretty good beat on the Bible,
and I do, but you are able to really get
specific chapter and verse, which is why I thought you
would be perfect for this conversation because a lot of
our audience still engages with Bible believers or they're looking
for a better tool set to help explain why the
Bible is so problematic and why Christianity as a religion
just really splinters at even the most cursory of examinations.
I made a few notes of some stuff I wanted
to get into before we get any further. Give everybody
your background, introduce yourself. Well.
Speaker 3: I actually formally have an education in engineering, so I
worked twenty years as an austrial engineer. But when I
was younger, I wanted to go into ministry. So when
I finished that education, I went to Bible College and
then seminary. I went to Bible College at Bethel University.
But when I was there, because I'm a dinosaur now,
when I was there, it was Bethel College, and then
I went to seminary at Ashland Seminary in Ashland, Ohio.
I specialized in the Old Testament. I know, most people
go to school and they want to read the New Testament,
they want to do all the theological work. I was much
more interested in the relationship between the Old Testament and
the New Testament. And ultimately it was my higher education
that led me away from Christianity. It didn't lead me
specifically into atheism. I came to that after the fact,
but certainly I think reading the Bible, doing the textual criticism,
doing the Hermoneutics, and you know, doing all the the
real work of asking yourself, hey, is this like actually true?
When I freed myself to ask that particular question, it
was very difficult to go to the text and say
that it was true. And so I had to get
real with the data that I had, and that's why
I left Christianity. And now I do deconstruction work on
TikTok and YouTube, and I primarily focus on the book.
And one of the reasons why I do that is
because I think most people in the Christian variety have
this idea that, well, the book is like sacred and perfect,
and like we can trust that Jesus is the Messiah
because of this book. The book is the evidence, right,
But if the book is the evidence, it's not good evidence.
Speaker 2: But justin if somebody is confronted with some of the
contradictions or you know, the moral dilemmas that we see
in the Old End, then New to Testament, don't they
begin to drift out to it's not a religion, it's
a relationship kind of thing. Jesus lives in my heart.
Speaker 3: You absolutely get some of that. With the moral quandaries
alone aren't usually going to cause a Christian to leave
their faith. They were difficult for me when I was deconstructing.
You know, I got to some of the common stuff
like the slavery, the treatment of women, different things like that,
the genocide, and you know what, as a Christian, you
kind of make those moral qundries go away because you're like, well,
that was God's judgment right now, it's not as clean
as that. When you actually get down to reading the passages,
it's not as clean as well. They needed to be punished.
But for a lot of Christians, like they can get
around that. Now, that's not true of all Christians. I
knew some Christians who read about the moral atrocities and
it was like, m it doesn't strike me as a
God that's believable. But for me personally, I was somewhere
in the middle of those two camps. I didn't really
rationalize it, but I wasn't ready to throw the whole
thing out because of it. For me, I was like,
We're gonna put that on the shelf. Well, we'll address
this later. This is a piece of the pie, but
I'm not going to eat this piece just yet. I
need to see the rest of it.
Speaker 2: Isn't much of that a riff on divine command theory.
I mean, whatever God wants to do, we are antswering
his and farm who are we to question what he
wants to do with it? So, I mean that's sort
of a thought stopper right off the bat, right.
Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely. And the problem with divine command theory is
once you get to divine command theory, there's nothing that
you can't justify with it, right, And I think that's
the scary part with the religion.
Speaker 2: If I made justin I guess I should do our
due diligence, would you explain divine command theory for us?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So there's this classic episode in Plato. He writes
through the voice of Socrates, unless you think Socrates really
spoke this, but he writes about the youth row dilemma
where it's like what is good?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: So is do something because good because God spoke it?
Or is something good because there's a subjective form of
good and God can only speak what is objectively good?
And so there's this big quandary about objective morals verse
divine command theory. If God speaks it and it's good
because God speaks it, well, then you have divine command theory.
But if you actually have objective morals, what that means
is that there's something outside of God that he has
to abide by. He's like bound by it. And that's
why most Christians don't realize it. They've been told by C. S.
Lewis that they have objective morals, but they don't. What
they actually have is divine command theory, which is it's
good because God said it. Because once you posit the
idea that there's something outside of God that he has
to follow, well they get they can't get on board
with that. But that's what objective morals are. Objective morals
are completely stance independent, completely mind independent, even independent of
God's mind.
Speaker 2: And then we see a riff on that in Christian nationalism.
They can just decide arbitrarily which of man's laws are wrong,
and that they can ignore because God wants something greater,
and of course they're cherry picking. I don't know if
it's a is it like what Susan B. Anthony once said,
I distrust people who say they know what God wants
because it's so often aligns with their own desires.
Speaker 3: Do you buy that justin Not only is that dangerous,
but I don't think it fits with all of the
classical models. So for example, even in Judaism, if you
talk to a typical Jew today, they're okay with questioning God.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: It's really more of like Christianity adopted this authoritarian point
of view where you can't question God. In number two,
this person over here speaks for God, like this person
is getting the divine revelation, or the Bible speaks perfectly
for God. One of the two things. Not all Christians
believe that the Bible's in errant, but most of them do.
So this is this is just a recipe for a disaster.
But it didn't always have to be that way.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Classically, even in the period of the Greeks, in the Romans,
they could question the gods like that. They could call
into account somebody's behavior that's above the human realm. But
we're we're in a dangerous spot right now where people
are like, not only can you not question God, but
I'm going to tell you what God said.
Speaker 2: We go back to Genesis chapter one and two. I
love the idea that God, who is the smartest being
in the history of history, created this master plan, a
divine blueprint made perfection just whispered his plan into existence,
and within three chapters of Genesis it all goes to shit.
I mean right.
Speaker 3: Away, right away. And you know, the funniest thing is,
like you may or may not have been to like
the Creation Museum. One of my favorite things is at
the Chriatian Museum. They've got this big hall of like
the downfall of man, Like God made this beautiful thing
and then man ruined it. And there's this big sign
that said something along the lines of it wasn't supposed
to be this way, but as preposterble if God designed
it this way and knowing what it would do, and
he could have designed it another way, and he's all knowing, well,
then it was designed to be that way. Like he
did it that way on purpose. He could have did
it a different way. He could have did it without
the tree. He could have did it without the snake.
He could have made the desires of man just a
little bit different. He could have changed the heart, because
he's going to do that later, if you read the
Hebrew Bible, He's going to change the heart of man
later so that they don't have these evil desires. He
could have done that from the very beginning there's so
many solutions. But the reality is the way the modern
Christian reads Genesis is fundamentally different from what the ancient did.
The ancient this was a mythological tale. This wasn't supposed
to be actual history. It takes a little bit of
time for a mythology to get planted in the culture
before people start to treat it like it's a religion.
Speaker 2: The Creation Museum, I remember two big things about it, except,
you know, the dinosaurs are the easy one. Beyond that,
there's this big sign of Adam. You know, he's out
there and he's tilling the earth, and there's a big
sign that said that our sin is responsible for weeds.
So there were no weeds in the Garden of Eden
until the fall of Adam and Eve. And then there's
a whole exhibit justifying incest. And I'm doing it from memory,
but it was like, you know, essentially our DNA was
purer back then. So God said, okay, I don't know,
what do you think about incests justice.
Speaker 3: So that's a real thing. And the problem for the
Christian is that the Hebrew Bible forbids incests. If you
go to Levitigus eighteen and Lavidigus twenty you'll find laws
regarding this, and so then you have to ask yourself, like,
if you believe that God's laws are objective, which they're not,
but if you're a Christian, you think they are and
that they're unchanging because if they're objective, they can't change.
Unless you believe that objective morals can be relative, which
they don't, then you've got a serious problem. How is
it that God's unchanging objective moral law code says that
you can do polygamy and you can do incests and
stuff at some points, but then not at other points. Right,
So this gets you again, This breaks the entire argument
of objective morals because the morals are coming from God's
mind and they change over time, which means you've got
subjective relative morals. And that's the only way you can
deal with this whole situation with incest. And it's also
true that like listen, like, unless God was controlling the
way your genes change with each successive generation, then the
data we have today showing the dangerous effects of incest
breeding would have been true. Then. The only way that
it couldn't have been true then is if God put
something in place and then removed it like God had
a mechanism in the human body to keep the the
DNA from not replicating in a deleterious way, and then
when they fell, I guess he just removed that part.
Speaker 2: A lot of people in this community love the irony
of having a host with a biblical name, and for
those who aren't exactly it's funny because some people will
bring a Bible to a convention and they will say,
would you sign my Bible? And what I do is
I sort of flip over to the seventh or eighth page,
and I find Seth in the Book of Genesis, and
I circle at night. I say I'm on page seven
and that I sign next to it. I like to
tell people I'm the one of Adam and Eve's sons
that was not involved in a homicide. It was always
a good way to set that up. So let's get
into canaan Abel. We're talking about incest with mom to
populate the earth, or going to a different town that
somehow existed to find whys you want to explain this
whole dilemma for us.
Speaker 3: This has always been a problem even for scholars. So
if if Kine has to go east, to Nod and
there's going to be people there. Where did they come from?
The only way there could be people here is if
one of two things happened. God created more than this
small cluster of humans. He maybe he created some over here,
Maybe he created some over there. And certainly there are
Christians who believe that that's a real thing that Christians believe.
But also there's the possibility that there are children of
Eve and Adam that just don't get mentioned, right, so
because they live for so long, the theory is that listen,
there were other children that we don't learn about, especially
because if you look at the lineages, most of the
lineages don't include the girls. They mostly just include the men.
And so without mention of the women, we could ask ourselves, Okay, well,
maybe they had a whole bunch of girls that grew
up to be women, and maybe there was some reproduction there.
Maybe there was some brother on syste or reproduction that
was enough to create some people. But the problem that
that solution fails because when you like look at the
problem with Cain, like Caine's concerned that there's gonna be
like some sort of killing, like he's gonna go and
because of what I've done, somebody's gonna murder me. But
like the problem that you're gonna have with that is like, well,
theoretically that person would have been like, you're a very
near kin, right, Like they would have known the whole story.
They would have like, I don't know how much time
has to pass for you to not know like your
brother or your half brother or your cousin. But it
seems to me kind of preposterous to think that there's
a bunch of people that are related to you directly
related to you over here and when you when you,
when you go and wander in that direction, they're gonna
be like, hey, who's this guy? I heard about what
he did? Maybe we should off the It's just it's
just it's a really weird solution.
Speaker 2: That takes us into Noah's ark too. You've got eight
people committing in sound to create what up to twenty
thousand ethnic groups and four thousand years, and people are
okay with it, like okay, mom and sisters, yay, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's funny because it there's a really weird
genealogical issue that I don't think it gets a lot
of airtime. But I feel like most people who want
the seminary know about it. So, like, there's this really
interesting thing in the lineage that you get in Genesis four.
In Genesis five, we've got these lineages from these individuals,
and in part of the lineage it talks about like, hey,
from this ancestor of Adam, we get the people who
who make who does all this that they make? They
might like harps buyers, metalworks, different things like that, And
so they're like, hey, this is how this people group
got here. But the interesting thing is, like this text
is being written after the flood, right, So if this
is being written after the flood, what that means is
that those people groups don't exist. They're gone. They got
wiped out in the flood. Right, So it can't be
true that one of these children or great grandchildren of
Adam and Eve became one of these people groups over
here after the flood, because all of those people groups
after the flood actually just came from Noah and Noah's family.
They didn't come from any of Adam and Ned's descendants.
Speaker 2: Because the Book of Genesis is not wacky enough, would
you like to tell everyone what the Nephilim are? Because
the Nephilim are awesome.
Speaker 3: So not all Christians believe in Nephelim, and the reason
is because it's so goofy that they don't want to
associate in public with people who know that they believe
in it. But it goes back pretty deep in ancient
Near Eastern Lore and even in Mediterranean lor, this idea
that there were these gods. Now in the ancient Eur
Eastern literature, a lot of people believe these were the Onanaki.
They're not. They're not the Aanaki. They're called the Apkalu.
The Opclu come down, and they show up in the
Book of Enoch as well, but not as Opkalu. But
the Bible calls them sons of God, and in the
ancient Ugarritic we have parallels to this. They're called the
bene Elohim, and they were thought to be literal sons
of God. They were seventy sons born between el and
Atzerote we call her at Scheron nowadays, and they had
they were in charge of all the nations. They got
put in charge of each individual nation. But at one point,
according to Genesis chapter six, these sons of God were like, hey,
these women, we got some down there, which is a
wild thing that if you're cause you're if you're an angel.
In modern Christianity, you think of the angels as being
non corporeal and then they have to like manifest into
corporeal form. But in reality, like listen, if in fact
the angels are up in the sky because that's where
Heaven is, and they're looking down on Earth and they're
lusting after the women, it would assume that they're in
corporeal form up there too, because what is lust. Lust
is a chemical reaction from within the body, right, So
how are they lusting without a body? So they go
down and they sleep with these women and they produce
a race of giants. Poor women who had to give
birth to these gigantic babies. I'm not sure how that
worked out. And they were on the earth, and there's
a huge like meta narrative in the Torah about like
having to get rid of all these giants, even Ogg
the last of the Refaem as he's called the Refem
is another name for the giants, just like the on Achem.
So we have this weird narrative where like God is
like having to stamp out these giants and it's so weird,
and like, then the question has to arise, like, well,
if Ogg is the last of the refeem and God
sent the flood to deal with the giants, well, how
in the world did Ogg or any of the giants
for that matter, survive the flood, because in Deuteronomy chapter
two we find there are more giants. So, like, I
don't know if you know about this solution, but according
to the ancient rabbits, if you read the Tumid, what
they say is that there's one animal that's the Rama,
and there's one Og, and they survived the flood by
clinging on to the outside of the boat. And that
is how both the Rama and King Ogg were able
to survive the flood, even though they believed that just
like the people in the Arab tradition, they believe that
the water was boiling. So not only was the water boiling,
but also a god had to create a pocket of
cool water around the arc so that the arc didn't overheat.
And because there was a pocket of cool water there,
that allowed both King Og and the Rama to survive the.
Speaker 2: I guess that gets us around the did no one
else in the Middle East own a boat problem with
the Noah's ark story, because some people have mentioned that
so incess to repopulate the earth, Jesus, we're still in
the Book of Genesis. Speaking of Genesis, you talked about
corporeal forms for the angels. I'm reminded in later Genesis
Jacob wrestles with some say with God, some say with
an angel. Right, that would be a physical form of
the divine interacting with mortal humans. Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And in the early days, for sure, this idea
that a god was like a corporeal but was like
more of a superhuman that was common. In fact, there's
a really good book on this subject. I recommend it
a lot. It is expensive, so I apologize ahead of
time because it started out as I think a PhD
dissertation and then it got turned into a book by
Esther Memorius when it's called When God's Were Men, and
it goes through the the engiineer Stern idea of like, hey, listen,
in the old days, the gods were really man like.
They had arms and legs and noses, and they could smell,
and they could eat. And maybe a good follow up
on this you might want to check out is Francesca
Stavrakapulu's book God and Anatomy. This idea that God had
a body is so pervasive in the Bible and in
the ancient eur East it's hard to get rid of it.
It's not until we get like this later Greek philosophical
nonsense that we start to get this weird concept of like, no,
there's this God that's completely immaterial and transcends all reality.
That's not part of the ancient Jewish mindset at all.
Speaker 2: Isn't this a lot like you know, let's say the
Greek gods, right, they had very human characteristics, whether it
was Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite, et cetera. They were jealous, they lusted.
There was all this scheming and drama going on. I
mean we see that in the Christian God, oh for sure.
Speaker 3: Like if you look at the Christian God, he comes
down and eats, so we find him in corporeal form
eating in Genesis eighteen when he visits Abraham, it's Yahweh
and two angels that visit. And there's a really easy
case to make for that. We find elsewhere, like in
Exus twenty four there's seventy elders along with Moses, Aaron,
Nadab and Abby, who they go up on a mountain
and share a meal with Yahweh. He's got feet that
you can visibly see. They see him. In Exus twenty four,
Ezekiel sees it as well. And then also we find
in Believe the Book of Job, which I think we'll
get into at some point here today. It talks is
either Job or one of the Psalms or Proverbs where
it says God walks on the top of the firmament.
There's this idea in the Hebrew Bible where God's thrown
like Psalm one fifty says, it says his habitation is
in the firmament, that is at the very top of
the firmament, and he looks down from his heavenly throne.
And then even says he walks on the firmament. So
this idea that God, hey, God's up way up here,
He's way above us, but like he still is, like
he's got feet, arms, legs, and even the angels. We
learn in the Psalms that the manna that came from
heaven was the food of the angels. Like these these
people up here in heaven, they eat, they drink, and
this is common if you read the bail cycle that
comes from the Canaanite literature, and the Canaanites were the
precursors to the Israelites. But if you read the Canaanet literature,
like they're up there drinking wine and getting tipsy and
having eating buffets and so like this idea of a
non corporable, you know, pantheon of Gods is just complete
nonsense that came thousands, you know, fifteen hundred years later, which.
Speaker 2: Takes us back to the shame of Adam. And even
they're hiding from God in the garden of Eden. So
now I'm picturing God. He's wandering through trees, you know.
Oh look, they're behind a shrub. God's like, hello, my children.
It's just a bizarre isn't it true? Not check me
on this. The story in Exodus, I want to say,
it's like one of the thirty something where God is
going to appear to Moses, but he says, you can't
see me in my full glory. Irt'le freaking I'll kill you.
So when I walk past, you can see my ass.
It's how I read the verse, and I'm sure I'm
reading it wrong. Just to help me out with that.
Speaker 3: I think it's usually just not translated. There's a passage
in there where God says, I'm going to back that
ass up, but they translate that out.
Speaker 2: The verse says something like I will let you see
my backside, which I mean, I guess might mean his shoulders,
the back of his hair or something. You can see
you can glimpse just enough of me so you won't
be in physic danger. Would that be more accurate?
Speaker 3: That is it? Yeah, we're so, that's the Exos thirty three.
Exous thirty three. As you said, God is like, you
can't see my face and live, you can see my backside.
But it's funny because they're in the same chapters. There's
this weird phrase where it talks about Moses, is that
Moses uh spoke with yahweh face to face as a
man speaks to his friend. And then in the same chapter,
God's like, hey, you can't see my face and live, Like,
wait a minute now. To be sure. While this is
a it in the most literal sense, it is a contradiction,
but it's also an idiomatic expression. When you talk to
somebody face to face, it doesn't always mean that you're
literally like physically face to face. It just means that
you're having a you know, a one to one conversation,
but it is it's delightful the way that they've just
put it in the same chapter.
Speaker 2: In our next segment, let's do a whole bunch prophecies
that failed. Oh, the apologists like to say that the
Old Testament writers spake it and it came true. Not
so much. We're going to find out more next. I'm
speaking here with Justin Dez of Deconstruction Zone. Did you
bring some greatest hits or greatest shits from the Bible?
Some stuff that you get to talk about that I
don't know that entertains you or frustrates you any specifics.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know what, there's a lot of stuff from
the Bible that I don't think a lot of people
know about, but is really interesting and I think it
for me, it kind of helped me or moved me
along in my deconstruction. I think the first thing is
probably like some of the textual criticism stuff. So there's
this really interesting thing that happened where like we have
a Bible, right Like I can hold up a Bible
and people are like, oh, yeah, it's a Bible, and
it's just, you know, it's always been the same. Like
I can open up a Hebrew Bible and it reads
something and then it said the same thing two thousand
years ago. Turns out that's not the case. In fact,
anyone who's bothered to take the New Testament quotations and
compare them with the Old Testament will find out the
Bible did, in fact change. And so like one of
one of my favorite goodies is the difference between the
Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek Old Testament. And most
people might know that typically, not always, but typically the
New Testament quotes from the Greek septuagen There's only like
two or three cases where it quotes from the Hebrew,
and we're going to touch on one of those. But
there's this fun stuff that happens both in Isaiah and Hoseiah.
So in the Book of Matthew, we find that chapter
seven of Isaiah is quoted in chapter one of Matthew,
verse twenty three talking about the virgin birth. And this
is a really common thing. No one knows that the
original Hebrew doesn't say virgin. This is hamahara, which means
a pregnant young woman. And then the Greek says parthenos,
which at the time of Matthew it really did mean
virgin at the time it was written in Isaiah though
it didn't. We've got lots of instances in this period
where it's used of people that are non virgins. Like
there's a woman who has a child with aries in
the Iliad, she's referred to as a Parthenosenis thirty four.
Dinah's referred to as a Parthenos after she's already been
assaulted by Schuchem. And there's lots of examples. So, but
the point is, you know, Matthew was relying on the
Greek sceptu agent. He couldn't read Hebrew most likely or
he didn't have access to the Hebrew, and he was like, oh,
this this is how we get this virgin birth nonsense. Now,
if you're a Christian, you might say to yourself, Okay, well,
if this is the case, then that mean that must
mean that the Greek sceptuagent is primary. Like if the
Greek septuagent has a rendering that's different from the Hebrew Bible,
we should take the Greek right, because our New Testament
treats the Greek as though that's the one that's the
one you need to read right, because otherwise you couldn't
get to Isaiah chapter seven, you'd never get it with Alma.
So nevertheless, this could be an acceptable proposition if you
don't read the rest of the Greek septuagent, because when
you get to other vital prophecies that they really want
to be true, they can't be true of the Greek subtuagen.
And so, for example, in Isaiah nine to six, we
get this passage about you know, a child has been
born to us, a son given to us. You know,
authority will be on his shoulders. He'll be a prince
of peace, YadA, YadA, YadA, everlasting father. And be like, ah,
this must be a prophecy about Jesus. Now like almost
no biblical scholar believes it. They think that this is
most likely an enthronement or a birth prophecy for Hezekiah.
We can worry about that later, but the reality is
none that's relevant. If you think that the Greek septuagent
must take primary focus over the actual Hebrew, then this
passage goes away. It's it's doesn't read remotely the same
in the Greek septuagen. You'll never make Isaiah nine six
be about Jesus. If you're reading it in the LEXX,
that's the shorthand for the septuagent. In fact, let me
let me grab it for you real quick. I'm going
to show you or read for you. Isaiah ninety six.
This is in the translation from the Greek. It says,
because a child was born for us, a son also
given to us, whose sovereignty was upon his shoulder, and
he is named messenger of great Council, for I will
bring peace upon the rulers, and peace and health to him.
Wait what, that's way different, not even close to the same,
And it's really funny, and people wonder, like, hey, how
come Isaiah ninety six was never quoted in the New Testament.
Don't you think that be a slam dunk for the
New Testament authors. Well, it wasn't a slam dunk because
they didn't read the Hebrew. They only read the Greek,
and the Greek didn't sound anything remotely like Jesus. And
then the other thing is if you throw out the
Hebrew Bible, you also lose Hoseiah eleven to one, which
Matthew quotes. This is one of the few times that
Matthew seems to be quoting or alluding to the Hebrew
text when they go in chapter two, it says they
go into Egypt and then they wait there until the
death of Aired in order to fulfill what was spoken
through the prophet out of Egypt, I I've brought my
son out of Egypt. And if you go to Hosea
eleven to one in the Greek. In fact, we'll pull
it up real quick. It's a really interesting passage because,
like the meaning is pretty pretty obvious. Right, So is
that out of Egypt I've called my son. That's the
Hebrew in the English, but if you read it in
the Greek, it actually says out of Egypt, I've called
my children. Wait a minute, what And there's a couple
of variants.
Speaker 2: So this is what a matter of New Testament authors saying,
I need to make something come true to fit my narrative.
I mean, this is all probably speculation, but you know,
it's easy to fulfill prophecy if you've got a cheat
sheet in the back, and then you can alter it
at will, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what we find in the in the New
Testament is they're kind of bouncing back and forth between
the Hebrew Bible and the Greek septuagen at various times
trying to figure out what can I use to make
Jesus the Messiah? How can I justify Jesus as the Messiah?
And when the Hebrew Bible fits their fancy, like Hoseah
eleven one, they grab it, said, that's what I want.
When the Greek subtuigent fits their fancy, they're like, that's
what I want. But the reality is like if you
just think, like listen, if God gave you two different
texts and they disagree with each other, and that means
He put you in a position as a Christian to
have to look at both texts and ask yourself which
one of these is true? Why wouldn't He just give
you one of them that was accurate? And this is
why textual criticism is so important, because once you see
all the differences in the text, and you see how
the New Testament kind of exploited the differences to make
their case, well, then you're like, how do we know
what was really in the Hebrew Bible. There's so much
there that seemed to have changed that like, how could
we possibly know what was original? Especially given the fact
that our oldest Hebrew manuscripts and the Dead Sea scrolls
don't go anywhere near the time that the Torah was given.
Speaker 2: Okay, I was going to go back to the early
Old Testament, but you said, Matthew says, and I'm not
trying to be pedantic, but Matthew being written in the
third person about Matthew. Matthew did not write Matthew, right.
Speaker 3: That seems to be the case. The earliest manuscript is P. One,
he one of Matthew. We have the section where the
title Matthew would have been applied. We don't find it. Typically,
like in the Gospels, it'll say something like ew On Gellian,
you know, Kata Johannen or Katta Maton. We'll find that
in Greek, but we don't find it in P.
Speaker 2: One.
Speaker 3: That's the earliest one we've got. And to think that
Matthew wrote Matthew to me is kind of a huge leap,
because Matthew copies his own conversion story from Mark. So
in Mark we find the conversion story of the tax
collector Levi. That same story is ripped off in Matthew,
told from the third person, and then the name gets
changed from Levi to Matthew, which means either A he
had two names or B somebody got it wrong. Maybe
Mark got the wrong person and Matthew was correcting the record,
and Matthew does do that. Matthew corrects Mark chapter two
when Mark said that Jesus said that Abiathar was the
high priest when David ate the showbread out of for
Samuel twenty one to believe. So and that's wrong. So
Matthew cuts it up. Matthew's like, nope, we're just going
to remove Abiathar altogether, and we're going to fix it up.
And so it's weird to me that this guy named
Matthew would copy his own conversion story from somebody else
and then tell it in the third person. It's just
such a weird juxtaposition. Even if he wanted to tell
it in the third person, it seems like he would
have had some extra detail, he would have had some
more flourishes maybe, but no, it's basically the same.
Speaker 2: Another example of the same problem being the claim by
many apologists that Moses wrote the Pentateuch right the Torah,
the help re Bible, the first five books of the
Old Testament. And I'm like, well, okay, first of all,
there's the issue of the first verses happening at the
beginning of space time before there were any humans. And
then you've got the chronicling of Moses's own death and
the third person in Deuteronomy blah blah blah. So when
apologist comes to you and they're like, Moses wrote the Pentateuch,
how would you respond?
Speaker 3: I would take them to the many instances of something
in the text where Moses simply could not have written it. So,
for example, in Genesis eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, all those
chapters we've got references to like people groups that didn't
really exist. So in Genesis eleven, we've got reference to
the Chaldeans, but they didn't exist. I mean, the people
group existed, but they weren't called Chaldeans. Then that didn't
come until the period of the Greeks. This is this
is not what they would have been called. So why
in the world if Moses is writing Genesis eleven, why
would he put the word for Caaldeans when there's not
a word that was even used for another thousand years.
That would be preposterous. And then another thing, roughly the
same chapter Chances fourteen, we learned about this battle or
these multiple battles between Abraham and some of these we'll
call them marauders for lack of better words. But he
says he chases them as far as the land of Dan. Well,
that's the northern tip, and that's the right Dan. If
anyone knows their Bible really well, they know that there
was actually two Dans. There's one down by the land
of Philistine Felictia, and then they failed to take hold
of the land, so they moved up to the northern tip.
But here's the thing. The tribe of Dan didn't exist
when Abraham was around. He could not have chased the
enemies as far as the land of Dan because the
land of Dan didn't exist. And you might say, well, yeah,
but Moses was writing it, Well, it didn't exist when
Moses is around, right, Moses never entered the Promised Land.
There was no settlement of the Promised Land in Moses's lifetime.
It would have been preposterous for Moses to write as
far as the land of Dan. He would have no
idea where land of Dan is or whether whether or
not it was even settled by the Danites. So we've
got lots of like, really weird anachronisms like that. And
then there's even more so, like there's a passage where
there it's just thirty six we get kings. Let me
pull it up. These are the kings who reigned in
the land of Edom before any king reigned over the Israelites. Oh. Interesting,
So Moses is like, hey, prior to any king in Israel,
here were the kings of Edom. But he wouldn't have
known that. He died way before Israel ever got a king.
Moses theoretically died roughly in the fourteen hundreds, so you
know he was eighty when the excess happened. According to
the Bible, he died at one hundred and twenty and
he was in the desert wandering for forty years, So
he wandered for forty years, so he would know about
the Edomite kings most likely, but he wouldn't know about
any Edomite kings after his death. There are about maybe
three to four hundred years between him and the first
king of Israel, and he would have no idea that
there was ever a king in Israel. He has not
been told that there will be a king in Israel,
or when there was a king in Israel, or how
many Itamite kings will reign before there's a king in Israel.
This is all information that doesn't come until hundreds of
years later, which is why we see lots of references
in the Torah of saying when they were on the
east side of the river. Wait, what do you mean
if you're riding from the western side of the river
about a time earlier when they were on the eastern
side of the river. That can't be Moses. Moses never
crossed over. So this was obviously written by somebody hundreds
of years later that had already been living in the
land of Israel and is writing about an earlier time
before they had crossed over.
Speaker 2: If you'll forgive a deedtour taken by my primitive primate brain.
I found myself smirking when you were talking about Dan's
northern tip, and I just want to apologize to everyone
for being so base, just a very bad person. I
have another prophecy question, but first I'm going to pinball
it back to you. Any other favorites apologetics that you
like to address in your work.
Speaker 3: Since we're still talking about historical I'm going to call
them blunders. We've got a couple prophecies that simply don't
come true, and I'm going to go out on a
limb say that they're never going to come true for
reasons that we'll address here. So, for example, we've got
an interesting promise if you go to the book of Isaiah,
both in chapter twenty nine and also in chapter thirteen.
But we're going to go to Isaiah twenty nine. Isaiah
twenty nine, we hear about this battle that comes against Jerusalem,
but Jerusalem doesn't get taken, right, So this obviously is
going to be the siege that was done by the Assyrians,
not the Babylonians. Blonians overtook Jerusalem, the Assyrians did not.
The Assyrians only wiped out the ten northern tribes. Now,
the interesting thing is if you go to the vision
that we find in chapter thirteen, what we find is
that the people who do get exiled, the people who
do get taken away, it says that they're going to
be restored. And it talks about how this we got
this period of restoration right, says, shall not Lebanon in
a very little while become a fruit field that never happened,
and the fruit field be regarded as a forest. On
that day the death shall hear the words of a scroll,
and a freed from the gloom of darkness, and the
eyes of the blind shall see. The meek shall obtain
fresh joy in the Lord, and the neediest people shall
exalt the Holy One of Israel. For the tyrant shall
be no more, and a scoffer will cease to be,
and all those alert to evil shall be cut off.
So this is really interesting. We've got this idea of like, hey,
now that God has like exiled some of the people,
but not all the people, because Jerusalem and Judea survived,
God's gonna make it so that there's no more tyrants.
We're gonna have like this time of peace, there's gonna
be no scoffer, there'd be no more tyrants. But that's
just simply not true. Within uh, within his lifetime, we
already see the Babylonian army building up forces and getting
ready to go on a conquering spree, and then they
eventually go on and conquer all of the Levant and
then even Jerusalem. So this prophecy didn't come true. And
if this is referring to the restoration and the in
gathering of the northern tribes, which it certainly seems to be. Well,
then that never happened either, and I don't think it
will happen because a lot of the people that were
scattered never came back to the land. Their identity is
kind of lost to history. That's why we talk about
the lost Ten Tribes. So all of the prophecies in
the early proper, it's like Hoseiah Amos and the early
parts of Isaiah that talk about the restoration of the
ten northern tribes that God punished with the Assyrian captivity.
They're not coming back. They don't. Their ancestry is lost
to history, right, So the fact that God's going to
gather them again is kind of preposterous, as is chapter thirteen.
In chapter thirteen, we've got an out of place prophecy
that is much later than the earlier parts of Isaiah
because it's talking about the Babylonian exile. I don't know
how it ended up in this part. It should be
in Deutero Isaiah, but it talks about what God's going
to do to Babylon with the Israelites, which will never happen.
The punishment comes in chapter fourteen, says but the Lord
will have compassion on Jacob and will again choose Israel
and settle them in their own land. And aliens will
join them and attach themselves to the House of Jacob,
and the nations will take them and bring them to
their place, and the House of Israel will possessed the
nations as male and female slaves in the Lord's land.
So what's happening here? Says that they're going to take
the captives who took them captive and make them captives.
Did that happen with the Babylonians? Did Israel ever take
the Babylonian's captive? No, they never did. Could they still
do it? No? The Babylonians don't exist. So this whole
prophecy of God taking the Babylonian's captive for the Israelites
not only did it not come true, it will simply
never come true.
Speaker 2: I saw a great line by an apologetics website that said,
prophecy is not prediction. They were trying to explain how
so many prophecies did not come true, and I still
didn't understand what I was reading. But we were getting
into the prophecy of tire in Ezekiel. Right, Navikanezer's army
is going to go in devastate the city. The entire
place is going to be raised and burned down and looted,
and then tire is not going to exist ever again.
It's going to be a barren place, so barren that
fish and are going to throw their nets out and
dry their nets on the rubble. And then, of course
in Zachariah is still talking about tire. What the hell justin.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not only that, So in Ezekiel twenty six we
get this prophecy against tire, and there's a couple of them,
but like, it didn't come true, right, there was a
besieging of tire, but it wasn't fully taken. It didn't
get fully taken until Alexander. But like in Ezekiel twenty nine,
we actually get an excuse from God, like we get
an admission from God that the whole tire prophecy failed.
He says in verse seventeen, in the twentieth year, the
first month, on the first day of the month, the
word of Lord came to me. Mortal King Nebukanezzer of
Babylon made his army labor hard against tyre. Every head
was made bald, and every shoulder was rubbed bare. Yet
neither he nor his army he got anything from tire
to pay for the labor that he had expended against it. Therefore,
thus said the Lord God, I will give the land
of Egypt to King Nebukinezzer of Babyloni. He shall carry
off its wealth and just spoil it and plunder it.
So there's an admission. It's really funny in Ezekiel, like
Ezekiel's got to go do like propaganda work for like,
oh my gosh, the prophecy failed. So it's like, as
it turns out, God's got a new prophecy, right, But Ezekiel,
if you read the Book of Ezekiel like it really is,
it's a cope. Ezekiel really is coping with the reality
of his time period, and one of the biggest realities
that he was dealing with is that there were prophecies
not coming true, a bunch of them not coming true.
He's writing during the time of the Babylonians, which means
all of the Assyrian prophecies were they've all failed already.
So now we're getting our asses kicked by the Babylonians,
and the Israelites are like, eh, fuck this, I don't
think this Yahweh stuff is really real, right, So he
says something that is super interesting and gets overlooked. Almost
everybody overlooks Ezekiel twelve, except for people that are in
the like full prederist camp. There's a note here in
twelve that to me, I think, basically debunks the entire
Hebrew Bible. Says, the word of the Lord came to me, mortal.
What is this proverb of yours about the land of
Israel that says the days are prolonged and every vision
comes to nothing. Tell them, therefore, thus say it the
Lord God. I will put an end to this proverb,
and they shall use it no more as a proverb
in Israel. But say to them, the days are near
and the fulfillment of every vision, For there shall no
longer be any false vision or flattering divination, which there
are false visions later in the Hebrew Bible. But the
Lord will speak a word that I shall speak, and
it will be fulfilled. No longer will it be delayed.
But in your days, o rebellious house, I will speak
the word and fulfill it, says the Lord. The word
of the Lord came to me a second time, it
says Mortal, the House of Israel is saying that the
vision he hees is for many years ahead. He prophesied
for distant times. Therefore say to them, thus say it
the Lord God. None of my words will be delayed
any longer. But the word that I speak will be fulfilled,
does the Lord God. So we've got this interesting prophecy
in Ezekiel twelve that would lead us to believe all
the rest of that book, all the prophecies that came
after that, should have been fulfilled in his lifetime, and
they just simply weren't coming up.
Speaker 2: I'm going to talk about the Dead Sea scrolls. These
were supposedly proofs of the authenticity and holiness of scripture.
I don't know about that. Let's ask Justin d Z
after this, continuing with part one of a two part
series on the Bible, Part two is going to release
in just a few days, and then I will go
back and put that link in the description box for
both shows in case you're catching this in archive. Justin
DZ of Deconstruction Zone he is a seminary graduate, he
has a master's in divinity, and he knows a lot
about the Bible. I want to get into the Dead
Sea Scrolls in Justice. Second, I have to ask do
you have a favorite translation that you use for reference?
You know, the apologist are always arguing. Put fifty in
a room and say, okay, do you use the KJV,
the NKJV, the New American, the Revised New American, the
you know, the NASB, the NIV, the Message Bible, the
Living Bible. God. I mean, it's crazy. Do you have
a favorite?
Speaker 3: Justin I do have a favorite. So my favorite Bible
is the New Oxford Annotated Study Bible. In fact, I've
got a copyright here.
Speaker 2: Now I see two cats. Now, oh, I said both
of them?
Speaker 3: There, Yeah, both of them here. This is the fifth
it's the NRSV edition, the new one. It's coming out
this spring, is going to be NRSV updated. And this
is a good scholarly Bible. And the reason why most
scholars prefer the NRSV. Almost all the new Bibles that
are study Bibles are in the NRSV Updated Edition, including
the Westminster Bible, and you know a bunch of other
Bibles that are kind of coming out in that vein
of study Bible is because it was done by scholars
to be a scholarly translation. Most translations are trying to
like be scholarly but also not deconvert people. Like they're
keenly aware that if they translate something in a particular way,
it could cause people to no longer hold the same doctrine.
So they kind of toe the line with that, and
you'll find that in the ESV. The SV does that.
There's parts of the NIV where they purposely try to
be Christological where there's no need for for it. And
we have like these Messianic helpers in the Hebrew Bible
and these other translations where it'll say, like where it
says like an anointed One, it'll say the Messiah in
capital letters, even though that's not in the text. So
the NRSP doesn't do all that nonsense. It's like, listen,
here's the translation. You worry about what it means. Like,
we're not doing theology for you. We're just translating the text.
Theology is your business. And so that's why the translation
is so well used by scholars and academics, because they're
not interested in reading a Bible that is telling them
what to think about the text. They're like, here's the text,
here's what it says. You guys can do the theology
on your own time.
Speaker 2: When you see pastors get together with their various translations
and ask them to agree on the basics. Right, literal
six day creation where Adam and Eve the literal parents?
Was it an actual flow, global flood, regional floods? Was
it a metaphor slavery and dentured servitude? The role of
women speaking in tongues? How do you baptize? Is there
a literal hell or is it just a grave or separation?
The Book of Revelation? Right? The experts can't agree on
the basics, which I think is I find it a
useful way to help debunk the bunk. Do you go
there at all? Justin Yeah?
Speaker 3: I think that's important. So one thing you'll find in
apologetics is there's a lot of people that they'll find
like their favorite conservative scholar, and they'll be like, well,
this guy over here says right, and then they just
run away with that. Right. They think, if I find
one scholar that believes what I believe, I'm justified in
my belief. But in reality, like for every position that's
out there, I'm sure there's ten scholars that will vouch
for that position. Now, that's why we look at what
is like the scholarly consensus, Like, so we look at
an issue and we're like, okay, what are most scholars
saying about this? Because what you don't want to do
is base your beliefs on outliers, right, But that's really
the goal of apologetics is to find an outlier that
tells the Christian like, hey, it's okay, you're justified in
believing this because of this outlier over here. But if
you actually look at like the bulk of doctrine and
the bulk of like the academic work that's done on
the Hebrew Bible, you'll find that typically they don't agree
with the apologist's position hardly ever. But to be fair,
you know, the goal of the apologist is not to
it's not to make this stuff necessarily like true. The
goal of the apologist is to say, well, it could
be true because of this.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: As soon as you give it like the air of possibility,
you've kind of done your job. You've soothed the person
who had doubts, like you've said, listen, no, no, no, no,
we'll put this band aid down your doubts. It'll be okay,
and then hopefully it goes away.
Speaker 2: The word apologetics, of course, translating speaking in defense, which
brings us to the question of why God would need
pithy humans who got everything else wrong to explain and
or defend him. Let's talk about this major, perhaps arguably
one of the biggest Biblical discoveries, mid twentieth century discovery
near the Dead Sea of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hey,
wait a minute, this proves the Bible. Let's talk about that.
Speaker 3: Certainly not now, there are some people who've done a
good job of trying to integrate what we find in
the Dead Sea Scrolls with what we find in the
Christian tradition. Like we see lots of crossover between John
the Baptist and these scenes. We see lots of we'll
call them parallels between the two Messiah theory and what
we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we even
find the interpretive method that we find in the New Testament,
where it basically says, but here's a prophecy from the
Old Testament, and we're going to spiritualize it. Right, We're
going to give you an interpretation that's spiritualized, not literal.
We find that in the Dead Sea Scrolls as well.
We've got like the pressure of Habit Kook and the
pressure of Nahum, where it says like here's this passage,
but here's what it really means. Right, So there's a
lot of crossover with Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls,
But what we also find is a lot of failed predictions.
Like at one point there were two leaders at least
within the community that believed that they were in the Messiah.
And it's also kind of silly because like the entire
the entire group wasn't like homogeneous. It seemed like there
was some infighting, right, So it's it's an interesting thing,
but it's also causing the question, like in the Dead
Sea Scrolls, like if they literally believed in the two
Messiah theory, and James Tabor talks about this a bit,
Doctor James Tabor, if they really bleed into two Messiah theory,
then that means the other Messiah would have been John
the Baptist. But like according to the Bible, John the
Baptist wasn't the Messiah. In fact, he explicitly denied being
the Messiah. He even explicitly denied being Elijah. I'm Elijah
or the Messiah's a I'm you know, I'm the one
in the wilderness, so like it's really interesting there. It
feels like there's crossover with Christianity, but when you actually
read the New Testament, it weeds out some of those options.
That being said, the other problem we have with the
Dead Sea scrolls is like it doesn't really it doesn't
really know what to do with the Greek. So we
talked previously about the textual criticism standpoint of like the
Greek and the Hebrew not always agreeing with each other.
But we find the same thing in the Dead Sea scrolls.
About sixty to sixty five percent of our Dead Sea
scrolls match what's in our Massoretic text, meaning it's somewhat comparable.
About six percent match the Greek, which is interesting. So
like if you if you're looking at the whole of
the documents from the Dead Sea, we've got a bunch
about five to six percent that match what we find
in the Greek manuscripts, and then we've got a whole
host of other manuscripts that don't really match. They don't
line up with the Greek scept two agent, they don't
really line up with the Massoretic text, and you're just like,
we don't know what family of texts they even belong to.
And then we find huge issues like if you compare
Jeremiah in the in the Greek to Jeremiah in the Hebrew,
there's all kinds of problems, like the entire chapters are mithing.
Sometimes they're moved around into different locations. In fact, I
recently did a deep dive on this with doctor Kip Davis.
That was his area of expertise for his PhD. So, like,
we just find so many problems when you introduce the
Dead Sea scrolls, all it really tells you is that
a lot of these texts still were not stable. They
were still changing even in the time period of the
Dead Sea.
Speaker 2: Once again, I put the cart before the horse. We
have to I'd like to explain what they are. So
are these treated as kind of an uncanonized scripture, are
they corroborating documents? Are they something else? What are they?
Speaker 3: It's actually a really cool mixture of all of the above.
So we've got some documents that were being copied and
edited we'll say two to three hundred years prior to Jesus,
and this copyist's work was being done at different locations
by different people. In fact, there are a lot of
people who do textual criticism, but just on the Dead
Sea Scrolls, and they believe that they've identified particular scribes
based on their handwriting and based on the language they use.
They can say, oh, this document was done by you
know scribe one point b. You know. The other thing
is that we find it spans a good range of
time though. We've got you know, two to two and
a half, maybe even three centuries worth of texts, which
means some of the latest texts that are in the
Dead Sea Scrolls actually post state Jesus, because remember those
scrolls weren't stashed until probably the time of Hadrian, after
the Second Revolt or the second major revolts. So we've
got the Barkochlo revolt in the early second century that
came to a culmination about one thirty six, and they
outlawed all Jewish Hebrew texts. If you were found with them,
you're in a huge heap of trouble. And so what
we found, and this is what scholars typically think, how
the Dead Sea scrolls, a lot of them got there
was they in order to preserve their texts, they hid
these out in the caves during the diaspora. And so
what we have While they were all probably hidden out
there roughly the same time period, what was hidden was
a collection of texts that did span a good amount
of time. And not only that, they weren't just Biblical texts.
We also got rules for the community. We've got psalms
that aren't from the Bible. We've got prophecies that don't
show up in the Bible. We've got apocalyptic messages that
don't show up in the Bible, like the Apocalypse of Milkisa,
dec So it's kind of a cool collection of different manuscripts.
You can section them off and just read the biblical manuscripts,
or you can section them off and just read kind
of their community manuscripts, because they had lots of rules
for how to behave in the community and what happens
when you break the rules.
Speaker 2: Later this week, Part two of this two part series
with Justin de Z, will Conte and I'll see you then.
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