Speaker 1: Welcome to the gods Iye View podcast. I am your host, Trevor.
How is everyone doing out there? You guys? This is crazy.
I have like a series of legitimate interviews lined up
over the next couple of weeks. I don't know what's happening.
I'm not sure how I'm gonna do it. I might
need to just modify my entire personality because some of
these guys are some heavy hitters, and I'm living this
sort of secret double life where I'm semi anonymous on
this show. So I'm comfortable just being myself. But I've
been told many times that myself is not the best. Uh,
the genuine version of myself is not the best, the
best version of myself, so to speak. No, I'm just
messing around. It's just people. Well, here's what's going on.
So we have a few interviews lined up with some uh,
some folks who have written some really just incredible research papers,
papers that, in my opinion, have really shaped the way
we look at consciousness. We also have a paleontologist coming on,
so I'm excited about that. But then we have some
real heavy hitters in the consciousness space and the orchestrated
objective reduction space, which I'm casually fascinated by, as you know,
and the the neuronal microtubule as this like structure that's
so somehow scales its resonance. It it vibrates or it
does it does a vibrator to the tubulent subunits oscillate.
I'm not sure, but let's just say it resonates and
it scales to this like mega sounds ridiculous. It's like
this large network of crystalline resonance structures inside your mind.
And people suggest that there could be sort of a
quantum basis to consciousness and that these structures are intimately involved.
It's really quite amazing. And I've seen some presentations and
I've read some papers and it's really it's way above
my head. But it's fascinating. So we'll be we'll be
bringing some interesting folks on the next few weeks. Please
stay tuned. But yeah, I am just a little bit
nervous because we're kind of where getting operation over here.
You know, this is being ran out of my basement.
So maybe we'll I might need a spruce to place up,
get some art on the wall, that kind of thing. Anyway,
So this will be our last our third and final
installment for Deconstructing the Fall of Adam and Eve with
Alex O'Connor and Jonathan Pago Pago Pagot, I don't know.
Jonathan Pago is an Orthodox Christian. I believe in some
kind of academic Alex is a YouTuber, but he I
believe has a PhD in philosophy or something, I'm not sure,
from Oxford. A couple of real smart folks, Alex playing
the atheist or the agnostic, Jonathan playing the Christian. And
it's been interesting. It's been interesting watching John things take
on this. I think I think Alex's criticisms are pretty
difficult to contend with intellectually. You know, at some point
you do just kind of have to say, like, well,
I don't know, I just I kind of feel like
I can see what the message is and I just
believe it. You know. It's tough. It's tough to contend
with this intellectually. So we'll see, we'll see how this
part three goes. Interestingly, speaking of Orthodox Christianity, there is
a there's a there's a big Orthodox church about forty
five minutes from my house and the the Father There
is a pretty well known media personality. He does a
lot of does a lot of interviews promoting Orthodox Christianity
and different you know, he has like a publishing company
and different things, and I really like him. He seems
very consistent. Everything he says, you know, more or less
seems to make sense, which is nice. Anyway, they're opening
up a church in my town. They're opening up a
second location, so I kind of want to check it out.
I'll check it out and report back to you guys.
Let you know. Anyway, So let's just jump right in.
So you know, we're going to start off with Alex
is going to be just criticizing this idea of like
why is the serpent there? And why are Adam and
Eve and the serpent? Why are they intermingled? Why are
they accessible to the serpent? It is a reasonable question.
It sort of implies that the serpent, for whatever reason,
had to be there, whatever the serpent represents, you know,
in this story. Otherwise you would have to propose that
God is limited, or that God is I don't know
what testing Adam and Eve I suppose, but that seems
odd in the context of them not having the knowledge
of good and evil yet, So maybe it's why is
he just testing their ability to listen these creatures that
are just you know, not even self aware yet they're
almost like animals, except they're made in God's image, so
you almost you kind of are forced to conclude almost
that like, no, there's a reason why the serpent is there.
It has to be there for some reason, and so
they'll briefly just explore that, and they're going to shift
topics into the gnostic interpretation in Jesus's role in Eden,
and if we're still enjoying it, then in twenty minutes
we may go further. Or he made us wrap up
the series. Here we go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, God, God creates the Garden of Eden, and even
if for some reason, the serpent needs to be in there,
like okay, you know, put this open, you know, a
thousand miles away, so that by the time it finally,
you know, walks its way across the garden and finds
Adam and Eve, they've already been given that. It's already
the Sabbath, they've already be given the tritonology and evil
and there's nothing they can do, right. It just seems
it seems totally strange to me, Like I say, this
is this is what I was getting out earlier when
I say that if you just say this is the
way the world is, and I'm offering a mythological, you know,
account of the world, fine, Yeah, the serpent, you know,
convinces Adam and Eve that's what happened. But if you believe,
as a Christian that God sort of designs this world.
God creates this world, and maybe he's limited in some
respect as to what he can do by the laws
of necessity. Maybe being itself requires order and chaos, so
you need the chaos, right, It doesn't seem obvious to
me that it needed to be such that this sort
of horrible series of events is inaugurated by Adam and Eve.
In fact, it seems like it could have been relatively
easily avoided had the snake just been you know, just
put a wall between the snake and Adam and Eve,
or you know, like like some anything, even even God
could just warn them. God could say, oh, by the way,
there's this serpent in the garden. You should watch out
for him. You know, he's a crafty one. It just
seems to me like a like a very strange thing
to just say either, well, it had to be that
way or well it just was that way, and there's
sort of nothing more interesting to ask about. I guess
one I'm raising now is a moral object, which is
what I usually do with the Garden of Beaten But like, like,
why on earth would would God sort of permit that
or allow that or create that, you know what I mean?
And this is why, by the way, I was so
interested in this interpretation of Genesis that sees the serpent
as the hero, because you know, I mentioned this, Sir
Jordan Peterson, This this apocryphal gospel, the Testimony of Truth,
And anytime I bring up the apocryphal Gospels, a lot
of Christians get get angry at me because they seem
to think that I'm somehow endorsing it or thinking that
this is the true account. I don't even believe that
the canonical accounts, the canonical Gospels a true account, though,
would be very strange if I believe the apocryphal ones.
But I found it interesting that early Christians, some early Christians,
did believe this, this Testimony of Truth. It reads the
story of Genesis and says, what kind of God is this?
This jealous God who lies to Adam and Eve about
what's going to happen to them, and it identifies the
serpent not with Satan but with Christ and says that
what's happening here is you've got that. And in the
Gnostic theology, the material world is created by this sort
of evil or incompetent demiurge. So you've got this material
world and it's got its grass and it's trees, and
it's it's it's you know, it's it's sort of evil whatever.
And and human beings are sort of made out of
the dust. They're made out of the evil stuff. You know.
The really good stuff is spirit. The really good stuff
is like soul and spirit and morality and that kind
of stuff. And so these these.
Speaker 1: Just a quick pause. This is a very long question.
If I if I invited guests on the show and
I speak for this long, please email me to shut up.
Although I shouldn't say that, because I probably will. I'll
be geeking out anyway. It's just interesting, you know, I
think a lot of times we think of objections to
certain stories in the Bible as being like a very
modern phenomenon, and that's just not true. You know, these topics,
these questions have been debated and argued over forever and
quite you know, dramatically in the early Christian Church, very
early Christian Church. I mean a few of these texts
from these groups of Christians that he's mentioning kind of
collectively called gnostic. The word means a lot of different things.
I mean, the word literally means knowledge, but in reference
to groups of people who we are referring to when
we say gnostic, it means many different things. But some
of these texts that they would go on to adopt,
like the Gospel of Thomas, they're pretty much contemporary with
the Gospel of Mark and Luke. I think, I think
most scholars believe they're they're not written by the individuals
whose name they bear. But a lot of you know,
New Testament scholars think the same thing about the actual Gospel.
So it's it's really tough to know. I mean, it's
tough to say. So this is not like a modern phenomenon.
I mean Marcianism, which was a type of gnosticism that
really only wanted to include the Gospel of Luke in
the Bible. This this was very early, very early, and
he had a lot of support the same is it
Valentine Valentinis or Valentinius, I forget his name, another one
of these guys. Really, you know, the only reason that
their popularity dwindled, as far as I know, is that Polycarp,
who's the last living person to John the Apostle, the
beloved Apostle, made a pilgrimage to Rome in his late
life and just explained to them that they were wrong.
And it was because I'm in a position to know,
you know, I've spent a lot of time speaking with
the actual disciples of Jesus, and so, you know, personally,
for me, I think that's a good thing that that happened.
But I know a lot of people feel differently. This
is a very like hot topic, particularly just I think
a lot of it comes from a lot of anti
Catholic sentiment, especially you know, during that time, like the
time of Athenacius, and then much later, you know, all
the way up into like the Roman Inquisition. You know,
the Catholic pr has been pretty thoroughly beat down. I
think a lot of it's probably overblown. But I also
think they burned people alive, you know, So it's it's
a mixed bag, you know, like all institutions over that
have lasted thousands of years. I'm sure you can find
lots of good and lots of bad. So let's see,
let's see this modern rehashing of it of us, you know,
ancient terracy.
Speaker 2: These humans are there, but they don't have this knowledge
of good and evil, which is which is what life's
really about. Man. And so the serpent sort of sneaks
into this garden. And because God is the creator God,
for the serpent to even be there in the first place,
the serpent must have some kind of like power, It
must have some kind of intelligence, it must have some
kind of like you know, awesome ability to put itself
in there, in the same way that like, you know,
Athena disguises herself as a slave to appear to Odysseus
or whatever it is that you know happens in the Odyssey. Yeah,
these gods sort of sort of, these these more intelligent
gods sort of sneaking the way around the evil and
getting their message into the world. So so thisnostic gospel
thing that it's it's Jesus who takes the form with
the snake, goes up to Eve and says, listen, like
you've you've been told all this all this stuff. But but no, no, no.
If you want to be like God, if you want
the knowledge of good and evil, if you want to
be like what you're supposed to be, which is spiritual,
knowledgeable beings, then you should eat the fruit. And then
God just gets really angry and banishes them like that
to me, given one I've just said about the fact
that God, God didn't need to do this, He didn't
need to to condemn Adam and Eve in this way.
Like look, I'm not saying that's a true account of Genesis,
but I'm saying make as much sense to me as the.
Speaker 3: Other whole I hope that I'm saying. So let's let's
unpack that. It's unpacked. It's not that hard to unpack.
Speaker 2: So, but by the way, just before you do, it's
important to say that that word you mentioned earlier, and
and and emphasize this word shrewd or u or subtle
or crafty, which the serpent is introduced as the serpent
is more, you know, crafty or shrewd. If you look
at the Hebrew word aram, and you how it's used
elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, all throughout Proverbs and Psalms.
The same word is translated as sensible or prudent. And
so there's a reading of this text which says that
the serpent is more sensible than any of the other
beasts that God has created. And it's this sensible serpent
who tells out of any of the truth, you know
what I mean?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well it is that it is in some ways
you could say that in this case, the way he's
the serpent is described is something maybe the being in
the in the the animal that is the closest to man. Right,
So Saint John Christ system says that it says something
like the serpent was like a dog in the garden,
like he was the closest being to man. He was
the one that is the most the most akin to man.
And so that is why in some ways it would
be the being that would more more easily influence from below,
you know, the human. So if you take the Gnostic
the Gnostic Gospels as as an example, you know, you
you have this problem, like again, which is the idea
that the source of the world is evil is a
big problem. Like it's that that's a huge metaphysical problem
if you take that on, if you take on the
fact that the very origin of reality is bad and
that material. Yeah, all of all of created reality is bad.
Down the line from that are very dark things, you know,
and you know and the Gnostics embrace those very dark
things too, you know. They you you end up with
this idea that you have to escape the world, right,
you constantly just have to escape it. You don't have to,
you're not supposed to like live live life. You have
to escape escape this reality. And then what what that
will lead to is something like caste system. Like a
cast system is a good example of the contict of
gnosticism on the world, which is that you identify a
hierarchy and then you identify all that which is below
in the hierarchy is bad and all that which is
above in the hierarchy as good because it's the closest
to heaven. It's the one that gives order to all
the lower the lower aspects and that but the lower
you get, the more evil you are. And then you
so then you end up with these very dark, dark
implications of what of what gnostic type thinking does, like
this idea that that the world is maya that it's
an illusion that we have to escape. That leads to
things like cast systems like it's one example. There are
other examples of what it can lead to, not just
that one can lead to other things. It can lead
to For example, in the Gospel of Thomas where at
the end, you know, Christ tells Mary Magdalene that in
order for her to be safe, she has to become
like a man, because the man is better, because he's
you know, he's above and the woman is below. And
therefore the woman has to become like a man in
order to get close. Should have it. Yeah, but that's
the world that isn't described in Genesis like it's God.
When God, all things are good.
Speaker 1: So I think alex is probably not going to find
this type of argument compelling, and I kind of get that,
But I do think there is something to be said
for the fruits of different beliefs. You know, this is
a biblical principle, of course, you know that you'll know
them by their fruits. And yeah, there is something about
belief that the material world is evil or or you know,
systems that aren't gnostic like Hinduism or Buddhism or let's
just say Hinduism for now. With these belief in the
in in rebirth, you know, these cycles, it does lead
to pretty horrible cast systems. And this is not a
trivial thing. You know. My dad went to India once
and there was this woman like bent over and half sweeping.
She had this short little broom that was like way
too short for her, like, and she was sweeping behind
them as they walked. He was like an honored guest,
you know. And she dropped her broom and she was
struggling to pick it up, and my dad leaned over
to pick it up for her, and he was kind
of like scolded, and he was like, no, she's she's untouchable.
You know. This was the cast she belonged to. It
was the untouchables. And then there's like the Brahmin and
this and then that, and there's also there's just all
sorts of weird things that come out of these systems.
Like I don't know, I mean, people would probably say
the same thing about Christianity, like people who are skeptical
of Christianity. But the problem is, like I I find
that often when people criticize Christianity, they tend to criticize
the institution. And it's like, okay, fine, but let's just
compare like what what do what does our what does
it the base text or the you know, the church
that Jesus established on earth, Like what do they say,
like not like what does your uncle Tony say right
about Catholicism because he's a Catholic, Or what does your
aunt who's an Episcopalian or whatever a Lutheran say? Like
what what do the actual those institute, like the the
actual like at their best, what they're publicly saying that
they're aspiring to be their ideal, their foundational principles. What
are those? So I think it's kind of good to
prepare best to best, you know, and you know the
cast systems are not like this hidden thing that happens
in only back rooms without anyone knowing. This is like
this is stated, this is open, and you know, the
burning of thousands and thousands of bodies so that it's
like ashy and the river is filled with ash and
ancient practices of women be having to be burned alive
when their husbands died. Like yeah, I mean you could
do kind of the same thing for Christianity. But you know,
if you say, what, okay, what does the book actually say?
Like it says, okay, love your neighbor, treat them like
as you would want to be treated and I get
there's stuff like that and other religions too, but I
don't know. I just I do think there is something
to this idea that everything we see is evil and
we must escape it. It's like, oh, I don't know.
It's hard for me to really wrap my head around,
like I get, I get. You know that Satan is
the god of this world. There is evil, don't get
me wrong, but it's all evil. Really, I don't know.
It seems cynical. Although I will say gnostic ideas make
great movies. You know, the Truman Show, the Matrix great movies,
So I'll give them that.
Speaker 3: And that's a different it's a whole different cosmology and
everything about it is different once you start with that
premise of the evil demiurge creator.
Speaker 2: I agree with that that it's definitely significant, but the
idea that well, So if this.
Speaker 3: Then tells if a serpent comes and tells Adam and
Eve a better solution, where does that come from? Like
where does the better solution come from? If the origin
of the world is of the order, the created world
is evil, you know, where how can I say this?
Speaker 1: It's like.
Speaker 3: It's always about accounting for the gap between. It's always
about accounting for the gap between the sin and the purpose, right,
and so you have something from below, the serpent that
comes and then proposes a solution to you, and so
that solution will be a revolutionary solution. So we could
actually think about like there are two forms of mythology
in the world, like in terms of there are more,
but we could just for this purpose, we could say
that there are two types of mythologies. They're one which
establishes an orderly procession of being from above down below,
and that this is there's a there's an orderly procession,
and that things you know, fall down from their identities
and that they all function together. Then you have a
revolutionary trope. You have the idea that that which is
below has to come up and take that which is above.
And you can see, like if you compare the cosmogony
the theogony Hessian's theogony to the creation narrative in scripture,
you can actually see the difference between the two. Right,
where God creates the world with name with order within tation,
and the world possesses orderly down from this heavenly influence.
And then you have another one which is basically castraight
my father, you know, and then and then having to
devour my children, and this revolutionary process of trying to
get from above like I'm gonna that Heaven is a tyrant.
Heaven is evil, that which comes all the order, all
the processes, all the patterns. They are forms of oppression.
And I have to free myself from that oppression. And
so I go up and I take the fire from
the gods. I castraight my father. I do all these
things that are there to take power on myself. And
those two have to those two structures like of storytelling
or of understanding the world they have. They have they
have consequences. So if you see one in a certain
way and you see it one in the other way,
they have they have different They have different worlds that
they that they create and that they make happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel I feel obliged to offer a sort
of limp defense of the Gnostic theology, not because I
am myself a Gnostic, but because I think it's perhaps
a little unfair the treatment that you're giving to it.
I mean, I understand what you mean. And Jordan Peterson
said the same thing to me. He said, well, sort
of alluded to it by saying, the problem with narcissism
is it condemns the material world, and that's a problem.
And we didn't really I didn't want to go down
the rabbit whole at the time. But what you just
said there you identify two things. You said, here are
two examples of what it can lead to believing. This
is the idea that the material world is somehow either
evil or bad, or incompetently or incompletely produced. The problem
with that is that it leads to something like a
caste system. And the problem with that is it leads.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, I'm about to get torn up. Should have
just listened.
Speaker 2: Things like in the Gospel of Thomas, you know, man
over the woman. I would say the opposite is true.
I would say that the idea that what you are
as fundamentally is a spiritual being who sort of trapped
in this physical condition and you need to escape. For
someone who believes that, if you look at sort of
different human beings being treated differently based on their physical characteristics,
the gnostics would say, well, of course they're sort of
battling it out over skin color because they're sort of
constrained by the material world. They think that those kinds
of things matter. If only they understood that the truth
of the world is in the things that you know
and your spiritual being and got nothing to do with
your physical characteristics, they'd abandon this, this whole caste system altogether.
In other words, I mean, think about the racist myth
that was pedaled that. I think it's something to do
with different races being different descendants of Adam and Eve.
The idea that you know, that non white people are
the descendants of Cain, That the idea that like sort
of this is where we get our racial divisions, and
because of their sort of origins were all sort of
separate like people. You know, American evangelicals used this physical
delineation of races as a sort of theological way to
justify racism. Now, I don't think that's theologically literate. I
don't think that that's appropriate. What I'm saying is it
can clearly be done whether you're an ostic or not.
And arguably, to me, the gnostic who says the thing
that matters is that you are a spiritual being constrained
in a physical creature is far more akin to the
idea that actually all people are sort of spiritual beings
made in the image of the true God, that is Jesus,
and all of this physical characteristic stuff is pogwash. Yeah versus.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is sort of but all Christians are
supposed to believe, right, I mean, there is no Jew
or Greek. There is no Jew or gentile, slave or free.
This is you know, treat others how you want to
be treated. This is really this is what it says. So,
I mean, I don't know, I'm not sure if this
is really an interesting distinction.
Speaker 2: But let's continue the orthodox Christiany who says no, no,
you are a physical creature. Those physical characteristics are part
of who you are. The other example that you gave
was sort of the Gospel of Thomas and making Mary
Magdalen into a into a man, which is one of
the most bizarre parts of the Gnostic gospels. But that
the objection that this is a sort of ordering of
the man above the woman. I mean, I won't need
to point you to the to the myriad examples in
the Letters of Paul that do exactly the same thing,
making man sort of over the woman, telling women not
to speak in church, saying it's disgraceful them to ask
questions and they should go home and ask their husbands.
In other words, like everything you just said about the
sort of Gnostic tradition, well look what it leads to.
I'm like, not only can it lead to that in
the Orthodox Christian tradition, but it has done as well.
And so it doesn't seem obvious to me that that's
a good reason to reject noscissism. And even if it were,
even if it were that this led to some moral problems,
that wouldn't be to say that it's untrue, and as
well as that, it wouldn't make it a worse account
specifically of this genesis story, of the Genesis story, that
that you've got the sort of creator of the material world,
seemingly inexplicably introducing this serpent, and the serpent is the
one who's who, like you said before, unlike all the
other beasts, there's something specially about the serpent. The serpent
can speak, The serpent has this thing has this sort
of you know, godlike propensity for sort of language and
understanding and probably knowledge of good and evil as well,
which which again for the Gnostics would say, yeah, that's
because it was a divine being who was also in
the guarden of the Veeden, the true, good, divine being
that was trying to sort of bring this wisdom to
to Adam and Eve. So again I want to emphasize
that I'm not saying that this is you know, true
or even the best account of Genesis. But I don't
think it should just be sort of, you know, handwaved away,
as so many often do. I'm not saying you're doing
that there, but a lot of people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I definitely don't want I take I take
it very seriously. And okay, so let me go a
lot a little ways along with you to show you
that I take it very seriously, which is there's a
really I can understand why people would say something like
that the serpent is Christ. Know, it's not even from
the Gospel themselves. There is some things in there that
can make you understand that if you can see with
the structure of the story. Because because Jesus.
Speaker 1: Actually quick quick interlude, you know, one interesting thing and
one thing I do here kind of pointing to this
idea might need to wrap up soon. I'm getting in
a bunch of emails at work, but one interesting thing
I hear is that Jesus is likened to a serpent.
At other points in the Bible. You know, there's there's
references to old things that to things that happen in
the Old Testament and the Gospel. You know, like Jesus says,
just like he references the sign of Jonah, the idea
that he will go down into the underworld for three
days and then return like as Jonah did, you know
in a whale, And he also references, you know, just
I forget the exact words in the book, but something
along the lines of just as you know, the Israelites
hoisted the serpent on a staff, so too must the
son of Man be lifted up or whatever. And it's
a reference to this point in I think Exodus, I
guess where the the Israelites are being plagued by serpents
by snakes, and God instructs them to put the snake
up on a staff and stare at it, to confront it.
And you know this is this is generally interpreted to
be like you must face that which ails you. You know,
you must confront it. And it's an interesting symbol for
Jesus because what Jesus faces and conquers when he's lifted
up on the on the on the tree, on the
on the cross is death. You know. He is lifted
up like that snake was, and everyone's looking at him.
Some people are happy it's happening to him. Some people
are devastated. It's just tragedy. And by facing death, he
defeats it. This is sort of the symbolism, but that
this is sort of used as like a tool like
see look, he's being compared to a serpent. That that
does very little for me because he's referencing all sorts
of things that happened in the Old Testament. But I
only bring that up because I do find it funny.
So that symbol, the staff with a serpent a snake
on it is a medical symbol. Should google what it's called,
uh raw rod of aeplis, I guess. But what's funny
is often hospitals and I've even seen it on an
ambulance is use the caducius, which is two snakes wrapped
around a staff with wings. And this is the symbol
of commerce and negotiation, which is so funny because that's
all healthcare is now, you know. And this was the
staff of Hermes or Mercury. Some people even say even
say it has like a worse connotation, like it's about
like commerce crime, like like theft, which is kind of
hilarious given the context of modern medicine. But all right,
let's continue. I got to say, you know, I like Jonathan,
but I just I don't think this is the right
environment for his kind of for his style. You know,
I can totally see why him and Jordan Peterson are friends.
They love the symbolism, they love the abstraction. You know,
Alex O'Connor is taking a much more straightforward read of
the text and is I just don't think you're going
to be able to have a super productive argument. But
I still think it's interesting. Let's play another few minutes
and then we'll wrap up.
Speaker 3: He fines himself in that very position. So the text
in the gospel is allude to the fact that Jesus
eats the free fruit of the knowledge of good and evil,
and that because of that he knows good and evil.
And that's what happens on the cross. On the cross,
he has a good thief and a bad thief, and
he judges between them. He that he he sayds, he says,
you're the good thief, leaving the bad thief for the
say to to to fend for himself. And so in
the in the crucifixion story, there is an intuition that
Christ eats the eats the fruit and knows good and evil,
and because of that enters into the into the whole place, right,
rips the veil, goes into the Holy Place, and then
eats the tree of life. Right. So, the like I
told you, like, it's important to understand that the paradise
as a temple structure right where you have these levels,
and so there's a level beyond it, which is the
Holy of Holies, the place where God reveals himself. And
Christ plays out that story. And so the difference again
like for example, in the Gospel, the difference is that
God that Christ does that in an opposite way to Adam.
You know when when Christ goes into the garden, right,
so just before Christ is crucified, he goes into the garden.
He goes into the garden of getz semone and then
he says to God, I don't want to eat this
I don't want to drink this cup. I don't want it.
Like if you can take it away from me, take
it away. And so the difference between him and Adam
and Eve is that God says, if you eat this fruit,
you will die, and Jesus says yes. He says, okay,
I will eat the fruit, and I will die, and
I will know good and evil. And so there's a
sense in which the crucifixion is in many ways a
way to answer the problem that is set up in Genesis,
which is the problem of identity, the problem of inside
and outside, the problem of purpose and breakdown. And the
way in which Christ seems to answer it is that
instead of blaming others, you take the blame on yourself,
because that's what happens in the garden. Right in the garden,
Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the serpent, and that brings
about the fall. It's not just the eating of the fruit.
There are many of the fathers that say that God
gives Adam and Eve way a way out. At every
part of the story. He said, if they had taken
the blame for eating the fruit, they would have gotten
a way out, like etcetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: But they just.
Speaker 3: Keep doubling down into their division, and they break down
into chaos. And then Jesus flips it. Jesus says, Okay,
I'm willing to die. I'm willing, and then I will
eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil,
out of obedience, not out of pride, not out of
like self taking. And what that will do is it
will transform the very basis of the world. It will
transform reality. It will create a body right that is
cohesive and held together in love, instead of a body
that is divided and breaking, broken and fighting amongst each other.
And so the relationship between Christ being crucified, eating the fruit, willing,
being willing to die, taking the blame is reversing that
which happens in the garden. And what it does is
it creates a body, a body of people that are
that are together in love. Now, obviously you know the
case that that's not always what happens like in the church.
There are obviously all kinds of all kinds of sad reversions.
But that's the that's the way in which Jesus is
akin to what happens in the garden. Like there's a
relationship between the between the two. And so it's it's
not it's understandable that gnostics would have read or heard
the gospel stories or no known the gospel stories and
would have come to similar conclusions. But I think they're
missing They're missing the die part, which is God was
telling the truth. If you eat the fruit of the
knowledge of good and evil, you will die. But when
Adam meets the fruit, he refuses to die. He blames like,
he refuses to take death on himself. He starts he
right away. He blames Eve, and he blames the serpent,
and he blames everybody. And he's basically trying to cast
off the consequence of the of the of the eating
of the fruit. And so ultimately that's the that's the
the solution, and and in some ways it does become
the solution that we all live in.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I gotta wrap up because I'm getting too many messages.
But I don't know, I kind of like that. It's
not an answer to Alex's question, admittedly, but I do.
I like it. It's just, uh just feel it just
feels like more than a book, you know, And yeah,
it's just it's cool, it's beautiful. I mean, this is
the feeling you're left with when you read the Gospels
is like this, you're kind of in awe of this
figure Jesus, who we know really lived and really died
and was crucified. I mean, we know that as about
as well as we can know anything that happened in history,
certainly ancient history. And uh, you know, we probably have
some eyewitness accounts written down Matthew John, maybe Mark, an
early investigation done by Luke, and they all paint this
figure of this just amazing individual. And it is the
symbolism between him and Adam is very interesting. He is
sort of the antithesis of Adam. You know, I like that.
I haven't heard that articulated quite like that. I'm going
to use that. I enjoyed that. Anyway. Please join us
tomorrow evening. That's about what I expect to see to
have the interview posted. That will be with doctor David Campbell, palaeontologist,
teaches a lot of interesting evolutionary biology classes, and he
is a Presbyterian, so we'll have a good time exploring
how exactly that works. All right, everybody, thanks for listening.
Send me an email at God's I viewbook at gmail
dot com. Talk soon. Stay safe, God bless