#363 - Explosive Bible Debate: Exiled Language Expert vs Ancient Religion PhD | Ammon Hillman & Luke Gorton

Summary

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Danny Jones Podcast #363

Title: Explosive Bible Debate: Exiled Language Expert vs Ancient Religion PhD | Ammon Hillman & Luke Gorton
Date: January 12, 2026
Host: Danny Jones
Guests: Ammon Hillman (Lady Babylon), Dr. Luke Gorton

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Overview

This high-intensity, three-hour episode features a rigorous and sometimes combative debate between two classicists: Ammon Hillman, an exiled language expert with controversial views on ancient drug use and the origins of biblical texts, and Dr. Luke Gorton, a university professor and linguist specializing in ancient languages, religious texts, and ancient magic. Danny moderates as the guests argue explosively about the origins and interpretations of key biblical and classical terms, the reliability of source languages, the context behind words like “Christ,” and the intersection of ancient pharmacology and early religion.

The episode is a deep dive into the world of classics, linguistics, and biblical scholarship—and is especially notable for its sharp disagreements, bold hypotheses, and (occasionally) heated exchanges.

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Meet the Guests & Opening Banter

[00:37–08:17]

Dr. Luke Gorton

• PhD in classics, Master’s in Linguistics (historical linguistics).
• University professor, specialist in ancient languages (Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Avestan, Old Irish, Gothic, Hebrew, Egyptian, Akkadian, Hittite).
• Taught at University of New Mexico, focuses on Greek.
• Works on ancient magic, sex/gender in religion, and classic texts [00:48–04:27].

Ammon Hillman

• PhD in classics (focus on medicine/pharmacology), Master’s in bacteriology.
• Studied under John Scarborough (ancient medicine) and worked with magic scholars Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston.
• Formerly taught at University of Wisconsin Madison and St. Mary's; left academia amid controversy after a historically accurate (and highly phallic) performance of Medea led to accusations of “opening portals” and impropriety at a Catholic college [05:38–12:22].
• Author of The Chemical Muse, focusing on drug use in antiquity (material universities allegedly pressured him to censor from his dissertation).

Notable Quotes

• “My heart always remained with Greek and Latin. And between Greek and Latin, my heart is more on the Greek side.” —Luke [03:34]
• “The ancient world was a very different place. … Phalluses were not considered lewd ... and today, it’s still going to be [taboo].” —Luke [12:26]
• “You can see how this would lead to problems.” —Ammon on his Medea production [12:18]

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The Silo Problem: Academia, Bible Scholars & Classicists

[20:56–31:15]

• Classicists, linguists, and Bible scholars often work in isolated “silos,” rarely collaborating or understanding context outside their specialties.
• Luke describes himself as a “neutral, textual, historical, linguistic perspective” reader—neither grinding a religious nor anti-religious axe [21:35].
• Key insight: Most biblical scholars lack deep training in Greek (or focus only on the New Testament flavor of Greek and ignore surrounding classical sources) [09:10–11:00; 22:33–35:47].
• Classicists must master Greek and Latin because almost all the primary evidence from the relevant civilizations is in these languages, and real philological rigor demands it.

Memorable Exchange

• Danny: “You were eventually ejected by the university … some controversy with a play … right?”
• Ammon: “Opening portals … accused of demon possession and opening portals … [I] marched down an eight-foot phallus … Which was normal for Roman times!” [08:36–11:00]

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Barriers & Methodologies: How (and Why) Different Disciplines Disagree

[27:26–39:48]

• Not only are classics and modern linguistics often isolated from archaeology, forensics, and even each other, but their methodologies vary widely.
• Ammon critiques a prominent negative peer review of his book by a forensic pathologist with little ancient language knowledge [27:14].
• Classicists/linguists argue about how you should approach context, translation, and meaning—most importantly, to avoid cherry-picking or “pulling a verse out of context.”

Memorable Quote

• “We do the Bible a disservice if we try to bury those arguments instead of bringing them to light and trying to understand what the original authors were living through, like what that cultural context was.” —Luke [39:24]

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When Were the Gospels Written?

[39:48–45:07]

• Luke: The scholarly “consensus” (cautioning this is always tentative) is:
  • Mark: Earliest, ca. 65 CE, contains unique and “weird” features (ex: Mark 14).
  • Matthew/Luke: 70s–80s, draw from Mark and earlier sources.
  • John: Latest, late 1st century.
• Ammon: Based on vocabulary and style, he sees Gospel literature as aligning more with 2nd-century Greek/Christian apocrypha, suggesting even later composition.
• Both agree debates hinge on method and available evidence; Luke presses for humility about the “unknowability” of certainty in ancient chronology.
• Paul’s epistles have clear connections to classical Greek texts and reveal a highly educated author, familiar with wide-ranging pagan literature.

Quote

• “I think one of the big things that I learned in grad school is methodology matters.” —Luke [37:03]

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Linguistics Lesson: Context, Meaning, and the Problem of “Christ”

[70:29–79:01]

• The word “Christ” comes up repeatedly; Ammon’s central thesis is that it’s fundamentally a pharmaceutical/drug term, used in classical Greek to mean “anointed,” “smeared,” or “drugged.”
• Luke draws a parallel to the English word “bitten,” arguing that when ancient Jews needed to translate ‘Messiah’ (anointed one) into Greek for the Hellenistic world, “Christos” was the best available; in Greek, it did not have any deliberate drug connotations in the New Testament context [176:05–179:17].
• Methodological debate centers on whether you can draw a straight line from a broad Greek pharmaceutical context to the Jesus of the Gospels, or whether that’s faulty logic (what Luke calls “pulling a Dick Nixon”—overextending a word’s meaning based on ambiguous linguistic resemblance) [72:23–75:32].

Memorable Analogy

• “Let’s say ... you have a tradition where if you become the ruler... you have to get bitten by a snake. ... In this local Polynesian community, they refer to their kings as the bitten ones. ... Now, in the English-speaking world, that word ‘bitten’ has lots of other meanings ... but when missionaries spread their tradition and have to translate, confusion arises.” —Luke [183:00]

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Big Biblical Etymology Debate:

Was the Septuagint (Greek Bible) a Translation from Hebrew, or Vice-Versa?
[41:41–131:00 and again 164:47–221:28]

Ammon’s Radical Thesis

• The Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, is not a translation of Hebrew but the original, later back-converted into Hebrew.
• Hebrew is structurally and lexically less sophisticated and looks like a “constructed” language drawing on Greek technical, philosophical, and medical vocabulary.

Supporting Claims

• Hebrew OT has ~7,000 unique words; Greek has 1.5 million forms.
• Example: Genesis 1:2, “tohu wa-bohu” (”formless and void") in Hebrew, becomes two distinct technical and philosophical Greek terms in the Septuagint.
• Claims some contemporary Jewish scholars, e.g. Yehuda, support “Hebrew is Greek.”

Luke’s Rebuttal

• There is archaeological evidence of Hebrew texts and inscriptions centuries before the Septuagint (citing Paleo-Hebrew, the Numbers blessing on a silver scroll from 7th c. BCE) [121:13–121:56].
• Ancient Hebrew existed as a language and literary tradition, but much was destroyed in war (Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem), leaving fragmentary archaeological remains.
• All translation is inherently interpretive and context-sensitive. The Torah and Hebrew literary tradition predate the Greek version; the emergence of the Septuagint reflects cosmopolitan Jewish scholars in Alexandria translating into the Greek lingua franca of the time [134:51–135:02].
• Linguistic arguments about translation direction, sophistication, or technical precision are not proof in themselves; you need documentary evidence.

Quote

• “We are dealing with a lack of data. ... They just wrote so much stuff in all of those languages and almost all of it’s gone.” —Luke [47:35]

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Drug Rituals, Magic, and Ancient Pharmacology in Religion

[51:09–61:58]

• Detailed discussion of the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM), pharmacology, magical rituals, and the intersection of cult practice — often involving drugs, bodily fluids, and mythic contexts.
• Discovery: Recent scientific analysis of ancient ritual vessels (e.g. the “Bess mug” in Tampa) contain psychotropic drug residues, blood, and vaginal fluid — pointing to the deep overlap of ritual, sexuality, and altered states in ancient practice [60:09–61:58].
• Ammon: These realities, found in medical and magical texts, are consistently ignored or downplayed in “Bible scholarship.”

Quote

• “They were very creative. Yeah. And they didn’t have a lot of boundaries, right?” —Luke [62:08]

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Bible, Magic, Drugs, and Context: Debate Over Early Christian “Heresy”

[62:16–89:10]

• Analysis of the Greater Questions of Mary, a controversial “heretical” 4th-century Christian text referencing bizarre sexual rituals, Jesus offering “semen,” and eating “bodily essences.”
• Debate over whether this demonstrates core early Christian drug/sex rituals, or simply represents fringe beliefs catalogued by later church fathers as “heresy.”
• Luke presses the importance of methodology: “Just because something is written in a text, especially centuries later, doesn’t mean it reflects what happened”—context, sectarian variety and polemics matter [88:38–95:05].
• Ammon, by contrast, prefers a text-based approach, “presenting all the evidence” regardless of source reliability, and lets viewers “figure out whether or not they think it’s true” [95:05].

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“Christing” and Early Christianity: Linguistics, Ritual Action, and (Possibly) Drugs

[165:23–215:43]

The Core Disagreement

Ammon’s View:

• The Greek word “Christos” (from kriō, to anoint or smear) is overwhelmingly a term of pharmacology and drug use in classical sources—well-attested in Homer, medical, magical, and ritual texts.
• “Christing” is ancient slang for dosing, smearing, or anointing people or things with drugs, sometimes in sexual or initiatory/mystery contexts.
• The application of this term to Jesus is deliberate, reflecting his status as a “drugged” figure or shamanic practitioner drawing on deep ancient traditions.

Luke’s Skeptical Linguistics:

• “Christos” means “the anointed one”—a standard translation of the Hebrew mashiach (”anointed”)—and is, in biblical context, a direct calque reflecting the Jewish anointing of kings/priests with oil.
• While the base verb krio can be used “pharmaceutically”, it much more broadly means “to smear, to anoint, to apply”, also used of ship pitch, dung, and more; context determines meaning.
• Analogizes the process to translating hypothetical “bitten one” Polynesian rulers into English—just because the target language (English/Greek) uses "bitten"/"anointed" broadly doesn’t retroactively mean the originator was a vampire/drug lord [183:19–185:52].

Key Linguistic Points

• “Christing” as a form, strictly speaking, is not even a proper Greek participle—it’s an English neologism [176:39–178:14].
• Grammar matters: Christos is a past participle (“one who has been anointed”), not an agent noun (“anointer”) or an act (“Christing”).
• Paul’s use of “in the Christ of Jesus" is often mistranslated as “in Jesus Christ” when the genitive is functionally different.

Quotes

• “It means to apply something, apply something to the surface of something else. So if you’re applying an ointment which is a medicine, which could be called a drug, then sure, if you want to call that a drug term, go for it.” —Luke [171:03]
• “If you search for all the compounds of Christing, you’re going to find thousands and thousands. This is not an unusual word.” —Ammon [166:56]

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Closing Thoughts & Debrief

[221:21–224:41]

• Both guests express mutual respect for each other’s deep training and love for Greek.
• Danny highlights value for the audience: showcasing a real classicist-on-classicist debate, showing the gulf between academic classicists and “biblical studies” as often practiced in the U.S.
• Both guests will return for Part 2 for deeper dives into “Christing,” ancient magic, early Christian heresy/texts, and the tangled roots of classic and biblical literature.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:37]: Introductions, backgrounds, expertise
• [08:36]: Ammon’s Medea controversy at Catholic college
• [13:13]: The censorship of Ammon’s dissertation on ancient drugs
• [21:35]: Differences between classicists, linguists, and Bible scholars
• [28:45]: Problems with peer review when reviewers lack ancient language skills
• [39:48]: Dating the Gospels: Mark, Matthew, Luke, John
• [41:41–131:00]: The Septuagint debate: translation direction, archaeological evidence, language sophistication
• [51:09]: Greek Magical Papyri, ancient ritual drugs and bodily fluids
• [62:16]: Early Christian heresy texts—“Greater Questions of Mary”
• [70:29–79:01]: "Christing" — how linguistic meaning gets (mis)applied across contexts
• [176:05–179:17]: “Christing” as English neologism vs. Greek participle
• [183:00]: The “bitten one” analogy—how translation between cultural contexts creates new meanings
• [165:23–215:43]: Deep dive into “Christing" (pharmaceutical, mystical, and ritual meaning)
• [221:21–224:41]: Wrap-up, mutual respect, and plans for part 2

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Notable Quotes (Timestamped)

• “The ancient world was a very different place. They had very different morals, customs, standards … back then phalluses were not considered lewd … today, whether it’s a Catholic college or not—if you go walking out here, it’s still going to be—” —Luke [12:26]
• “Philologist comes from two Greek words—philo, which means love, and logos, which means word ... We are lovers of the Word.” —Luke [34:43]
• “If you really wanted to understand the Bible, you would read all the Greek from 200 years before until 200 years after.” —Amin [34:18]
• “Sometimes some of us, not us, but some classicists, might not want to talk to them, which is unfortunate. I want to be trying to build bridges.” —Luke [10:34]
• “Everything is speculation. The question is, when we go to Vegas, what odds are we going to get on that speculation?” —Luke [153:53]
• “I present evidence to the court, let the viewer figure out whether or not they think it’s true.” —Amin [95:05]

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Episode Tone & Style

The conversation is rapid, combative, but rich with technical minutiae.

• Ammon is brash and provocative, offering radical hypotheses, drawing from technical philology, magical texts, and ancient pharmacology—and pushing boundaries on accepted academic consensus.
• Luke is cautious and methodical, emphasizing humility, context, source criticism, and the difference between language connection and cultural/religious meaning.
• Danny, the host, plays an active moderating role, sometimes expressing confusion, sometimes pushing both guests for clarity and accessibility.

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Takeaways

• On Bible Interpretation: The importance of original languages and full cultural context is paramount to any serious claim about the Bible or classical texts.
• On “Christ”: The etymology is complex; while it can mean drug/anointment in Greek, its biblical context is rooted in the specific Jewish ritual of anointing kings, not in a general culture of drug use.
• On Lost Evidence: Much ancient literature is gone—sometimes forever—and the stories we tell about antiquity are, by necessity, speculative, reliant on the odds and quality of surviving evidence.
• On Academic Silos: The lack of interdisciplinary conversation (between classics, linguistics, biblical scholarship, archaeology, and science) produces major interpretive blind spots.
• On Controversy: Bringing radical views or reintroducing taboo ancient realities (drugs, sexuality, magic in religious origins) remains contentious—even within academia.

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Where to Find the Guests

• Luke Gorton: Word Safari (YouTube channel on etymology and ancient languages)
• Ammon Hillman: Lady Babylon (YouTube, deep dives on biblical language arcana, classics and pharmacology)

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Transcript

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[Danny]

Welcome, gentlemen. First of all, just to start this whole thing off, I want to have both of you guys introduce yourselves and your academic backgrounds. Luke, we'll start with you.

[Luke]

Yeah. My name is Dr. Luke Gordon. I have been fascinated by the ancient world, by ancient languages, for most of my life. At this point, I was very fortunate to take Latin in 8th and 9th grade. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I did so. Everyone had always told me, languages are hard. Latin is hard. Why are you taking that? And then I took it and it just clicked. I just loved this stuff. I had no idea that I was going to love it this much, but I did. I ended up taking Spanish later in high school. And of course, as we know, Spanish is descended from Latin. It's one of the Romance languages. And that got me hooked on connections between languages. How are languages related to each other? How do languages evolve from, you know, an older language to a younger language or whatever? I went to college. I majored in Spanish. I also majored in religion, especially early Christianity, Second Temple Judaism, Mediterranean religions. That's when I first took Greek, was in college. I took three years of Greek in college, and I didn't think I could love anything more than Latin, but I did. I found that Greek was just the most amazing language that, of course, at this point, I'd only taken three languages. Latin, Spanish, and then Greek. But it was the most amazing language that I had ever been fortunate enough to take. And I still feel that way today now that I've taken many, many other ancient languages. Especially when I went on to grad school, I decided to do my master's degree in linguistics, specifically historical linguistics, which is again, the study of how languages are connected to each other. It's really the study of old dead languages. That's essentially what historical linguistics is. So as part of that program, I learned the general principles of linguistics, which I think are very important, and I'm sure those will come up more in our discussion. But I also learned I was also able to take many other old dead languages, I took three semesters of Sanskrit, which is essentially the Latin of India. It's what the Rig Veda and the ancient Hindu texts are written, in, which super cool stuff. I took Avestin, which is the ancient language of Iran, and there's various ancient religious texts that are written in that as well. I was able to take old Irish. I was able to take Gothic, which is the oldest Germanic language. I also took Hebrew, which, of course, we'll get into that as well. And I was able to take a little bit of old Egyptian, which is what the hieroglyphs are writing. Essentially, they're writing this old Egyptian language, Akkadian, which is the old Babylonian or Assyrian language, Hittite, which is a language from what we today call Turkey, and several other ancient languages as well. So I was able to really fill out my ancient language portfolio, if you want to call it that. But my heart always remained with Greek and Latin. And between Greek and Latin, my heart is more on the Greek side. I love Latin. I tell all my students this. And my students at the University of New Mexico, they're classicists, for the most part, at least in the upper level Latin and Greek language classes that I get to teach. And within classics, as Amma knows, there are different opinions about Latin versus Greek. There's people who like Latin better, there's people who like Greek better, and sometimes it's just a vibe thing. You know, you take these two languages, and if you're a classicist, you have to take both of them. It's kind of part of the job description. But some people vibe more with Latin, some people vibe more with Greek. I was always on the Greek side. I love Latin, but Greek is really where my heart is. It's a fascinating, wonderful language. And I honestly, I wish everybody could learn it, all of you, and I could probably hope so.

[Danny]

You have a PhD in classics.

[Luke]

That's correct.

[Danny]

And what about linguistics?

[Luke]

My master's degree is in linguistics.

[Danny]

Got it.

[Luke]

So, yeah, let me finish the story. So I kind of interrupted myself because I'm so excited about ancient languages. So I did my master's degree in linguistics, and then I was deciding what to go on for my PhD. And I could have gone on and stayed with linguistics, and some people said I should have. But I decided that I wanted to specifically focus on the ancient Mediterranean world, which is essentially what classics is. And I know that you. You and Amin have had some discussions about what this word called classics is, because a lot of people don't know, like, they Hear classics and they think Shakespeare. Like we're Shakespeare scholars, which we're not.

[Danny]

I had no idea what that word meant before am. Before I met Amin.

[Luke]

Yeah, I think a lot of people are in that boat. So that's a. That's a PR issue that I think in classics, we have to kind of deal with. I don't know how we're going to deal with it. And.

[Danny]

And then only Greek experts wear sunglasses.

[Luke]

That's correct.

[Danny]

Inside cathedrals.

[Luke]

Yeah, that's the rule that we just made.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Luke]

So. Yeah. Are we taking these off? Are you keeping them on? I'm just.

[Amin]

No, I feel good.

[Danny]

So let's treat this as a brand new podcast and assume. So a lot of the viewers here have never been exposed to you. Amin, why don't you give a brief summary of your background and what you know, your experience with academia and what you're doing now.

[Amin]

Okay. I'm also a PhD in classics. I went the whole way through bachelor's, master's, and PhD in classics. My field of expertise was medicine. I had the privilege of studying with John Scarborough, who's, you know, the authority. And during this time, I was exposed to texts that are pharmacological, stuff that we don't translate, and. Oh, God. All of a sudden, a world of evidence came forward, just out bubbling out of the surface. So I spent a ton of time getting those degrees and a master's in bacteriology because I wanted to keep my both feet, you know, one foot on this side of the fence and, you know, the humanities and science divide, and that's what turned on John Scarborough. Right. And by the way, John Scarborough works with a Professor Grof.

[Luke]

Yeah. Fritz Grof.

[Amin]

You're associated with. And this is all ancient magic.

[Danny]

So Fritz Grof was ancient. He's specialized in ancient magic.

[Luke]

Yeah. So I worked with two professors during my PhD program at Ohio State who are two of the preeminent scholars in the field of ancient magic. Fritz Graf and actually his wife, Sarah Isles Johnson, both of whom are amazing professors and scholars who have been in the field for a long time, who have published an incredible amount of stuff, who have done a lot of translations of these ancient magical texts.

[Danny]

Wow.

[Luke]

And they've made some of the most authoritative translations that are available to the English speaking market. I was able to work with both of them. Sarah Isles Johnston, she's done a lot of work on ancient witches and witchcraft. Wow. She used to tell us, because I had classes with both of them, so I know them both personally. She, she. I remember she told Us once in one class that she. She gets. She gets phone calls from random people online, or just random people who are trying to become witches, because she knows all the ancient texts. She's translated a lot of them, so she has some notoriety in that sense.

[Danny]

That's amazing. So they knew John Scott, John Scarborough, and. And him were close. They work together. So we found, like, a little cosmic connection between you two. That's fun.

[Luke]

Yes.

[Amin]

And it's not a big field.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Amin]

Translating the PGM and whatnot. The Greek of a pyri and all of that information that's in there, that's all locked into the pharmacology.

[Danny]

So you were a professor at one point?

[Luke]

Yes.

[Danny]

At University of Madison.

[Amin]

Yes.

[Danny]

Wisconsin Madison.

[Luke]

Yes.

[Amin]

At the extended university. So I. I used to teach medical terms.

[Luke]

Yeah, I taught a class on that, too. And that's a pretty common class. We classicists teach for them. Yeah, for. I assume it was a class that had a lot of biology majors and.

[Amin]

Oh, it was all science people.

[Luke]

Yeah. Because they want to learn the terms because they're all Greek, but mostly Greek.

[Danny]

And then for context, people that don't know. You were eventually ejected by the university.

[Amin]

Then I went to.

[Danny]

There was some controversy with a play you were doing about Medea. Right.

[Amin]

Yeah. I Then after that, I went to the. To St. Mary's University in Minnesota and was classics there and taught Greeks, all the seminarians. And after two years, we got started getting calls back about how good the. The priests were doing in their Greek. You know, it was a big deal. So I. I mean, you know as well as I know that biblical studies is not the sharpest when it comes to Greek.

[Luke]

I would love it if they focused on it more. It would help them. Yeah.

[Amin]

If they read something outside of the New Testament, maybe, and didn't just interlinear translate. Right.

[Luke]

Yeah. And from what I understand, a lot of seminaries are moving away from language instruction altogether.

[Amin]

Right.

[Luke]

And again, I'm not like, in the seminary field. This is what I hear from people I know who are, which I think is a crime. Like, you have to be able to read any of these texts in the original language. Which, of course, if you're a New Testament scholar, I think you absolutely, absolutely need to be able to work with the Greek. Working with the New Testament is a good start. But like you said, the New Testament is part of a wider linguistic world. It's not an island unto itself. Which I think a lot of times we have these false barriers within academia, which are very frustrating for interdisciplinary scholars and I think we both are. So, you know, people who work on the New Testament kind of have their own little academic bubble. And then people like us, who are classicists, who work on the wider Greek world but might be interested in stuff in the New Testament, we have our own bubble. And a lot of times it's difficult for us to talk to each other across those lines because we work in different buildings and we work in different departments and sometimes we don't even know each other and sometimes they don't want to talk to us. And sometimes some of us, not us, but some of us can. Classicists might not want to talk to them, which is unfortunate. I want to be trying to build bridges, and I mean, that's one of the reasons I'm here, is to try to build bridges and talk to people and talk to a wider audience, because I think that's our mission. I think a lot of academics are closeted in their own little silos, in their own little fields, and they're like, well, we know stuff and it doesn't really matter if we tell other people or not, or talk to other people who are different than us, who might disagree with us. And I don't see it that way. I think that we should be reaching out. I think we should be talking to people who are different than us, who maybe disagree with us, and there can be productive disagreement.

[Danny]

Yes.

[Amin]

So to answer your question, it ties in. I was at St. Mary's at a seminary, teaching. Right. And we did a play. We. We produced the Medea. Seneca's Medea. Not sure if it's.

[Luke]

Sure. And.

[Amin]

I was decommissioned. I was let go. For what?

[Danny]

Opening portals or something.

[Amin]

Opening portals.

[Danny]

Accused of demon possession and opening portals.

[Amin]

There was an inquiry bishop had to oversee.

[Luke]

It was a Catholic college.

[Amin]

Yes.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Amin]

Right, okay. He gets it though. Right. You see me as a classicist. Right. In the middle of this. And in the beginning of the play, I marched down an eight foot phallus. Right. Now is that.

[Luke]

Which was normal for Roman times. Yeah.

[Amin]

Do you see?

[Luke]

Do you see what happens to a modern audience? Normal for Roman times? Which is one of the things, you know, as we're trying to explain the ancient world to people.

[Danny]

If you're in a Catholic school, that might be frowned upon.

[Luke]

Sure.

[Amin]

Correct. But they contracted with me.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Amin]

To do it as historically accurate as possible. So everybody in the chorus had a dildo.

[Danny]

Right, Right.

[Amin]

You can see how this would lead to problems.

[Luke]

Cultural disconnect is what it is. Right.

[Amin]

It is. Right. I cannot teach this, even though it's.

[Luke]

The reality and the disconnect is in many ways between the modern world and the ancient world. The ancient world was a very different place. They had very different morals, customs, standards. Back then, you know, phalluses were not considered lewd. They weren't considered problematic to just be out in public. And today, whether it's a Catholic college or not, I mean, if you go walking down the street out here, it's still going to be.

[Danny]

One of the things that blew my mind the first time I talked to Amin, he showed me about the God Priapus.

[Luke]

Sure. Yeah.

[Danny]

Who walked around with this gigantic erection.

[Luke]

That was his whole thing. Yeah. He wasn't famous for anything else. That wasn't a pun, by the way. Yeah. So that's what he was known for. Yeah.

[Danny]

So you should also lay out for folks who haven't heard what happened to you when you were doing your dissertation.

[Amin]

Oh, right. So I'm writing this dissertation about. It's Roman pharmacy. And one of the meeting did, long story short, I defended. And afterwards the meeting was just long. Professors were taking forever. Oh, God, what's going on? And the head professor pulled me aside, the head of the department pulled me aside and said, what makes you think that the Romans would use drugs?

[Luke]

So they didn't bring this up with you before your defense?

[Amin]

Correct.

[Luke]

That's odd.

[Amin]

Interesting, isn't it?

[Luke]

Because it's normal for, you know, we go through this whole process when we write a dissertation. It's a years long process. We're working with an advisor and at least two committee members and they send us critiques. And it's normal to. Throughout the process for them to tell us to take stuff out during the process leading up to the defense.

[Amin]

Right.

[Luke]

I got told to take stuff out multiple times. And then I had to, because that's just how it works. You know, you bow to the powers that be so they, you know, knight you or whatever. So we all had to do that. But. But what you're describing is a little odd because it sounds like what happened with you is after you defended, they told you to take something out. Right. That's. That's less normal. I had to make some changes to my dissertation after I defended and they voted thumbs up as long as I made the changes. So that's.

[Amin]

They were typical changes, not anything drastic. I was told you have to go delete any references to recreational drug use. So take out the chapter on recreational and sacramental drug use that. Take that out and don't mention any of these recreational drugs throughout the. It was clearly just Censorship. It was not. And we know that for a fact now because the press came in and invaded and the department said, oh, no, he never had a chapter on recreational drugs.

[Luke]

Interesting. Yeah.

[Amin]

So they went and looked it up. It was already deposited.

[Luke]

Right.

[Amin]

They went and looked it up in the library and it did. Right. Oh, I'm sorry, it's backwards. It was removed. It was removed in the depos. No. No. Which way?

[Luke]

Usually it's not deposited. So you have your final. Final version. It sounds like for your final. Final version, they made you take it out. Is that right? Right.

[Amin]

It was taken out. And when they went to. Oh, that's what it was. When they went to them, they said to Patricia Rosenmeyer, they said, is there a problem here? And is it true what he's saying, that you made him take out a chapter on recreational drugs? You know what I mean? And she said, no, we had no problem with that. So they went and looked it up in the deposit, right. And they were like, there is no chapter on recreational drugs and there's no reference. They can see that. It was basically Epstein filed. Right. Redacted.

[Luke]

Wow.

[Amin]

Right. And the press blew that up and went back to the department and department after that point, said, we have no more comment. Right. So it was. It was obvious that my advisor did not communicate with the other members of the department about the existence of the recreational drug frogs. Right.

[Luke]

Was it your advisor? They asked you to take it out.

[Amin]

And they got tripped up? No, it was the head of the.

[Luke]

Department, and the head of the department was not on your.

[Amin]

The head of the department said, you will not get your degree warrant signed until you have removed all references to recreational drugs.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

Why do you think they had a problem with it?

[Amin]

Because, as she said, quote, the Romans just wouldn't do such a thing.

[Luke]

What were her sources?

[Amin]

Nothing. Right, Exactly.

[Danny]

You see?

[Amin]

Where were you, Luke? If you'd have been there, this wouldn't have happened. Right.

[Danny]

That's a shame.

[Amin]

It is.

[Danny]

And that's sort of what led you in the path that you've been. That you've taken.

[Amin]

I took the information that was redacted and I put it into the form of a book. And the Chemical Music published it with St. Martin's Press. And that was a fantastic experience because it allowed people to then see in a broader audience that, oh, God, they use drugs in the ancient world and using them for all sorts of things.

[Danny]

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[Amin]

I had, you know, until about 21. I was Christian Evangelical. I taught in the. As I was getting my undergraduate in classics, I taught in a mission, you know, preached in a mission, I should say. Yeah, So I had a particular interest in that and classics. Luke just liberated my mind. And I was reading Aristotle and got it suddenly talking about nature, you know, and the metaphysics, the purpose and everything. And I went out that night and got laid, you know what I mean? And just for suck.

[Luke]

So Aristotle got you laid?

[Amin]

Yeah, exactly. See, it works.

[Danny]

You were holding it off till marriage, right?

[Amin]

Okay, so I just laid aside Christianity. But then I came back later, Luke, and looked at this. I started using the texts and looking at them and my God, there is so much drug use, especially all the Christ thing, you know.

[Danny]

So the first time Amin was on the podcast, it just completely blew my mind. I discovered that I'm absolutely fascinated with this stuff, but I simply lack the personal expertise to make an informed assessment on anything that he is saying. He's obviously taken a lot of arrows from people on the Internet, poison arrows, if you will, and that's why you're here. So you are the first accredited high level Greek expert, classicist and linguist that has ever. And who actually specializes in some of this same stuff. You specialize in magic, anc, ancient magic and ancient religions, and then like sex and gender in ancient religions. Is that right?

[Luke]

That's right. So at unm, I teach a class called Magic in Ancient Religion, which is exactly what it sounds like. We read parts of the pgm, as you would imagine. I teach a class called Sex and Gender in Ancient Religion. Actually, both of those are going on in spring, so everyone can come. Feel free to register and hang out or just come hang out. I don't know.

[Amin]

So I'm gone.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah, they're both, I mean, they're both fascinating topics. I tell everyone I get to teach some of the coolest stuff in the world. Honestly, at unm, the, the students regularly, you know, love these classes and, and, and feel like they get a lot out of them.

[Danny]

So first of all, I, I would like to stay kind of high level on this podcast for, for the, the first half of it and then before we really dive into the weeds, because I feel like that's going to lose a lot of folks. But Luke, in your view, what is the difference between classic classicists, linguists, and like, Bible scholars?

[Luke]

Okay, this is a great question because, you know, I was just talking maybe 10 minutes ago that, that oftentimes those of us in academia are kind of in our silos, and you've just discussed three different silos, none of which talk to each other very often, which is really too bad. I am a, I am a trained classicist and I'm a trained linguist. I'm not a trained Bible theologian, but I've read a lot of the Bible in the original languages and can comment on it from what I hope is a neutral, textual, historical, linguistic perspective. I'm not trying to grind any axe.

[Danny]

You didn't come at this from a religious background.

[Luke]

I'm not trying to. Yeah, that's not, that's not my goal. So as an academic, I'm trying to read these texts and understand them again, historically, linguistically, textually, scientifically. Scientifically, sure, yeah. I don't have an agenda either way on that. So, like, I'm not trying to say something specific about the Bible from a religious perspective. I'm also not trying to attack it from like an anti religious perspective. Right. So I want to make that clear as well.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

Like, I'm actually trying to read what's in there. Read what? The words Say. Right. And what the words mean, both within their own biblical context and within the wider cultural context. Okay, so back to your question. Classics is the study of. I. It's a huge, huge, insanely huge field. It's. It's the study of everything that happened in the ancient world of the Mediterranean and Near east, which is basically what we were today called the Middle East. So everything we would take, all the Middle east is pretty much ancient Near East.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Luke]

There was no major cultural divide between Europe and the Middle east back then. Like there has been for the past 1400 years when. When it's been like a Christianity versus Islam thing, you know?

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

Europe being mostly Christian, North Africa and the Middle east being most Islam. But that's new. And by new, of course, I mean from our ancient standards. It's new. It's 1500 years old. That, that distinction postdates the era that we are talking about when. When we're doing classics. So I think that's one thing we have to. We have to remember didn't exist. There wasn't this giant cultural gap between, say, Greece and Syria like there might be today. Right. Because of the different religions that historically in here, in those two places today. So. So classics is the study of everything from what's now Spain to what's now Iran, that entire area, that entire geographic area, and then all the way up to Germany, all the way down to Sudan, up the Nile River. Wow. You know, there are. There are. There are peripheral locations like England and Arabia and India. Honestly, like, there's connections with India, of course, because we know that people were going back and forth. Alexander the Great marched all the way from Greece to India. Right.

[Amin]

Drugs.

[Luke]

Yeah, sure. And drugs, ideas, words, concepts, all of these things are flowing back and forth in that corridor. So classics is the study of everything that happened in that whole area up until about the year 500 of our era.

[Amin]

Okay. Can I say a lot of stuff?

[Danny]

500 A.D. yeah. Okay.

[Amin]

That's classics big picture. If you want to state it differently. If.

[Danny]

Yep, yep.

[Amin]

Stated simply for people. Right. Like me. The evidence is. The evidence that we have for that is going to be in Greek and Latin.

[Luke]

Most of it.

[Amin]

So a classical philologist, that's why you.

[Luke]

Got to know Greek and Latin, is.

[Amin]

Supposed to be a master of Greek and Latin, because all of the evidence for anything you can determine from the civilization, it's going to all be in Greek and Latin. I mean, if you don't like that, go be an archaeologist.

[Luke]

And they have important things to say, too, because they're digging up important evidence as well. And some of that evidence has Greek and Latin written on it, right? Yeah. So there are allies. That's another silly wall. That often happens.

[Danny]

Well, here's a really interesting anecdote I'll bring up. Is the guy who peer reviewed your book in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. I had him on the podcast. He's a forensic pathologist who did the only peer review on his book the Chemical Muse. I had him in here, he was a great guy. He did all kinds amazing work on like the remains of Picasso, Napoleon, Hitler, all these huge figures. And I asked him what his ancient Greek, what his level was for translating these ancient languages and Greek and all this stuff. And he says like little to none. And I said, well, I'm like, you did this. I asked him like, you did a pretty extraordinary criticism of this book the Chemical Muse, about which the premise of his book was that drugs were ubiquitous in antiquity because plague and famine and hand to hand combat were at, were happening all the times. People were constantly trying to use remedies to cure these, this pain. And his, his review was basically saying, no, this is wrong. This is like painting the world as being a world of drug addicts. And he's like, I'm like, well, what Greek do you know and what have you read? Have you read the sources? And he's like, no, this is not my area of expertise. That was his answer. And I thought that blew my mind. I was like, how do you do a peer review of something based on classical Greek when it's not your expertise? Like, wouldn't you, instead of wanting to do peer review to just dismiss, wouldn't you want to like actually engage with the person who wrote it and try to collaborate on ideas that. Anyways, that was something that really kind of like warped my, like blew my perspective out of the water.

[Amin]

It was a hack job. Yeah, right. It was a hack job. It was meant to take down the book, that's all.

[Danny]

Yes.

[Amin]

But unfortunately the guy hadn't been exposed the sources.

[Danny]

Right.

[Amin]

He doesn't know what he's doing. He just.

[Danny]

Right. But you know, it does make me wonder though, how much do forensic pathologists or archaeologists actually do, like communicate and, and swap notes with classicists and linguists?

[Luke]

Not much. Like I said, there are these walls. Yeah. And if there's walls between classicists and linguists which are, which are closely allied fields, then you can imagine there's even higher walls between classicists and forensic pathologists. And oftentimes there's a sense of superiority that each group has within their own field. Like we know enough, we don't really need to talk to other people. And that's even true with classicists and linguists a lot of times. As someone who is a hybrid scholar, because I am a classicist and a linguist and I have a graduate degree in both of those, I have a fairly unusual perspective on that because obviously I don't think linguistics is worthless and I don't think classics is worthless. I think they're both very valuable and have a lot to communicate to each other. But I'm unusual in the sense that I have degrees in both fields and expertise in both fields. And most of my classics friends, even when I was going through the PhD in Classics, I would try to talk to them about Greek linguistics because we're learning Greek and Greek linguistics. Maybe this will help. Loop back around to your question a few minutes ago. What is linguistics? Linguistics is the scientific study of language. So how do languages work, how are they structured, how do they evolve all of this kind of stuff? How do humans communicate with each other via language? So linguistics is kind of an overview that applies to what we're doing right now. We're using language right now, the English language of the 21st century in the United States, that particular dialect to communicate with each other. So if you get a degree in linguistics like I did, just a two year degree, just a master's, your mind will be blown, honestly, because you learn about stuff that you know but you don't know. You know, because you're speaking a language. So you suddenly find out that you're doing all these things with your, with your teeth and your tongue and your mouth to make these sounds that you've never thought about before. But we're all doing it very competently right now. Right. But, but, but until you learn linguistics, you don't, you don't think about it. So linguistics is a subject that blows people's minds every time it's, it's, they're exposed to it anyways. So linguistics can apply to modern English, it can apply to any language. But, but I'm particularly interested in it when it comes to ancient languages with, you know, Greek and Latin and the other ancient languages. So as a, as a linguist studying ancient Greek, I have a, I have a richer perspective on it than someone who's not a linguist studying ancient Greek in the sense that I can appreciate the sounds that they're making. And of course we don't, they don't have tape recorders, you know, that we have to try to reconstruct them based on the writing system. So then we have to understand the Alphabet and the letters and the words they're using. Right. So. So that's what linguistics is. That's how it kind of does a Venn diagram with classics. Most linguists are not classicists. Most classicists are not linguists. And so they.

[Danny]

Interesting.

[Luke]

They can't really, you know, appreciate what's at the center of that Venn diagram when you kind of cross pollinate.

[Amin]

Every physicist in a degree program gets forced to do a complex semesters of linguistics just to be exposed.

[Luke]

I wish that were true. That's not true. In my experience at Ohio State at least none of nobody had to do take a semester.

[Amin]

No, we had to take two.

[Luke]

I'm glad to hear that.

[Amin]

Yeah, we had to take two. And that's where I first encountered Noam Chomsky.

[Luke]

Sure. And he's a fascinating figure, of course, with his own theories. You know, I didn't know he didn't.

[Danny]

Know he was a linguist.

[Luke]

Yeah, that's how he got his start. I know he's kind of into other stuff now. How old is he? How is he?

[Amin]

He's old.

[Luke]

He's super old.

[Danny]

There was a picture of him that just came out in the Epstein files on the jet with Epstein.

[Luke]

Oh, I didn't know that. That's interesting find that picture comes back to Christ.

[Amin]

Oh my God.

[Luke]

Okay, so the third thing. Yeah, just a circle. Background Bible scholars. So Bible scholars are exactly what they sound like. They're. They're specifically focusing on and specializing in the biblical texts, but the world of the Bible in general. But oftentimes and you know, there's all sorts of different Bible scholars and theologians. Some of them are secular, some of them are not.

[Danny]

Look at that.

[Luke]

There is. Yeah.

[Amin]

Linguists.

[Luke]

If you told me that was AI, I wouldn't even know.

[Danny]

Yikes.

[Luke]

Well, that's it. Yeah. And that's already what, 15 years ago? 100. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. There's a. This reminds me, you know, of the quote from Herodotus. This is the great thing about classics. There's all these fascinating ancient quotes that are just full of all this wisdom. There' there's this quote from Herodotus and it's this aphorism from the ancient Greek world that you shouldn't judge the happiness. And by that they mean the fortunateness of a person's life until they're dead because you don't know what's going to happen to them. It's like you think that, oh, this person's the luckiest person in the world, whatever. But then something bad happens to them before they die. Sorry, you're not fortunate after all. That just brought that to mind. Yes.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

I don't know.

[Amin]

Go to Epstein Island.

[Luke]

Go to Epstein Island.

[Amin]

Bible scholars now. Bible scholars, please be honest. The Greek, not so well.

[Luke]

They're all over the place. Right. There's no consistent standard. Okay. So even today, if you go to a seminary, some of them will make you learn Greek, which they all should, and some of them are moving away from it. So. So it depends on what denominations seminary you go to today. Some of the more rigorous ones will make you learn Greek, which again, is good. And some of them might not. And then some individuals are more personally dedicated to it than others. Right. So there are individual Bible scholars whose Greek has become very good because maybe they went to a good seminary that actually did force them to do it.

[Amin]

Yeah. Like the one that I taught at.

[Luke]

Yeah. That's great that they wanted you to teach people Greek, which is awesome. It's better than the alternative of not teaching people Greek. Right. And then some individuals have taken this farther on their own and have become quite good at it. But like we were talking about, they're probably going to be mostly focused on the biblical texts with less of a relationship to the outside Greek world that these Bible texts are occurring in. Just like any text that we have in English today, whether it's religious or whatever, it's not existing in a vacuum. Right. Those words exist outside of that religious text. They have a context, which is literally context, which means the weaving together the text that's with it. Right. They have a context outside of whatever it is. And so I always tell people, if you want to understand the Bible better, you got to understand the context. The Bible was not written in a vacuum. It was written in a culture. That culture had norms and rules and standards like we were talking about earlier, that are not always remotely similar to ours. So people who are understanding the Bible, are trying to understand the Bible today do themselves a massive disservice if they don't learn about the culture that the Bible arose in.

[Amin]

If you really wanted to understand the Bible, you would read all the Greek from 200 years before until 200 years after.

[Luke]

Because that's the context. Right.

[Amin]

Because it's going to give you a rich understanding of what those words mean. And remember, those words are our evidence.

[Luke]

Yeah. As philologists. So this is another word that's worth. Worth studying, talking about.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

Philologist comes from two Greek words, philo, which means love. And loge, which means word, anything, logi, logos, logic, whatever comes from this logos, Greek word, which is a very complicated word, by the way. So as philologists, what we are is we are lovers of the Word.

[Amin]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And the words. Right. It's like, what do these words mean? We're really trying to dig deep into these words. And that's what a philologist does, right?

[Danny]

Yeah, so it does. And one of the things I learned from Amin is that the Bible scholars typically like to stay in that vacuum of the Bible and ignore all the peripheral stuff that was happening.

[Luke]

You know, again, I'm not a Bible scholar. I can't speak for them. I think some of them do.

[Danny]

He doesn't want to fire any shots.

[Amin]

That's okay.

[Luke]

I'm honestly not here. You can fire all the shots you want.

[Amin]

Let me do it.

[Luke]

So, and again, I think from what I. From my knowledge of Bible scholars and I've known a few here and there, even though it's not not my field per se, they are all over the place. Some of them are very meticulous and want, do genuinely want to reach out. And some of them really are just in their lane. So that's been my experience.

[Danny]

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[Luke]

Oh, man. I think a lot of it comes down to what we were just talking about, these cultural gaps, right? So a random person who might go to church every once in a while consider themselves a Christian, probably has never read the Bible, like almost at all. I think the vast majority of Christians have either never read the Bible or maybe cracked it to a few verses here and there. And when you do that, you are missing the context. And if you crack it to a few verses here and there, you're actually missing the intra biblical context. So you can't just pull a verse out of context and say this is what it means. You can if you're trying to make some spiritual argument for your life, that's whatever. But if you're trying to make an academic argument about what a verse meant, you have to get your methodology straight. I think one of the big things that I learned in grad school is methodology matters. What is methodology? It's the way that we get from point A to point B. So how do we arrive at what we think we know? How are we going to get there? So there are sloppy ways of doing methodology. There are more careful ways of doing methodology. The scientific method is a classic form of methodology in scientific fields where if you're doing science, you can't just throw a bunch of data up in the air and see how it falls. You have to organize it in a specific way and then go through that data in a specific way. So that's really, that's important methodology. So pulling a verse out of context is bad methodology because when you do that, you're not being careful to take a look at what's around that verse in the same book in the Bible. Right. So that's the first piece of context is what does this book of the Bible say? Not just in this one verse that I like that speaks to me or whatever, but what does the whole chapter say? What does the whole book say? Why was this book written in the first place? Who was it written by? And then you kind of just go out from there because there's these concentric circles of context. The chapter, the book, the whole Hebrew Bible or New Testament or whatever it is, and then the culture that those works arose in, and then the other people who may have, you know, agreed or disagreed with what's being written, their, their voices are sometimes found hidden in the Bible because sometimes a lot of the Bible is arguments between people, you know, like they're arguing about the nature of God or they're arguing about who Jesus really was or things like that. Right. So. So those arguments are oftentimes hidden in the Bible and, and we do the Bible a disservice if we try to bury those arguments instead of bringing them to light and trying to understand what the original authors were living through, like what that cultural context was.

[Danny]

What is your view on. I know there's different, there's varying opinions, but when would the gospels were written?

[Luke]

Yeah, so, you know, I, I tend to, to take a pretty standard view on this, but I'm open to other ideas. I don't think anybody knows for sure, but the standard opinion, and you know, I'm interested to hear what Aman thinks, but the standard opinion is that Mark is the earliest gospel. There are a couple of reasons for thinking this. It's the weirdest gospel. It's got some mark 14. Yeah, well, yeah, I'm sure we're going to get into that. It's got some unexplained, like only verse.

[Danny]

I've ever written in the Bible, by the way.

[Luke]

There you go. So you need some context. You need some context.

[Amin]

It's the only one you need.

[Luke]

So, yeah, I'm sure we'll get to the context later since I just spent five minutes on a soapbox about context. So, yeah, Mark is probably the earliest gospel. Again, we'll never know this for sure, but we're trying to build theories based on the data, which is what we do, by the way. Those of us who work with the ancient world, we always live in a state of uncertainty because we have a fairly limited amount of data about everything that happened in the ancient world. And so when we're trying to seek understanding, which is literally our job and our training, we have to have a certain amount of humility. And you're going to hear me probably say this several times today that I don't know, Amin might say something and I might say, well, I'm not sure about that, but I can't disprove it either. It might be right. I don't know. Like, let's just. I'm going to be humble about it and I'm going to say that maybe we don't have enough evidence either way to decide this and let's just, you know, look at the evidence we have. So I think there's that.

[Amin]

I'm going to. Instead I'm going to resort to John Scarborough's training and I'm just going to look at the primaries.

[Luke]

Well, that's Primaries.

[Amin]

To me, it's all that matters. If you asked me the same question of when Mark was dated or when the New Testament, I would answer from the perspective of reading it and say, what other texts have I read that are using similar vocabulary and style? And from that you can put it straight first to second, late first, second centuries. And it's meshing perfectly with the apocryphal. It's using this. These texts are using the same vocabulary. It's gorgeous. So I would put it, look, these are second. These are second century texts.

[Danny]

That's consensus or what the.

[Luke]

The consensus. And again, again, I'm humble about.

[Danny]

Again, I hate it when people always fall back on consensus for everything because that's what most people in my experience have done. When I ask, you know, sure, yeah.

[Luke]

The consensus is it was probably written in the 60s, like around 65.

[Danny]

Oh, okay.

[Luke]

Which is last half of the first century. Of course, the consensus, for whatever that's worth, is that it was written in the years leading up to the Jewish revolt against the Romans, which took place between 66 and 70, which is a watershed event in Jewish and Roman relations, as you can imagine.

[Danny]

So that would have been Mark.

[Luke]

That would have been Mark. And then again, we're talking. The consensus here is that Matthew and Luke were a little bit later. Again, the consensus is that Matthew and Luke use Mark as a source because they have a lot of the same material. The three of them, Mark, Matthew and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels, which comes from two Greek words that mean to see together synoptic. So they have a lot of the same material. The consensus is that Matthew and Luke already have Mark in front of them. So Mark had already been written by the time Matthew and Luke are writing their gospels, which can help explain why they have so much similar material. Luke, right in his prologue says, I wasn't there, but I've done my research and I'm using sources. So Luke tells us right up front that he is reading earlier material and talking to eyewitnesses because Luke wasn't there. He didn't see Jesus. So Luke tells us right up front he has earlier sources. And it seems like Mark was probably one of them. John is kind of off in his own world, doing his own thing. He has a lot of different material from the other three gospels. Most people date John as the latest one, maybe in the 90s, but some people would put it later. Matthew and Luke maybe being in the 70s or 80s. But again, I think. I think these are all estimates. What Aman said about Looking at the text is always good. But then, of course, what's our methodology? Like, how are we looking at the text? What kind of connections are we making? It's useful to do what you said. I absolutely agree it's useful to do what you said, but it doesn't necessarily. It's not necessarily slam dunk either, because you can copy style, right? So, like, for instance, I can read a bunch of Shakespeare, which we know was written over 400 years ago, and I could write a Shakespearean play in Shakespearean style right now if I. If I, you know, bathe my mind in Shakespearean.

[Amin]

You're a weirdo, right?

[Luke]

Well, I am. I am a weirdo. I am a weirdo.

[Danny]

Yeah, you guys are two weirdos wearing sunglasses.

[Luke]

No comment. No, I haven't. No, I haven't. But I could. I could. And that's the point. Right. So you're right that we can look at similar styles and similar vocab, but that can be counterfeited.

[Danny]

Sure.

[Luke]

By me. I could write a lost Shakespeare play tomorrow and I could make it look pretty realistic.

[Amin]

One of the best tools when you're looking at just the language is the use of quotes. So you know that Paul, for example, quotes Medea ultimately throughout.

[Luke]

Paul has a lot of classical quotes. Yeah, he seems to be a classically trained individual.

[Amin]

Those influences, the Apostle Paul.

[Luke]

Apostle Paul.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Amin]

Those influences can be read in the language because, for example, just dialect wise, you can tell that somebody's been reading the Ionian physicians by the dialect that they're referring to, if they're using technical terms. So ancient Greek is so gorgeous in so many ways. One of the ways is that you can trace the influences of the person who's writing that text through the language that they're using. And so that's how, for example, you could see people reading Nicander. I know we talked about Nicander a little. Just mentioned him, right. He is one of the most famous ancient writers. People are quoting him all over the place. Nicander, Nicander. Nicander. What we have. You probably never heard of nickname. How is Nicander, right? But he's a priest of Apollo who is writing poetry that is holy medical. It is pharmacologically holy, medicinal, Right. It's polypharmacy. So it's a whole bunch of, you know, if you get this problem, if you bitten by this animal, give this antidote, which is a combination of these eight different plants and in the form of a song that would be transmitted by a priest who is a priest of visionary experience. These are pre He's a priest of Apollo. Clarus. Right, so these sources are sitting there, all surrounding the Bible, these sources and nobody reads. It's hard enough to get a classicist to read Nicander. Have you ever read Philuminous? He's. He writes on antidotes and he writes about different.

[Luke]

Yeah, no I haven't.

[Amin]

Is he right? By the way, people, there's something special about Greek. There is so much material, big language. There is so much material. It.

[Danny]

How much in antiquity, how much Greek was there compared to Latin or Hebrew?

[Luke]

It's hard to answer that question for sure because we've lost most of all of it. Like most of the Greek, most of the Latin, most of the Hebrew is gone and almost all of the Persian is gone and almost all of the Egyptian is gone. Like what we have of old Egyptian is what they inscribe in hieroglyphs that survive for thousands of years. But there was other stuff written on papyrus that is just gone. So this is something that I always impress upon my classes that we are dealing with a lack of data. We are dealing with a serious lack of data when we are trying to understand the ancient world. Because they just wrote so much stuff. We know they wrote so much stuff in all of those languages and almost all of it's gone.

[Amin]

Well, wait, and despite that, what we have remaining is still awesome. From the libraries from east to west, when archaeologists open up a new library. Rome. We're in Rome. Right. What would you think would be written in these Latin libraries?

[Danny]

Dwelling Romans. Right?

[Amin]

Friggin Latin. Right, because they're Romans. No, it's majority Greek with some Latin. The amount that we have that survives is so much that I've been doing Greek for 35 plus years. You've been doing Greek for what?

[Luke]

Over 20?

[Amin]

Over 20. And between the two of us, we should both know all the authors then if there's not, you know.

[Luke]

But we never will because it's just.

[Amin]

Like we never will. There's so much.

[Luke]

I mean, if we read Greek for the rest of our lives and all of our waking hours, you know, we might make a dent. Right.

[Amin]

Herculaneum is coming out. I don't know.

[Luke]

Yeah, so, so what we have left from the ancient world, you know, because again, another thing I remind my classes is they didn't have the printing press up until, you know, five, 600 years ago. So everything that has survived has survived because somebody cared enough to keep it and, and to copy it. Right? So like things that were all, almost all this stuff was on, was written on Perishable material, papyrus, vellum, you know.

[Danny]

Very humid climate too. Right.

[Luke]

Often so. So more stuff survives in a place like Egypt, which is not humid at all. It's a dry, dry desert.

[Danny]

So even, even near Alexandria.

[Luke]

So out in the desert. So there were a lot of our interesting finds, like the PGM from Egypt have been found in ancient trash dumps that were out in the desert.

[Amin]

Oxyrank is.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah. So they would dump their trash out in the desert and sometimes that trash included manuscripts that had writing on it, such as this document that's really interesting. The Papyrus Graecae Magicai, which is Latin for the Greek magical papyrus, as you might guess.

[Amin]

Whoa.

[Luke]

And there's one copy, one copy that was thrown out and that's the only reason we even have that book today. It wasn't handed down. The people who were in charge of handing these texts down didn't hand it down. It was probably supposed to be a semi secret document in the first place, really. But at some point this one copy got thrown out and it's such a dry climate that it, you know, it didn't biodegrade. Some bugs ate holes in it. So we have some gaps.

[Amin]

Classicists translated it.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And it was. They found purple in it.

[Luke]

Right.

[Amin]

And Scarborough was one of them. And Scarborough told me this is the crappiest translation in existence because it is so completely difficult to step, step from that base level of reading to the higher magical reading. And what are these words actually mean? Are they using code here?

[Luke]

They are. Well, they are. They come out. Right. And say they're using code. Yeah, yeah.

[Amin]

Right.

[Danny]

So wait, wait, wait, hold on. For, for. So the Greek magical papyri is what you're discussing right now, and it's written in Greek? Yes, it was. We found it was written in Greek with magic.

[Luke]

Magic words that have codes that don't look like Greek from something else.

[Amin]

Things that they're doing directions for the text. This is how you do the cerem. And this is what, this is the God you invoke. And this is the sub. These are the drugs that you use.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Amin]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And do we know or is there an idea of when those were written?

[Luke]

Again? I think the consensus is maybe second to fourth century of our era, but it's probably based in older material.

[Amin]

Right, right. And it, from the hymns, the invocations, it's heavily, heavily Orphic and it has elements. I, I date the Orphic stuff earlier. I'm of that, of, of that group. Just because the Orphic hymns are so packed with technical terminology. That meshes with everything else contemporary in an early time. So I'm talking 6th, 5th century BC is what I'd like to push. The ideas that are in the pgm.

[Luke]

Not necessarily the text coming out. No.

[Amin]

But the language itself. The language itself. So, yeah, I mean, it's got root. It's second century is a nice place in Anno Domini, it's a good place to put it. Right. But you've got to realize when you're looking at it, you're not dealing with just the second century, you're dealing with hundreds of years before it. Yeah, right.

[Luke]

And there's a lot of cross cultural fusion that shows up in the pgm. So it's written in Greek, but there's a lot of cultural ideas from other cultures because the ancient Mediterranean world was a very diverse place. As I was talking about earlier today, we kind of think of these two major cultural traditions in the area of the Mediterranean. Christianity to the north and Islam to the south. But back then, neither of those religions existed yet. Right. And so there was just a fantastic diversity of local religions all over the Mediterranean basin. Local languages, local cultures, local gods, local ways of worship, local ways of doing magic. And so what you get in the PGM is a lot of that kind of that material is kind of being brought together into one document. And you can see because they're writing in Greek. And the reason they're writing in Greek is because just like English today, it was the cosmopolitan, global language of the day. So if you wanted your message to get out or just to be understood by as many people as possible, you'd write in Greek. Just like today, if you're on the Internet, you're going to write in English to get the widest audience possible. Like, we're recording this podcast in English and obviously we're native English speakers, but we might be doing it in English anyways. Even if we weren't.

[Amin]

There's also a level of superiority to Greek. Greek, though.

[Luke]

Well, the Greeks thought so.

[Amin]

To the Greek. Yeah.

[Luke]

They called everyone else barbarians. You're right. The Romans agreed.

[Amin]

The Romans agreed. Lucretius is writing in Latin. He says, I'm sorry I have to write in Latin because it restricts me with what I can explain to you. If I could, I'd be doing this in Greek. But, you know, hey, that's true.

[Luke]

So the Romans looked up to the Greeks like a big brother. It was kind of a big brother, little brother relationship is kind of how I describe it, which is interesting because the Romans militarily conquered the Greeks. The way that the Roman Empire expanded is they conquered Greece, they conquered Egypt, which was Greek speaking by then as a. Well, not the upper crust, like not the regular people, but the upper crust was Greek speaking as a result of Alexander the Great's conquest of the whole what we would today call Middle east and over to India, right? The Romans militarily conquered all that. And they had the military power, if they wanted to, to impose Latin. They never did that. And the reason is that, as I was just saying, they.

[Amin]

Greece better.

[Luke]

They. They looked up to the. They looked up to the Greeks. They looked up to Greek culture. Yeah. They knew that the Greeks had been working on science and medicine and all this stuff, and they were colonized, for.

[Amin]

Fuck'S sake, by the Greeks. I mean, there was.

[Luke]

Sure. And instead of coming up with their own mythology, they tied in all of their own mythology to the existing Greek mythology. Right? The Aeneid is basically just a fanfic. The Aeneid is basically just a fanfic on Greek mythology, right? So they're tying in their own Roman origin story to this pre existing Greek mythological narrative in the Iliad and the Odyssey, going all the way back to Homer. So, yeah, the Romans 100% look up to the Greeks, even though they own them. Like they conquered them, right. They're still like, wow, this is a really cool language. This is a really cool culture.

[Amin]

The Greeks are the first grammarians. Grammar, right. It's a Greek word, for frick's sake. This tech that they are exploiting, this beautiful, beautiful mother Greek is driving all the science, everything. So, you know, it's no wonder that the drug using Marcus Aurelius is writing in Greek. Why would he choose Latin? It's inferior.

[Luke]

Yeah, he's the Roman Emperor, but he's writing and speaking Greek. Wow.

[Danny]

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[Luke]

Now I do want to go another step further. You know, there's always a bigger fish, right? So the Romans looked up to the Greeks because they understood accurately that the Greeks had been doing science and knowledge and writing for longer than they had. But the Greeks weren't the end of that line. So the Greeks in turn looked up to cultures to the east and south of them because the Greeks understood that, that other cultures to the east and south of them had been doing things longer than they had. And those cultures are several different cultures. The Egyptians are one big group. Right. So the Greeks always looked up to the Egyptians. They understood, going all the way back to Homer, they understood that the Egyptians were doing drug stuff long before they. The Greeks had been doing it and.

[Amin]

Were good at it and knew that.

[Luke]

They were good at part of its climate. Right. So even in Homer, the characters talk about how Egypt is a magical drug land, essentially. And the reason they think that, not inaccurately, is that Egypt has a warmer climate.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Luke]

So you can grow more tropical.

[Danny]

What's that word I asked you about the other day? Chem? Kemet.

[Amin]

Oh, yeah.

[Danny]

Isn't Egypt known as like land of Kemet?

[Luke]

That's the older name for Egypt.

[Danny]

Yeah, that's the older name. Egyptian name which means chemicals or alchemy. Or something.

[Luke]

I'm not sure. Yeah, it does mean dark soil. I think you're right. Which is where you can grow a lot of plants which create drugs. Sure. Yeah. Awesome. The Greeks called Egypt Aiguptos, and that's where our name Egypt comes from. But that was never their native name. So the Greeks looked up to these cultures to their east and south. Egypt was one of the big ones. And the Greeks accurately understood that Egyptian culture and Egyptian knowledge, whether drug or otherwise, went back a lot further than the Greeks did. So the Greeks kind of looked up to the Egyptians as a big brother in the same way that the Romans looked up to the Greeks as a big brother. Other cultures of that area, of course, were the Babylonians. The Sumerians go way back. The Assyrians were a little bit later, but they're still very old compared to the Greeks. The Phoenicians, who lived on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, Basically what's now the country of Lebanon. The Phoenicians were well known for building boats and sailing all over the Mediterranean. When they did so, they brought trade goods with them. The reason they were sailing is to try to make a profit.

[Amin]

Mostly they were trading in dill.

[Luke]

They were trading in all sorts of things. All sorts of things. Right.

[Amin]

Opium. So we have the vases. Did you see that?

[Luke]

Which one?

[Amin]

The little opium vases.

[Luke]

I don't think so.

[Danny]

Are you talking about the cup of best ship?

[Amin]

Whole bunch. Have you seen like the op. The opium head capsule?

[Danny]

Have you seen the University of Tampa? A couple, maybe a year or two ago. Steve, you could pull it up. They did an analysis of this Egyptian vase. Small, little, like cup or a mug of the God Bess. And they did this analysis and they found all kinds of crazy in it.

[Luke]

Like.

[Danny]

Like what was it? Vaginal fluid, like sick stuff. Blood.

[Amin]

They identified vaginal proteins.

[Danny]

Find that article. That was pretty wild.

[Amin]

Yeah. Because we were talking about ejaculate being used. And there it is in this jug that's in Tampa.

[Danny]

And that. It seems like that had something to do with some sort of magical drug rituals or something like that.

[Luke]

Right. That's not my Bailey Wick.

[Danny]

Here it is right here. Tampa Museum of Art once held psychotropic drugs, human blood and bodily fluids. Research reveals the object was probably used in rituals by cult worshippers. By. Of the deity Bess, one of the most popular figures in ancient Egyptian pantheon.

[Luke]

There it is.

[Amin]

Talks about vaginal.

[Danny]

Yeah. Scroll down where it says the. Where it says the. There you go. Look right here. By analyzing proteins and metabolites Using genetic techniques and synchrotron sync, whatever that word is. Radiation based Fourier transformed infrared micro spectroscopy. The authors found that the mug contained residues of the psychotropic substances. These included Pergonum harmala, also known as Harmal or Syrian rue, Nymphaea. No, Kalii blue water lily, and a plant of the cleome genus. They also found evidence of human blood, bodily fluids, such as oral or vaginal mucus and breast milk. Yeah, fun stuff.

[Amin]

Fantastic. The polypharmacy of you.

[Danny]

This was University of Tampa, right down the street.

[Amin]

Using the human body as a means of making drugs. Look, there's one right there. That's what they're doing.

[Luke]

Well, they were very creative. Yeah. And they didn't have a lot of boundaries, Right? Right.

[Danny]

They didn't have the cultural boundaries that we have today.

[Luke]

No, they didn't. In many cases. Now, they had boundaries. Every culture has boundaries.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

The question is, what were their boundaries and how did they differ from ours?

[Amin]

Why do you think Jesus offers Mary his semen in the Greater Questions of Mary?

[Luke]

I don't know about that text. Can you bring it up?

[Amin]

Oh, God, yes.

[Danny]

The Greater Questions of Mary.

[Luke]

That's not a biblical text.

[Amin]

Number seven.

[Danny]

That one was taken out.

[Luke]

I don't think it was ever in there.

[Danny]

That was probably written way after the Bible, I think.

[Luke]

Exactly. Yeah. There's a lot of later mythology about Jesus. And that's one of the methodological questions.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

We know that people were saying and writing things about Jesus that were very diverse, even early Christians. Like, some of this stuff came from people who didn't like Jesus and weren't Christian. But some of this stuff comes from people who were Christian, like who did worship Jesus. But there's a lot of diversity, a ton of diversity. So the question is, you know, what. What group do these texts come from? And. And what kind of historical accuracy would we assign?

[Danny]

Find the context for Steve1 before that. This is amin slide. But find, like, the definitions of the great Greater Questions of Mary so we can give the audience context of who wrote it, when it was written, and all that kind of stuff.

[Amin]

It is Epiphanius.

[Danny]

Okay, okay, okay.

[Amin]

And he is writing about the heresy.

[Danny]

Do we want the English or the Greek?

[Luke]

Yeah, so the heresy.

[Danny]

Google explanation of it.

[Amin]

Okay, good. It's good.

[Luke]

Yeah. So as I was just saying, there was a ton of diversity in early Christianity. And you might think that something like this that sounds off the wall was coming from someone outside of the faith, but it might not have been. Might not have been. Right. Because there was no Orthodoxy yet. Right, right.

[Amin]

So like it's being established, early Christians.

[Luke]

Are arguing with each other about who Jesus was, why he's important and why.

[Amin]

We have to eat his semen.

[Luke]

Well, that's what apparently some people thought, these guys. I don't think that was ever Orthodox. You don't think that was Orthodox? Right. You don't think that's normal?

[Amin]

It was one of the things, it.

[Luke]

Was one of the many things that somebody said at some point.

[Amin]

The O fights from the beginning were doing it. So there was all Simon Magus, crazy diversity. In the book of Jude it says, hey, stop doing all that sexy sex marriage.

[Danny]

Okay. Early Christian writings. Epiphanius writes the following about the Gnostics and this is our only source for the contents. They publish certain questions of Mary. So what year was this published? Amen.

[Amin]

It wasn't well or written. Let's see, Epiphanius is fourth. Right?

[Danny]

Okay, so fourth century, 400.

[Amin]

Confirm my friggin dates.

[Luke]

I think that's right.

[Amin]

He's right after Julian.

[Luke]

Right.

[Amin]

After Julian died.

[Luke]

The 4th century is really important to Christianity because that's exactly when Orthodoxy is being formed. Right. Because Constantine converts to Christianity in 313.

[Amin]

Yes.

[Luke]

And for the first time there's a top down power structure where somebody at the top can say, and Constantine did say this. Guys, get your act together. What do we believe? What is this religion anyways? Who was Jesus? What. What's the official story on him?

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

And so then you get a guy like this who's cataloging some of the diverse and maybe unusual stories about Jesus. Right.

[Amin]

If that's the way we can refer to it. Exactly, that's perfect. And remember, this is Epiphany we're talking about. After Julian tried to restore the paper.

[Luke]

Yeah, 360s.

[Amin]

Yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

This is the hard thing to me about trying to figure out. I, I think. And I also think that that's kind of like coming at it from the wrong perspective, trying to figure out exactly what was going on. Because you're never going to do that. All you can really do is just sort of read it and then take it for, for face value. You can't really. Because my question was like how many people in antiquity that are writing stuff like this had an ax to grind against someone else?

[Luke]

Most of them.

[Danny]

Like how do we know this wasn't the ancient National Inquirer? You know what I mean? Something like that.

[Luke]

And yeah, this guy is reporting on this thing that he's calling a heresy. He doesn't agree with it. The guy who's writing this doesn't think that's true, right?

[Amin]

No, he's saying he's reporting another. No, he's not saying it's not true. He's saying this is what they do, the people who eat the semen. Right. This is how they justify it. Jesus said, eat my blood and flesh. That blood is his heimer, his excrement, his semen.

[Luke]

Well, heima and semen are two different words, right?

[Amin]

Originally, Heima. No, originally. Heyman is what, an essence. It's a bodily essence. Right?

[Luke]

Blood.

[Amin]

Right.

[Luke]

Yeah. Blood.

[Amin]

Okay. That's just blood. It's not just blood.

[Luke]

Now, I mean, let me tell you this. This will help you. The ancient Greek physicians and, you know, this thought that semen was a highly concocted form of blood. Blood.

[Danny]

Whoa.

[Luke]

They did. That's what they thought. They thought that it. Highly concocted. So what they thought is that your blood go. If. If you produce semen, your blood goes through your brain and it picks up thought and air bubbles and spiritual essence, which is why it's white, by the way. And that's where it comes from.

[Amin]

It's an s. A question of essence that you and I can sit and debate about. The earliest references to hyena. Can this be so.

[Luke]

So.

[Amin]

But in. And what the Christian author here is saying is this is what these people.

[Luke]

Sure. He's reporting. He's reporting it, and he's orthodox, so he doesn't agree with it.

[Danny]

He's not Christian.

[Luke]

I think he is.

[Amin]

He is Christian.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Amin]

He is a Christian.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Amin]

And in this section, he's talking about eiskrugia, which is fellatio. Fellatio. And he's fellatio right up here. Was. He says. Right, let me just translate. And now Luke is, of course, here to. Just to make sure that I don't, you know, pull any wool over anybody's eyes.

[Danny]

But not taking us into the back alley.

[Amin]

Yeah, I'm not taking you guys in the back alley. Right. He says these people aren't ashamed to say that he himself, Jesus, revealed to her this eiscorquia, this terrible, shameful act. Right. And in the questions of Mary that are called the greater. You know, because he says there's also. In the parentheses. He says there's also these lesser questions of Mary. Right. That have been created. Right. He says they assert that he showed her this by taking her up into the hills, praying and positioning her at the level, throwing her down to the level of his groin. Where are you getting groin from Began plow.

[Luke]

Ross, where's that Side.

[Amin]

Not groin, Right, Right. But it's in the region of the side.

[Luke]

From the side. Which means by his side.

[Amin]

Telling you position. We're talking about position by side. Okay, so her head's by his side, which is vague. Okay.

[Luke]

Not necessarily groin.

[Amin]

Okay. She's on her knees for some reason. Let's keep. Okay, let's keep going and see if may, as we translate it, clears it up.

[Danny]

Right.

[Amin]

And they said that he began a salmon on to do what to her? To incata mignosthai. Now, mignumi is literally mix the fluids once again.

[Luke]

Oftentimes it means sex and it's sexual.

[Amin]

But magnum means to mix the fluids.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Amin]

And what do we do with the. What do we do with the compound form? The content in the end, when you put constant. It has a sense of consumption. Somebody consuming this thing is being consumed. And it can also be wasted. Positionally down. It can also be wasted like you used it up. And the. In positionally within this is prefer us referencing fellatio, the act of sex. That is that exchange of fluids, that life giving fluid. Because what does. Jesus.

[Danny]

What is the word that's highlighted there?

[Amin]

Yeah, the shameful.

[Danny]

What does that mean?

[Amin]

The shameful fellatio. Here.

[Luke]

Do you agree that means fellatio does not mean fellatio. It literally means. So ice. Gross means shameful, as you said correctly. Org means act, work, deed, something like that. So eisrugia means some kind of shameful act. Now the question is what kind of shameful act? Now, amin, you're taking a step further and putting your own interpretation.

[Amin]

No, no, no. Why am I.

[Luke]

Which is fine.

[Amin]

Yes. No, no, no.

[Luke]

It's clear that you are doing it.

[Amin]

No, I'm not. Well, I mean, yes, I'm doing. You're interpreting it, but I'm doing that because of my experience with the Greek.

[Luke]

I have a lot of experience.

[Amin]

Not necessarily what that means, because ice. Do you know what an ice rotase is?

[Luke]

We talked about this. Yeah.

[Amin]

What is it? Look it up, Steve. Look up ice crotase. It's a person who performs fellatio.

[Luke]

Not necessarily.

[Amin]

Okay, is it a person who performs fellatio or not? Not necessarily. It's not really a good answer.

[Luke]

Okay, so let's be more than that. Can it be other things?

[Danny]

Can it be. Is it possible that. Is that also somebody who performs fellatio as well as other things?

[Luke]

Okay, let me. Let me talk about this a little bit because I think it would help to kind of make an analogy. So that we're all sort of on the same page methodologically. All right, so let's say that there's a scholar in 2000 years, because I like to do these thought experiments about. Let's say somebody's studying classical English in 2000 years. And I think we are living in the era that will someday be called classical English because we're a global language. We've spread to every corner of the world. Everyone's speaking English. There's so much English literature being created. It's diverse, though. Right. So the English that's spoken in the United States is not the same as the English spoken in Britain or Australia or some place like India. Right. It was colonized by the. By the British. So let's say that there's a scholar in the future who notices that there's this particular word in 21st century American English. And I don't know if you're gonna have to bleep this or not, but I'm just, you know, making. Making. Making a scholarly point here. That is the word dick.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Luke]

All right. And. And those of us who. Who live in and speak 21st century English, we understand that this word today primarily refers to male genitalia.

[Danny]

Right. Or it could be someone being an asshole.

[Luke]

Exactly. Okay, so this one word, it refers to male genitalia, but then we can use it colloquially to say, like, stop being a dick. Right. And when I say that, I'm not literally saying that you were male genitalia.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

I'm making a reference. Right. And we understand that. Okay, now there's also another use of this word that's older. And so from my understanding, this use of the word dick as male genitalia is pretty recent, actually.

[Danny]

Is this in idioms. Is this kind of like.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So every language has idioms and semantic references. Right? Right. So this. This use of the word that we kind of take for granted in English today is pretty recent. Up until fairly recently, dick was used as. As a. As a. As a name for Richard. Right. As we all know. As we all know. Right. So we had a president named Dick Nixon. We just had a vice president who just died named Dick Cheney.

[Danny]

Dick Cheney, Right.

[Luke]

And there's lots of other dicks in the world who are just guys named Richard. Right. Okay. So we understand because we speak English, that there are multiple meanings of the word dick, and they don't all mean male genitalia. Right, Right. So we understand that Dick Nixon was not calling himself that because he was making. Trying to say he's the penis guy, Right? He's not. He's not. It's a totally different thing, and it actually predates our meaning of the word dick. Now, let's say that there's a scholar of classical English at some university in 2000 years who correctly notices that this word dick in 21st century classical English, as I'm calling it, oftentimes occurs in dirty contexts. Okay? It refers to male genitalia. And then he has a hundred, a thousand, a million different examples of that, right? And so he hits you over the head and says, look, this word clearly means male genitalia. And he's right. But oftentimes it does mean male genitalia. But then let's say he takes a leap and he says, well, you know what this means about Dick Nixon, right? That means that Dick Nixon was calling himself that because he was a child. Like, he just was obsessed with male genitalia. And I mean, like, why else would he use that as his first name? Like. Like, how dirty would he have to be to use Dick as his first name? Right? And so this. This. This person 2000 years down the road has this theory that. That Dick Nixon was. Was, I don't know, maybe gay. Maybe he. Who knows? Like, come up with some theory like that. Now, those of us who speak English today know that that makes no sense and isn't true at all, Right? Because we know that there are different contexts in which this word can exist and it has different meanings in different contexts. And that's methodologically sound, is we have to pay attention to the text. So I want to come back to that word because what I'm calling this is pulling a Dick Nixon. So from now on, when I say pulling a Dick Nixon, and I think I'm going to have to say it multiple times, what I'm referring to is pointing out a word that could be dirty or could mean a certain thing. Yes, but then. But it might not. It might mean something else.

[Amin]

It could mean fellatio here, right?

[Danny]

Is it possible it means fellatio in that context?

[Luke]

Okay, so since it means dirty deeds, euphemism.

[Danny]

I see it.

[Luke]

Oh, by the way, can we bring that up?

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Show that. So this is actually. Yeah. So this was from your short. You sent this to me a few weeks ago. But since you brought it up, let's bring up now Steve. Yeah. Lsj.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Luke]

It was ice Corgia, Right? Yeah.

[Amin]

No, no, Ice Crotes.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Amin]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Honestly, can we. Can we bring up. Can we take on.

[Danny]

Let's take a. I gotta Take a leak. So you look it up. I'm gonna go pee. Steve, are you ready?

[Amin]

Go to the definition.

[Luke]

Yes, let's go to the definition.

[Danny]

All right, we are back, and Steve just pulled up the definition of. What's this word again?

[Amin]

Now, this is is. And all of this is using the beautiful, glorious Greek root alpha yoda sigma. He. Right. That row is hanging on there. Can come off or not, but the I scron is that, which is just awful, ugly, deformed. Oh, look, it's in his hand, the ice cross.

[Luke]

So you see, the main.

[Amin]

The main definition, I screw gia, is the working of this shameful thing committing. Exactly.

[Danny]

Filthy conduct, ugliness, deformity.

[Amin]

You notice it's a euphemism for fellatio.

[Luke]

Right.

[Danny]

But why is it so. I'm curious, why is it so they're associating filthy conduct with fellatio?

[Amin]

Yeah, because these are Victorians. Right.

[Luke]

Okay, so this is something now. Now for. For the listeners. The three of us have had a. Had a text discussion or a text thread for the past few months.

[Danny]

Yes.

[Luke]

Amin sent this to the thread a few weeks ago, and I pointed out at the time that that semicolon is very important. Right after Ephesians 5, 4, there is a semicolon. Amin, what does that semicolon mean to you? What does it mean to you?

[Amin]

You surprise me as a Greek reader. It means nothing to me.

[Luke]

Well, that's a problem. It means something very.

[Amin]

It's an. And as an English reader, and it's euphemism, separating two, as you see from the scholias, the scolios.

[Luke]

Frogs, sorry, aristophanes. Frogs.

[Amin]

Frogs. 1308.

[Luke]

Yep, we agree with that.

[Amin]

And then they refer to you the general term eis crosunae. Right. Which is which Tsets is going to talk about.

[Luke]

Sure.

[Amin]

Right. And his comment, I don't know, Tzantine.

[Danny]

All right, to you, what does that colon mean?

[Luke]

It's separating two different things that are. That are pretty different here. Okay. So specifically, it's separating two places in which this word, eis grotes has been used by two different authors at two different times and places. Before the semicolon, what we see is filthy conduct. Epistle to the Ephesians, Chapter five, verse four. Okay, okay. And in that use. And we can go look at that if you want, but I don't think this is particularly controversial. The author of Ephesians is simply saying, don't engage in eis grotes. Right. He doesn't define it because I think he's being vague. Yeah, I don't think he. I don't think he necessarily has one particular dirty thing in mind when he says that. So Gaya.

[Amin]

That he.

[Luke]

Could be sexual. Okay? So I think. I think when he has dirty things in mind in Ephesians, sexual stuff is part of it. All right, but he's not narrowing down the sexual stuff. Do you agree with that? He doesn't just mean one particular sexual thing.

[Amin]

No, he does, because. No, I don't think he does it A dolo la tri. It is the act itself of engaging in these dirty, dirty mysteries where they are eating.

[Luke]

Let me go back to the semicolon. All right, okay. So then the next use of this is centuries later. I'm actually not sure what century the scolios to Aristophanes frogs is. I want to say like 11th or 12th century. It's over a thousand years after Aristophanes. Yes. Or sorry, a thousand years after the author of Ephesians. It's Byzantine. Right, so. So hundreds, maybe over a thousand years later, a scholiist. And let me. Let me tell everyone what a scholast is. Aman and I both know a scholeist is somebody who is a commentator on an. On an older work. Okay? So like for instance, today you can buy a Shakespeare annotated volume because sometimes we don't know what Shakespeare means because it's been 400 years, right? And so somebody will say, put notes in and say, this is what Shakespeare meant when he said this or whatever.

[Danny]

Okay?

[Luke]

That's what Aescholius is doing. He's a later writer who is a commentator on an earlier work.

[Amin]

Usually grammarians. Grammarians.

[Luke]

All sorts of nerdy people, as you can imagine, are scholiist. Right.

[Amin]

Linguists.

[Luke]

Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. So this is a much later commentator on this classical Greek play. So aristophanes, you know, 5th century, late 5th century, early 4th century B.C. okay, so there is the use of this word aiskrotes in this play by Aristophanes. In the play by Aristophanes, the author doesn't explain what he means by Akrotes. But this later commentator from literally a millennium and a half after Aristophanes wrote this, he says, I think it means fellatio. Okay, so that doesn't mean he's wrong, but that doesn't mean he's right. That's the opinion of someone from a millennium and a half later. That's important to know that some later literally random dud was part of that culture at all. Speaks and Reads Greek, but from a much later, much later period. That's what he thinks. That's his opinion.

[Danny]

Is that not.

[Amin]

Do you agree? No, I think he's. I think, Luke, you're under emphasizing.

[Luke]

What do you disagree with? About what I said?

[Amin]

These Scolias are so separated from these traditions. They're grammarians. John Tsets, the guy on the end there, he's a Byzantine guy, and he is right up there in preserving. I mean, he preserves stuff that we don't even have. He talks about in the Odyssey, what's going on when Circe goes back to visit Homer, and you're like, what? We didn't know that tradition was there. How the hell. Huh? It's the first time we see it. He preserves that from things he's read himself.

[Luke]

That's true. That could be true.

[Amin]

Like he has a commentary. That guy who's there talking about the eis crosune, which is the older form that they would have been using, he is saying, oh, this source is telling us X, Y, and Z, and we don't have any other record of that. He's the one who's saying, look, this is euphemistically. Right, yeah.

[Luke]

He's saying it's a euphemism for a fellatio. Now, I'm. Not. To be clear, I'm not saying he's definitely wrong because he's writing 1500 years later. And I 100% agree that these scolios are in a tradition where they are very well read. They're not dummies. Just like if you hire someone to write a commentary on Shakespeare, hopefully they've read all of Shakespeare and everything else from the period to even know what they're talking about.

[Danny]

Right?

[Luke]

Right. So I am not trying to discount that these Scolias don't know anything, otherwise we wouldn't cite them in a dictionary. However, we have to cite them with a pretty large grain of salt. So we can't just say, that's definitely right, because this is 1500 years later that somebody is coming along and saying, I, Mr. Scholius, from the Byzantine period, think that the use of this word in Aristophanes play the frogs means fellatio. Right. That's its opinion. It's a learned opinion. Okay. I'm not saying he's wrong. I'm just saying we do have to take it with a grain of salt. We can't say, that's definitely okay. Yeah. So also, I want to make this point. He's only talking about the use of the word in Aristophanes, frogs. He's not talking about it anywhere else. Okay. He's not talking about the use of the word in Ephesians. He had no comment about the use of the word in Ephesians. He's not talking about the use of the word in what we were discussing before.

[Amin]

That's the Victorians who were putting them next to each other and putting. The semicolon.

[Luke]

No, the semicolon. No, no, no, no, it's not. No, it's not the reason that the semicolon is there. It's very simple. It's dividing two different times that this word was used. You agreed it was used in Ephesians. It was using the frogs two different times, and that's all. The semicolon.

[Amin]

I would say it's used the same. I would say it's used the same colon is an.

[Luke]

And you can have that opinion, but it's just your opinion. I might have a different opinion. You might have a different opinion. We can both argue for it.

[Amin]

Correct. And it's good. That's what university is for.

[Luke]

Yes.

[Amin]

We argue for our particular. You think the leaders of the museum didn't fight with each other and all.

[Luke]

The other things all the time, and they stormed off and they started new museums.

[Amin]

Exactly.

[Luke]

Of course they did.

[Amin]

Exactly. Now can we have the text now?

[Danny]

I'm just trying to start a new religion here today. That's all I'm here for.

[Amin]

For to finish the text.

[Luke]

So I want to go back to. Yeah, we were. We were debating, actually, what led us to this is what the word is means. And so. So what Ammon has done is he's. He's pointed out that hundreds and hundreds of years later, one guy had an opinion that this meant fellatio in a different text. Not even here, he said.

[Danny]

Not even in this text.

[Luke]

Not even in this text.

[Danny]

This was in an Aristophanes play.

[Luke]

Aristophanes play, which is not what we're dealing with here. Right. So. So this is where methodology comes into play. On the. No pun intended. On the one hand, Amin is doing linguistic work here, which is important and valuable because he's saying, look, here's another time where somebody said that this word used in a different place, but still the same language, even if it's 1500 years apart or whatever means this particular thing. However, it doesn't remotely prove in any way that that's what it means here. Are we pulling a Dick Nixon by saying that this means fellatio?

[Amin]

Okay.

[Luke]

And it's up to you. You're the one who has to kind of build your case.

[Amin]

Answer that by just translating. I don't want to have any ideas, but I just want to translate it. Right. So what does it then say after he did entered into this act, the sexual act with her, what really happened? Dathan. He's really emphasizing that he took the meta love unto the Apo Royan. He took the off runnings. Right. What is that? His own. His own off runnings. His could be his efflorescence. His efflorescence. Right.

[Luke]

Yeah. I'm sure it's vague though, right?

[Amin]

It could be. Except we know also blood. Also contextually though he's been talking about semen eaters, so. Right.

[Luke]

Context matters.

[Amin]

Right.

[Luke]

But then you got to build a case.

[Amin]

He's been talking about it. So it's a little bit of a cheat, but he's been talking about it already.

[Danny]

Who has?

[Amin]

The author of this epiphany. And he says he. He showed her that we do this in order to it we'd live. Right. How are we. How are we going to live if we don't do this? And then it says, look and it says Mary Tarak Seis. She was taken aback and falls down.

[Luke]

More than that, she was deeply trouble. That's what Tarek faces. She's not happy about this.

[Amin]

Yeah. No, yeah. She's. Yeah.

[Luke]

She's like what?

[Amin]

It's like she's stunned. What the hell? She falls all the way kamai to the ground.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Amin]

And he picks her up and he. He says to her, why. Why are you so freaking unfaithful? You faithless, Right, Ollie.

[Luke]

Peace state Almond Translation Right.

[Amin]

I added the bitch part, right? I had the bitch part. Now tell me something. Where is the. Where is the off runnings? Where? What is he doing? He's making her eat something. Like the O fights. That epiphanes has already talked about her eating the same. He goes on. This passage goes on to explain what the people who are eating the semen believed about why he was doing this. And they use a half a dozen verses from the New Testament. So they're quoting. When Jesus says X, he means this. When Jesus said, eat my flesh and blood, this is the offering. When he said, I'm going somewhere and I'm going to return from the origin. The origin is his semen.

[Luke]

Is that your interpretation?

[Amin]

I'm ascending to the place. It was his semen. That's what they. How they explain it. There's all sorts. There's a half a dozen justifications.

[Danny]

This is how epiphanius explains it.

[Amin]

Yeah. Of why these people were doing what they did. And it's through Epiphanius's.

[Danny]

So do you believe that this is Epiphanius's theory on what was happening in.

[Luke]

The Bible or what he's quoting? He's quoting somebody that he calls a heresy that believes this.

[Danny]

Oh, I see.

[Amin]

Apophanius is talking about people who are doing and saying, this is not good. Right. This is one of the heresies. And in this one, they justify the eating this ice crea. They justify it by saying Jesus specifically showed Mary how to do this and said, look, we have to do this to live. Live. And they go on to quote, which is, to me, most important, they're going on to quote Jesus when he is saying things like, eat my flesh.

[Danny]

And that's right here.

[Amin]

It's what he means. It's following it. Following below where I.

[Danny]

Okay, what is your take on.

[Luke]

Okay, I. I think context, as we've been talking about and Amen and I both agree on this, context is paramount. Right. So this is from a late document, but for Christian historical standards, 400. 400. So this is 400 years after, you know, 300 plus years after Jesus. Right. So. And it's from a guy who is. Who is trying to catalog all the weird things that people think about Jesus, but this guy doesn't think they're true. Not that we would necessarily care what this guy thinks either way, but I don't think he thinks it's true. Even if he did think it's true, doesn't make it true. Right. Lots of people are wrong about a lot of things.

[Amin]

Except for that Dathan. Except for that Dathan, which is. It's like he's saying, hey, what is Dathan? You literally, you have to snap your mind out of it and realize now that really what I'm telling you is.

[Luke]

Okay, wait, so you think. So you think this, that Epiphanes secretly thinks this is true? And he's trying to like.

[Amin]

No, no, he's telling his reader, you know, don't be shocked here. This is really the way that they're doing it.

[Luke]

Okay. So, yeah, what I want to do is back up here and ask ourselves why this matters to Jesus. Right. So we're trying to get back to Jesus here as historical scholars, like, not doing biblical theology of, like, what Jesus means from a theological perspective, but we're trying to understand as historians, because classics are historians. Right. So who was this guy Jesus who walked the earth?

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

And most of us really, you know, There's a minority, mostly on the Internet, that thinks that Jesus has made up and there never really was a guy named Jesus. But almost everybody in the academy that I've ever met would say that there really was a historical Jesus who did walk the earth. Amin you think there was a historical Jesus? Jesus who walked the earth?

[Danny]

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[Luke]

You.

[Amin]

I read texts that talk about him all the time.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Amin]

That's my only.

[Luke]

I don't.

[Amin]

Well, all of the, all of the academic debate, all the myth, you know, is this person a myth? Is this. Does it fucking matter? The Greek is what matters. That's what our.

[Luke]

Of course it matters. Of course it matters because they wrote a lot of made up stuff, okay. About everything. Not just about Jesus, about Zeus, about. I mean, you know, so just because something is written in a historical text and we do want to be responsible lingually and philologians and try to dive down into the text, which is what we've been talking about here, right. And try to get a good idea of what it means. The next question to ask is so what? So like, okay, maybe we're trying to see what this text means. Does this word specifically mean this or something else? Those are wonderful debates to have. But then the next step is, you know, like, did Jesus really exist? Okay. And it sounds like amen. You're kind of not taking a position on that, which is fine.

[Amin]

No, I don't take any positions. This text says Jesus was making Mary blow him and he tried to make the apostles do the same thing after this and they didn't. And it says they didn't follow him after that point.

[Luke]

Okay, so. So do you believe that really happened?

[Amin]

I don't have to believe anything. That's a text I'm talking about.

[Luke]

Okay, we're having a disconnect here.

[Amin]

Science. It's not. This is science.

[Luke]

No, it's a text.

[Amin]

I don't have to believe. I don't have to believe in chlorine. I know chlorine.

[Luke]

Text lie. I don't know if you know this, but sometimes text lie. Actually, usually text lie.

[Amin]

Yeah, it knows. You can be. This guy could be lying out his butt. Epiphany, Church bishop. He could be lying out his back. Plato's the biggest fucking liar on the planet.

[Luke]

He's quoting people. So he's not lying.

[Amin]

He's the biggest liar on the planet.

[Luke]

Oh, sure, Plato admits to it right up front.

[Amin]

So no, that's a part of the text. But I'm still going to tell you what Plato.

[Luke]

That's. Sure, I 100% agree with that. But then I don't agree that it's not worthwhile or that we can just wave our hands and say, well, so what? Like, did this really happen? And what you're saying right now is that, that you don't necessarily believe this happened. You don't necessarily believe this happened.

[Amin]

It doesn't matter.

[Luke]

Or it doesn't matter to you because you're more text based, which I respect. Text based.

[Amin]

It matters that somebody wrote this down and that's our evidence.

[Luke]

So let me tell you how I see this again. It's a 4th century text from a Christian guy who is trying to explain what he calls heretical Christians believe. Okay, this is not coming from outside the church. This is coming from inside the church. And he's saying these are some Christians with what we would today kindly call diverse beliefs. But that sounds too positive for what he's trying to do here. I think he's saying these are weirdos, these are heretics, these are people who don't know who Jesus is, but they think they know who Jesus is. And they tell stories. Okay. They tell stories about Jesus doing some weird stuff with Mary. All right. That most other Christians, including this guy Buffanius, are not going to believe. So we can kind of back away from that. Now. This is where biblical theologians would say, well, well, we know what Jesus did, and he did this and he didn't do that. But as a historian, I'm actually still interested. Not from a biblical theologian perspective, but I'm still interested in trying to get back to the historical Jesus. And I do believe there was really a historical Jesus who really did walk the earth and we could talk more about him. So that's the question that remains. So on your YouTube channel, you bring up texts like this, but then I think you leave the question hanging as to whether this is true or not. Not.

[Amin]

Yeah. Because I'm not. I'm only there to present evidence to the court, let the viewer figure out whether or not they think it's true.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Amin]

When I'm a pure, pure classicist, I only want the philology. That's all I want.

[Luke]

Classicists are also interested in what really happened. Yeah. Are we?

[Amin]

We are. But the. The actual surgery, like a surgeon. Sure. The surgeon has morals to him. What matters is that surgery, that technique, you know, it's an art, and you have to do it. Right. And that's all I'm saying. When. When you go to the Bible and you see terms that are related and you see episodes that are related, and Paul's saying, throughout your book, your magic books, and in Jude, he's saying, don't do this. This stuff, this idolatry that involves the pharmakeya, don't do it. That's sexual stuff. Don't. Paul's like, stop your family members. Right, right.

[Luke]

And in Stepmother. Yeah.

[Amin]

Alexandria. And in Alexandria, what are the. What are they persecuting Christians for? Incest. Right. They go to their ceremonies, they put out the lights, everybody disrobes and they screw. Why? Because these fluids are life. They're life. This is the salvation. Right. This is what Epiphanius is trying to say. Hey, this is, you know, within Christianity, it's this.

[Luke]

This.

[Amin]

This is a movement. And just like Jude said, don't do this stuff.

[Luke]

Okay, so. So, yeah, in First Corinthians, which is a very early letter, everyone agrees Paul wrote it in the 50s, probably. It's one of our earliest Christian documents because it's earlier than the Gospels. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Paul has to call out some of the. The people in the Christian community at Corinth, one of them is sleeping with his stepmother. And he says, don't do that. Like, what. What are you sleeping with your stepmom for, Bro, that's my translation, which the Romans hated.

[Amin]

Incest to the Romans was like, no.

[Danny]

God, that's not technically incest.

[Amin]

Don't be doing this.

[Luke]

There were people in the Christian community that there was actually. And this actually goes to show the crazy diversity within the very early Christian community. Some Christians were at opposite ends of the spectrum as far as their attitudes towards sex. So some Christians heard Paul's message of a resurrection and that we're going to get new bodies. Okay, that's. That's one of Paul's central messages. It seems like that we can reconstruct from his letters. He's going around telling people Jesus is coming back soon and. And we're going to have our bodies transformed. He says this in 1st Corinthians 15. And so some Christians, like apparently some of them at Corinth, took this to mean that we can do whatever we want with our bodies because we're getting new ones anyway, so who cares? That seems to have been their attitude. And so some of those. Those Christians, this is not people outside the church, but some of those Christians were sleeping with their stepmother. They were sleeping with prostitutes. They were doing whatever they wanted sexually. Right. Because they actually internalized Paul's message in a way that he didn't necessarily intend. And the way we know that he didn't intend it that way is because then he wrote the letter of First Corinthians to tell them not to do that, among other things in First Corinthians. It's a fascinating piece of literature from the mid 1st century BC that offers a pretty important window into early Christian thinking, at least from Paul. Now, again, we always have to remember there's diversity. And that's one of the things I'm trying to hammer home with this text, is that just because we have one Christian text that says some Christians were doing it this way doesn't mean that anyone else was necessarily. So. We have to be careful with methodological slippage, which means we can't just wave at a text and say, oh, yeah, that proves everything. It doesn't necessarily prove much at all. Okay, back to Paul. Back to Paul. So he's writing specifically to this one community, these Christians at Corinth, that he had just recently converted from paganism. The recent converts from paganism to the Jesus movement.

[Danny]

Paganism. Explain what paganism is.

[Luke]

Yeah. So I'm using this loosely. And of course, that's a later term, as Amen probably knows.

[Danny]

Polytheism.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they were worshiping the Greco Roman God. So paganism comes from a Latin word that means rural. So it comes from a later period when Christians had taken over the cities, ideologically speaking, not militarily, but ideologically speaking. But then there were still people out in the countryside doing things in the conservative way, as. As is the case today. Oftentimes in places like the United States, cities are what is deemed more quote, unquote, progressive, and rural areas are more likely to be conservative. It's honestly kind of always been that way.

[Amin]

It's derogatory.

[Luke]

It is, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Amin]

It's kind of like hillbilly.

[Luke]

It was derogatory because it was used. It was used by Christians to refer to. Yeah, hillbillies. Pagan means hillbilly, you know, rural bumpkin or something like that. Obviously, I'm not using it in a derogatory sense. Polytheism is fine, though. So Paul had just converted a handful, we don't know how many hundred, not that many people in the Greek bustling metropolis of Corinth to the Jesus movement. He rolled into town, told them the message of Jesus as he saw it, and then converted this handful of people. And then he left because he had to go to the next city and make more converts. That was his whole career, going from city to city trying to make converts. And he felt the urgency that Jesus.

[Amin]

Was coming back soon, getting thrown in jail a lot.

[Luke]

Getting thrown in jail a lot. He gets thrown in jail.

[Amin]

What did he do to the Pythia? Oh, my God, that whole city was mad.

[Luke]

Yeah, well, the time that he cast the demon according to Acts. Cast a demon out of.

[Amin]

Yes. He kept saying, you're doing the Christos.

[Luke]

Thing, so we'll get there, I'm sure. I assume. Okay, so. So Paul writes to this community at Corinth and he says, yeah, so you guys need to not be sleeping with your stepmother. Just because I said you're getting new bodies doesn't mean it doesn't matter what you do in this body. Now, there were Christians on the other end of the spectrum who apparently thought that you should never have sex with anyone ever, even your own spouse. Never, Never. And there was a monastic movement. It wasn't called that yet, but there was a.

[Danny]

That's what creates those sicko priests.

[Luke]

There was a strain of self control already within in Greek philosophy that Aman probably knows about, where Greek philosophers were already saying maybe you should control yourself and, like, focus on higher spiritual realities. Meditate. Maybe sex isn't the best way to use your finite earthly existence. So Christians didn't make this up. Jews didn't make this up. This is. Greek philosophers were always saying this. They weren't always living it, but they were saying it a lot of times. And so Paul also disagrees with them. So he also thinks sex has a time and place. You should never have sex. And that's basically. That's the middle ground that Paul is trying to drive in the letter of First Corinthians. And that's where this stuff comes up, essentially. So, again, why do you think he.

[Amin]

Didn'T suffer the ill effects of being bitten by a poisonous viper when he got shipwrecked? And all the locals were like, oh, God, that dude's gonna die. Watch him.

[Luke]

That's an interpretive question. So we have the story in Acts 27 or Acts 28, where he has a shipwreck. He's taken to Rome to stand trial before the emperor. And so they put him on a ship, load him from the eastern Mediterranean, sail him all the way to Rome. They have a shipwreck on Malta, which is an island in the Mediterranean to the south of Italy. You know, he's not supposed to be there, but the locals kind of take him and the other shipwreck victims in, and then they're sitting around a fire. It's winter, apparently, and this. This snake comes out of the fire and latches onto his hand. And all the locals look at him like he's gonna die because he just got bit by this viper.

[Danny]

And apparently talking about Paul. Right?

[Luke]

Paul. Yeah, it's. Apparently it's a poisonous one. And he just looks and shakes it off into the fire like nothing happened and keeps going on with his preaching. And all the natives just look at him, stare at him, wait for him to die. He doesn't die. It's like nothing happened. And then they start worshiping him as a God. And then he has to be like, no, guys, I'm not God. I'm just God's representative. And so the text. And again, this is an interpretive question, right? As we were just saying, we have the text. That's what the text says. The text doesn't give us an explicit explanation for why Paul doesn't die, except that I think that the author of the text, which is probably Luke, wants us to believe that God is protecting him. Right. That doesn't mean that you can't come along like Ammon, I think, and Say he's got some kind of concoction of anti venom in his body or something.

[Amin]

If we have contemporary texts like Philuminous, who we're talking about out, hey, this is the theriac that is used. You can counter the viper with this and that, but you have to Christ it, right? It has to be Christed. Those texts are additional evidence that there's something going on there with Paul's viper bite. I don't have to believe in miracles because I have the reason of the word. And that word clearly is reflecting a real scientific, anthropological reality that Paul is walking around with viper venom, which is not typical, which is not atypical. Excuse me, is not atypical.

[Luke]

So you think he's like the guy in the Princess Bride?

[Danny]

So he's using, he's using his knowledge of Galen's theriac, which allegedly Galen was using as like a, a performance enhancing drug to keep himself safe from being poisoned by venoms, by snake venoms. And he's connecting that to this biblical writing of Paul getting bit.

[Amin]

All of that is written in Galen in a work on the theriac Depiso.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Amin]

And he talks about the theriac that Marcus Aurelius is on with its compound drugs.

[Luke]

Yep.

[Amin]

The concept of using antidotes through the viper venom, specifically traces in the Bacchic text as well. It's the same. All these priests like Nicander, that's what they're talking about. They're talking about the use of these venoms and toxins in order to induce that open eyed spiritual experience, vision. It is a process that is biochemical. And I as an investigator of the Greek, it looks to me like Paul is on that list. And that's why the Pythia calls him out for it. She knows that he's got to be Christing. She knows what Christing is.

[Danny]

All right, we're going to get into the Christing stuff. I want to make sure we stay on track though and not make this thing go all over the place. I want to keep it kind of like segmented. So does that make sense to you how he's connecting this, the, the idea of the, the act and these? First of all, I'm sure you know about, or are you familiar with Galen's theriac and, and Nero's physician talking about this Marcus Aurelius?

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Also Nero's physician talked about the theriac. Right. A concoction of like seven different viper venoms, viper flesh and all kinds of stuff that allegedly Marcus Aurelius was using. And Drinking daily. It had opium in it as well. Well, to keep himself safe from people who were trying to kill him with poisons.

[Luke]

I have little doubt that there were people doing drugs.

[Amin]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Regardless of what your advisor said.

[Danny]

Well, this wasn't, this wasn't necessarily like a. Like a drug to get you high. This was more.

[Luke]

This was more of like a concoction. That's fine. That's fine. Again, I, I think Aman and I both agree. We want to be faithful to the texts and be careful with the texts. Right. So. So Galen is writing quite a bit later. Nero's obviously, obviously closer to Paul's time. Much closer to Paul's time. So we.

[Amin]

He's executed under Nero, isn't he?

[Luke]

Yeah. At least traditionally. Right.

[Amin]

It's actually Nero.

[Luke]

Our sources aren't great for that.

[Danny]

Paul was executed under Nero.

[Luke]

Yeah, traditionally. Like our sources are not great for that. But that was the early rumor. Very early rumor. It's definitely not a later creation by any stretch. It's not in the Bible. So my perspective on this is that we can hypothesize. I think it's interesting to hypothesize size. I don't see any evidence in the Bible for that. I don't see any evidence in the biblical text of Acts where this, this, you know, viper bites Paul. That makes me think he's definitely on some kind of concoction.

[Danny]

Sure, sure, I get that. I get that.

[Luke]

Like it's not in there.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

But it doesn't say he's not.

[Danny]

But do you think it's reasonable how he's making the connection from Galen's theory act to Paul not dying from being bit by a viper?

[Luke]

I think he could write an article on it.

[Danny]

Is that it's too much of a stretch.

[Luke]

Talk about it. I think, I think he could write an article on it more.

[Amin]

I'm done with it.

[Luke]

It'd be fun. It'd be fun because I. The community can decide if it's too much of a stretch now. The community is wrong sometimes.

[Amin]

Yes.

[Luke]

Right. I think we can all agree on that.

[Amin]

Yes.

[Luke]

Sometimes the community's too conservative. I don't mean that politically. I mean like they just cling to older ideas. Right. I don't know. I'm not a drug expert. Honestly, like, like, you know, I haven't read Galen, so I can't really comment. I've read parts of Galen.

[Amin]

That's why I respect that he hasn't read Galen. He doesn't know.

[Luke]

Yeah. As talking about earlier, I'm here to call Balls and strikes. And most of what we talked about has been within my area of expertise. I have no problem saying you've read more Galen than me. Okay, now I'm interested. Maybe you send me these sources and I'll take a look at them and then we can do this thing with them.

[Amin]

You know, a good connection is your wine too. He wrote about wine.

[Luke]

I know a lot more about wine than any other drugs.

[Amin]

It's connected because dioscorides and others physicians write about. The use of. Of wine is a base for the drugs, man.

[Luke]

A lot of times they put drugs.

[Amin]

In the wine, all sorts of wines that are drugs.

[Danny]

Like the Lucinian Mysteries. Right.

[Amin]

This is not anything to do with cult. This is just people enjoying drugged wines.

[Danny]

Oh, wow.

[Amin]

Yeah. It's for health.

[Danny]

Really?

[Amin]

Yes, it's for health purposes. They're. And they're all. Oh, God, the descriptions of them are lengthy. And the stuff, the amount of ingredients they're putting in, oh, it's fantastic. And there's always a medical connection. It's always like, oh, this one cures your dropsy. Right. Your inflammation will be reduced with this wine, which has these three herbs that are Attic herbs from so and so. Okay, fantastic. But you did wine. You did. You.

[Luke]

Sure.

[Amin]

History of wine and of course, wine.

[Luke]

Was the most common drug in antiquity.

[Amin]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Like everybody drank it, even kids, really. Although we do have to understand that, that the Greeks specifically mixed wine quite heavily with water. So their traditional concoction of wine was 2 parts water to 1 part wine. In other words, it was only one third wine and it was 2/3 water that they were drinking. What this did, and of course we know this now, they didn't know this, is that it killed the bacteria, or at least a lot of the bacteria in the water. They had very dirty water. The wine did, the wine did. By mixing the water and the wine.

[Danny]

Wow.

[Luke]

And so they just realized getting plagued.

[Danny]

Just be drunk all the time.

[Luke]

Well, they didn't want to do that either, though. So they realized with trial and error that if you, if you mixed one third part wine with 2/3 part water, you wouldn't get. You were healthier.

[Danny]

Oh, really?

[Luke]

You were healthier because it would kill a lot of the bacteria in the water. Where if you just drank straight water, you get sick all the time because their water sources were terrible.

[Danny]

Wow.

[Luke]

But when you drank this water mixed with wine, you wouldn't get sick near as much, but you also wouldn't get drunk unless you drank a lot. Because if you, if it's two parts water to one part wine. It's going to take quite a bit, Bit for you to even get buzzed. Right. Which is why they would give it to kids. So it was a health drink for everybody of age.

[Amin]

And opium, they gave a ton of opium to kids. And earaches, toothaches. The recommendation is always opium.

[Luke]

I don't know about that. I have nothing.

[Amin]

Diarrhea, opium. Yeah, it's way, way over prescribed. Way, way overused. It's like common. Very common.

[Danny]

Okay, before we get into the Christing stuff, I want to talk about the idea that Amin brings forward about the Septuagint. And Ammon believes the Septuagint was originally written in Greek and then translated into Hebrew. And he is the only person with a pulse on the, in the cosmos that believes this to be truth. And other people I've had on here, experts, I've asked the same thing, and they all say that. That the Greek and the Septuagint was, Was one guy, Gad Barnett, said it was Jewish Greek. Some people say it's Koine Greek.

[Luke]

It is Jewish.

[Danny]

Yeah, it's Jewish.

[Luke]

It's.

[Amin]

Wait, wait, are you gonna say it's Jewish Greek?

[Luke]

Why don't you make your case, and.

[Danny]

Then I'll make your case.

[Luke]

Make your case.

[Danny]

Lay it out for folks who aren't familiar with this, people that may not even know what the Septuagint is.

[Amin]

Sure. So I'm not actually the first person to say this, nor am I the only person. There was a Jewish scholar, Yehudah, Dr. Yehuda, who wrote a book called Hebrew is Greek. And in it he takes the. Or he takes the trilateral roots that you find in the Hebrew. And then he shows you the Greek from which that term was derived. So. And he shows you, through the use of colloquialisms, euphemisms, that the Hebrew is actually being constructed around the Greek. And he. He wrote his book Hebrew is Greek in the 80s, I think it was 70s 80s, something like that. And of course, you can imagine it did a dive. Because if that's the case, everything that we know about biblical scholarship is wrong, completely wrong. There is a rabbi who came forward. Oh, there it is. Do you have. And there he's talking about the Spartans in the Greek, that the Jews are actually from Sparta and Crete. Anyway, can you. Steve, did you get the video clip, the short clip that I sent you last night?

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah, I got it.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Amin]

This is Rabbi. Right? Telvia. Right. Let's see here what he says. I'll be quiet.

[Luke]

The key is that Christians are appealing to a Septuagint, a Greek translation.

[Amin]

A translation can never be superior to.

[Luke]

The original in any Western court. The law of best evidence states that an original document in its original language is always superior to any translation.

[Danny]

So this is a specious argument, but.

[Amin]

He is exactly right. A translation cannot not be superior.

[Luke]

To be clear, he is saying the Septuagint is a translation.

[Amin]

Right? He's saying the Septuagint. Right. So it. This, the Septuagint should be a step down from the Hebrew original because in the translation process, you lose information. You never gain information. You never get a more technical document from a translation because.

[Luke]

Not.

[Amin]

Because the translation is not adding.

[Luke]

You can always add stuff anytime you translate anything.

[Amin]

Well, you can, but you're always. You're not translating. You're. You're.

[Luke]

Then a lot of the Septuagint is an embellishment of the original Hebrew.

[Amin]

You're embellishing. Yeah.

[Luke]

So what I'm saying is. Exactly. What you're saying doesn't happen. Does happen with the Septuagint. Okay, go on.

[Amin]

So his. His premise is this superior form is the original.

[Luke]

Who decides superior form?

[Amin]

I'll show you right now. Let's look at an actual text. Hey, it. Steve, with the Greek text there. This is from Genesis 1:2. This is from Genesis 1:2. This one. The one with this. Yep, There you go. The whole verse is in the middle. And the Earth was oratos and Akatas. The Earth was King Jamesy without form and void. Kai scotos in the darkness was upon the deep. They'll say the abyss. And the spirit of God hovered there over the waters. Now look at the two words that The Earth is in the beginning. The Earth was aortos in Greek and akataskewas tos. If you look up those words just because you want to know what they are, next slide, Steve. If you look them up, you're going to see. Right, Here we go. Look at the. Just tell me really quick. Akataskevos toast not properly prepared. And after that, you. They give a reference to a pharmakon. Right. This word is used for synthetic drugs. Right. These are unworked principles. Akatasuasdos. Look at katask below it. That's without the alpha privative on the front. So the alpha privative just negativizes the word. So what is something that is kataskia? It's artificial. It's created or artificial. Okay, so the Earth is akataskevastos not prepared, not created, not yet synthesized. Look at the bottom. Ahoratos. What else is the earth? It's unseen or invisible. I want you to drop down to the second line and look at what is it? When you take the substantive of this adjective, it's an unseen world. And right after that you get ex Uranu. Do you understand me? This is a part of Greek physics that you're looking at this word. Auratos, Gaia and Uranus are part of it. Are you ready? Give me the next one. Wait, let me finish. Give me the next. After that. Here's the verb. Because everything comes from the verb. What does the Hebrew version. Okay, let's see. Is this superior or inferior? Look at the Hebrew version. An empty place. This is tohu for Auratos. Does this. Does the trip. Was the translator on dope? If this went from Hebrew and this means an emptiness, how did it get to a. You couldn't have. Somebody's on dope or Hebrew is less sophisticated. Clearly. Look at the next one word for Akata. Skelas to us. Bohu. Are you kidding? They just took toe and made it into a bow. And what do they got here? Again, emptiness. This Hebrew is not original. It is being constructed from the Greek. It is a terrible, terrible attempt to make a native translation out of a language that is so far sophisticated. Greek has 1.5 million word forms. Haber has 7,000 unique words. It can't compete. Okay, I'll stop there. You respond now.

[Luke]

Okay. Thank you. So again, let's. Let's examine our priors here. In other words, what are we sort of assuming? You're assuming as you go through this, number one, that you can make a judgment as to which language is more superior, which is very debatable. But let's just say for the sake of argument that you're right, that somehow Greek is more superior than Hebrew, which no linguist would.

[Amin]

Technically superior. That it's more advanced, that it's more descriptive, has a bigger vocabulary.

[Luke]

Greek has the philosophical tradition by this point, right? And so the translator, who must be fluent in both Hebrew and Greek to do this translation, is probably a Jewish person who knows Greek because nothing else really makes sense. And. And this is a person probably in Alexandria, which is a center of Greek philosophical learning, right? And this Jewish guy who knows Greek, and maybe Greek is even his native language. Of course it is, because he's in a Jewish colonial context, just like a Jew in the United States today would have. English as their native language. Doesn't make them any less Jewish, doesn't mean that they haven't been to synagogue and learned 100%. I get it. So this guy is familiar with the Greek philosophical tradition. And so when he's translating these words, he is embellishing them. He's absolutely embellishing them. He's taking the Hebrew. And by the way, tohu wabohu. We don't even know to this day exactly what this means. Okay. Like, there have been so many books written on just these few words and.

[Amin]

It'S unclear, okay, outside of the septu, outside of the Torah, how much Hebrew literature from the third century uses this word, bohu or tohu and bohu.

[Luke]

Very rare.

[Amin]

Yeah, because there's no Hebrew literature outside.

[Luke]

Of course there is.

[Amin]

The Old Testament is there?

[Luke]

Of course there is. Yeah.

[Danny]

So, okay, what Hebrew literature is there outside?

[Luke]

Let's say that your theory is right, that the Greeks or Jewish, you know, Greek speaking Jews or whatever, in Alexandria, which is probably where this is being written, the Septuagint are inventing this language. Do you think they're inventing it in Alexandria in the third second century B.C.

[Amin]

Definitely.

[Luke]

Okay, so if that were true, there should be no Hebrew before that.

[Amin]

There should be no literature at all. There should be nothing.

[Luke]

Ammon, you have a problem because there is Hebrew before that.

[Amin]

What is the Hebrew?

[Luke]

The archaeological evidence. We have a lot of archaeological evidence.

[Amin]

Scribblings.

[Luke]

No, it's not. Okay.

[Amin]

You have no work. You have no. You go and look at. They talk about the amulets, and you go and look at these things. It looks like it could be an olive. It must be. It must be Hebrew or. No, it's proto Hebrew. You have no works like Danny just said. You have no works in Hebrew.

[Danny]

Let's see what. Let's hear. Let's hear what he has to say about it.

[Luke]

Amen. We have the priestly blessing, which is in the Book of Numbers, attested from an archaeological dig dated to the 7th century BC. Amen. That's 500 years before the Septuagint dates.

[Amin]

You have the text.

[Luke]

You can go look it up.

[Amin]

It was an archaeological numbers on a.

[Luke]

It was an archaeological date written on.

[Amin]

The entire Book of Numbers.

[Luke]

No, I said. I said three verses. The priestly blessing in numbers.

[Danny]

Let's look this up.

[Luke]

Look up. Look up. Kf, Katef.

[Amin]

That's fantastic.

[Luke]

Ketefinom. K, E, T, E F, H, I, N, N, O, M. Two words. Yeah, yeah. Space. Two words. Kef. Space. H I is Katef. And gnome. Scrolls. Yeah, yeah. Go to all. This is the silver. It's written on silver.

[Danny]

Oh, wow.

[Luke]

And it's written in Paleo. Hebrew. There it is. Priestly blessing from number six.

[Danny]

Tiny.

[Luke]

Well, I mean, it's a theory because it's true.

[Amin]

No, no. What is Paleo Hebrew? Explain to the people what Paleo Hebrew is. What are your documents that are in Paleo?

[Luke]

Right here. Here's one of them.

[Amin]

Three lines from a silver. From a silver plate.

[Luke]

One of thousands. Okay, so there is Paleo Hebrew. Everyone agrees that Paleo Hebrew is an Alphabet that was used in. In pre exilic time. So leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC, they used a different Alphabet than they used later. And this is what it looks like. This is what it looks like. That's Paleo Hebrew.

[Danny]

That's silver.

[Luke]

That's silver and written.

[Danny]

Can you zoom in a little bit more, Steve?

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Amin]

So Tohu Wabohu is in there or.

[Luke]

Of course not. That's not the verse.

[Danny]

So that scribbling is Hebrew.

[Luke]

That's Hebrew. Yeah. And it's something that's in the Bible. It's something in the Hebrew Bible that already is. Found in an archeological dig from earlier than 600 BC, so it predates the Septuagint by hundreds of years. They're already writing Hebrew. They're already writing stuff that's in the Bible. They're already inscribing it on scrolls, maybe keeping it with them, maybe as an amulet.

[Amin]

What is Paleo Hebrew?

[Luke]

Paleo Hebrew is this Alphabet we're looking at here.

[Amin]

This is an Alphabet.

[Luke]

That's an Alphabet.

[Amin]

Okay. And it's Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalit.

[Luke]

Hey, that's the.

[Amin]

Yeah, it's an Abjad, technically, the exact Alphabet of the. It's an Abjad, what we call Hebrew.

[Luke]

It's a different script, but it's the exact same Alphabet. Yeah, yeah.

[Amin]

And they're sure it's completely been identified?

[Luke]

It's very clear.

[Amin]

I see a Hebrew rendition, but they are certain. Wait, and they base that on what? It's just from this one.

[Luke]

There's thousands of these.

[Amin]

There's.

[Luke]

This is just the most famous one.

[Amin]

But there's no. Is there a translation of this from antiquity?

[Luke]

I mean, how do we call it an archaeological dig? They didn't put English translations in the archaeological digit.

[Amin]

How do we know that that's the line from the text that we have?

[Luke]

Because it's the exact same words from.

[Amin]

Several people put that. Somebody put that.

[Luke]

Oh, you think it was planted?

[Amin]

But no, no.

[Luke]

Is this like an alien theory?

[Amin]

They do the same thing with Phoenician. Right? The same thing about guessing what the letters are. And that's why when they find an insect inscription, they guess that it's either Hebrew or proto Hebrew at the time that this is being written. What's the date on the silver?

[Luke]

Yeah, 700. So yeah, 7th century BC.

[Amin]

It was found in 600 BC. 600 BC. How many.

[Luke]

That's the consensus.

[Amin]

How much. How much literature is there being generated that is from this proto Hebrew? What other cultures are referring to proto Hebrew? It's not.

[Luke]

There's several cultures around them that refer to Israel and refer to specific kings of Israel. Right.

[Amin]

They think they found the name Israel in an inscription.

[Luke]

They found it multiple times. I don't think anybody debates that except you, apparently.

[Amin]

What is the Israel? Where's it come from? What's the.

[Luke]

You're a language. It's a Semitic. Yeah.

[Amin]

Where does the word Israel come from?

[Luke]

Well, it's a Semitic word. It looks like a verb, but it's a name. Of course. So Semitic names are often compounds of a verb and a noun. And the L at the end is God.

[Amin]

L is certainly right.

[Luke]

The yser part looks like a third singular masculine Semitic verb. There's debate about which verb it would come from, but it might mean God rules or he struggles with God or God struggles with somebody. That's the traditional etymology.

[Amin]

Okay. What literature do we have in it that you just gained that insight from? Where is the evidence?

[Luke]

Yeah, so here's, I think the methodological problem. You're saying that if a culture got destroyed and the pre existing Israelite and Judean kingdoms got destroyed. Well, no, the people, the kingdoms got destroyed by the Assyrians in 721 BC and then the Babylonians in 586 BC. They had an apocalypse. Essentially. Those nations, those ethnicities had an apocalypse where these foreign empires rolled in and destroyed them. They just leveled their cities to the ground. Jerusalem was leveled to the ground in 586 BC. They burned Jerusalem to the ground in 586 BC. And so what happened when Jerusalem specifically was burned at the ground in 586 BC? Guess where all the texts went? Burned. Gone. They got burned.

[Amin]

And a lot is burned.

[Danny]

That's why we had the silver is what we have.

[Luke]

The silver survived. And this was. I think. Yeah, it was buried and it was outside of Jerusalem. So it wouldn't have been caught in the fire.

[Amin]

It was in a limb.

[Luke]

They would have had libraries that got burned. Just like the library libraries. They almost certainly did.

[Amin]

Full of Hebrew libraries.

[Luke]

Almost certainly. Almost certainly.

[Amin]

Almost certainly. Or they did. That's a Big difference.

[Luke]

Yeah. Okay, Amin, let's back up and talk about methodology again, because I want to make sure.

[Amin]

I just want to know if they want to.

[Luke]

I want to keep our eye on.

[Amin]

Where this language was preserved.

[Luke]

I want to keep our eye on the ball.

[Amin]

Yeah.

[Luke]

We've already said two hours ago at this point that we don't know much about the ancient world. So what we're dealing with usually is probabilities. I like to think of this from, like, the perspective of a Vegas gambler. We don't know, you know, if you're gambling on something in Vegas, you don't know for sure what's going to happen or whatever. Whatever. But you have probabilities. Okay? You can say, well, it's most likely or it's less likely. And so I'm going to put money on things that are more likely. And so we have probability. So you're asking me for a hundred percent probability of Something that happened 3,000 years ago.

[Amin]

Evidence.

[Luke]

And we really. This. It's right up on the screen. Here's the.

[Amin]

This is not.

[Luke]

This is evidence.

[Amin]

Somebody's interpretation of what that is. That is not the evidence. What I'm telling to you. If this is.

[Danny]

I mean, hold on, hold on.

[Luke]

Let me, let me.

[Amin]

If this language is being used at the time. If this language is being used at the time, what other surrounding peoples and cultures record it?

[Luke]

I just told you there's multiple ones. But the problem is that those same. Same empires that rolled in and destroyed Jerusalem destroyed those other cultures too, right? Why isn't there so am. Are you saying the Greeks weren't doing anything over there?

[Danny]

Hold on a second.

[Luke]

Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

[Danny]

Are you saying that the Hebrew. Hebrew writing on the. Right.

[Amin]

Correct.

[Danny]

Is not accurate to what's on the silver?

[Amin]

How do we know that it's accurate? Questioning the evidence of the people who made this translation or interpretation of what it is? Because what other documents are they using do they have? That's why I asked, do they have libraries? You can't do this with Greek. There's no guesswork.

[Luke]

Pretty clear. No Greeks had different alphabets.

[Amin]

No. Say this day is existing. There's Greek works all over the place. Society is run.

[Luke]

Yeah. Guess what?

[Amin]

By that Greek work, you know what?

[Luke]

The Greeks avoided getting burned to the ground by the Persians, which almost happened in 480. Okay? So if the Greeks had not managed to fight off those two Persian invasions, we'd probably be in the same position with Greek literature where it would have all got burned to the ground. And then we'd be in this position where all the Greek we would have is digging up stuff in archaeological digs.

[Amin]

I hate to guess.

[Luke]

We'd be in a difficult position. We always have to guess.

[Amin]

But when the Christians.

[Luke]

Anything we do is guessing. For the ancient world, we don't know anything for sure.

[Amin]

I hate to guess. But when the. When Greek lost its. Began to lose its glory as the oracle shut down and as the 4th century lurched over its loss of its pagan origin, the language was affected. And you see that. But the whole. In the influence of the Byzantine Greek. The problem is throughout the use of the Greek, we've got Greek grammarians, we've got Greek scientists who are working on the language. What I am saying here is at the time that the Greeks are doing that and noting these other histories and these other societies around them and forming anthropologies and explanations of. Of history of the cultures around them, nobody ever encounters anything like this. The only reference that we have to anything Semitic is the Phoenician. And we know the connection to the Phoenician that the Greeks even argued themselves that the Phoenician was not responsible for Greek. There's a Greeks to say it was, and Greeks who say it wasn't for the alpha.

[Danny]

But.

[Amin]

Right, so this is theoretical. There's no contemporary documentation of any of this. This could be somebody sitting in the desert copying out BS and then planting.

[Luke]

It in the ground for an archeological dig to be dated to 600 BC. Do you realize how you're getting into.

[Amin]

Like alien theories, saying it's planted? That's why I hate ideas. We. If we stick with the text. What I'm saying is this thing that you've got here just showed up in a vacuum.

[Luke]

We showed up out of the ground.

[Amin]

Where does this Paleo. Where does this Paleo Hebrew come from? Did they build buildings? If they got to this level of writing, they must have structures. They must have history and archaeology. Where is it for this?

[Luke]

This is the archaeology.

[Amin]

It's not.

[Luke]

This is coming out of the ground. It's coming from the archaeologists who found it in the ground when they were doing an archaeological.

[Danny]

Everything has to start somewhere, right?

[Luke]

Yeah, right.

[Amin]

But when you find. Let me tell you what I'm talking about. When you find. When you're doing a Greek site, for example, and you find Greek writing, the Greek writing builds for you. Exactly. What's going on? You see those columns? You see this type of architecture? You see what they're using, the mathematics, they're in these Greek texts. This is in isolation. It's got no relative.

[Luke]

That's how archaeology works.

[Amin]

It's just sitting there by itself. There was. So they didn't find anything with this. Wait, they didn't find anything with this. That was a building dedicated to some guy with. Using this in his name. Using this Alphabet.

[Luke]

Why do they have so much stuff in this Alphabet?

[Amin]

They just found.

[Luke]

Widespread. It's widespread. This Alphabet is very common.

[Amin]

Right. But it wasn't in a building with a dude's name on it that was using the same.

[Luke]

There's a lot of stuff with dudes names on them in this Alphabet. That has been found in archaeological digs from the 6 to the 10th century.

[Amin]

BC there are cities that you use this proto Hebrew.

[Luke]

Yeah. It's widespread as they're like they're cities.

[Amin]

In Israel and they have libraries.

[Luke]

They had cities. Yeah, Jerusalem and they have libraries.

[Amin]

And there's libraries in Jerusalem.

[Luke]

They were burned to the ground. There's libraries by the Babylonians.

[Amin]

Okay. So was Herculaneum. We still have the. We still have a shit ton.

[Luke]

And then. And then they built a bunch of stuff on top of it. I don't know if you.

[Amin]

That's no evidence. You're not giving me any evidence.

[Luke]

I just don't think you're willing to look at isolation.

[Amin]

This is in complete isolation.

[Luke]

You don't like the evidence to say you're disappointed. Discounting it. That's all that's happening here.

[Amin]

It's not the. The thing that really bothers me is that there is no Hebrew literature. When you talk outside the Torah. There is no Hebrew documentation. There are no Hebrew doctors. There's no Hebrew architecture. There's no Hebrew geometry. There's no Hebrew anything because it got.

[Luke]

Burned to the ground. Everything. So you're saying they should have just done a better job of not getting.

[Amin]

Burned to the ground. You're saying everything got lost of any Hebrew writing any time.

[Luke]

The only remnants were there were was a small group of captives after the city got burned to the ground and lots of people got slaughtered and taken into slavery by the Babylonians.

[Amin]

That sound how life works?

[Luke]

Of course that's how life works. That's how all ancient warfare. There's a small. There's a small group of people who were taken into captivity by the Babylonians to Babylon. And they could only carry anything they could carry. They carried their most sacred text. And that's all that survived. That conflagration, that civilizational conflagration. That's all they kept. That doesn't mean they didn't have more. In fact, they almost certainly had more. It's gone.

[Amin]

And they're the only culture that. That happened to.

[Luke]

Of course, they're not the only ones.

[Amin]

The language will survive.

[Luke]

It did survive. You just don't want to see survived in the Torah and it survived in the Hebrew box and it survived in the ground.

[Amin]

That's all you've got?

[Luke]

Okay, you just made a. You just made a statement that is false and that is. This is the only culture that's happened to. Of course it's not the only culture that's happened to. Let's talk about the Persians. Yeah, let's talk about the Persians. The Persian Empire was far mightier, far more scientifically advanced than the Hebrews do.

[Amin]

We have classical Persian.

[Luke]

We have inscriptions, we have the Behistun inscription. And then we have a few things from Herodotus where he's transliterating words from Persian.

[Amin]

So we have contemporary, we have contemporaries talking about the language.

[Luke]

We have Herodotus talking about language.

[Amin]

That's exactly what I'm talking about. We have no Herodotus. Who can say there is Paleo Hebrew. Yes. We've got the Persian.

[Luke]

He's after The Phoenician. He's 200 years after that.

[Amin]

All of these like. Well, I'm saying. And a dude like Herodotus.

[Luke]

Actually, you're wrong. You're wrong about that too. You're wrong about that too. The Nebuchadnezzar chronicle has been discovered in Babylon. So Nebuchadnezzar was the most powerful king of Babylon. He, from 605 to 562 BC, he was the guy who came over and burned Jerusalem to the ground with his armies. Historians generally accept this. We have found his chronicle. So most kings would write a chronicle of the things that were ongoing during their reign that they thought was important enough to be kept for future generations. We found his chronicle from 605 to 594 BC. Unfortunately, it cuts off in 594 because we just haven't found the rest. Or maybe it got shattered or lost or something. In his chronicle, he talks about Jerusalem and the Jews in his chronicle that has been found from that time period. So when Ammon says there's no other records, he's wrong about that because King Nebuchadnezzar, the most powerful king in the world at that time, talks about them. Okay, it's in the chronicle. And he says, I'm going over there to talk about. About them. There it is right there. Confirming biblical accounts of his Conquest of Jerusalem in 597 BC the deposition of King Jean and the installation of Zedekiah. It's all there. Contemporary, that is.

[Amin]

A contemporary document justifies a text perfectly.

[Danny]

So the people. You're so. So. So your belief is that the people who were writing the Septuagint were Jewish Greek speakers who were.

[Luke]

Who were living in Alexandria in a.

[Danny]

Greek milieu, and they were taking the Hebrew, translating it into Greek and embellishing and adding stuff to it.

[Luke]

Yeah. So there's a whole. There's not just one translator who does all of this work.

[Danny]

Sure.

[Luke]

It's. It's. It's different Jews translating different books at different times.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

And I can say this because I. I've worked with this stuff. I've gotten my hands dirty with this. With this stuff. It's. It's incredible stuff. I've written articles on it. You can look them up. I did my master's thesis on the Septuagint.

[Amin]

Oh, fantastic.

[Luke]

So. So it's very linguistic.

[Amin]

This is perfect. That's why I said you're perfect.

[Luke]

It's wonderful.

[Amin]

Hit me with the evidence.

[Luke]

So there's different translators who are translating different books at different times. What seems to have happened is.

[Danny]

And what year was it translated?

[Luke]

We don't know for sure, but probably third to first century B.C. probably the earliest stuff is third.

[Amin]

The only way you can really date something is by people who quote it. What's the earliest we get people reading this text? Right. That's really what you can quote. You can look at the letter of Aristeas, which people in antiquity said was a forgery. That talks about the translation. People said that was a forgery. That doesn't matter who's quoting it and when are they quoting it? Jesus is quoting it. Right. The New Testament is quoting the Septuagint. In Greek.

[Danny]

In Greek.

[Amin]

It never quotes it in Hebrew, which has always bothered me. If the Hebrew is the superior original, and that's what the people, the rabbis, are promoting, why the hell doesn't Jesus quote?

[Danny]

Why don't you think Jesus is quoting it?

[Luke]

Hebrews quote. So Jesus was probably quoting in Aramaic.

[Amin]

All right, probably. No, that's linguistically.

[Luke]

Let's go back to methodology.

[Amin]

Probably. It's probably in Greek. No, it either is in Greek or it isn't.

[Luke]

Amen. You're trying to pull a fast one here. All we have is probably. So when I say probably, I'm being responsible. But Ammon doesn't say probably. He's being irresponsible with the data. I want to be clear about that. So I'm a responsible scholar. I hope you are, too. Let's try to work toward that. So obviously not, you know, hey, look, I'm dealing with you, and we're talking about stuff. I'm not calling you names.

[Amin]

Just one of the times Jesus quotes. He's Hebrew.

[Luke]

Well, here's the thing. As you know, Jesus didn't write anything down, right? So all the stories we have about Jesus or somebody talking about him at a later date. Right? But when they're writing about him, they're writing about him in Greek because that was the colonial, cosmopolitan language and they want their message to get out. Okay, all right. So Jesus was not a Greek guy. He's a Jewish guy. You agree with that, right, Aman? I mean, I guess you already said you don't know who Jesus was.

[Amin]

Greek is not an ethnicity. It's a language. Jesus was a.

[Luke]

It's a colonial. It's a colonial language.

[Amin]

Greek fluently. And he was in Egypt, so he probably studied in Alexandria. And he would have been studying Greek, not Hebrew. The question is, why does Jesus or anybody in the New Testament never quote Hebrew?

[Luke]

Quotes Aramaic? Several times, in fact. The only times in the New Testament, in the Gospels, of course, when Jesus directly quoted at least a handful.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

Because they only quoted at least a handful.

[Amin]

And a couple of those are ones that we think. Right. That we think may be Aramaic.

[Luke]

No, they are. It's pretty clear, if you know Aramaic, that he's Aramaic.

[Amin]

It's pretty clear. It is.

[Luke]

And we're going to keep going back to science.

[Amin]

It's science. Look, it's science. It neither is clearly Aramaic.

[Luke]

Okay, you want me to say it this way? It is clearly Aramaic.

[Amin]

It's clearly Aramaic. Sabachthon. That's when they say.

[Luke]

Yeah, let's talk about that. That's when they put this up. Sorry. Mark 15, I believe, is when Jesus gets quoted saying, Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabaktha. Right. Can we. Can we put that on everybody?

[Amin]

Oh, it's Mark.

[Luke]

I believe that's Mark 15. Yeah. Because it is. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about it.

[Danny]

I love this.

[Luke]

Yeah. So I have not studied Aramaic, but it's closely related to Hebrew. So just because I've studied Hebrew, I can understand the Aramaic.

[Amin]

Okay.

[Luke]

Because they're. They're like Spanish and Portuguese. They're not. They're not that different. And so if you study one, you can. You can make heads and tails of the other.

[Danny]

Okay?

[Luke]

So I can tell you what this Aramaic Is. And I will break it down for you. Linguistic. Okay, scroll down, scroll down. We don't. Yeah, we. Okay, this is the Greek, but can we get it in English? I think it's going to be more helpful if we get a translation.

[Amin]

Actually.

[Luke]

One chapter.

[Amin]

If you look at the Sabachthon in the Greek.

[Danny]

Hold on, let's focus on this.

[Luke]

Scroll down, scroll down, scroll down. It's toward the. It's when he's on the cross and he cries out his final word. Yeah, a little more, a little more. There it is, there it is. They even put it in italics. Okay, okay. Eloi, Eloi, lama, sabachtani. Okay, they put in italics. So Jesus is being directly quoted as saying this. And then they have to translate it because that's not Greek. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? So. So Mark is writing in Greek, but he's quoting Jesus saying.

[Danny]

So he's writing in Greek, and he's interrupting his Greek to.

[Luke]

To say something. Aramaic.

[Danny]

To say something Aramaic.

[Luke]

Jesus is saying his final words in Aramaic because that was his native language. So let's break down this Aramaic linguistic. Basically, el is God, just like Hebrew. All right, Eloi, Eloi. The E at the end in both Hebrew and Aramaic is a first person possessive pronoun that means my. Okay, so Eloi is my God, which you can see it's translated correctly. They're my God. My God. That's the Eloi, Eloi part in Hebrew.

[Amin]

Right?

[Luke]

In Hebrew and Aramaic. He's speaking Aramaic and not Hebrew. Yeah, he's speaking Aramaic.

[Amin]

Okay, so in Aramaic, yeah.

[Luke]

Luma is actually two words that are usually written as one, whether in Hebrew or Aramaic.

[Amin]

Like lama in Hebrew. Right? Why?

[Luke]

Exactly.

[Amin]

Yes.

[Luke]

Yeah, there you go.

[Amin]

Yes.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah. So la means for, and ma means what?

[Amin]

Yes.

[Luke]

So when you say for, what you're asking, why does that make sense? So lama is why, but it means literally for what? Got it. I think this is the most important word here. Clearly, this is your verb. As you can see from the translation. They're translating this. Have you forsaken me? Those are the words that we have left in the English there. And that's being translated from the Greek. I mean, the Greek says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? In the translation, which is in the parentheses there. Right? Okay, so Aramaic has this verb now. There's triliteral consonantal roots in the Semitic languages, not just Hebrew, not just Aramaic. The Babylonian languages, Phoenician, all the Semitic languages operate on what we call triliteral Consonantal roots, which means it's three consonants, and you put vowels in the middle of the consonants to sort of. Of inflect the term. Okay, so there's three consonants here. S, B, and K. The ch is being, is a chi there in Greek, because in the original Semitic, this is actually a guttural sound that we don't even have in English. And they didn't have in Greek either. So they're doing the best they can to transliterate this, because Greek has this. That. That is a chi. It's the letter chi in Greek. So they're doing the best they can to write this in. Write this Aramaic sound in Greek.

[Amin]

What's the aromatic Aramaic letter for? The he?

[Luke]

It's. It's. It's a. It's the kulf. Okay.

[Amin]

What does it look like?

[Luke]

Yeah, it looks like a. It kind of looks like. Well, it looks like a P thing, but it's. It's the source of our Q. Yes, it's the source of our Latin Q, actually. Yeah. Because the Alphabet wandered from Phoenicia to Greece to the Etruscans and ultimately to Rome. And that's where we get it from. So you have this. You have this sound that the Greeks don't know what to do with, but they write the next closest thing, which is. Which is we. We transliterate with ch there into English. But that's a chi. That's the letter. The letter chi in Greek. Right. We can go look at it.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Luke]

So, yeah, however you want to pronounce it.

[Amin]

Right. Who cares? Modern Greeks.

[Luke]

Yeah, modern Greeks. Key. Whatever. It's. It's in ancient Greek. That's. That's what's going on there. The. The Semitic languages have the sound sh. And Greek, as you know, does not have the sound sh. So. So Greeks didn't not. Could not pronounce the sound sh. They did have the sound like a regular S. And so anytime there is a word in any Semitic language that has a sh sound, and there's lots of them, and they want to try to pronounce that in Greek, they write s instead of sh because it's the next closest thing.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Luke]

Okay, so this is shabak in the original Aramaic, which means. It's this triliteral root. You put vowels in the middle. That means to forsake. All right? You inflect it by putting a second singular masculine ending on it, which is the ta, the T, H, A there.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

That's the second singular masculine ending because Jesus is talking to God. And second singular is you. Okay, so he's talking to you. God, singular. And then the Ni Semitic languages have this really cool thing where they actually just attach object pronouns right, to the word. So in English, if you say, have forsaken me, me is a separate word word from forsaken. You don't say, forsaken me all as one word, Right? But in Semitic languages, you say that all as one word, forsaken me, and you write it all as one word, so that ni is the first person singular object pronoun. So when Jesus says sa baktani, that's why it takes four English words. Which, by the way, shows that Semitic languages are very elegant. They can actually express a lot of ideas that take us multiple words in English. Which is another reason I push back against your idea that somehow Hebrew is not as superior as Greek. Because it's pretty cool. It's a very elegant language. And this is Aramaic, which is similar to Hebrew. Right. So the author of Mark is going out of his way. He doesn't have to do this. He's writing in Greek, but he goes out of his way to say, actually, Jesus said this in Aramaic. And then he quotes the exact Aramaic here.

[Amin]

Well, I hate to ask it in Aramaic.

[Luke]

That's Aramaic.

[Amin]

But he doesn't say it's an Aramaic make.

[Luke]

Elsewhere there's another quote where he says.

[Amin]

In Hebrew, Jesus said, okay, but here he's not.

[Danny]

Why does it matter? Why would it matter if he says it, if it's written, if it's in Aramaic, why does he have to say it's Aramaic?

[Amin]

Because it's written in Aramaic is our conclusion. Is your conclusion.

[Luke]

Okay, go ahead, argue against it.

[Amin]

It's not. It's. Go back to the Greek.

[Luke]

Go back to the Greek. Go back to the Greek.

[Amin]

Go back to the Greek text. Let's see. Maybe it's not Aramaic.

[Luke]

Is it possible it's written in Greek letters?

[Amin]

Is it possible it's not.

[Luke]

I'm all ears.

[Amin]

Arabic, Aramaic text, right? Scholars. Scholars entertain discussion. Right? It's a museum. Blow it up. Steve. On the. I have no idea on the verse. What verse was that?

[Luke]

A little further down. A little further down.

[Amin]

What verse is that?

[Luke]

30S?

[Amin]

There it is. There it is. It's right above 35.

[Luke]

Right in the upper middle. Right. Right side. Right margin. Right margin.

[Amin]

No, no, no. Go right. Go right.

[Luke]

There it is.

[Amin]

There. Stop. That last. That last word before the semicolon. And remember, there's your semicolon. Wait, just show me.

[Luke]

That's not a semicolon. That's a question mark. Right. In Greek. You write. You write question marks to semicolons. Right.

[Amin]

And he'll put that in. So Byzantine nerd. The Greeks didn't put that.

[Luke]

That's true. I mean, all the punctuation is later.

[Amin]

Right, Right.

[Luke]

All the capitalization is later.

[Amin]

Right. And the word that they wrote like that.

[Luke]

Sometimes there's no spaces in the original.

[Amin]

There's no spaces.

[Luke]

Okay, Steve, you just got to know.

[Amin]

Just blow up.

[Danny]

That's as blown up as I can get.

[Amin]

Is that as blown up? Okay, just this one word. Because this is the verb. And to be honest, this is the most interesting of the words. Verb is always awesome.

[Luke]

Oh, sure.

[Amin]

So if this is Aramaic, as you say, this should have really no Greek essence to it. Why it should.

[Luke]

What do you mean by Greek essence?

[Amin]

Because there's no influence. There's no Aramaic influence on Greek. Greek.

[Luke]

There are people bilingual with each other.

[Amin]

We have no authors, though, who are saying, I'm going to use this Aramaicism and I'm going to write and write it down. We don't have to.

[Luke]

Marcus just doing this.

[Amin]

Okay, well, no, not if it's a quote.

[Luke]

He's quoting him.

[Amin]

Right?

[Luke]

Okay.

[Amin]

It's a right quote. It's just a direct quote. You're saying Sabachthon. Is there anything in that that looks Greek? If I have read the Greek magical papyrus, I Now my anus twitches because you can see both the roots for Saba, that worship, and the Chthonian divinity that is the Christing head, the Ion, who is the person inside the synagogues that is pictured on the walls of the synagogues. The God Ion, that is Saba of the Kthon. This is used in magic. Jesus is from the cross. Cross using magic Greek. And he's talking about that God that induces that transfer from death to resurrection. And if you look up, if. If you. You know the Saba root, right? That I'm talking about, you know the.

[Luke]

Seb root, not the sabre. Are you talking about Sebo mai, to.

[Amin]

Worship Sebo, my verb.

[Luke]

So that's a different.

[Amin]

But here the Saba. No, this is the Sabbath.

[Luke]

Same Spelled differently too.

[Amin]

The God.

[Luke]

You're sad. Different altogether.

[Amin]

He's going to say it's also sad. See, I told you the same thing. Where is the literature that backs you up?

[Luke]

What do you mean the literature that backs you up?

[Amin]

Where is the literature outside the Bible that backs you up? Because I can give you literature outside of this that backs up.

[Luke]

We've already been over this mythological territory. We're just beating a dead horse. It doesn't exist because it got burned to the ground.

[Amin]

No, it doesn't exist. You don't have evidence that it exists. You don't have any Hebrew literature that's going to use the term Sabbath. What you have is Greek and you have Greek. And the magical you have. You have Greek. That is telling us even the pharmacology does this.

[Danny]

His. His reasoning for that is because he thinks it all got. Well, he says, we know it all got burned down. All the libraries are gone.

[Luke]

There was nothing magic. It was imperialism.

[Amin]

If your evidence got magically disappeared, it's easy to make whatever argument you want.

[Danny]

Sure. You can say that we have Greek.

[Amin]

Evidence that where these roots are coming from.

[Luke]

What are you talking about?

[Amin]

Okay, Sabachthon, when you look in the pgm, we're just talking about the pgm. You've worked with professors who help translate it, Right? And so did I. Yeah. So fantastic. In the pgm, do we refer to the God of the Sabbath?

[Luke]

Sabaoth appears in the pgm, Right, Right.

[Amin]

Is that a Hebrew concept?

[Luke]

Concept, Absolutely.

[Amin]

Where's the Hebrew to back it up?

[Luke]

It's behind the pgm. So we talked about the PGM earlier.

[Amin]

It doesn't exist.

[Danny]

Behind. Explain what you mean it's behind the pgm. What do you mean by that?

[Luke]

So we talked about the PGM earlier, actually, right near the start of this. And I mentioned that the PGM is a collection of diverse cultures, cultural sources, okay? They reference Egyptian gods like Thoth. Okay? So according. According to Aman's argument here, if we see the Greek letters T, H O T H, that proves. Proves it's Greek and not Egyptian, which is not true. Of course we know that's not because.

[Amin]

He'S saying that's because there's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the cult because I'm not talking ethnicities, I'm talking language.

[Luke]

I'm talking language.

[Amin]

The practice of a cult. And the cult terminology is the Sabakthon, the God of Sabbath.

[Luke]

Okay, so that is not Hebrew, that is Greek. Time out. We're dealing with three different things here that you're conflating and none of them have anything to do with each other. There's the Greek word sebo mai, which means to revere, to worship. Theose means God worshiping. Theo sebase. Okay, Correct. That's an Indo European root that goes back to the Indo European root which is found as far afield as India. Okay?

[Amin]

So in the asterisk you will put an asterisk on that term because that is a back formation. You are guessing. Indo European is.

[Luke]

Guess what? For the thousandth time, we're guessing about everything. Yes. Guessing is guessing about everything.

[Amin]

These are texts, and I don't want to guess. I have seen that expression in magical texts. That is not Hebrew or Aramaic. There is no guesswork here.

[Luke]

Quoting him in Aramaic.

[Amin]

This is pure philology. There is no text. You have to back that up. There is no Hebrew doctrine. There is no Hebrew epics, There is no Hebrew plays. There's nothing outside of the Hebrew Bible. Nothing.

[Luke]

I think we've already disproven that point several times, so I think we should move on.

[Danny]

On.

[Luke]

So here's the deal. Sebami, all right. Is a Greek word, goes back to an Indo European root that is found, and you're right back formed because Indo European language, proto Indo European, that was spoken by very early Greeks.

[Amin]

Tell people what back formation is.

[Luke]

Yeah. What it means. And I did my. My master's degree on this for two years. Okay. So. And honestly, I think. I think anyone who's interested in ancient texts should probably become a historical linguist. It's fascinating stuff. So what we do is we look at the text. Texts that exist. The texts that exist in the real world, whether Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, Old English, whatever, and we notice similarities that are highly unlikely to be accidental. Okay? And the scholars, the European scholars who first noticed this, they already knew Greek and Latin. They went to India as part of the British colonial project that was there. And then they learned Sanskrit, some of them learned Sanskrit, and they said Sanskrit is suspiciously similar to Greek and Latin. Latin, okay? Now, there were always theories. Like, in antiquity, people already noticed that Latin and Greek were suspiciously similar. Their theories usually ran in the direction of, well, like the Latin is like a borrowing of Greek or something like that. But what scholars have recently realized in the past couple hundred years is that none of them are stealing from each other. The reason they look similar is the same reason that you look similar to your brothers and sisters and cousins. Cousins. It's not because you stole genetic material from your brothers and sisters and cousins, because you have a common ancestor. There's an evolutionary tree that's going on here. And so the Sanskrit word tyaj means to worship. It means to revere. It means to do that kind of thing. And we're talking about science and data. So historical linguistics is all about science and data. That's really all we do in historical linguistics. I think you'd like it, Amin. So we have the Grimm brothers.

[Amin]

They're into. They were into that, too.

[Luke]

Yeah. Grimm's law is a famous sound law in ancient Germanic linguistics. So they. So what we've seen in historical linguistics is anytime you have the sound T, it palatalizes. That's kind of a technical term in linguistics. It palatalizes to an S. All right. Tia becomes S, which you got. You can almost kind of see how not that different. Right? So anytime you have a T in proto Indo European, it's going to become a S in Greek. And then anytime you have A, it's going to become a buh. It simplifies to a B. So se is the regular outcome of this hypothetical, but I think pretty well substantiated based on the linguistic evidence. Indo European Ruth at mental worship. In Sanskrit, it doesn't change as much. The gua becomes a J, which we write J usually, but it's in Devanagari originally. And so you get this form. All right, so sebo mai is a well understood Indo European root that goes back thousands of years in the Greek language that means to worship.

[Amin]

So back formation is the creation of a word that you don't have a text to back it up.

[Luke]

That's because there were no texts 6,000 years ago.

[Danny]

Right, we've already said that.

[Amin]

So the back formation is a creation. It's not a reality. In language and philology. It's not a reality. That's why they have to put an asterisk next to it in linguistics to show you this is not a real word.

[Luke]

Do you think those are all made up?

[Amin]

There is no evidence.

[Danny]

Why were they making up?

[Amin]

They are all. All speculation. Just like you were saying.

[Luke]

Everything is.

[Amin]

We are speculating.

[Luke]

The question is, when we go to Vegas, what odds are we going to get on that speculation?

[Amin]

I don't want to speculate.

[Luke]

Then you can't do this. All you can do is speculation. On linguistics, everything is speculation.

[Amin]

When you talk about historical linguistics. The Greeks themselves, the grammarians. I don't know if you read many grammarians, but I do. And the grammarians will talk about the influence of languages like Pelasgian with the double sigma. And they'll talk about how that arrives and the influence as far west as the Etruscans. That's the type of historical development. You don't have to put an asterisk next to the Grimm Brothers with all of their stories. Oh, God. It's just speculation and I don't want speculation for this text. If I see other Greek texts that use this word and it's a magical time text, that makes me think this is probably a magical term.

[Luke]

Okay, so you keep harking on this thing. Just speculation. Just speculation. Just speculation. But then in your work, we've already noticed that a lot of what you do is speculation.

[Amin]

No, give me an example.

[Luke]

Yes, we've already talked about this. Okay, give me an example. Like the earlier thing, the fellatio, pure speculation.

[Amin]

It said it was a euphemism. It said it's a euphemism. I didn't say that.

[Luke]

Okay. When you speculate that that's what that word means in that context is pure speculation. Now, we can go to Vegas and put odds on it. But you don't know that. We've already covered that ground. You don't know that.

[Amin]

When you don't know that was in his hand.

[Luke]

You don't know that.

[Amin]

You don't think.

[Luke]

Okay, another thing.

[Amin]

Something's wrong.

[Luke]

Something is wrong, Amin. Something is wrong, Amin. So it seems. It seems like you think that texts are divine. Like you think that it's in the texts. That's all we got. Texts are divine.

[Amin]

No, I'm a classical philologist. That's all I do is text.

[Luke]

That's a problem because you have to have context for the text. There's more to just what we're doing than just what the text is. We have to analyze it. We have to say, is this text wrong? Is it right? Who wrote it? What's the problem?

[Danny]

What was everyone else saying in different. In different professions surrounding that. Yeah, like doctors or lawyers or physician or whatever. Philosophers.

[Luke]

Yeah. Can we return to Sabakthani because there's several more speculations I want to hear.

[Danny]

Let's wrap up.

[Luke]

Let's wrap this.

[Danny]

I want to move on after this.

[Luke]

So, Aman, what did you say about the Cthon? You said it's connected to Chthon.

[Amin]

Chthonian divinities.

[Luke]

Okay. All right. So let me point out the methodological problem with the way that you're approaching this word. It seems that you're saying, hey, look, there's this word that doesn't appear to be in Greek because it's nonsense in Greek. Sabachthani doesn't mean anything in Greek, but there's a part of it that looks like a word that is Greek.

[Amin]

It's not nonsense.

[Luke]

There's a part of it.

[Amin]

No, it's not. No, you're wrong. That's not what I'm saying.

[Luke]

It's Aramaic.

[Amin]

It's not nonsense. Sabachthon is attested in the pgm. You can go and look at a goddamn ion wall.

[Luke]

Are you mixing up Sabaoth and Sabbath.

[Amin]

Do you know who the God Ion is?

[Luke]

Yeah, I'm familiar with it.

[Amin]

What does Ion give the Jew or the Christian? Ionic. Life. It's why he's sitting in the synagogue. Yes. And ideos. Why does that also mean eternity?

[Luke]

What does this have to do with Sabachthani?

[Amin]

What is I. No, no.

[Luke]

Can we focus here? Let's focus.

[Amin]

Listen, I'm telling you, it reads so much. That's Greek. I can see.

[Luke]

So you can mystically see things that nobody else, even me, cannot see?

[Amin]

No, I'm showing you what experience does.

[Luke]

Oh, so 20 years, not enough? Am I going to learn this in year 30, 32? When am I going to get to this?

[Amin]

I'm going to bring you. When I bring you an apocryphal text that uses Ionic right next to eternal ideals, and you will see the difference, but you haven't, because you are trusting in Jesus.

[Luke]

What are you talking about?

[Amin]

You are trusting in that text next. You are the one who's making this.

[Luke]

I have no idea what you're talking about right now. Yes, do you? Danny, you don't have.

[Amin]

Listen, listen. Have you read Philuminous?

[Luke]

Does it matter? Why does it matter?

[Amin]

I'm asking. Luminous.

[Luke]

Not most of it. Why does it matter?

[Amin]

So you have no idea what's in Phyluminous?

[Luke]

Correct. We're reading Mark right now.

[Amin]

If I told you.

[Danny]

More confusing. Trying to bring in all this other stuff that I don't even know what you're talking about.

[Luke]

Okay, So I want to get back to what we're talking about with Chthon here, because Amin interrupted me when I was trying to talk about this. So Ammon's methodology seems to be. Hey, there's a Greek word, chthon, which we both agree is a real Greek word that means earth. Okay? And it's in various compounds, like, you know, different. Erichthonius, mythical early king of Athens, et cetera.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

Okay. It's not the same word. There is a vowel different. Chthon versus Chthon, but at least it sounds like. Like it. It's not the same word. But it sounds like. By the way, vowels are very important in Greek. You can't just substitute them in and out. Vowels are very important. So you can't. You can't say that Chthon and Chthon are the same thing. But. But let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say, oh, you know, they're mispronouncing it. Okay, whatever. Let me. Let me.

[Amin]

I'm not gonna say that. Stop putting arguments in my mouth. That's disingenuous.

[Luke]

You are mispronouncing.

[Amin]

You don't do that at Camwis, do you?

[Luke]

You are mispronouncing.

[Amin]

Do you talk about. Do you talk about.

[Luke]

I know you talk about this because.

[Amin]

No, come on. That's unprofessional.

[Luke]

No one's going to take you seriously.

[Amin]

I was once a professor, so.

[Luke]

Okay, so here's the deal. So we got kthon, which is a valid Greek word. We all agree with this, okay? Amman says he sees the word kthon in this Aramaic word, or what everyone else except Amon thinks is an Aramaic word. Yes, sabachthani. Okay? So here's the problem with this kind of methodology. And I actually talk about this in my book on wine, which came out of my dissertation. I have a whole chapter on linguistics and linguistic methodology in that book. Okay? Okay. And in that chapter, literally the very first part of the chapter when you open it up, is a quote from an ancient grammarian. Because we were talking about this. I love the grammarians, okay? And they talk. They try to make connections like this. So.

[Danny]

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

[Luke]

Well, let me explain. They try to make connections like this. Let me explain. Okay. Yeah. So I deal with the wine word oino, Sweenham, you know, this word that's floating around the ancient Mediterranean, right? And what I'm doing when I do this is I'm. First of all, I'm going all the way back to the original sources. What did the grammarians say about it? Like, what did the Greek grammarians say about this word? What did Roman say about this word? And their speculation usually relies on what I call in the book, the sounds like principle. Okay? So they'll say the word oinos or oinos in Greek means dygamma.

[Amin]

You put the dygamma, of course.

[Luke]

Of course. Classic, right?

[Amin]

Nice.

[Luke]

I love the dygamma. So you got oinos or winos, we know, in Latin. Latin. And they're already trying to figure out where this word comes from. Like, what other words out there in the universe is it connected to? And they use what I call the sounds like principle. And there's multiple layers of speculation where they say, oh, maybe it's connected to this word that sounds like oinos or oinos. Maybe it's connected this way. One of them says, hey, maybe it's connected to this word onesios, which means benefit, because o nesios, oinos kind of sound alike. They have most of the same consonants. Right. And that's the. That's. That's the methodology that the ancient grammarians use. All right? Modern historical linguistics has moved far past that methodology, all right? We.

[Amin]

Have.

[Luke]

It's just called building. What if it's. Do you think science. Do you think science has actually.

[Amin]

What do you think the Greek is? Musical?

[Luke]

Do you think science has made progress in the past 2000 years or not?

[Amin]

Science is completely based on what, that great concept of how to create a hypothesis.

[Luke]

Okay, so has science progressed in the past 2000 years?

[Amin]

Not beyond its roots, no. Technologically, yes, but not beyond its basic methodological roots.

[Luke]

Well, what I'm saying is the methodology has progressed, and I told you we would come back to this. Time and time again, the methodology has progressed. All right? We are not doing the sounds like principle anymore because it didn't work. Let me explain. No, of course not. The Greeks were brilliant for their time period. Hey, you're talking to me. I love the Greeks. I know I love Greeks, so don't put words in my mouth.

[Amin]

Just not great grammarians, right?

[Luke]

We read them, but we don't believe everything they say.

[Amin]

This was in Antiquity. They're. They're arguing like this in Antiquity.

[Luke]

It's great. Yeah.

[Amin]

The etymology of words is important to the Greeks.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Amin]

Some people say you're full of shit.

[Luke]

Absolutely is.

[Amin]

You don't know what you're talking about.

[Luke]

Right. Here's why this sounds like principle doesn't work. So Amin is saying, okay, there's this. There's this part that sounds like something else that he has read, which is a legit thing, phone, whatever. How do we know it's connected, though? All right, so there's lots of things that sound like other things. Okay? So for instance, let's say that as a linguist, I said that your name, Danny, contains the word knee. The last syllable contains knee, which proves that there's a connection to the knee. That's your body part. And then I could make up a story. I could say your ancestors would knee people. I don't know. Who knows? Or maybe a little more fanciful. I could say, you know what? What? Your ancestors were the knights who said knee. Okay, Right. From Ponty. Python. Okay. Love that movie. Love that reference. And so your ancestors stood in a forest and demanded shrubberies from passing knights because of the knee in your name. Okay, that's where the sounds like principle leads us. I could do it with Sabakthani. Sure. I could say, see the first syllable, saab, that proves that it's connected to The Swedish Karko company that produces sobs. All right? That's where the sounds like principle can lead us. It can lead us anywhere. Random. Anything sounds like anything. It's not good enough. Right, right. So we need a more principled way of acting. And that's where the modern discipline of historical linguistics comes in. So the modern discipline, to go back to your name, I assume? Danny. Short for Daniel. Okay, so Daniel is a Hebrew word. I don't know if Ammon believes this or not, but everyone else does. Daniel is a Hebrew word. We can break it down into three morphemes.

[Danny]

So I'm Jewish.

[Luke]

Jewish. Well, your name is. Okay, Your name is Hebrew. Yeah, but lots of our names are. Mine isn't. But lots of our names are from some Hebrew source in the Hebrew Bible, which was written in Hebrew. Right? So, Daniel, we can break it down to three morphemes. Let me. Your ears pricked up because I said morphine. But I didn't morpheme. Morpheme, which is a meaning bearing unit of language. Every language has morphemes. Like if you say the word tree, there's two things that. That have meaning in there. Tree and Z. Tree means a thing that grows out of the ground. And means plural.

[Danny]

Yes.

[Luke]

More than one. Okay. That's all a morpheme is. All right. Okay, so there are three morphemes in the name Daniel dawn, which is the Hebrew word for judge. E. The I in the middle of your name, which means my. It's the same I and Eloi, actually. Right there. And. Which means God. Which means God. Hold on, hold on. Let me.

[Danny]

This is interesting.

[Luke]

So doni l means God is my. It literally means God, my judge. But you throw in the is to make it make sense.

[Amin]

You learn that because that's what ancient Hebrew grammarians wrote, right?

[Luke]

Yeah. They got burned to the ground. We talked about that.

[Amin]

Oh, but how do you know that, then? That that's what it means?

[Luke]

We don't know anything. We talked about that, too.

[Amin]

Oh, my God. Am I stoned?

[Luke]

You might be.

[Danny]

Yes, you are.

[Amin]

Oh, my God. Wait a minute. All of that was based on not having any evidence, though? That's bad, bro. Huh? That's bad.

[Luke]

I think we've gone through this already. I don't know if we need to go through. What time is it? We're already three hours in. How long?

[Danny]

We're almost three hours in.

[Luke]

We have a lot of ground to cover. So much to cover that. Can we come back?

[Danny]

Yeah. Well, we're not going to end it right now, we still want.

[Luke]

Oh, no, I know.

[Danny]

Absolutely.

[Luke]

I think we have another five hours left here.

[Amin]

We got way more wondering if we're keeping the audience.

[Danny]

Yes. Yeah, we got. We really got stuck here on, on in the weeds here on this. This stuff about the Septuagint and this. This word. But so basically, the case Luke is making is Jesus spoke Aramaic, he was Jewish, and. And you think he was Greek. You think he only spoke Greek.

[Luke]

Textual evidence.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

Which Amin loves.

[Danny]

Right. The audience can make up their mind. We'll have to definitely do another one on this. So now I want to move on to Amin's biggest claim is that Christ is a pharmaceutical term. Now, the case Amin makes, and correct me if I'm wrong, is the original. The first time the word Christ was ever used in Greek was from Homer, and it's been used hundreds of times before Jesus Christ.

[Luke]

Correct? Correct.

[Danny]

And Amin specializes in ancient pharmacology and ancient pharmacy, and he uses that context to corroborate all of this other historical writing we have from Homer and everything else. Talking about Christing, arrows with poisons and all kinds of Christing. Right. Applying something to the skin, to the eyes, to. To an arrow, to something else. And he's taking that and connecting it to Jesus Christ, saying that he, Jesus, was someone who was known and was connected to drugs. Is that. Is that about right?

[Amin]

Correct. Yes. Yeah, we have the reference. Bring up Odysseus. It's a gorgeous.

[Danny]

So he has tons of references and he sent us, in our group chat, a whole list of them all, hundreds of references.

[Amin]

Just to make a long story short, you can tell by having read all those references and you've read hundreds. I sent you over a hundred. If you search for all the compounds of Christing, you're going to find thousands and thousands. This is like not an unusual word. That's why when Bart Ehrman came along and said, I doubt if Christing came before the Septuagint, it why he looks so bad, because it's overwhelming the history of this word. Biblical scholars have no idea what Christing is. They don't know it's an actual drug. They don't know the action of Christing as somebody applying a drug. They don't know that Rio is associated with ostrich, the sting of the gadfly the Greeks had established in mental. Mental changes, frustration, craziness, mania, Right? Those are all associated with being Christing. We have an Aeschylus himself with IO, right? And she says, what about this? I'm being Christed by this powerful Mind altering thing.

[Danny]

So from the arguments I've heard against all Amen me using my, my best judgment is that what most people believe is that Christing was applying something. It could have been drugs. It could have been a roof, it could have been a coating underneath to make ships more buoyant. They would Christ Christ them painting something. Yes, it was drugs. It was lots of other things. But they don't believe that. That Christ had anything to do with this word. Similar to your dick. Dick Cheney. Yeah.

[Luke]

Pulling out Dick Nixon.

[Danny]

Dick Nixon, Right.

[Luke]

Sure. Yeah. Okay.

[Danny]

That seems to be the general pushback to.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah. So.

[Danny]

But Amit thinks Christing was exclusively drugs.

[Amin]

No, no, no.

[Luke]

It definitely wasn't exclusively plastered.

[Amin]

No. See, here's the thing.

[Luke]

I don't come up all sorts of things.

[Amin]

I don't come up with ideas. I just read the text. Now, in the overwhelming majority, it's drugs. You can Christ plaster. Heraclitus Christed himself off with. With poop. Right. Dung. There's all sorts of things. You can Christ a ship with the pitch. So that. Or so that it's not waterproof.

[Danny]

Right, Right.

[Amin]

But the overwhelming majority are drugs. And the texts that I read are talking about the use over and over and even texts like.

[Danny]

And how do you know.

[Amin]

Did notice this paraphrase of John? He talks about the antidote. That's the Greek word that was given to Jesus when he was on the cross. So this is not the association of Christ. You can Christ your penis. There's a very well known satyr's right where you Christ the penis and you introduce that Christ penis to the vagina. And that process is to kick start the mystery. It's a bond. Bacchic satanic chorus. You didn't know. Did you know in Greek that you have the expression the Bacchic satanic chorus?

[Luke]

I mean, Satan is a Jewish idea, not a Greek idea. So what are you talking about?

[Amin]

I'm asking you, did you know that there is a Greek text that uses the Greek term Bacchic satanic chorus?

[Luke]

I'd have to see the text and I think you would agree.

[Amin]

I would love to show it.

[Luke]

It's probably not the time.

[Danny]

Here's the point. Here's my, my question. Are you just saying it's overwhelmingly associated with drugs because you specialize in drugs and read drug text? Or have you looked through everything I'm saying?

[Amin]

Performing a TLG search of everything that we've got on Christing? The overwhelming majority are drug associated.

[Danny]

That should be pretty easy to prove or disprove Right. With the tlg.

[Luke]

Okay. So do you think inject is a drug term?

[Amin]

The English inject?

[Luke]

Yeah, English inject.

[Amin]

I think it's pharmaceutically associated.

[Luke]

I agree, I agree. Yeah. So it's a term that is often used in drug context.

[Danny]

Sure.

[Luke]

It's also used in other contexts, like let me inject myself into this conversation. Right, right, correct. And so the verb krio in Greek is the same way. Okay. It can be used in various terms because it means to apply something, apply something to the surface of something else. So if you're applying an ointment which is a medicine, which could be called a drug, then sure, if you want to call that a drug term, go for it. I'm not going to argue with you on that. And you have all these references where, where there's some kind of ointment, some applied, you know, medicine, drug, pharmacon.

[Amin]

Right.

[Luke]

That's fine.

[Danny]

There was Euripides. He said, was it. What was it? Was it a potable or a Christ?

[Amin]

What kind of drug is it? He says in Hippolytus. Is it a Christ or is it a.

[Luke]

Is it one that's anointed, in other words, smeared on like an unguent. Right, right. Or is it one that you drink?

[Amin]

Right.

[Luke]

And those are two main different kinds of drugs. Right.

[Amin]

There. Also a big catch. You probably didn't catch this, or you did and you went past it because you accepted the common modern notion in Greek. The expression in Christoi. Right. Is coupled with, yes, a genitive form of Jesus in the Christ of Jesus. Every time it occurs in Paul, it's in the Bible in general, it's translated as what Paul uses it most. It's translated as in Jesus Christ. We have faith in Jesus Christ of this in Jesus Christ. The problem is that genitive is just genitive. And nowhere else in Greek are you going to translate that as part of that dative. So it literally should be translated in the Christ of Jesus. Jesus was performing the mystery openly. The fact that he is casting out demons is perfect, perfect evidence of that. He knows these terms or he wouldn't be called the one who was Christed and there wouldn't be a naked kid with a medicated bandage.

[Luke]

I think we're getting ahead of ourselves.

[Amin]

Here with him there.

[Danny]

So do you think Christ knew, spoke Greek or knew Greek at all?

[Amin]

Oh, my God. Right. Who knew Hebrew, if there's that much Hebrew?

[Luke]

He didn't speak Hebrew, he spoke Arabic.

[Amin]

And if there's that much Hebrew, then there would have been documents left this magical disappearance.

[Luke]

Hebrew. I literally quoted talking about Hebrew. Anymore. We're talking about.

[Danny]

So if you, you agree, you agree with Luke that Christing was similar to the English word inject. Christ was similar to inject. Inject is commonly associated today as injecting something into your body. But you can also use other word. I would say it's overwhelmingly associated with a syringe. Right, Obviously. But you can use that expression for other things, like a conversation or whatever.

[Amin]

If you could expand it to in.

[Danny]

Would you agree with him on that?

[Amin]

You say in Jack, though, you're not including things like injection. What is the substance that Christ becomes the substance as opposed to the act of Christing. So inject. Okay, Maybe injection.

[Danny]

An injection. Okay, I see what you're saying.

[Luke]

And then you have like fuel injection engines.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

Which doesn't have to do with drugs, but has to do with something else. We're being put into something else, right? Yeah, I think we agree on that mostly.

[Danny]

Okay, so where do we disagree here?

[Luke]

Yeah, so. So this is an important thing that you just brought up, which there's different, different parts of speech. There's inject, there's injection, there's past participles, there's present participles. You have this verb creo in Greek, which is a well understood verb. There's. You can make a present participle out of it. In English, our present participle ending is ing. Right. So you are anointing. If we just use the sort of whatever term, anoint. Anointing. Like I am anointing my body with some drug or all of what, it doesn't matter. And then there's the past participle which means you have been anointed. Ted. Okay, I want to use the word just to kind of, to make this, this point here. I want to use the word bite, which is a different word. But the reason I'm using this word is going to become clear. Specifically in English, our past tense, like I anointed my body yesterday and the past participle, my body has been anointed are often identical with most verbs. But that's confusing the point because in Greek they're not identical, as I'm going to say.

[Amin]

Greek is sexual. Sexy.

[Luke]

Yeah. Because I'm a. Thinks Greek is superior, which I love Greek too, so whatever. So I'm using bite because in English, bite is one of the relatively small number of verbs where the past tense is different from the past participle. I bit into a cake yesterday, but I have been bitten. So bitten is the past Participle. If you were in a state of having been bitten, then you were already bit, and you. You have, you know, been resulted from that action. Like, I was bitten by. And I'm going to get into this. I was bitten by a vampire. I was not. That's not a confession, but that's, you know, that's. That's how we would use the term. Right? So bite, bit, bitten. Biting is the present participle. Bitten is the past participle. So the first point I want to make is that is. And this, you know, this is. I just want to make it clear because I'm here to call balls and strikes, and I think people. People know, you know, this. This is the simplest grammatic thing in the world, right? Christ. Sting is not a word in Greek. And the. And let me explain, because I'm not accusing you of anything. Super. I'm just explaining here. All right? Christos is. Is a past participial form of krio. So the CRE in Christos is the verb part. The toast part at the end is a past participle. It means. Yeah, like bitten. Exactly. Like. Bitten is one who has been anointed. A Christos can be one who has been anointed or a drug like. Like in the Jesus.

[Amin]

The Christ did.

[Luke]

Yeah, we're gonna get there. We're gonna get there. We're gonna. To get there. It's somebody who has been had.

[Amin]

An action, an action of anointing that.

[Luke]

Has done to them. So I just, again, I just want to make clear that the ing ending is the present participle, and you can't mix those two. Okay, so when Amun says Christ ing, he's actually taking the T of the past participle and then putting a present participle onto it. And you will never find that form in Greek.

[Amin]

No, I'm making an English word Christ.

[Luke]

Correct. Yeah, you're making a neologism. And we deal with neologisms all the time. So I just want to make it.

[Amin]

Clear just because I don't want to say anoint because it sounds like something else. The verb is krio. So just use the Christ. Just use the root.

[Luke]

Okay, It's Christy. But the work that neologism is doing for you is that it's making people who don't know Greek think the connection to Christ is more obvious than it is, because that's not a word. That's not a word in Greek. Well, you can use it, but you're making the argument without doing the work.

[Amin]

If they had read, though if this audience that were taken talking to that were right now, if they had read all these documents in Greek, it's going to hit them like it's hitting them.

[Danny]

Yeah, you can say that all day long, but they're never going to do that. So you have to make a case in. In something we can understand.

[Amin]

Yeah, right.

[Luke]

So this is me calling balls and strikes.

[Danny]

Sure.

[Luke]

I'm saying that's not a word in Greek. It's based on a true story. Yeah, but there's no word Christing in Greek. All right. Because that's a past participle.

[Danny]

Christing.

[Luke]

Christing is not a word. Christing crying, which is not a word either. I just made it up with an I.

[Amin]

How about the participle chreominos?

[Luke]

Well, that's also a participle. That's a present mediocre.

[Amin]

That's Christ thing, though. How would you translate that?

[Luke]

Being anointed. That's what that means. Chrome. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. I just wanted to establish that.

[Danny]

Yes.

[Luke]

Hopefully not controversial. Just wanted to make sure that we're all on the same page here so that people understand that Amman has created neologism, which he's welcome to as long as we know that he's created a neologism. Okay, let's put. Move on.

[Amin]

Wait, so does that mean that the.

[Danny]

Current word is different like that?

[Amin]

The current. So it's anointed.

[Luke]

So Christ comes from the Greek word Christos, which is. Which is a past participial form, which means the anointed one, the person who has been anointed.

[Danny]

The person who has been bitten, technically.

[Luke]

Exactly. From the person who has been bitten.

[Danny]

Christos means you're bitten. A bitten one.

[Luke]

You've been anointed.

[Danny]

Anointed. Christ did one.

[Luke]

Correct. Yeah, except Christ did the anointed one. Anointed again, it's a neologism. As long as we're all clear. You can use the neologist.

[Danny]

As long as that makes sense. That makes sense.

[Luke]

Cool. Onward. So I want to. I want to take an analogy here using this word bite, that I think will help us understand. And I'm just going to disagree with this. I'm going to say it anyways. It's what 99.99% of us would agree with, except maybe almond. But let's. Let's hear what he said.

[Amin]

Let's see. I'm excited.

[Luke]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So as, as I've already said, Greek was the colonial language of the day.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And in that sense, it's like modern English. All Right. Modern English has spread all over the globe. Partially. That's the legacy of British colonialism for the past three, 400 years or whatever. British people sailed everywhere. Australia, New Zealand, obviously North America, South Africa, whatever. They've taken English and lots of people who didn't used to speak English, their descendants now speak English, right? Like the Maori in New Zealand were the natives, they didn't speak English. But now, because it's a colonial language, they now speak English. Right. Greek was the same way. Greek was a language that was originally just spoken in a relatively small part of the world called Greece. And not even all of it that we would call Greece, really, just the southern part. And then Alexander the Great comes along and Alexander the Great conquers everything from Greece to India, including Egypt, Palestine, everywhere in between. Right? So he, he brings the Greek language all over, all over that part of the world. He spreads it all over that part of the world and it becomes the colonial language of the day, just like English has become the colonial language of our day. And so you have a lot of people speaking Greek post Alexander. And Jesus is living 300 some odd years after Alexander the Great. So he's living in what we call the Hellenistic period, which means the Greek period. Period. The Greeks call themselves the Hellenes. So you have a lot of local colonized ethnicities who are speaking Greek. Sometimes. Okay, but sometimes they're not. Okay. So oftentimes what there is, is there's an upper crust. And this happens in Egypt. We all know this happens in Egypt. There's an upper crust of, say, Egyptians who speak Greek because it is the cosmopolitan colonial language of the day. But the everyday peasants in Egypt are not speaking Greek, they're speaking Coptic. All right, which is the native Egyptian language. Like they didn't get it from anywhere. That's just what they've always been speaking there in Egypt. And we have Coptic records from a little bit later. Okay? So this is the case in a lot of the Greek speaking world of the Eastern Mediterranean. Okay? And this is similar, and I'm going to extend this analogy. This is similar to English speakers. Let's say the British sailed to the South Pacific, which we know they did. James Cook, whatever. And I'm just going to invent a South Pacific community. It doesn't really matter who, for the purpose of the analogy. And there is a local Polynesian group, Polynesianly ethnic. I just made up an adverb, Polynesianly ethnic group in the South Pacific that has their own local customs. But then the British show up and they colonize Them. And there might be some people who learn English, but then most of the like to deal with their English colonial overlords or whatever. And of course, at this point, English becomes the elite language language. And if you're a Polynesian person from this South Pacific country, island chain or whatever, and you want to leave, you're going to need to know English to go to Australia, New Zealand, Britain, United States, whatever. Okay, so. So you have this colonial relationship that is going on. Okay, let's say that there is a tradition in this. This local Polynesian island chain. Again, it's hypothetical, but I'm making. I'm making a point because this is actually the historic history of the era we're dealing with 2,000 years ago. And they have a tradition. I'm going back to this bite word now. They have a tradition. And I made this up especially for you because I know you like this. They have a tradition where if you become the ruler, or maybe in order to become the ruler of this local island, you have to get bitten by a snake. You like this, right? I know you would like this. You have to get bitten by a snake. They put a snake up to your arm. It's non venomous. It doesn't kill you. Maybe Amin would say it's to going inject you with some pharmaca or whatever.

[Amin]

That's boring.

[Luke]

Yeah, well, you can't die because you're going to be the ruler.

[Amin]

Why don't they use the venomous snakes?

[Luke]

You're going to be the ruler. Give me the ruler. You can't die. Can't fall over.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Luke]

So in this local Polynesian community, they refer to their kings as the bitten ones. And it's based on a very specific ceremony that they do in their part of the world to create rapid rulers. They get bitten by a snake. That's cool. It is cool. I just made it up just for you. Okay, so.

[Amin]

Oh, you're making this up.

[Danny]

Yes. Hypothetical.

[Luke]

Yeah. Sorry.

[Amin]

Oh, God damn it. I thought there were some Maori.

[Luke]

We're gonna start a religion. Well, there might be. I don't know. I'm not a Maori expert.

[Amin]

I was gonna say they should have a theriac.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Amin]

And then they got bit and they wouldn't.

[Luke]

Okay, so let's keep going. So they've been colonized by the English. They are hoping for freedom from English colonial overlords. All right? And they are hoping that one of their bitten ones, which is their rulers, will rise up and throw the English out. And so they're. They're looking forward to the day that a bitten one. And of course, they're using their own native Polynesian language, which again, is hypothetical. It's like, it's like Hawaiian, it's like Maori. It's one of those languages. It doesn't matter what the word is. It's not the word bitten because that's an English word. And they're not speaking English because they're a local people, right? They're not speaking English. So they use this word bitten to refer to their kings. And then they are looking forward to a king, a bitten one, as they would call them in their local language, who is going to kick the English out so they can get their freedom back. Okay, now let's say that there is a wannabe ruler in this local Polynesian society. And some people think he is the bitten one who is to come, and some people don't. And there's arguments about, about them. And then he dies. And then there are missionaries who go out from those Polynesian islands and they believe that he came back from the dead or some religious thing happened, it doesn't really matter, but they think some religious thing happened with this guy. But they decide they're going to leave their native islands and go preach the message of the bitten one to other places in the world. World. When they do that, they can't use their own language to spread that message anymore because no one except the people on their island chain understands their local language. They have to use English, right? Because English is the global colonial language. So they translate that native term that was referring to a native kind of, you know, unusual custom of getting bitten by a snake to be, to be a ruler, right? They, they translate that word as bitten into English and then they go out and preach the message of the bitten one in English. English. Now, in the English speaking world, they have to explain what they even mean by a bitten one, right? Because if someone rolled up to you and said, have you heard the good news of the bitten one? You'd be like, what? What does that even mean? Right? Nobody knows what that means because we're not Polynesian, right? Okay? We're not from this, this, this local culture.

[Danny]

We're not familiar with the whole snake biting.

[Luke]

We're not familiar with the snake biting thing. And honestly, at some point, it gets attenuated to the point that maybe the people preaching it to you don't even remember that original. They just call him the bitten one because that's, that's, that's, that's what he's known for, for as being the bitten One. Right. But now they're using English. They weren't originally using English, but now they're using English. Okay. And so they're preaching the message of the bitten one in the United States, in England. And some people are converting people who are not Polynesian, who never spoke that Polynesian language, but they hear about this hypothetical, potentially religious, divine figure called the bitten one, and they decide to convert to bittenism. Okay. All right. Now some people. People.

[Danny]

Bitty anity.

[Luke]

That's perfect. I love it. So in the English speaking world, that word bitten has been. It's a native word that stretches back to Old English. This is. This. This word is attested in Shakespeare. It's tested in Chaucer. It's a good old English word. All right, so we have a thousand plus year literary textual history of this word bitten, but it, but that doesn't. That those uses of the word bitten from a thousand years ago don't have anything to do with this new. New use from Polynesia of the word bitten. That's actually a translation of a local Polynesian term and a translation of a local Polynesian.

[Amin]

Do we have texts about the bitten?

[Danny]

Hold on, let's finish this.

[Amin]

Polynesian.

[Luke]

I wish we do. I know.

[Amin]

No, no, I'm asking you in this hypothetical world.

[Luke]

Oh, in the hypothetical.

[Amin]

Right. Because the Polynesians.

[Luke]

Well, no, they probably didn't write it down.

[Amin]

No, they didn't write it down either.

[Luke]

They probably didn't. Yeah. Strange in the hypothesis. It's not strange at all. Most cultures that have ever existed never had texts. I mean, you agree with that, right?

[Amin]

Most cultures that have existed have never had text because most cultures that have existed have crap language.

[Luke]

Okay, well, that's your judgment, and that's fine. You're welcome to. I don't think that's why I'm totally b. All right, that's fine. You may.

[Amin]

In your hypothetical example, if there was written, why do these cultures always not leave anything written?

[Luke]

Most of them don't.

[Danny]

If.

[Luke]

If one of the ones that do it gets destroyed.

[Danny]

Interesting. So. So, so why.

[Luke]

Can I say one more thing about this?

[Danny]

Yeah, continue.

[Luke]

Okay, so just one more thing. In English, we have a rich tradition of vampire literature. And in vampire literature, there is a clear connection to the word bitten. Right. Like you're bitten by a vampire and then something happens. Right. So when these missionaries from Polynesia roll up into English speaking places and they preach the message of the bitten one, some people think they're talking about vampires, because we know that there is, in fact, in English, this tradition of Vampire literature. Now, if we understand the history, this was not a vampire king from Polynesia. There's this local custom about being bitten by a snake, but it doesn't have to do with vampires. But a lot of people are going to think that it has to do with vampires. And then when this new religious tradition gets loose in the global English speaking community, some people are going to to start to worship the bitten one as a vampire lord because they misunderstand the original meaning of it or they're just like, hey, I mean, we got biting, we got bitten ones in English, they're vampires. Now from a historical perspective, we would say, well, we know that that's not the original meaning of the word, but there may well be people, and there probably are going to be people in this hypothetical scenario who take this religious figure, this new religious figure, from an ethnicity that's not even ancient English, and from a language specifically that's not even English. And they are going to say, oh, there's a connection. Okay, let me bring this back. You can probably already see where this is going. Jews were a subject colonized population by Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great conquered that whole area, including Palestine, which is where Jews were living around Jerusalem in the 3002 BC. Jews were not speaking Greek at the time that Alexander the Great colonized them. Yeah, why would they? He was the one who brought the Greek.

[Amin]

How about the Jews as you minor.

[Danny]

One second. I don't want to derail this yet.

[Luke]

Let's. So it's generally conceded that the Jews who were living in and around Jerusalem when Alexander showed up for the first time bringing Greek, we're speaking Aramaic. Okay. Hebrew was already a liturgical language by that point, but their living language was Aramaic, which, by the way, is why Jesus gets quoted.

[Danny]

What do you mean liturgical language?

[Luke]

Liturgical is like Latin in the Catholic Church today. It's used in religious circumstances. Okay. But it's not a language that people speak every day with each other.

[Danny]

Got it.

[Luke]

You know, unless you're the Pope and you learned Latin or something. Okay, so that's what I mean by liturgical. So the Aramaic was like their regular language they used with each other on a daily basis.

[Amin]

When you say that, they were assuming they're using it, the Aramaic. Is that because we have Aramaic texts?

[Luke]

We do. We have lots of Aramaic texts from the Second Temple period.

[Amin]

Fantastic.

[Luke]

Yeah. And some of the later books of the Hebrew Bible, AKA Old Testament are written in Aramaic. Like a whole chunk of Daniel is written in Aramaic. Yeah. Which is probably from that period. Right.

[Danny]

All right, so you have Other Aramaic.

[Amin]

So you have. That's data. I love that. That's data.

[Danny]

So Alexander the Great comes.

[Luke]

Alexander the Great comes. He's the one bringing Greek for the first time to Palestine. There's no evidence of Greek speakers in Palestine until Alexander comes. But just like in my analogy or my metaphor or whatever, he's the colonial power who's coming and conquering this other area. Just like the British come and conquer Polynesia and bring English, so Alexander's bringing Greek just like they're bringing English. There are local customs, obviously there. The Jews are their own ethnicity. They're not Greek. Okay. Of course, over the centuries, there's over 300 years between Alexander and Jesus. Right? You have the upper crust of Jews learning Greek because it's the cosmopolitan language. It's the elite language. Just like in what I was saying. You would have upper level Polynesians maybe learning English so they could travel, they could talk to their English overlords, the colonial overlords, whatever. Okay. But you still have most of the people, the common people, the peasants who are not being educated, who are speaking the local traditional language of Aramaic and not Greek. Now, Jesus is very likely one of them. This is where we're going to disagree. But Jesus was very likely one of those peasants. He doesn't seem to have come from a wealthy family. He seems to have lived a poor peasant existence and he's gathering his followers from the peasantry and not the upper low level groups. He never goes to the elite cities where Greek is being spoken. So nobody who reads the Bible.

[Amin]

How do we know that?

[Luke]

Well, let's read the Bible. Let's go back to the text. Because you like.

[Amin]

No, but I mean, how do you know he didn't like. I'm genuinely asking this as a Bible, scar. How do you know that he didn't? How can you make the statement Jesus never went to Alexandria?

[Luke]

Well, we can't for sure because here we go for sure. Right? What's going on?

[Danny]

Sounds like a battery bank. Back up.

[Amin]

Oh, God.

[Danny]

Huh.

[Amin]

We broke the system.

[Luke]

Yeah. So should I pick up with like sort of. I already fleshed out the analogy, but like bringing it into what we're really talking about here. Yeah, so. So you have Alexander. He's. He's bringing Greek as this colonial language. With all these conquests, the upper crust in these, in these, among these local subject populations speak Greek, but most of the peasants never learn it. They're still speaking their, their native language language. In Egypt, they're speaking Coptic, which is the native Egyptian language. In Palestine, they're speaking Aramaic because that's by this point the native Jewish language. All right. And everywhere else they're speaking anything. Okay. All over the place. There's different subject languages.

[Amin]

Barbarian.

[Luke]

Well, that's what the Greeks. That's what the Greeks called them. Right. The Greeks called them barbarians. Because the Greeks were chauvinists.

[Amin]

Speak Greek.

[Luke]

But most cultures are chauvinist because they don't speak Greek. Because they don't speak Greek. Yeah.

[Amin]

And it was all ethnicities. The Syrians spoke Greek.

[Luke]

Greek. Well, at some point they learned it, right? Yeah, at some point.

[Amin]

At some point, another Greek went down and seduced them. They all abandoned. They were speaking and they embraced it, just like the Judeans in Alexandria.

[Luke]

Just to make the point, I'll say if you go to a linguist school, they're never going to say that some languages are crap.

[Amin]

I'm just like, no.

[Luke]

That's your personal opinion. Fine. No. All right. We disagree on that. But that's neither here nor there.

[Amin]

Right?

[Luke]

That's fine.

[Amin]

Just me.

[Luke]

I'm.

[Amin]

Amen. I'm free to say that. So you are free to say whatever you want. I would never have said that as a professor.

[Luke]

I mean, I don't believe it, honestly. Like, I'm telling you what I believe. I don't think that's true. Okay, so to bring my analogy, because that was all hypothetical with the Polynesians and everything else.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Luke]

You have Jesus and. Oh, you know, we were talking and you brought up the good point. How do we know Jesus didn't speak Greek? We don't. Okay. We're doing exactly what you want us to do, which is look at the text. Okay. So when every time Jesus is directly quoted, it's an Arab Aramaic, like what we looked at. I know we disagree. I think I made my point. So it's in Aramaic. There's a couple other texts. Maybe when we come back we can look at the other text. Yeah, whatever. Neither here nor there. So when he's quoted, it's in Aramaic. And again, his earliest followers are these peasant Jews who seem to be speaking Aramaic and not Greek. You have John writing the Book of Revelation in Greek, and he's a Jewish guy. Guy. But his Greek looks like a guy who learned Greek as a second language as an adult. And he's making some basic grammatical mistakes, like a second language learner. Okay. Like somebody who moved from. Who learned a local native language but then moved to London and had to learn English as an adult. And he never gets quite comfortable with it, but then he has To. That's what revelation looks like in Greek. I know you're familiar with the Greek revelation. It's pretty trippy, right? It's pretty trippy.

[Amin]

Anyways, I wouldn't say uneducated, educated. So I didn't say language or language way. People criticize Peter too. They say, ah, it's Greek, isn't it? You man, Peter's awesome. His Greek is great. I worked with an m. Div on. On Peter and I can't. I can't fault his style, baby. People say he's not as good as Paul.

[Luke]

You.

[Amin]

You know what I mean?

[Luke]

In First Peter he says that he wrote this letter, dia sawanu, which means through the agency of Sylvan Vanis, who's a Greek guy, which means that Peter as a native Aramaic speaker is probably telling this content to his friend who's bilingual in Aramaic and Greek. And Sylvanus is writing it in Greek form.

[Amin]

Sylvanus is his preach.

[Luke]

Sure.

[Amin]

And he does exactly what he said to scribes were very common too. And he's.

[Luke]

How are you defining bitch here again?

[Amin]

And he's.

[Luke]

What's your. What's your technical define?

[Danny]

Bitch?

[Amin]

Somebody who is subservient his servant to another lot. No. Not technically a slave. Right. Doesn't have to be that. Right.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Amin]

Akolutho. I'm a. Your attendant follower.

[Luke]

Exact follower. That's fine. Okay. All right. So Jesus, just like our local Polynesian bitten one.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Luke]

There's these. There's a local Jewish custom of anointing kings. And usually it's with olive oil. All right. Maybe Amen would have some theory about the.

[Danny]

It was a Jewish custom of anointing kings with olive oil.

[Luke]

Yeah. And it goes all the way back throughout the Bible. Every Jewish king gets. And sometimes priests and prophets as well. They get olive oil poured on their heads, which is a local custom. The Greeks, the Romans don't do this, but Jews do it. And that's their traditional way of showing that you've been inaugurated. Okay. The example I use because everyone's going to get it is it's like putting your hand on the Bible and saying the oath when you become president. If you think about. That's kind of a weird custom.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Luke]

That's how we Americans do it.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And that's how we show. Okay. You have now become this new thing that's important. Right?

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And different cultures have different things. In this made up culture from Polynesia, they. You get bitten with a snake in Judaism, in Jewish culture, you get olive oil pour on your head, you get anointed. All right?

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

So when you have been anointed, you are the anointed one. Just like once you have been bitten, you're the bitten one.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

In Hebrew, that. That native word is mashiach, which means anointed one. It's person who has that oil poured on their head. Literally. That's all that word means. Okay. Okay. You get oil poured on your head. Now you're the king. And so people can refer to the king as. As the anointed one, the one who has been anointed in the past and therefore is in a state of being anointed. That's what a past participle does. Okay.

[Danny]

And they're trying to translate this into Greek.

[Luke]

They are translating into Greek with Christ, Christos with Chris. Because Christos is a past participle in Greek that means anointed one.

[Amin]

Right.

[Luke]

That's all they're doing. So just like you translate the local.

[Amin]

Polynesian word, I want to register. He's made an error.

[Luke]

Just like.

[Danny]

You can correct him in a minute.

[Luke]

Okay? Yeah, try to correct me. Yeah.

[Amin]

So somebody's challenge, baby. You gotta restrain that. You know what I mean? Your people and your faculty will be like, oh, that's all right. You can't.

[Danny]

He's rowing.

[Luke]

Yeah. Bring it on. Bring it on. So we've been bringing it on with each other this whole time. Yeah. Let's keep doing it. Let's keep doing it. So you have the anointed one. It's mashiach in the Hebrew. And then just like the word bitten in this local Polynesian language is not the English word bitten. It's some other word. I didn't even bother making one up.

[Danny]

Sure.

[Luke]

That's the equivalent of a mashiach in this case. Got it. It's a local word. It's a local custom. And then after the death and as his followers believe, the resurrection of Jesus, whom they declared to be the anointed one they were waiting for. They called him the anointed one. Right? Which is. Which is Mashiach? Okay. Which is, by the way, as you. As you probably know, we transliterate that. Even the Greeks transliterate that as Messiah. Remember I said that? The Greeks don't have the sh. Sound. Yeah. Okay, let's start. Let's start that so we can come back.

[Amin]

We have a Greek word, masias, Right.

[Luke]

Which is a transliteration of the Christ.

[Amin]

Is not Christ is Christ. Christing. Okay.

[Luke]

Anyway, all right, so you have. You have the local Hebrew word. Sometimes the Greeks do transliterate that Hebrew word. As Masias, which we just talked about. Sometimes they do what's called a cal, C, A, L, Q, U, E, which is a loan translation, which means that you translate a word as you're borrowing it into your language. Okay. So they borrow this local Jewish custom of anointing rulers. And when somebody's been anointed, anointed, that person is the Mashiach, the anointed one. The person who has that oil pour on the head to show that they're king. No, no, no. Christos is a native Greek word. But then when they take that language into the cosmopolitan Greek speaking world that was created by Alexander, the colonial world, they can't speak Aramaic anymore because no one will understand them. Just like the local Polynesians can't speak their local Polynesian language. If they come to London or New York City, they have to translate everything into English. And they translate is they translate that term as the bitten one, because that's the English word. Right. In the same way when those local Aramaic peasants were following Jesus and believe that he was resurrected and is the king that was to come, and they call him the anointed one, the Mashiach, as a result, they translate that term as Christos. Yes, because that's the Greek equivalent of Mashiach. Now when it gets, when, when that term gets loose out there, there in the Greek speaking, cosmopolitan, colonial world, just like in my. Just like what I was saying that some people are going to make a connection with vampires because, because there's this vampire literature in English and it involves biting and being bitten and all these other things. So also, once you get the message of the Mashiach, AKA the Christos, Jesus Christ as we would call him, which is a past participle, someone who has had oil poured on his head. Anointed, right? Or as you would call it, Christ did, you're going to have Greeks hearing this message who are, who are, who are radically divorced from the original Jewish context. They don't know Aramaic. Why would they? It's a local language within, within the Greek speaking world. And those people might think that Christos has something to do with drugs, that, that Jesus is a drug Lord. Because Christos can like inject, can be a drug term, right? Just like bitten. We use the word bitten all the time in English. English doesn't have to be a vampire.

[Danny]

We would think it's a vampire.

[Luke]

Yeah, you might think it's a vampire. You don't have to.

[Amin]

Don't leave out the sex element. Because even Jeb the class, great classicist, you Know Jeb.

[Luke]

Yeah, Jeb Bush, of course.

[Amin]

Fantastic. No, we're talking about a great classicist who's already pointed out that Christ thing is used with drugs to induce sexuality. See, and I think this is a.

[Luke]

Little far a field of what we just discussed.

[Danny]

This is. Yeah, yeah.

[Amin]

Wait, no, no. You talking about Maas, weren't you?

[Luke]

Yeah. I want you to respond to what I just said. Like where, Where's. Where's. I'm done.

[Danny]

So, so, so, so what Luke just said seems to make sense to a dumb, dumb like me. Like that. That, that seems to make logical sense that what he was saying about the. The Jews speaking Aramaic and Alexander the Great bringing in the Greek. The people who were divorced from, who didn't know understand the Arama Aramaic. They're used to the word creo Christos, that is being associated with injection or applying something to the skin. They might confuse that Mashia word with a drug term.

[Amin]

Right, right. You are meant to be confused by all.

[Danny]

Does that not remember?

[Amin]

This is a thought experiment. Correct. You're not talking about.

[Luke]

Actually, I created an analogy based on the sources that we have from the world. They talk about the history of what happened.

[Amin]

I have no clue. I have no clue if there is any element of reality in what was just spoken.

[Luke]

So Jews didn't speak Aramaic.

[Amin]

I know that we have texts and that those texts tell us about who is speaking what and we don't.

[Luke]

You've read Josephus, right? Josephus talks about this.

[Amin]

Josephus is writing in Greek. Perfect, beautiful Greek. Perfect, beautiful Greek. It's a pleasure to read Joseph.

[Luke]

He probably had a scribe helping him with that.

[Amin]

It's a pleasure.

[Danny]

Who is Josephus?

[Luke]

He's a Jewish guy.

[Amin]

Philo 2, right?

[Luke]

Philo 2. Different kind of Jews.

[Amin]

Right.

[Luke]

So just like today, Jews were scattered all over the. Well, the Mediterranean at that point. And so they spoke different languages just like Jews. Jews today, Jews in America are going to speak English. Jews in Sweden are going to speak Swedish, whatever. And so you had Jews living in Palestine who were speaking Aramaic. That was the Jewish homeland. That's their native. That's their native homeland. Right. They're speaking their traditional language, which at that point was Aramaic. After, after they came back from the Babylonian exile Jews, as they went out into different parts of the world, just like Jews today oftentimes spoke whatever the local language was as their original language. So Jews in Egypt, Egypt were 100% speaking Greek as their first language in Egypt.

[Amin]

He's educated.

[Luke]

Oh, yeah. Philo is an Egyptian Jew.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Amin]

He's not A Palestinian quoting fantastic Greek sources.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Amin]

For somebody to say that that's not Greek.

[Luke]

Of course it's Greek. Who said that?

[Amin]

He's doing. A professor from Haifa said he is writing in Jewish Greek.

[Luke]

Okay, Josephus.

[Amin]

Okay. Josephus. The Septuagint, Philo.

[Luke]

It's a dialect of Greek. Yes.

[Amin]

No, it's not. It doesn't exist.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Amin]

Do you believe there is no Jewish Greek? It's just Greek? I'm telling you, I read it all the time. It's just the same fucking language.

[Luke]

This is something we need to come back to in the next interview because we didn't actually get into this.

[Amin]

Do you think there's a difference between koine and. When I say classical Greek, do you think there's a difference?

[Luke]

It's a later version. Right. Classical evolves into koine.

[Amin]

Is koine. Great. Later is coining Greek.

[Luke]

It's a different stage.

[Amin]

Is a classicist like yourself qualified to read koine Greek? Just tell me that.

[Luke]

Yes.

[Amin]

Okay.

[Luke]

What's your point?

[Amin]

So what we're being flooded with is people saying, no, no, this guy is an expert in classical Greek, not koine. It's stupid.

[Danny]

You're saying people are saying that about you.

[Amin]

Yeah, it's stupid misconceptions like this that come from the biblical side. People saying. Let me state it very Simply. Amon has PhD in classical Greek. He's not qualified to read the Koine Greek because it's a different language.

[Luke]

Okay, I disagree with that.

[Amin]

It's, isn't it?

[Luke]

Of course it is.

[Amin]

Yeah, exactly.

[Luke]

They are just different dialects. But not that different. Not that different. Okay, you can go between them.

[Amin]

Where's the koine from? Which dialect is it? Koine of.

[Luke]

It mostly comes from Attic, Ionic, Greek.

[Amin]

Yes, very nice. Gorgeous. See, he knows what he's talking about. Right? Fantastic. So this is the thing that is replacing the little languages of the backwaters like Judea. You have to admit, Judea is a shed.

[Danny]

Hole.

[Luke]

Hole.

[Amin]

Nobody wants to go to Judea. The governors that are getting assigned there, it's punishment. Right. So we have no system of education. When Jesus comes back from Egypt because he was given a ton of money from the magi. And you're well familiar with what a magus is. Correct?

[Luke]

Of course.

[Amin]

Because you teach ain't ancient magic. Yeah.

[Luke]

They're magoi, not wise men.

[Amin]

Yeah, sure. When he goes with all the.

[Danny]

What are the magi.

[Luke]

Oh, that's a whole nother thing. But they just.

[Danny]

For people that are listening.

[Luke]

Yeah. I actually think this is a whole nother hour. We could do just on this topic. It's where the word magic comes from. But it doesn't mean magic necessarily. It comes from a Persian word. Speaking of Persian and Persian that we have left. The priests of the Persian religion, which was Zoroastrianism, were called magic. And that was their. That was the regular word in old Persian for. For the priesthood.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Luke]

Yeah. The Greeks heard about them and they borrowed that word into Greek and they called them magoi, which is the. The closest they got to that. It was pretty similar.

[Amin]

Obviously they know the drugs. They're known for practicing the pharmakeia. All the drug works.

[Luke]

Right.

[Amin]

They're the ones bringing us. And they give Jesus all the gold and the frankincense and the myrrh. The frankincense. Frankincense of the myrrh. Bases for drugs when he comes back from valuable spices, when he comes back from Egypt. Plus venoms when he comes back from Egypt.

[Luke]

Which gift of the wise men was that?

[Amin]

He's. It's the guy who put it in his buttocks. When.

[Luke]

I don't remember that.

[Amin]

That's how they administer it. No, I'm not kidding you. The doctors are talking about this, right?

[Luke]

Right.

[Amin]

Even Dioces talks about the Mago and what they do with the drugs.

[Danny]

So. So you're making the case that Jesus. There's texts that connect Jesus to drug use.

[Amin]

Yes.

[Danny]

Quite literally.

[Amin]

Yes. When he came back from Egypt, he goes to the temple and he's. You know, he's just a kid, but he's outsmarting the people that are there because it's backwater. He went to an educated Egypt, to Alexandria. It's only unified in its Greek that you were talking about. You think he didn't speak Greek? Of course he did.

[Luke]

Yeah. Other than Christos.

[Amin]

That's a Greek concept. Soteria is a Greek concept. Right.

[Luke]

I only know of one early halfway anything reliable reference to Jesus going to Egypt is when he's a baby and he comes back while he's still a baby. Yeah. I don't know of anything early that ever says he goes to Egypt. Now we've seen because remember that very first thing we looked at? We saw that there's all these crazy stories about Egypt from. Sorry. About Jesus. Egypt too, from hundreds of years later. Okay. They may or may not be reliable. Often they're not. So you're saying, let's look at the text. And I'm saying, are these texts reliable?

[Amin]

Okay. This is perfect. I'm glad you said that. This is something I. I Don't do. I used to, but I don't do it anymore. I don't discriminate between the Bible, the New Testament and any of the other Christian literature. Any of it that's contemporary. I read it all the apocryphal stuff, everything.

[Luke]

I read it too. But I do discriminate. And there's a very good historical methodological reason I discriminate. And any historian will would. And that is that we go by the principle the earlier the better. So this is true for any historical event, not just about Jesus. I mean, we use this for everything. If you call witnesses into a courtroom. Actually, you know, let's. We can do this with anything.

[Amin]

Yeah.

[Luke]

If you have a source that was written, let's say it's the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Lots of theories. Let's say you have a source from 1964 about it, right? And we know it was written in 1964. And then you have a source from. From today. I don't know, they made something up yesterday, or maybe not made something up, but they wrote something yesterday. And it's not necessarily based on earlier sources. You're going to be more likely to just a priori judge that the 1964 source is more likely to be reliable than the 2025 source. Now, that's not a guarantee. That's not a guarantee.

[Amin]

It's contemporary. No, I totally agree. Contemporary sources.

[Luke]

So we need to discriminate evidence. We need to discriminate based on age, correct the text, if we can date the text, right? So I think we should discriminate. Now, if I, quote, unquote, discriminate in favor of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, it's not for a religious reason, it's for a historical reason. Those are the four earliest stories we have about Jesus or sources we have about Jesus, okay? All of this stuff that's coming from two hundreds, three hundreds, four hundreds. We know there's all this mythology that grows up about Jesus in those intervening centuries, right? That doesn't mean it's all made up. Okay? So when. When we put something up on the screen from 350 or something, or 370, I'm not saying, oh, it's all fake, we should throw it out.

[Amin]

I'm not saying that's the same.

[Luke]

I'm saying methodologically, it's a lot less likely to be true than something written 30 years after he walked the earth. Right? That's the principle.

[Amin]

That's why I think Dioscorides is so important, because you need contemporary data to Back up. And Christing. If you want to see more about Christing than any other source, go look in Dioscorides, dude. Right? It's. You've got more Christing there than anywhere.

[Luke]

And it's exactly in the Greek tradition.

[Amin]

Exactly contemporary with Jesus. It's perfect. So nobody pays attention to that. So is philuminous. Right. So antidotes, Antidotes. Right. It's all there.

[Danny]

So what is the best, best connection, in your view, Aman, that Jesus had anything to do with actual drug use?

[Amin]

His title.

[Danny]

Right, but he just explained that. He just explained what we.

[Amin]

The history of his title is most important. By the time Jesus Christ is called the Christed One, there is a thousand years of popular history to Christing. It is something that is featured on the democratic stage of Athens.

[Danny]

Right?

[Luke]

Yeah, It's a Greek word as well as 300 years.

[Amin]

No, no, no. Christing. The actual verb, Christing is what I'm talking about. All the forms, look, we're all about the language, but they were.

[Danny]

They were using it way before J, and they were also using it way after Jesus.

[Amin]

Jesus's time. And after Jesus time, right. You take a look and figure out the best evidence that you're talking about comes from his contemporaries. What are the contemporaries saying? And when you jump into that pond, you're gonna find sex, drugs, and mystery ritual that involves the consumption of semen by a bunch of child traffickers. And that's why Jesus is screaming out on the cross when he's arrested. I am not a lay stace. You could have arrested me at any time. Why'd you come out here with all the weapons? I am not a lace stays.

[Danny]

That's something that we should definitely talk about next time.

[Luke]

Yeah, that's a whole other thing. I think we need hours, at least days. Yeah. Can we send. Save that. Can we come back?

[Amin]

Did you. Regulation.

[Luke]

Yeah, I'm familiar with it.

[Amin]

Let's come back for that.

[Luke]

Let's come back for that. Yeah, if we can.

[Danny]

Yeah, no, that. That's. That's something that I'm definitely fascinated by. And.

[Luke]

Yeah, we don't want to. We don't want to short shrift that.

[Danny]

Right?

[Amin]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Okay, we'll do a part two to that then.

[Amin]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Well, thank you, guys. I think this has been fantastic. I think there's definitely a lot more for us to discuss. We should definitely set up a part two and. Yeah, I have tons. I have tons more questions. I feel like we're only halfway through.

[Luke]

This, but that's how I feel too. I think that's why we needed part two. Yeah.

[Amin]

I just wish we could have talked about some of the Christ things. Like, I was looking forward to the Christ thing and. Yeah, Christing. Virgin breasts and little boys. Did you see that one in there?

[Luke]

I said I try to avoid little boys personally.

[Amin]

I know, but did you see that in all the Christ things that I sent both. Let the world hear it.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Amin]

Sent both of these champions. I sent them.

[Danny]

Yes.

[Amin]

All the Christings with the sex stuff and Christing. Your balanos. Right.

[Luke]

There's no doubt that Christos was a term that could be a drug term that was used going back a thousand years. I don't think there's a debate.

[Danny]

I don't think.

[Luke]

Did you get this?

[Amin]

All the sex stuff?

[Luke]

I said there's sex stuff in there too. Sure.

[Amin]

A lot of graphic sex stuff. Right.

[Luke]

Well, of course.

[Amin]

With saviors.

[Luke]

Yeah. Sotera was a Greek word that was very complicated that later got applied to.

[Amin]

Jesus and it has a pharmaceutical history. You would love that. It's the history.

[Luke]

I love words.

[Amin]

Yeah.

[Luke]

I'm a philologist.

[Amin]

We should talk about that.

[Danny]

Well, we're definitely going to talk about this. One quick thing completely unrelated to any of this, I want to ask before we wrap it up. The Isaiah scroll found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic texts from a thousand ad. There are people who say that it's like a miracle that the Masoretic text of Isaiah match the Isaiah scroll word for word. First of all, is that real? Second of all, what do you. What do you make of that claim?

[Luke]

Yeah, I. I would want to, actually. And maybe we can. Maybe I can answer this question in part two. 2. Just because I want to be as responsible as possible. I haven't compared them word for word personally.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Luke]

I will say in general, because I do know this, that of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of them match the mt, the Masoretic text whose earliest copies we still have are from a thousand years later and some don't. So those are all over the place. I want to double check the Isaiah scroll before I say anything.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Amin]

Can I just say. No fucking way.

[Luke]

Way.

[Amin]

Do you have that much time? And the transmission of the text is exact. No way.

[Danny]

A thousand years.

[Amin]

It's a miracle.

[Luke]

I will say it's possible. It is.

[Danny]

That would make me believe in God.

[Luke]

If that was real. Here's why I know it's possible. We've talked about India. I took three semesters of Sanskrit, the Rig Veda, the earliest texts of the Sanskrit or the Hindu religion that are written in very early, very early Sanskrit. They were handed down orally for, for I think around 2,000 years before they were written down. And they are pristine. I mean they look exactly like we would think from the earliest level of Sanskrit. I mean, linguists think that they almost didn't change a single word in 2000 years in Hinduism.

[Danny]

But also, wouldn't it be possible for, for people to be copying that scroll like when, when they hid those scrolls in those, in those pots or whatever? Isn't it also possible that there was many other copies existing?

[Luke]

There were.

[Danny]

And that were being copied.

[Luke]

Up until that time there were multiple copies. The Dead Sea community had their copies. Other people in Jerusalem and elsewhere would have had their copies as well.

[Amin]

When does the first copy of the Hebrew Bible emerge?

[Luke]

Like complete copy?

[Amin]

Yes.

[Luke]

Yeah, I think it's 11th century, the oldest one that still exists. Now the reason, and I know you know this is not because there weren't earlier copies. You don't think they invented it in the 11th century, do you? You.

[Amin]

I'm wondering if the process of. Not just at one time, but a process. Why don't we have like consistent copies? That's what I don't understand. It's a Masoretic invention, right?

[Luke]

Because vowels are a Masoretic invention. The vowel points, they were the ones who started writing the vowels. So the continental text is, is older. The vowel points probably go back to the seventh century.

[Danny]

Isn't it possible?

[Amin]

Why does every, all the translators. Why do the. They use just that Masoretic text?

[Luke]

I. I wouldn't want to just use the Masoretic text. I would want to look at the Septuagint. I would want to look at.

[Amin]

Why didn't they. Cuz, you know, why didn't good Bible.

[Luke]

Translations look at all those? They don't just look at the empty.

[Amin]

Are there good Bible transl. What would you recommend?

[Luke]

Yeah, I would recommend learning Hebrew and reading it.

[Amin]

For the. Okay, you just like learning Greek. Learning Greek and reading it, isn't it?

[Luke]

What's a shame, learning the original language.

[Amin]

What if the Greek. No, if this is my thought experiment, I get one too. What if the Greek is the original? Then you're doing yourself a huge disservice.

[Luke]

I read the Greek too. Yeah, I study the translation because we both agree there's a translation going on here. 99.9% of the world, including me, thinks it's Hebrew to Greek. You think it's Greek to Hebrew, but we both agree it's a translation.

[Amin]

And what did you think about the tohu wabohu. Can you just.

[Luke]

What about it?

[Amin]

Sum it up? Going from these really sophisticated concepts in Greek to these really basic. And it means the same thing. Empty and empty.

[Luke]

Yeah. I'm still not sure of your logic as to why you think it has to go in one direction. I don't understand.

[Amin]

Okay, so if you do have this Hebrew original and you're translating it into Greek, you're going to see tehu wa bohu, which both mean empty. And somehow you're going to get two consistent concepts. They're totally different.

[Luke]

Well, that's how translation works. You have to choose the best word you have in the target language.

[Amin]

Why didn't they just choose empty?

[Luke]

Because they didn't want to. Why does any translator choose any word? It's a stylistic term.

[Amin]

Do you understand why it sounds sus to me?

[Luke]

I don't think I do. I mean, I want to understand. I do genuinely want to understand. The Greeks had a rich philosophical tradition, so they had complicated words like our.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Right. That's fine. So they had those. Those linguist. That linguistic technology. You want to call that linguistic technology? All right. That they could just. Okay, let's plug this into this word. All right. Hebrew had tohu wabohu. Now, we don't know what kind of Hebrew philosophical tradition preceded the cataclysmic destruction. Yeah.

[Amin]

Because nothing survives.

[Luke]

Well, the Torah survives.

[Amin]

And the rest of it, besides the tone, none of this rich literature and the archaeology and those goddamn silver tablets.

[Luke]

By the way, I do think we should bring this up again in part two. First of all, I think it's one of our. It's a good discussion we had. I think there's more that both of us could bring to bear. I have other points. I made a list of about 10. I got through three of them.

[Amin]

What are some of mine?

[Luke]

We'll do the replay and I'm sure you can bring more. I have many more points that I could make as to why. Arguments for why the Septuagint the Greek is a translation of the Hebrew, not the other way around.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

And I'd like to hear what he has to say about those.

[Danny]

Fantastic. Everybody, this has been super fascinating. I think. I think this has been a great discussion between both you guys. You guys obviously respect each other's Expertise. You guys PhDs and share the same passion for these languages. And this has been super informative for me. And at the very least, I think what this discussion is going to do is going to bring more. More inquiry into this stuff and bring more interest into this classics, the study of classics and the ancient language and all this stuff. And thank you guys so much for your time.

[Amin]

Can I say one thing before you finish?

[Danny]

Yes.

[Amin]

This is the first time that you've seen somebody trained in the dojo. Do you understand why I say now that without the classicist, you've got the Bible scholarship and they're not up to snuff. They really don't work with these texts. Right. They just kind of do a little peripheral and pull in and bs and people are supposed to follow that.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Amin]

But this is a classicist today, Luke, who has stepped forward. And do you see how the. The training is different? And that's why I say I can spot it. I can spot it 100%. I can't. I want to thank you for bringing. Bringing that force.

[Danny]

Yes.

[Luke]

And.

[Amin]

And Luke, thank you for engaging. It's been a long battle for me to get somebody with training to be able to sit here and talk to. And I know you don't think that Jesus was arrested in a public park.

[Luke]

We'll get to that.

[Danny]

That'll be part of. That'll be part two.

[Luke]

It'll come.

[Amin]

Come. Let's see it.

[Danny]

Thank you guys, both. Luke, where. Where can people find more about you online or read your work or anything like that?

[Luke]

Yeah, I have a. I have a side project that's a YouTube channel called Word Safari That's. That's pretty small. It doesn't deal with any of this stuff except etymology. So I deal with a lot of Greek and Latin roots on that channel. And it's all about English, to be clear, like that. That is about English words that come from Greek and Latin. And I think you agree with that, right? There's nothing controversial here, right?

[Amin]

Yeah, I've watched it. You're on audience or. Must be totally brainy nerds.

[Luke]

They have some very smart comments. I always appreciate the comments. You know, there's episodes on the origin of the Alphabet, you know, from Greek, Phoenician, all the way back.

[Amin]

Yeah.

[Luke]

So. So, yeah, and I think. And I think you said you watched a few episodes. We probably don't have any argument about this stuff. Right. Origins of English and Greek and Latin.

[Amin]

Every once in a while, some kind of origin, I'll be like, yeah, that's possible. But they don't know for. For sure.

[Luke]

That's.

[Amin]

You know what I mean? It's kind of like that.

[Luke]

As I've been saying, there's a lot we don't know for sure. And I think you have. I am comfortable with that I'm not. As a classicist, I'm comfortable with not knowing things for sure because we're just never going to know for sure. 100% for sure.

[Danny]

Right.

[Luke]

We can take the odds in Vegas and we go from there.

[Danny]

Y.

[Amin]

You're optimistic I'm going to be negative and say no.

[Luke]

Then we're a good. We're a good foil. We're a good foil for each other. We're providing both sides. Right?

[Amin]

Let's go. Christ.

[Danny]

Amen. Lady Babylon on YouTube.

[Amin]

Yes.

[Danny]

That's the main place people can find you. Yeah, we'll link. We'll link both of those YouTube channels below for everyone who wants to learn more. And I'm very much looking forward to part two.

[Amin]

Thank you, Danny, for the opportunity.

[Danny]

My pleasure. Good night, everybody.