As Delivered by Angels

Summary

The Lord of Spirits Podcast: "As Delivered by Angels"

Date: June 10, 2022
Hosts: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick & Fr. Stephen De Young
Main Theme:
The Nature of Textual Authority in Orthodox Christian Tradition
Exploring how sacred texts—biblical and related literature—function authoritatively in the Orthodox Church, their origins, how “canon” is formed, and how we should relate to authoritative texts versus tradition. The hosts delve into the ritual, liturgical, and historical reality of “canonicity,” contrast modern misconceptions, and explain why Orthodox understanding is fundamentally different from Western (especially Protestant) approaches to the Bible and tradition.

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Episode Overview

• Purpose: To explain what makes a text (such as the Bible) authoritative in Orthodox Christianity, how canons emerge, and how pre- and post-Christian communities use and receive texts in their religious life.
• Key Questions:
  • What is the nature of “authority” in religious texts?
  • How do texts become “canonical,” and what does that mean?
  • What’s the relationship between Scripture, other writings (apocrypha, fathers), and tradition in the Orthodox Church?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is Textual Authority? (01:07–06:15)

• Authority isn't about beliefs or ideas: Both hosts stress early that ancient texts functioned ritually, not as systems of beliefs. A text’s authority was in its use and participation, not as an “object of belief.”
  • “It’s not about here’s a set of truths that are to be believed... here's the correct procedure. Here's the correct way to do this, way to tell the story, the correct way to do the ritual.” — Fr. Stephen (15:25)
• Ancient texts as living rituals: Examples include the Babylonian Enuma Elish and Egyptian Book of the Dead, both enacted ritually, not analyzed as mythology as we do now.
  • Example: The Enuma Elish was celebrated in annual rituals to maintain cosmic order (07:53–09:29).
  • The written form becomes a “monument”—it stabilizes a tradition or ritual, not just a record (10:38–12:53).

2. Scripture Within Community: Ritual, Correction, and Variation (13:10–19:10)

• The Torah is a “ritual manual,” not a law code: The Torah gave procedures for living and worshipping in the community; beliefs are not the focus. Ritual precedes narrative, e.g., the Passover instructions (Exodus).
  • “It’s not a play by play of what happened. It’s a text within a ritual context.” — Fr. Andrew (17:29)
  • “This is not a list of things you’re supposed to do and not to do. It’s, ‘Okay, this bad thing happened, here’s what we do about that.’” — Fr. Andrew (24:56)
• Legacy in modern liturgics: Parallels are drawn to the Orthodox Liturgikon with its instructions to priests—ritual action and moral instructions serve the liturgy (28:32–29:59).

3. Canon Formation is Descriptive, Not Prescriptive (Topically Throughout Episode; cf. 77:09–86:16, 163:00–164:49)

• Canons emerge organically:
  • There is never a council or cabal that chooses the canon; rather, the canon “describes the reality” of which texts communities have been using, reading, and considering authoritative.
    • “This is always descriptive, and not prescriptive.” — Fr. Stephen (83:56)
    • Example: Ancient Jewish and later Christian communities inherit and use what is already occurring.
• The Western & Biblical Canons are not lists decreed or enforced from above:
  • Like the “Western Canon” in literature or the “canon” in fandoms, it’s about which texts have been formative, not which ones are supposed to be formative (77:38–84:47).
• Canons differ between communities:
  • There are different canonical lists in the ancient Jewish, Ethiopian, Alexandrian, and later Christian worlds (100:19–101:21).

4. The Danger of “Textual Fundamentalism” (43:41–46:54; 174:48–175:44)

• Sola Scriptura and Rabbinic Scribe Models:
  • Protestant and post-Temple Judaism place authority in the text itself, in contrast to both ancient Israel and Orthodox Christianity, where authority is in God and the experience of God, mediated through the texts and the living community.
    • “The authority is never in the text itself, it's always Christ who is mediated through the text.” — Fr. Stephen (44:43)
• Authority in experience, not mediation:
  • Prophets functioned without reference to the written Torah because they experienced God directly (38:26–41:00).

5. Authorship & the Organic Emergence of Scripture (48:18–55:43)

• Authorship as irrelevant:
  • Orthodox tradition acknowledges that the books of the Old Testament were written, compiled, and edited over centuries by unknown authors.
    • “It does not matter who wrote the books… because it has been all… how this works.” — Fr. Stephen (69:27)
  • Church fathers often believed in Mosaic origin of the Torah, but not that he wrote every word (65:06–67:47).
• Reception is what gives authority:
  • The form and content that the community receives is sanctified by the Holy Spirit over time—not by signature or time stamp.

6. Canonization of the New Testament (110:19–113:11)

• No voting, no sudden decisions:
  • The 4 Gospels, Paul’s epistles, and most of the NT were circulating and accepted early (by 150 AD at latest).
  • Disputes or doubts were over books unfamiliar or unavailable to particular communities, not over arguments about inclusion (117:00–119:13).
• Mutual recognition and acceptance:
  • When Christian communities encountered one another, differences in canons led to mutual enrichment, not rejections (121:09–121:24).

7. Category of Apocrypha and “Private” Literature (137:32–144:15 and 154:13–156:19)

• Three categories of texts in Orthodox usage:
  • 1) Publicly read in Church (canonical Scripture)
  • 2) Read in private for spiritual edification (apocrypha, fathers, etc.)
  • 3) Not to be read (heretical or disapproved texts)
• Apocrypha ≠ heretical or suppressed:
  • They are edifying, often encouraged, but not read liturgically. Example: Shepherd of Hermas “ought to be read, but not in the church” (142:25–143:55)
• Monasteries preserve ‘non-canonical’ texts out of spiritual purpose (155:15–155:53).

8. Living Tradition and the Role of the Holy Spirit (163:00–166:49)

• Tradition is not transmission of raw data or a secret code:

  • It is the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church.
  • The received canon, liturgy, and doctrines are recognized by the Church in retrospect, not constructed in anticipation or as a checklist.
    • “So what holds authority in my church community is...what holds authority in my church community… it's descriptive. This is just the case.” — Fr. Stephen (165:04)

• No office, synod, or group determines canon or tradition:

  • If a synod tried to declare a new canon, the Church’s gradual, Spirit-guided reception or rejection would ultimately decide (166:01–166:29).

• Church councils and validity:

  • Reception history is decisive. The Council of Florence “looked” like an ecumenical council but was never received—so not ecumenical.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• [15:25, Fr. Stephen:] “It's not about...truths to be believed...it's that here’s the correct procedure. Here’s the correct way to do this.”
• [31:12, Fr. Andrew:] “Liturgical change, adapting to the particular needs of the context. Yeah, it's okay, everybody.”
• [44:43, Fr. Stephen:] “The authority is never in the text itself, it’s always Christ who is mediated through the text.”
• [83:56, Fr. Stephen:] “This is always descriptive, and not prescriptive.”
• [87:00, Fr. Stephen:] “There has never been in the Orthodox Church any council, any emperor, any...group... who went out and decreed, ‘These are the canonical books.’”
• [107:37, Fr. Stephen:] [On Josephus and his hyperbolic canon witness] “The baby comes out from its mother’s womb, recognizes the authority of these 22 books, and no others. Recognizes them specifically. It’s the proclamation of God...”
• [163:17, Fr. Stephen:] “We're talking about the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, which is an ongoing thing.”
• [179:43, Fr. Andrew:] “When we attempt to create a system that is the basis for how authority is assigned, then that's a kind of trying to get a handle on things that is actually stepping away from the way that the Orthodox tradition actually works... The task is to try to understand the tradition...”
• [191:39, Fr. Stephen:] “The reality of the churches that exist, the reality of what the Holy Spirit has done through history, the reality of the lives lived by the saints before us. All of that reality is our basis. And then we take that reality and we apply it in reality.”

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Important Timestamps

• [01:07] – Introductions, textual authority, ancient texts
• [07:53] – Babylonian & Egyptian ritual texts: ritual vs. mythology
• [13:10] – Bible as ritual/liturgical text; authority & correction
• [31:12] – Liturgical adaptation—Deuteronomy’s context
• [43:41] – Rabbinic Judaism & Protestant sola scriptura models
• [48:18] – Authorship and textual history, why it doesn’t matter
• [83:56] – What is a canon? Canon as description/recognition, not rule
• [110:19] – New Testament canon: organic, never voted
• [137:32] – Non-canonical, apocryphal literature: private vs. public use
• [154:13] – Reception and transmission, role of monasteries in preserving
• [163:00] – Holy Tradition as living, Spirit-filled, not data-transmission
• [179:43] – Critique of systematizers and the need for spiritual humility
• [191:39] – Final word: Reality, tradition, and living the Orthodox faith

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Tone and Style

• Candid, conversational, mixing scholarship, personal experience, and wit.
• Frequent asides, humor (especially about pop culture and wrestling), but always returning to substance.
• Critical of ideology, legalism, and rationalist/systematic approaches to tradition.

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Summary Takeaways

• Orthodox canonicity is about how texts function liturgically, communally, and spiritually—not who wrote them or when.
• Authority comes from Christ, experienced in the Church by the Holy Spirit, mediated through—but not limited to—canonical texts.
• Tradition is a living thing, not a system. The canon, councils, and saints become authoritative by reception and continued life in Christ’s Church, not by decree or theory.
• Orthodoxy resists both materialist and idealist distortions. Reality—of text, worship, life, and salvation—is always the ground.
• Humility, patience, and participation in the actual, received life of the Church is the path—not systems, not control, not “correct opinions” for their own sake.

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For more:

• Listen to the episode or find more resources at Ancient Faith’s Lord of Spirits page.
• See Dr. Jeannie Constantinou’s Guiding to a Blessed End for history of Revelation’s canonical reception.
• Explore OrthodoxIntro.org for basics of Orthodox faith and canonical tradition.

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Transcript

[Narrator]

He will be a staff for the righteous with which for them to stand and not to fall. And he will be the light of the nations and the hope of those whose hearts are troubled. All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship him. And they will praise and bless and celebrate with song the lord of spirits. First Enoch, chapter 48, verses 4 through 5. The modern world doesn't acknowledge, but is nevertheless haunted by spirits, angels, demons and saints. In our time, many yearn to break free of the prison of a flat secular materialism, to see and to know reality as it truly is. What is this spiritual reality like? How do we engage with it? Well, how do we permeate everyday life with spiritual presence? Orthodox Christian priests, Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung host this live call in show, folks. Focused on enchantment in creation, the union of the seen and unseen as made by God and experienced by mankind throughout history. Welcome to the Lord of Spirits.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Good evening. Giants killers and giant killers. But it's easy for me to say giant killers, dragon slayers said giants killers. I think that becomes a football thing then. You are listening to Lord of Spirits podcast. My co Host Father Steven DeYoung is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana and I'm Father Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. We are recording live, but we're actually not going to be taking phone calls tonight. That said, if you leave a question on our Facebook or ancient faith YouTube streams and we spot it, there is a chance that we could take it and respond. So tonight we're talking about textual authority. I know that sounds like a hoot, but stick with me here. As Christians, whether it's the Bible, the Apocrypha, the writings of the church fathers, texts related to the ecumenical councils or the divine services, we have a lot of texts. So how are we supposed to understand these various texts? In what sense are they authoritative? That's what we're talking about tonight. Now, as we are wont to do, we're going to begin looking at this question in the ancient world thousands of years ago, beginning even before the writings that make up the holy Scriptures. So what's up first tonight, Fr. Stephen? Are we going to look at that Sumerian clay tablet where someone complains about how kids don't obey their parents anymore? Things just aren't what they used to be?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh. Oh.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, not quite that far back.

So I have to comment. People may hear the difference, but I have this new, this new like technology setup thing happening now.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, you sound so much better.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And like with the headphones and the way my mic is set up on my desk, I sort of feel like I'm guest hosting the delicious dish.

But I'm not.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So I will not even attempt NPR voice any further.

But so yeah, we're not, we're not, we're not starting quite that far back with the first piece of writing ever because as far as we could tell, that piece of writing was just a grumpy old man like me and is not actually authoritative in any way for anyone.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I do love that that is the earliest known piece of writing. Is someone complaining how things are going downhill and just not what they used to be?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, they haven't gone back up, really.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Think about it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But.

That'S not true. So Sumerian Renaissance was definitely a slight uptick.

But yeah. So we're talking about texts that play a particular kind of role in a community tonight. Right. So complaint notes like that, or.

Hate mail or.

Grocery lists, trade receipts, we're going to leave those aside.

And talk about first things that aren't the Bible, that even precede anything in the Bible, but that had a function in their respective communities in the ancient near east that were something like the function that the Bible would come to have.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so specifically, we're talking about.

These texts that form out of a preceding oral.

Recitation or oral tradition. Right. And an oral use of storytelling or narrative or ritual performance that then eventually gets written down. I'm sure that guy complained about kids these days all the time before it was written down, but that's still not quite what we were talking about.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

These texts, as I mentioned, whether it's a narrative story, whether it's a story that we would now call myth or mythology, whether it's direct sort of ritual instructions, these aren't things that are invented when somebody comes and sits down to write them down.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like you can't just think up like. Well, I mean, L. Ron Hubbard did. But most people can't just sit and think up a bunch of rituals and then get people to go along with them.

Usually these are things that form semi organically. We talked about that back when we talked about sacrifices.

And encounters with.

Spiritual beings. But so a couple of early examples that are kind of helpful in terms of what we're talking about. So people, at least people who listen to this show, have probably heard of the Enuma Elish, which is the sort of Babylonian creation account.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And we've talked before on the show about the difference between myth and mythology.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That a myth is a story that has this sort of ritual component that sort of keeps that story alive and makes it real in the experience of people. When all of that drops out, it becomes mythology.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so most folks, I'd wager, who have read the Enuma Elish have approached it as mythology.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's just a story that doesn't actually play a part in their life in any way, except maybe as a piece of entertainment.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Or. Or, you know, from a very sort of Protestant perspective, we say, oh, this is what the ancient Babylonians believed about how the world was created.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So it's about thoughts or beliefs. Right.

And this isn't just picking on our Protestant friends. Right. Like, everyone does this. We all tend to think of other religions in terms of our own religion. Right. Because our own religion is the religious experience that we have. So it was sort of natural for Protestant scholars, when they started studying ancient religion, to look at it in terms of beliefs.

And what people held to.

And then going forward, as there were sort of wars that we talked about how. And how not to read the Bible episode, there's sort of wars over how to read the creation account in Genesis. Right. Then when people turn to the Babylonian creation account, they tended to read it the same way. So either they said, well, this is just sort of poetic, interesting stuff, or they said, no, this is exactly how they believed it happened.

But the Enuma Elish actually in Babylon was actually reenacted every year.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There was a. There were a series of processions to a sacred ziggurat.

And the processions were considered to be processions of the gods. So the idol that was the body of Marduk was picked up and carried down there, and.

The idols of the other gods from the other cities were carried there in procession. And then there was this reenactment with the king embodying Marduk in the story. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And it wasn't understood just as a kind of play. Right. Like, look, we're putting on a story, but that this thing is happening again and we're part of it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. We're participating in it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And the reason it kept being done is, of course, this is how the world was created. And as we've pointed out, for ancient people, this isn't about being versus nothingness. Because especially when you look at, like, the Enuma Elish, there's nothing created out of nothing. Right. Everything's created out of something else.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But it's things being put in order. And so this gets repeated and participated in as a way of maintaining that order. Right. And this is a pretty constant factor in all kinds of pagan religions. Right. You know, you look at Mesoamerican human sacrifices, that was to maintain the ordering of the world and keep it from ending, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. If you don't do this ritual, then really bad, bad things will happen.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And so this was the same kind of thing. This was maintenance. Right. Of the order.

By reenacting it was actually doing something. But of course, that annual festival, all of those ritual elements are now gone. And so now it just sort of gets read as mythology. Mythology.

Another example. And this one's a pretty obvious example. Right. This isn't a narrative text per se, though there are narrative elements of it is the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Which is basically a manual for doing funerals in the Egyptian religious tradition.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So it's all the funerary and burial rites. And so that includes some sort of narrative elements about Osiris and Anubis and. Right. And the gods.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But those narrative elements are then actually sort of played out in the rituals.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. That you. By doing the ritual, you are participating in Osiris's story of him dying and that sort of thing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So.

What'S happening when these things are written down? Right. So these stories are still being told orally, they're being passed on orally, and they're being enacted in this ritual. What happens when they finally get written down. Right. Is that once they're written down, they become. That becomes the normative form. Right. Now, this is the written form. We talked before about how expensive and difficult writing something down was. So it is written, is this big statement. Right. It's like a literary monument. And you still find this in oral cultures to this day. In oral cultures, you can have two people, two storytellers from that culture tell the same story, and their tellings of it can be radically different. One could be an hour long and one could be 20 minutes long. And yet if you ask one of the storytellers who listened to the other, did they tell it correctly, they say yes, even though it was totally different than their own telling. But in those same cultures, once a version of that story gets written down.

Then correct becomes conforming to the written text.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then any telling that doesn't conform to that or any ritual enactment that doesn't follow the text once it's written down is now wrong, is now incorrect. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Look at. Do it by the book, essentially. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so this is. This is a way of. Of establishing something like that permanently. Of reducing variation. Right. And of Locking in a true version. And, and this is why this is part of. We've talked about before several times on the show how a number of the narratives and non narratives, poetry in the Psalms, elements in the Old Testament especially, will take elements of ancient Near Eastern religion in other cultures and invert them or change them or correct them. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Here's the true version of what happened with Baal's insurrection against the Most High.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Here's right. And the, the Old Testament doing that is not like a weird thing. Right. The fact that it's written down already carries with it culturally this idea of this is now going to be the correct version.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And I think that's a really important point about the way actually the whole Bible in a lot of ways functions. It's not, it's not that it was written down to create a whole system of religious belief and structures and rituals and so forth, but rather that it came about within an existing social reality. And you know, it doesn't come out of nowhere. Right. It's not a founding document, it's not a constitution. Right. Although, I mean, if you think about the US Constitution, it is very self consciously a response to other kinds of government. Right. So it's a response. The scripture, one of the ways to look at it is that it's a response to other things that are already happening on the ground. And it's an attempt to, to correct that, to fix it, to create new norms or to, you know, to create, to set norms for a particular group of people.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. And, and we've lost that sense of something written as a monument because now, you know, I could go and self publish something on the Internet, you know, and.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If millions of people cared, they could all read it tomorrow. So the printed word has gotten kind of cheap. It wasn't cheap in the ancient world.

So this also means that we see this throughout ancient Near Eastern and even into late antiquity to a certain extent.

In paganism, where you have a class of priests whose job is essentially to be able to read.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. To read the stories as part of these ritual experiences that people have.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. They're supposed to maintain the documents, copy the documents, be able to read the documents, know how to perform the rituals. Right. So this starts out as just knowledge that's handed down orally, but then once it goes into written form, then you get lector priests in Egypt. You get, you know, the priests who are in charge of the Sibylline books in Rome. Right. Where their job is to be able to consult the books to consult.

The things written, to know how to do these things. But again, it's not about, you know, here's a set of truths that are to be believed. It's not about even here's like some hidden knowledge about the universe. Right. And salvation. It's that, that here's the correct procedure. Right. Here's the correct way to do this, way to tell the story, the correct way to do the ritual. Right. The correct.

Application of these things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And the sibling books are a really good example of that because that's literally what it was. They would go, something would happen. You know, there's a comet. Oh, that's a bad omen. What do we do? Well, we went and consulted the books, and the books said we should bury three slaves alive. This is an actual example that happened.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so they go and they do that. They're like, well, okay, right. So it was this very procedural kind of thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Notice it's never bury three senators alive.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No.

And if it was, they probably would have, you know, named a slave as a senator and then buried him alive.

Or a horse, if we're Caligula, you know.

So. And we're this horse. We're not used to. Now thinking of the Torah this way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Sure.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But if you read the Torah for itself and you read it in that ancient context, the Torah really is sort of the same thing. Right. And there's countless examples of this, but sort of exhibit A of this is Passover, Right. Where you have. It's even given for. Right. It's laid out first. Here's how you are to celebrate the Passover in Exodus, and it gives all of the ritual instructions for celebrating the Passover every year. This is to be your first of months. So it even starts constructing a ritual calendar. Right. All of that information comes first, and then the actual event of the Passover happens afterwards.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. That's why, you know, the, the Bible doesn't make a really good screenplay kind of as written. You're like, wait, let's take a moment here. Like, yes, yes, certainly there's death instruction about to come. But we're going to first describe this ritual to you and how you're going to do it for the future. Because it's not a play by play of what happened. It's. It's a text within a ritual context. So of course, those ritual instructions are there and our primary.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You're going to do these ritual acts and then you're going to tell the story to your family and you're going to Participate in the story in this way. Oh, by the way, here's the story right after the fact. Right. And we've mentioned before on the show, I know that you see that same pattern with Christ's mystical supper, that the Eucharist is actually instituted ritually before Christ dies and rises again.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Do this as my remembrance. This is my, you know, this is my body, my blood, which again, if you just take it as a sort of screenplay, doesn't make much sense. Like, you're not dead. Lord. What are you talking about?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know, body has not been broken yet. Your blood has not been shed yet.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right. Even though he puts it in the present tense, you know? Right. Or past tense, really. This is my body broken. This is my bloodshed.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, but this is true over and over again in the Torah. Right. So this is even true. I mean, chapter one, in the beginning of chapter two, right. Creation is put into this seven day structure. And the story of the creation of the world culminates with, therefore the Sabbath day, the seventh day of the week is holy and you don't do any work.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. And Sabbath is not just a name for the day of the week. It's. It's a specific set of practices that you engage in.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And that's there explicitly.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So if you take that at face value, it's not saying like, here's what you have to believe precisely in terms of the exact order of events when God created the world. Right. It's saying the thrust of it is, therefore you should rest on the seventh day of the week as a way of participating in God's enthronement over his creation and his rule.

And, you know, there's the actual event of the giving of the covenant at Sinai and Pentecost, the annual observance.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that even these narrative portions. Right. Are directly connected then to the ritual, the ritual which involves the telling of the story, the participation in the story.

And of course, you know, like I said, there's countless examples. It's not just the Torah. Right. The book of Esther is all aimed at the celebration of Purim, arguably, First Maccabees is all aimed at the feast of lights at Hanukkah. Right.

So that's sort of one type. So that, that's sort of parallel to the way that like the Enuma Elish functioned, that there was this ritual, this annual ritual. There was a regular ritual observance in which this story was enacted and participated in more like the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the actual rites, instructions you get A book like Leviticus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Which is clearly a liturgical book that's mostly about. This is how you do these rituals.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And that's brought out by the title.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The Greek title. Leviticus is literally the Levitical thing, the Levites thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, the stuff that. The Book of the Levites.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. The thing here being a book. But yeah, now that's not the Hebrew title. The.

Hebrew title is Vahikre, but that's one of those titles that's sort of like the things we don't translate in our orthodox liturgical books. Right. Like the Kathismata. Right. Because that sounds fancy. The things you can sit during.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It just means the city, so leave it there. Like. Like Vahi Kray. That sounds really interesting. That means. And he called. It's just the first word of the Book of Leviticus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. I think that's true of all the Torah books. Right. The Hebrew names are just the first word that you see on the scroll.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. But so the Greek name tells you, like, the actual context, like, what this is. Right. And what it is, what the Book of Leviticus is, is a manual for priests, basically.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And some of that's obvious. So a big chunk of Leviticus is this detailed stuff of. Here's how you divvy up the entrails of this type of sacrifice. Here are the things that you offer for this. That type of sacrifice.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And a lot of it feast super repetitive. Here's what you do with the fatty lobe that is next to the liver. Like that kind of detail, you know? Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. That very much reads like a priest manual. That reads like rubrics, like instructions.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Now, there's other parts of it that don't necessarily read that way to us, especially since we're used to having this in our modern English called the law.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So there's a lot of it, like in the holiness code that runs from Leviticus 17 to somewhere around 23 or 24, depending on who you ask.

Where it looks to us like it's just a bunch of, like, moral rules. Right. Like Leviticus 18 is all rules about sexual morality and immorality.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so that seems to us to be less directed towards a priest. Right. We think, well, no, that's like, so people could read it and know what they should and shouldn't do morally. Right. So the problem with that is nobody could read.

And they didn't have access to the texts even if they could. Right. Because there were so few copies and they were treasured and the priests had possession of them. So the way people had access to what was in those texts was through the priests.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They would come and participate in the rituals and in the feasts and in the sacrifices and when they came and participated. Right. So this would be sort of mediated to them through the text and through the priest. Right. That's how they found out about it. So those commandments were not. And they were not just in there for the priests to sort of advise people. Right. Though obviously.

It should be obvious that hopefully priests were doing that. Though we know from reading the Old Testament that that was not necessarily the case. Most of the time they should have been teaching people what to avoid and what not to do. But for the most part, those sins are in there because the priest has to know what to do about them when they happen. Because remember the priest's job, the job that this is a manual for. Right. The priests there in, whether it's in the camp, in the wilderness, whether it's in the temple later in Judah, their job is to maintain purity through. Through the sacrificial system, to manage the sin in the camp or in the nation so that God can safely remain living among them. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So it's not just a list of, like, here's things you're supposed to do and not do. It's okay, this bad thing happened. So here's what we do about that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Here's how we restore justice. Here's how we. What the sacrifices we need to offer. Here's the kind of repentance that needs to be seen. If there's not repentance, here's what you have to do in terms of stoning.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Somebody and even, like the narrative bits of Leviticus. I mean, probably in my mind, the classic example being the institution of the Day of Atonement ritual is given in response to one of the narrative parts of Leviticus in which Nadab and Abihu really mess up and God kills them. You know, fire comes out from the Lord and kills them there in the tabernacle. So that's given. And this is why we do the Day of Atonement stuff in response to that so that that kind of thing doesn't happen again.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, we don't want that to recur.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Like, there's a little sign with a number. They hang up so many days since death by holiness.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We want to get that number high. We want to keep it rolling.

Yeah. And so therefore, you know, those parts are also sort of a priest manual, but they're a priest manual for managing Right. The sins of the people and dealing with that, because that's sort of part of their job.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And we of course have sort of direct parallels to that in manuals of confession in the Orthodox Church, Right. Where these aren't like commandments. Right. You don't handle one of these manuals of confession. You shouldn't. If you're, if you are a layperson in the Orthodox Church, do not buy or read a Byzantine manual of confession. It is not for you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That is a. Yeah, that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's like spiritual WebMD, man.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You will excommunicate yourself.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, we're not forbidding people from reading books, just saying, like, look, you don't need that book. That is not.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's not for. I mean, it's not, it's not supposed to be applied by layman to themselves.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You're not going to have a good time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, that's what I'm saying.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You're not going to have a good time. It seems like fun and games, but it's not. It's like WebMD convinces everyone they have cancer and they're going to die. Right. So this is the same kind of thing, but spiritually. So don't read it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But the purpose of that is for especially someone who's new to hearing confessions from people to give advice on. Here's how to counsel someone dealing with this or that or the other.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And here are the more serious forms of this. And here are the less serious forms of this. Not that you disregard them, but you have to be more strict with the more severe ones with someone who's committing those than with someone who's committed the less severe forms. So it's practical advice for priests who are hearing confessions. It's not for someone to sit and try and hear their own confession. Just like WebMD, right? You go to your doctor, let your doctor diagnose you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that's the idea there. So.

Again, that's not used to how we're thinking about the Torah functioning, but that is really how it functioned and how it was received by people in the ancient near east who are used to text functioning that way within communities.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well. And it continues on. Right. I mean, we're going to kind of make our way chronologically down as we so often do. But like something that's much more recent.

If you pick up the, like the Liturgicon that is published by the Antioch in Archdiocese that you and I serve in, right up at the front is the list of commandments of Saint Basil the Great to priests. Now, the book is mostly a book of how to do vespers and orthros and the Divine Liturgy and all these services. Right. You know, as they say, you know, say the black, do the red. Right. Because the spoken parts are in black ink and the actions are in red ink, which is where the word rubric comes from. It has to do with red.

But you've got.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

From a script people, but you've got them. It's not improv.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, sorry.

Actually, the rubric bit being about red is improv. No. Oh, sorry. Very meta there.

But there's these commandments from St. Basil, for instance. One of them is never stand at the synaxes. That's the, you know, gathering together for the church service. Never stand at the synaxes having hatred toward anyone so as not to banish the comforter. And so this is a commandment to priests, like, don't go to, you know, don't serve angry, basically, because that's bad for. For this. So it's, it's a, it's a. It comes off as a moral commandment, but it's a moral commandment in service to ritual. Right. So this is, you know, this is, this is. Even till today, we, we have the same kind of use of texts.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, Right. And as we, as we switch into or move into Deuteronomy. So Deuteronomy, there's this shift because Deuteronomy is presented here. This is Moses giving his sort of final instructions to Israel before they enter the land. And so as things are repeated here, as the name Deuteronomy implies.

There'S a little bit of a shift in that. Now this is aimed at. Here's how we're going to implement these things.

Now that we're not in a camp in the wilderness anymore.

Now we're going to be in the land. Right. So people have fits. And by people, I mean Old Testament scholars who are still people. Even the 19th century German ones.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Old Testament scholars are people too.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

That. That the instructions are different in Leviticus than they are in Deuteronomy.

For Passover or exodus of Deuteronomy for Passover. Right. It's like. Yeah, because one's out in the desert.

One is in a city.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Liturgical change adapting to the particular needs of the context. Yeah, it's okay, everybody.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But so one major element is the. That in the same way that we see these things functioning with the priesthood, Right. Like in Leviticus, we start to see in Deuteronomy more talk of the elders the presbyters of the people. Right. Because as we talked about back in the priesthood episode, these get separated, right? Priesthood and sort of elderhood that the. I don't want to use civil and religious because that's categories. Right. But those two things get separated. The king and the high priest are two different people, Right. Moses and Aaron and the Levites and the elders of the people. We talked about this in the priesthood episode. So they're still separate, but so the elders and then the king get talked about in these same terms by Deuteronomy, where as it's presented in Deuteronomy, this is the Torah as sort of a tool or instrument.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The king is to make a copy of the Torah and study it for them to use to guide the people, to establish justice, to deal with disputes, to deal with sins when they happen, and reconciliation and repentance. Right. And so very practical.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Not just a theoretical. Here's some things we believe and have to agree with. This is what needs to be done.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That word law again, that we've gotten hammered with. Right? Thanks a lot. St. Jerome. No, I actually have his icon here. So I actually like St. Jerome. But.

Because, you know, you don't have a lion as a pet, you're not as cool as him.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It is true. I do not have a lion as a pet.

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We're used to looking at the Torah as if it's a law code. Right. And you'll even see this.

In some of these intro to the Old Testament books where they go, oh, well, this is the law. This is the Jewish law. We're going to compare it to Hammurabi's code.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Hammurabi, our Amorite friend.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And he was a giant. I just really. He's an emirate, so he's one of those clan.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, yeah. And he had this great affection for sandals imported from Crete.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. I remember that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Greek sandals.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He's a little bit of a clothes horse.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I never made. I never made that connection that he was an Amorite. That's Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. He's one of the Amuru.

So. But. But a law code functions differently, right? And this is even this, shall we say, misunderstanding is even built into some theological systems, right? Where the Torah gets turned into law and God is the king and he gives this law that must be obeyed or he will punish.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And in actuality, right. This, this use of the text and this function of the text that we've been describing that's apparent in the Torah is not really a law code. It's actually more like what's sometimes called an English household law.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And they call it household law because it's.

They're working off of the Greek term economia. Right. Which economics means something else in English.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, literally, if you're going to translate that word, it's sort of the law of the house.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well. Or the customs of the house, the.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Way household management is.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is how we do things in this household. Right. And this is how we resolve disputes, and this is how it is governed.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

As long as you live under my roof.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And. And so if we. And if we don't understand that there's big chunks of St. Paul's epistles that we're going to radically misinterpret because he uses this concept of the household of God. Right. Over and over again. And he especially uses it when he's talking about, like, the presbyters.

In the church and what they do and the episcopy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The.

Bishops.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

As we would say. Right. The leadership in the church that they are managers of the household of God. Right. He's directly appealing to this language. And we hear that in English. And because we're so used to law. Right. This law code thinking, we think that's something other than and different from what was going on in the Torah. Right. When really what St. Paul is saying is thoroughly consistent. He's saying that the presbyters of the New Covenant in the church have pretty much the same job as the presbyters, the elders of the people in the Old Covenant.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That they also were really managing that household.

So we talked just now about sort of priests and how sort of the Torah worked in terms of them as an instrument. And we talked about the king and the elders of the people. So there's somebody from a couple weeks ago who we haven't talked about yet.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. How about the prophets? I mean, where do they fit into all of this? I mean, they're not walking around with text in their hands and applying them to people, are they?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. So we don't see, like, Saint Elias, you know, the prophet Elijah going in, you know, in front of King Ahab and unrolling a Torah scroll and, like, reading him the section about what is to be done with false prophets. Right, right. Like, that's. That's not what we see.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We don't even see, like, I mean, Ezekiel was from a priestly family and, you know, therefore, presumably can read it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We don't even see him doing that. We see him wandering around naked and Stuff, Right. We see these prophetic, kind of bizarre, prophetic actions, having visions. Right. And, and so.

They'Re not using the Torah instrumentally, at least we don't see them doing that in the same way that priest and king, or priest and presbyter. Right. Do.

In the Old Testament.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So they're not really quoting it usually even, are they?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. No. Now what they're saying is consonant with it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? Right. It's consistent.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. But they're not showing up and quoting it right now. Our 19th century German friends would say that's because it hasn't been written yet. But we're not going to get into all that right now.

But they don't.

The idea here.

Is related to where the Torah came from.

And what it is. Moses goes to the top of Mount Sinai and as we've talked about before, enters into the divine council, right. The law is given through angels, Right. He speaks to God face to face. We've talked about how this is Christ, right? And so he has this direct experience and direct encounter with God, as we talked about in the last episode about prophets.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then he brings the Torah, which means teaching in Hebrew. He brings this teaching. And the teaching, therefore serves as this sort of mediation of Moses experience for the people. Because remember, the people are terrified when they see that God is on the mountain. They're not going to go near it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

When they see Moses face is all shining, they're like, cover up Moses. It's really a traumatic thing for them. They're not interested in that direct encounter with God.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so the Torah comes in this mediatorial role.

Between this direct experience which they can't handle. And this is not just some kind of psychological weakness, Right. Death by holiness is a real thing.

This is something they can't abide because they haven't been purified for it.

And therefore there is this teaching that functions mediatorially. This is, by the way, why when we read in Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Joel about the coming of the Holy Spirit in the new Covenant, this is why we get this element of you will not have. A man will not have to teach his brother to do this and not to do that, because the law will be written on their heart.

Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So direct experience that they will also be having now.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so.

Once a person has been purified by the blood of Christ, they are able to experience God directly. That takes the form of the filling of the Holy Spirit. And so now they don't need the Torah in this instrumental role anymore.

That doesn't mean that the Torah is like, no longer valid because the Torah is still the description of that experience.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So nobody who has this direct experience with God is going to be a lawbreaker, or if they are, they're going to end up like Ananias and Sapphira.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? That's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So that. That's still real, but that's why that mediation is no longer necessary, because now we can all. We can all approach.

But so for that same reason, the prophets in the Old Testament didn't need the Torah in that mediatorial or instrumental role.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, they didn't need it. It was not secondhand. I mean, secondhand sounds negative, but I mean, it was direct for them. So they're like, yeah, I don't need you to tell me what God said because I know him.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so they could. So Saint Elias, prophet Elijah can come to Ahab and because of his direct encounters with God, he could come to Ahab and denounce his wickedness and pronounce the judgment of God against him without needing to cite or proof text.

Because he knows who God is. The core is. This is Christ.

But the important element to carry forward. Right. Is that even when the Torah is serving this instrumental role, the authority is never in the text itself.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Because if it were, then.

Prophets having direct experiences would not, you know, sort of trump. It's not trump. But they would have to be citing the Bible. Right. They could not simply say, look, thus saith the Lord, because he said this to me. It would always have to make some reference to the text, because if that's where the authority is, but rather the text points to an experience. And if you're having that experience, then you're also accessing the actual authority, which is God himself.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so this is.

God himself maintains the authority. Christ maintains the authority. Right. The text is mediation to allow a person to draw close and have the direct experience of God in Christ. And this is. When we talk about the formation of Rabbinic Judaism.

What makes it very different than the religion of ancient Israel and of Second Temple Judaism? This is the big shift. The authority goes to the text itself. So you no longer have a succession of prophets, you have a succession of scribes.

Who read and interpret and apply the text. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And.

I don't want to be mean to our Protestant friends.

But honestly, a lot of forms of Protestantism are following that model.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Show me where it is in the Bible.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Of going to be biblical scribes reading.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And interpret the text, which, I mean, we should say by no Means, are we suggesting a kind of denigration of the scripture? I mean.

We'Ve been talking about this stuff for almost two years now and mainly talking about the Bible. So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, clearly I don't care about the Bible or think it's important.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I will show you my student loan balance, sir.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Could have had a house anyway.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. But it's. But we're talking about a different mode of how it's. How it's received and used and talked about and that sort of thing. Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That it is the text of scripture points to someone greater than itself.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And that is Christ. And so the authority is never in the text itself. It's always Christ who is mediated through the text.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And Christ is not mediated through every text.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So this is why it's not denigrating the scriptures. Christ is not mediated through Moby Dick.

Right. He's not even through Wuthering Heights.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Not even when Patrick Stewart recites passages from it. I mean, for some people.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Recites passages from it.

Now if William Shatner or when Ricardo Montalban recites passages from it, then we're talking.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The, the.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you know, Wuthering Heights, pick your. Pick your text. Right. The experience of. The direct experience of God in Christ is not mediated through any of those. Any of those texts.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And.

Again, I don't want to be mean, but this is one of my problems with those the Gospel According to Fill in the pop culture thing here. Books.

Right. This is how old I am. I remember the Gospel According to the Simpsons.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, I remember that back in the day.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

They were all.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There were a bunch of those back in the 90s. Gospel according to the X Files. Gospel. Gospel According to, you know, I know, Star Trek, the Next Generation. Right.

None of those, none of those pop culture properties. They're all fine to enjoy as entertainment, but they do not mediate Christ to people the way scriptures do.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

They're not preaching.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And to be fair, most of the people, at least who write those books, some of them are probably writing it as a crass cash in. But I think most of the good people who write those books aren't intending to put them in parallel with the scriptures.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. No, but.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But it almost conveys that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The idea that you could just sort of get the gospel anywhere. Right. Just mediated through trees. Right. It's mediated through Marvel movies. It's.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And that does serve to lower the level of scripture because, you know, guess what? There's a lot of people who find that pop culture stuff more entertaining than reading the Bible.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, that's because it's entertainment and you.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Kind of give them an excuse. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, no.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

See, this is good. This has good Christian moral lessons in it. And yeah, if you're a kid and you're trying to get your parents to let you watch stuff. Okay. Game. Recognized game. But.

That'S not the highest mode of discourse, shall we say.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right, exactly. So, yeah. So, okay, well, all of that in hand. I mean, at some point this stuff starts getting written down.

So. Yeah, like when, when exactly does that occur? Because it's clear that, like, it's clear that you have a. The community of Israel exists before these texts exist. Right. So, you know, so at some point it gets written down. How does. Where is that all coming from?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And you know, this writing starts at a certain point in human history. Right, Right. Which, regardless of how old, and again, not interested in discussing it, how old do you think the earth is? It's still a long time passes before any of this starts getting written down.

So.

Obviously the first thing traditionally that starts getting written down is the Torah. Right, right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The five books of Moses.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. The Pentateuch. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Again, we're going to have to have a talk here. People.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Gather around children.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I know people have been taught the traditional shorthand, and it is a traditional shorthand that Moses wrote the Torah. Right. Or Moses wrote the Pentateuch.

But we have to take a little more nuanced. Right. When we look at reality, we have to take a little more nuanced. So, for example, the earliest form of the Torah we have available to us, which is the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Is written in a language, in an Alphabet, in a language that didn't exist when. When Moses left.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It didn't exist in his era.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And, you know, and even if I can imagine, there's probably someone out there that would say, you know, yes, it did. That's just what academics say. But there's internal indications about this, too. Like a good example, for instance, is that the Torah includes the death and then the funeral of Moses.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Unless you could pull out the. Well, he prophesied. He's a prophet. He prophesied his own death.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. But it's not presented that way. It doesn't. And this is the manner in which I will die, and this is the manner in which I will be buried. You know, it's not right. It's just.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is not to deny that Moses engaged in scribal activity. There are portions of the Torah.

Specifically thinking of Exodus 15 and the song of the sea and Deuteronomy 32.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That in their current form go back to.

The Mosaic era. Right. Meaning they haven't been updated really.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's why they're so hard to read and translate.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Because these are the only samples we have of that sort of Paleo Hebrew.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And it's transliterated, but not really translated. And you get. There are Parts of Deuteronomy 32 where if you compare English translations, they are wildly different.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Because even the best scholars are looking at it and kind of going, well, I think that's what this is. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So there. There is. So it is more appropriate in terms of being accurate to reality to talk about the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That the first layer of what becomes the Pentateuch as we have it now. Right. That's where that Ur layer is.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then over time, that gets translated, it gets edited. It gets, you know, moved into a different Alphabet. Right. It gets translated into Greek.

And a Greek translation that is no less authoritative. Right. Than the Hebrew.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And sometimes you can actually see by looking at the text, not just stuff like Moses, death and funeral, but you can see the editing process become apparent in the text. Right. There's stuff that's anachronistic.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, Right. Like, you know, the story that we read at vespers in the Orthodox church before most of the feast days of the Holy Fathers, about Abram going and rescuing his nephew Lot.

In the original War of the Five Kings.

The Battle of the. It says that Abram.

Abram pursues them as far as Dan. Right. Well, that city was not called Dan in Abram's time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Because Dan is the name of one of the 12 tribes of Israel.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And it wasn't even called Dan when Moses lived. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We find out how it gets the name Dan at the end of the book of Joshua, when the tribe of Dan goes and conquers it, even though they weren't supposed to, and renames it before that it was called Laish. Right. So somebody.

Through the centuries came and updated that place name because they were like, nobody knows where Laish was anymore. We've been calling it Dan for a while now. So let's just update that for Dan so people will know where we're talking about when we tell the story. Right. So in the same way that, like, if you look at. If you. If you read a story about pre Columbian American history. Right. As I know everyone here does, everyone listening, but they'll say, you know, these. This tribe traveled up the Missouri river and settled near St. Louis. Right. They're not implying that the tribe called it the Missouri river and that St. Louis was there. It was like a Native American city.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's the modern. Right. They're just saying this is the modern location that we all know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. But if they use the native names for those places, then all of us modern people reading it would be like, where.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, they'd have no idea. Like, you know, for instance, if you were to translate Julius Caesar's Gallic wars, and to make this kind of reference, you would begin with, you know, all of France is divided into four parts, whatever it is. Three, rather than all Gaul. Sorry. Yeah, three.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I should.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I've read enough Asterix and Obelix comics that I should remember that. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, just remember what Aristotle told us. Everything that comes in threes is perfect.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Are you saying Francis.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, no, it didn't come in three. It was split in three.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's true.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He was trying to perfect it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We love you French listeners, though.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We do.

But so. And there's places where. That's even more transparent, where it'll give a name of a place and then say. Which used to be called something else.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And there are places in the Torah that say something that says until this very day.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So if Moses is writing this, like, a year and a half after it happened until this very day doesn't make, you know.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Not that big of a deal.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. This stone that we set up last week is still there to this very day.

Right. So that. That implies that. That's like an editorial note. Right. From later. Right. Where they're copying it and. And they're like, oh, yeah, that stone's still there to this very day. Right. So they noted it. You know, hey, reader, you could go and see this stone from this story I just told you.

Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The question, when was the Torah written? The answer is several centuries.

Right. Starting somewhere in the mid second millennium B.C. and again, I'm not gonna argue about the date of the Exodus.

And then going through until after the exile when, you know, sometime around the time of Ezra, it probably received its current form. The Hebrew received pretty much its current form. Right. And then, of course, the Greek translation was made after that. Other translations were made after that.

And.

There are. When we take a look at the other books of the Old Testament, Right. We see similar things. Right. These aren't books that someone sat down one day, wrote in toto, and they definitely aren't books that were written like as the things were happening.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The book of Joshua is not his journal.

Right. Like from during the conquest.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Today we marched around Jericho. Dear Diary.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. That's not how any of this works.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But you especially see this in some of the books because of the themes. Right? So Judges and Ruth originally circulated on the same scroll. Right. And the book of Judges, when you read it closely and you're looking for the ark, right, the ark of the book. What the arc of the book is, is you have this repeated refrain in that those days, there was no king.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There was no king in Israel.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Everyone did what was right in their own eyes. Right. It's about the. The tribes descending into chaos. Right. The last four chapters that nobody reads, there's this huge civil war between the tribes where they're killing each other.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so it's saying, this is why we need a king, to stop stuff like this from happening. And then if you read those last four chapters closely again, right. Suspiciously, the tribe of Benjamin are the bad guys and Judah are the good guys. What I mean by good guys and bad guys? Well, as we've said before, this isn't doing modern history. This isn't trying to be objective.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. It's like, here's a list of complaints of this tribe over against the other tribe. And really the blame was shared by everybody. There's none of that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? No, Both sides thing going on there.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Here are the many factors that led to this civil war, economic and otherwise. Right. So it's giving a clear perspective, right. Benjamin being Saul's tribe, Judah being David's tribe. Right. And then on the scroll is appended this story about David's great grandma.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, Ruth.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's what the scroll ends with. Right. So it's very clear what's going on here in Judges and Ruth. It's talking about the importance of the Davidic monarchy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

This is how we got to the point that we needed a king and how, like, let's support the kingship because we don't want things to be like that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

David's kingship is the right one, Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Not Saul's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And you know, we also hold that the Davidic monarchy is very important, of course, because it produces the Messiah, Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Produces Christ.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

As we have said many times before.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And. And we see the same thing when you look at what are in the Greek, the four books of kingdoms. What are first and Second Samuel, first and Second Kings. Kings. Right. In other translations. You see, this is one overarching narrative explaining from the perspective of the exile, how Israel ended up getting destroyed and Judah ended up being taken into exile. And why.

So things start out good with the Davidic monarchy, and then they go very bad. Right. And they follow what was basically prophesied in Deuteronomy through Moses. Yeah. Once you get into the land, this is what's going to happen and you're going to end up in exile. So it's showing that unfold.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right. It's not just a historical. It's not a chronicle. There are chronicles. Right. The books of chronicles. But it's not just a chronicle saying this happened and then this happened and this happened. There is, like you said, an arc to it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And they keep referring you to the annals. Right. As for everything else, this king did consult the annals, is it not written.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

In the chronicles of the books of the King of Judah? I know, that's over and over again in those books. Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you've got that. If you want to go read the official record.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We're here making a point.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So not that those official records were objective either. Those were from the king's point of view. So.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But so then, you know, that's. That's two. Two of our parts of. Of the Old Testament, the other part being the writings. And the writings is just this giant catch. All right. The writings is sort of like all the other stuff that's in the Old Testament. So you have things from like Ezra and Nehemiah that are.

From right after the. The return from exile all the way up to.

The Book of Wisdom. This is going to make people mad, too. The church fathers were fully aware that the Book of Wisdom was not written by Solomon.

Even though it's sometimes called the Wisdom of Solomon.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Because aren't the earliest sort of references to it as being canonical? Don't they include it in the New Testament?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. The earliest references we have to it being included in the canon have it as part of the New Testament because they knew it was written in Greek and they knew it was written in the first century A.D. it was probably written in the early 30s of the.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

First century A.D. it's the, you know, if we're going to be modern about it, it's the wisdom inspired by Solomon.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right, right, right. Sort of all the wisdom literature gets associated with Solomon.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Yeah. Because he's so.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because I know there's people out there who, if I said was Proverbs written by Solomon, you. You probably off the cuff really quickly say yes. And then I'd go through and show you like oh, really? Because this chapter says it's the wisdom of this other guy. Right. But we still ascribe Proverbs to Solomon, just like the Psalms get ascribed to David. Even though, again, the Psalms don't say they're all written by David. Some of them say they're written by other people. Right. Like the sons of Korah or the sons of Asaph or Moses.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Or other people.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So. Yeah, so that. That I think is pretty clearly the latest one. That's the only one that was written AD.

Of the Old Testament books, arguably the only one that was originally written in Greek.

There's argument about some of the books of the Maccabees depending on. We're including. Right. Like four was probably written in Greek, but then, you know, I'm not Russian, so.

But you get the point. Right. So those are written over this vast. This vast swath of time. So there's not these sort of.

In all of these discussions, people tend to take what they know about the New Testament and then generalize it and just act like it's true of the Old Testament, but it really isn't.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We can narrow down New Testament books.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right. Most of them we. There is a clear author that there's every good reason actually to believe that it came pretty directly from that author. And especially because the New Testament books, their writing and then they're. I mean, we'll get to this. Right. But their writing in their collection happens really fast by. Compared to the Old Testament.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, where the Old Testament, you're talking about centuries upon centuries. The New Testament, it's pretty much wrapped up almost in a bow within about 70 or 80 or so years.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right, right. And we can nail down pretty. I mean.

We'Re pretty sure Galatians was written about 45. We're pretty sure.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We can nail down pretty solid dates. Like, you can't do that with the Old Testament books.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And a lot of it is. I mean, some of it, of course, is because there's indications within the texts that point to things that we have other corroborating evidence for his persistent particular historical events or where someone was at a particular time, you know, and so. And that's just because records from that period are much, much better. You know, we have a lot more to work with than. Than, you know, if you're looking at 1500 years of. Of ancient Near Eastern history.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, and there's less. There's less process.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So we don't end up.

Five centuries after Jeremiah lived with two.

Pretty Radically different versions of the book of Jeremiah. Right. We have that for Jeremiah, but we don't have that with any of the New Testament books.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. It's pretty much the same text, just about.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Almost every copy.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, There's a couple of exceptions like Luke and Acts, but even those you're talking about, the biggest difference we have is about 10%.

We don't have radically different versions of books or the different versions we have of the book of Daniel or the different versions we have of the book of Esther.

So what happens is that the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, which are technically different things.

Just sort of emerge out of ancient history and they emerge from a process.

They aren't a series of books that are written down by different people at these specific points in time and then all get wrapped up together, together in a book.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And notably the church fathers don't ever treat them that way.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, they knew all this stuff.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Because that's how religious texts worked. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, you know, and.

So we talked in the episode about how to, and how not to read the Bible about the whole modernist fundamentalist controversy and all of these things. And we have folks who are now, especially in sort of the Anglophone, English speaking Orthodox world who come from those backgrounds. Right. And so there's still a little bit of that reactionary idea. And so there's some people who seem to feel like they need to like be more conservative than the church fathers. Right. So you get people wanting to argue against all reality that, you know, Moses wrote every word of the Torah as we have it today.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And like, if you actually read what the church fathers say about it, like a good portion of them, a good portion of them, because they had read for Ezra, they'd read the Epistle of Barnabas, they read other texts, right. That contained this tradition. A good portion of them thought that ancient Israel lost the Torah and that Ezra miraculously recreated it.

So that it comes from Ezra and they'll make offhand comments about it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

St. Jerome does that at one point, which we're not. Now, don't get us wrong, we're not saying that that is how it happened, but we are pointing out that some of the fathers say that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. And so they didn't have to sit there and say, no, every word of the Torah as we have it now in Greek or Latin. Right. But. Or even as the Hebrew that was floating around at the time. Right. Because there were people in the ancient church who could read Hebrew. St. Jerome was one of them. Maybe not so well, but he could.

And they don't feel the need to say that. Right. St. Jerome literally says, whether you think what we have is what Moses wrote or whether you think Ezra restored it, this is what it says.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. This is our text. So, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So then the. He said that in reference to. Let me make this very pointed. He said that in reference to the phrase until this very day.

As it appears in the Torah. So he was saying that it was a common opinion at the time that until this very day was Ezra's editorial comment.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Huh. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And meant until the day of Ezra.

So he was saying this could be until the day of Moses. This could be until the day of Ezra.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So. So this kind of raises the question then. I mean, do we know who wrote any of the Old Testament? Who actually was the person who wrote it down? I mean, do we know that a.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Particular word that we have now. No.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No. I mean, there's some cases where we have no idea.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We have no idea who wrote first through fourth kingdoms.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Because, you know, again, if you say that the prophet Samuel wrote the first two of those books, you have to deal with the fact that he dies in the first one.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, yeah. And if.

Good listener, if anyone comes to you and says, traditionally.

Samuel wrote first and second Samuel, I want you to respond to them. By traditionally, you mean the Talmud, because that's where it comes from.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Which is not orthodox Christian tradition.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And that makes sense because everybody reading it in Greek, it wasn't called Samuel.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Those are the kingdoms for the first and second kingdoms.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But. So we have no idea. We have no idea who wrote first and second Chronicles. We don't have a hint. Right. Moses, as we said, is the origin of the Torah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But especially if you get outside of Exodus 15 and Deuteronomy 32.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Is this the exact word that Moses would have written? Well, no, it's not the exact word because it's in a different language. Right. At very least, it would have been spelled differently.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And written in a different Alphabet. Right. But here's the thing. It doesn't matter.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It does. It literally does not matter. It has no bearing on the authority of the Bible in the church who wrote it and when, because it has been all.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

How this works.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. It could have all been written by me last week.

Wouldn't make a lick of difference, which.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, would be consistent with how much you sleep. So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, fair enough.

So. And we'll explain why in our second half.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, exactly. All right, well, all of that said, we're going to take a little bit break and we'll be right back.

[Narrator]

Father Andrew Steven Damick and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Are you curious about the Orthodox Christian faith?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Do you have questions about Orthodox Christianity that you can't trust strangers in Internet forums to answer?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Are you an Orthodox Christian looking for a reliable first place to send your interested friends?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Do you need help finding an Orthodox church near you? My name is Father Paul Hodge. I serve in the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. My name is Father Joseph Lucas. I serve in the Orthodox Church in America.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

My name is Father Anthony Cook. I serve in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And I'm Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, chief content officer of Ancient Faith Ministries and a priest of the Antiochian Archdiocese. And we're the Orthodox Intro team.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If you're looking for a first stop online to get an introduction to the Orthodox faith, a place to get answers.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

To questions from qualified Orthodox Christian clergy, a place to send your friends and.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Not just toss them into the chaos of the Internet, a place to get.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Help finding an Orthodox parish and get plugged into an actual Orthodox community, then point your web browser@ orthodoxyintro.org Orthodoxintro.org is a free service of Ancient Faith Ministries and made possible by our donors. It's an Orthodox on ramp to the Christian life. Again, that's orthodoxintro.org.

Foreign.

[Narrator]

We're back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Welcome back, everybody. Like I said, we're not actually taking calls tonight, despite what you just heard the voice of Steve say.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But maybe, maybe if they call in right then and they're watching on the stream, right, that will cause like the room where the phone is to slowly fade into view and you'll see like the ringing phone by itself.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Get a whole David lynch thing happening.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say like Twilight Zone sort of thing. Yeah. I mean, it was funny. I remember last time, right, that sort of the streams started out with the camera inside the studio there in Chesterton where there wasn't anybody. Like it was automated over there. It was kind of funny.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Did Father Joseph Lucas give you that background music, by the way? It's very kind of Miami.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, no, I picked that out. No, yeah, I picked that out actually myself. But yes, yes. Yeah, he is there in Miami. They've got alligators and stuff and very good Cuban coffee.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Everything I know about Miami I learned from the Will Smith song. So I don't know a lot about Miami.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Worth going. The food is excellent, among other things. So. Yeah. All right. Well, welcome back. It is the second half we just wrapped up by saying it doesn't matter who wrote the books, particularly of the Old Testament, or when.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Can you do it? Like the Rock? Like the. It doesn't matter what your name is. Can you do that?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, I. You know, although. Although Dwayne the Rock Johnson actually went to high school not too far from where I'm sitting. Did you know that?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's true. In Allentown.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Bethlehem, actually. Bethlehem. I think he went to either. Either Liberty or Freedom High School. You know, the way they name their high schools over there in Bethlehem, it's very confusing, but he went to either one of those two.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

His father, Rocky Johnson, was also a wrestler, as was his grandfather, the High Chief, Peter Maivia.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And I did not know that the.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Whole Allentown area was like a big hub of wrestling back in the. In the. The old circuits. Wow. Regional promotions.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow. That's some thank you for. You know, you have to say. When I say thank you for that, you have to say, what can I say except you're welcome? I don't know if you're up on your modern kids films there, but now.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know, and knowing is half the battle.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go. Bring it back to the 80s.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

All right, well, so I'll give the quick answer to why it doesn't matter.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

People will still stay tuned because we're going to talk about a bunch of other stuff.

The quick answer to why it doesn't matter is. Right. It only matters if you think the text itself has authority. And so then you have to come up with quality qualities of the text that give it authority, like the author or when it was written. So, anyway, we're gonna keep going now.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I should point out, by the way, you know, so they have at least one Star Trek reference. This half the Rock actually appeared on an episode I think it was of. Was it Voyager?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I think it appeared it was Voyager. He battled Seven of Nine in a Tsunkatsi.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. He was sort of a gladiator way out there in the Delta Quadrant.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So they had. They had a sword that was a type of falchion. Nice that was used in Studenkatsu.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Nice, nice.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

All right, so I doubled down on that reference.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's good. No, that's good. He does the eyebrow thing in that too.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know.

Voyager was sort of the flagship show of UPN in the long ago time, children. There was a united Paramount network that was an over the. They used to broadcast television over the air, not through a cable anyway, or through the interwebs. And so Voyager was like the flagship show at the time, WWF Smackdown, also on upn. So they did a lot of cross promotion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Wrestlers on Star Trek have Star Trek person show up at a wrestler.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It was kind of a golden age in some ways.

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Mostly lame. Anyway, it's true.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But they had Voyager, which is why everyone got it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The whole reason I gave that quick answer was I was trying to help out our listeners who hate it when we go on rambling digressions like that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know, I know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I said, here, here's a nugget.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But, but, but it's like, you know, it's like I feel like I need to pop culture even harder, you know, when, when, when, when people are a little impatient about that. But yes. Okay. So we talked about the way that religious texts, especially the scriptures, function in the ancient world and then how they arise and all that kind of stuff.

Let's now move on the other side of the B.C. aD right. And we're going to now start talking about canons. Canons of scripture.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

An idea of a canon.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. An actual list of books. And what does that do? What do you do with that? Right. So what is a canon?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What does it even mean? Yeah. Why does that word come into play here? Right.

So the word canon, to help us define it, we're going to talk about first, a couple of examples not related to scripture.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then we'll come to scripture because then it'll become a little more clear what it means.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So we have this idea, especially the classical education folks of the Western canon.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right. The books you should read as an English major.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. These are the texts that helped shape our culture. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And by that I mean like anglophone culture. The whole Western civilization thing is kind of weird.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like drawing a weird wavy line. It's like that tool in paint. It doesn't make like a circle. It makes like the weird, like blobby shape. Right. Like you kind of have to do that with history to make Western civilization. But.

There'S this idea that once you've made that blobby shape. Right. You then say, well, here are the books that have been said, you know, Plato's Republic, Shakespeare.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The Bible.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

These are the only ones I can think of.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Freud.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Thomas.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, I don't think Freud. I don't know. I don't. I don't think he's in the Western canon.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He is in the great books of the Western world. My friend Mortimer Adler would dare to disagree with you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I. I'm fine with that. So I can live my life without reading Sigmund Freud or telling anyone else to read Sigmund Freud.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Stuff there.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'm sure. I'm sure. Anyway, I'm sure. So the Western literary canon, those kinds of. The great books. Right. Although great books is probably a broader concept, but it's a similar concept.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, I mean, it's really a shortening of Mortimer Adler set, the great books of the Western world. So whether people refer to great Books Program, that's usually actually what they're referring to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, all right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So. But that kind of idea, right? Or we use the term canon in lots of nerd slash geek contexts. Right.

So there's this idea of, you know, Star Trek fans or Star wars fans or Doctor who. Well, Doctor who fans don't argue about it because, I mean, the idea of Doctor who canon is like, laughable on its face, but.

We'Ll argue about what is canonical and what isn't. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And it's interesting in Tolkien studies, mostly, the conversation comes up just to point out that there really is no such thing, that it's a useless category in Tolkien studies.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right? Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's more argued against than even used by anybody in the fandom, honestly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's a bizarre idea because you're essentially arguing about what events are real in an imaginary reality.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And which are unreal even in the imaginary reality.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And the funny thing is, I mean, this is related. I mean, this is not just a nerd geek thing that we're talking about. Right. This is related to religious texts. Because, like, for instance, you know, one of the studies I'm making right now is I'm reading Norse mythic texts, which actually there's not a huge number of them, by the way. The sources themselves is not a large amount of text. Text, but there's variations between them. And, you know, even in as much as these might have been used in Norse religion in some way, we don't know. In most cases, you're going to say that this version is the. This is the true Odin, you know, or whatever. Or what about the fact that Loki seems to be relatively late. I'M sorry, Marvel fans. Loki is a relatively late addition probably to the Norse mythical, you know, source text. Like, there's variation. So how do you say that this is the, you know, this is the canon, the canonical version of, of, you know, the, the. The creation of the world according to Norse mythology. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There is Loki's in Avengers Number one. So clearly that's the canonical.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

True, true.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Can't argue with that. Stanley and Jack Kirby, men.

Right. And so what we mean is.

Texts that are considered in some way authoritative within that community.

Right. Texts that bear some weight.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Even if we're talking about an imaginary reality.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There. There are stories, right. Like Star Trek 5, where Cybok is ridiculous. Right. Where just. We all acknowledge that's not a thing. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I need my pain.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And we ignore it.

Yes. And then there are others that we exult in.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And discuss. Right. But so even in that case, right, it's the idea there's some kind of authority, there's some kind of weight, there's some kind of import to them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That other text lacks. These texts have shaped, right. With the Western canon. Right. The idea is that, right, Whether, whether you, you care for Shakespeare, whether you are able to read and understand Shakespeare, like Shakespeare, the turns of phrase in Shakespeare, the, The dramatic pivots in Shakespeare, these are things that have influenced the broader culture, Right? Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Big time.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you go and see the Northman, and at some point you realize, hey, man, this is Viking Hamlet. What's going on? Right, Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, it is.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They have sort of been, right. Influential. Right. And so the important thing to draw out of this, when we're talking about the canon of scripture, right. I mean, obviously at the first layer, there's. Yes, these are texts out of all the texts that have been handed down and copied and that we're aware of and that we might read, these are the ones that have particular authority within. Right. Our community. Whether that's like a Second Temple Jewish community or whether that's a Christian community. Right. There are certain texts that have authority in our community. The slightly deeper level of that. The important thing to emphasize here is that this is always descriptive and not prescriptive.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? Yeah. So we're saying. We're basically saying this is how these texts have been used. You know, it's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We're saying this is what occurred. Not.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Not this is how they ought to be used, but this is how they're used.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This text. Right. If we're talking about scripture, this text is read during the liturgy. This text has been preached on and taught and quoted in theological discussions for centuries. This text. Right? It has. That has concretely happened in reality.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so this is why sometimes, because occasionally we'll talk about, say, the Book of Enoch or the Book of Jubilees on this show. Occasionally we get asked, like, so are you saying that that book is canonical? And, like, that's literally a nonsensical question, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Because it does not function as canon within the church. Unless you're in the Ethiopian tradition. That's the only place where it does.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right? So, like, it's literally. It's not prescript. You can't, like, prescribe it, right? Like, if. If someone comes out, like VH1 used to in the good old days when VH1 showed music.

Like, they would come out with a list of, here's the hundred greatest rock songs of all time. Right? Or the hundred most influential bands of all time.

And if, like, their top 10 bands were bands you'd never heard of.

Right? Like, that wouldn't work. You wouldn't be like, oh, well, I'd never heard of those bands. But those must be the greatest and.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Most influential bands you call shenanigans, right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You'd be like, dude, this is bogus. What are you talking about?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

How could you make this person under that person?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? Yeah, like, the right. The right way to do that would be by things like how often it gets played or album sales or, you know, this kind of stuff that shows that has been used by this community in this way.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right? But you would react to it not as. You wouldn't even react to it as if it was a prescription. You wouldn't say, hey, man, you can't shove this lousy music down my throat. You would react to it by saying, this is a bad description.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Why did you rank this band above that band?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Clearly, that band is better than the other one. That's a description. You're not describing reality correctly. So this kind of candidate is a description of reality.

So you can't just eat it. But this also means. This also means.

That.

There has never been in the Orthodox Church any council, any emperor, any Illuminati group.

Any Episcopal cabal. Yeah, cabal of monks, right. Who went out and decreed, these are the canonical books, and they went on a rampage burning all the other ones.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? Because, I mean, even when you do get canonical lists, they are, as you said, descriptive. These are the books. These are the books we read. These are the books. Yeah, exactly. These are the ones that we've been.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Reading, you know, and sometimes we're aware of these other ones. They're okay, but they're not the same level as the first list. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. But more on that later, Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. It's not just like these are the only books we've ever heard of in our lives, Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right. So what are some examples of, really early canons in the history of Christianity?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, well, we'll actually start before Christianity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We'll start with.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because this is really something that emerges in Second Temple Judaism. Right before that, when you get into ancient Israel, right. This is where this stuff is coming together and being edited and forming, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So as these texts sort of emerge fully formed in Second Temple Judaism, right. Then, then. And you have a variety of Jewish communities at that point. You have Jewish communities that are still in Mesopotamia, you have Jewish communities in Egypt, you have Jewish communities in Palestine. Then as the Greek and Roman periods go on, they get scattered all over the known world. Right. Jewish communities all over the place.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And those individual communities are all functioning as communities. They all have synagogues. In those synagogues, texts are being. Being read, right. In a ritual way. And so there are certain texts that are being read and other texts that are not being read. And there's texts functioning in this way and others that aren't.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And this differs from community to community as they're spread out. Right. And so we can look at one example, one good example is the community at Qumran, right. At Wadi Qumran, which is from whence we get the Dead Sea Scrolls. And they're a good example because we basically found their whole library. They hid their library because the Romans were coming, the Romans came, they didn't ever go back and retrieve it. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Convenient for us.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So we've now found it. Right. So we have a good idea of. Of sort of all the texts they had, all the texts they were copying, all the texts they had preserved. And we can even get an idea of sort of the relative influence and authority of those texts in the community based on how many copies there were.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? Right. So you got lots of copies. That's way. You know, a lot of people can be reading it all at once.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. If you got one old ratty copy, probably not the most influential text, right. In your community, right. Because you haven't ever bothered to recopy it. Right. And preserve it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Just like in my house, the book we have the most copies of is the Bible. But the second after that, of course, is the Hobbit.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Just putting that out there.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And the third, oddly enough, is John Grisham's the Firm. I've never seen that, Father Andrew. I mean, why multiple copies?

It doesn't even make sense.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So if you go in order of copies at Qumran in the Dead Sea Scrolls, right. The number one book is Genesis. Right. Number two is the Book of Enoch.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Number three is Exodus. Number four is the book of Jubilees.

And in fact.

If you add the copies of Enoch and Jubilees together, there are more copies of the two of them together than Genesis. So that is to say, Genesis isn't way ahead of the Book of Enoch, it's a little ahead in terms of number of copies. So.

As we were saying, right, These, these texts, it's not just these are texts and scribes are copying them and interpreting them and debating their interpretation, but these are functioning ritually. This is why Enoch and Jubilees are so important. So the whole reason this community at Qumran existed out in the desert by itself, separate from the other communities, was over a dispute about the ritual calendar.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wait, religious people argue about calendars?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, they do.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And in this case, the founders of the community at Qumran looked at the Sadducees and said, how dare you use that Julian calendar. It is pagan, literally.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, it's from. Yes, you know, it's named after a pagan emperor.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's a dirty pagan Roman calendar. That Julian calendar, we want nothing to do with you. Right.

And for them, even the Pharisees calendar, the Pharisees were too liberal for them because the Pharisees calendar was using the old Israelite lunar calendar. But a lunar calendar, you have like 1230 day months. So every couple years you have to add like a whole month, like to line things back up.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right. Because, because the moon doesn't move like that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And yeah, the moon and the sun don't match well enough.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you have feast days bouncing around in the year. Right. And you have these things happening. And, and the community Qumran looked at that and said, clearly this is a man made calendar. This calendar doesn't come from God, it comes from humans. Because look how imperfect it is.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Look at what a mess it is. You Pharisees and your traditions of men. Right?

So for them, the whole basis of forming this community was to observe. And they observed sort of a stripped town version because they didn't have the actual temple of the ritual life of ancient Israel sort of out in the desert, but they observed it according to the Anakic calendar.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So why that one well, this is.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Officially the most boring part of the Book of Enoch. Right. This is where people wash out. If you try to read straight through the Book of Enoch, like that watcher stuff, everybody's into that. Right. Then you roll into the second part like the book of Similitudes and stuff, and you get to the calendar stuff and it's like.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And people just stop reading. But so the Anaka calendar, that's laid out in great detail. There is. And the way it's laid out is Enoch is taken by the angels and sees sort of all the movements of the heavenly host in all of this. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's sort of a big planetarium kind of experience. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The calendar is revealed to him by God. Right. That this is the true right divine calendar. It's 364 days long. But.

So in their minds though, that 364 day year, it's mathematically perfect because you have three 30 day months, then you have an interstitial day, three more 30 day months, interstitial day. And when you do it that way, the feasts are on the same day every year. Right. It all lines up.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's very regular. I have to point out.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's very regular. Perfect.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I have to point out this is also basically the shire calendar. It's 30 day months with an occasional extra day in between.

So I don't know. There's a paper to be written about the relationship between the Enoch calendar and the calendar of Hobbits. Just putting that out there.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Bilbo and Enoch.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, totally.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so but this is. I mean, this is a very common idea in the ancient world that mathematical perfection is somehow divine.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Seeing Pythagoras play.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, Right, right. Yeah. The Pythagorean theorem is a cultic theorem.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So again, the reason this book is so important to them is not just that they got excited when people talked about giants.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Though they may well have because they also had the Book of the Giants.

But because this is the whole basis of their ritual life is this calendar from this text.

So it's also worth noting that in addition to. A lot of attention is paid to the biblical texts that were found at Qumran in the Dead Sea Scrolls. But there's also a whole bunch of sectarian texts because. Meaning texts that are only found there and texts that are specific to them, like this is how. And it's their economia for the community. It's their community rules.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And things. Here's how we govern ourselves, here's how we resolve Disputes. Here's who's in charge. Here's how they get to be in charge. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Sort of the bylaws.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. Or a monastic rule. Right. That kind of idea. Right. But again, it's that economy idea that we already saw. Right. Functioning in Scripture. So their canon is this set of texts that's clearly at great variance with, for example, the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, sure.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And deliberately so to some level. Right. So what we see when we look at all these different communities, Second Temple Jewish communities spread out all over the world.

We can say certain things in terms of trends. Right. Sort of generalizations. Right. So everybody has the Torah. Right. Somewhere in there.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And we should mention, like these communities all would regard each other as Judeans, as Jews.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, you know, sort of.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Okay. Roughly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But didn't consider the Sadducees to be.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, that's true, that's true.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

All right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But, but nonetheless they are all saying, you know, they all believe themselves to be truly Jews. And some cases. Yeah. And in some cases there's some level of mutual recognition, even if there's arguments. And yet they don't all share the same canon of scripture.

Remotely.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So everybody's got the Torah somewhere in there. Now, somewhat surprisingly to people, there are significant Second Temple Jewish communities that are not really considered to be forms of Torah based Judaism. The idea of non Torah based Judaism confuses some people because of how it's been drilled into our head. Right. And because we're thinking of Rabbinic Judaism.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And it's true that for the most Second Temple Jewish communities, the Torah was the most important. Right. Text. But not all of them. Right. But even those where it was not at the top. Right. If it, where was the base of the canon, it was still in there. Right. They didn't reject the Torah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Even the Samaritans had their own version of the Pentateuch. It was tinkered with. But the Samaritan Pentateuch was a thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So then when you get into the Neviim, Right. The prophets, those are mostly the same.

You're gonna find most if you include Daniel with the prophets instead of the writings. And if you include Jeremiah, you got different versions of the book of Jeremiah. Right. But for the most part, those books are going to be the same. But then as we mentioned, with the writings, the Ketuvim, there's a big catch all in the Hebrew Bible in the Old Testament, that's where you've got stuff all over the map. Right. So Ethiopian Jewish communities have Jubilees and Enoch and a whole bunch of stuff that most Palestinian Jewish communities don't have.

That aren't functioning that way there. And then you've got Jewish communities in what's now Spain.

In Rome. And so which of the writings are included? Even in Palestine, where obviously Judea is where you'd think they'd have this sort of more nailed down, There were arguments about the writings, whether Ecclesiastes was or wasn't authoritative, whether Esther was or wasn't authoritative.

Whether Ben Sirach was or wasn't authoritative. So there are these disagreements even there. Right.

Sort of in the. In the Hub. Right. And then making it even more confusing. Right. There isn't like. Because again, we're not. They don't have like a Bible. They don't have like one book.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

With all these texts in it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Scrolls. Bunch of scrolls.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, it's scrolls. There's different functions. And, you know, a given synagogue might fully acknowledge the authority of Samuel and Kings, but just not have a scroll and so not ever actually read it. So they can't use it in their public worship. Right. They're not rejecting it, they just don't have it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And you've also got these sort of dotted lines at the borders where you'll have someone like. And we're going to talk more about Josephus in a little bit. But Josephus, who's a Pharisee, does not accept Jubilees as being canonical, as being an authoritative work. But when you read his Jewish Antiquities and he's going through the history of, especially the early history of the world up through the time of Moses, he cribs all this stuff from the book of Jubilees.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right. So thus kind of proving or demonstrating, I should say that just because you treat a book as in some level authoritative doesn't mean that you're saying it's part of the canon of Scripture. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because whether it's authoritative in his community as a Pharisee is an objective thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So he may like the book of Jubilees, he may find it fascinating, he may think it gives lots of important traditions, he may think it's reliable. Right. But there's no question whether it's canonical or not. It wasn't because he was a Pharisee.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's descriptive. But.

So each, each of these communities has its own functional canon. They're listed descriptively. Right. There's no committee decide like voting on books in any of these communities.

And when the Gospel comes to these various Jewish communities, they just inherit Whatever that canon is as their Old Testament.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. They just keep using it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so this is how the canon of the Ethiopian Jews becomes the canon of the Ethiopian church. This is how the canon of Alexandrian Judaism becomes the Old Testament of the church in Alexandria. Right. And so this. And this is why, as we talked about in our episode about how to read the Bible, this is why to this day, Eastern churches have different Old Testament canons functionally, because we just inherited them. Again, there was no vote. There was no, like, weeding through them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And it's okay, it's okay, everybody. We don't need to.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay. This is your Jewish Bible. This is what our Old Testament. Right. That was it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then added to it. Right.

So this brings up the question of what would become the Hebrew Bible. Right? The Rabbinic. The Rabbinic canon. Right.

There's a little bit of an urban legend here.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You will hear people talk about the Council of Jomnia.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? Which is not a thing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Whenever you hear somebody talk about non Christians having a church council, your eyebrow should go up. The aforementioned Rock the Dwayne Johnson.

Rock the Dwayne.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I like that. That's better than Dwayne. The Rock the Dwayne.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, right. You should get a little suspicious, right, that maybe somebody, like we said before, they're a Christian, so they're looking at Jesus Judaism from a Christian perspective. Right.

So what that's about Jamnia is where the major, like, rabbinical school of the Pharisees was after the construction of Jerusalem by the Romans.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, what does it actually have to do with this question?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, it became sort of the teaching hub for nascent rabbinical Judaism.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So in a sense, in a sense, everything about Rabbinic Judaism sort of has its, its origins from Jamnia. Right. Like, but that doesn't mean that the rabbis got together and voted on what books would be in the Hebrew Bible is the key thing here.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, it's just this is. These are the books that were functioning as canonical within that community for the Pharisees.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. It's the Pharisaic canon.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And that was the canon of the Pharisees before any of this. Right. This is what Josephus says is the canon. These are the books that were authoritative for Josephus because Josephus was a Pharisee.

And so this is the, the 39 books that are now the Old Testament. In most Protestant Bibles, when you see the church fathers and rabbinical sources refer to them, they usually refer ancient ones. They usually refer to them as the 22 books that's because a bunch of them were combined on the same scroll. So, like what we call the minor prophets, the 12 of them were on one scroll. The book of the 12.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that just weeds out like 11 books.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then, as we said, Judges and Ruth, first and second Samuel are one scroll, etc. Etc.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, the funny thing is, is that even if we talk about 66 or, you know, whatever number of books of the Bible, we. We tend to call it the Bible, which simply means the book. And that's because we've combined it into a single codex, that you can just have them all together in a single book.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's a library, really.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, but.

So part of the reason why the Jomnia stuff gets started, part of the reason why.

People want to say, well, no, that Hebrew Bible canon that emerges in Rabbinic Judaism, that was the Pharisaic canon. That was just. Everybody in the first century accepted that those were the canonical books. Right. We sometimes hear this from our Protestant friends when arguments break out over, you know, for example, the longer Latin canon or the longer Greek canon or. Right. Any of these. Right. In terms of specific Old Testament books, say, no, this is. Everybody knew at the time. And when they say that, they're essentially taking a quote from Josephus, the aforementioned Josephus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. Who stands in for everybody.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Josephus makes a modest claim. Modest in the Jonathan Swift sense of the term, about canonicity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Okay, so we're going to read this to you, and I'll just note at the outset here that there's a few ellipses in here, so we're skipping some bits.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Because it would go on very long, but it escalates quickly. So here we go.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, here we go. Therefore, it naturally even necessarily follows that we do not possess a myriad of divergent books which conflict with each other. Our books, those which are rightly recognized, are only 22 and contain the record of all time. Of these five are the books of Moses, made up of the laws and the traditional history from the beginning of humanity to the death of the Lawgiver, from the death of Moses until Artaxerxes, who succeeded Xerxes as king of Persia. The prophets who followed Moses wrote the history of the events of their own times in 13 books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God and rules for the conduct of human life. From Artaxerxes to our own day. The complete history has been written, but has not been deemed worthy of equal credit with the earlier records because of the failure of the succession of the prophets. Although long ages have now passed, no one has dared either to add, to remove, or to alter a syllable. It is instinctual for every Judean from the day of his birth to recognize them as the proclamation of God, to obey them, and if need be, willingly to die for them. And that's from the Contra Appion, chapter 137 44. I mean, it's pretty amazing that he's saying Judean babies are born. Born recognizing his canon.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, first of all, I have to ask, why did you not name any of your sons Arta? Andrew?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's an interesting question. I don't know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Missed opportunity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But.

Anderson would be the equivalent, right? Just call him Anderson. No, that's suspiciously.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Everybody can just call him Artie. Right. I mean, it's a fine nickname.

So, yeah, so we have several claims here at the end. So a lot of this seems fairly reasonable. Right. You can see why someone would follow it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Hey, yeah, those other books, those other books you're talking about, you Roman Catholics and Orthodox folks. Yeah, they're there, but they're not on the same level because the succession of prophets failed.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you got something there. Right. But here's the problem, right? This argument is all leading up to where it goes, right? Which is Josephus making the following claims. First of all, long ages have passed since these books were written, but no one has dared to add, remove or alter a syllable.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's not reality.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Not true. Just not true. Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that's not true, then. It's instinctual for every Judean. Right. It's like built into someone. By virtue of being Jewish.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You'Re born.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

With a can from the day of your birth, Right. So the baby comes out from its mother's womb. Recognize the authority of these 22 books, and no others.

Recognize them specifically. It's the proclamation of God. They all. Every Judean obeys every word of them their entire life.

Like Josephus. Have you read them?

And not only do they obey them, every single one of them is willing to die for them. Every single one.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Slight exaggeration.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There might be some hyperbole there.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This. This might be a Pharisee talking to Romans and presenting his form and his understanding of Judaism, the real Judaism.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Because, you know, what do Romans know about the differences in canonical collections between Jewish communities, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Over against these other sects.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? Yeah, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that might be going on there. And so I think basing.

Arguments about the Old Testament canon on.

Taking this kind of hyperbole from somebody like Josephus, who, remember, is not a Christian. Right. Taking this very literally, giving Josephus this authority. Right. Which is authority that most of the people who use this quote authoritatively would not give to any of the church fathers who are actually Christians, for example, who are outside the Bible. That doesn't seem to me to be a good platform to stand on to make an argument. It.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So we've seen and we've talked about all these people out there who very much disagreed with Josephus on this.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because they were aware of reality.

So what we see when we turn to, like the New Testament canon. Right. So the, the Old Testament canon, the idea of these books being authoritative is inherited.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

From. From the Second Temple Jewish communities from which the Christian communities emerge. The New Testament canon forms organically in the same way that the Old Testament canon did.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Meaning nobody ever sat down and picked.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No one ever, Ever. Dan Brown.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Ever.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Not Constantine, not Theodosius, not, you know, anybody. No tribunals. No. Nobody sat down and said, okay, well, We've got these 12 gospels. Let's vote on each one. Okay. These four, pass these other eight, burn them. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, and there's even. You can even hear sometimes orthodox people will say, you know, well, the canon was decided at Nicaea. And I'm like.

So me.

Where do we have that?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We have multiple accounts of the proceedings at Nicaea. None of them say anything about the canon. The closest you could get. I'm going to try and be as generous as I can. The closest you get to that is that we have from one Source that afterwards.

St. Constantine commissioned 50 Bibles.

Containing the Old and New Testaments to be written.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay, but you have no idea the contents.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's just Bibles, no idea the contents. Hypothetically, you could say, well, that was the canonical one, I guess we don't know what's in it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right.

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, yeah, the dog don't hunt.

And also, maybe more surprisingly to people, they didn't sit around arguing about it much.

Right. Because again, it was descriptive, not prescriptive.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Because so, you know, it would just be questions of fact, not questions of, of, you know, authoritative opinion about stuff like, you know, you read the early Church Fathers. I don't remember. I mean, I've read most of the texts of the first couple of centuries. I don't remember.

Coming across any debates like that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Nobody's saying, like, man, you people need to start reading Second Peter, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

Yeah, right, exactly. It's just like, well, this is what's used in our church.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

So.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's not.

These big debates, in fact. Right. Most of these things are settled very early. Right. So by the time you get to AD 150, all across the world and the churches, at least in all of the major cities, they're using the four Gospels that we're using today.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And they're. And they're in one collection together. Right. Like a single scroll or. I don't know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, I don't remember when.

Codices, I.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Was going to say I don't remember when. When codices start being used, but yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It'S the Christians who start doing it, really. In mass. So. And it's the four gospels together. It's not like one community is using Matthew and another one's using Luke. And it's like, you know, peanut butter and chocolate. We get together now, we're going to use both. Right. Now we met this other guy who has this gospel of St. John.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So there's this sense that. There's this sense that these four books go together and everyone, you know that we are all using them together. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And that's despite the fact that. That they differ in some details.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And people noticed because they were reading them, it didn't bother them.

But we'll leave that for now. But those four, and pretty much only those four. And the earliest of the gospels that modern people want to act like maybe had a chance of being in the Bible, which would be like the Gospel of Thomas. Right. Pretty much the earliest one that was being written around that time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So by the time that was being written, it was already settled. And so St. Irenaeus could say, hey, man, you got this, this gospel and that Gnostic gospel. He's like, every church of the world uses these four, and only these four. You know that. I know that. Where are you coming from with this stuff?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And so, like, this, this idea that there is this big conspiracy to weed out all these other gospels, it's just, again, as you say, it is a dog that does not hunt.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. And so St. Paul's epistles were collected together even earlier. Right. By AD 100, they were circulating together as a group. Second, Peter refers to them as a group.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, this is just within a few years after the death of the Apostle John. Right. I mean. Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And every, every manuscript that's come down to us is a copy of the collection. We do not have a single copy of an individual letter of St. Paul circulating together. And this includes Hebrews, the earliest one we have from the mid second century. That's called P46. P is for papyrus, because that's what it's on. And 46 because it's the 46th. The one we found that includes Hebrews. And Hebrews is right after Romans, because they're arranged in order of length.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And we should point out, by the way, that just because we have. Well, we use, you know, the dating is. It's by this date. And when we say by, you know, AD100, we mean that's the earliest known example of that. Not. And this is the date of publication.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. In that exact year. They. They collected them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

By that date. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's the oldest point we can give that, you know, that we know of.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so. So that's why, for the record, even though we have church fathers saying, you know, I read Hebrews, I'm not sure St. Paul wrote Hebrews. Right. It kind of doesn't look like, even though we have that, it's always St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews. Why? Because it's in the collection of St. Paul's epistles.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that. That. And that's why it's always, when it comes down to it, it's St. Paul's epistles to the Epistle to the Hebrews, regardless of what other conjecture there is or thought there is.

So then, in terms of the other stuff, the other stuff of the New Testament, which is generally the general epistles in Revelation and Revelation is a special case that we'll get to in a minute.

The general epistles we know are circulating as a collection at least by 180ad180.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And this is basically what, you know, in most Bibles these days would be James through Jude.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. Yeah, yeah, right. And. And we know that they were circulating as a collection by then because Clement of Alexandria writes a commentary on them as a collection.

Around that time. So that. That's why we know at some time before that they were collected together.

And that those texts are the ones where we see the big variations in different Christian communities. Communities.

So.

There are some communities that very clearly only had only knew about First Peter and weren't aware of Second Peter.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And there were other communities that had both. There are a lot of communities that didn't have Jude.

There are. Jude is actually kind of interesting because this weird thing happens before the. During the centuries before the Council of Nicaea, where at first.

There are all these communities that had never seen the Epistle of Jude. And so we see people who are aware of the Epistle of Jude, saying, no, this is a really good canonical letter. Even though it's really short, this is a really good canonical letter because, see, look, it quotes the Book of Enoch, huh? Right? And so then as things shift in terms of people's impression of the Book of Enoch, right? And the authority it comes to hold, or not hold in most Christian communities, then all of a sudden the people who still kind of like the Book of Enoch are like, yeah, but St. Jude quotes it.

St. Jude by that time becomes more firmly established, right, in terms of all the churches. And so they start using it to argue for the Book of Enoch instead of vice versa. But so there's. There's. That's where you get the most distinctions, right? But even in those cases, it's not that, like, places we're rejecting those books. It's not like we're fully aware of the Epistle of St James and we don't cotton to it, right? We gotta wait for Martin Luther for that.

Right? It's. It's just communities didn't know about it, right? And. And so the way this sort of organically happens, the way there comes to be sort of one canon across Christian communities, is that Christian communities, as they live their communal life and as they develop, they encounter other Christian communities or at least other communities who identify themselves as Christian communities, right? And when they do, there's sort of this process of mutual recognition that goes on, right? And for all the Martin Buber fans out there, right, he talks about the other and the other self, right?

The idea being other, when you identify something as other, you're saying, this is not me and not not like me. Whereas when you identify someone as an other self, you're saying, this is another person, but they are a person like me, right? Right. And so there's sort of this. Is this community a community, another community like ours, or is this community something different? Is this a different type of community? Right? And so one of the things that goes into that, right, they're all manner of factors that go into that, their liturgical life, right? The way they worship, the way they practice, how they do, all these things are factored into it. But one of those is what texts they read from authoritatively, right? And what we find is that when these communities come into contact with each other, right, If. If they're based. If they're using the same four gospels and they're using St. Paul's epistles, right? And they're like, well, These guys have two epistles, epistles of St. Peter, they say, and we only have this one. They don't say, be gone, heretic. Right? Filthy apostates. Get out.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They say, no, this is another community like us. Right. They just have this other epistle of St. Peter that we don't have. And, hey, let's take a look at it. It's kind of interesting, right?

Whereas when they encounter another group and, like, they're doing the Eucharist differently and they're celebrating different feasts and they're talking about the Ogdoad, and they're reading the Gospel, Gospel of truth. Now, the four Gospels, they go, yeah.

Sir, this is a. Wendy's, right? They're like, this is something. This is a church. The way church's chicken is a church. Right. This is not Right. This is not one of us. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so over time, right. And this is still really how the Orthodox Church is structured to this day. The Orthodox Church is a communion of local churches who recognize each other and are in communion with each other as Orthodox. And so that develops. And as that develops, this 26 book canon of the New Testament develop. Emerges.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You may have noticed it. 26 and not 26.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because that brings us to the revelation of St. John.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which is a special case.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. It has a fascinating history. And if you want to know all about it, let me tell you. Ancient Faith Ministries own Dr. Jeanne Constantino. Her doctoral dissertation was published under the title Guiding to a Blessed End and is about the reception history of the Book of Revelation in the east, especially centering on St. Andrew of Caesarea's commentary on the Book of Revelation. And her doctoral dissertation is literally magisterial on this topic.

So if you can find it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's about, not the A team, the dissertation, if you could find it, it's.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

About $75 for hardcover on Amazon right now. I just checked.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If you could get it through interlibrary alone.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, there you go, everybody.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If you could. If you could track it down. Right. It is the place to go on this.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But. Yeah, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We're going to give sort of brief summary, which I'm sure if she ever listens to this, she will thoroughly critique. Right. Because it's going to lack nuance because we're going to do it in brief and I might even get some details wrong. But.

So in the broad strokes, Right. The reception history of Revelation is really interesting because.

Revelation of St. John has this very early attestation to it being this authoritative text. Right. So Saint Justin the philosopher, or Saint Justin Martyr, Saint Irenaeus of Lyon.

These early fathers who studied in the area around Ephesus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Who studied in the areas around Pontus where St. John had his ministry. St. Irenaeus is a spiritual grandson of St. John. They all attest. I mean, St. Irenaeus gives us the exact date that St. John had his vision. A.D. 95.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Like we don't have that kind of information about any other book of the New Testament. No, there's a super early attestation as to who wrote it, when, where. Right. The whole. The whole thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you would think, well, hey, this should be right in there with the four gospels in St. Paul's epistles. Right?

Well, no, because what happens is the teaching of chiliasm emerges.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which just to summarize, in case you haven't heard that word before, is the idea that there is going to be a literal thousand year age of the church.

I don't know. There's variations on the beginning and end of that. Right. But that's kind of the kingdom of.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Christ on earth in the future.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The kingdom of Christ on earth is going to be exactly a thousand years long and, you know, might be in the future, might be now, but there's no.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's in the future. Kiliasm is in the future.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. What separates Kilism from like modern forms of premillennialism, Right. Dispensational and otherwise, is that they're not. Because they're not the same thing. Kiliasm wasn't based on in the way dispensational premillennialism is. It wasn't based on any covenantal theory. Right. Like Old Covenant, New Covenant. It wasn't particularly based on. There's no connection to ethnic Judaism.

It was. And that thousand year period, that messianic age in the future, meaning the messianic age is now, was one of like earthly delights.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Everybody has all the food, everybody has all the folks and all the fun. Right.

So, yeah. So that was chiliasm. And.

While sort of forms of that were tolerated even there, even a handful of church fathers, I think St. Irenaeus is more debatable on this than some folks do.

May have held to some version of this.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It wasn't. It was sort of tolerated. Versions of it were sort of tolerated if with people who are otherwise orthodox, but it was picked up as an element of certain other heresies.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right. It gets associated with. With Montanism in particular.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. And so for people who don't know a lot about Montanism, Montanus was this fellow who proclaimed himself to be the Paraclete promised by Jesus the comforter.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So he said he was the one who Jesus said was coming, that he was a prophet. He traveled around with two prophetesses.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm sure it was Platonic.

And must have been. Yes. And they also were prophetesses and they did a lot of glossolalia and stuff. And so all that's really problematic. And they were also killy ass. Right, yeah. And so not only were they Kilias, but Montanism was often referred to as the Pontic heresy because it emerged from that same region.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And a lot of the Kilias would cite Revelation to support their view. Right. The revelation of St. John. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So it kind of gets a bad rap because of its association with this. This very live heresy. I mean, it wasn't just one guy, some. Some wacko wandering the countryside. I mean it was a big. It was a fairly big movement. I mean, it pulled in Tertullian.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this was a major heresy. Right. And.

Remember, this is not that. Well, all these books that all these churches had been using Revel, the Book of Revelation and then they found out. Oh, wait, the Montanists quote this. Well, burn it. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, no, because lots of heretics quoted lots of books of the Bible that didn't cause you to get rid of. Right. The books of the Bible because the heretic quoted them. Right. But it's. That it wasn't in widespread use.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It was mostly local to Asia Minor, AKA certain areas.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. And people who are from there.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So when this is a book that your community is unfamiliar with and in your early encounters with it, a heretic is quoting it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You're going to be. It's a little sus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So it kind of got tarred with that same brush. So it takes a few centuries for the Book of Revelation to really get rehabilitated.

And sort of re. Accepted. And that happens through the work of a couple of Saints. Right. So St. Jerome in the west in the fifth century, Andrea Caesarea in the east in the sixth century. Both do the same thing separately. They both take. And each of them takes a different one because Jerome's is in Latin and St. Andrews is in Greek. They take a commentary on Revelation written by Achilles.

And they revise it. They didn't have plagiarism rules back then. There were no intellectual property laws. They took it, they revised it and took the Kiliasm out. Yeah, right. They looked at it they said, you know, this is a pretty solid commentary on this text if it weren't for all this Killian ASM nonsense. Right. So they took it out and they published it under their own name.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so now in the West. Oh, St. Jerome's commentary on the revelation of St. John.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Let's read this.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so.

Through the commentary, they said, oh, there's another way of reading this text that doesn't lead to all this, these heretical, wacky ideas. Right. And the same thing happens in the east with St. Andrew Caesarea's commentary and becomes so influential if you get, like you can buy now, Archbishop of Verkes commentary on Revelation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And if you get it and read it, it's a commentary on St Andrew's commentary on Revelation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So it's foundational. Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's just like, here's what St. Andrew says.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And here's how I would apply that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, yeah. So if I remember correctly, what. What Dr. Jeannie demonstrates is that for the. For the east, you know.

Revelation becomes canonical not just by means of this commentary put forth by St. Andrew of Caesarea, but it becomes canonical almost accompanied by that commentary in the sense that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

His reading of it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Authoritative reading.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right. It comes with an interpretation, essentially, which is one of. One of the several ways in which this particular story is different from the. The other books of the Scriptures.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's not. Revelation is read by the Kilas.

Revelation is read by Andrew of Caesarea.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. And if I remember correctly, then the timing. So, you know, St. Jerome is doing this about a century before St. Andrew of Caesarea. And so it kind of happens early enough in the west that it becomes part of the lectionary.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It happened quicker in the west, too.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It happened more quickly in the West.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And late enough in the east that it doesn't really get into the lectionary.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. And I know, folks, folks, save the emails so Father Andrew doesn't have to read them. I won't. Anyway.

We know that there are individual instances. There are places at the monastery, at Patmos in Alexandria, and in certain monastic services where someone physically in a church is reading the Book of Revelation. We mean, it's not part of the regular cycle of readings. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If you go and pick up an Epistle book in most Orthodox churches, they're not readings from the Book of Revelation in the cycle.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's all the other books, except for the Gospels in Revelation. And the Gospel book also logically does not contain Revelation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's what we're talking about. And it's not because the Book of Revelation is not canonical in the Orthodox Church. It's just because of the historical road it took to coming to hold this authority. And even and we're going to talk more about St. Nikophorus in our third half, but even in the 9th century, St. Nickaphorus tells us that there are still some churches who didn't recognize at that late date in the east that didn't recognize the Book of Revelation yet.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So this really took a long time, but it did happen after all that time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, all that said, we're going to go to our second and final break and we will be right back in a moment.

[Narrator]

Father Andrew, Stephen Damek and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-ADIO.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

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[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

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[Father Stephen DeYoung]

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[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, there's that crunchy metal theme. Thanks a lot once again for that, Rob. We appreciate it. So I know everybody likes that one. That's great.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So people, people should buy that book of Father Jeremy's.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Have I mentioned that?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like if you have money such that you can purchase a book, that would be the book to purchase.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. There you go.

Everybody get that book, you know, in between reading. Reading our books. So. All right. Well, welcome back so far as to.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Say just go ahead and get that book. Don't worry about order. Don't worry about the stack of books you already have that you haven't read.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, it will stand up and testify against you at the judgment, but still.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Pop it to the top.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Go and get this book.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Nice yeah, there you go. We endorse it. All right, well, welcome back. It's the third half of the Lord of Spirits. We're talking about texts and how they function canonically. What exactly that means how they're used authoritatively within the Orthodox Church. And we just wrapped up talking about, especially the New Testament, particularly the revelation of St. John. And now in the third half, we're going to talk about some other books that occasionally people say wacky things like, why do you guys act like the Book of Enoch is canonical? And we have to roll our eyebrows and say we have never actually acted like that because.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm still stuck on Dwayne. You're still thinking about Dwayne. It's true.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, you said. You said rock the Dwayne Johnson earlier.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So I think we're both a little punched.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Rock the Dwayne. It's Dwayne the Rock.

Yeah. Roll the eyebrow. Raise an eyebrow. It's when you roll your eyeballs and raise your eyebrows at the same time. That's what that action is like.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like, what other Dwayne is there such that you would say he is not the Dwayne.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Dwayne. Wayne. No.

Come on.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right. So, yes, there are other texts that we read as Orthodox Christians that we treat as authoritative, but that we don't treat as canonical. Right. This is a thing. It's. Okay, everybody.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That aren't read aloud in the Church, that don't form the liturgical ritual function.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right. And the traditional word for these books, especially the first set of those, is apocrypha. That's the word. We'll talk about what that means.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

And again.

There'S a caveat to carry over here. We're being descriptive. Right. Of reality. So even when we talk about these other texts.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

When we're trying to figure this out, we're not working off of some preconceived theological notion. Right. And then. Right. Working that out. This is. We're describing what has in reality historically happened and happens today, how these texts function today and how they have functioned in the past. It's descriptive.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So we've talked before about. And I know we have. See, I say the same things, and I say them over and over again. So sometimes I forget what I've said on this show and what I've said somewhere else. Like to myself in the bathroom, people.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The bathroom commentaries. The bathroom commentaries by father Stephen DeYoung.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What's amazing when I walk around talking to myself, my wife will tell you this is I start making Hand gestures. Like I engage in. In self rhetoric, which is probably sinful in some way.

But so we. But I know for sure because we've gotten questions from listeners, we've talked on this show about that there are in the east and the understanding of canonicity and authority, that there are these three categories, that it's not just a binary thing, thing of one or zero.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This, this text is completely authoritative and, and inerrant and infallible. And this other text is not that. And so throw it away.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So it's the same level as Moby Dick. Right? Like it's, it's irrelevant.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I don't know why I keep going to Moby Dick either.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I don't know. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Gulliver's Travels, Les Miserables, back to Jonathan Swift, man. I mean, these loops, recursive loops.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The Count of Monte Cristo.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay.

Yeah. We haven't had Dumas yet.

So.

At least there's those texts that are read in the church, those that are read in the home, and those that are not to be read.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so.

You'Ll get the folks, right. We all went to high school with these people, right. They had to write a paper on something, right. They said write a paper on world peace. And they get up and start with, webster's Dictionary defines world peace.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So when it comes to talking about apocrypha, someone will get up and say the word apocrypha means hidden or secret.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. These are the dark esoteric books of the ancient church.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Dan Brown again rears his ugly head.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Renowned author Dan Brown.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the, the idea that these are somehow mysterious or that they were banned from the Bible and someone hid them somewhere. Right.

That's not really what I mean. It's. Yes, that is what the word mean. Can mean hidden or secret, but it could also just mean private.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Public.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Meaning you don't read it in the church, you read it at home. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Private reading. It's just like, for instance, that there's lines in the liturgy where the rubric, if you're reading it in Greek, it says that the priest reads a certain prayer, you know, mysticos, mystically. But that just means relatively quietly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

See, I was making the gestures again. Now I've been messing up.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Mystic gestures.

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Going all doctor Strange.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so if you want like an exhibit A, right. Of the type of thing in this middle category of books read in private or books read in the home. Right. Exhibit A of that is the shepherd of Hermas, which you usually find collected with The Apostolic Fathers.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Even though it's kind of a weird genre, it's kind of a prophetic book from the second century.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

AD.

But so the Muratorian canon was called the Muratorian canon because it's the earliest list we have, of course, which books of the Bible were authoritative in someone's community. We're not sure exactly who. Whoever wrote it. Right.

Refers to the shepherd of Hermas and it says that the shepherd of Hermas ought to be read, but not in the church because the number of the prophets is complete and it is after the apostles.

So he says, you ought to read this. But we don't read it in the church. Right. We don't read it in the gathering publicly because the Old Testament is complete.

And this was written after the time of the apostles. So it's sort of not eligible to be New Testament in our terminology. They weren't calling it the Old Testament and the New Testament at the time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. It's notable that it doesn't say it's not read in church and no one should read it ever. Anywhere actually says it ought to be read.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, it positively should be read by people.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But we don't read it in the church because it doesn't belong to these two cat. To either of these two categories of books that we do read in the church.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So there's an example of one of those books, and there's an example of someone in the, you know, the third quarter of the second century, the middle part of the second century, who is thinking of texts in that way, that there are these texts in this middle category.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And part of what engenders this is the fact that. So historically we see when we talk about Second Temple Judaism and Second Temple Jewish literature during that post exotic period, there's just this explosion of writing activity in all of these Jewish communities. So you end up with these communities producing their own sectarian texts.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And having different texts from different places and different texts being compiled in different ways.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you get different versions of the same book. So there's all of this literary activity. And then in the second century, not at the Council of Jomnia.

As nascent Rabbinic Judaism is being formed, part of what they think went wrong. So they're looking at Christianity and they're like, from their perspective, in nascent Rabbinic Judaism, they're like, wow, this all went really badly. Right. Because from their perspective, Christians are a heretical Jewish sect at this point.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Who's just been expelled from the synagogue. So they say one of the places where we went wrong was all of this literature. Right. There was just sort of this uncontrolled production of literature and thoughts and ideas and religious ritual practice and all of this. It all got out of hand and look what happened. Right. And so.

There'S actually a ban on writing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And what that concretely means, because again, it's not like rabbis were riding around on horses burning books either.

What that concretely meant is that at the big rabbinical schools like Jamnia, at the major rabbinical schools, they didn't do any writing. They didn't write down. They didn't preserve traditions in writing. They did it orally. All the teaching was done orally. The learning was done orally. Traditions were handed down from generation to generation, just orally.

And it's not until you get into like the 5th century that the tractates of the Talmud start being formed. Right, yeah. Ban on writing sort of gets lifted. And that's why it's in the Talmud that you start getting sayings attributed to like 1st century A.D. rabbis written down for the first time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So. So that happens within the non Christian Jewish communities that survive, which is mainly Pharisaic Judaism. That becomes Rabbinic Judaism.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Because the rest kind of don't continue.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. For various reasons.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, the Sadducees, their whole power base was the temple. No temple, no Sadducees. Right. They become unimportant.

But Christians keep writing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This activity continues in Christianity. And. And so it's not just the New Testament documents, there's other books alongside the New Testament documents.

And they keep writing in the same genres. So you look at the first clement, Epistle of St. Clement, you look at the Epistles of St. Ignatius, as my co host is want to do.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I am.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And they're the same genre pretty much as the epistles you find in the New Testament.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. I mean, if you read St. Ignatius and a lot of scholars will say this, I mean, it's not me. It reads a lot like a kind of merger of Paul and John. Like the tone is similar, the content, the content is definitely Johannine, but he seems to make.

Reference to St. Paul's works. It's interesting actually that he doesn't ever quote John.

Which. But his theology is very Johannine, which kind of suggests that he just simply got the theology from the apostle directly and wasn't being mediated to him by, you know, a book. But. But yeah, it reads like the New Testament. St. Ignatius reads like his works could be part of the New Testament.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And. And, you know, shepherd of Hermas is a prophetic book. Epistle of Barnabas looks a lot like.

Hebrews. In fact, you find people arguing that Barnabas wrote Hebrews, and they're like church fathers. And their argument is, well, look how much it looks like the Epistle of St. Barnabas.

So it must have been written by St. Barnabas.

You have stuff like the Apocalypse of St. Peter. You have gospels. You have. They're writing in the same genres. They just keep writing and pursuing this literary activity. Right. And so. And there's a big swath of this stuff that's not heretical.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Obviously, including the Apostolic Fathers. Obviously including, you know, the other early church fathers, but also including some of these other books. Right. Like the Gospel of Nicodemus that Father Andrew read from back at Pascha. Right. These Christian texts of Issio Poly goes on into the Middle Ages. And so no one was reading these other texts and arguing they should be tacked on to the end of the New Testament.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Because again, that's not how canon works.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And none of them even were bothered by the fact that they knew that St. Peter didn't write the Apocalypse of St. Peter and they knew St. Nicodemus didn't write the Gospel of Nicodemus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They didn't react to it as, this is a lie. This is. Right. They looked at the contents.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And this has defined contents.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And this is the way that some people have labeled this idea of apocrypha as that it's. It's deceptive in some way, you know, that it's attempting to. To deceive, to. To pull a fast one, you know. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you have, just as you've had in every era, you have texts that are canonical, that have this ritual life and life of authority and the public life of the community. And then you just also have a lot of popular Christian texts.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Christian texts that are edifying stories and traditions that are passed down. Acts of different apostles, the Acts of St. Paul, the Acts of St. Peter. Right. There's tons of tons and tons of.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

These, which, not unlike our own era, in which there are books being written that are not heretical, there are saints lives collected. There's all kinds of texts that, you know, no one will ever say that any of my books should be part of the Bible. No one will ever say that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, now you can't. You never know.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay? Someone, some crazy nut might say something like that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But you may have your own L.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Ron Hubbard someday.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Will he start out being A bad science fiction writer. Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

After nuclear World War three, right. In the ravages, someone might find a copy of Orthodoxy and heterodoxy found a whole new civilization on it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

God help him if it's just the.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Last chapters, like the comms and the yangs.

Anyway.

So I had to get another Star Trek reference in.

So.

Yeah. And we see that this isn't just like sort of an early church phenomena, like, oh, well, they hadn't sorted it all out yet. Right. And eventually when this stuff gets sorted out, they sort of get rid of all that other stuff. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's not true. Right. And one of the big places we see that is in the work of George Sinkellos and Saint Nikephoros, the confessor of Constantinople. George Sinkellos did most of the writing on.

What'S called the chronography, which was sort of the history of the world as a universal history world up to that time. And then he lived at the end of the 8th century.

The very end, and.

Sort of the history of the world up to that time, making use of all kinds of extra biblical literature, including the Book of Enoch and stuff. And sort of appended to the end of that by Saint Nikephoros of Constantinople, who was. So Georg Sinquelos is called Sid Kelos because he was the cellmate, monastic cell of St. Terrasios of Constantinople, who was the patriarch before Saint Nikephoros. So Saint Nikephoros becomes patriarch after St. Tarasios. He publishes George Sankellos chronography. He appended to it a listing of texts, and on it he lists for the Old Testament and the New Testament he lists. And so this is beginning of the 9th century, Saint Nickaphorus lists. Here's the books that everybody acknowledges in the Old Testament. Here's the books that some people acknowledge and not others. And here are the Old Testament apocrypha, the private books. Then he lists. Here are the New Testament books that everyone accepts. Here are the New Testament books that some people use and not others. And that's not just revelation, but it includes Revelation, includes The Apocalypse of St. Peter, believe it or not, and the Gospel of the Hebrews. And then he lists the New Testament apocrypha, which includes things like the Epistles of Saint Ignatius and the shepherd of Hermas and a bunch of first Clement, these things actually a lot of Clementine literature.

So that idea, right, that there are these two categories of books to be read, one in public, in the churches, right, which he defines descriptively.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Here's the ones that all the churches are using. Here's the one that some are and some aren't. Right. He defines that category descriptively and then he says, here are the other books that are to be used in the home. And we find that it's those books that he lists as apocrypha, those privately read books. Those are the ones that we find preserved at monastic settlements. Right. So Jewish communities don't preserve, like the Testament of the twelve Patriarchs or the story of Joseph and Asenath. Right. They don't preserve even first Enoch. These aren't preserved by Jewish groups because Rabbinic Judaism repudiates all these books. These books are preserved in Orthodox monasteries.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's why Mount Athos, that's where we get the testament of the 12 Patriarchs is Mount Athos, Marsaba, these major ancient monastery foundations, they preserve the Second Temple Jewish texts and these early Christian texts. Right. Which they do not think are part of the scriptures that they are not reading publicly in church, but that they think are important.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And should be read.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. Right. They're not just copying them as kind of weird antiquarians. You know, look, here's this ancient text that we have. Let's make sure that we have copies of it because someday we scholars are going to want to look at this. It's for spiritual edification. That's why they keep them around.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There are a lot more books that they didn't copy than that they did. So the ones they did, they did because they thought they were really important.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Because it's not just, oh, here's a cool thing to put in my library. You copy a book that's a lot of time and effort and expense.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so.

It is. It's that understanding. It's that understanding of this middle category, this third category, the books to be privately read that are not read publicly as scripture, that gives. Provides the paradigm for understanding the role of the writings of the later Church Fathers. Right. So some of those are Apostolic Fathers, but the later Church Fathers. Right. The people who we call the Church Fathers and their writings.

The role of their authority in the life of the church is within that same kind of category. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. We read St. John Chrysostom's Paschal Homily at Pascha. Right. But we aren't reading it as scripture.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm reading that homily instead of me trying to give one because I can't do better than he did.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's worth noting that not everything that is read out loud in church equals canonical scripture.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Is not canonical Scripture.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. And you know, the homily you're going to preach on Sunday is not the Scripture.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There is a liturgical ritual act that takes place in an Orthodox Church before you read Scripture, right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Before it's marked out.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's blessings that are given. There's.

We literally pray that we would be made worthy to hear the Gospel before it's read to us.

Part of this liturgical ritual act. Remember, that's what we're talking about with these texts. Texts, Right. It's not just authority in some banal sense. It's not authority in the sense that the text itself has this authority and commands us to do things and we must obey the text.

But it serves this ritual function. And that function is to give us access to the experience of God in Christ.

And we don't do that with even The Paschal Homily, St. John Chrysostom or the Cynicsarian or, or write or any other text. But we do read them, right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And get a lot out of them.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And they are preserved. And so this is sort of what I think of. Every once in a while somebody will critique Father Andrew and or I for talking about these extra canonical texts, and they'll say, why are you talking about these extra canonical texts? Either you shouldn't be talking about them at all, or more mildly, hey, there's a lot of folks out there who haven't even read the Bible, right? So why are you talking to them about and potentially getting them to read these other things that aren't in the Bible? Right. And what I think is, well, you know, St. John Chrysostom isn't in the Bible.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

St. Gregory the Theologian isn't in the Bible. St. Gregory Palamas isn't in the Bible. St Maximus the Confessor isn't in the Bible. St Aaron, if Leon isn't in the Bible, I would certainly encourage people to read those right now, if you ask me, should you read the whole Bible first? I'd probably say, yeah, that'd be good, Right? Because it'll help you understand what the Fathers are saying because they read the Bible a lot.

But I wouldn't say no, you are not allowed to read anything but the Bible until you have read the whole Bible.

But that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

[Narrator]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So these other things are outside the Bible too, but they have this role.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And the reason they have that role is why? Well, because in another way, in a derivative way, they're providing the same function. They're helping connect us to the experience of God and Jesus Christ.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But in a different way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Enoch and Jubilees only make the most possible sense in light of Genesis, and they help us to understand Genesis is. Yeah. A lot of what's really going on there, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And other. And the interpretation of other parts of the Bible. Yeah. That calendar section, really, as a nerd, it's interesting, but.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Doesn't really help you understand much of the Bible.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No. Right, right. And. And, and it's worth. I mean, I think it's worth pointing out that the way that the Church fathers talk about these kinds of texts.

The way that they cite them and the way that they treat them is basically the way that we cite and treat the Church Fathers, meaning that the Church Fathers, their writings function essentially in the same way that the. The earliest apocrypha function. They're alongside. You know, they're part of the tradition. They're alongside the Scriptures, and. But they are not the Scriptures, and they're not held in the same way or cited in the same way or regarded as reliable in the same way.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

At least they shouldn't be.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right, exactly. By the Church. They're not, I should say, maybe by individual people who kind of get off kilter, but the Church's tradition.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So this is part of the problem of what happens in the west.

When you take a binary view of authority and you apply it to the Church Fathers.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Either true or false. Absolutely true or absolutely false.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So on one side, you get some of the extreme positions within Roman Catholicism. Yes, there are a number of positions within Roman Catholicism, but there are some sort of extreme positions in Roman Catholicism which hold that anybody who's considered a Church father, especially anybody who's been named a doctor of the Church. Church in the Roman Catholic Church is essentially infallible.

Right. You're at least not allowed to just go and say, yeah, this guy was wrong. St. Augustine was just wrong about that. Right. If there are contradictions, you have to try to reconcile them. If it seems like St. Augustine is saying something wrong, see how Thomas Aquinas reads St. Augustine.

Well, it seems like St. Augustine is saying this, but he can't really be saying that because that's wrong. So he must actually be saying this other thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that's one extreme. Right. And then the. The other extreme would be. And again, there are a variety of positions within Protestantism, but the other extreme would be some of the really extreme forms of sola scriptura, where it's like anything that's not in the Bible. Right. If it's not in the Bible. It's a pack of lies. Right. So don't come to me with your Church fathers. Don't. Don't come at me with your, you know, don't come into me and tell me that St. Peter was crucified in Rome, because that ain't in the Bible. So that's not true. It's false because it's not in the Bible.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Again, that's not all Protestants. That's an extreme. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So I'm putting out the two extremes in the West. Right. But both of those extremes result from that kind of binary view of authority.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Where it's not like a continuum.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But what we see is that there is this middle category.

Not considered infallible, but shouldn't be disregarded either.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

And so what this all ultimately comes down to is the orthodox understanding of. Of holy tradition.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. That.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That tradition is not the transmission of data. Right. This is the way sometimes you hear tradition talked about as oral tradition. Right. Which is. Yeah. There's this stuff that we didn't write down that the bishops just told each other when they got consecrated. Right. That's been like, passed down to today.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The secret handshake.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Nobody ever wrote it down any place. Right. That's not what we're talking about.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's not what we're talking about in the Orthodox Church. We talk about holy tradition, we're talking about the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, which is an ongoing thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So it's not a problem for us that we don't know who wrote a book of the Old Testament, and we. Or we don't know exactly when it was written or it was compiled and edited over centuries. That's not a problem for us because we believe the Holy Spirit was involved in that whole process.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. From beginning to end and in the transmission of that final text, quote, unquote.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What is done down to us today, The Holy Spirit was involved in that, too. Holy Spirit's involved in the whole thing. Right. And so we don't have to argue about a specific act. Right. A specific point in time. Right. And so what we look at the place where we see the life of the Holy Spirit unfolding in the Church is essentially in reception history.

Right. In the way in which things were received, because things aren't always clear at the time that they're happening.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. You're kind of, you know, there's the. The fog of war in some sense. Right. You know, with. With heretical controversies. With, you know, all kinds of stuff like that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The scriptures tell us this, the Holy Spirit blows where he will. So we don't always know at the time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But we can see after the fact.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We can see after the fact.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. There's a sort of digesting that happens.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so this is the core of why it's not important who wrote the books of the Bible, when they were written, how early or how late it was, what language it was written in.

None of that really matters because what holds authority in my church community is. What holds authority in my church community, which is a particular form of those, of certain texts that we have today. Doesn't matter when that form came to be, doesn't matter. How does it matter who?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's descriptive. This is just the case.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And it should be noted that it's not. It's also not to say that all authority for these things resides in the group of people who happen to be gathering to get like you. You could not, you know, even your bishop could not get together with the rest of his synod and say, okay, we're going to take a vote and replace the canon.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That. That's just not how. So it's not a matter of, of, you know, authoritative offices either.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, they physically could.

But here's what would happen over the next century. We'd find out if they were right or not.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right. As the other church was rejected by.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The rest of the church.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And they were no longer bishops and they were cast out of the church, we would say, ah, the Holy Spirit found against that one.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right, right. So it's not just a matter of saying, here's the office that's allowed to make these determinations. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There is no office that there are no determinations made.

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Except maybe by the Holy Spirit, if you want to try to figure out how the mind of God works. Good luck. You don't even know what it's like to be a bat. Right.

You know, you can't translate hours into Jeremy Barami's. You don't know how this all works.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Nice. That's a nice reference. Yeah. And then, I mean, and then this also, you know, this also transmits to how we understand church councils. Right. Like there are some people, it translates.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

How we understand everything, but.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, yeah, right, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. No, not only church councils, but like, you know, for instance, there are people that want to tinker or critique or whatever particular church councils because they have an interest in overturning their decisions or editing them or this Kind of thing saying, well, you know, this council, that's not what really went down there because it was changed later on. And, you know, a kind of fraud was perpetuated on the Church later on. And it's like, well, that's, again, that's not how this works. Let's look at how the Church has received that counsel, has confirmed it, has repeated it, has sung it. You either believe that the Holy Spirit works in that process or you don't. And if you don't believe that the Holy Spirit actually worked in that process of reception, then what are we doing here?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know, like, then it's irrelevant.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Then who cares what a bunch of bishops decided.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

A thousand years ago.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If the Holy Spirit wasn't involved, I don't care.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. You can't say that they pulled a fast one or even some emperor pulled a fast one, you know, And. And while the Church has been getting this wrong for centuries upon centuries. No, that is not a thing within the Orthodox Church.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah, right. Because the Orthodox Church would have to cease to exist.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because you'd have to say that.

The Holy Spirit is not alive.

Guiding the life of the Church. And we see this with ecumenical councils. Right. Council of Florence looked like an ecumenical council. Emperor signed off on it. Bishops there signed off on it. Wasn't an ecumenical council.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, I don't know if you noticed, but we're not in communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I have noticed this. Yeah. I mean, one, you know, one bishop is the holdout. But at the time, it looked like, okay, we've got this one dissident. But, I mean, all of the rest of these wise and holy men are all saying, yes. You know, now we look back on that and say, thank you, Mark of Ephesus, for holding out, you know. Yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And that happens all the time. And so I'll just go ahead and address the elephant in the room. Sorry. Origenists and universalists. At all. It doesn't matter what you construct as having really happened at the fifth Ecumenical Council.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It was received as a condemnation of particular elements of origins, theology and of universalism. So it doesn't matter. You can do all the history work in the world. No reconstruction. You could try and reconstruct the original text of a biblical book. You could try to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You can do that all day. It can be fun.

But your reconstruction at the end of the day has no authority in the Church.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Because that's not how it works.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. It just doesn't.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because your reconstruction has nothing to do with the Holy Spirit.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, and, you know, we kind of alluded to this earlier. Like, what do you do if you're living in the midst of some kind of church controversy, as seems to always be the case throughout the whole history of the church? There's always something going on. You know, it's be. Be as faithful as you can in the midst of it, and you kind of have to muddle through on some level. Right. Like, it's just how it is. I mean, what else can you do if you're looking for utter certainty? We don't get that in this life. You know, it's just not, well, uncertainty of what right, which party to pick, which thing to sign off on, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yes, yes. My salvation does not hinge in any way on anything ecclesiastical or geopolitical going on in Ukraine right now.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. You don't have to take a side in order to.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If I lived in Ukraine, it might. Right. So I'm not, you know, belittling that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But for the amount that people say in the United States are all worked up about that, all those related issues. Right. You don't need any certainty about that in terms of your salvation. Right. We all know what we're supposed to be doing for our salvation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And we, you know, also thinking about church councils, we can't. We can't look back at them and say, ah, here are the marks of ecumenicity. Because for any collection of those marks of ecumenicity you might set up, you're going to find some council that qualifies and yet isn't received as ecumenical, or you're going to find a council that doesn't quite qualify and yet is received as ecumenical, because that's just the way that the church sort of received it. That's the way that it goes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's this whole post hoc thing. It's not just councils. Right. You'll get this. When people start talking about the canon, they're like, well, here are the criteria for canonical books. You if was written by an apostle, then you're like, what about the Old Testament?

It was written in this period.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And again, that presupposes that there was some committee that sat down and came.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Up, here's the criteria we will use. That's all post hoc. That's all. Looking back on it and saying, well, these are the things I've received as canonical. I don't want to just say, I received these by tradition for whatever reason, that I've received these handed down to me. And so I'm going to try and make some meant after.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Some sort of formal criteria that makes tradition what it is.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

An external.

Waste of time.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, if that's how you get your kicks, go ahead, but it's kind of a waste of time. I waste a lot of time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So, I mean, it's true. I mean, the same is true of liturgical practice. Right. Because liturgical change is a thing. There's even liturgical reform.

Now in the history of the Orthodox Church. We're never talking about liturgical reform on the level of, say, for instance, what happens after the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church, but there are liturgical reforms. There's of course, the Niconian reforms in the 17th century in Russia, which were hugely problematic at the time, for sure, but largely are what is received as modern Russian Orthodox liturgical practice. But also in the Greek speaking world, there is St. Philotheos Kokinos. He was a liturgical reformer and kind of streamliner. He's the guy who canonized St. Gregory Palamas.

And I should mention, since I'm God willing, going there, not too long, he's the guy who canonized the three Holy Martyrs of Vilnius. So there you go.

Liturgical reform is a thing. How do we know that it was good? A particular reform is good. A particular change or introduction to something is good. By seeing how it's received, seeing how.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

History, reality played out.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, in the moment it may not be clear, you may not know how to evaluate it.

But it's okay. Again, you don't have to take sides on these things for your salvation.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And this is true in terms of Church Fathers.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Who's a Father and who's not, who's a saint and who's not?

How prominent is a given Church Father and his works compared to another Church Father and his works, or Mother of the Church and her.

Which works were preserved and which ones weren't? Church Fathers wrote a lot of stuff that didn't get handed down to us and then some stuff that did. What works by people who aren't saints, people like origen and Tertullian, etc. Did get handed down to us. And why and in what context. Right. All of those things are guided by the Holy Spirit. And so we take our cues from that.

Descriptive, not prescriptive.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, yeah. Which means that reconstructions or attempts to correct the record are not the way that Orthodox Christianity works.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You're trying to correct reality. Good luck with that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Yeah. So, you know, one might therefore ask then, since a lot of what we. A big piece of what we try to do on this podcast is to direct people's attention to things that often it's not being directed to. Are we trying to revise the church? Right. Are we trying to. I know, I know. But, you know, it's good to ask these questions.

Is that what we're trying to do is we're trying to say, oh, let's dig up this stuff that no one's talking about and bring it back out in the open.

Even though the church hasn't received this, we're going to make everybody receive it. Now, is that what we're actually trying to do?

No. I don't know. I don't have the timbre in my voice to do that the way that you do.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. So the issue is, if we were doing this show in Greek, in Greece, or in Russian in Russia.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We sort of wouldn't be doing this show. We'd be doing a different show.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because it would be a wholly different context. So the reality is that, you know, you and I are both in the United States. Right. But even if we broaden that to sort of Anglophone Orthodoxy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

To include some former British imperial holdings.

Anglophone Orthodoxy isn't just in its childhood or infancy. It's like a fetus. Right. It's still like being born.

Some kind of real sense of Anglophone Orthodoxy. And it's kind of a mess. We have random bits and bobs of all kinds of things in English. A lot of them aren't even translated by Orthodox people.

And in some cases, that affects the translations. I'm not just talking about church fathers. I'm talking about liturgical stuff.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'm talking about liturgical hymns. I mean, some of the earliest Orthodox liturgical translations in English were done by Isabel Hapgood, who was an Episcopalian.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. I mean.

You have to pull together two or three different projects each even, to get a complete new translation of the whole Bible made by Orthodox Christians into English.

This stuff just doesn't exist in English. And so I see what we're doing here as us going and finding all this stuff in the tradition, some of it not in English, and trying to bring it to the attention of Orthodox Christians here in the US who don't have access to it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's sort of a translation project on some level.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Like monks on Mount Athos for centuries have, if they wanted it, had access potentially to the Testament of the twelve Patriarchs. Most American Orthodox Christians don't know what I'm talking about.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So is that Me trying to change.

The American Orthodox? Well, I don't think so. I think it's me saying, hey, here's something Orthodox you don't know about, right? Try to get some more of this. And I'm only qualified to do a certain little piece of it. I can't do nothing with music, man. I can't carry a tune in a bucket. I can't help you with liturgical music. I can't help anybody with that. I'm not an expert on everything. I'm an expert on a tiny little sliver of things, right? And I kind of know some stuff about the broader things related to the Scriptures, right? But. And so I could try and help fill in some of that stuff, but we actually need a whole lot of other people doing this, but doing it with other areas, right? With liturgical music, with church fathers of different eras, with canons in the sense of the structures of the church, with church history, right? We need all of this, and we need it for years and years and years so that we can, can maybe in a few centuries have an American Orthodox Church that's a real and vital Orthodox Church. Not that America will be here by then, but an English speaking Orthodox Church somewhere in whatever's left.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow. Now that you've pronounced our doom.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, we're in mid collapse, man. Deal with it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I know, I know. It's true. All right, well, just some final thoughts now here for our episode on textual authority.

You know, along the way, we critiqued a number of ways of looking at texts, right?

For instance, the desire to find, you know, like we, in our, especially in our episode about how to read the Bible, you know, this desire to find what's sort of behind the text or what was in the mind of the author, this kind of thing. We didn't talk about that as much tonight, but that's related also to this question of attempting to reconstruct a basis for why certain books of the Bible are canonical. Reconstruct a basis for how ecumenical councils are ecumenical, who's a church? I mean, the list goes on and on and on, right?

And.

What I believe, I certainly believe that a lot of these attempts are well intended, right? But there is nonetheless, even if they're well intended, if the person has in their mind to do something good, there is still a very problematic spiritual motion going on with that. And it's that.

A desire to get a handle on something that you can't get a handle on. I understand wanting to get a handle on stuff. I mean, I am an inherently curious person. I want to understand things, I want to take complex systems and try to figure out how to talk about them with people. I get it. Right. I get it. And I think it's important to try to get a handle on.

Trying to understand.

What'S going on in orthodox tradition.

But when we attempt to create a kind of system that is the basis for how authority is assigned, then that's a kind of trying to get a handle on things that is actually stepping away from the way that the orthodox tradition actually works. And the beginning of really understanding how it works is, number one, accepting what it is as it is as it is, even if you don't agree with it or don't like it or are uncomfortable with it or even offended by it. Right.

We receive the whole tradition, and then the task then is to try to understand the tradition, right? Not to come up with a system for.

Figuring out how it gains its authority and all this kind of stuff. There's not. There is no system. There's no criteria. There's no, you know, it just doesn't work that way. Way, right. So that's why I say there's a different spiritual motion involved. The spiritual motion of attempting to.

Create a system for all of it is ultimately about trying to assert some kind of control over it. And I think that's why so many people who attempt to do this end up in a lot of arguments and debates over it. Why, which is not how the tradition actually works. Right. Certainly you have debate and argument within the orthodox tradition, but largely.

It has a pastoral purpose of rescuing people.

From being drawn away from Christ. It's not just about being right about certain things. And it's done by the people who have been given the task to shepherd people and to care for them. You know, we mentioned, for instance, the feasts of the ecumenical councils, the feasts of the fathers, and we've talked about this on the show before, you know, and there's that reading, that Old Testament reading from Genesis that's given in Vespers about how Abram, along with his 318 guys, goes and rescues his nephew Lot. And it's not coincidence that the traditional number of fathers at the first ecumenical council is 318.

Whether that was literally the actual headcount there is not the point. The point is that they were engaged in a rescue mission for the church. They were rescuing.

People from error because that's their task. That's their job as the shepherds of the church.

They weren't trying to create a system of authority to impose so that they would be obeyed.

They were reaching out in love to bring people back towards Christ. Right? And that's the spiritual motion that we need to engage in. It's the spiritual motion of accepting the tradition. I mean, you notice that the ecumenical councils, they begin with following the Holy Fathers, right? We have come up with a system, but following the. We're followers, you know, of the Fathers, we're followers of the Apostles. We've received the tradition, and now we're reiterating it in an appropriate way at this time and place to deal with whatever is in front of us. You know, it's. It's ultimately. It ultimately comes down to pride and humility. It comes down to pride and humility. And you can see when I know, when I'm filled with pride, I want to show everybody how right I am and to defeat them. You know, when someone has humility, then it works in a very, very different way. And then actually the beautiful thing is, is that when you approach the orthodox tradition with humility, then it opens up in front of you as this beautiful, beautiful tapestry of endless possibility of exploration and diving deeper into its depths. I know I'm kind of mixing my metaphors, but you get what I mean, I think.

And so, I mean, that's my encouragement, is.

To enter into it with a sense of wonder. And wonder is based on humility. And that's how we receive the orthodox tradition, and that's how we're able to see and to describe how it is that texts function authoritatively within the Church's tradition. So, Father Stephen, what are your final comments?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So.

I think maybe some folks have gotten a wrong impression in terms of what we're about, not through any fault of their own. So we write from the beginning, like from the beginning of each episode and from the beginning of the doing. This podcast have been highly critical of materialism, meaning, you know, scientific materialism, the idea that the material is all that exists, right? The material is the real, and that's the limit of it.

And the reason I think some folks may have gotten a misinterpretation is recently when I've taken to, as has been my want for some time to bashing Plato, I think people have gotten confused, right? Because.

I think the easiest place for people to try to take refuge when they reject materialism is to try to go to the other end and become idealists.

And try and deal with things in the realm of ideas.

As if that's spiritual reality.

What I think we're actually doing is neither materialism nor idealism, but realism, right? Dealing with reality.

I think you see that in our approach, like tonight, right? We're dealing with, well, how did these texts actually become canonical in history? How did it really happen in the real world?

As opposed to the kind of idealist approach which would be, what does canonicity mean? What are the marks? What is my theological system in terms of how the Scriptures work? And then, therefore, what does that require the Scriptures to be? And then what do I need to say about canonicity based on that to fit with the rest of these ideas?

It's very easy and maybe even comforting as an escape.

Because reality is not so great.

To go into that realm of ideas and act like, hey, if we could just get these ideas hammered out, if we could just get people have the right ideas and the right understandings in people's heads, if we could just get people to look at these things in the right way and hold the right opinions, that will cause a change in the world and reality, right? And the material will sort of fix itself, right? And the problem is that doesn't work, right. What you end up producing is a fantasy. And it's very easy for theology, even good theology, even technically correct theology, to just become fantasy. It's really easy for it to become the same thing as, you know, Star Trek canon is in my head, or Marvel or DC Comic book canon is in my head. Theology can come to be essentially the same thing. It's very easy in theological debates for theology to become something like math, right? I use the right words, the right technical terms. I put them in the right order and use the right conjunctions. Therefore, I am orthodox and I have correct theology. And you, sir, are not orthodox, therefore you have bad theology. And I'm going to argue that my conjunctions are correct and yours are wrong. And then if I feel like, or if people tell me I won the argument, then I will have won a great victory for orthodoxy, and maybe that will help my salvation or something.

But none of that is connected to reality in any way. St. James told us a long time ago, true religion is care for widows and orphans and keeping yourself pure from the world.

Religion is about what you do. Not because the material is all that there is, but because the spiritual things that we talk about on this show, whether it's angels and demons, whether it's the Holy Spirit living through the Church, directing the church. These are not ideas. These are things that are real.

They're real. In addition to the material being real, we're talking about more reality that includes, but is not limited to the material that's where we find our salvation as Orthodox Christians, in our material bodies, in this world, in communities with other people who often smell bad and don't look pretty to us all the time and don't dress the way we think they should and don't say things to us that we always like and don't go along with our great ideas and disagree with us about our brilliant ideas.

That's the arena where all of salvation is worked out. And so we start with, rather than ideas and a theology that exists in the realm of imagination. We start with an understanding of God that's based in reality.

The reality of the churches that exist, the reality of what the Holy Spirit has done through history, the reality of the lives lived by the saints before us. All of that reality is our basis. And then we take that reality and we apply it in reality.

To caring for others, to helping others, to loving others. And it's when we do that that our salvation is furthered, that things fall into place, right? You will never have assurance of your salvation or standing before God based on ideas, because you can't trick yourself that well. You can't get out of having doubts about things through ideas. You can't deceive yourself that well. The only way to get past doubts and the only way to get past fears and the only way to have any kind of assurance of your relationship with Christ is to actually experience it in reality. And the way you do that is concretely by loving others, by participating in worship, by being part of a community, by loving people and being loved, right? And by participating, that's where you're going to find salvation. That's where Christ is going to become real to you. And all of the ideas in the world, right, are ultimately irrelevant in the face of what we actually live and do and practice and experience and become. So those are my final thoughts for this evening.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Amen.

Well, that is our show for today. Thank you very much for listening, everyone. If you didn't get through to us live as we were monitoring our social media channels tonight, we'd still love to hear from you. You can email [e-mail] you can message us at our Facebook page, or you can leave us a [e-mail] LordOfSpirits and.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In a general sense, you should join us for our live broadcast on the second four Thursdays of the month at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific. But the one in two weeks is pre recorded.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So it's like indeed that was the next and if you are on Facebook you can like our page and join our discussion group. You can leave ratings and reviews everywhere. But most importantly please share this show with a friend, tell someone about it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And finally be sure to go to anxiousfaith.com stroke support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air and come back in a month when we'll have a very special guest.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Thank you, good night and God bless you.

[Narrator]

You've been listening to the Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen DeYoung, a listener supported presentation of Ancient Faith Radio and I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders, and the number of them was 10,000 times 10,000 and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and Blessing. Revelation, chapter 5, verses 11 through 12.