Let Me Acts You Something

Summary

The Lord of Spirits Podcast

Episode: Let Me Acts You Something

Hosts: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick & Fr. Stephen DeYoung

Date: May 19, 2026

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Episode Theme & Overview

Main Theme:
This episode explores the intersection of church history, hagiography, and the Orthodox Christian understanding of the "seen and unseen world" by focusing on extra-canonical "Acts" of the Apostles—texts not read as Scripture in the Church, but still preserved and valued for private edification. The fathers walk through four particular "Acts" (Paul, Peter, John, Thomas) associated with the adventures and legacies of the apostles after the events of the Biblical Book of Acts, analyzing their content, historical reliability, cultural impact, and what reading these texts reveals about Orthodox tradition and the communion of saints.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Groundwork: Canon, Tradition, and Extra-Canonical Texts

[03:23-09:37]

• The hosts clarify the terms canonical (read in Church), apocryphal (read privately, valuable but not public liturgical texts), and heretical (to be rejected).
• The Book of Acts is "weird" in the canon: a narrative continuation of St. Luke, not simply a type or shadow like much of the Old Testament, showing saints' deeds as a continuation of Christ's work.
• Emphasis: The existence of the canonical Book of Acts itself upholds the Orthodox doctrine of the communion of saints and the historical and theological value of their stories beyond mere typology.
• Quote:

  “The Book of Acts shows us how to interpret the world, history, and current events...what the saints are doing in every generation, what the church is doing—this is the record of God working in the world” (Fr. Stephen, 19:20)

2. Historical Context for Extra-Canonical "Acts"

[21:58-29:03]

• Not every apostle's deeds were included in the canonical Acts; the Church preserved many other stories, which were remembered, venerated, and recorded in other ways.
• The dismissal of "if it isn't in the Bible, it couldn't or didn't happen" is challenged. Analogies are made with secular history.

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3. The Acts of Paul & Thecla

[29:03–75:49]

• Historical Attestation:
  • Highly valued in antiquity; some churches treated as Scripture, others as edifying apocrypha.
  • St. Hippolytus and Eusebius both reference its events as historical; attested in both the East and West.
• Content Highlights & Analysis:
  • St. Thecla is a key figure: a principal female disciple who evangelizes and baptizes women, modeling early female diaconal ministry.
    • Her insistence on virginity signals an epochal shift in the status and rights of women, introducing consent as a moral concept.
    • Quote:

      “Until the coming of Christianity there was no such concept [as sexual consent].” (Fr. Stephen, 49:46)

    • Thecla’s life and actions fueled venerations and pilgrimages; her story was long known from oral and liturgical tradition, not invented by the text.
  • Paul’s Unflattering Appearance:
    • Earliest description of St. Paul: bald, big nose, unibrow, bow-legged—backed up by iconography; underlines the primacy of his message over personality.
  • Paul and the Lion episode:
    • St. Paul heals a lion, baptizes it; later, when thrown to the lions, the same lion refuses to eat him. This is an adaptation of “Androcles and the Lion,” but with a Christian message: all creation finds its salvation in Christ, in contrast to Gnostic contempt for matter.
  • Strong anti-Gnostic polemic:
    • Midsection features Pauline epistles denouncing cosmic dualism and denying docetism.
  • Martyrdom of Paul:
    • Paul's beheading under Nero, milk pours out of the neck—a symbolic sign of spiritual nourishment.

[Notable Quotes]

• “St. Thecla came from the womb of her mother into reality and existed. That’s the source.” (Fr. Stephen, 45:15)
• “If the answer is yes, [a non-canonical text] is Gnostic, that gives a pretty good explanation for why it’s not in the Bible.” (Fr. Stephen, 26:26)

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4. The Acts of Peter

[80:17–101:00]

• Context & Authority:
  • Written a bit later (late 2nd century Rome), widely circulated and translated.
  • St. Photius and others viewed it nearly as authoritative as Acts of Paul.
• Stories & Key Moments:
  • St. Peter’s daughter is paralyzed to avoid being taken as an underage sex slave by a Roman (she is 10). Modern scholars’ misreadings (as Christian “hatred of sex”) are critiqued and exposed as based on misunderstanding the text and context.
    • Quote:

      “[Peter] is trying to prevent her being trafficked into underage sex slavery… That’s called being a dad.” (Fr. Stephen, 90:01)

  • Peter vs. Simon Magus:
    • Simon, representing Gnosticism, employs sorcery and faked miracles in Rome; Peter prays and Simon is destroyed.
  • The Quo Vadis story:
    • Peter, fleeing persecution, sees Christ entering Rome, realizes he must stay and be martyred, and is crucified upside-down.
  • Multiple early independent sources affirm Peter’s martyrdom in Rome: Clement, Ignatius, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius.

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5. The Acts of John

[102:07–147:38]

• Manuscript Complexity:
  • Original mid-2nd century core with later heretical (Gnostic/Manichean) interpolations.
  • Scholars can distinguish these based on style, content, and theology.
• Key Episodes:
  • Lycomedes and Icons:
    • St. John objects to being venerated in paint alone; instead, urges imitation (used in Seventh Ecumenical Council debates about icons).
  • Collapse of Artemis’ temple:
    • St. John challenges pagans; part of the temple collapses, killing the high priest.
  • Extreme episodes of sin and repentance:
    • John intervenes in situations involving murder, adultery, demon-possession, and sexual violence—scenes emphasize the depth of human brokenness and the reach of Christ’s redemption.
      • The church's function: to bring Christ even into the messiest, most shameful corners of human life.
    • Notable wild stories include raising the dead, exorcising bedbugs, and giving moral lessons about controlling one's thoughts rather than self-mutilation (anti-Originist).
  • John’s Dormition:
    • John digs his own grave, lays down, prays, and is covered—stories consistent with ancient commemoration of the saint (September 26).
• Use at the Seventh Ecumenical Council:
  • Iconoclasts tried to use the Acts of John against icon veneration; the council responded that the text’s Gnostic interpolation made it unreliable; later, Patriarch Nikephoros still had it on his list for private reading.

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6. The Acts of Thomas

[169:09–198:33]

• Tradition & Archaeological Support:
  • Universally attested tradition that Thomas went to India; dismissed by some historically until modern archaeology unearthed coins of King Gundaphar (central figure in the text).
  • Archaeological proofs: 1st–2nd-century churches with Aramaic inscriptions in present-day Pakistan.
    • Quote:

      “…How would they have known about this king to invent this?” (Fr. Stephen, 173:06)

• The Text’s Ambiguity (Gnostic or Not?):
  • Some sections can be read gnostically (esp. about Thomas as Christ’s “twin”), but alternate readings are equally possible—hence valued as edifying, but not read in church.
• Key Episodes:
  • Christ sells Thomas into slavery to a royal official—a parallel with Joseph in Egypt.
  • Thomas disrupts a pagan wedding—can be read as anti-marriage (Gnostic) or anti-idolatry (Orthodox).
  • Builds a heavenly palace with money given to him (by distributing it to the poor); King’s brother dies, sees the palace in heaven, is revived, and converted.
  • Incredible exorcisms and miraculous events, especially involving women delivered from demons and sexual exploitation.
  • Encounters a “Naga” or serpent-being who is identified as the devil; the demon is ultimately destroyed.
  • A talking donkey descended from Balaam's ass assists Thomas.
  • Hymn of the Pearl at the end: ambiguous symbolism about a son sent for a precious pearl, detoured in Egypt, and returning after rediscovering his mission—can be read both gnostically and in an Orthodox (parable/repentance) way.

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Introduction/Setting up Canon, Acts, Apocrypha: 01:05–15:43
• Why Acts Exists in the New Testament: 09:37–18:00
• Non-Canonical Acts & Church Tradition: 22:03–29:03
• Acts of Paul & Thecla: 29:03–75:49
• Acts of Peter: 80:17–101:00
• Acts of John & Icon Controversy: 102:07–147:38
• Acts of Thomas (Apostle to India): 169:09–198:33
• How Orthodox Discerns and Uses Apocrypha: 149:14–159:59
• Synthesis & Spiritual Takeaway: 207:22–215:49

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Notable Quotes & Moments

On the Authority & Use of Apocrypha

• “A book is either read publicly in your church or it’s not. You can’t really debate that. It is or it isn’t.” (Fr. Stephen, 156:04)
• “Most of the time it probably is truly historically true... But it’s still not the right question. If you’re so busy asking whether this is dogmatically true or not, you’re missing why these stories are written.” (Fr. Andrew, 199:13)

On Saints and Historical Tradition

• “No one would say, ‘the few things we know about Herod from the Bible, those are true, but all the stuff about Herod in the Roman records... gotta take that with a grain of salt.’ That’s ridiculous.” (Fr. Stephen, 26:28)
• On Quo Vadis:

  “He sees Christ carrying his cross... and Christ says he is going to be crucified again in the city of Rome. Peter realizes if he leaves, he’ll be repeating his denial of Christ... so he returns and is crucified upside down.” (Fr. Stephen, 98:56)

On Extraordinary Hagiography

• “It’s just going to sound like St. John randomly wandering into episodes of Law & Order SVU, like, halfway through... He stops the guy, and the young man... had been sleeping with another man's wife... Now, having killed his father, he was now running with the sickle to find the woman and murder both of them and then take his own life... [then] castrates himself... flings his severed genitals at her.” (Fr. Stephen, 133:47)
• On the Naga/serpent in Thomas:

  “He identifies himself as the serpent from the Garden of Eden, the angel who led the other angels in seducing women to create the Nephilim, and the spirit that possessed Judas. So basically, he’s the devil.” (Fr. Stephen, 189:14)

Final Spiritual Takeaway

[207:22-215:49]

• “How did Christ come to the city of Rome? He came in the person of St. Peter. How did Christ come to India? He came in the person of St. Thomas... For those people to find salvation, they’re going to find it in and through the Church... and you are the designated member of the Church assigned to them.” (Fr. Stephen, 213:10)

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Flow, Tone, and Listener Takeaways

• The episode is both scholarly and playful, with running jokes about historical accuracy, denominational quirks, and frequent asides on the risks of reading “the wrong” kind of apocryphal literature.
• Several calls focus on how to rightly interpret and use these texts in spiritual life; the priests are unanimous in upholding patristic guidance: these are for private edification, not church proclamation; their value is in edifying, not dogmatic, truth.
• The wildness of these stories underlines a major Orthodox insight: the lives of the saints are sites of God’s interaction with the world, and the tradition is richer, more complex, and more full of wonder than either skeptical Protestant minimalism or narrow literalism allows.
• The distinction between worship (due to God alone) and veneration (due to saints, icons, relics) is shown to be ancient, not a medieval innovation.

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Conclusion

Usefulness for new listeners:
This episode provides a lively, deep, and at times startling window into how the Orthodox Church views historical tradition, hagiography, and the mysterious workings of God through His saints—even outside the canonical scriptures. If you want to understand how Orthodoxy handles tradition, story, and the “seen and unseen,” this discussion delivers both wisdom and delight.

For further reading, the hosts recommend Fr. Stephen DeYoung's book, Apocrypha, and remind listeners that the ultimate use of such stories is to form us more fully in the life of Christ—the real “Lord of Spirits”—through His body, the Church.

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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 and 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 Fr. Stephen DeYoung host this live call in show focused on enchantment in creation. This 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]

Hey. Greetings, dragon slayers, giant killers and detonators of demon serpents. Christ has risen. You're listening to the 139th episode of the Lord of Spirits podcast. I'm Father Andrew Stephen Damick, coming to you from the bustling North Carolinian metropolis of Raleigh for the first time from the brand new Three Martyrs Studio, the veritable Versailles of vocal vigor, the palace of podcasting.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So when you say the Versailles of vocal vigor.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there's literally a ballroom upstairs called the Marie Antoinette Ballroom. Like, I'm not even joking.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Did you come to some sort of agreement to use the space?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Something like that, yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you realize the Treaty of Versailles was bungled and resulted in millions of deaths in the Second World War?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's true.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's true. I don't know why you'd want to invoke that kind of dark history here at the beginning of the show.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, my last location was perched precariously over top of a disused gateway to the underworld. So maybe here I'm supposed to stand athwart the guillotine.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, there's no. I'm not talking. Okay. French Revolution.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's all one, Father. It's all one.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

World War II, mid 20th century. I'm just telling you we have deeper issues here than just, you know, you making an untoward reference comparing Sing Swing,

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Savor the Sting, Madame Guillotine, comparing your

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

new studio and the agreement, confound it. To one of the most regrettable bunglings in 20th century world history. But anyway.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, I mean. Yes, well, you, Father Steven DeYoung are knee deep in the swampy muck of Lafayette, Louisiana. So is that better? Probably at least less deadly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You could try and connect it to the War of 1812 and the Battle of New Orleans, I guess, somehow, but it's going to be a strain.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep, yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, we are a much bigger debacle.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We are. You know, other things happen at Versailles, Father. Not. Not all of it is treaties.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Not good ones, really.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay, go ahead.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Anyway, anyway, we are live. We're live. And that means that Mike Hadouken Degan will be taking your calls starting in the second half. So have you ever wondered what happened to the apostles after the Acts of the Apostles? It turns out that there are various texts from the early church which tell stories about the apostles and what they did next. And. And some of them are pretty wild. And we all know that wild stories are what you come here for. So that's what you're going to get tonight. But first, we're going to go all the way back to. Well, not Genesis.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Where are we?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, we could.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Why not?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We could. We could go Genesis or Stone Age or something. If you really want to. I could figure out a way to do that. And yeah, the wildness of the stories will probably end up being good news for those of you who are upset about the number of ads that this show has on YouTube, because I'm pretty sure we're getting demonetized with this one on about eight different counts.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You're going to give poor Simon heartburn.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. People are going to be clipping this and sending it to our bishops. Yeah, that's what I predict.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right. I hope so. I hope so. So where are we starting if it's not Genesis?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, we will start with the canonical acts of the apostles.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because what we're going to be talking about most of tonight are non canonical acts of various and sundry apostles. So there's, of course, just the one book, the Acts of the Apostles, in the New Testament that picks up, well, really begins with a retelling of Christ's ascension and then moves on in history from there. Does not move that far in terms of consecutive time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then that is the end of narrative, really, for the New Testament. I mean, technically, there are little bits of narrative surrounding St. John's vision in Revelation, but that's stretching it to call.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And there's some clues from St. Paul's epistles, but it's not a lot.

[Caller]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He refers to things that happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in terms of actual, just narrative storytelling that's, that's sort of the last book. But included among the various non canonical texts related to the New Testament is a whole genre of acts of the apostles that are compiled from traditions about different apostles after. Take place mostly after the book of Acts, as you mentioned, in at least one case there may be a little bit of overlap time wise, but we're going to be talking about four of those books this evening. There are some others and there are some books that sort of blur the line genre wise. Right. For example, there are a lot of Gnostic texts that purport to be written by various apostles that will have like some narrative elements about that apostle as well as stuff about Jesus or kooky visions or other Gnostic nonsense in them. So there's that kind of thing. There's a whole genre of literature ascribed to St. James, the brother of the Lord in particular.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, and that's not what this episode is about. People do get excited about that stuff, but.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, but that's another set of stuff. Some of that is Gnostic and some of it isn't. So there's. There is other stuff there. So the four texts we're going to talk about tonight do not exhaust everything that could be shoehorned into this category. But the four texts we're going to mainly focus on are four texts that have historical importance as indicated by the number of copies we still have, for example, and the number of translations into different languages we have that they played some part in. One of them in particular played a part in one of the ecumenical councils. All of these four are found on St. Nikophorus, the confessor of Constantinople. His list of texts in the texts that are not read publicly in the Church, but are good to be read privately. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Which is apocrypha. That's what apocrypha are.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, it means. Does it mean secret or hidden?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It means private, esoteric, secret wisdom.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. And so that's all the way the beginning of the 9th century. The church still considered these texts to be worthwhile reading and to contain important traditions. A lot of these texts contain the earliest written version of some of these traditions that still exists. We'll get into that. Why we're phrasing it that way in a little bit, but with traditions that are also attested to elsewhere outside of these texts. But. So that's why we're talking about. That's why these four texts in particular, I think are especially worth talking about compared to some of the others. But so to sort of frame this Whole discussion. We kind of want to start with the canonical book of the Acts of the Apostles. And the Acts of the Apostles is kind of a weird book in terms of the New Testament canon.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If you stop to think about it. So let's all pause for a moment of thought. No,

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

a moment of silence, please.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Let's all think about it. So, for example, it's in our Epistle book or the Apostle. The Book of the Apostle, the Apostolicon or Apostolikon Apostolos. It is in there, whatever fake accent you want to affect, but it's of a different, fundamentally different genre than everything else in that book. Everything else in that book is an Epistle. That's why we so often refer to it as the Epistle book. Right? Yeah, because that's the vast majority of what's in there. But the Book of Acts is also in there. And if you've been attending liturgy since Pascha, you have heard readings from the Acts of the Apostles during the Epistle time. But genre wise, in terms of the genre of text, it's basically the same genre as the Gospels.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's narrative. What happened next?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And more to the point, it's volume two of a two volume work with the Gospel of St. Luke.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Now, did Luke and Acts ever circulate together, like as a single text that we know of?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They did. In fact, the variations that we have are variations across Luke and Acts. So there's what's called Western Luke, Acts, that's a whole set of text variants, but they're spread across both the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts. So. Yeah, they didn't circulate independently, as far as we could tell.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Nevertheless, we have liturgically severed Acts from Luke functionally. And that's because even though, genre wise, it's the same genre as St. Luke's gospel, obviously St. Luke's gospel has a different, at least on the surface, main character. So the main character very directly and on the surface of St. Luke's gospel is Christ.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Now you could ultimately say the same thing about the Book of Acts. We'll get to that in a minute. But that's less on the surface. The person who's being talked about just on a surface reading of the Book of Acts, if you read it out loud for most of the Book of acts is St. Paul, but not all of it. Just like the last two thirds or so and the first third, there's a whole bunch of different people, St. Peter, St. Philip, St. Stephen. Right. That are sort of in the foreground with Christ in the background all the way through this is also. It's kind of a challenging book to the way many of us may have been taught to read the Scriptures. So, for example, one very common view of the Old Testament that you will hear is that, well, the Old Testament is just all of these shadows and types that are pointing us to Jesus. Right. And implied within that is that sort of, oh, well, now that we have Jesus and we have the Gospels, Christ has revealed all these things clearly. Now the Old Testament and the types and the shadows are kind of obsolete because now we have the fullness and everything.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Soft Marcionism.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And so then when you read the Old Testament narratives, right. They're narratives about people other than Jesus of Nazareth. Again, at least on the surface, we could say it's all ultimately about him. But on the surface, right. We're reading about King David or reading about King Saul or Ezra or whomever. But they are seen as being a type of. They point us to Christ. So they'll talk about, you know, David and Goliath in terms of David as, you know, the future king, we represent of Christ, Goliath representing, you know, the devil or the enemies of God. And. Right. And this kind of typological reading. I'm not saying there's something wrong with that kind of typological reading, but the idea that that's all that's going on there. That's all that's going on there. And so that the details of the information and even the people themselves, like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Moses and whomever from the Old Testament are now sort of obsolete. Because we just, you know what, we just need Christ. Right? We have Christ. Christ is God himself. We don't need these images and stuff. Kind of then invokes the question, so why the Book of Acts? Why am I reading about St. Peter and St. Philip and St. Paul?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. If you got everything in the Gospels that you need from Jesus,

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

you know. Right. And I mean, the epistles are clearly talking about. Right. St. Paul is writing about Jesus. And so just the mere fact of the existence of Acts, of the apostles in the canon says a lot about the idea of the communion of saints, the importance of saints in their own right. Not just in how we can allegorically or otherwise get from them to Christ, that God is glorified in his saints.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, it does say that in.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Read that somewhere. Yeah. Right. And so when you see Abraham, you see Moses, when you see these, St. Paul, St. Peter, you see the transformation of their life in Christ. The great deeds they did in the name of Christ, how they preach the gospel for Christ. Right. That's not. Instead of reading about Christ or instead of thinking about Christ. Right. That's something that leads you to give glory to Christ. This is subtle Plato brain. Why are you reading about St. Paul when you could be reading about Jesus? You could be reading the red letters. Why are you reading the black letters, which there's a basic illogic to once you move past Plato.

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So we're talking about Acts in particular. So that's in general. Right. That's something that Acts. The existence of Acts in the canon helps us see regarding how to read narrative passages of the Bible outside of the Gospels. But in terms of the Book of Acts in particular, you kind of find out the most important theme right at the beginning if you read closely, because St. Luke says that in his first book, O Theophilus, he wrote about all that Christ began to do and to teach. And right there you have the setup for what he's trying to communicate with Acts that the church, particularly through her ordained leaders. Right. But the church, what the church is doing on earth is the continuation of the life of Christ. It's the continuation of Christ's deeds and it's a continuation of Christ's teaching in the world.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, it's. It's just simply the narrative form of referring to the church as the body of Christ, which is not this metaphor. You know, the church is Christ working in the world.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And that's why. Right from the beginning. Right. What do you immediately see? You see the 11 apostles who are left of the 12 doing miracles. And what miracles are they doing? They're doing the same miracles Christ did in St. Luke's Gospel.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, Jesus even said that they would do greater things, but they're always

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

saying Christ has healed you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, yes, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So it continues through the church. Right. The church is the means through which God is acting in the world. And so this, then the Book of Acts also, in addition to the sort of retroactive thing we talked about before in terms of helping us see how we ought to read the Old Testament narratives, this also gives us a forward looking for how we ought to read and understand things like church history and hagiography.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

How do we interpret the events of the Council of Nicaea? Because I don't know if you've been on the Internet, but there's a lot of ways that gets interpreted, some of which have little relation to the historical facts, some of which are closer. But the Bible doesn't just teach us, you know, our Protestant friends are good about saying, well, the Bible shows us how to interpret the Bible. And I was just making that kind of argument. Right. I was saying the book of Acts shows us something about how we ought to interpret the Old Testament. They wouldn't be so happy with the conclusion I came to, but they, you know, they'd have to, I think, endorse the methodology at least. But it also teaches us how to understand the world and history and current events, future events. Right. How we interpret what's going on. And the church has frankly always done this. This is why we start getting people writing down church history. Yeah, right. They're not just writing it down because, hey, here are some fun facts about this guy you may remember from the canonical book of Acts. Bet you didn't know Thomas went to India. It's true. Right? That's not right. That's not what people are interested in. The reason they're interested in writing it down is what the saints are doing in every generation, what the church is doing in every generation. This is the record of God working in the world in each generation. Because we believe as Christians that there has never been a generation in which God was not at work in the world. And so good church history, real church history, the church's own history, the church's self understanding of history is always from that perspective, is always from the perspective of recognizing and preserving for posterity what God is doing in the world at any given time in any given place, which is a very different understanding of history than the one we get from 19th century Germany. I hope no one ever takes a time machine back to 19th century Germany and loses it because I'm going to have a lot of angry people showing up on my.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's been a while since you've mentioned 19th century Germans on this podcast. I guess we're due for it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They're going to be very well dressed and they're all going to have canes to beat me with, but they're not going to be dressed for the Louisiana weather. That will be my advantage. So the Acts of the Apostles, obviously, and this really is obvious, right? Or should be, doesn't record everything that happened with every apostle, even during the time period it covers. So aside to, like, references to the 11 that are especially concentrated at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, there's a whole bunch of apostles who we never even see specifically singled out. Like St. Simon the Zealot. Yeah, St. Bartholomew. He's doing stuff, preaching. He's, you know, we're kind of told generally that the 11 are doing these things, but we don't get specific details. Same thing with the women disciples. So the Theotokos appears at the beginning of the Book of Acts. And if that's news to you, especially to some of our Protestant listeners, why is that news to you? You're sole scriptura. You're supposed to know these things. Read the Bible, get with the program. Theotokos appears a few times at the beginning with other women disciples. But I mean, we don't get details of, like Joanne, St. Joanna, St. Mary Magdalene. Right. Exactly where they went and what they were doing in. In the Book of Acts itself. So the Book of Acts kind of has its own through line. Just like St. John points out in his Gospel, there's not enough books of the world to write down every single thing Jesus said and did. There's not enough books of the world to write down every single thing that every one of the apostles said and did. So Acts of the Apostles is not claiming to do that. Acts of the Apostles is being very deliberately selective. And so the primary through line with the book, the Acts of the Apostles, is geographic. Christ says to the disciples, as I said should, that they're going to be his witnesses in Judea and then Samaria and then to the ends of the earth. And so the movement of the Acts of the Apostles as a book is about the Gospel going from Jerusalem to Rome, the capital of the empire. And so it follows first the eleven and the other disciples and apostles in Jerusalem, then St. Philip going to Samaria, and then St. Paul going out to the ends of the earth. Right. Ultimately to Rome. And so all of these other things are going on. They're going on with the other apostles and other things, but we're not getting all the details in this particular book. And so all of that reality out there of what the other apostles were doing, it's not that that was just instantly forgotten by everyone. Oh, well, it didn't end up in the canonical New Testament. So I guess no one knows. Everyone just forgot. That, of course, is ridiculous. But sometimes you will catch people, especially some of our Protestant friends, talking that way. Someone in my own family said, well, the Bible doesn't say where St. Paul was buried, so how do you know? And my response was, the Bible doesn't say where our grandparents were buried, but we both know.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's not where either of us lives now either, but we know where it is. And, you know, we can tell the next generation of the young relatives, and they can tell the next generation. Does it have to be the Bible? It's this idea that, like, facts that aren't recorded in the Bible, some somehow instantly become unknown is kind of weird. And, and no one would say it about secular history.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like, who was, who was the Roman emperor after Tiberius? I, I don't know. It's not in the New Testament.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And he claims the contrary. Must be, must be false.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Or at least they're fallible.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

How can you possibly know for sure it's not in the New Testament? I mean, no one would say that. That'd be ridiculous. Right. Like, so why, why is that different for a quote unquote biblical character, which is itself a term that's a little fraught like. No, this is an actual existing historical human being whom the Bible mentions. That doesn't move them into some weird category of being. Right. Where, you know, the, the few things we know about Herod from the Bible, those are true. But all the stuff about Herod in the Roman records, all the inscriptions he left, all the building that. Yeah, gotta take that with a grain of salt. That's all true. Right. That really doesn't make any logical sense if you think about it very hard for more than a couple of seconds. But the reason we're bringing that up here is not to sort of bash on certain popular discourse from some of our Protestant friends. It's because we're now about to talk about a bunch of texts that are not in the New Testament that contain information and traditions about different apostles who do appear in the New Testament, but the particular details are not in the New Testament, but we hold them to be nonetheless true. And so again, if you want to say to me, hey, a fact appears in the Bible that means 100% it's true. I'm good with that. I'm good with that. But if you're going to say to me a fact doesn't appear in the Bible, therefore it is false, now I'm going to be like, what?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, yes, we don't have a detailed account of St. Paul's martyrdom in the New Testament, but we don't have any account of his death in the New Testament. Does that mean he didn't die? See what I'm saying? Right. Like, we know he died. Every piece of information we have from the ancient world says he was martyred and martyred in a certain way at a certain time in a certain place. Why would we not believe any of it?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like, it just doesn't make sense. But we'll get into specific things as we. As we go through some of these. So the first one we want to talk about is probably the most important one of the. One of the four we're going to talk about in that it is the one that has been most broadly considered to be historically reliable. Very few scholars, even like secular scholars, like wildly secular scholars, now basically consider the Acts of Paul that we're about to be talking about to be elements of it, I should say, to be broadly historically reliable.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. They probably wouldn't go in for the miraculous stuff.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right, broadly. And. And when I say that, like, there is a weird irony to it, because I can think of at least one major New Testament scholar who thinks that the. Some of the stuff in the first part of the Acts of Paul is more historically reliable than he thinks major portions of the New Testament are.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Huh.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So there you go. That's weird. But, yeah, now there's an agenda behind that that'll become apparent here as we go on. But. So the Acts of Paul, sometimes the whole book gets called the Acts of Paul and Thecla, but properly speaking, there are sort of subsections of the book, the Acts of Paul, and the first section is, properly speaking, the Acts of Paul and Thecla. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Because she doesn't show up in the rest.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, yeah. And so if you want to be technically correct, which is the best kind of correct, then you say the book is called the Acts of Paul and the first part is called the Acts of Paul and Thecla. So as late as Eusebius. So Eusebius is in the fourth century A.D. eusebius says that at his time, there were some churches still existing, like local churches, that considered the Acts of Paul to be canonical.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, so they were reading it out loud in church.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They would read from it publicly.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. You know, a reading from the Acts of the Holy Apostle Paul.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that gives you an idea. So when I say. Right, it was broadly considered reliable in the ancient church, like, to that level, it's not just that everybody thinks, oh, yeah, that's a book to be read privately. There were people who thought it was part of the New Testament.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So since technically correct is the best kind of correct, technically speaking, in some places at certain times, this was a canonical book.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Because it was treated that way. Certain churches. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So it would be in the category of like the Deuterocanon of the Old Testament, where some local churches would do public readings from those books and others would not.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So Saint Hippolytus So we're talking sec. Late second century.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

References events that are recorded in the Acts of Paul as just events that happened. Meaning he's not referencing the text, he's just referring to things as historical fact that our earliest written account of is in the Acts of Paul.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that, that gives you an idea that's, that's part of the basis for. When I say historically reliable. And we'll find this with some of the other texts we talk about tonight too. There are other places and people who refer to these events that we first hear about in terms of surviving texts we first hear about in these books. But they're also attested to in these other outside places as being just events that happened. The first and frankly only really super negative thing we have about the AX of Paul comes from Tertullian. But it's not so much that he has a beef with the text as he has a beef with the existence of Saint Thecla.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, Tertullian definitely had problems with women.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

To put it mildly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He did not have a balanced view specifically in the text, Saint Thecla. And as you may know, even if you've never touched the Acts of Paul in your life, especially if you're, you're going to an Antiochian church. Right. You may have just heard the life of Saint Thecla. Right. And stuff and not know anything about the Acts of Paul, but know things about St. Thecla. And that's where Tertullian's beef was. St. Thecla is a disciple of St. Paul is recorded as having preached to and baptized other women. So Tertullian had a problem with the idea that a woman would be allowed to preach to anyone or baptize anyone.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean this is basically what the role of the deaconess in the early church was.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If, if you know anything about what deaconesses actually did in the early church. Right. Getting away from the present day nonsense. What deaconesses actually did. This is who are mentioned in the ddk. Who are mentioned. Right. We know existed in the early church. What they did was preach and teach to other women and participate in the baptisms of other women. Right. That's sort of exactly what they did. So from the perspective of the early church. Right. There's kind of no problem with St. Thecla. Tertullian just was, you know, he left the church for the He Man Woman haters club. No girls allowed. And except Montanus's two prophetesses that he traveled with. But we won't, you know, hey, we don't throw any more shade there. Less said the better. But this text, for example, when you're dealing with any. With any text. So this. This is a text from the early second century.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the early one. Hundreds.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And written in the western part of Asia Minor. And when you hear western Asia Minor, when you're reading about ancient texts and you're reading about this kind of stuff, Western Asia Minor, the. You should think Ephesus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, western Asia. I mean, Asia Minor is kind of basically Turkey. Modern Turkey.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Roughly. I. I think I also wanted to say, by the way, that, you know, when you're thinking early second century, when you're talking about that, we should remember that, like, the last book of the canonical New Testament is written in what, the 90s, the late. The late first century.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you're talking around 95, 96. Revelation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So. So these. This is a text that's from within just decades, Just a few decades of the death of the last apostle.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. So Ephesus gets destroyed later on, essentially, in terms of church polity, gets replaced by Constantinople, once it's founded in that part of the world as the major Christian center. But if you read the canonical book of acts, right. When St. Paul gives his farewell address, he gives his farewell address to the presbyters at Ephesus, Ephesus is the hub. St. John goes to Ephesus with the Theotokos saint. Mary Magdalene goes to Ephesus. Right. This is the. In that part of the world, Ephesus was the hub, to the point that assuming you're going to an Eastern rite Orthodox church, the liturgy you celebrate, every time you celebrate liturgy is a subspecies of the Ephesian liturgy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, and if history had turned out a little bit differently, Ephesus might well have been one of the pentarchy or hexarchy or whatever. Really?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So Ephesus, when you were talking about this period in history, this very early period in church history, Ephesus is right there with Antioch and Alexandria and Jerusalem and Rome is still getting started.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Really? They're late comers. They're little brothers anyway. Not, sorry, Roman Catholic listeners.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But. So that's. That's where it comes from. And they would have reason, as we were just saying, they would have reason to have living memory of information about St. Paul's life that hadn't necessarily been written down. St. Paul spent a lot of time in Ephesus and around Ephesus, and so they would have access to these traditions to compile them. And put them into a text. But when you're looking at any text. Yeah, go ahead.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I was just going to say again, just for reference. Right. So here we are in 2026. You and I were in our 20s, starting in the mid-90s.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And so, I mean, the original mid-90s, that's when St. John is running the apocalypse and dying. And then these texts are basically from like the equivalent of now, but you know, 2,000 years ago. So I mean, I just want to kind of emphasize that for people like this is the level of closeness in time. There's a lot of living people who would have remembered some of this stuff.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes. St. Paul was martyred about 50 years, give or take, before this was written.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay. So do you think you could put

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

together that's when Monty Python and the Holy Grail came out?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, well, 51 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. But so do you think if you wanted to, you could put together a pretty good history of the year 1976? Right. Just by interviewing people who were alive at the time? Right. Obviously, yes. Right. Obviously. This is within living memory. There were still people alive who had met St. Paul at the time this was written. Yeah. This isn't some vast gulf of time for all these legends and weird things to grow up.

[Caller]

Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But whenever we're talking about a second century text and even an early third century text that's not canonical, you always end up having to answer the question, is this agnostic text? Because that is a big divide in terms of non canonical texts written during this period. Even when I was, when we were introducing this a few minutes ago, when I was talking about the various St James literature, I said some of it's Gnostic and some of it's not. Right. So we have to ask that question, and is it Gnostic? If the answer is yes, that gives you a pretty good explanation right off the bat about why it's not the Bible. But in this case and in many other cases, the answer is no, it is not. In fact, the text at many points is very deliberately and directly anti Gnostic. So the text and pro. And therefore probably it seems that the major reason for writing down these traditions, it wasn't just like, hey man, we got a lot of people here who knew St. Paul and knew some interesting tidbits about him. Let's get that written down before these people die off. That doesn't seem to be what occasioned the compilation of this text. What seems to have occasioned the compilation of this text is actually the rise of Gnosticism which they saw as opposed to the gospel that St. Paul had preached to them. And so they're wanting to clearly set out here's who St. Paul was and here's what he taught over against these newfangled gnostic so and so's coming around with their, with their nonsense.

[Caller]

So

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

you could broadly divide the text of the Acts of Paul into either three or four parts. The middle part you could consider just to be a middle part, or you consider it to be two different things. We'll get to that in a second. But the first part, as we mentioned, is the Acts of Paul and Thecla because Saint Thecla takes up a lot of the quote unquote screen time, as it were, right. In this part of the text. And so Saint Thecla, the Acts of Paul, is not our only source about the existence and life of Saint Thecla by a long shot. So obviously there are Syrian traditions surrounding the figure of Saint Thecla, the monastery founded at a significant place in her life that we'll get to here in a minute when we get into the text, feast day pilgrimages surrounding her. Right. That go deeply back into Christian history. One of the ways we know that this goes way back into Christian history is that we also have in written form Saint Evgenia, who's living in Rome. So the other side of the empire, the other side of the inhabited world. In AD185, we have talking about St. Thecla as a role model for Christian women.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, wow. And I mean all this just kind of underlines a point we've made a bunch of times. But I think it's one worth reiterating is that when we look at one of these texts from the early church, these texts are not the source of the traditions about whoever they're talking about. They are a witness to these traditions. It's not like there's suddenly this text appears out of nowhere and then suddenly people say, oh yes, those are the things that St. Paul did. No, that doesn't make any sense. That doesn't make any sense. You know, this is not historical fiction. This is a collection of traditions being written down. And this happens to be the text, the earliest text that we have that is extant. Because remember, most everything from, you know, most written stuff from the ancient world is gone. Most of it's gone. You know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So this is just the earliest text that we have that bears witness to these traditions. Yes, like the, the, the events and the occur before the written stuff. Just like the Gospels. Right. Jesus does all those things. And then later on you get these apostles writing down what he did.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes. So Saint Thecla does not come from the Acts of Paul.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Saint Thecla came from the womb of her mother into reality and existed on the earth and lived and did things. That's the source. That's the original, ultimate source. The information about who she is and what she did made its way down to us many centuries later through various written and oral means. But this is, this is important because the way you express it, when you say that something came from a text, you are already implying that the text invented it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That the text made it up. And you shouldn't even use that language for the same reason when you're talking about the Bible, by the way. That comes from the Bible. Well, no, that comes from reality. And the Bible is maybe, you know, the primary place where that information was preserved for us down to the present day. But that's not where it comes from. The revelation is Christ, not the Bible. The Bible is where that revelation that came in Christ is recorded. Very important distinction. So. But yeah, so by AD185, knowledge of Saint Thecla in some detail about her life had literally made it from one end of the Roman Empire to the other, completely apart from this text, as far as we can tell. Now, in the text, St. Thecla is one of St. Paul's first converts at the city of Iconium when he goes there on his first missionary journey. So this is kind of an overlap with the canonical acts of the Apostles. And she follows him. Then she travels, which is one of the people of the several people who travels with him on his journey. As we mentioned, she evangelizes and assists with the baptisms of women, as St. Paul is preaching primarily to men. Once again, this is the first century. Synagogues were not integrated across gender lines. So this is what we would expect. This is what, this is what would be normal. Now, one of the very important things in terms of how this text presents Saint Thecla is, and this will become a motif in hagiography of particularly female saints and martyrs going forward, is her decision to maintain her virginity, which in the ancient world, in the time that she lived, was her deciding not to marry.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which that's not a thing in the first.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's not a thing that women were allowed to do.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It was just unthinkable.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But within the text, she is allowed to do it because she's making that decision in line with things we see St. Paul saying.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In his canonical epistles, so that she could devote herself to serving Christ entirely, devote her whole life, continue traveling with St. Paul. Rather than being married, staying in one place, raising children, she wants to continue to travel, help spread the Gospel, serve him, serve Christ with her whole life. Now, that may not sound that crazy to us, right. But as Father Andrew pointed out, number one, that was a thing you were not allowed to do in the ancient world. Even in the ancient Jewish world, women did not have that right to say no to marriage for that or any reason. But also the Christian embrace of that idea. This is the beginning of the whole, of the development of the whole idea of sexual consent as it has now come to exist in the modern world.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And regardless of what you think the current state of that discourse is, until right here, until the coming of Christianity, there was no such concept. It is very difficult to separate in ancient stories and ancient narratives, even when you're going through the Torah and some of the commandments to separate consensual sexual relations from sexual assault. So when you see the word here goes, here goes our modernization, I'll just kill it right now. When you see the word rape in ancient texts, like ancient Greek texts, there are several texts, famous paintings and stuff, the rape of this female character. Rape is not a concept that had something to do with consent. Rape was having sexual relations with someone either surreptitiously, like secretly, like because they were married to someone else, you were sneaking around or under false pretenses, you were pretending to be a different person.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, and even the, I mean, even the, the. The English word rape within, I mean, literally just within our lifetimes, it used to mean. I mean, it's often had the sexual sense to it, but it used to also have a very strong sense of just meaning to carry some to carry, especially carry a woman off, you know, like. So, like the rape of the Sabine. Yeah, the rape of the Sabine women was not what we would now call rape. It was carrying. Now it was carrying them off to forcibly marry them, but it was carrying them off, you know, and so taking

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

them from their father without paying the dowry.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right. I mean, I remember. And I mean, just to illustrate that this change in English anyways has happened relatively recently. The longest running off Broadway musical for a long time was a show called the Fantasticks. And in the Fantasticks, there was a song called Rape, and it was not about sexual assault, it was about carrying a woman off. And. But recent productions of that show no longer include that song. And they've changed. Yeah. In fact, now the song is called Abductions and they just. A completely different song, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Nirvana can't even sing about it on snl. But. But, yeah. So the idea of consent comes from this idea that comes with Christianity in particular, that women have the right to not get married in order to dedicate their lives to serving the Lord. And so this is a. This, this is of. I mean, obviously if this is sinking in, this is of massive cultural importance. This is. This is like a watershed in the development of what we think of as. As culture and morality today. And it's something that comes from Christianity and it's why. And then we'll move on, but it's why anybody who tells you that Christianity is misogynistic, it acts like the pagan world loved women pre Christianity. You should just laugh in their face and watch. Yeah, it's exactly the opposite of true because they just. They know nothing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. It reminds me of this clip I just saw of Sean McDowell and friend of the show Bart Ehrman, where Sean McDowell was trying to argue that there is inbuilt into humanity this kind of basic moral compass. Oh, yeah. And friend of the show Bart Ehrman, telling him he was full of it and that almost all the stuff he thought was part of the general moral compass was actually a product of Christianity. It was just amazing. So, wow.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Someone needs to be.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is one of the reasons this is. This is one of the. Yeah. Barn Urban's new book is like virtually a sequel to Dominion. So we also have in the Acts of Paul, our earliest physical description of St. Paul. I referenced this in my book on St. Paul, and I'm sure I've referenced it on the show before. This is where it actually is, is in the Acts of Paul. And again, this is about circa 50 years after his death. And we have good reason to believe that this physical description is accurate for I think two primary reasons. Number one, it matches our earliest iconography of St. Paul. And number two, it is very unflattering. So, like, if you were going to make up something about this figure, like the Acts of Paul, they love St. Paul. They think St. Paul's great. They want you to know how great an apostle St. Paul was, and then they describe him physically and it's super unflattering. You probably got to figure they're being honest, right? Like, yeah, they could have cut him a break otherwise. So to give you an idea of how unflattering, they said he had really large watery eyes, a very large pronounced nose, his eyebrows met in the middle Unibrow. Yes. He was nearly completely bald. He was bandy legged, meaning like bow legged. And he walked awkwardly. He had big knobby knees.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Poor guy.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You can imagine some of that was the result of being, you know, beaten and shipwrecked and all the stoned and all the things he went through. But again, and if based on these other factors, we consider this to be broadly accurate, it makes sense of a lot of things he says in his canonical epistles, like talking about how there was nothing about him in terms of his physical presence. Right. And rhetorical skill that would in and of itself win people over to his cause. Right. He's not exactly an Adonis. This is, you know, this is not somebody who. He's not. He's not Saul from the Old Testament, who is a head taller than everybody else. Right. And like, yeah. Strapping. And, you know, everyone wants him to be king. Saul of Tarsus was kind of the other end of the physical spectrum. And so. But that, again, shows you it's his message, it's what he's saying, it's what he's preaching that is important. And that was captivating people. We then get the story of St. Thecla's suitors, who, given that she wasn't allowed to say no in the ancient world, didn't want to take no for an answer, terms of marrying her, and so chased her to a large rock, which rock opened up in front of her and hid her in an area with a spring of water. And you can still go there, kept safe. And that is Malula. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Mala. Father Mala.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Caller]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Fake. Fake your accent. That's why. I'm just saying, I'm a white boy. I don't have that accent.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know. Well, I am also white, but I. I did marry into a vast Middle Eastern world.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that's.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But yeah, you can go there. It's there in Syria.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Saying it's an affectation. I'm just saying, you know, it's not something I do.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's an adaptation.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So. So that. That is still there, still a place that you could go.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then the last bit. And this is not exactly historical fiction. It's definitely not historical fact in the modern sense either. The last bit of the first part of the Acts of Paul tells a story that is very clearly borrowed. It's a story that everyone at the time, everyone in the early second century had heard before. Probably a lot of our listeners have heard before, even if they've never read the Acts of Paul. And that is St. Paul meets a lion and this lion has an injured paw. Yeah. That's making him upset. So St. Paul helps him with the injured paw, helps him out, heals him, then preaches the gospel to him and baptizes the lion. There's a.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There's a twist, as one does, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And they go their separate ways. And then later on, St. Paul gets thrown to the lions for preaching the Gospels. And guess who one of the lions turns out to be?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's the Christian lion.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's the Christian lion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Unfortunately for St. Paul, that doesn't mean he just blesses his meal. He refrains from eating. St. Paul being a Christian lion. It's sort of like that scene from Ragnarok with the Hulk. But so. So he doesn't. Now, those of you with a little bit of. Even a little bit of classical education may. May recognize the story of Androcles and the lion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like, pretty instantly. And you're not wrong. You're not wrong. So this is taking a story that would have been very. This is not plagiarism, because all of the original readers would be familiar with this story.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, I mean, this would be like if I was writing a story and I insert into the story I'm writing that the main character gets bitten by a radioactive spider and can now stick to walls. Okay. Plagiarism would not be a correct charge because it'd be like, dude, I know everybody has heard of Spider man, right? Like, I was trying to allude to Spider Man. That was the whole point. Right. I was making a Spider man reference. So this is the text making an Androcles and the lion reference.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so when you see something like this, when you see a sub reference, now I feel like I'm telling people how to interpret the things I say. But anyway, when you hear sub reference, and it's not on Family Guy, because Family Guy is lame. I said it. It's lame. It's always been lame. Their sub references go nowhere. Right. Like, it's manatees. We've known this. So when someone makes a sub reference where there's intertextuality like this, the first thing you want to look at is not what is the thing being referenced or what are the things in common? That's the mistake. Oh, look, this is just Androcles of the lion. Look. Yeah. Forget about it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Or. I mean, I was gonna say. And I mean, I'm not saying, you know, making accusations of bad faith here, but also, like, the person in the chat who said, wait, can the church still baptize animals? I'M like, no, that's not what this story is about.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, we'll get there. It's a little too fast. Yes. Oh, yeah, no, I already said this to you, Father Andrew. Like, do not take this the wrong way, guys,

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I do not need a line 35 deep of middle aged women and their cats looking for baptisms at the church tomorrow. Although, as another person pointed out in

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

this chat, trying to baptize a cat would be pretty exciting.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh no, I do not need that. The blood. You can't have that much blood in the church.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So yeah, you would never immerse a cat three times. One maybe if you surprised it, but then you're done. Right? Like, I mean, first you have to

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

put them in a sack and then you. No, sorry.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Wow, you took it again. Taking it to a dark place. First the horrors of the Second World War, now you're drowning cats. Like, what has happened during this move? Father Andrew, who hurt you? I finally snapped after all these years of talking to you, man. You're going to turn into me. Yeah.

[Caller]

So

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

you want to look for the differences, Right? And the main difference, as people have correctly noted, is St. Paul here preaches to, preaches the gospel to, and then baptizes the lion, which obviously that part doesn't happen in Androcles. In the lion.

[Caller]

Okay?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the, the overarching structure of Androcles of the light has been borrowed in order to send us a message about the salvation that, the idea that salvation, the salvation that comes in Christ extends not just to humans, but to the whole of creation. And why Androcles and the lion? Well, a lion is a wild animal, it is an unclean animal. It is a non domesticated animal. Right. A fierce animal that potentially will eat a person.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so it is sort of an element of the created order that is perhaps the most hostile to man.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But God's love, His saving love extends even to that creature, that part of the created order. Okay, now again, this doesn't mean we're going to go around baptizing animals, right? If you want to go and preach the gospel to a herd of sheep or cows, go ahead. It works really well. Take it from a Dutchman, it works really well with cows. They will just stand there and stare at you while you preach for hours at a time. Same sometimes happens at Dutch churches. But that's a whole other, whole other thing. But what's, what's the point then? If, if, if the text isn't telling us we should go baptize animals. What's the point of having this lie get baptized? It's a point of argue this. Well, who would you be arguing that against in the early part of the second century? You'd be arguing that against various Gnostic sects. Because what is one of the basic beliefs of a sect that would cause us to identify it as Gnostic? It's that the created order is itself in some way evil.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Or needs to be transcended or something. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Is evil. And so you're saved out of it. You're saved from it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so again, we have a lion, a creature that is hostile to humanity. So if you're going to peg something as evil, if you're going to talk about even just nature, red and tooth and claw. Right. Even that level of evil. Right. A lion's a pretty good symbol for that. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so the text is here using this, is using this borrowed, partially borrowed narrative element to communicate to us. Right. That the whole created order finds its salvation in Christ. And through the Gospel of Jesus Christ, even the parts that may seem the most hostile to humanity are not actually evil in that they are part of God's creation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, God said that it was good.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. And now you may think, okay, well, yeah, but you're just importing this whole anti Gnostic thing in. But that now brings us to section two of the Acts of Paul and section two, or possibly two and three, if you want to divide these. Section two is made up of two letters, two epistles that aren't canonical epistles of St. Paul, but two epistles. And the subject of these two epistles is Gnosticism. So that's literally where the narrative segways into the letters about Gnosticism. So, you know, I think it's pretty fair, right, contextually to see the connection there. Now, these two letters are not two letters from St. Paul. One of them is a letter to St. Paul from the church at Corinth. That's the first one. And then the Second one is St. Paul's response back to the church at Corinth. And someone may think, well, wait, if you know anything about, if you've read recently, first and Second Corinthians, you know that there were other letters, that there was at least one letter that St. Paul sent to Corinth before First Corinthians, that there was probably one in between. Right. You know that there are these sort of quote unquote missing letters of St. Paul to Corinth. St. Paul also refers to letters he had received from them. So you Might think, oh, are these two letters of the Acts of Paul two of those letters that are missing from the new answer? No, there. And, and it's not just me saying no, they're not presented as that. Yeah, they're presented as this is just. This is a separate mail exchange. This is a separate email thread from the canonical epistles. Right. This is a whole separate set of correspondence. That's how it's presented in the Acts of Paul. So the Acts of Paul is not claiming that these fit back in between the canonical epistles. The Acts of Paul is presenting these as a second follow up thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so the first letter, the letter from Corinth, basically they lay out the problem. The problem is these two wandering presbyters have shown up. Not that anything like this would ever happened today. They've shown up, they're preaching some kind of weird sounding stuff, right. That sounds like it contradicts the stuff that St. Paul had taught them. And so they're asking St. Paul, hey, here's the stuff they're teaching is this, right? Should we receive them, should we let them preach this stuff or should we throw them out, Right. And call them anathema. Right. And the two main things that the letter says that they're teaching is, number one, that the cosmos, right, the world, the cosmos is evil and was created by lesser angels, not by God. So there's one big Gnostic red flag, right? And seems related to Marcionism that would have been going around at this time, right. Old Testament God is a lesser God, right? Creator created the evil creation, or at least bad creation. They've got a Platonic metaphysics. So lesser means bad, right? Lesser means evil in that kind of metaphysics. And then they're going to be out after strike two. Strike two is they're teaching that Jesus was not actually incarnate as flesh and blood. And this of course is related because flesh and blood, the material creation, is evil.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. If you're, if you're a Gnostic, you don't believe in the incarnation. That would be crazy, right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Defeat the whole purpose.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Us being you and I being incarnate is the problem according to Gnostics. So as one might anticipate, St. Paul sends his letter back to Corinth saying, no, these guys are anathema. Throw them out, have nothing to do with them. Pop of wood upside the head for me, that last one, not literate, literally, but have nothing to do with them. Right? Throw them out. So this is what we meant when we said the text is clearly anti gnostic and this is sort of introduced by the episode with the lion. So then after these two letters, the last part of the Acts of Paul is the martyrdom of St. Paul. St. Paul goes to Rome, he stands trial before Nero. And Nero has a cup bearer, a servant, who's his good friend. They're close pals named Patroclus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If you have a classical education, who was Achilles, close pal and really good friend. Patroclus falls over dead. You're gonna get the idea from these non canonical acts we read tonight that people are really fragile in the second century. It does not take a lot to kill a person in the second century. But Patroclus falls over dead. St. Paul, right, works a miracle, raises Patroclus from the dead, intending to use this as an opportunity to now preach the gospel to Nero and try to convert him to Christianity. Nero, however, is just scared. Right. Nero sees this. St. Paul raised a guy from the dead and is like, oh no, he's going to use his magic powers to overthrow me and take over the empire. I need to kill this guy. And so Nero begins his persecution of Christians and he orders St. Paul beheaded. And in the telling of the Acts of Paul, when St. Paul's head is severed, the stump of his neck pours out milk instead of blood.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's wild.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, but the idea here is that this is milk, as in this is a reference back to his teachings.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. That even his death is nourishing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Sort of thing. Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. That's the idea of, of the symbolism. There are other traditions in other places about the details. St. Paul's death. Everywhere he's beheaded, he's beheaded. Under Nero, beheading is how you were executed if you were a Roman citizen. Roman citizens could not be crucified. Crucifixion was considered barbaric and horrible. That's why they only did it to barbarians and known Persona slaves, etc. So St. Paul as a Roman citizen had the right to be beheaded instead, which was considered a mercy. There is a church in Rome where this happened that you could go to. To this day, St. Paul's relics were interred near their. St. Paul's relics have relatively recently been. They ran all the scientific texts. Now you can't prove that something that this is St. Paul. Right. It's not like we have a St. Paul DNA record to compare it to, but that did demonstrate that it was a first century Jewish man who had been beheaded buried there and that he was wearing first century Palestinian textiles.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, who could that possibly be.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Yes. So it's been confirmed as far as you can confirm it. So the detail of the milk. Right. Is the main thing that's ascribable to the text in particular. And that's an interpretation. Right. That's a symbolic interpretation of St. Paul's death. That is telling us something about St. Paul's death. That St. Paul was beheaded under Nero is a very firmly established fact of history.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, yes. So that's where the Acts of Paul is.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well started.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And we are just getting started.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Really crazy stuff is yet to come.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yet to come. Yet to come. So that wraps up the first half half of this episode of the Lord of Spirits podcast. And we'll be right back after this short break.

[Narrator]

Father Andrew Stephen 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 Andrew Stephen Damick]

Ancient Near Eastern texts such as the BAAL Cycle portray the pagan God BAAL

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

as a rebel, the hero of a revolution worshipped and glorified for his long string of victories.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

In the Baal book, A Biography of the Devil, Fr. Stephen DeYoung shows that the Hebrew Scriptures

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

consciously turned the Baal story on its

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

head, depicting him as a failed and

[Narrator]

defeated rebel who nonetheless tries to steal

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

the glory that belongs to Almighty God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

From these scriptures, the figure of the

[Narrator]

devil emerged within Jewish and Christian tradition.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Father Stephen works through the Old and New Testament passages that refer to various BAAL stories. And he surveys BAAL worship through followers,

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

beliefs, religious practices and liturgical life to

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

show that the figures of BAAL and

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

the devil, the prince of Demons, are one in the same.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You can find the Baal book at store.ancientfaith.com that's store.ancientfaith.com.

[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]

Hey, welcome back, everybody. It's the second half of this episode on, should I say uncanonical, non canonical,

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

extra canonical, sub canonical, sub canonical, super

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

super canonical metacanonical text about the apostles.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Books to be read in the church parking lot.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There we go. Yes. Only readable in the narthex or the exo. Narthex.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm not sure if that was a commercial break or a visit to a Belgian discotheque and that was the voice

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

of Simon, everybody, by the way.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah, I like, I really like Simon's drawings.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Nice.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's what I have to say about it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Nice. Yes. So anyway, yeah, so we talked about the Acts of Paul, which also of course includes a subsection of that is the Acts of St. Paul and St. Thecla. St. Thecla, the proto martyr among women. Super beloved in the Antiochian Church, but universally beloved throughout the whole Orthodox Church. But like we double, quadruple, triple a hextuple down on our veneration of Saint Thecla in the Antiochian Church.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

She's, you know, she's like a fifth class saint on the Russian calendar.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Really?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, she's like the third or fourth one listed on that day.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Russian brothers and sisters. Sit down for a moment.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. You'd have a talk. She does need to align yourself with the chair of St. Peter in Antioch.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right. That's right. The successor of Peter. You guys.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Speaking of Peter.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. That was a good, good, good segue. We haven't actually gotten any on topic phone calls yet, so, you know, and

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

no one knows who cares about Hot Topic.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And no one said the secret word either, so. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If you want to call in about baptizing cats, like we could. I mean, that's true. We could go there. I will not baptize that. That movie.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There was some dude in the chat who wanted, who wanted to debate, you know, he wanted to tell us that trinitarian theology was false, so he had to be put in timeout. But anyway. Well, I thought someone would call since we. I made that big, that big pitch there. But I guess Mike has just taken the evening off. I don't know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That could be too.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That could be too. Yep, yep. All right, well, St. Paul.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Not that many questions about St. Paul at Thecla. Don't worry, we'll give you stuff to talk about this half.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

How about that? How about that brother of St. Andrew, everybody? He's interesting.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

St. Andrew's little bro. Yeah, that's right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Did you notice that the icon that I picked for this, this episode, St. Andrew is right in the middle.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

People are just gonna, just gonna think you're one of those. One of those EP Papalists.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, no, no.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You're trying to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's all legend.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay, anyway, so. Yes. So now we're gonna turn to the Acts of Peter. And Saint Peter, slightly important figure in the early church.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Indeed. He

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

looks for a hot minute like he might be the main character of the Acts of the Apostles. And if you were the sort of person who thought that St. Peter was just taking over for Jesus after the end of the Gospel of St. Luke, you'd expect him to be the main character for the whole book of the Acts of the Apostles, even though he isn't. But he sort of, you know, as, you know, if you've actually read the Acts of the Apostles, he kind of frankly disappears.

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Basically. Not. Not very Vicar Christie, is he?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, he. He disappears. He pops up again at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, which he doesn't share and doesn't issue the final statement on.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, we love St. Peter, but

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

submits himself to the Council and then. And its authority, but then. And then he sort of disappears again for the rest of the Book of Acts. So the Acts of Peter, we know from a bunch of things, including his epistles, that he goes to Rome. And so the Acts of Peter is a text that. That collects some very early traditions about Saint Peter from Rome and its environs, the Christian communities, the churches there.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Saint Photius the Great actually believed that the Acts of Paul and the Acts of Peter had the same authority when he did his catalog of the library at Constantinople, which is a thing he did that maybe people don't know about, but we. We now don't think that's the case. We can see what he was looking at. Right. So he was just looking at the two texts and the Greek, and that kind of thing is very similar. Right. So he was going based on the style and kind of the syntax.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But it's now clear based on some other things, we have more manuscripts from different places, some different things that. In different languages, that the Acts of Peter was written later in the second century. So it's not impossible that whoever compiled the acts of Paul 50 years later also compiled the Acts of Peter. That's not impossible, but it seems less likely than that there is a second author. Yeah. So, as we said, this is a compilation of traditions about St. Peter, a number of the traditions that are recorded here, particularly surrounding his death. We have other independent sources with basically the same information, just as we did with the Acts of Paul. Acts of Peter was incredibly popular as a text in the ancient church because we have multiple copies in sort of all of the major languages. Right. That you would have this stuff in. So it's originally in Greek, but we've also got Latin, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Syriac. Right. Just across the board, multiple copies, all these different translations, all these different languages. That's part of what Lets us kind of hone in on better, on exactly when it was written and when these translations were made, because we're not just working from one version of the text or one copy, as we mentioned, any text from the second century, even though this is later in the second century, any text from the second century, you got to ask, is it Gnostic?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Answer is no, because it is very clearly anti Gnostic. We will see, as we saw with the Acts of Paul, it is not ambivalent in any way about Gnosticism. And Gnosticism is actually represented by a figure in the narrative, that figure being Simon Magus, who we'll talk about more here in a couple of minutes. So it begins, the Acts of Peter begins with St. Peter arriving in Rome. He travels there with his family, with his wife and kids, who are alluded to within the canonical New testament. So in 1 Corinthians 9:5, remember, St. Paul says that he. He would have the right to take a wife and children with him in his travels, the way Cephas and the other apostles did. So he specifically mentioned St. Peter as having a wife and children and traveling with them. And of course, famously, in St. Luke's Gospel, chapter 4, verses 38 through 40, Christ healed St. Peter's mother in law, which kind of requires you to have a wife. Insert old school mother in law joke here about how she's a real battle axe or something similar. But that old Henny Youngman material and Buddy Hackett, we got to bring some of that stuff back. So the Acts of Peter begins with them arriving in Rome. And then we get this episode which one of the themes you've probably gleaned already tonight and that you're going to continue to glean, is that when people interpret these texts, people tend to interpret them with weird agendas.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So here, here's what happens in the text and then we'll talk about interpreting it. Right? So what happens in the text is Roman guy, Roman pagan guy, wants to marry St. Peter's daughter, okay? St. Peter doesn't want her to get married, so he prays that God will paralyze her. He prays, God paralyzes his daughter. Roman pagan dude says, nah, yeah, I don't want to marry him. She's damaged, paralyzed woman. So he moves on. St. Peter prays again. God cures her paralysis. Okay? So that's what happens in the text. Most modern scholarly interpreters, you find, will use this episode as evidence, and I'm not joking or exaggerating, that early Christians hated sex and thought it Was evil.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, I mean, just think about the layers of that even besides, from what I know you're about to say, which is like, here's a guy who's married, right? St. Peter is married, not into clerical

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

celibacy, and has children. So he has children.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, like even just that by itself.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah, yes. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But also.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So see, you can see from this that Christians would rather see their, their, their children be, be crippled than get married and have sexual relations.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay, so what are the details that they're leaving out that you get if you read the Acts of Peter closely? Well, here's the first important detail. St. Peter's daughter is 10.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Huh. That kind of changes the picture just a little bit.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

10 years old.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Which I mean, you know, not to, not to play devil's advocate for the Romans, but Romans would have had no problem with that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So if you understand the social setting at the time, St. Peter is not a Roman citizen, nor is his daughter. Meaning a Roman man could take a 10 year old Jewish girl as a sex slave anytime he wanted to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So what St. Peter here is trying to prevent is not his daughter settling down with a nice man and having a family. He's trying to prevent her being trafficked into underage sex slavery.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

With. Especially with a pagan Roman.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, with a pagan Roman. Well, a Christian Roman, one would think would not be so much.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Into the underage sex slavery, one would hope at least. Right. And so societally, St. Peter had no means to prevent this. He couldn't go to a court, be like, your honor, I don't want him to take my 10 year old daughter.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, who's St. Peter? St. Peter is not even like St. Paul. He's not a Roman citizen. He's literally non Persona far as the Romans are concerned.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes. So him praying and having something happen to his daughter that caused the Roman to lose interest and move on. That's the only way St. Peter has to prevent this horrible thing from happening.

[Caller]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And yes, the language is used in his prayer that St. Peter wants to preserve her from sin. That's not the sin of getting married and having kids, quote, unquote.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like that's a sin. It's the sin of her being like defiled by a pagan Roman adult when she's 10.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He wants that not to happen to

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

his daughter, which, I mean, that's just called good parenting.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, that's called being a dad. Okay. Like, yeah, okay. So. Yes. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And the reason I'm spending time on this right, Is I know we like headlines, okay? You know how I know we like headlines? Cause I have made a mistake a few times in my life of reading YouTube comments. And so I've seen all of you commenting on videos with me in them. And by that I mean commenting on the title of videos with me in them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We like headlines, okay?

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's the. It's the cardinal sin of the Internet, people commenting without reading or listening or watching.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But most people aren't going to ever even people into this show. I know most of the people who listen to this will probably never sit down and read the Acts of Peter in full. Okay. So if anybody knows anything about the Acts of Peter, if anybody knows anything about these texts, it's usually from some documentary they watch. Watched.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which often the sound bite about this in the documentary is going to be somebody with PhD after their name saying, we know from this that Christians thought sex was innately evil.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. You're going to accept their summary of it without investigating? We have to do that. We can't investigate everything. Right. No one has enough time to study everything they're told in detail, to verify every single thing. No one can do that. Right. And so we end up just accepting a lot of this stuff.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But when it comes to matters of spiritual importance about the teachings of Christianity and stuff, you can't just accept these sound bites.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You can't just accept these characterizations because you don't have to push very hard. You only have to read enough to find out that his daughter is 10. And you kind of know that their whole narrative falls apart. Right. Like that something else is going on here. Right. So, yes. So that is the story of, through St. Peter's prayers, God rescuing his daughter from being horribly violated by a pagan Roman. Okay.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, good job, Peter.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, Right. And thank you, God. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

For.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

For doing that. Okay, so after this, we get a little more into the meat of St. Peter's Day in Rome and his rivalry with Simon Magus, who we mentioned. So Simon Magus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I was just saying. Dun, dun, dun. Oh, okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, the official Simon Magus, of course, shows up in the canonical acts of the Apostles, tries to pay for the ability to bestow the Holy Spirit.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Disciples original simony.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Magus is not his last name. It's the idea that he's a sorcerer, a involved in. In magical practices, Pagan magical practices of the day. So as he appears here in Rome, he has not learned his lesson. So Simon Magus is here. The text presented as sort of the archetype of Gnosticism. We know historically that Gnosticism was made up of a bunch of different cults and groups and sects in different parts of the world that had their own origins. But like, Simon Magus is here sort of. He's the figure who represents sort of all of them within this narrative. Right. If we could kind of. We've combined several historical characters into this one character for the sake of narrative. And so St. Peter is traveling around in Rome. He's doing miracles. He's baptizing people, making them Christians. Right. The church is growing. At the same time, Simon Magus is traveling around in Rome and he's using a combination of sorcery and fakery, not in the fakir Hindu religion sense, but in the sleight of hand, bogus sense sense, to begin sort of effectively a cult that is Gnosticism. Right, a Gnostic cult. And this culminates in St. Peter and Simon Magus are going to sort of have a wizard duel. And by wizard duel, I mean it's deliberately evoking like Moses and the, the sorcerers or the wizards in. Or magicians in Pharaoh's court, right? Like Janice and Jabbers. We're going to have this showdown between St. Peter and Simon Magus. And Simon Magus, sort of for his ultimate trick, when he decides to pull out all the stops, he takes off into the air and he's flying around over the city of Rome, right? You'll believe a man can fly, right? So he's doing that shtick to show his powers. And St. Peter prays and Simon Magnus crash and burns and gets mangled. And it literally describes him getting mangled like a whole bunch of pagan Roman doctors run over and they're all trying to save his life and fix him. But no, He's. He's wrecked. St. Peter wins flawless victory. And so then after that comes one of the most famous traditions about St. Peter that there is outside of, outside of the text of the. The New Testament, which we have tested, which we have testified to a whole bunch of other places, as well as the Acts of Peter. And that is what is often called the whole Quo Vadis story or the quo vadis incident. St. Peter hears that Nero's persecution is beginning. Those people who he's been preaching to and baptizing to are starting to be persecuted, jailed, killed. And so St. Peter gets ready. They come to him and tell him, oh, this is happening. St. Peter, you're one of the leaders. They're going to be after you. You guys to get out of here. So he packs up and he starts to leave. And as he's leaving Rome on the road, he sees Christ carrying his cross, going the other way, going back into the city. And St. Peter says to him, famously, dominique Vadis, Lord, where are you going? In Latin, And Christ says that he is going to be crucified again in the city of Rome. And St. Peter sort of realizes if he leaves during this persecution, if he goes and he hides, he'll be doing it again. He'll be repeating his denial of Christ. And so he can't do that. He turns around, he goes back into the city. He stays with his people during the persecution, he ends up getting arrested, he ends up getting crucified, and he gets crucified. Famously, upside down, inverted.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Which is why the St. Peter cross looks like a regular cross, but just upside down.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. So. And that is not historically odd, actually. The Romans, especially Roman centurions, were real sickos. Like, literally, they would get bored, and so they would crucify people in what they thought were interesting ways all the time. Upside down, sideways, backwards. Right. Just to kind of amuse themselves, because they were bored at killing all these people. And sometimes the Romans would crucify hundreds of people at a time, like during Spartacus's rebellion and stuff. So, you know, horrible torture and murder, I guess, gets dull after the 150th time. So they would do things like this. So. And the fact of St. Peter's death in Rome by crucifixion and even some of the other details is testified to by Saint Clement, Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Saint Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius, whole bunch of other independent accounts. Right. So the source of that fact is not the Acts of Peter. In fact, since we told you the Acts of Peter is written toward the end of the second century, several of those figures, like St. Clement, St. Ignatius, St. Hereditis are writing before that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So this is just a known thing. And of course, there is the illusion within St. John's gospel about St. Peter stretching out his arms, going where he does not want to go,

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

and that

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

being a reference to the manner of his death.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, you know, it's real special pleading to try and argue that this didn't happen. Sorry, Protestant friends who are inclined to make that argument. You're trying to ice skate uphill. That's all I'm saying. So much for the Acts of Peter. Do we have any Acts of Peter calls?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We don't. I don't know. Either. Everyone is either Enthralled or just, you know, dumbfounded.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So dubbed out, bored to tears.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That could be it, too.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Old hat. Okay, well, I heard people were getting bored, so now we're up in the ante. We're going all in.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right, all right, all right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Whatever you think of this next one, it ain't boring, my friend. And any hopes that monetization on this video are gone by the time we're done with the Acts of John. Oh, boy, I just rhymed that. It's pretty impressive.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Nice.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the Acts of John, in addition to being just a wild ride, as we'll see, becomes important in large part due to the. It becoming a point of argumentation in the seventh Ecumenical Council. You may not have seen that coming, unless you're Michael Garten, in which case you saw it coming. So we'll get. We'll come back to. Once we're done talking about what's in the. In the text, we'll come back to the seventh Ecumenical Council and why it became important there. But so like the other ones we've been talking about, Right. Acts of John is a collection of St. John traditions. It is a text from the mid second century. So in between the Acts of Paul and the Acts of Peter, around circa 150 AD, you get the Acts of John.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. When St. Justin Martyr is writing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. You get the original composition of the Acts of John. We're going to talk about that in a second. And so that means that. And it's also from Western Asia Minor code for Ephesus, where St. John was also active.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. We're also talking about within about 50 years of St. John's death. So these are like his spiritual grandchildren are the ones who are recording these traditions. Do you. Do you think somebody's grandchildren are kind of a reliable witness to stories about their grandparents? In general? Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. In general, I would say yes. So there is the original text in Greek, and then there's a chunk of text that gets inserted into the text.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So how do they know that? How do they know that this. Is it a radically different style? Is it because the content.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They don't. We're just guessing. No.

[Narrator]

Okay.

[Caller]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No. We know that for a whole bunch of reasons. For a whole bunch of reasons. So the writing style is completely different. The vocabulary is completely different in this added section, it's a different genre.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So up until this addition, this added section begins, it's like narrative telling us these stories in St. John's life. And then all of a sudden, at the Beginning of what's now chapter 87.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

St. John just kind of like turns toward camera, like Jim on the office and shrugs, starts talking to the reader.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, that's fun.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And he does that until the end of chapter 105, and then it goes back to third person narrative.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you get this weird, like, address to the reader. It's got a completely different vocabulary. It's got a completely different Greek style from much later. And the theology in it is kooky such that. And so we know that there was a version of the Acts of John that was used by the Manakees.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And suspiciously, the weird theology of this inserted chunk kind of matches theirs. So to give you a couple of examples, give this address to the reader.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The Maniches was the weird heretical group that St. Augustine belonged to before he became a Christian.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Yeah, yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's the, that's probably the, the, the touch, you know, the touch, touching point that most people would have in their heads.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, yeah, Maybe we'll do an episode someday about the Maniches.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That would be fun.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Fascinating stuff.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They have three Christs, only one of whom is Jesus of Nazareth. But so in this weird inserted address to the reader, St. John says, hey, you know, sometimes we tried to touch Jesus and he was tangible and you could touch him, and then other times our hands would just pass right through him. Apropos of nothing, let me just.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I was. Isn't this the, the apostle that, you know, that which we have.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Leaned on his breast. Yeah, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Leaned on his breast. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

See, it would be funnier if he said he fell over. Right? Like if we just went to prop comedy with the Gnostics. Right. And he also, he retells the story of trans. The transfiguration. And he leaves out the whole thing with Moses and Elijah being there. Yeah, you go, huh? Do you not like the Old Testament for some reason? Little sus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So for all those reasons, it's pretty clear that this is an insertion. Right. Syntax doesn't match, vocab doesn't match. Genre doesn't match. Theology doesn't match. Right. Like in terms of the content. We know a group with that weird theology was using a version of the text centuries after it was written.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

By the way, speaking of texts, that's not a good segue, but.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Speaking of apocryphal texts from a Manichean I know.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, no, no, we actually have a caller who has a question about some of this stuff. So, yeah, let's just put them on Through. So, Paul, welcome to Laura Spears podcast. Christ is risen.

[Caller]

He's risen indeed. Thank you very much for having me. Fathers.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Is this phone call technically one of the acts of Paul?

[Caller]

A lesser. Lesser Paul, but sure.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

This is a Paul in Texas.

[Caller]

So I wanted to ask. I don't have any particular questions based on what you all covered so far. And I wanted to tell you all that maybe it's because maybe a bunch of the listeners tonight are like me, where they just don't know enough about this to even, like, have a question yet. Digesting it all.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I hear you.

[Caller]

Like, I had nothing prepared because I don't. I'm not familiar with any of these texts yet. But I do have a question in relation to Apocrypha in general, but, like, this would include the Old Testament stuff. So I was orthodox for three years, thank God, on Holy Saturday. In the entire time, it's only really in the Lord of Spirits kind of online community that I've seen like a general kind of affinity for the apocryphal text. Whereas in the standard orthodox world that I've encountered thus far, it still seems that there's some kind of like, what's the word I'm looking for? Aversion to it. I wanted to ask what the reason for that is, because some of the people I've heard talk about it, particularly in regards to the Book of Enoch. It seems like it's more than just like, you know, convertitis or something, like a holdout that we brought over from the Protestant world. And it seems like there are some people that think that the patristic teaching on a lot of these texts is it's better to stay away as opposed to just reading in private.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Caller]

And I'm confused by that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, I mean, the first thing that I'll say is I'm not just trying to sell a book here. It was written for this purpose. I do recommend Father Stevens book, which is called Apocrypha, which treats a lot of this stuff in detail and gives a framework for understanding it. But I think here's the thing. A lot of what's in these texts is. Is in the church, it's in the saints lives, it's in our hymns. Right. It simply is digested. Right. Largely without pointing at a text. It's the same content in many cases that's being represented. So I do think, honestly, in some cases, I do think it is a kind of culturally Protestant attitude. And here's why, like, one of the things that Father Stephen puts in that book Is, you know, when he's, you know, correct me if I'm wrong about this, Father, but I mean like when you were picking your table of contents, like which books you were gonna, which texts you were gonna talk about. Father Stephen chose Saint Nikephoros, Patrick of Constantinople. His list of books that he said are, that are profitable to read but are not considered canonical texts, in other words, not read aloud as scripture in church. So this is a patriarch of Constantinople and a saint who says this. And it's like almost a millennium later. I can't remember when is Saint nikephoros. Is he 9th century, father 10th, beginning

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

of the 9th century, beginning of the 9th century.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So this is like triumph of Orthodoxy era, right? You know, roughly the time when the events that get celebrated on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, which happened in 8:43 as I recall. So that same era. And so he is pointing and saying, yeah, these are good books to read. They're not Bible, but they're good books to read, you know, in a certain context. Right. So I think part of it is just that English speaking Orthodox Christianity and I mean, I don't know what other languages you read or understand Paul, but English speaking Orthodox Christianity is still kind of appropriating consciously talking about the whole orthodox tradition, if that makes sense. But like I said, I mean, these things are, they're in the texts of our liturgical hymns. A lot of these same traditions are in the lives of saints. Like we just said, for instance, St. Peter is crucified upside down. If you've ever read the life of St. Peter that's always mentioned, you know, whatever version of the life that you read. So, or like, you know, the traditions that we have about Saint Thecla, this is, this is the big witness that we have to those traditions. Not the only one, but it's the big one. You know, St. Thecla is a saint to the church. She celebrated September 24th. Her apolitikian references, her learning from St. Paul, like, this is all there, it's all represented there. It's just that most of the time when you're doing catechesis, your priest is probably not going to say, and now let's read the Acts of Paul and Thecla. It's just, you know, if you talk about Saint Thecla, what's known about her life will be mentioned. And it just so happens it's the same stuff that's in that text. So that's my take on it. I mean, I don't know. Father, did you want to add subtract multiply, divide, anything. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, so I think there's broadly two main arguments against considering this stuff. So this. This stuff, inarguably, as Father Andrew was saying, it's part of our tradition, right? Like, we did an episode on the Testament of the twelve Patriarchs. I mean, that's preserved at Mount Athos, right? Like, yeah, it's incontrovertible that this is part of our orthodox tradition. Okay. But so in terms of emphasis, how much emphasis it receives, I think there's a good argument and a bad argument, right. I want to be fair and give both. Okay. The argument that I think is fair and this argument you might hear from another person who hosts a show about the scriptures on ancient faith, right? Who I think has a little bit of an issue with how much we talk. We talk about this stuff a lot less than people think on Lord of Spirits.

[Caller]

But,

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

like, there's a bunch of people. There's a whole meme out there that all we ever talk about is the Book of Enoch on this show.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We have literally never done an episode on the Book of Enoch.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

All we talk about, right? But, but, but the person in question, who's an ancient faith host, I think would say, and I think kind of has said that, you know, most orthodox people don't know the actual canonical scriptures well enough to be moving on to this other stuff, right? And I think that's fair in some ways. I'm saying that kind of thing is fair, right? Because our orthodox tradition is huge. There is no human who comprehends all of it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There is no human out there who is equally an expert on Byzantine chant, extra canonical biblical literature, Byzantine church history, right? Like all of these things, right? Like those of us who have gone and got a PhD and become an expert in something, right? Have one little slice, right? If you put all of us together in a room, right? You've got a whole bunch of slices. But I don't even think if you get all of us together in a room, right? Like, seriously, like, you get a room. There may be a room like this in a few weeks, close to it, right? You put me and Father Joseph Lucas and Dr. Bo Branson and Dr. David Bradshaw, Dr. Edith. We could run down the list, right? All the people you think of. It's like Orthodox scholars with PhDs in any field. If you put us all in a room, I don't think we'd cover the entirety of the orthodox tradition in expertise.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No. And there's some parts of it that are so specialized or so localized, like, for Instance, Georgian Orthodox history is a huge subject which almost no one in the west knows hardly anything about. Yeah, it's just an example.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's what I'm saying. Right. And so no one can master all of it. I think many thousands, if not millions of Orthodox Christians have lived holy lives, gone on to their reward in Christ without ever having read the entire text of the book of Ezekiel, let alone the Acts of John.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Accept it. Right. Accept it. This is not the most important thing for you working out your salvation. For you living the Orthodox life, it is not the most important thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So I think that's fair. That's a fair point to make. Right. And if I thought, if I thought for a second, I think I could honestly say this. If I thought for a second that the sort of harshest knee jerk critics of this show were right and that we were starting some kind of weird faction within the church that was just obsessed with these obscuritus ideas and weren't really Orthodox or weren't really embracing the fullness of the Orthodox faith, I would stop doing this show. I don't think that's remotely true. I don't think you guys are doing that. I think you guys are Orthodox Christians who are just interested in this stuff.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so from my perspective, being an Orthodox Christian who's interested in this stuff is no different than being an Orthodox Christian who's interested in Byzantine chant or interested in Georgian church history, or interested in the historical doctrine of the Trinity, or interested in how the essence energies distinction works in St. Gregory Palabas. We're all Orthodox Christians and we have interests that we invest relative amounts of time in in different parts of the tradition that are especially interesting or resonate with us as particular people. So that's my response to what I think is the good and the fair objection. I think there's also the unfair and bad objection, which is based on just that. Our culture, I don't even think you could narrow it down to Protestantism. I think our culture, I think this is Plato brain, our culture is just indoctrinating us, this kind of binary thinking, right. Of like, this is Bible, this is not Bible. Right. Bible good, not Bible bad.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know, every moment you spend, you know, having fun, you're not spending praying, you know, every this kind of way of thinking where unless you are spending your time and your thought and your resource and whatever on the most important thing, it's virtually sinful. Right. And that's nonsense.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Number one, no one actually can live like that. But Platonic metaphysics isn't real. That's not actually how God constructed the world. That's not how the world works. And so if it's just that, you know, hey, this isn't in the Bible, so it's bad, then, you know, there is a third possibility, and that is that I think there are particular people who shouldn't read this stuff. Like, there are particular people who shouldn't read the Book of Revelation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And that's Bible.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's not to say there's something wrong with the Book of Revelation. It's just where they are at a particular place in time or the way their mind's working at the moment or certain tendencies they have as a person. If they start focusing on the Book of Revelation and spending a lot of time reading it, they're going to run off in a weird direction. Right. And someone could do the same thing with the Book of Enoch. Someone could do the same thing with the Philicolea, which is why some people get told not to read the Philicolea.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

By their spiritual fathers. Right. So there's that individual level, too. And if somebody's spiritual father has told them to stay away from this or that book, I'm not going to encourage them to read this or that book. Yeah, right. Like, so there's that, too. But. So that's my take on that situation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep. Yep. All right, Well, I hope that helps a bit. Paul, thank you very much for calling.

[Caller]

Thank you, Father.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right, we're going to take another call. So we have. I know I always mispronounce, but you've called before. Anush. Anash.

[Caller]

Yes, Father. It's Anush.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Anush. Okay. Welcome, Anush, to the Lord of Spirits podcast. Christ is risen indeed.

[Caller]

He is resin. Yeah, So I, you know, I tend to call. I was traveling, and I'm in Chicago, so I figured I'd do my usual call on a lot of spirits from a different state. So.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Caller]

Keeping up with that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We're all over. I mean, we actually have. I actually have somebody listening from Egypt tonight who commented in the YouTube chat. So it's. It's always amazing to me where people are listening from Chicago, that weird, exotic place. Almost as exotic as Egypt.

[Caller]

Almost as. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So my question was. Sorry, there's some background noise. I'm just gonna try to get away from the. My question was related to. Totally off topic, but it's related to the book of Genesis and.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, I think we lost the nose. Are you still there?

[Caller]

Yeah, sorry, I'm still there.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay. Related to the book of Genesis.

[Caller]

And I'm wondering what the connection is, or maybe there's not. Is with the tree of life and Christ, because salvation comes through Christ and he gives life. And so I'm just wondering why the tree was there in the first place. Or like. Yeah, like what's the connection and what are your thoughts on that?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay. So I mean, the first thing I'll say is that the cross is very often identified with the tree of life because through the cross, incorruption, immortality, eternal life come into the world. And so it's, it's really that the cross is the restoration of the tree of life, but of course it's Christ's cross. And so, you know, we don't eat fruit of the tree, we eat the flesh and blood of Christ. Right. And that is what that is the medicine of immortality. That is the food of. Of eternal life right there. So, I mean, you're definitely tracking correctly, Father. I don't know. I mean, there's so many things that can be said about this. I feel like whole books have been written about this. Question.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, don't. Don't forget the leaves. This is a deep cut. I guess. I guess people don't know about this, but if you read the Old Testament prophets and you read the Book of Revelation, the leaves of the tree of life have healing in them for the nations. Which is why you may notice that the cross, as used most commonly in Orthodox crosses, is the one that is blossoming.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because we have as our self identity that we are the Gentile church at this point. Right. And so that blossoming is the healing of the nations, them being called back to God. So the. That paradise is found within the church where the tree of life is.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know if we still have you, Anush, but I hope that that that helps a little bit. Are you still with us?

[Caller]

Yeah, that really helps. I never thought about the connection with the leaves and the cross in the churches, so that's really cool. Thank you again.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, sure. Thanks for calling. God bless you. All right, well, so see, finally someone called. They took pity on you, Father.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, yeah. I mean, otherwise I'm stuck talking to you for three hours every two. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, what do we have to talk about?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Liven it up a little bit. So, yeah, the act. Speaking of livening it up, here we go. The Ax of John. So we have this text, it's Middle of the Second Century, compiled by St. John's Spiritual Grandchildren at some indeterminate Point after it's written, this gnostic chunk gets shoved in there pretty awkwardly. And obviously. And that version of the text comes into popular use among gnostic groups, including the Manicheans. So when we're talking about the original text. Right, because, you know, I gave you a couple examples. Beyond that, I don't really care about the later insertion. That's not that interesting to me. The original text and the traditions about St. John. So this is going to escalate quickly. I'm just. I'm just telling you now. Buckle up a little bit. We're gonna try and be as politic and as gentle as we can about this, but wild stuff's gonna ensue. So it begins with the. The king of. There's a king of Ephesus named Lycomedes. And Lycomedes is married to a woman named Cleopatra. Cleopatra dies. And you remember what I was saying about the fragility of ancient people. Lycometes sort of pines to death and he dies too. He dies of a broken heart.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Due to his. His wife having died. They're not extremely elderly. They're not. It's not one of those things, you know, it's just fragile constitution, I guess. There were emo kids, like, in the mid second century, ruling Ephesus, but. So St. John comes and he raises them both from the dead. Cleopatra first, Right. So that when Lachabeth is raised for the dead, Cleopatra is alive. He is so happy that he has a portrait icon painted of St. John. You may be guessing why this comes up in the 7th Ecumenical Council. And he has it adorned with flowers, and they light candles in front of it. Right. And so St. John hears about this, okay. And sort of comes back to see Lycometes. And Lycomedes says, oh, listen, I worship only God, but I also honor the gods, lowercase G, for us who do his works and teach his word in this world. Right. So he basically gives the distinction between worship and veneration. Right. To St. John. So St. John responds, and this is widely open to interpretation. We'll come back to this when we get to the seventh council. But St. John responds by saying, first he says, well, you've made a dead image of a dead man. Okay. But then he goes on to say. St. John goes on to say that what. Excuse me, what Christ really wants is for Lycomedes to paint a portrait of St. John with his life, using his good deeds as the paints and the colors. So St. John effectively is saying to him the real way to honor me is not to light candles in front of my picture, but to imitate St. John's life as he imitates Christ. Right. To become a saint yourself. You honor a saint by imitating them. You honor a saint by becoming a saint yourself. Right. And following their example, not just by outwardly honoring their image. Okay, we'll come back to this. St. John then moves on. He goes to the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, which of course is one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Is still standing at this time. For the moment, they're having the big feast, the big annual feast of Artemis. St. John comes wandering in. He is not wearing the pagan festal garb, being not a pagan. And so this makes the, the priests at the temple of Artemis very upset. They get angry and St John responds. He challenges them to a showdown. Prophet Elijah and the prophets of Baal style showdown. But St. John says, I am going to pray to my God that you all die. And you all pray to your God that I die. And we'll see what happens.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Man bringing a gun to a knife fight.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I told you this was going to escalate quickly. Okay, so he just goes nuclear option.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like bring it right now. The. To their, to their. The credit of their intelligence, at least the priests of Artemis have heard about St. John and the miracles he's been doing and raising people from the dead and stuff. And they're like, you know, this will go badly for us. We do not accept your challenge. Right. They're not stupid. Right. Whatever other faults they have. And so St. John then prays anyway. And part of the temple collapses and kills their high priest. But the rest of them who are smart enough not to accept the challenge, they survive. Okay. Things have not actually begun to escalate. Now's when you really need to buckle up. Stuff's about to get weird. Okay. St. John continues his travels around. He's walking through a field. He sees a guy running through the field carrying a sickle.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Not exactly runs with scissors, but basically, yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You don't run with scissors or sickles, kids.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No running with sharp implements. But he's running with a sickle.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I learned what a sickle is because I read Asterix and Obelix comics. And the druid Getafix was always cutting mistletoe with a sickle, a golden sickle, so he could make his magic potion. So that's how I learned. Yes. Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But he probably would not run with it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In my head, I always see Gettofix's

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

golden sickle, you know, that he used to cut mistletoe.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So this is why, from an early age, you were indoctrinated in communism. So, no, no.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Without the hammer, I'm safe. Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, okay. So he sees man running with sickle. This is an unusual thing. Uh, so he stops the guy. Hey, you know, what are you doing? Where are you going? Running with that sickle. Uh, and so the young man who was running with the sickle says to say, john, well, that he had been sleeping with another man's wife, and his father had found out that he was sleeping with another man's wife. He pulled him aside. It said, son, you can't be sleeping with other men's wives. You're bringing disgrace and dishonor upon us and upon our family. How dare you? You need to stop this. You need to get back in line. And this young man responded by getting very angry at his father and beating and kicking his father to death.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And now have he killed his father? Having killed his father, he was now running with the sickle to go and find the woman he had been cheating with her husband to murder both of them and then take his own life, presumably with the sickle. And then St. John stopped him, and, you know, he told him all this. Okay, so, I mean, let me just clue you in now, A lot of the rest of this, the acts of John is just going to sound like St. John randomly wandering into episodes of Law Order SVU, like, halfway through. So he's on his way to kill Everybody, right? So St. John says, hey, hey, buddy, calm down. If I go and I raise your father from the dead, right? I'll raise your father from the dead if you agree not to go murder anyone. And the kid says, okay, I'll take that deal. And so they go back, and St. John raises his father from the dead. Okay? So, okay, I no longer am guilty of the murder of my father, technically, because he's alive, even though he did murder him, right? But still, the guilt, right? The guilt over what he done. The guilt over having slept with this other man's wife and that having driven him to this horrible crime of killing his own father, he can't deal with the guilt. And he can only think of one thing that could be responsible for all this, for having driven to do all this. And so he takes the sickle and he castrates himself.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's why you don't run with scissors, kids, or sickles.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then having castrated himself, he runs again. He goes and finds the woman with whom he had been cheating and flings his severed genitals at her. This sounds like something that is the first time that sentence has ever been said on the airwaves of ancient faith radio.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Very likely.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Likely the last also.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Flings it at her and says that the thing which he has wong and she, the woman are what got him into this whole mess. Right through. Through the. The seduction of lust. Okay, so St. John then finds the kid again and says, son, self mutilation is also a sin, right? Self mutilation is also a sin. And not only is it also a sin, but it is just as bad of a sin as the adultery and the murder and stuff. Don't do that. Right. So we have an anti originist element here to our. To the acts of John. You should not do this. And he says, the real problem is your thoughts. You need to learn to control your thoughts and not act impulsively. I think St. John's kind of right on. On that one. The acting impulsively is clearly this kid's problem. But learning to understand your thoughts, right. To control your thoughts and not to run off after these. These various sins. Okay? So you might think, well, okay, Texas, to mellow out from here. Don't get excited yet. There's more coming. So St. John travels on. He decides he's. He's moving on. He stops at an innie, stops that his bed is full of bedbugs. So he sort of dispels. He sort of exercises the bedbugs.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, how many state lives do you get with.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

With bed bugs? Like. Yeah. Casts out the bedbugs. And then here's the next episode of Criminal Minds that he wanders into. There is this town, this. There is this fellow named Kalimakis. Kalamakis is, let's be honest, in lust, more than love with a Christian woman. Calakus is a pagan. He's in lust after this Christian woman, Drew Siana, who is married to a Christian man named Andronicus. Callimachus the pagan man is a horrible sex pest. And between his. His lewd advances, et cetera, he puts so much stress and anxiety on Drew that she dies from all the stress and everything. How to put this delicately? This does not discourage Kalimakis from wanting to sleep with her. Her being dead.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so he goes with his servant Fortunatus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Ms. Fortunatus.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, if you're nasty. No, no, just Fortunatus goes with Fortunatus to steal her body for these purposes. As they go to do it, a snake bites. Fortunatus and Kalimakis and kills them both. St. John comes into the scene, raises everybody from the dead. Hey, right. Callimachus and Fortunatus and Drusiana, and calls upon Callimachus and Fortunatus to repent of what they were up to and become Christians. And they, of course, see now the error of their ways due to snakebite. Oh, now I understand that that was wrong. Wow. Yes. So we had to be a little under detailed in that section for reasons that are probably apparent to all listeners. It's because of the bedbugs, isn't it? Yes, the bedbugs. We didn't want to creep people out about the bedbugs. So then the final bit in the Acts of John is about the death of St. John. And this tradition about the death of St. John is also something that we have a lot of independent attestation of. So when St. John reaches great old age, so he's like a hundred or older even he has revealed to him that the time has come for him to die. So he goes and he digs his own grave and climbs into it and praise sort of his final prayer, entrusting himself to God. And the dirt comes in and covers him, and that is how he dies, that he's the only one of the apostles to not be martyred. There are. So there's. There's that version here, the Acts of John. In other versions of the story, it talks about the earth on the top of the grave still moving, like maybe St. John is still alive in there. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, there's this tradition of. It's often called manna. But I mean, it doesn't mean mana like in. In, you know, in. In the Torah. But, but like they. They call it mana anyways, coming up out of his grave like once a year. And then people. This sort of dust or whatever, people being healed because of that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. There's also a version where his disciples come out the next day and they find his sandals laying there by themselves, like the rest of his him has been assumed into heaven. But you could compare those versions left behind to. If you go and read the Cynic Sarian for September 26th. In the Orthodox Church, on September 26th, we commemorate the Dormition of St. John the Theologian. Falling asleep of St. John the TheologiAn. And you can read the Sidic Sarian there. There is another version of the same story. Right. So this is a widely attested tradition as to how St. John's life ended. So just coming back here at the end, we mentioned that the Acts of John got brought up at the 7th Ecumenical Council, it was actually being used by the iconoclasts. So the iconoclasts, this is the end of the 8th century, right. They show up with a copy of the Acts of John. And say, well, look here, this guy made an icon and was venerating it of St. John. And in their interpretation, St. John rejected that. Right, and St. John rejected that. And so c. This is proof, this is proof that the apostles rejected icon veneration. Yeah. The council was like, huh? And said, you know, first of all, no, that's not what's going on in the text. Second of all, you're assuming this is like authentic, right? Like that this is a hundred percent historically accurate. St. John. And then three, hey, look at this big Gnostic section, right in this text. Clearly Gnostics, Manicheans have fiddled with this text. Right. So not only can you not assume it's reliable, we could kind of assume it's kind of unreliable. And so basically they threw out that argument and they ordered that the iconoclast copies of the Acts of John be burned.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. So why do we.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, here's the thing. As Father Andrew mentioned to the caller, this book is on the list of Saint Nikephoros, a generation later, patriarch of Constantinople, as him having copies in the library and saying it was beneficial to read privately. Right. So that whole burning all the copies thing never happened.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Now there may have been, right. A different. Maybe there was an even more gnostic version than the one we have now. And maybe that's the version that was burned. Maybe it was some particular version of the text or something.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Or maybe it was just not carried out because people pointed out there were other ways to read the text or there were other beneficial things in the text. Right. And of course, the fact that it's to be read privately. Right. You have to remember how low the literacy rate was. Right. Anyone who could read was probably either ordained or a monastic or both. Right. Meaning they had the context and everything to be able to read and interpret it properly and deal with the text properly. Right. So limiting it to those people who could read it in an appropriate way makes sense as a solution. But yes. So that's how the text ends up becoming involved in the seventh Ecumenical Council. But any way you cut it, any way you cut it, even if you say, even if you want to say, okay, this is just a straight out Gnostic text and you want to read it in a Gnostic way for purposes of the seventh Ecumenical Council, let's say this is a Gnostic text. Right. Well, then this is a Gnostic text. And let's say they were. The Iota class were reading it correctly. Well, then you have a Gnostic text from the middle of the second century AD Critique critiquing Christian icon veneration. And any way you read the text, you have the distinction between worship and icon veneration being made by. In a Christian text of the mid second century.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Proving the antiquity of that idea.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you take all that into account in terms of this text, its relationship to. To iconoclasm. And that brings us to the end of our second half.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right, well, we're gonna go ahead and take our second and final break.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And one more act.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right, one more. The final act. It's the. Anyway, we'll be right back.

[Narrator]

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

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We live in a world that commonly sees the passion of anger as a virtue that can be used to help right wrongs. But what do scripture and the Father

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

say about anger is expressed? Is expressing outrage at societal ills a true reflection of God's attitude towards these evils? Or does it instead blind us to his presence? Father Theodore Pulcini and Oswin Creighton join together to examine how anger affects our journey towards theosis. Find it [e-mail]. that's store.ancientfaith.com.

[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 855-23-7-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hey, we're back. We actually had a caller waiting and he disappeared. He disappeared. But if I remember correctly, his question was, because this is a good question, like, how do you distinguish between sort of different kinds of apocrypha? You know, because obviously, you know, we're making distinctions between even portions of texts, Right. That are Gnostic.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Just to remind everybody, right, There's. There's canonical scripture, there's apocrypha, which means, you know, stuff that's okay, you know, good to be read at home privately or whatever. And then there's books that you should not read. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, so. So how do you like, you know, just kind of review that for us? Father like, what are these distinctions and what's kind of a good way. I mean, I'm just going to plug your book again. It's worth it because it covers all this stuff, but just give a short outline there.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, I mean, historically, the Church has made these distinctions for us. That's why I used Saint Nikephoros list, which one of the appendices of that book is just Saint Nikephoros list. Right. So. And he's actually got four categories. He's got books that are read publicly, meaning canonical books, books that some churches read publicly and others do not, which is interesting, given that it's the 9th century.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In the. For the Old Testament, he has exactly what you might expect. What are generally called the deuterocanonicals are listed as Old Testament books that some churches read and not others. But in the New Testament, he's got both the apocalypse of St. John, meaning the Book of Revelation as a book accepted by some and not others, even in the 9th century. And also he's got the Apocalypse of St. Peter there and a couple of others. So I think we did an episode where we went through The Apocalypse of St. Peter way back. So there's that category then, Apocrypha. Right. Meaning books to be read privately, which, as I was just saying at the end of the last half, the fact that they're to be read privately means that the people who are reading them are going to have a certain level of education and background at this kind of thing by the fact that they're, number one, able to read and number two, have access to the text. And then there's the category of things not to be read, which would be called another kind of a banned book list, whatever. Things that are identified as being gnostic junk. Right. Or other heretical junk. And those books would generally be excluded from libraries and that kind of thing. And when you have those listed, it's with a deliberate purpose. It's, you know, a bishop will list those because it's like, oh, I've heard there are people reading this in the church's. This is not good. Go get rid of this. Right. Like, if a bishop today found out that a bunch of parishioners at one of his churches were reading from the New World translation, which is the Jehovah's Witness Bible translation. Right. Like, he might be like, yeah, get rid of those guys.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Get yourself a KJV or something.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Not just making like a list of banned books or whatever. It's about addressing actual things going on.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. There was Someone, you know, there are. Someone's reading this and something was happening, and they say, hey, God, this isn't one we want to be, right? We want to be reading. And so, yeah, so the books that are the books that are listed as Apocrypha by somebody. That is somebody. So, for example, Saint Nikophorus saying out of his. He has the patriarchal library at Constantinople, right. What are the sort of quasi scriptural books, right. That are out there that I think there is some value to reading, but that I don't believe are scripture, essentially. Right. And so when I go and do a book like Apocrypha or I talk about these texts that he lists, what I'm saying is, right, well, here's a saint who suffered for the faith as a confessor, who was the patriarch of Constantinople. He considered that this is a book that has something worth reading in it, right? So let's look at it and discuss it, see if we can figure out what the things are that are valuable here. That. That he would. That he would point to. But this isn't an assessment that, like, each person is called to make for themselves,

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And this is important because this is. A lot of our Protestant friends talk this way. If you push them on it, they'll admit it's ridiculous and not true. Right? But they'll say things like, you know, oh, well, when I read these books and only these books, I hear the voice of God, right? Or the Holy Spirit revealed to me that these books, that only these books are Scripture. And that's nonsense. Someone handed you a Bible. Yeah, that Bible was compiled centuries before you were born. I'm talking about everybody. Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant. Okay? You're handed a Bible, right? It has books in it. You're told that's the Bible, okay? At some point later in your life, you run into somebody whose Bible is missing some of those books or who has more books than you do, and you figure out what to do with that. But that's real life, okay? There is no one who was born with no concept of what a Bible even was. And you went out and read every book ever written and determined, purely based on the guidance of the Holy spirit, that these 66 books and only these are the Bible. Right? That. That's nonsense. Right. No one has ever done that. Okay? The question is this book canonical? Is not an open question. It's not subject to discussion. It's objective fact. A book is either read publicly in your church or it's not.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You can't really debate that. It is or it isn't.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's the same question as, like, frankly, who is a saint of your church? It's in the list of your patriarchate or your, you know, your jurisdiction. That's the list.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is an objective thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay. You can do all kinds of special pleading, but it's an objective thing. So this is why, I mean, this show, since all we ever do on this show is talk about the Book of Enoch. Right, of course. Right. I occasionally, you know, is the Book of Enoch canonical? Should we think the Book of Enoch is canonical? I'm like, are you Ethiopian? Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

If you belong to the Ethiopian or Eritrean church, then the answer for you. Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. The answer to the question, are you an Ethiopian? Is no. Then no, it's not canonical for you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And from what I am given to understand from Ethiopian people, even if you are Ethiopian, the answer is more like, it's complicated. But. Yeah, right. But like, the point being, this is. This is an objective thing. Right. And it's something that was decided and settled long before any of us listening or talking were born.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. We got another question which is related to this was actually, you know, could Apocrypha ever be considered canonical? And I mean, and, you know, obviously not. The question is, what does your church actually read as canon in church services? That's what's canonical.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. So not now. Yeah. I mean, is it possible? Yeah, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Is it possible at some time, some place or whatever? Yeah, it's possible. And in some cases, yes, as you said, Eusebius said that. Was it Eusebius that said that some churches were reading the Acts of Paul as a canonical book?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, so it was canonical for them.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, like. So there's a Doctor who audio drama where the eighth Doctor has to fight Krampus, and so he jumps to the TARDIS, it goes back in time and gets the actual St Nicholas from the 4th century and brings him forward in time to Vienna to help him destroy Krampus. Okay. But if he had detoured while he was in the 4th century in Asia Minor, he could have gone to into a church where they read from the Apocalypse of Peter.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And while standing in that church in the fourth century, the Apocalypse of St. Peter was canonical in that church in the fourth century.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But no such church exists today.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And that. And this challenges. The reason people have trouble with this is it challenges the view of candidacy that they have, because the view of candidacy that they have is tied up with this whole other set of ideas of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and this and that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, it's this objectification of the texts rather than how is this situated within your church?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. It's the text itself. Right. So the authority is not in the text itself. The authority is in the church. Yeah, it's the church's use, reading application of the text that is authoritative. We actually have, by itself, as a book.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, it is a book. Which book?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And it is not. It is not ontologically different than other books. Take that, Gavin Ortland.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right. We do actually have a couple calls that came in. They're about. I don't know, I don't want to use the word random haphazard. The bits. So we actually do have some.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I don't know that we want detailed questions about what we discussed in the last half, so.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, indeed not.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This may be safer.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Indeed not. So we actually have a caller coming all the way from Australia. So, Christian from Australia, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Caller]

Hello, can you hear me?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, hello, we hear you. Christ is risen.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You found a working phone in the atomic wasteland.

[Caller]

Martin Shaw would say.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So what's your. What's your question, Kristen?

[Caller]

I had a question. Firstly, I wanted to tie up a loose end from the last conversation we had a few months ago on defending my use of the term platypi. You see, fathers, if you would indulge me to hear my case, the platypus is the ultimate ambiguous creature. I'm not sure if you've seen one in person before, but it's not one animal. It's a combination of many kinds of animals. It's a mammal that lays eggs. Is it a platypus? Is it a beaver? Is it a mouse? Is it some weird amphibian? We don't know. And I also, too, am an ambiguous creature, you see, because Mum's side is the Western Roman Empire and that site is Eastern. So thus, it is fitting that platypus would be a merge of both Greek and Latin terms.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, but English doesn't have to do that.

[Caller]

Right, I see.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, yeah, yeah.

[Caller]

Anyway, despite my schizophrenic ramblings,

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's a noble try, though. I. I will give you that. It's a noble thing you're trying to do.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Plus, if you say platypodus, you can put on airs.

[Caller]

I see. Well, it's okay. One day, in my crusade for the defense of the turned platypi, perhaps I may be successful. But in regards to today's question, it's not Terribly related to the topic at hand, but I did want to pick Father Stephen's brain about this, because I can't.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Before you do, I have, I have one more comment. I have one more comment on the Platypi situation.

[Caller]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Is this coming out of some kind of resentment of the English as an Australian?

[Caller]

No, I love the English.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know, they are very picky about that kind of thing. And I feel like you wanting. You're kind of doing the working man. They exiled you, right? And now you're going to get back at them by offending their refined grammatical senses.

[Caller]

My goodness. Stephen Young. I think I've just about aggravated everyone then.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

My goodness.

[Caller]

The Greeks are not happy, the Romans aren't happy, the English aren't happy. My goodness. Anyway, regarding to today's topic, by all means, Father Stephen, Danish, if you have anything to say as well, but can't find any orthodox sources in particular talking about in the Gospels when Christ is referred to as a carpenter, I understand that there's some dispute about whether that means a literal timber worker, whether it means a builder or perhaps even a stonemason. Would you be able to comment at all, Fathers, on if there's any scholarly, orthodox content that you may know in regards to this topic?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'm trying to correct me if I'm wrong, Father Stephen, but the Gospels call him. People say he's the carpenter's son, obviously, because St. Joseph is a carpenter. But does it ever describe Jesus himself as a carpenter?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, it doesn't describe Joseph as a carpenter either. The word in Greek is technon. Oh, he's a maker, a craftsman. Yeah, essentially. And. Yeah, and I don't know any particularly. I mean, there's a ton of journal articles about this in biblical studies, but I don't know of any that are from an orthodox author in particular. But so within the context of. So Nazareth, we're talking about biblical Nazareth, not modern day Nazareth and Palestine. Biblical Nazareth was not in one location. Peasant villages like Nazareth in Galilee in the first century moved around because the peasants were mainly working as laborers, harvesting crops for landowners. And so the village would kind of. It was more like what we would call a shanty town. It would kind of be sort of re erected as the harvest right. Moved around. It would kind of move around within a. I mean within a specific area, but it would move around within that area. It was not fully a settlement. And so within that, St. Joseph's role within that community was that he was sort of more like a craftsman. He wouldn't have been specialized. It would have been more like, we think of like a handyman. So he would have worked with wood. He would have also worked with stone. He would have worked with various things. He would have been one of the people helping erect the shelters, break down things, re. Erect them, move them around, repair roofs, thatching. Right. All of those kind of things for the other villagers. And that. That gives you an idea of the sort of poverty level we're talking about for Jesus and his family. Because. Right. If you think. Right, this village is primarily made up of these peasants who are getting paid basically to harvest crops. So think farm workers.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And Christ's father is getting paid by farm workers to work on and repair their homes. Right. He works for poor people.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So and the fact that Christ also would have learned this kind of trade with it for his father. His public ministry, remember, doesn't start until he's 30.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So, I mean, it doesn't say this, but it's probably good conjecture that he would have.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. In the ancient world, that's what everyone did. Did.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. You do what your dad does.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

When you were old enough, you started assisting your father in working with him. Be that if you had a family farm, it would have been doing that. Right. Helping around the farm. But I think we've talked about this on the show before. One of the political undercurrents going on in the background of. Of the Gospels is that by that point in the first century, 70% of the land in Judea and Galilee that wasn't owned by the Romans. Right. The Romans, of course, took whatever they wanted. But the land that wasn't directly controlled by the Romans, 70% of it was owned by the high priest in his family. And they had used the Temple tax to basically extort the land from the people who God had given it to in the Torah. And so those day laborers in Galilee, like in Nazareth, those were the people whose families originally owned that land and had been given that land to farm it by God. The Sadducees essentially had used the Temple tax to extort it and take it from them. And now we're employing them for pennies to harvest what had once been their

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

own family's land and should be, according to the Torah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And should be forever, according to the Torah. Yes. With no jubilee year in sight.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, yeah, that's kind of what's going on with the economics of Nazareth.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Interesting.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

At the time of Christ's childhood, we

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

lost our connection to Australia there. But hopefully Christian was able to continue to look. Listen. So anyway. All right, well, Acts of St. Thomas. How about that? Someone actually in the chat wanted to know, is this the same thing as the Gospel of Thomas? No, it is not.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, it is not.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Gospel of Thomas is a whole other thing. Yes, there's another. There's another potential future episode. Extra canonical sayings of Jesus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Saying of Jesus that aren't in the Gospels, but that the church fathers refer to and quote. There's more than you think.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So what happened to say, I mean, the tradition, of course, is that he went to India. So is that what we're talking about here?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, that's what we're talking about here. That's the short answer.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All of our friends in the Malak are at church are like, finally, finally.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, here we go. Your moment has come.

[Caller]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. So there is, of course, just this broad tradition that, that St. Thomas went to India. That's attested to all over the place. Right. That's not. Again, that's not coming from the Acts of Thomas. Yeah, that's all over the place. Right. That. That St. Thomas went to India. Now, if you want to hear the, The. The worst counter argument in history to that, I could give it to you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Go for it. I'm always ready for a worst counter argument in history.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because in my Calvinist seminary days, I brought this up. The fact that St. Thomas had gone to India and was told by a very intelligent man, one of the professors there, who I won't name, because he is very intelligent and this answer will reflect badly on him and maybe make you question that characterization, said to me, no, that never happened. I was like, well, how. How do you know that never. I mean, I said, I know it's not the Bible, but I mean, there's all this attestation, right. To that this happened. Why. Why are you saying with so much certainty? He said, because the New Testament says that St. Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow. Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Therefore, if you say any other apostle converted any other Gentiles, I guess we're winking at the whole Cornelius thing. Any apostle went to any Gentiles, then you're contradicting the Bible. Was the theory there? I do not find this to be a compelling counter argument. But besides the absence of a good counter argument and the broad base of this tradition, there's some very specific things that we now know for certain.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

One of the most important ones is that the Acts of Thomas, the text we're about to talk about, a lot of the action centers around a king named Gwandifer.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And until very recently, like within my lifetime, everyone said, well, this is how we know that this is fake. Right. There's no such King Gwandifer. There's no record of any king named Gwandifer in India, in any part of India. The part of India we're talking about, it never existed, therefore this is bogus. And then within our lifetimes, archeologically, they discovered a huge cache of coins and guess whose face and name was printed on them from the first century. King Gwanda Forest.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

How about that? Oops.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And this isn't just a gotcha like haha, laugh at the scholars who assume that absence of evidence meant evidence of absence. It goes beyond that. Right. Because the only record we had of this king's existence until the late 20th century was in the Acts of Thomas.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Was in stories associated with St. Thomas going to India. Otherwise that name was lost to history until the late 20th century. So that makes it very powerful evidence. Right. Because when and how would they have made this up? How would they have known about this king in order to invent this? Right, Yeah. So in addition to King Gwandover being confirmed, we have also now archeologically confirmed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there were Christian churches, fully functioning Christian churches with bishops who had ongoing relationships with bishops in churches in Mesopotamia by the year A.D. 200. You could go today. I don't recommend it. I'm not advising you to do this. I know someone who did this, though. You could go to Pakistan and. Because of course, what's now Pakistan was the western part of India before the partition by the British, you go to Pakistan and there are remains of churches from the late first and early second centuries with Aramaic inscriptions, Christian churches right there to be seen, that have been archaeologically excavated. So we know Christianity came there in the first century. We have details about the history of that region of India that were only preserved in these texts about St. Thomas. Right. This is a very strong. This is about as good in terms of ancient history, this is about as good of a historical case as you get for St. Thomas having gone to India.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like you, you do not expect more evidence than this. We believe a lot of things happened in the ancient world where we have much less evidence than this supporting it. Right. But no one questions it. So then we have to ask the question once again, as apparently somebody in the chat did, related to the Gospel of Thomas, is it Gnostic? Right. And this is especially an important question because it's not just the Gospel of Thomas. There's a. The the dialogue of Thomas the Contender. There's a whole bunch of gnostic stuff with St. Thomas's name on it, right? So, yeah, red flags go up. There are a lot of folks as scholars out there who just blanket assume that anything with St. Thomas's name on it is a gnostic text. Because, you know, if the Acts of Thomas isn't, it's an exception, right? And on one hand, it's on St. Nick, of course's, list. So I want to say it's an exception, right? But it is at best ambiguous. And here's what I mean by ambiguous. And we're going to see specific examples of this as we go through the text, but there are significant passages and elements of it that you can read in a gnostic way, or you could read in a not gnostic way, because guess what, related to what we were saying earlier about texts not being. To have a. Not being able to exercise authority by themselves, you can read texts in different ways, right? And so when I say that this text is ambiguous, I mean that quite literally you can read it either way and it's not. And neither way requires a whole ton of special pleading, right? In the sense that like, you know, sure, you could like if you find one of the kooky Jesus mythicist people on the, on YouTube, Friend of the show, Bart Ehrman, had a debate with one at one point. That's. And it's funny to watch because there's literally a point where Bart Urban, he's tried to be respect. He tries his best to be respectful. He always does in debates, but he, he kind of bursts out laughing at the guy because the guy says something super ridiculous. But. And this guy had figured out some way to read St. Paul's epistles so that they were talking about some kind of cosmic gnostic Jesus or something and not Jesus of Nazareth. Right. It's about as kooky to imagine, right? So I'm not saying, yes, you can come up with some cockeyed way to read the Acts of Thomas to make it orthodox or to make it Gnostic. I'm saying fairly plain common sense reading of it. You could go either way. There's stuff in it that's ambiguous enough. You could go either way. So here's the first example and we'll see some more. First example, the way you would usually make this determination. In fact, this is, this is how scholars with St. Thomas literature in particular make this. So St. Thomas is the twin, right, Didymus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, it's says in the Gospels, Thomas called the twin Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Thomas who's called Didymus, Thomas who's called the twin. Okay, so in general, your sort of bare bones, typical orthodox historical reading of this is just, hey, St. Thomas had a twin brother. Pretty, pretty clear cut, straightforward when you read Gnostic texts. One of the tells when you're reading a Thomas text that's Gnostic is, is that it will say that St. Thomas is Jesus twin.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Or like his mirror or something weird like that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, it gets weirder. Yeah. Spiritual twin. Right. And in different Gnostic texts, this goes different ways. So like in, in Thomas the Contender, like Thomas is a physical human and Jesus is like an ephemeral divine person. And the two of them are twins, like he's the material part and Jesus the immature part. Right. So you get weird things like that. St. Thomas gets crucified instead of Jesus because they're twins. So like they do a Patty Duke and like switch places. So there's a lot of weird twin stuff like that. Right. So okay, okay, so Acts of Thomas, what does it say? Well, it says that, that St. Thomas is Jesus twin. Right. So you're like, oh, okay, wait, radar goes up. Is this, is this Gnostic then? But then it says, well, he's his twin in that he lived a life that was just like Christ's. Okay, so it's like, well, okay, so is that Gnostic or is it just saying he lived his life in imitation of Christ? Right. Like he's a saint. This is what I mean by ambiguous.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like it's not totally clear, but that means that you're not going to find sort of like that piece that got added to the Acts of John, which is blatant in your face, like, hey, guess what? Jesus was intangible some of the time. You know, I mean, like there's not stuff like that, right, that's blatantly Gnostic or. But there's also not anything that's like, hey, the incarnation is real. Right. Like the other way either. So the Acts of Thomas begins with Christ selling Thomas into slavery, literally. So,

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

yes. So, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So King Gwer has sent one of his officials westward to Syria to find slaves to work on building his new palace. And so Christ appears to the servant of gifer and sells St. Thomas to him as a slave, as a workman to go oversee the building of King Gwandifer's palace. And that's how St. Thomas gets to India. The idea here in the tax seems to be, seems to be trying to draw parallels to Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers and Going to Egypt, right? And then, of course, once he's in Egypt, he kind of works his way into Pharaoh's court. It seems like they're trying to do a parallel there in the narrative. And that's what's going on with Thomas going there as a slave. But so as St Thomas arrives in India, the first thing he does is disrupt the prince's wedding. King Waifer's son is getting married, and they're having this sort of pagan marriage procession that's going to culminate in this big feast. And St. Thomas runs in and breaks it all up, sort of ruins the wedding and the wedding feast, okay? So here's another thing. So the folks who are on the. This is a Gnostic text side, go see, this is anti marriage. St Thomas hates marriages at weddings and doesn't want people to get married. Okay? On the other side, this is a pagan wedding. Pagan stuff is going on. That feast at the end is all food offered to idols to Hindu idols in India. So is St Thomas just breaking up the idolatry and the paganism? Right. Not entirely clear in the text. Right. You could. You could kind of go either way with it. So despite getting really bad about this, about his son's wedding being broken up, King Gwandover has been assured that St. Thomas is this master workman. And so St. Thomas agrees to build the temple for King Gwandolyver. And so he gets some money, and then he keeps coming back to King Gwandifer over and over again and being like, man, I need a little more money. I need some more money. I need some more money. Just a little more money. We're almost done. Okay? I need some more money. And finally, King Gwennifer gets suspicious and sends somebody to find out what's going on. And he finds out that St. Thomas is just taking all the money he gives him and giving it to the poor and then preaching the gospel to them and baptizing them and stuff, right? So he hauls St Thomas back in front of him and says, what are you doing? You take all this money. You bamboozled me, right? You're taking my money and giving it to the poor. You haven't built a thing, right? You haven't put a single stone out there. And St. Thomas says, Ah, King, I have been building you a beautiful palace in heaven with the good deeds I have been doing in your name, right? And King Gwandover says, bull, and throws him in prison.

[Caller]

Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'm not interested in that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. He's like, I'm not falling for that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Throws him in jail. But then once he has thrown St. Thomas in jail, remember where Joseph ended up? Right? The king's brother dies. This is one of the themes in all of these apocryphal acts. People just dropping dead.

[Caller]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the king's brother dies. And when the king's brother dies, he goes up to heaven and he sees the palace. He sees this incredible, beautiful palace in heaven. And he asks an angel, hey, what's that palace? And he says, oh, that's your brother's palace that, that St. Thomas built for him that he has waiting for him in the kingdom of heaven.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so miraculously, the king's brother comes back to life and says to the king, no, he's telling the truth, man. Really, Like, I saw the palace, it's magnificent. You should let him out. So let's say Thomas, out of prison, he gets baptized, becomes a Christian so that he could, you know, enjoy his palace in the life of the world to come. So having now baptized the king, St. Thomas says, well, my work here is done. And King Gwandover's kingdom, by the way, archaeologically is exactly where you would expect it to be. It is, it was right on the border between India and like Parthian, like Persia. Right. Like, it's like, Right. Their territory. Right. So the coins had Gwandifer's face and name on the front. And on the obverse side, about half of them had Zeus and about half of them had Shiva. So it was sort of a meeting point between Greek speakers. Right, The Greek speaking Roman world. The eastern part of the stretch of the Roman world and India.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But his work is done in Guadifer's kingdom. And so he decides to move on to the kingdom of Misdeus, which is the next, the next kingdom over. There's not a united India at this time. And so he hits the road to head there. Now, a major thing in the Acts of Thomas that you see a lot more. Like in the Acts of John, there's lots of resurrections, lots of raising the dead. In the Acts of Thomas, there's tons of exorcisms, as you might expect, if he's the first person bringing the gospel to the, to pagan India, right. Where they're practicing pagan Hinduism, there's going to be a lot of demonic possession that he's. Right. Gonna have to deal with. But kind of the most amazing episode of this happens on the road where he runs into what in Hinduism would be called a Naga, this serpent being creature. This serpent man on the road, this serpent man identifies himself as, number one, the serpent from the Garden of Eden, Number two, the angel who led the other angels in seducing the human women to create the Nephilim. And number three, the spirit that possessed Judas when he betrayed Christ.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So basically he's saying he's the devil.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Basically, right? Yeah, but those are the three specific identifiers he gives for himself. Okay, this Naga and the. And as St. Thomas finds him, he's just bitten and poisoned and killed this dude. So St. Thomas forces this creature to bite the guy he just killed again and suck all the venom out. Suck all the venom back out. And so he does this. He sucks the venom back out, the guy he had killed comes back to life, and the Naga who has sucked back up his own venom, explodes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I mean, I feel like that's. You know, I'm seeing a 1970s or 1960s Doug McClure film. You know, Like, I feel like this is special effects of that sort. The exploding demon serpent.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I don't know. Bollywood could do a lot with this too.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Absolutely. It would be song and dance number to go with it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Naga, song and dance number.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, big time.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then it ends with him exploding. Yeah. And I don't know if they collected the pieces and made like a jacket out of it, because that would be. Naga hide.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Why was I not prepared for that?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But so the next. The next thing that happens, fortunately, because he's still got a long road ahead of him to get to the kingdom of Ms. Deus, is he runs into a donkey. And that the donkey agrees to carry him the rest of the way to the next kingdom. And when I say agrees to carry him, I mean that literally, because this is a talking donkey.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I mean, in my head, talking donkeys always sound like Eddie Murphy. Even Balaam's ass.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, well, and that's important because why could this donkey talk? According to the Acts of Thomas, he is descended from Balaam's ass.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hey, they've been talking all this time, so.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. So technically, the Book of Numbers never says that God took away the power of speech from that donkey. And apparently, according to the Acts of Thomas, he had passed the ability to speak on to his progeny. And so now, some 1500 or so years later, there is this race of talking donkeys, one of whom so now going to carry St. Thomas to the kingdom of M. Deus. He has a lot more exorcisms on the way. A lot of these exorcisms involve women. There's this trope Here of women becoming demon possessed and the demons possessing them, forcing them into acts of public lewdness and sexuality. This is probably connection connected to certain forms of ancient Hindu pagan worship and that kind of thing in the area which is here being characterized as demonic. Finally, he gets to the kingdom of his dais and there we get a little more information about sort of the pattern of his ministry there, which takes the form of he will go to a place, he will do miracles. Those miracles, then once they have gotten people's attention, this pattern should be familiar from the canonical acts of the apostles. Once those miracles have gotten people's attention, he will use them as an opportunity to preach the gospel to those people. When those people accept the gospel, he baptizes them and then celebrates the Eucharist with them. So that is the pattern.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

One of the important things to emphasize, again, this is the earliest layer of right. Christian tradition. And what we see here is that what it means to be a Christian, once you accept the gospel is conceived in these sacramental terms, you are baptized and then you join the sacramental life of the church. There is no sort of, oh, you're a Christian now, here's a Bible, see you later. You guys should get together and talk about it once in a while. Yeah, right. That these structures are put in place in the Acts of Thomas and what we would expect to see, frankly from what we know historically about the first and second and third century church, most of his converts are actually women.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, that's how it was in the early days, majority women.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And that, that's the case in the Roman Empire as well. And we even get the, the names of a couple of the early bishops, which I'm probably mispronouncing because these are like hellenized forms of ancient Indian names, but Sephora and Euzinese. I'm sure there is a, an Indian form of those names that, that's covering

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

for in Greek, Sanskrit at that point, I'm sure.

[Caller]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But cypher and usages are identified. The reason I say the early bishops is they're identified as people whom St. Thomas makes his successors in particular places when he moves on to the next place. Yeah, right. So they're literally there's sort of apostolic succession happening with these, with these bishops. Once again, you see church structures here already as part and parcel of evangelism and preaching the Gospel. And so then at the end of the Acts of Thomas, we get a series of hymns. The longest and most prominent one, the one everybody talks about, is called the Hymn of the Pearl. And the Hymn of the Pearl is another one of these ambiguous texts. It's a poetic text, right? And basically it poetically tells the story of this son who is sent by his father to Egypt to get a pearl, this very valuable and beautiful pearl. And while he's there, he's seduced by the Egyptian gods into worshiping them, and he's seduced by the women of Egypt into spending time with them, shall we say. And he sort of forgets about his mission. And then his father sends him a letter that reminds him of his mission, and he goes and gets the pearl and returns home to his father. Okay, now you may be hearing this and you may be thinking, wow, that sounds Gnostic. And that could be a fair reaction. There's a Gospel of the Pearl in the Nag Hammadi texts. You can read this in a Gnostic way where this is about, you know, sort of, you are one of the sons of God. You have fallen into the material world and become distracted by things like sex and, you know, relations with women and the religions of this world and forgotten your true identity and your true purpose. But now we've got, you know, the secret Gnosis, the hidden truth. The pearl, we could reveal it to you and you could return to divinity or oneness with everything or whatever. Right. You can read it in that kind of Gnostic way. You can also, however, look at it and say, you know, this is kind of a smushing together of the parable of the pearl of great price and the parable of the Prodigal Son. Right. Like tropes from both of them. You know, this could just be about, you know, you have a mission and a purpose in life. Right. The Gospel is the pearl. Right. It will allow you to break away from sins like idolatry and sexual immorality, which we've seen pagan India, just like pagan Rome was prone to. Right. You could break away from these and come back to the God who created you. Right. You could read this in an orthodox way too, Right. And you can throw in. Why is it Egypt? Well, the whole symbolism. We were talking about Joseph before. The whole symbolism of the Exodus, right. That wanting to go back to Egypt, we had it better. Right. The whole symbolism of Egypt in the Old Testament, you could perfectly well read this in an orthodox way also. So from beginning to end, Acts of Thomas, very interesting. Lots of good stuff. Is it Gnostic? Can be if you want it to be.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Can you read it in an orthodox way? Sure. And that's a good reason for it to be on a list of books that are read privately instead of publicly. So you can make sure that people read it the right way instead of the wrong way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, well, I mean, I. I was. I've been trying to think about what kind of stuff I might say in terms of my own conclusions. I would sort of tie all this stuff together. I mean, there's not a single thread. I mean, there's definitely. There's definitely a theme of like, anti Gnosticism in some of these texts and that. But of course, then there's some. It's like, well, if you really want to read it in a gnostic way, you could.

[Caller]

But.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But to me, the more important thing, because it's interesting, we got a lot of questions about, like, well, how do you think about texts like this at all? You know,

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I think what this does for us is it illustrates that there are a lot of different elements of orthodox tradition that should be treated differently. You know, and for those who are influenced. Well, not just influence. I mean, grew up in swimming in what is still, frankly, a basically Protestant culture. It can be difficult to sort this out, which is why I think we got multiple questions about this. Because, you know, most Protestants have been taught, look, the Bible is the one really reliable thing. It's true. And everything else is kind of, well, which of course, we've taken that apart and shown how that doesn't really work. And so then the question is, okay, well, what am I supposed to do about texts like this? I mean, number one, there's obviously a lot that's in these that has become part of the traditional. One could also almost say in a certain sense, canonical, not like scriptural canonical, but canonical life of some of these saints. Like if you look up in the Synoxadian, which historically anyways, has had an actual liturgical function, you know, parts of these being read during orthros. If you look up in the synaxotion, the lives of some of these saints, you'll see some of the same elements are in there. Not necessarily all of them, not necessarily all the same elements, but the sum of the same elements. And so often what you'll see in the Synoxodian versions of these lives is they tend to be kind of trimmer and more restrained in some ways. It's not that they're cutting out by any means, like miraculous stuff, because saints lives are full, full of miracles. So there's no problem like that. The question is just sort of, well, how reliable? How well you know, based are the sources, you know, that that are being used in putting together. Because the lives of saints that are in exodia tend to be a kind of compilation of traditions. And so the question is, you know, like, how reliable are they? So when you read stuff like this and you read like, you know, a story about Jesus selling Thomas into slavery, how literally are we supposed to take that? Or you know, St. Paul baptizing a lion, how literally are we supposed to take that? We're not. You don't have to take that literally. It's okay to just say, okay, this is a valuable story that teaches me certain kinds of things. That doesn't mean that we just simply say, oh, it's all allegory. You know, none of that really happened. It's all just kind of make believe stories to teach us a lesson. No, that's not true. But the problem is that when you try to apply the question of sort of the dogmatic filter to everything, then you're going to miss the point. You're going to miss the point. This is the truth. There are saints lives that were self consciously fictional and even made their way into the cynics audience. I've had a couple of conversations and just recently heard another conversation with someone else, Deacon Nicholas Kotar, talking especially about a saint named Averkios, who. The only thing that was known about him was his name, but it was needed to read his life during orthros. And so hagiographers created a life of St. Averkios based on elements from other saints lives so that there would be something to read at the appropriate time during Orthros. So it was very self consciously a work of what we would call fiction. But it sits there in that slot, not just because the slot needs to be filled, but because the point is to edify the listener so that he can repent, so that he can be a better Christian. And that is ultimately the point of reading any of these texts. The question did this literally happen or not? It's not the right question to ask of these texts because that's not why they're written. I'm not saying that ancient people had no concept of fiction and nonfiction. Absolutely. They understood that some things were fiction. Absolutely. And they also had no problem sometimes mixing the two together to produce an edifying story. That's okay. It's all right. I mean, this existed in the Jewish tradition. You have Midrash, right. Sort of filling out these stories for the purposes of commentary, for the purposes of directing people to living life according to God's commandments correctly. So, you know, it's okay that. And in those. These cases, like some. These are. Most of these are really early texts. But it's okay that even saints lives that. That, you know, get transmitted over centuries and start to accumulate stuff along the way. That's okay. It's okay. Because the point of saints lives is not to say, now this is a blow by blow account of what happened. And if you don't believe that, you're anathematized. No, that's not how these texts function. That's not their purpose at all. Right. I mean, another good example that's pre Christian, like the story of Joseph and Azinith. The elements that are from scripture in there are pretty small compared to most of the story that's there. So it's basically a kind of historical fiction. And that's okay, right? It's written to be edifying. I'm not saying it's written to be pure allegory or anything like that, but it is written to be edifying. Like, we have genres like this. Okay, so these texts that we've looked at this evening are not canonical saints lives. They're not. Right? That's not what they are. There are canonical saints lives canonical, again, not in the sense of being read as scripture, but being read as part of liturgical services, connected with liturgical services, put together in collections of lives of saints, this kind of thing. And they tend to be much more restrained. But even then, the question that we approach saints lives with is not, could this satisfy, you know, a 19th, 20th, 21st century secular historians requirements for what they would consider true and not true? The reality is, most of the time, it probably is historic true in that historical sense. I have little reason to doubt that. But it's still not the right question. If you're so busy asking whether this is sort of dogmatically true or not, you're missing why these stories are written. They're written so that we can be formed in the atmosphere of the church, so that we can have the mind of Christ through looking at the examples of the saints and imitate them where it's appropriate. It's not always appropriate to imitate every saint in every way. It's just not like, please, kids, most of you are not meant to live up on top of pillars like Saint Simeon the Stylite and other stylites did. That's just not what you're supposed to do. But nonetheless, we can see the kind of drive for holiness in the lives of even people like that. And so that's really the point of what's going on in all these things and there's some wild, wild elements. And honestly, I mean, some of that's what keeps you coming back. And you want to know more, you want to hear the rest, you want to connect. And the truth is, of course, that if you look at other kinds of texts from this period and even throughout the history of the Church, there's not really much that's actually unusual there. It's weird to us as 21st century people, but it's not weird to most people throughout history. Not most Christians for sure. So, yeah, that's, that's, that's my understanding, one understanding of how to kind of understand these texts.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So at the present time, among people who identify as Christians, at least in the Americas, probably the least popular phrase is extra ecclesiam nulla salis. Outside of the Church, there is no salvation. This causes a lot of our friends anxiety, distress. Anyone who says it is some kind of weird exclusionary bigot and bad person. But the truth that that phrase is trying to express is exactly the theme where we started tonight and kind of where we ended up, which is that, as it says at the beginning of the canonical acts of the apostles, St. Luke's gospel described everything that Christ began to do and to teach and the teaching of Christ and the works of Christ then continued in and through his Church, his body in the world. The Church is how Christ is present and working in the world today. And so all salvation comes in and through the Church because all salvation comes in and through Christ. It's a logical corollary. Right? So the question is not about, is any individual person who is not a communicate member of the Orthodox Church saved? That's not the question. The question is anyone in the world who is saved, how does their salvation come to them, comes to them through the Orthodox Church. True, historically,

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's literally the Orthodox Church that copied the New Testament in Greek all through the centuries. So we have it today. That's how we got the Bible. It's how we got church structures. It's how the Gospel got preached. Right. Just historically, it's true, it's the source. But what the Book of Acts in the New Testament and what the other extra biblical texts that we read tonight also point out is that it's true at a very existential and experiential level. How did Christ come to the city of Rome? He came to the city of Rome in The person of St. Peter,

[Narrator]

who

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

was an apostle of the Church, who came to Rome and started preaching, baptizing people, celebrating the Eucharist, established bishops as his successors. How did Christ come to India? The person of St. Thomas, one of his apostles who came there, preached the gospel, baptized people, celebrated the Eucharist, appointed bishops as his successors, created the structures of the church. Those structures of those bishops then continued the ministry that St Thomas had done. That was the ministry that St Thomas received from Christ, continued to teach Christ's teachings, continued to do Christ's works in those places, continued to bring Christ's gospel to the next kingdom and the next kingdom and the next kingdom and to the next generation and the next generation and the next generation. We read about some pretty extreme situations in the Acts of John. They're kind of extreme to the point of almost comedy, right? You could probably detect in the way I describe them. Part of that was to diffuse just how horrific some of them were and sexually gross some of them were. Right? But I, I've been at this game a while in terms of being a priest, and let me tell you, there are, Reese, real life situations that extreme that happen in the world. There are people you know

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

who have

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

been through, come through, been exposed to situations that extreme involving sexuality and violence and things during their life. They don't go around talking about it for obvious reasons.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And what we're reading about in the Acts of John, with St. John walking into those episodes is St. John bringing Christ even into those incredibly dark, incredibly sinful situations. And by bringing Christ into them, he transforms them. People who were dead are made alive. People who were had gone down the most grievous, almost unimaginable road of sin, turn around and repent. And so this raises the question, if Christ is going to come into your family, your workplace, your school, your circle of friends, how's he going to come there? He's going to come there through you. If you are a member of the church, then you are a member of the body of Christ. You are one of the members, one of the organs, one of the instruments through which Christ is working in the world and the one who's designated for Christ to work through in your world. The people you know, the people you encounter, the people you work with, people you're related to by blood and by choice. Because for those people to find salvation, they're going to find it in and through the church, whether you want to accept it or not, whether you want to think that way or not, you're the designated member of the church who's assigned to them. Being a missionary isn't about. You don't have to go into the depths of pagan India and Start from scratch, like St. Thomas after being sold into slavery,

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You don't have to travel very far at all for your mission field, for the place where you're called to bring Christ. That's, I think, the thing we need to take away from these acts, even from the crazy and fabulous stories. There are places of quiet desperation, sadness, darkness, sin, distorted sexuality. All of these things all around us right here in the quote, unquote Western world. People who desperately need Christ, they need to hear the gospel, need to get baptized. You need to come into the church. Lives need to be transformed. They're virtually dead. They need to come back to a new life. And each of us has the privilege, at least potentially, of being the vehicle, the instrument through which Christ does those great works. So that's what I have to say to sum all this up.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Amen. Well, everyone, that's our show for tonight. Thank you very much for listening. If you didn't happen to get through to us live this time, we'd still like to hear from you. You can email us LordOfSpiritscientientFaith.com you can also send a message to our Facebook page. You can leave us a [e-mail] LordOfSpirits and if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or you need help finding finding a parish, go to orthodoxintro.org.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Then join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 6pm Eastern, 3pm Pacific. Suspicions rising. Answers aren't clear. I thought we made a promise. Now you've disappeared.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And if you're on Facebook, you can also follow our page. You can join our discussion group and and leave ratings and reviews and share this show with a friend.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. You seem to lead two lives at a time. Do I still fit in? I thought you were mine.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Thank you. Good night. Christ has risen.

[Narrator]

You've been listening to the Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests, Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father 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. Receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and Blessing. Revelation, chapter 5, verses 11 through 12.