A (0:01)

Hey everybody. This is a short podcast I recorded for Easter two years ago. It's been available only on the Martyr Maid substack up until now, which you should all go subscribe to if you haven't already. But I thought I'd repost it here for everybody. So I hope you all had a blessed week and that you have a blessed day. Happy Easter. I'm content to die for my beliefs so cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it. No, they will forget. Hell does exist. God is a thought. God is an idea. It is a place. It is somewhere. Hell does exist, but its resting is to something that transcends all things. Why we must tear ourselves apart for this small question of religion. So start this episode out. I thought I'd go with this well so the the biblical scholar Bart Ehrman begins his introduction to the New Testament class in the following way. He says even before he was born, it was known that he would be someone special. A supernatural being informed his mother that the child she was to conceive would not be a mere mortal, but would be divine. He was born miraculously, and he became an unusually precocious young man. As an adult, he left home and went on an itinerant preaching ministry, urging his listeners to live not for the material things of this world, but for what is spiritual. He gathered a number of disciples around him who became convinced that his teachings were divinely inspired, in no small part because he himself was divine. He proved it to them by doing many miracles, healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead. But at the end of his life, he roused opposition and his enemies delivered him over to the Roman authorities for judgment. Still, after he left this world, he returned to meet his followers in order to convince them that he was not really dead, but lived on in the heavenly realm. And later some of his followers wrote books about him. Now, if they were really good students, really good students, and had read Professor Ehrman's book before starting his class, they would have already been in on the joke. But most of the students, assuming that they had at least a passing knowledge of the Gospel story, are surprised when he tells them that he is not describing Jesus Christ, but the neo Pythagorean holy man Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius of Tyana lived during the same time as Jesus, although he managed to avoid falling on the wrong side of Rome until much later. So he outlived Jesus by many years. He died near the end of the 1st century. By the late 3rd, early 4th century the spread of Christianity was causing alarm among the pagan philosophers at the court of the Roman emperor Diocletian. And so, while simpler men took to the streets to go stamp out this strange new religion the old fashioned way, the philosophers set out to attack the faith with public arguments in a series of anti Christian polemics. One of these polemical tracts was by an infamous persecutor of Christians called Sassanius Hierocles. Another was written by Porphyry of Tyre and was called against the Christians. Both of those polemics used what had by then already become a well worn trope among critics and enemies of Christianity in the Roman Empire. They both drew comparisons between the Christian savior and Apollonius of Tyana. One of Apollonius miracles is especially interesting for what we're talking about here. After Apollonius had traveled far and wide, purportedly studying under the naked ones in Egypt and even trekking all the way to India, following in the footsteps of the original Pythagoras, Apollonius returned to the Hellenistic world and finally settles in the city of Ephesus. One day he comes to understand that the city will soon be suffering a terrible plague. And so he warns the residents of this. But despite his reputation, the people don't believe him. So they go about their lives and lo and behold, a plague visited upon the city. Well, the people, they come crawling back to him. They say, we made a huge mistake. We should have listened to you, Apollonius of Tyana, Please, please help us. And so he says, all right, I'll help you. But since you did not believe me the first time, I will only help you if you agree to follow my commands without question. Well, the people are desperate and so they agree. And he tells the people that he will lead them to a spot at which they are all to gather. His chronicler, Philostratus picks up the story from here. Take courage, for I will today put a stop to the course of the disease. And with these words he led the population entire to a theater where the image of the averting God has since been set up. And there he saw what seemed an old beggar, artfully blinking his eyes as if blind. And he carried a wallet and a crust of bread in it. And he was clad in filthy rags and was very squalid of countenance. Apollonius therefore ranged the Ephesians around him and said, pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods. Now the Ephesians wondered what he meant and were shocked at the idea of murdering a stranger so manifestly miserable, for he was begging and praying them to take mercy upon him. Nevertheless, Apollonius insisted and egged on the Ephesians to launch themselves on him and not let him go. And as soon as some of them began to take shots and hit him with their stones, the beggar, who had seemed to blink and be blind, gave them all a sudden glance and showed that his eyes were full of fire. Then the Ephesians recognized that he was a demon, and they stoned him so thoroughly that their stones were heaped into a great cairn around him. After a little pause, Apollonius bade them remove the stones and acquaint themselves with this wild animal which they had slain. When, therefore, they had exposed the object which they thought they had thrown their missiles at, they found that he had disappeared. And instead of him there was a hound who resembled in form and look a Molossian dog, but was in size the equal of the largest lion. There he lay before their eyes, pounded to a pulp by their stones and vomiting foam as mad dogs do. Accordingly, the statue of the averting God, namely Hercules, has been set up over the spot where the ghost was slain. End quote. Well, it's hard to imagine a more horrible miracle than that. But the miracle worked, and the plague was lifted from the city of Ephesus. If a Christian writer had written that story about a pagan holy man like Apollonius of Tyana, historians today would probably assume that it had been made up to slander him. But Philostratus and the others who shared that story did so as an example of Apollonius's great power and understanding. They were proud of the story. Here's another version of it. And in this version we might recognize a bit more clearly the dynamics at play. This one also involves a terrible plague, only this time it's the real historical Black Death in 14th century France. Our storyteller is Guillaume de Macha, a poet, and his story is related in his Judgment of the King of Navarre. He tells us that no physician or doctor was there who really knew the cause or origin or what it was. Nor was there any remedy. Yet this malady was so great that it was called an epidemic. The whole community is in an uproar and in despair. But soon there are some among them who claimed that they knew how this whole thing had gotten started. So these ones, who were just a few at first, but then more as rumors began to spread, and soon everyone was pointing the finger at the cause of all their troubles. After that came a false, treacherous and contemptible swine. This was shameful. Israel, the wicked and disloyal, who hated good and loved everything evil, who gave so much gold and silver and promises to Christians. Who then poisoned several rivers and fountains that had been clear and pure. So that many had lost their lives. For whoever used them died suddenly. Certainly 10 times 100,000 died from it. In country and in city. Then finally, this mortal calamity was noticed. He who sits on high and sees far, who governs and provides for everything. Did not want this treachery to remain hidden. He revealed it and made it so generally known. That they lost their lives and possessions. Then every Jew was destroyed. Some hanged, others burned, some were drowned, others beheaded with an axe or sword. During one peak of the plague, from 1348 to 1351, some 500 Jewish communities were destroyed. West of the Rhineland, the hysteria reached a level so that in some cities Jews were massacred. As soon as the first rumors began that the plague was in the area. The French thinker and author Rene Girard tells us that Guillaume de Mache's tale and the tale of Apollonius in Ephesus are actually the same tale. Not that they tell of the same events, obviously, but that the events they describe. Are examples of an anthropological process. That runs so deep and fundamental to human beings. That other versions in various guises, are to be found at all times in all parts of the world. From primitive mythologies to the religions and histories of great civilizations. To take a more familiar example, maybe more familiar, we'll go with the Greek myth of Oedipus. You might remember this story from high school or college. But just in case you don't remember the outlines, this is how it goes. Oedipus father, Laius had once, as a young man, been taken into the house of a king to tutor the king's son. Instead of doing his job, he ended up raping the prince, who committed suicide. And Laius was thenceforth cursed by the God Apollo. When Oedipus is born, Laius, who's a king by now, consults an oracle to learn that his son that was just born will one day kill him. And so he orders the infant bound. And he orders his wife, Oedipus mother, to kill the boy. Well, she can't bring herself to do it. And so instead she gives the little boy to a servant to go do the job. And so the servant climbs to a mountaintop and leaves the baby to die of exposure. But, of course, the baby is found by a shepherd and named Oedipus by the shepherd, which means swollen foot. Because his feet Were badly deformed from being so tightly bound. It was a deformity that would cause him to limp throughout his life. Was the boy becomes a man. One day, Oedipus consults an oracle himself, which warns him that one day he will mate with his own mother and shed the blood of his own father. And so, still believing that the shepherd and his wife are his own actual parents, he doesn't want this to happen. So he flees the area to the city of Thebes, which, unbeknownst to him, is the city where he was born and where his real parents live. On his way there, he encounters another man accompanied by his servants. And he and the other man begin to argue over whose chariot should be given the right of way on the road. The other man loses his temper and attacks Oedipus. But Oedipus overcomes him and throws him down from his chariot. And the man is killed. Only much later in the story would Oedipus learn that the man he'd killed was his father, King Laius. On the outskirts of Thebes, Oedipus encounters a sphinx, which is a creature with the breasts of a human female and the body and head of a lion and the wings of an eagle who has been terrorizing any Thebans or other travelers who cross her territory. She would ask them a riddle, and those who could not answer the riddle were immediately devoured. Well, Oedipus, of course, guesses the right answer. And the sphinx is defeated. And she no longer harasses the city. And so, in appreciation of his heroism, the city grants Oedipus the hand of the newly widowed queen. Unbeknownst to anyone, Oedipus own mother. Well, a plague then descends upon Thebes. It's known by everyone to be a curse of some kind. But nobody knows the cause of the curse. Some say it's punishment by the gods for King Laius murder have murderer having not been brought to justice. And so King Oedipus consults an oracle again to try to find out the identity of the killer. And after some back and forth, things get a little testy because the oracle's being indirect and evasive as oracles do. And finally the oracle tells him that he Oedip Oedipus is the criminal that he has been looking for. Oedipus is outraged, believes that his uncle Creon, who he thinks is his brother in law, which I guess is both at this point has paid this prophet to accuse him of the murder. And so he returns to go face and accuse his Uncle, Brother in law, Creon. While at the confrontation, Oedipus's wife, who again still unknown to all, is also his mother, Tries to calm things down. She says, Oedipus, pay no attention to the ramblings of some oracle. Why? My dead husband. Laius once consulted an oracle. And he was given a prophecy that proved false. She told him that the prophet predicted Laius would be killed by their own son. But in fact it had turned out that he was just murdered by bandits at a certain fork in the road. Hearing her mention the location of Laius death hits Oedipus like a bolt of lightning. And he demands more information about where the murder took place. He then asks his wife, his mother, to describe the physical appearance of her dead husband. And then witnesses are called in. And soon Oedipus has put two and two together. And realizes that the prophecy has been fulfilled. And that he has committed both parricide and incest. His mother hangs herself and Oedipus. In one version, he takes two pins from the clothing of his mother's corpse. And puts out his eyes. In another version, it's a vengeful servant of Laius who blinds him. He then goes into exile. And he wanders the countryside until he dies. And the killer, now having met his fate, the plague is lifted from Thebes. And then, to complete the story of this star crossed family. Oedipus, two sons who had agreed to share rule over the kingdom after their father was gone. Instead went to war with each other. And both of them were killed. Girard uses Oedipus as an example of a myth par excellence. He uses myth in a somewhat idiosyncratic way. But that's okay, we'll get to that. It starkly draws several stereotypes common to myth. Gerard writes, quote, the plague is ravaging Thebes. Here we have the first stereotype of persecution. Oedipus is responsible because he has killed his father and married his mother. Here is the second stereotype. The oracle declares that in order to end the epidemic. The abominable criminal must be banished. The finality of persecution is explicit. The third stereotype has to do with the signs of a victim. The first is disability. Oedipus limps. This hero from another country arrived in Thebes unknown to anyone. A stranger in fact, if not in right. Finally, he is the son of the king and a king himself. The legitimate heir of Laius. Like many other mythical characters, Oedipus manages to combine the marginality of the outsider. With the marginality of the insider. Like Ulysses, at the end of the Odyssey, he is sometimes a stranger and a beggar, and sometimes an all powerful monarch. The more signs of a victim an individual bears, the more likely he is to attract disaster. Oedipus infirmity, his past history of exposure as an infant, his situation as a foreigner and a newcomer and a king, all make him a veritable conglomerate of future victim signs. We would not fail to observe this if the myth had been handed down to us as a purportedly historical document. And we would wonder at the meaning of all these signs, together with other stereotypes of persecution. There would be no doubt about the answer. We would certainly see in the myth what we see in Guillaume de Mache's An Account of Persecution told from the perspective of the persecutors. The persecutors portray their victim exactly as they see him, as the guilty person. But they hide none of the objective traces of their persecution. We conclude that there must be a real victim behind the text, chosen not by virtue of the stereotypical crimes of which he is accused, crimes which never spread the plague, but because of all the characteristics of a victim specified in that text, which are most likely to project on him the paranoiac suspicion of a crowd tormented by the plague. In the myth, as in Guillaume and the witchcraft trials, the accusations are truly mythological. Parricide, incest, the moral or physical poisoning of the community. These accusations are characteristic of the way in which frenzied crowds conceive of their victims. End quote. Many of you might be familiar with the Bible story of Jonah, but to recap, it goes like this. The word of the Lord comes upon Jonah, instructing him to go to Nineveh and preach against its wickedness. Now, I would be hesitant to roll into any foreign city and start denouncing its wickedness on my first day, but I would be really hesitant to do that in the capital of the Assyrian Empire. And Jonah, understandably, was too. So instead of going to Nineveh, he goes and books a ride on a ship to Tarshish. But you can't run from God. And soon the ship is overtaken by a storm, and everybody is aboard is sure that they're about to die. And so they all cast lots, which you can say is kind of like consulting an oracle to determine who on board is the cause of their trouble. And the lot, of course, falls to Jonah. They discern that he has brought a curse upon their ship, so they heave him overboard and the weather returns to calm. And then, of course, Jonah is swallowed up by a great fish and remains in its belly for three days and three nights before he spewed out on shore. The theme of a scapegoat is maybe most obvious in the Jonah story, short as it is just as we all know that in real life, plagues are not actually brought about by the presence of a beggar or the hidden crimes of a king. Storms are not actually caused by having the wrong guy aboard your ship. We accept these stories on their own terms because they're delivered to us as myths. But if anybody were to write them down in a history book, as Gerard says, we would all say, wait a second, wait a second. I see what's going on here. Those guys on the boat, they just threw overboard some random guy, and since they survived, they came up with a story afterward that he must have been a cause of all their trouble or, hey, hey, hey, hey. Those Puritans in Massachusetts were not really hanging witches. They were just freaked out by all the Indian raids and smallpox and political turmoil, and they got caught up by hysteria and started killing people that they already didn't like and who they decided were responsible for all the stress in the community. Or as we do now, wait a second. Those Jews weren't actually engaged in a global conspiracy to take over all the governments of Christian countries to exploit and destroy the goyim. Germany was just under a huge amount of social and political stress in the 20s and 30s and keyed on them as a scapegoat for everything that had gone wrong after World War I. And one day, I think we will look back and say that maybe, maybe some of those handicapped Russian kids that we banned from the Paralympics or the ethnic Russian patients we turned away from hospitals or forced to stand up in public and make public denunciations of their home country like we were Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, that maybe they didn't actually have anything to do with the complex geopolitical crisis in Eastern Europe. And maybe we were just using them as substitute victims because we couldn't get it. The one we really wanted. This week's version of Emmanuel Goldstein, Vladimir Putin. We'll have to wait for that one, because we're still in the middle of it. And nobody ever recognizes that they're scapegoating others while it's going on. As one such victim said of his persecutors, they know not what they do. I think a lot about how strange it is, just historically speaking, but even psychologically, sociologically speaking, how strange it is for a religion to have as its symbol the central figure of their story, hanging as a Criminal on a cross, beaten, stabbed, humiliated, with a mocking indictment pinned over his head, destroyed by his enemies and held up for all to see. And for the devotees of that religion to say that that cross, that horrible torture instrument, that that awful scene is their salvation, that the blood dripping from the crucified man has saved them and that his death has given them new life. After Jesus had been betrayed and arrested, the disciple Peter fulfilled a prophecy by denying three times that he had ever known Jesus. Peter. Petra. It means the rock. And he had that name because he was the strongest and the most uncompromising of the disciples. When Jesus was taken away, it was Peter who had drawn his sword and cut off the ear of Malchus. He was ready to fight and die to protect Jesus from the band of soldiers facing them. It was insuperable odds. It was a whole group of soldiers there. But when he saw that it was not only the temple priests, but the people as well, the very same people who one week before had welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem with waving palm fronds, his peers, that it was they who had decided Jesus was at the root of all the trouble plaguing the community. Then Peter did not have the courage to stand up to them. I know him not, he told one group. I am not he, he told another. He denied Jesus a third time, and a cock crowed. And Peter remembered Jesus prediction. And he was ashamed that Peter and the other disciples eventually came back around and refused to join the crowd. In pronouncing Jesus guilty is the only reason we have the story of the Gospels as we do. If they had been too afraid, or if the mob had successfully sucked them in, convinced them that they'd been tricked by Jesus, but that they could rejoin the community in good standing if only they denounced him, then the story of Jesus would instead be very much like that of the beggar set upon by the mob at the order of Apollonius of Tyana. The Gospels are the story of that unfortunate beggar told from the beggar's perspective or from the perspective of his friends who refused to join the crowd in turning on him. For 2000 years, Christians have been torn by ambivalence toward the Jews. The Jews killed Jesus. But of course, Jesus was a Jew. And he was a devout Jew and one who proclaimed that he had come not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it. The Jews, in the Christian telling, are the chosen people because they had been designated as the vessel that would deliver the Holy One to earth for the salvation of mankind. But what does that really mean? Maybe it means that the history of the Israelites made them the only people who could have been prepared to recognize the historical importance of what was being done to Jesus when he was crucified. The history of most peoples, just name them. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Romans for that matter. Their stories all share a pretty similar trajectory. They start small, they get big and powerful, and then one day they're conquered by barbarians or a stronger neighbor. And then that's it. That's pretty much the last you hear from them. You hear the story of their rise from the people themselves and then the story of their fall from the people who took them down. But that's not the case with the Jews, because the Jews figured something out. They figured out that if they just remembered who they were, focused on it, wrote it down, studied it, made remembrance of their history and identity a holy duty, then they could survive anything. They could survive enslavement, conquest, exile, even holocaust. So we don't even have the story of the Jews, defeats and tribulations from the people who did it to them. There's a few notes here and there in the Roman and Egyptian and other chronicles, but not much. We don't have the story from them. Instead, probably uniquely in history, certainly in ancient history, we have the story of defeat and disaster from the people who went through it. This was a people who knew, who remembered what it was like to be on the wrong end of an ass kicking. Who knew what it meant to be the victim. There's a whole book in the Hebrew Bible called Lamentations. In the Psalms we read passages like, Lord, how many are my foes? Many are they who rise up against me. Many are they who say his God will not help him. O Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger, nor chasten me in your displeasure. Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am helpless. O Lord, heal me, for my bones are troubled. My soul is also greatly troubled. But you, O Lord, how long return? O Lord, deliver me. O save me for your mercy's sake. I am wary with my groaning all night I make my bed swim. I drench my couch with tears. My eye wastes away because of grief. It grows old because of the number of my enemies. Lord my God, I take refuge in you. Save and deliver me from all who pursue me. Or they will tear me apart like a lion and rip me to pieces with no one to rescue me. And this is the voice of that beggar saying, if I'm guilty of what they're accusing me of, then Let them throw their stones. Lord, my God, if I have done this and there is guilt on my hands, if I have repaid my ally with evil or without cause, have robbed my foe, then let my enemies pursue and overtake me. Let them trample my life to the ground and make me sleep in the dust. Now it is simply impossible to imagine a holy book of the Romans or the Assyrians or the Hittites or the Babylonians or any of the warrior peoples who rose to a rank where their literature would have made it down to us, containing verses like these, crying of their own humiliation and helplessness. These passages that I'm about to read are from the book of Isaiah and are taken by Christians as prefiguring the appearance and mission of Christ. And we call them today the songs of the servant. The sovereign Lord has opened my ears. I have not been rebellious. I have not turned away. I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard. I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting. But now the Lord speaks of this one against whom the whole community has been plotting, the one who's been outcast and made anathema and been subject to rumors and made the object of hatred and persecution. These are the Lord's words about this desperate figure. See, my servant will act wisely. He will be raised, raised and lifted up and highly exalted. Just as there were many who were appalled at him. His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being. And his form was marred beyond human likeness. This is the deformity, the limp, the stigma, the hunchback, the beastly appearance of the mythical scapegoat. So he will sprinkle. Many nations and kings will shut their mouths because of him. For what they were not told, they will see. And what they have not heard, they will understand. Now here it gets pretty explicit. Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot and like a root out of dry earth. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. After all, he was born in a barn and slept in a livestock feeding trough. And people would whisper that he'd been born a bastard. He was despised and rejected by mankind. A man of suffering and familiar with pain, like one from whom people hide their faces. He was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering. Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds are we healed. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. He was like a lamb led to slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested? For he was cut off from the land of the living. For the transgression of my people he was punished. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, though he had done no violence, Nor was any deceit in his mouth. Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death and was numbered among the transgressors. One of the sections near the end there of what I just read is very interesting, and you can see why Christians focus on it so much. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, and yet we considered him punished by God, stricken and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. And so, of course, Christians hear that, and they say that this is a prophecy of the healing power of Jesus crucifixion. But what's the mechanism of that healing power? What does that actually mean? He took up our pain, bore our suffering, and yet we considered him punished by God. When a society is in a state of great turmoil, or an individual for that matter. But we'll talk about a society. In many of these myths, I think plague is kind of a stand in for general social breakdown and stress. When a society is in a state like that, it is felt by the individual, and it's felt at every level of society. And consider the United States. In the last 20 years, we suffered nine, 11, and then a whole bunch of subsequent terrorist attacks and a general sort of fear permeating the air all the time that terrorist attacks might happen. We went through two failed wars. We had a financial crisis that saw 9 million people lose their jobs and 6 million homes lost to foreclosure. And lately, of course, we had an actual plague. Millennials are building wealth at a historically slow rate and are on track to be the first generation in American history whose standards of living will decline relative to their parents. On top of it all, we are adjusting to a radical new media Technology that has thrown many of our institutions and our basic ability to process reality into chaos. Well, how does all this stress, all of this building, latent, permeating stress, how does it manifest? It manifests as personal stress. It manifests as stress within families. It manifests in a shared feeling that things are going downhill. It manifests in nastiness between strangers and protests and riots and extreme political turmoil. All this stress, all the frustration and feeling of instability and uncertainty, all the rage of unfulfilled hopes and desires builds to a point where it threatens to tear a society apart. We hear different versions of that all the time. The liberals say the right is trying to bring about a fascist revolution and must be dealt with as a law enforcement or military threat. The alt right says there's a race war coming. The new right says we need a national divorce. Groups of people fight in the streets. Families break down over political arguments. Suicide and overdose deaths are at all time highs. Violent crime has spiked to levels not seen in decades. Well, it's a time like that, a time like this, that Satan comes to us. Satan means the accuser. Sometimes it's translated as slanderer. But there are points in the Hebrew Bible where the word is used to refer to someone who brings a lawsuit or a formal accusation against someone else. So think of it like a prosecuting attorney or a plaintiff. Satan's very clever and comes in many disguises, but ultimately only ever says one thing. He says that person or those people over there, they're the cause of all this. Everything you're feeling, all the pain, all the frustration, all the stress and hopelessness and fear, they're to blame. And if you just get rid of them, then everything will become better. You'll see. And here's the thing, that last part about things getting better, he's not lying. When a community is tearing itself apart, falling into that Hobbesian state of a war of all against all, but then comes together to identify a single party, whether an individual or a group, as the one great evil that has brought about this crisis, changing that war of all against all into a war of all against one, then they're able to put aside their own differences, to unite and destroy it. They convince themselves that the chosen one really is the embodiment of evil. On a deep psychological level, they identify their own personal pain and frustration with that figure. And when they can put aside their lesser conflicts with the rest of the community and have this shared experience of purging and overcoming the great enemy, there's a sense of catharsis. And they really do feel better, and the community really does seem healed. And so their sense that the rumors must have all been true, that everything they said about. About. About the. The person they had. They had purged must have all been true, that the person they purged really was the cause of their troubles. That sense is reinforced since things did actually improve once they were taken out of the picture. And you can imagine if they tell the story to their kids and their kids tell it to their kids, and it makes its way down through the centuries, it might come to us as a simplified tale about the people of Ephesus taking up stones against a beggar who turned out to be a demon afflicting their community. All myths are told from the standpoint of the surviving community. That's what makes a myth a myth. The story of the Hebrew Bible that culminates in the Gospels does not tell the story from the standpoint of the ones holding the stones, but of the ones being struck by the stones. Jesus tells his disciples that although he must depart in order to fulfill his mission, he will not leave us alone, but will leave behind. Well, we usually translate it as holy spirit, but the Greek word is paraclete. Paracletus to be literal, and paraclete means advocate, as in a defense attorney. To serve as the counterparty to the accuser. Satan. When Satan whispers in our ear, that. That one right over there, that beggar, that old lady of ill repute who lives outside Salem, the Jews, they're to blame for all of this. The Holy Spirit is there to whisper. No, no, no, no, no. You know better than that. The things that they're saying about them are not true. You remember what they said about Jesus when they killed him? Stand up to them if you can, but whatever you do for the sake of your soul, do not join them. Most of the disciples were martyred because mobs don't like it when you stand up for the one they're targeting. So were Paul and many of the other apostles. It's a truism that it was not Christian preachers, but Christian martyrs who spread the early faith by their example. What does it mean to be martyred in a Christian context? Many people say it means that you die for your beliefs, but I've never really thought that made much sense. A lot of people die for their beliefs. Kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers die for their beliefs. I think a martyr is not someone who dies for a cause. It is someone who refuses to go along with a mob, refuses to join the crowd of persecutors and instead stands with the victim and then pays for it with his or her life. That's a martyr. Humans are hypersocial mammals, which means we are intensely sensitive to the demands and expectations of our peers and our communities. And so the pull of the crowd is extremely powerful. I remember times when I was in school K through 12. I remember different times when I would be around when a bully or some group led by a bully would be humiliating or intimidating some other kid. The impulse to persecute is very strong, and once it gets going, it can run out of control very quickly. And people who were kind and thoughtful 10 minutes ago can tear someone apart. Well, some of the times I stood up for the kid being picked on, but sometimes I didn't. And sometimes I even made a comment to denigrate the kid myself to be a part of the crowd. And I swear to you that to this day I'm talking things that happened when I was in third, fourth, fifth grade. To this day, I remember every single one of those times when I was too cowardly to stand with the kid getting picked on because I knew it at the time. And when I think about it, it still brings me shame. Jesus doesn't call on us to be martyred for him, but to be martyred with him. For all the people in the world who have been unjustly victimized, if fate happens to put one of them in front of you and you're the only one between them and the mob. The word scapegoat comes from a passage in Leviticus describing a ritual whereby a priest would lay hands on the head of a young goat and speak aloud. All the sin and all the iniquity and all the hatred and frustration, basically all the negative energy of the community in order to put it all onto the goat. And once it's all been purged onto the goat, the goat itself is purged from the community, chased out into the wilderness, carrying all their negative energy with it. Isaiah's Song of the Servant says that the one who has been pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, was led like a lamb to slaughter. And the Gospels follow up on that by informing us that there's another word for scapegoat. Once the scapegoat is recognized as the innocent victim beloved by God, that he actually is. The word for scapegoat scene in the light of the Gospels, is the Lamb of God. Well, you guys have listened to enough of my amateur hour preaching. I am even less of a theologian than I am a historian, and this is not meant as a complete account of the Gospels or the meaning of Easter or of anything else. I mean, I didn't even mention the Resurrection. These were just the thoughts that came to mind when I decided at the last minute to sit down and talk to you today about Easter. I just want to say thanks again to everyone for everything. For listening to the show, for helping support it, for being patient with me, many of you. For putting up with me when I go on Twitter and violate everything I just said in this episode. And just for being there. I really am grateful. Happy Easter. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. SA Oh.