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A
Officer, this is not a bribe. This is a gift. This is a gift.
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B
This is for the.
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A
For the police union, you know, banquet next month. Hey, everybody, it's Sky Jutani. Welcome back to the Sky Pod, brought to you by Holy Post Media. I am joined today by. By a New Testament scholar, professor at Northern Seminary, Nijay Gupta. How's it going, Nijay?
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B
Doing well. How are you doing, Sky?
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A
All right, so here's the deal. For those of you, I don't know if you've been on The Skypod before, N.J. have you?
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B
I think. Didn't we do a bonus thing for Paul, for the world? Yeah.
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A
That was a bonus thing, wasn't Skypod.
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B
Skypod. You've not. Not official.
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A
This is where the real.
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B
The main event.
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A
Yeah. This is the inner sanctum. This is the holy of holies. This is the crown jewel of the Holy Post Media universe. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Skype, first of all, welcome. This show is going to be approximately an hour long. About halfway through, somewhere in the middle range. If you are not a subscriber to Holeypost plus, this whole episode is going to fade away and you're going to hear my voice pop in saying you need to be a Holy Post subscriber to get the entire episode. That's how this thing works. It's also why we have no ads on the Skypod because it's for, you know, mostly premium subscriber consumption. But if you become a Holy Post plus subscriber, not only will you get access to the Skypod, you'll get access to everybody, everything at Holy Post plus, including with God Daily, My daily devotional for people who hate devotionals. Getting schooled by Caitlin Hess Esau McCauley's show, 66 verses to explain the Bible. All of our bonus episodes, a ton of other things. The Holy Post book club. It just goes on and on and on. Well worth it. And most importantly, you'll be helping to support the good work that we're doing here at Holy Post Media to create orthodox, pro neighbor entertaining content like this, the Skypod. So, Nijay, we're here to talk about the Odyssey, but not just the Odyssey. We're here to talk about the Odyssey and pagan religion and the New Testament. So you're doing a series on your substack page about the Odyssey and what it reveals about the world of the New Testament. We'll link to that. And you're going to do a whole series. I've only read a little bit of it because it's not all out yet, but right at the beginning. You confess in this that it's been a long time since you've read the Odyssey, but the movie has inspired you, obviously, to do this series. So did you go back and actually reread the whole thing or what did you do?
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B
I did. I first read the Odyssey probably in high school, maybe as a requirement. I was not a great student. I know sky my Indian heritage. And so I was a pretty. I'm an outlier in my family in terms of not being a great student back then. And then I probably dipped into pieces of it in college. I took classical Greek in college, but 20, 30 years later, I knew the movie was coming out. I wanted to be that persnickety nerd at the theater, critiquing every last line. So there's a bunch of translations out there, a whole bunch. And there are different styles. It's almost like a Bible translation where there are more literal, there are kind of more Elizabethan, and then there are like, almost like the message Bible version. So there's one by Emily Wilson, who I think teaches in Pennsylvania, and she put one out probably 2017, 2018, which is more contemporary, easy to read, tries to be poetic. So I decided I was going to read that. And you know what? It's not super long. I want to say four or five hundred pages, but. But because it's in verse, you're not using up the whole page. So I read it probably in three long sittings. So, yeah, I wanted to read through the whole thing. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then I saw it on Friday, the day.
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A
But Nijay, the real question is, you're a New Testament scholar.
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B
Yes.
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A
Why didn't you just read it in the original Greek?
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B
That would take me a lot longer. So Greek isn't just Greek. There are different types of Greek. There's kind of Homer's Greek, which is its own kind. Later you have Attic Greek, and then you have Koine Greek, which is the New Testament Greek. You have other shades of it. So it would take me probably a year to read it.
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A
Yeah, I guess in the original, it's sort of the difference between reading Shakespearean English versus very much so contemporary English. It is a different thing. Okay, so you reread it. You obviously watched the film. I don't know if we're gonna get
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C
a ton into the film detail stuff here.
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A
We'll get into some of it maybe. But I want to talk about and what you have built this series around on your substack page. Is what the Odyssey, including Christopher Nolan's film version of it, reveals about ancient paganism and the religion that was practiced by the Greeks and later the Romans, and how that relates to the world of the New Testament. So you've written a book called Strange Religion. Forgive me for forgetting the subtitle.
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B
Yeah. How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous and compelling.
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A
That's right. But a lot of that strange, dangerous, compelling part is because the Christianity, the faith they practiced, was totally out of sync with the popular understanding of religion in the ancient world, which is what Homer's Odyssey really does illuminate to some things. So there's definitely aspects I want to make sure we focus on. But I want to give you the first shot here as you reread the Odyssey and saw the film when you. What jumped out to you about what the film and Homer reveal about the nature of pagan religion in the ancient world.
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B
Yeah. This is one of my critiques of the film. I won't get deep into it unless you want me to, but essentially, Nolan secularizes the Odyssey.
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A
There's not a lot of the gods in here.
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B
Not a lot. And even Athena has given very short shrift. But let's jump over to Homer. The world that Homer inhabits, and it's not just in his head, is a world full of gods, demigods, nymphs, various monsters and humans, all in kind of an interconnected network. And now, obviously, your average reader of Homer in the ancient world isn't running into a Polyphemus or Calypso, but what they are running into is statues everywhere. When the Apostle Paul walks into Athens, he's shocked that it is a city full of so many gods. And probably what he means by that is statues. Statues and objects. When I go to a big city like New York or la, there's going to be street vendors selling souvenirs, selling knickknacks, selling hot dogs. Well, your equivalent in Homer's time are people selling religious objects, people selling sacrifice meats or sacrifice options. And everywhere you go, paintings, reliefs, statues. The equivalent of keychains. They didn't have keychains. The equivalent of keychains. They're all going to be gods. And so they're literally everywhere. And Nolan systematically erases them. And I find that really, really important.
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A
Yeah. The closest I've experienced to this is when I go back to India.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And you walk through the streets of Mumbai, and I mean, there's everything there. There's Starbucks there, There's a lot of modern things there. But it's sometimes Jarring for a person from a secular Western country to be immersed in this place where religion and deities are everywhere. You can't get into a taxi cab without a Ganesh on the dashboard. You see it in every storefront you walk into. You know, walking down the street, there'll be trees that have shrines around them. It's just pervasive. All of the things, the knickknacks that are all religiously connected. And you don't see that in the United States nearly as much as you do in places like that.
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C
And I'm sure in the ancient world
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A
it was even on a whole nother level. Talk about this interplay. You mentioned in the Odyssey. You have the gods, the demigods, these monsters, all these things interacting constantly with the human world.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
Even though the average person didn't experience what Odysseus experienced, they encountered these idols and images everywhere. What was the imagination of the ancient world in the role that these deities played in everyday life?
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B
It's funny, when I. When I did my research for strange religion, I was actually shocked at what I found. Some of it in literary legend, but some of it in sort of quote unquote, historical record. So when we see a statue, you know, recently my family and I went to D.C. we went to all the monuments and Lincoln and whatnot. And when we look at a statue, you think, that's a statue. Someone made that as a testimony to a great person. In the ancient world, people were so good at making statues and they looked so real. In fact, archaeologists and historians say probably especially in the Roman era, these statues were in color. Right.
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A
They were painted. They weren't just white marble.
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B
Yeah. The paint has been rubbed off over time. So when we look at them, they don't look like real people to us. But the ancients, they may have seen them in real color. They thought they looked so realistic. They actually thought this was a living avatar of the Olympian God. We have actually some evidence that this is the way they thought about it. So what would that mean? You have a statue of Jupiter, AKA Zeus, in the kind of the big. The big Jupiter temple in Rome. And there would be a guard there announcing who's walking into the statue or announcing what time of day it is. In the ancient world, people would take their statues to go to the bathroom. They would take their statue as if the statue needs to go to the bathroom. They would take their statue on vacation.
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A
It's like what a preschooler does with their American Girl doll.
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B
Yes, yes. There are testimonies, like human testimonies of statues moving, crying, weeping blood, cursing people. One of my favorite stories is the city of Tyre. T Y R e was getting sacked by the Romans and the people of Tyre were so concerned that their God Apollos would fly away, they actually tied down his statue with chains so that the statue wouldn't fly away, as if the God was abandoning them. There are also incidents where there's a. If. If you're. If you have a loved relative that died at sea, you might bury a statue of them so that they could have a real burial. And it wasn't just symbolic. They really thought somehow that person inhabited that statue. One of my favorite incidents I talk about the strange religion was there was a famous athlete who died and they made a statue of him and his family was mocking another family. So that family went to vandalize the statue. According to many records from the ancient world, the statue fought back and killed the person. So then the family of the killed person took the statue to court and the statue was exiled. Okay. This is the world they inhabit where they really think these things have, you know, their living object. I call them amphicosmic. They live in two worlds at once, the world of gods and the world of mortals.
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A
Fascinating. Okay, coming back to the Odyssey, one of the driving forces in the story is the idea that Poseidon, the God of the sea, is angry with Odysseus because of what happened with the Cyclops who's a child of Poseidon. And there's this theme of the gods either as obstacles or opponents of human beings, or the gods as helpers or aids. Athena helps Odysseus, Poseidon's against Odysseus. And that seems to be not just true of, obviously, the ancient epic of the Odyssey or the Iliad. It permeates ancient religion. We don't tend to have that complexity of texture because Christianity is a monotheistic religion. But I explain more about how the ancients thought about this kind of bureaucracy of deities that's in this parallel heavenly realm, and how they tried to garner favor or avoid disfavor as Odysseus experience. I mean, who wants to really irritate one of the gods and end up in a mess like Odysseus is in? How did they avoid that? Or how did they win the favor of the gods? What was their thinking about it?
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B
Good question. And we do struggle with this today because we think, Christians, I think, mistakenly think of there being two separate realms, Earth and heaven, and they really don't meet like we're here until we get Zapped up to heaven. That's sort of the classic, you know, cosmology, enlightenment driven version of spirituality. But in my book Strange Religion, I talk about how really the ancients see one universe with sort of a pyramid of power. And so at the top you have the highest Olympians, Jupiter and so forth. And then going down you have demigods, and going down further, you have the emperor who's kind of straddling the realm of the gods, the realm of humans. And then you have upper class humans. It's actually logical they think that way because they're sort of power rankings. And humans can do. Humans with money and status can do great things. And then you have gods of the highest level, then you have gods of lower levels.
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A
They're essentially taking the pyramid of human society and replicating it in the heavenly society.
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B
100%. 100%. But you know, sky, as you're talking, I was thinking monotheistic Christianity doesn't do this. But we do this with angels, don't we? Exactly. And so you have bad angels or bad creatures like the Nephilim. And then you have good one and the watchers, but then you have good ones, you have Gabriel, you have Michael. And I think Greeks and Romans who encounter Jewish religion, who encounter apostolic preaching, they're going to find some of that very familiar. They're going to, you know, even the Book of Acts, I think the Book of Acts is probably the best read for Greeks and Romans because they're going to be familiar with prophecies about shipwrecks and surviving poisonous snakes and, you know, amazing healings, things like that. But the idea behind these gods was in the Greek and Roman world, they're just as petty as humans. Zeus is really interesting as a character. Zeus is seen in two or three different ways. Even within the Odyssey, he seems to hold all the cards of everything. I mean, he's up there just sort of watching it, but at any moment he can snap his fingers and change people's fate. Now he has these brothers, you know, Poseidon and whatnot, but everybody kind of defers to Zeus. But then even behind Zeus are the Fates. So the Fates are these three goddesses. They're sometimes called the spinners. And they're kind of controlling sort of the unfolding of life and history. And Homer even kind of hints at things are out of Zeus's hands, sometimes left to fate. And from the human experience, that would be things like death. Death is outside human control. In some ways it's outside of even the God's control. What's fascinating for me about the Odyssey, and this will kind of resonate with things in the Bible is the gods can mess with pretty much everything except killing somebody. Why doesn't Poseidon just kill Odysseus rather than torture him? It seems like there are certain things that are even out of the gods hand.
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A
Yeah. You mentioned in the Odyssey, Athena says to Telemachus, death is universal. Even gods cannot protect people that they love when fate and cruel death catch up with them. So yes, yeah, there's this paradox of the gods do a lot of mischief and cause a lot of harm or in some cases help, but they don't seem to have ultimate control, that even they are subject to these greater forces of death that they can't withstand. Which is an interesting way of building a cosmology or explanation for why things happen. But there is this sense of an individual can frankly piss off the gods again, as Odysseus does, or an individual can win their favor.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Through virtue and sacrifice and various things.
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C
And I know we always want to
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A
think, well, we're so much far beyond those ancient pagan superstitions and stuff, but when you look at a lot of the practice of popular Christianity. Yeah, we see this all over the place, where there are people who have this imagination that there's this invisible spiritual realm filled with all kinds of spiritual forces. And if you do the wrong thing, you open yourself up to be vulnerable to really malevolent forces. And if you just do the right things, then you'll have favorable outcomes and you'll win God's favor. And sometimes it can be really superstitious, like, well, I'm going to use holy water or make the sign of the cross or wear a crucifix or an ichthus on the back of my car, whatever it might be. On the flip side, it can be, well, if you, I don't know, use a Ouija board or whatever, you're opening yourself up to demonic possession. And so these are not new ideas. This is as old as human civilization. We've just put a Christian veneer on these ideas and the Greeks had a pagan veneer on it. Is there a problem in transporting some of these assumptions into Christianity? I mean, which ones do you think are kind of valid? And which ones you go, guys, you're just. You're being a pagan by a different name.
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B
I think one of the reasons Christianity resonated with Greeks and Romans. Maybe you're wondering about the fullness of time. What does that mean? Is Greeks and Romans respected the gods on high. They respected Divine forces. And to have this one God who is really in control of everything, who is virtuous, who is perfect. Now, only, only a certain group of Greek and Roman philosophers would claim that Zeus is perfect or God is perfect. Most people know the gods aren't perfect. The Christians come along and say, we have this triune God, this triune God is perfect. I think in the first century A.D. that was really attractive. But in terms of some of the problematic ways that Greeks and Romans thought about the gods, yes, we do replicate them. Things like, karma, I'm having a bad day because I'm cursed. We do fall into that trap. One of my favorite stories from Jesus, I don't remember the exact story, but I think a tower falls and kills some people. And they're kind of like, hey, what happened? And he's like, sometimes towers fall, right?
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A
Do you think the people who were killed by the tower were somehow less righteous than those who survived?
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B
Yeah. And he's like, no. Whereas Greeks would be quick to say, oh, you did something. Romans, oh, something happened. You ticked off this God or that God. And I love, I love that Jesus. Answer is, let's not play second guessing. You know, it reminds me of like 9, 11 and people saying, this is God's judgment on XYZ or the Fukushima tsunami, oh, this is God's judgment on Japan or God's judgment on the West Coast. Those liberals, west coast cities like Portland. I hear Jesus saying, we got bigger fish to fry than second guessing what's happening.
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A
John, chapter nine is another great example. When they encounter that man who was born blind, and the disciples themselves come back to Jesus and say, who sinned? Him or his parents, that he was born blind. Because clearly blindness is some kind of curse from God. Someone must have sinned. And Jesus says, nobody sinned. So there's this persistent. This is the whole book of Job is basically dealing with this question. Job experiences these terrible calamities. His friends come along and say, job, you must have done something to deserve this, because this doesn't happen to righteous people. And the whole book is dismantling that assumption. But it's alive and well in all kinds of ancient religion. And it's certainly alive and well today in every human society. Whether it's religious or not. There's an assumption that you're getting what you deserve. And if things are bad, if your circumstances are bad, it's evidence that God, the gods, fate, karma, whatever it is, is against you. Okay, I want to talk about another theme that is significant in the Odyssey. It's a huge emphasis of Chris Nolan's movie. And that is the Greek understanding of hospitality. Xenia, you write about this in the first installment in your substack piece. Explain how the Greeks defined hospitality and why it's such a big deal in the Odyssey.
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B
Yeah. So Xenia, sometimes referred to as xenophilia, means treatment of the foreigner or stranger. But especially care for. Especially practical care for now, you have to remember, today we. We can call the police. Today we can get a $2 taco from Taco Bell.
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A
That explosive diarrhea, though, it's not worth it.
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B
That's priceless. Today we can go to Dollar General. Today we can use Airbnb. But the ancient world, if you're traveling and your horse dies, if you're traveling and you get hit by the hot sun or a storm, what do you do? You knock on the door and just hope for someone's help. And the ancient world, they had, not everybody. But these Greeks did want to reinforce the value of hospitality. Now we think of hospitality as. I'm going to put an Andes mint on your pillow when you come to this hotel. I miss the Andes mints, by the way. I used to love those. But, you know, or you know, we're going to fold your toilet paper in the V shape to show it's been sanitized for your protection. That's not what that means. Hospitality doesn't mean that in the ancient world. It really means providing a meal, providing protection from the elements. Maybe a sleepover. I mean, that's a lot to ask. Maybe a sleepover and helping people on their way. So actually, my parents from India, they would tell me stories of my grandparents doing this all the time, where traveler down, their luck comes in, stays for a week, they feed him, they take care of him. There's one situation with my grandfather where this guy says he needs help. They open the door, he actually robs them and runs off. But that doesn't stop them from doing again the next time. And so this is something we Americans really struggle with. No solicitors allowed, right? Well, a beggar is a solicitor. A traveler is a solicitor. They want help. So this is a huge thing. And the view from Homer and others is the gods like to test mortals. So they will come in disguise as a beggar, knock on your door and test you and check you. Think about secret shoppers. Secret shoppers or mystery shoppers. This is like where the company sends a secret shopper to shop at your business, and then they're going to report back based on the treatment, right? Oh, you wouldn't let me in or. Oh, you know. And. And this is exactly what the gods are doing.
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A
It's a little bit like the undercover CEO show.
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B
Yeah, yeah, totally. And. And don't we get this in the Bible where we get. Where we get Genesis, where we get. These strangers show up to Abraham and he, you know, shows hospitality to them. Jesus on the road to Emmaus with a little bit of cloak and dagger there. Right? We get this. Entertaining. Angels unaware. Hospitality is huge. Interesting about Homer's Odyssey is it's really a question of good and bad hospitality. These suitors are taking advantage of Penelope, the hundred suitors, by eating her out of house and home. But I don't know if you've heard this before. There's been all these questions about whether Odysseus is abusing Zeus's law with Polyphemus because he comes in uninvited, he steals his cheese, he blinds the guy.
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A
Polythemus is the cyclops for those.
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B
He steals his cheese, he blinds the guy. The only thing that's not in Cyclops favor is that he's a cannibal. I know that's a biggie, but. But really, people have said Odysseus is the colonizer. Like, this is Cyclops home and he has sheep. He doesn't have a bunch of prisoners in there.
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A
Okay, I wanted to spend some time on this because there's a lot here. And Chris Nolan seems to really build his whole narrative on this theme because the argument he's making in the movie is the Trojan horse, which is Odysseus's idea to defeat Troy, is essentially an inversion or a violation of this law of hospitality, because he sneaks in to Troy and then once inside, destroys it from the inside with the Trojan horse thing. And. And Odysseus wrestles with his guilt throughout the film about, I violated the law of Zeus, I betrayed hospitality and destroying Troy from the inside out. And the two things you just brought up there are interesting because his guilt over what he did to Troi is exactly what's happening to his home with the suitors who have come into his home and they're destroying it from the inside out. And then, yeah, you're right, with the cyclops. It is kind of weird because he just goes in and ruins. And that's his mistreatment of the Cyclops is what ultimately angers Poseidon, which then drives the whole story going forward and
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B
all the calamities because of that.
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A
So there is this theme of hospitality running through the entire story. I gotta tell you, I experienced this sort of Middle Eastern ancient view of hospitality when I was a college student. I spent some time in Turkey and one afternoon we took the train to Tarsus because we wanted to see Paul's hometown.
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C
Don't worry, this is not the end of the episode. There's actually plenty more. But to listen to the rest, you need to be a Holy Post plus subscriber. So head over to HolyPost.com SkyPod and sign up. For just $5 a month, not only will you get uninterrupted episodes of the Skypod, which means you'll never have to
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A
hear this dumb announcement again, but you'll
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C
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