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Foreign.
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Hello and welcome to the Thinking Fellows Podcast. My name is Caleb Keith and today I am joined by Adam Francisco, Scott, Keith and Chad Bird. I think lots of Thinking Fellows listeners will know who Chad is because Chad is a scholar in residence at 1517.org. He's a scholar of the Old Testament. He's a co host of 40 minutes in the Old Testament. He also leads our Bible in one year project that we do at 15:17. And it's not too late to start that either, so there might be a link in the show notes there. This episode should come out around late January, so you'd only be a couple weeks behind and could definitely catch up if you have any interest in reading through the Bible in 2026. And Chad is joining us today to talk about the Old Testament. Specifically, we're going to talk about secrets in the Old Testament or the idea that there are secrets in the Old Testament, which I mean, maybe it's anecdotal just with the Internet, actually even people in real life, it feels like there's a resurgence of this sort of like ancient Hebrew wisdom movement that says that there's secret knowledge in the Old Testament or that Christianity is only totally comprehensible or a total package if you understand not these big ideas from the Old Testament or not even if you have knowledge of the stories of the Old Testament, but that there's secret layers underneath or things you might be missing. People might be familiar with ideas of numerology. So Hebrew numbers are shared with the words in Hebrew and that certain words may have numerical meanings or that certain prophecies could be decoded in particular ways, or that there's extra biblical context that without it you can't really understand what's happening in the Old Testament, things like that. And so I thought it'd be good to have chat on because, well, he does so much Old Testament content and he dissects the Old Testament. He's done a lot of Hebrew word study at 15:17 and on social media and things like that. And so that'd be good to have Chad come say, what is the Old Testament actually there for, for Christians? What is the benefit of the Old Testament? What's the information inside the Old Testament and what's behind this idea that there are secrets embedded underneath the Old Testament? So that's where we're going to go today. That's some of the questions we're going to answer. I think the context here is that the Old Testament is sort of by the numbers, by the page count, word count, the vast majority of the Christian scriptures are made up by the Old Testament and the authors of the Old Testament. And the context of the Old Testament is something that Westerners, modern Westerners are removed from. It's an ancient society and societies really, and people across the Old Testament and that there's something mystical about that, that we are out of touch with those people, their practices. And so we have to put ourselves back into that mindset in order to get something there. Chad, what do you I know that your comments on various things you post about the Old Testament can be filled with, with this kind of rebuttal. When you try to say, especially when you do a lot of Christ in the Old Testament work or seeing Christ in the Old Testament or explaining you have like the Gospels through Hebrew eyes kind of stuff, you'll get these, hey, you missed this. Or what about this prophecy or these comments? Where does this come from, this idea that there's just secrets that normal people don't have access to in the Old Testament?
- [04:09]
C
You know, I think some of it at least can be explained by this idea that there's this attraction of secret knowledge and that there's sort of these gradations of spirituality to where the more that you know these secrets, the deeper spirituality you are able to obtain. And what goes along with that is a kind of, and I see this all over the place, it's a kind of arrogance. It's almost maybe Gnosticism isn't the right word, but it's like this secret knowledge that the more that you get of it, the better equipped you are to really understand the Bible as opposed to just typical readers of the Scriptures. And then there's a lot of information misinformation that's out there, even from sources that are trying to get you to learn Hebrew, where they give the impression that reading in translation, whether it's Old Testament or New Testament, although most of the time this is Old Testament directed, that you're really not understanding the Bible, that the Bible is just full of mistranslations, or there's these deep layers that you have access to only through the Hebrew. I see advertisements all the time for groups that want to teach you Hebrew that basically say you can't trust your translations and the only way you're going to really understand the Bible is by learning Hebrew. And by that they don't mean just learning the language as the language works, but rather you begin to learn these codes and supposed numerical significances and all the kind of things that you were alluding to earlier. I think there's a Combination of motivations behind this. But what I see over and over is this kind of mystical draw that you can get a deeper knowledge that not everyone else has. And you can only get that by diving into these mysterious elements of the Hebrew language.
- [06:05]
B
Yeah, I think when, you know, for me, when I think of the word hidden knowledge, the question that comes up is hidden from who? And it sounds like it's not. It's hidden from, in this case, the uncommitted. Right. So this is for that Christian who's in their walk with God, taking that next step, who takes the faith very seriously, who isn't just passively Christian, but is actively spiritual and religious. Is that sort of, I don't know, the sense you're getting at here?
- [06:41]
C
Yeah, that's definitely the sense of. So it's this idea. You're being inducted into this minority group of, as you say, seriously committed Christians who really want to know what the Bible teaches. And the only entry point into really getting into the true esoterica of the text is by means of learning the Hebrew and then from that, basically diving down into these hidden elements of the Hebrew language.
- [07:09]
B
Dad, you've given a couple of talks and I actually think your topic for Here We Still Stand this fall is on the perspicuity of Scripture. If I remember correctly, this is sort of like a classical Christian doctrine, especially a Reformation doctrine, tied closely to Sola scriptura. What does perspicuity mean and what are we losing about perspicuity when sort of these ideas of hidden knowledge within the Bible are entertained?
- [07:41]
D
Perspicuity just means clarity. At the end of the day, all we're saying is that the Scriptures are clear. In other words, they're written in a way that they're intended to be understood and not intended to contain un understandable or secret or hidden knowledge by virtue of sort of the words and the grammar and the syntax and all of that. I think it's not a tough topic. I don't mean to say that, but it's an interesting one because there's a bit of a balance here. When you study the Scriptures, it's of course good to have context. When Jesus is speaking to New Testament. Even Jesus is speaking to a group of first century fishermen and he uses their context. They might understand the intent of his words better than I do as a 21st century podcaster or whatever I am, they might get that. And so studying sort of how they would have understood that context can be a good thing. But that's much different than saying you can't understand Jesus words unless you have studied it in the Greek or unless the Hebrew. In the case of our discussion today, and when we talked about this, when I did this at the conference, the danger when you start saying large portions of Scripture can't be understood is that you're then unwilling to make an assertion about things that are clearly understood too. You're unwilling to make an assertion about Christ's death being the final payment for your sin, or unwilling to make an assertion about your salvation coming by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ, Christ alone. Because you can always say, well, maybe there's something I don't know because I haven't sort of gotten all the secret knowledge yet, or the Scripture is not speaking clearly on that generally and universally, it's only those few people that really know the secrets that can get it.
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B
So a lot of these, the people you run into with this, what I find interesting is they're not quite going as far as, say, Mormonism, LDS in its proposition that Christianity has strayed so far away from the truth, the translations are so corrupt that you need a new prophet to come enlightened here. And in fact, most people, I don't think we'll disagree about, say, what salvation is or that Jesus or who Jesus Christ is often, I mean, there are examples of this, but what is there to gain if, for instance, they don't disagree? The secret knowledge isn't about the doctrine of sin. It isn't about the Trinity, or it isn't about that there's a different way to get to heaven or something like that. What is the content of. Or what's the aim of saying, yeah, there's secret knowledge, but I'm still a Christian, I still go to a normal Christian church. I still, you know, go through the. I don't think it's so corrupt. I just think these translations are hiding. But hiding what? Chad, do you have any sort of, like, what. What the. What is behind the numerology if it's not salvation itself?
- [11:15]
D
The secret to my prosperity?
- [11:19]
C
Yeah, yeah, some of that's going on. But I think what I encounter sometimes is this idea that there's actually Christian messages that are hidden in some of these, like the meaning of certain Hebrew names and that by having access to that information, you're actually able to see more of the Christian message in the Old Testament. Now, on the surface, that might sound attractive, right? We're all looking for Christ in the Old Testament. We're all interested in Christian messages in the Old Testament. But the way that this has gone about is by basically trying to pound a square peg in a round hole, they're trying to find things that really aren't there. And the problem with that is that it basically discredits a Christian approach to the scriptures. If you're seeing what's not actually there, or if you're committing all kinds of linguistic. You're breaking all kind of linguistic rules to get that message, well, then that just gives ammunition to those who say that Christ isn't in the Old Testament and you're just twisting things around to try and find him there.
- [12:33]
B
You've been on some podcasts, Adam, as of late, talking about this idea of Christian Zionism and sort of getting to the question of what is or who is Israel? Do you see this kind of stuff too, where, like, the plain meaning of a word, you know, is basically so, like a lot of this Christian Zionism conversation publicly today is about what does the word Israel mean?
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D
Right.
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B
And that there's Christians, you know, or at least some American Christians or whatever we want to, are not agreeing on what Israel is. How do you deal with who's right here? Is it who can do the numerology? How do you determine, like, is the modern state of Israel Israel, or is Israel some other group? Is the Old Testament actually clear about these kind of things?
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A
Well, I would say that at least in most the circles that I am aware of, the traditions of interpreting, like the premillennial, dispensationalist kind of tradition, if you can call it a tradition, because it's not that old. But there's really not numerology or anything like that going on that I. In the sort of the mainstream. But they will. You're right. Especially when it comes to what is Israel, especially in light of. And it is not.
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B
I mean, it's clear.
- [13:51]
A
And Chad can hopefully will add to this because he's the guy on this, but, you know, I think Romans 11, all of Israel will be saved. There's a long history of Christian debate about what, what. What's being talked about there. Is Israel, does it refer to, like a carnal Israel? Does it refer. Is it a synonym for Judaism, you know, and. Or is it just God's people?
- [14:16]
C
Is it the church?
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A
And so on and so forth. So you do in those circles.
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D
They.
- [14:22]
A
Pick on passages that are not, like, crystal clear. They're clear, but they're not crystal clear. And we'll, you know, kind of rejigger the theology. You also, though, do get, I think of, is it Ezekiel 38 or 39, where you get the valley of dry bones coming to life. Chad, is it 38? Yeah, or maybe it's 38 and 39. But you'll get references to that where they will force that into sort of a Procrustean bed of a dispensationalist theology. That that reference is a reference to the, you know, 1940, May 14, 1948 and so on. So it doesn't really get close to like weird kind of mystical numerology, but it does pick on those passages that just aren't like crystal clear because let's face it, the scriptures are clear, as Scott said. But there are like any literature, there are places where it's, it's a little, you got to do a little homework, a little historical grammatical work, if you will, to figure out what the authors means when they, when Paul, for example, uses the word Israel when he says all of Israel will be saved.
- [15:42]
D
Can I just say where this kind of thing drives me crazy? Because just I'm trying to, to make it a little interesting and real life. I was teaching once with somebody else. I'm not going to get too much into the detail. We kind of like, I would do a session, he would do a session, I would do a session, he would do a session type thing which is never good for me. I'm way too snarky for that kind of thing. But at one of the sessions he was teaching on, I think Matthew 16, Jesus at Caesarea Philippi, where he does what he likes to do and he starts asking the disciples, who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am? This is where Peter gives his great confession. You were the Christ, the son of the living God. Jesus says on this rock I will build my church. Right. That whole thing, everybody knows that we obviously interpret that as the church is going to be built on the confession of Peter that he is the Christ. Roman Catholics somehow got out of that, that he was going to build the church on Peter. The most stalwart of all of the disciples, of course, the most constant Peter, the constant. He was going to be built on the church. And I'm teaching with this guy and he's, he's a Hebrew scholar, I think, of sorts. And he starts discussing telling the crowd that nobody understands this correctly. Now just to be clear, okay, to my understanding, unless Chad corrects me, within our tradition, and we were teaching at a place that was a Lutheran place within our tradition, the at least 500 year long understanding of that passage has been to interpret it that within Lutheranism, that Jesus is Building his church on the confession of Peter. Now, Chad, Adam, Caleb, tell me if I'm wrong on that. I feel like I'm pretty solid saying that, right? He looks at this group of Lutherans, says, no one understands this. In this cave in which Jesus is standing in front of, there's a little stream that comes out of it, and there's a rock in there. And that rock is an altar to Pan. And this is what Caesarea Philippi is known for, Pan worship. And Jesus isn't saying he's going to build the church on Peter. Jesus isn't saying he's going to build this church on this wonderful confession. Now, in my mind, the context of this whole passage is Jesus is searching out a confession from these guys. Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am? Jesus is doing what he's doing. He's trying to pluck out something good out of the, you know, just claptrap that they normally spew. And he does by work of the Holy Spirit, of course. And this guy goes, what Jesus is saying is he's going to break the rock of the tradition of Pan worship and build his confession on that rock in there, the one that receives all the sacrifices to Pan. He's breaking paganism. Okay, I don't mind the idea of a both and in there. In other words, the confession that Christ is the rock, the son of the living God, and that he is the only way to heaven is of course going to break the tradition of worship paganism when you take that gospel to them. But to say that no one's ever understood this, and here, let me give you some secret knowledge. Let me tell you where Jesus is standing. Let me tell you what goes on behind where Jesus is standing, and let me tell you why that is now the only clear understanding of this passage. I think it's just. It's not helpful. It might be helpful to say, oh, also interesting fact. We think that Jesus was standing over here. There's this thing going on here. The pagans wouldn't have really liked to hear that. There's not all these pantheon of gods, including Pan. They would have hated to hear that it's only Christ that is God. So this is happening too. I don't mind that kind of contextual stuff. But when it's literally set up as, like, now you have the secret knowledge that nobody else has ever understood, it's like, what? That's not the core of that passage. The core of that passage is that Christ is the son of the living God. That's the core of the passage. He could be actually standing anywhere, and the meaning of that text would be the same thing. Am I wrong?
- [19:58]
C
No. Just to add to that, that whole approach, especially to the confession in Matthew 16 or in Mark chapter 8, is pretty common, and it's based upon basically no evidence as far as I'm concerned. So, for instance, in Mark's version, he says this Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way, he asked his disciples, who do people say that I am? So it doesn't even say that he was actually in Caesarea Philippi. And there's nothing in any of the Gospels indicate that they were standing right there by that cave. And as it were, Jesus pointing to what did it. Yeah, yeah. So that is actually a great example of this idea of, oh, everybody's got it wrong. But let me show you, by means of whatever it might be, fill in the blank, you know, through me being to Israel and standing by this place, what the true meaning is. Or everybody's got it wrong. But if you knew the Hebrew like I did, and I show you this Hebrew root and what it entails, or, you know, everybody missed this for basically all of exegetical history. But if you take the names of Genesis 5 and you break them down into what their etymology means, then you have this Christian message that has been embedded by the Holy Spirit in these names for millennia. And it wasn't until the 1980s or 1990s when someone discovered it. All that kind of stuff should have all kinds of huge red flags waving all around anytime someone begins a statement by saying, everybody's got it wrong. But let me show you what it really means immediately. Whatever comes next, is 99.9% of the time going to be wrong.
- [21:45]
D
Well, what is the goal of inspiring the authors of the Old and New Testament to write the Scriptures? Is it to hide a bunch of things so that they will not understand the Gospel and come to the knowledge of the truth? Is that the goal? I mean, if so, the great way to do it is going to be to assign whatever number to every letter of somebody's name and tell only one person how you can decode that and hey, don't tell anybody for almost 2,000 years, because that'll be funny.
- [22:17]
C
Yeah, yeah. One of the great ironies here, too. Oh, go ahead, Adam. Sorry.
- [22:21]
A
I think about your first comment after we hit record here. There's a sort of prestige or power that comes along with knowing the secret meaning, you know, So I think, Scott, to Your question, and sorry to interrupt you, Chad, but that I think what really drives us is just prestige, you know, and I think of the reference you gave Scott about the accessory of Philippi and the alter to pan and so on, I've been told, and I don't know, Chad, maybe you know, that that's like something that the tour guides there in the Holy Land cooked up to make their tours a little more lively. So it's sort of like when they go around to all these spots and say, for sure, this is where Jesus did this or that and the other thing. And you know, Paul Meyer would always tell the story about how when he'd bring tour groups to the Holy Land and he'd have signs with like, percentages and as the tour guide saying this is where Jesus did that, he'd hold up the sign behind the tour guide, like, we're about 40% sure. That is amazing. If you know Paul Meyer, recently departed, sainted Paul Meyer, you know, you can just imagine how funny that would have been.
- [23:42]
D
Well, again, I mean, if you think of John 20, right, he literally says all these are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God. This is why all of the scriptures are given to you. They are not given so that a few people can do the numbers or the arrangement or the contextual magic the right way, and only they get it. This is just not anytime Jesus himself interprets the scripture, this is what you get. This is all about me. All of it. It's all about me here. Secret's out, guys. Secret's out. There is no secret. It is about me.
- [24:25]
B
Do you think, though, that some of this comes from trying to model after Jesus in this sense, which is. I could see you look at the ministry of Jesus in this lens where he's basically. He's a rabbi, he's a Jewish rabbi walking around telling everybody that they've misunderstood the Old Testament, right? That the experts of the Old Testament, the law keepers, the lawmakers, the scribes, the Pharisees, have all misunderstood this and so that there's some sort of draw to be like Jesus, right, To go to the religious establishment, because there's always sort of like an anti denominational or an anti Catholic, it could be anti Lutheran, any, like, established church body kind of vibe that goes along with this too, which is you go to those who have asserted themselves as the religious leaders and you do what Jesus did and you go find all the places where they missed what he was really trying to say.
- [25:30]
D
What does he accuse him of doing, though, is at the end of the day, he accuses him of doing this crap. I mean, you've made it a law unto yourself. You've over complicated it. You've taught the people things that God does not demand. You've not shown them the clear truth here. It's an interesting, and I can see that. But at the end of the day, what Jesus does is he's boiling this thing down to the one reality of the text of scripture in all of it and how clear that is and saying you've over complicated it because you're sinners and you've made it about you. I mean, the disciples do this every time he asks them a question. His two favorites apparently can't help but asking him, who's going to be on your right and who's going to be on your left. And then their mom comes up and says the same thing. I know you wouldn't answer them, but hey, I'm their mom, you can tell me. I mean, it's all this, we want to be the star of this show. And how better to be the star of this show than to know the secrets, huh?
- [26:35]
C
Yeah. One of the, one of the ironies of all of this, and I mean, I love Hebrew, of course, but one of the great ironies of this is that when you look at the New Testament, what is the text, the biblical text that is used overwhelmingly when it's quoted or alluded to, it's not the Hebrew text. So that, I mean, just on the surface should alert you to the fact that this is not the way to approach for our listeners.
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D
The Septuagint is the Old Testament in Greek.
- [27:08]
C
In Greek, yes. Which was used all over the Roman world in the first century. I mean, originated in Alexandria, Egypt. It was translated by Jews. This was not a Christian translation. It was used as I always refer it to like the, the Jewish King James Version of the first century. You know, KJV was the Bible the translation. Right. For a long time. Well, the Septuagint was the translation that was used by the Jews. It was used in synagogues. I'm positive that that's what Paul grew up reading, maybe even hearing in synagogue. I mean, that's what he alludes to. That's what he quotes all the time. So if, you know, if Jesus and the apostles would have us truly approach the Hebrew text the way that some people want us to approach it, well, then they certainly did not set a very good example because, number one, they never in their writings did the kind of things we see happening with some of this Hebrew stuff. And secondly, they quoted Septuagint instead of directly translating from the Hebrew.
- [28:09]
D
When did that change Chad for the Jews? When did they.
- [28:14]
C
Yeah, after the. Well, there was. So what began to happen is even before really, the beginnings of Christianity, you started to have other translations which began to emerge which were trying to produce a little bit more of a literal translation. And then you have that after. So after the Christians began to use the Septuagint and it kind of became the Christian Bible, then that certainly was the break that the Jews are like, all right, we're not doing that. You did have. I mean, you had some translations by a guy named Aquila and Syndicus, Theodotian, all these early Greek translations, some of which were more literal than others. Those were used by some Jews. But there was a kind of a switch back after the Christians claimed the Septuagint. Then the Jews, by and large, began to pivot back more to just the Hebrew text rather than using the Greek translation.
- [29:09]
D
Did they have a fairly faithful canon of the documents of the Hebrew canon from which to do that? I mean, did they have the text?
- [29:18]
C
Yeah, they did have the text. And these would have been. I mean, certainly the Temple had them prior to 70, and then most synagogues would have had the text as well for the. For the Sabbath readings. So they had the text. They had the Hebrew text. But the problem was, basically the problem was a lack of knowledge. You had a lot of Jews that especially Alex, didn't know Hebrew. Judea, they didn't know Hebrew. I mean, that's why you have the Septuagints to begin with. Right. Because people didn't know their Hebrew very well. So you had to have a shift back then to this Hebrew education so that people could actually understand what was being read to them.
- [29:49]
D
Well, and you don't get Christians studying Hebrew till the 1500s, really. Right. For the most part, you got just a few.
- [29:55]
C
You got Jerome, you got Origen. But, I mean, they're islands in a sea, basically, are just Greek. You know, it's pretty rare that you have Christians who actually know the Hebrew. Jerome and Origen stand out. I can't even think of a third one that regularly refers to the Hebrew.
- [30:13]
D
Yeah.
- [30:15]
B
So here's a question for you then, Chad, because you do Hebrew word studies all the time in your work for 15, 17. What's the sort of. And I think about this, too, when we even, you know, like, as a tradition, Lutheranism, confessional Lutheranism places an emphasis on its pastors and its scholars learning the biblical languages on Hebrew and Greek, you can start learning it at an undergraduate level, even some high school level for Greek is not uncommon. You go all the way, keep reading through seminary, do readings classes, various other things. What's the But Lutherans don't walk around asserting that all the translations are totally corrupt. Right. This is in fact, most Lutherans you will hear, especially on this show, will say, actually, most of your sort of edited, well edited public translations are pretty good. There's some differences here and there. We might say there's a mistake here or there, but that they're pretty reliable, that you don't need to place doubt in anybody's mind about what version of the Bible they're reading for the most part. So then what's the benefit to say studying Hebrew, studying Greek? Are our pastors full of secret knowledge when they read the Greek text before preaching on Sunday or when you read Hebrew? Yeah. What is the real benefit to exploring the text both in the original language, but also maybe historical context and things like that? What are the actual strengths and benefits that a person can gain there?
- [31:54]
C
Yeah, I think you could answer that by even broadening it to what? What's the what's the advantage of learning Russian so you can read Dostoevsky's Crime of Punishment? Or what's the advantage of learning Spanish? You can read Don Quixote or Latin.
- [32:10]
D
Or German to read Melancholy Luther.
- [32:12]
C
Yes, right. I mean, anyone who grows up with whatever mother tongue they have and then learns a second language realizes that there are certain things that they can't say fully in the other language because every single word has nuances. And when you put a string of words together into a sentence, there's a lot of nuances. And you can never bring 100% of one language over into another language. You can certainly communicate very clearly. You can have perspicuity when you are translating, but there's all kind of nuances which are just impossible to bring from one language to another. And the advantage of learning Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic or Latin and German, as far as that goes, is to be able to say, okay, this is an accurate translation. There are some nuances which are kind of hard to bring out. So I can amplify that translation a bit to maybe show you some different ways that you can look at that. Or, you know, languages change sometimes, too. I use this example all the time. I don't know when the King James was translated if our verb follow had a more aggressive sense to it or not. But when they translated Psalm 23, that surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. That, at least in our current usage of follow, that doesn't really capture the nuance of that verb as well as something like pursue.
- [33:41]
D
Pursue.
- [33:41]
C
Yeah, yeah. So it's the idea you're chasing. In fact, it's used negatively to mean persecute, like you're chasing somebody down to get them. So I mean, those kind of examples I use all the time to say it's not inaccurate to say the goodness and mercy follow us, but perhaps an English word which would capture better the power behind that, the active force behind that would be chase or pursue. So you're not saying follow is wrong. You're just saying there's another way that we can do this. And you can even do this by comparing English translations, right? Every translation has a little bit different way of rendering things. And so you can sometimes even by word choice that translations use, kind of get a feel for the various aspects of particular words and the way they can do Internet English.
- [34:28]
D
I tell students that all the time that if they're really trying to study certain passages of Scripture, certain sections of scripture, and they don't have ability in the languages, the next best thing you can do is go grab yourself four or five translations and lay them out on a table, and you'll get most of the legitimate variants, I think, in there. Now, one of the things that happens, like in the case that you just gave Chad, is that sometimes the translators will sort of follow the path of the first translator a little bit. And so you might just get follow, follow, follow, follow, because it's not wrong and it's easy, and people have memorized it that way. And so the path of least resistance is just to do that. That's also an interesting example, because if you are a pastor teaching that, you could actually. You could set that up in a way where no woman wants to be followed in the middle of the night because it feels like she's being stalked or pursued. You could provide context to that with that same word. And just some good teaching, too. So that's a really good example of where this isn't wrong to say follow, but if I were teaching it, I'd have to add some context. And if I were translating myself, I'd say pursue. But that's not secret knowledge.
- [35:44]
B
Well, it's actually the opposite in some ways. I like this example because you brought up something that I think is one of the biggest benefits of using this in teaching or preaching, like using the original languages as prep for doing that which is pursue or hunt down, even in this case, actually gives emphasis to the degree in which God is going to follow through on his promise. He gonna get you that he is going to get you with goodness and mercy. Like you are not going to escape his goodness and mercy. And so when you're doing that, you're actually providing somebody not with insecurity that you don't know what's in the Bible, but you're actually communicating God's promise more firmly to them, which is the opposite effect of. And I think this is why Adam's correct about sort of that power dynamic there, which is in some ways the preacher who has access to that Hebrew is now giving you greater independence from needing him for the secrets in this. You've now given them the confidence of God, that God will follow them and pursue them. The secret knowledge kind of camp wants to keep you in a system where you can never get untangled from the pastor or the prophet or the person who discovers all of these things. Your certainty can only come from your. Your certainty comes from them. And you need to stay in a perpetual state of uncertainty or else you might get compliant, you might get lazy, you might get, you know, wrapped up in the religious system, whatever it is, when it's used to the opposite effect, which is here's a way in which God's promise or command is more clearly understood and grasped by you. But it's the same words, it's the same promise, it's the same command. God hasn't hidden something new, some third category in Scripture. It's a more firm version that you get to cling to more rather than sort of now look at the whole Bible and go, did I miss something?
- [37:56]
D
Can I say that within the context of. Because you asked Chad about why at Lutheran seminaries specifically, I think, do we have pastors learn Greek and Hebrew? When you ask that kind of question about a particular tradition, in this case Lutheranism, it is good to know a little bit about the tradition. The Lutheran tradition is one that was born out of a university during a time period when the desire for knowledge led them back to as close to the original sources as they could get in all matters of study, including theology. And for theology, that meant, first of all, the Bible instead of commentaries by medieval theologians. And then when the ability to do so became more available to the study of Greek, and then reading the New Testament in Greek. You know, we said this before, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Luther's great nemesis. And the bondage of the will versus the freedom of the will produces A critical edition of the New Testament where he's trying to get the best sort of text to provide this Greek New Testament. And then he's annotating where all these texts come from and all this kind of thing. And then they start to get some access to learn Hebrew through various scholars. Like one of them is related to Melanchthon, named Roiclin, and it becomes part of their curriculum just so that they can be sort of the best scholars of the Bible that they can be as they are sent out into the world to teach and preach Bible to the people. And what we can't do with this is say, hey, just because there's no sort of secret Gnostic knowledge hidden in the numerology of Hebrew letters, there's not a category of Bible teacher, Bible scholar that does go to learn more about the languages and the context in order to teach this thing to you that is already clear, but to give you more background, more clarity, and to help you with difficult passages of Scripture. The other thing that during the Reformation, this really helped with is, I mean, Luther learns Greek from my good old buddy Melanchthon, and, you know, he starts to translate the Bible into German in the meantime, sort of creating modern German in the process, as he does at her at least, sort of a universally spoken and read German. And he comes across certain passages of the Vulgate that he thinks are translated incorrectly from the Greek to the Latin and that have theological consequence. Is it repent or do penance? And this becomes critical in a couple of clear passages in the New Testament and becomes theologically important too. So that's the other reason we're talking about. How good are modern translations? They're really good. But if you go back 500 years, they had one. They were supposed to operate out of Jerome's Latin Vulgate period. The end. This is the Textus Receptus. This is all they had. This is all they were supposed to use. In fact, they got in trouble when they wouldn't use it. But the two people that I know of, Erasmus and Reuchlin, they were both pursued by the Church for producing materials in Greek and Hebrew because it wasn't just a Latin Vulgate. So the historical context within Lutheranism studying Hebrew and Greek goes all the way back to that. It was our study of Hebrew and Greek that led to finding some of what we would say were the errors in the received text of the Latin Vulgate and then tried to produce better translations of the Bible that didn't have those errors. Now you have 500 years of tradition beyond that, where people have tried to produce very, very accurate text translations of the Scriptures. And from what I know, it seems like they've succeeded. But that's just been in the last several hundred years that that's been such a high priority. And thank God that it has been. And thank God for those people that did the work early on when nobody else really was doing the work. Not secret knowledge, by the way, just to learn the language.
- [42:45]
B
Well, I also think just because these two assertions are different, that there could be translation mistakes or things like even today, that there could be translation mistakes or errors, and that that necessitates that there's missing pieces of the puzzle. Right? You find this too in apologetics with, like, the assertion of how many thousands of errors the, you know, the biblical manuscripts have and then thus the translations must have and things like this. And, you know, Adam has talked on the show about how many of those are, you know, grammar commas, a difference between two texts that isn't substance in any meaningful way. And I think of that too, with a lot of this, which is like, if you go back to your example of this rock and this waterfall, well, what does that change about the gospel would be the question? Does this change that Christ died and rose for your sins? Does this change if you're going to get baptized? Does this change if you need the forgiveness of sins? Does this change the meaning of practices that we have, like the Lord's Supper? Does this change worship? Did you find something or does this context reveal something that means all Christian worship is being conducted incorrectly or whatever? And so apart from those assertions, it ends up kind of. It ends up a strange type of personal devotion where this, you know, this matters a lot, but it doesn't matter that much, right? It matters like it matters a ton. Everybody needs to know this. And also, nobody's damned for not knowing. This kind of is just. It ends up being a very interesting. You kind of go, well, where's the money in this is kind of the question, I think that follows with the.
- [44:35]
A
Your reference to, like, the textual variants and so on. Where it does matter is when somebody has at least one of the places it matters when somebody has a kind of a, shall we call it erroneous view of inerrancy, where they think there's been this perfect preservation of the text as it's been copied by scribes and monks and so on. But on here's, I don't know, we're getting kind of close to the end of time.
- [45:00]
D
Here.
- [45:00]
A
But here's a. I'm going to throw a curveball at you that wraps textual variants and numerology all together.
- [45:07]
D
Oh, wow, how exciting.
- [45:08]
A
There are, there are, there are numbers, like symbolic numbers in, in the Bible. 7, 12, 40. I'm thinking of one in particular, though. 666, Revelation 13.
- [45:24]
D
I was really worried about that tattoo I was gonna have to get because I did not want a tattoo.
- [45:31]
B
Adam is thinking about our next episode recording too, I see.
- [45:34]
C
Yeah. Well, 666.
- [45:36]
A
Or, or. And one. There's an early manuscript that has it, 616. And so I, maybe I'm just trying to like bring up or establish kind of a, a bookend here because there, there are places in that don't matter concerning your salvation and so on, but are matters of dispute. And there's a long history of Christians debating this thing. And that's part of the Christian tradition. Christians have always debated meanings of things, and that's okay, so long as we keep the main thing. The main thing when it comes to our public confession of faith. Our worship scholarship will always debate these things. So. And there is. We've been talking about, or we have numerology and stuff being kind of a newish thing. I think, you know, you can go back to at least the 13th or 14th century and find Christians thinking like, numerologically, if you will. Raymond Lowell would be an example, or Joachim if you're. And so on. So it's not like this is a totally brand new thing.
- [46:49]
D
There's.
- [46:50]
A
There's lots of this stuff going on. It's. It's always, I think, on the periphery of classic credo Christianity, but it's, it's always been there.
- [46:58]
D
Caleb, I want like a button that we can hit that plays like a, a certain melody every time Adam mentions names from history that nobody's ever heard of.
- [47:11]
A
Or Raymond Liu.
- [47:12]
D
I just want it to be like. It'd be like. Or something like that.
- [47:17]
B
That was what the chair. No, it's okay, Chad. I'm going to let you close this out. So if the motivation to study Scripture further is not that there are hidden secrets there, and we assert that the text has a plain meaning and is clear and has all of this. What do. What is the motivation for Christians to continue to study this Scripture? And what is a productive way of, you know, reading or utilizing the Old Testament in your life instead of looking for things that are hidden?
- [48:01]
C
You know, let me say two things. We're memetic creatures, right? We imitate. That's just the way we, that's the way we begin that way in infancy and we live our way, live our lives in that way. We're always imitating the people who are around us. We tend to take that way of living and push it into the Bible too, where we're looking for examples that we can imitate or bad examples that we should not imitate. So this kind of mimetic approach, reading the Scriptures leads to a very me centered and a very moralistic way of viewing the Scriptures. And that typically is the way the Old Testament is misused. You know, what can I learn from this story on how I should be or how I should act? Now what Christ and the apostles do is teach us something radically different. Jesus says that from Moses to the prophets to the Psalms to the writings, that all of these are about him. So when reading from Genesis or Leviticus or the Psalms or Isaiah, wherever it might be, the key question always to ask is how is this showing me Jesus? What is this teaching me about who he is and what he's done for me? That Christocentric, that Christ centered reading is going to lead you always to the Gospel, which is what Jesus taught us to do on the road to emmaus and John 5 and a lot of other places too. And you see this in the sermons in the Book of Acts too, where they're always saying all the prophets spoke of these days, Moses spoke of these days, Abraham saw my day and rejoiced. So if we imitate in a good way what Christ and the apostles did, then we're asking of every page in the Old Testament, okay, how is this going to lead me to Jesus? What is it teaching me about my Lord?
- [49:43]
B
Yeah, I think one of the ways that I saw it recently was that every story and event in the Old Testament is a prophecy, you could say, which kind of sounds hyper spiritual, but it's a prophecy in that it's a declaration about Christ. It's an event or a preaching that Christ is going to fulfill. And that comes even to some of the big ones we think as just sort of individual, historical contextualized stories. Like you know, the exodus from Egypt is actually, is actually a prophecy too about Christ. It's not just it is a historical event of deliverance that God does for his people, but it's one that is finally fulfilled in Christ coming out of Egypt or the same with the Noah's Ark and the flood, that is fulfilled in baptism, in the baptism of our Lord and then in your baptism, as Peter tells us too. And so you can see See that it's not that those things are hidden, but that the Old Testament is always preaching something additional to the event on the page. But it's not a hidden something. It is that promise that God gave at the very beginning, right at the fall, that he was going to deliver us and that he was going to deliver us through this person, Jesus Christ. And so I think that that's sort of a helpful way into your mimetic thing too. You know, that has habit in it. And so reading the scripture, it does sort of change you, changes who you are if you have a reading habit, changes how you think about these things, opens your ears to hear the gospel as well. And so I think there is, this is not saying there is no utility in studying further. In fact, our tradition, as we've stated here, has a long tradition of studying further. But it's not for secrets, it's for clarity and certainty. So I think that's, that's a great place to end. If you enjoyed this episode of the Thinking Fellows podcast, there is more for you from 1517.
- [51:55]
C
We have a YouTube channel that you.
- [51:58]
B
Can go subscribe to and we do short versions of these over here too. So I'll be recording a little something with Chad and we'll have a 15 minute version answering some of these questions. So if you're interested in video content, that'll be over there. And then we have more podcasts like 40 Minutes in the Old Testament, which Chad co hosts. And you can check out all of those@1517.org podcasts. We thank you for listening. We will catch you next time.
- [52:26]
C
Bye.