Reclaiming Primitive Christianity Part 2: Exploring the Historical Jesus with Dr. James Tabor: Season 2 Episode 5

Episode Transcript
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(00:09):
Welcome back to the Pulling the Threads podcast, where we dig
into histories, mysteries, and the ideology shaping our world
through the lens of textual criticism and the historical
critical method. I'm honored to continue this
deep dive conversation with someone whose scholarship has
profoundly influenced my thinking, Doctor James Tabor.
Tabor, the distinguished fellow at Hebrew University and author

(00:30):
of Jesus, Jesus Dynasty, Restoring Abrahamic Faith, and
many other instrumental works. Doctor Tabor, welcome.
Welcome back to the Pulling and Threads.
Good to see you again, Jeremy. Yeah.
Yeah, it's good to have you back.
Before we jump in, I wanted to address a couple fewer comments
from the last episode. It has been really popular, one

(00:51):
commenter noted. It was like listening to the
greatest hits of one of his favorite artists, the way we
went through things there. Another person asked, and this
is what, you know, I want to bring some course corrections
for people who might feel this way as well.
That what we're doing is Antichrist.
I think that's a misconception of the misconstrued question.

(01:14):
You know, that's worth addressing, I'd argue.
I think that you might agree we're not anti Jesus.
If anything we're trying to recover the real historical
Jesus. Would you say you're a more pro
real Jesus then this view that you know you're anti Christian,
anti Jesus? Yeah, the nomenclature is

(01:37):
complicated because Antichrist, of course, is used usually for
this final evil figure that Jewsand Christians both talk about,
although Christians are the oneswho use that phrase.
And the man of sin who sits in the temple of God certainly
don't want to be that guy. But I don't think that's what

(01:58):
your commoner meant against Christ.
Maybe literally is what it meanstearing down Christ.
And then you get into the difference between Christ and
Jesus. I like to stay with the
historical figure of Jesus. There was a person, unless

(02:19):
you're a myther, who doesn't think he existed.
And then what you're doing in terms of what we call the quest
for the historical Jesus is to ask how can we know what he was
really about and what he said and taught, in contrast perhaps

(02:39):
to what people said about him, since we don't have anything
directly from him. So that's where the problem
comes. So you have to use what we call
historical critical methods. And critical there does not mean
tear down, destroy. If anything, it means build up
and construct because what you're trying to get through is

(03:02):
the web of theological overlay that has been laid down.
If you're not for that and you say, look, I've got the New
Testament, I've got the four gospels, anything they say is
from Jesus, then there's nothingto discuss.
Just read, you know, just read. Might be a few questions here

(03:23):
and there. You want to know what Jesus
said, get a red letter Bible andread all the red stuff.
And that's what he said. But if you get into the
historical critical and remembercritical means careful doesn't
mean tear down, far from it. Like I said, it means build up.
If you get into the historical critical method, you're actually
trying to build up the layers that really go back to Jesus.

(03:48):
Let me give you an example. If in there's a underlying
source that the scholars call Q,it doesn't matter what you call
it. It's easy to define.
There's this material that Matthew and Luke have in common
that is not in Mark. So it like, again, forget the
name, some people, well, I don'tbelieve in Q.

(04:09):
Well, you believe that Matthew and Luke have things in common
because they do that are not in Mark.
So that material, if we pull it out and read it, we find that it
is primarily the sayings of Jesus, teachings of Jesus, red
letter stuff, but it contains a lot of material that seems more

(04:31):
primitive, more original. I'll give you one example.
Jesus says in that material, among those born of men, which
is to say human beings, there's none greater than John the
Baptizer, now a redactor. That means an editor has added

(04:54):
to that text because it's so shocking.
Think about it, if Jesus really said that, and I think he did,
we go for the hard sayings of Jesus, the sayings that later
followers who are following morethe theology of Christianity
would go like he couldn't have meant that because that he was

(05:15):
born of a woman and that would mean John was greater than
Jesus. And doesn't it also say that
John says he must increase and Imust decrease?
So the point is, if you just take everything in a big hopper
and mix it up and say, well, it's all true, you're going to
come out differently. So what is added by the editors?

(05:38):
We think because we have an earlier text, Hebrew, Matthew,
it doesn't have that. And what is added?
Oh, but the least in the Kingdomis greater than John.
You see what's happening here? Somebody's saying, well,
actually, yeah, he, we don't know what he meant there, but
you know, it doesn't matter because any of us are greater
than John because we're Christians now.

(05:59):
So that sort of thing is what you have.
You remember Matthew 28? This is not the cute thing.
This is something else. You're to go baptized in the
name of the Father, Son and HolyGhost, Holy Spirit, Holy Ghost,
King James. That's the Trinitarian formula.
Wow, Jesus is a Trinitarian now.Yet we have origin who quotes

(06:22):
that and other church fathers. And if it was in there they
would have quoted it. They would have made a big deal
about it because they're Trinitarians.
Origins. Not quite, but he certainly
thought Jesus was divine. He's a 3rd, 2nd, 3rd century
church father from Alexandria and it's not in their copies.

(06:43):
And we have a copy of Hebrew Matthew.
I have the book right here. I'm sure you've studied it and
your readers, you might not havethat cover, but this is by
George Howard, the editor, and it's called Evan Bohan.
It's a rabbi who preserved this version of Matthew and Hebrew,
and it doesn't have that. And it doesn't have that thing

(07:05):
about and he who is least in theKingdom is greater than he.
So critical studies, we take thetext seriously, but we don't
think anything in the text without any thinking about it is
from the historical Jesus. So I like to say it like this,
we try to go to the Jesus of history, not necessarily the

(07:28):
Christ of faith, because the Christ of faith gets into the
church councils, the creeds and what became Christianity and
involves all the thoughts of Paul and makes them dominant.
And Paul's long after Jesus in terms of decades.
And you know, is he reflecting Jesus?

(07:48):
We'll get into that, I'm sure. So that's a short answer.
Now, personally, you asked me, I'm very positive on Jesus.
I've spent 45 years studying andtrying to get at the historical
Jesus. I've written several major books
on Jesus trying to present what the results of these critical

(08:10):
studies layout for us. And you mentioned this book
already. We're going to talk about it
later. But this has a lot on Jesus.
It's probably my latest thought on Jesus.
And it's not a just about Jesus,but we believe, I believe, I
think you do too, that Jesus wasproclaiming what we might call a

(08:31):
original Abrahamic faith. He's not really bringing a new
message. He's bringing the good news of
the Kingdom of God. So, so I hope that will relax
everybody and there's no threat here.
In fact, we're wanting to get closer to what Jesus said.
I'll give you one more example. Examples are good Mark early

(08:51):
text. We think marks are at the
earliest Gospel. I know a lot of people.
I thought it was Matthew. Well, that's a tradition in the
church. But if you look at it, Matthew's
rewriting Mark, he's using the narrative and changing things.
So in Mark, I think it's chapter10, a man comes up to Jesus and
he says, good master, what shallI do to inherit eternal life?

(09:15):
Jewish question to a Jewish teacher.
And Jesus says, why are you calling me good?
There's no one good but God. Matthew comes up, he comes to
that passage. He's overwriting Mark and
rewriting Mark, he's following it to some degree.
He goes, oh, that's kind of problematic.
I, I don't know if, why would hesay that?

(09:37):
People are going to wonder. You can always explain it away,
but everybody's going to stop and go, why are you calling me
good? Of course Jesus is good.
I mean, he's the creator of the universe and he's the Lord and
sometimes say he's Yahweh and all this stuff.
So what, you know, what does Matthew do?
He says, why are you asking me about the good?

(09:58):
Wait a minute. That isn't what Mark says.
He didn't ask him about the good.
He did ask him how do you get eternal life, but he called him
good teacher. That would be a few examples.
So critical studies are helpful if you're open to the idea that
you want to get back to the historical Jesus, which I do.

(10:20):
I don't necessarily go by the overlay that's been added by
others. Yeah.
So you're being faithful to the historical Jesus, which is
probably more pro Jesus than just the faith stance, but you
know, maybe. It's debatable.
I mean, if someone, like I said,if someone said, look, I believe
every word in the New Testament,it's inspired and there's not

(10:40):
one mistake and it's all Jesus, then I don't have anything to
say. Although we could discuss that.
But there be no use in discussing any passage because
all what you end up doing is quoting one passage against
another. You see, it's futile.
Like anyone can read it, but what did Jesus actually say when

(11:00):
we have 2-3 versions? Don't think of it as
contradictions. See, people are, oh, are you
saying it contradicts? No, I'm saying they're layers,
earlier layers overwritten, overwritten.
And that discourages some peopleand they think, well, if it's
that complicated, forget it. We're never going to find out.
You know what a fairly consistent picture emerges if

(11:24):
you'll follow these methods. It really does and that
encourages you because you startthinking well and we have other
texts, not just the gospels. We've got the dedicate, we've
got other late the book of James.
James is Jesus brother. He should know something about
his own brother. He's the leader of the
community, so. Yeah, yeah, all very important

(11:46):
things. There's a lot of other texts,
you know, the diversity of earlytext is is something that's
significant. So last time we did cover a lot
about the Ebenite apocalypticisma little the Enochian text, the
impacts of the Dead Sea Scroll and Paul's divergent from the
original Jesus movement. Now my listeners here are

(12:07):
especially drawn to the Ebenite tradition since I talk about
them a lot and how they put Jesus as a Torah observant and
provided prophet of human origin, not born of a virgin,
not resurrected. How does the so the gospel of
Jesus, how does it what? What are the biggest difference

(12:28):
between what we understand of what we're talking about now,
the sayings of Jesus, the historical Jesus versus the
gospel of Paul? What are the differences between
Jesus Gospel and Paul's gospel? OK, so I have a screen share I
want to do so let me just share this for several reasons.

(12:52):
But this will also get to your question.
As you can see here, this is my blog.
It's jamestabor.com. So if you know my name, you can
get to it. And if you it has a good search
feature and it has hundreds and hundreds of posts.
So you can almost query anything.

(13:12):
But let's just take your query. Let's do EB a night.
Let me let me type it right. You got to look at where my
fingers are in the keys Ebionites and I hit return.
Here is there's several articles, but I was going to

(13:33):
refer you to this one. Ebionites and Nazarenes tracking
the original followers of Jesus.Now if we click on that so you
can go do this yourself, you canprint it out.
This is a fairly nice article overview that answers your
question, but we're not going toread it all.
I just want you to know that it's here because it goes into

(13:54):
great detail. But at the end there's a nice
summary. So we get all the way to the end
and let's see right here, we've got 4 points where they're
numbered and lots of sources andother things you can read.
Like here's that Hebrew Matthew I just mentioned.

(14:16):
Some of these things are linked,so here are the main things, and
we won't read this word for word, but we'll hit the high
points as far as the Ebenites go, and I'll get to the
Nazarenes because this is both. Jesus is a human being with a
father and a mother. They do think he's a Messiah,

(14:37):
meaning he's anointed of the Spirit.
This is from Isaiah 61. OK, they're big on that.
We have that in the New Testament and Luke for the Lord
has anointed me, the Spirit is annoying me and so forth.
But they like the term prophet like Moses.
Now that's also in the New Testament.
In the book of Acts, in Acts 7, Stephen says, you know, he's the

(14:59):
prophet like Moses. If you remember, the prophet
like Moses is the one who will come like Moses, whom the Lord
will know face to face. So they had a very high view of
Jesus. But as a human being, she's a
flesh and blood human being bornof a woman, born of a woman
doesn't mean oh, but virgin born.

(15:22):
It just it means you're a human being in Hebrew.
Secondly, this is surprising. They're vegetarian, they don't
like eating meat at all, and they think the temple slaughter
of animals was added. They don't think it was
originally given by God, but it was added either from the

(15:44):
people's sins or as Jeremiah 7 says, I did not ever command you
to do this, but only to seek my ways and follow me.
If you looked that up, Jeremiah is in the temple and he says
this is supposed to be a House of prayer, but you filled it
with shedding innocent blood, referring to the animals, and he

(16:04):
calls it a den of shredders. I know it's translated robbers.
That's a mistranslation. It actually is a word that means
to RIP apart literally. And of course robbers jump on
people and stab them and RIP them apart.
But it's used for a ravenous lion, for example, in the book

(16:24):
of Isaiah, same word, OK, and they, but part of this is let's
go back to the original way. For example, Moses allows
divorce, but Jesus says the wonderful, wonderful even I
phrase from the beginning it wasnot so you see that idea.

(16:45):
So eating meat, yes, it's allowed in Genesis 9 with
certain provisions for shedding blood.
But ideally, remember, I've given you every green plant to
eat. So they're trying to go back to
Eden, so to speak. And, and divorce and eating meat
would be two examples. And then they believe in

(17:08):
following the Torah, but they think that lots of things, this
is part 4 has been, have been added to the Torah like wheat
and tares. You know, a field is the word of
God sown in a field. And they believe that there are
things in the Torah that have been added by the priests
particularly that are not reallyof the Torah.

(17:32):
Now we would call that today historical critical study, but
also of the Torah they believe in.
So that's sort of an overview. Now they also generally have a
negative view of Pole and they might have been branches.
Later people start saying, well,Nazarenes are not like

(17:53):
Ebionites. There's a church father named
Epiphanius I'm going to talk about in a second.
But anyway, I just want to recommend that article to you.
Now, if you go back here to my beginning page, just so you know
all these sources, I want your people to realize what this it

(18:13):
has books and it has online courses and all this.
But this you might find very helpful all kinds of background
on the Jewish Roman world of Jesus.
So if you happen to click on that, look, you got all of this
kind of material. These are original sources and
here's an example of what I I put blog posts up all the time

(18:35):
and you were going to ask me about this later, but I just did
a video on the Shroud of Turin and we'll, we'll save that for
the end. But this is talking about that.
There's a blog post. So the videos often have an
introduction. This is what I just put up, and
it's going crazy on my YouTube is Mark the earliest surviving

(18:56):
Jewish text after the Jerusalem temple was destroyed.
Think about that. And if you read Mark, what I
argue in this video, this is a new idea for me.
You know, I changed my mind. I learned new things.
I didn't know this five years ago.
And now I think it's pretty persuasive.
You probably haven't seen it yet, Jeremiah.
I want to see what you think of it.

(19:16):
What I argue is that in seven ways Mark is telling people
here's how to follow the God of Israel now that there's no
temple and Jerusalem is destroyed.
So think who is God because the Shema Mark 10 or or Mark 12
rather. And it says if you love God and

(19:40):
love your neighbor as yourself. This is more than all the burnt
offerings and sacrifices kind ofsounding Amy, right?
And what about the purity laws, traditions of men that have been
added? You see, And it's really what
goes in the heart and so forth. So you could even look at that.
Those just happened to be up there.
So I wanted to mention them, buthere's another document and I,

(20:05):
I'll be curious to see if you'veseen this one.
There is a church father, as we call them, a church authority.
And we're going to look at this right here.
But in in he writes a book called The Panarian.
It's a Greek word and it means medicine chest.
Now he's an orthodox TrinitarianChristian.

(20:29):
He's after Constantine, he's around three, 73170.
So he's 4th century and he is Orthodox supporting
Christianity, absolutely believing in Paul that Paul's
his main guy. Now you notice this says #18
guess what? The book has two volumes printed

(20:52):
in English. It's 80 heresies.
So it's the medicine chest to cure you of 80 false beliefs of
Jews and Christians that are called heretics.
So he thinks these Nazarenes andEvianites are not true
Christians. So in chapter 29 and 30, you can

(21:16):
look it up on the Internet. These are available.
He covers the Evie nights and the Nazarenes and he tries to
make them different. In my article that I showed you
on my blog, I argue that they'rebasically the same in the early
days and there's Nazarene is a term that the followers of Jesus

(21:37):
had. There's Jews still call them
today Nazarenes, Christians. That's that's a word Yeshua
notary, Jesus Nazarene. And we think that's from Isaiah
11. One, that's more what convinces
me the branch. So they're branchites.
They believe in the branch of David waiting for the branch of

(21:59):
David. So that's the later groups that
he describes and he does not like them at all.
He hates the Evianites. In fact Ebionite means poor
ones. You know Jesus said blessed are
the Ebionites blessed are the poor ones.
If he was speaking Hebrew it would be blessed are the ebonym

(22:20):
the poor ones poor in spirit right Isaiah 66 to this person I
will look. God says not to the temple.
He says what is the house you'llbuild for me is Ebenites Love
this verse. Heaven is my throne, the earth
is my foot. So what's the house you're going
to build for me? I often say I might have said

(22:41):
this in the last episode we did.There are two things God says he
never wanted he didn't want Israel to have a temple and a
human king. Remember.
Yeah, comes. Up he goes.
Oh, I, I never asked for a temple.
Why? Why are you wanting to build me
a temple? I don't want a temple, but OK,
They build him a temple. And why?

(23:03):
Why do you want a king? I'm your king.
So they like that kind of idea. So the Messiah is a king, but
the word king is misleading. In Judaism the prayer is Baruch
Atta. You could say Adonai Elohima,

(23:27):
but Melek haalam, the king, onlyGod is really the king.
You know, we, we say a Prince islower than a king, but in Hebrew
a Prince is Nazi and really the Messiah is Nazi.
He's the Prince of the congregation.
So if you want to go back to Jesus, he probably would have
been called a Nazi, which means a ruler, a Prince, but God is

(23:51):
the king. Melak, you know the word.
So anyway, back to this chapter 18.
Here's what's tricky about this.Of the 80 heresies, he starts
with Jewish. Look, it's #18 of the series,
it's #5 from Judaism, but eighteen of the series is a

(24:12):
whole series and and five are Jewish.
This is Jewish, so this is not Christian.
But look at the name Nazarians. It's spelled just a little
differently. I don't know if you can see that
like. Maybe Yeah, yeah they were
associated possibly with Kamaran.
The Dead Sea Scrolls there is pre-existing or.

(24:34):
Say that, but possibly, but yeah.
But this is Nazar, not Nazor. So for Epiphanius, Nazor is the
later group. But here's Nazar, a sect of
Judaism. But look where they live.
They live across the Jordan in Transjordan.

(24:55):
They practice Judaism like circumcision in the Sabbath.
And I noticed that Hammer Baptist.
So they were into the mikvah, the Hammer Baptist.
That's right. And also here they recognize
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the fathers and so forth, but they
wouldn't accept the Torah as it's come down from the Jewish

(25:18):
tradition. They think it's been polluted or
things have been off, added to it and look again.
They would not sacrifice or eat meat.
They claims that the books have forgeries, a strong word, but I
would call it interpolations. So it sounds almost like the
later group that we just read about, right?

(25:40):
But this is an earlier group. So it shows that there's a
precursor. For example, you mentioned
Qumran. At Qumran they say I close my
screen right for you guys. Yeah, you can see me at Qumran.
They say in the community rule, we will build a temple of men,

(26:01):
of people, a temple of people. And our prayers will be our
offerings, not the blood and theHolocaust offerings of animals.
That's in the early text of Qumran.
Now we talked about this last time.
Remember Qumran the, I like to call it the Dead Sea Scroll
Group. You know, forget the name.

(26:24):
People say, well, you mean the Essenes, right?
Well, that's one name, but what does it mean?
We mentioned last time, it mightmean, O seem Hotura, the doers
of the law. But remember, in the Dead Sea
Scrolls, one of the things they say is that David had many wives
because he didn't have the seal book of the Torah.

(26:45):
The seal book, the Torah. They claim to have the real
Torah. OK, so they're doing Hick
historical critical reading of even the Torah and they think
other things were added. Jeremiah 7 again.
And the day I LED you out of Egypt, I did not command you
concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices.

(27:06):
Amos says the same thing. You know, did I command you when
I LED you out of Egypt? So their position was these
things were added later. And in their texts, what we call
the Hebrew Gospels, the EvianiteGospels, they say things like
they have Jesus say things like if you do not see sacrificing,

(27:29):
shedding this innocent blood in this temple, the wrath of God
will not be removed from you or it will fall upon you and so
forth. So that's a brief overview.
You know, the people, remember, we know about the mainly from
the people that hated them. So they're going to give all
kinds of negative things about them.

(27:52):
But they're not fans of Paul. They think Paul came along the
Christian version of them and so-called Christian post Jesus.
They they think that Paul taughtheresies and they even question
whether he really saw Jesus. You know, he, he's the 13th

(28:13):
apostle. But their basic argument would
be a pretty simple one. Do you go by the ones who are
with Jesus and followed him and the ones to whom Jesus said, I
will make you rulers over the 12tribes of Israel?
Should you go by them or should you go by a 13th guy?

(28:35):
It comes later and says, well, Isaw Jesus and he told me this,
that you should break bread as his body and take a cup of wine
as his blood and drink it and eat his body and blood and
through that you'll be saved. Now did Jesus say that is the
question? Say it's in Matthew, Mark and

(28:57):
Luke because Mark has it, but Mark probably gets it from Paul.
So it's, it's, I know it sounds complicated, but we can sort it
out. It actually sorts into two
piles. And this pile over here would
never think of drinking blood oreven symbolically drinking
blood. I'm not accusing sincere

(29:18):
Christians of cannibalism or anything like that.
That's not the point. They have a deep spiritual
meaning in their own lives. I grew up with it.
I, I try to be gentle with people.
But if you think about it, I don't think that would be an
image that would be used by a a Jewish person, particularly

(29:38):
coming from the tradition that you abstain from blood.
And even the requirement on Gentiles in Acts 15, if they
join the Nazarene movement, theyhave to be sexually pure,
worship the one God, no idols and not eat blood or sacrificed

(30:00):
the the meat, sacrificed idols and particularly the blood.
So that's the sort of thing thatyou get into.
So they didn't like Paul and they would argue visions are one
thing, but how do we know what you're seeing?
You know, you say you talk to Jesus.
Well, we talked to Jesus, but guess what?

(30:23):
We touched him and knew him and heard him first hand, and he
never said any of those things. That was the Ebionite argument,
and it's a pretty good argument if you accept it.
So Paul says things like we no longer know Jesus after the
flesh. After the flesh means a human
being. Even if we once didn't know him

(30:46):
that way, we no longer know him that way.
Almost as if to say, OK, yeah, you knew him, but I know him
after the Spirit. Almost like you would claim I've
got the latest word from Jesus. You guys are out of date.
Yeah, you knew him, but that wasbefore his death.
And now I've got all the new revelations that he's given me.

(31:08):
So they weren't so sure that youcould follow the latest new
revelation. If you go down that path, what
do you find all through church history?
Well, the first thing you find is Muhammad comes along very
early and says, well, I have a new revelation and it's
Abrahamic and you should follow this rather than that.

(31:29):
And if you really want to jump to American history, the job you
came from, the witnesses, they don't have a book, but they have
a translation that kind of enforces their views.
But think of the Mormons and they would still say we follow
the Bible, but through the Book of Mormon, it's going to now get
interpreted and so forth. So this idea of later

(31:52):
revelations coming by, visions of angels or visions of any
type, even if it's finding golden plates that will have the
new revelation, they would go like, wait a minute, let's stick
with the original. What did God really want when he
made human beings no divorce, peaceful Kingdom?

(32:14):
And then they would go to the end of the Bible, Isaiah 11.
What is the Messiah going to do?They're not going to hurt or
destroy on all my holy mountain and the word destroy a shahat to
slaughter, because the wolf willlie with the Lamb and there'll
be peace and the nations will beat peace.
So they would say, look, we havethe original ideal.

(32:38):
And then that was left behind after the flood.
And then violence filled the earth and all these other
innovations came in and the prophets come along and try to
take us back to the ideal. And then Jesus finally comes and
they thought he was kind of the final prophet.
They weren't looking for another.

(32:59):
God's Spirit rested on him and he was became the anointed one,
the prophet, like Moses. So you can drill into that a
little more of it. That's a good overview I think.
Yeah, that was, that was really good.
So the Clementine homilesian recognition, you know, sometimes
called pseudo. I'm not sure if I would put that

(33:20):
title on it. I think it reflects an important
text. They offer a radical different
view of the Jesus movement, muchof what you're saying here.
But how do we address the problem of Paul?
Would you agree that the historical Jesus aligns more
with the Ebionite view sans Paul, without Paul?
And, you know, who was the historical Paul?

(33:41):
What do we know about him? Some of the fringe theories
suggest that Marcy and I might have invented him, possibly
modeling him on the life of Josephus.
Or as Doctor Price suggests, that maybe there's a connection
between him, Simon Magus, and hesees, you know, symbolic layers
rather than biography. And in light of the
pseudepigrapha and redaction, you know, what's your take on

(34:05):
who the historical Paul is? OK, well I won't call them
fringe theories because I think that's a little bit pejorative,
but I understand what you mean. I mean, there are theories that
are kind of fringe, but sometimes minority opinions,

(34:26):
some of which I hold might be right and so, but they are
minority for sure. Everything from Jesus didn't
exist to Paul didn't exist to the letters.
All the letters of Paul are made-up and forged in his name.
Or there is there was a figure, but the letters aren't him.

(34:49):
On and on and on. I pretty well am mainstream on
this and I'll tell you why. If you take the 13 letters with
Paul's name and you can do all kinds of studies, you can do
computer studies. Even the latest AI studies show
this with vocabulary style usageideas that the seven early

(35:17):
letters, the 1st 7 chronologically generally are
accepted. And I don't know, see if I name
them right would be Galatians and 1st Thessalonians.
Those are the two earliest. And then you've got 2 Corinthian
letters. It's probably more than one
letter, but it's group now is 2 First and 2nd Corinthians.

(35:39):
And then you've got Romans and Philippians and Philemon.
Did I get 7 there? I think I did.
And I, I think I've got them all.
I'm just doing it out. Yeah, I I mean, I'd have to
refresh. Those are those stand out
differently. If you read them, they're very
apocalyptic. They think the end is very near.

(36:01):
They began talking about they'renot trying to organize the
church and set everything up andthey don't talk about the delay
of the coming of the Lord or anything like that.
They're not worried about that and particularly in a chapter
like First Corinthians 7, but probably there are 20 or 30

(36:23):
other texts and pulse 7 letters where it's like I told my
students, Jesus is coming next summer, so to speak, you know,
like you don't even have time. Don't start a Business Today,
you'd say. Don't buy life insurance.
Don't start a business. Don't get married.
Not because marriage is wrong. Are you kidding?

(36:46):
I mean, they're these are the people that go by the marriage
is holy and be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
But because he he gives the reason because the appointed
time of the end has grown very short.
And when the apocalypse comes, those who have wives will be as

(37:06):
though they have none, and thosewho go into business will be as
though they have no business. Why?
Because the form of the world ispassing away.
It's all crumbling. The schema of the world, the
whole system, the economy, the social world, the political
world is all collapsing. And Jesus is going to come in

(37:31):
the clouds of heaven and swoop the people up.
I'm not talking about the secretrapture.
The believers in Jesus, they'll get transformed and glorified.
This is Paul into the image and glory of Jesus himself when he
was raised and ascended to heaven.
And they'll be spirit beings andthey will note not be flesh and
blood. And Paul says, I can't even tell

(37:52):
you what they look like. It's blinding.
It's like looking at a blinding light a million times greater
than the sun. So, you know, don't ask me what
the body's like. It's glorious, it's powerful and
so forth. So I have a book.
I like to hold my books up just where people can see them.

(38:12):
It's good reference. Bear with me, it helps to see a
book sometimes. This is the easiest book to read
on this Paul and Jesus. And as you know from the title,
Paul and Jesus, it's your question and I go through the
letters of Paul, but I do I do think he was a historical
character. I do think he lives in the 50

(38:35):
CEI think it fits the times. I think he's very concerned
about what Caligula tried to do in the year 41, put his statue
in the temple, because that's a fulfillment of Daniel.
Paul's into Daniel, the visions of Daniel.
Chapter 2 brings the Kingdom andall the kingdoms fall.

(38:56):
Satan, the God of this world, Paul calls him, is going to be
defeated. He says the God of peace will
shortly crush Satan under your feet.
Genesis 3 notice shortly he endshis letters saying come Lord
Jesus Maranatha. So they're highly apocalyptic.

(39:17):
You're on the edge of history. It's all ready to end and Paul's
rushing around trying to bring the gospel to the non Jews that
God is also calling and pulling into the movement and so forth.
And I accept those letters as from a real historical
character. And I'll tell you the reason.

(39:39):
It's partly personal and anecdotal.
And I'm not saying Bob Price hasn't read them.
He's probably read them more than I have.
But I have read the letters of Paul in Greek.
I wrote my dissertation on Paul.I spent eight years on it.
I have read them in Greek. I, I'm not going to say hundreds
of times, I don't, I've never counted the times, but I've you

(40:02):
begin to feel a personality. You begin to feel a kind of a
character. It's not just formal rhetoric.
Yes, he uses rhetoric. And I know Nina's latest
theories and other people that, you know, have come up with
rhetorical theories of when theywere composed.
I, I just don't find them convincing.
And it's not because I'm trying to cling to a historical poll.

(40:25):
I, I don't, I just don't think he was made-up.
And I also think beyond the letters, probably the greatest
witness to his influence are thefour gospels.
They're very influenced by Paul in their final forms, so that
the theology of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is very Pauline

(40:50):
on one level. Now, not in details.
Paul has things that they don't have.
And scholars point out, you know, Luke's Paul is not really
the original Paul and that sort of thing.
But here's what I mean by that. If you ask what did Paul
essentially add? Not the seven letters, but the
Pauline stuff that went into theGospels.

(41:11):
Remember, you got six more letters, Colossians, Ephesians
particularly. Those are the big ones.
Suddenly he's the creator of theuniverse.
Paul never said that. The creator of the universe,
he's very close to being. He's not God the Father, but you
know, they're right there together, eternally together.

(41:31):
And I would say even in those letters, Paul would that Paul,
that secondary Paul so-called the Pauline school would still
say that Jesus is the first bornof all creation.
I don't think they would say thenice end thing like he was
eternal. They're probably more Aryan in

(41:53):
that sense, but they do think hepre existed.
They think he, God so loved the world, gave his only son, He
left heaven, came down to earth,was born of a virgin.
Now Paul, I don't think goes that far, but you see how it
becomes Pauline to think he's inheaven.

(42:13):
He sheds his divinity, he comes down to earth.
Now he's a human and he dies forthe sins of humankind.
And you have to believe in him to be saved.
And then he goes back to heaven and he's coming again to get all
those followers of him that are now been forgiven through his
blood. He's going to raise them up to
heaven and Romans would be his main manifesto.

(42:36):
So if you take Romans one through 8 particularly, you've
got the Pauline message. And that skeletal essential
Pauline message in its main elements are what begin to get
propagated as Christianity. So here's what gets me,
Jeremiah, when you go to the Vatican, this is a symbol.

(42:58):
But just think about it. These great steps going up into
the Vatican with Jesus and his mother in the famous statue in
the middle. And what do you see on the right
as you're going up is Paul. On the left is Peter.
Peter, the rock of the church, Paul holding scrolls, who wrote

(43:21):
most of the New Testament. And you going up.
And I stand at the top and I look back and I think, where's
James, right? There's James, said, James who?
James who? That's what people say.
That's what my classes say when I say, look, we're going to do
six weeks on James, the brother of Jesus.

(43:43):
They go like, now remember, I taught at Notre Dame.
Those kids are going to go. Doctor Taylor, I thought he
didn't have brothers because Mary's a perpetual virgin.
Say things like that and then wego to Mark 63 where the four
brothers are named and the sisters are mentioned and you
know, he's the son of Mary and so forth.

(44:05):
So the historical Jesus had brothers.
Now another book, this isn't outyet, but this is just a review
copy that we give to scholars. Philosoph, Mary rediscovering
the mother of Jesus. You can order it now.
Any bookseller has it pre-ordered and it doesn't.
You don't have to pay until you,especially on things like

(44:27):
Amazon. They don't bill you till it
comes out. Comes out September 30th.
That goes into all of that in great detail.
But essentially, see what I'm trying to do is give the whole
picture. But her first born son is Jesus.
Her second born is James. Now let me shock everybody.

(44:48):
James is the beloved disciple inJohn who leans on Jesus breast,
not Mary Magdalene, sorry Dan Brown, it's James the brother.
And at the cross Jesus says son,behold your mother, mother,
behold your son. This is the act of the older son

(45:10):
passing on the care of his widowed mother to the next in
line. Jesus was head of that
household. Joseph seems to disappear.
Many scholars and theologians. We just assume, you know, he's
never mentioned after age 12 andone passage in Luke and what

(45:30):
happened to Joseph, it's kind ofa mystery.
So he maybe he died, maybe he was an older man, older than
Mary. That would not surprise us.
Maybe he was in his 30s and maybe she was more 14 or 15.
That was common in the time thatcould happen and with in terms
of arranged marriages. So James takes over and I know

(45:55):
everybody said, well, I thought that was John.
I of course you thought it was John because everybody in the
world says it's John because of the late traditions and
Christianity that the apostle John, son of Zebedee took Mary
and cared for her. What an insult to James.
You know how you know that's nottrue?

(46:16):
Absolutely. We know that James is in charge
of the movement when Jesus dies.Yeah, He's not in charge of his
own mother. Think about it.
That just doesn't make sense. So when Jesus dies as his last
act, Gospel of John only he saysmother, your son, son, your

(46:37):
mother. It's a way of just saying.
And from that day that disciple took him into the house.
Now, why is it he named? Because the writer doesn't want
to exalt James. This is later when he's not
going to be on the Vatican steps.
He's not a big figure. Peter becomes the big figure.

(46:57):
And if you read first Peter, you'll think you're reading
Paul. I mean, I don't know if you read
first Peter yet, but you know what?
I've gone through first Peter, and I've marked the Paul
passages. In fact, I just crossed them out
because I want to see what it look like.
And then I pulled out just the passages that aren't pulsed

(47:20):
material. Wow.
It reads perfectly without them.So I think that's been Pauline
interpolated. A lot of scholars think that
it's called first Peter. So it's probably an original.
It probably would have been originally much like James.
So James, we do have and it is not interpolated except maybe
one verse in chapter 2 where he says don't hold the faith of our

(47:45):
Lord Jesus in vain. But I would go with that because
you know what he says. What do you mean hold the faith
in vain? Don't let a poor man sit in the
back of the synagogue, not church, and let the rich come up
front. Well, that does sound like the
faith of our Lord Jesus, right? And Lord, remember, means Master

(48:06):
teacher. So of course, James looked to
Jesus as the teacher, but then he hands it over to James.
Now we have dozens of texts saying that outside the New
Testament. But in the New Testament, he's
probably, but in the New Testament, I would say he's just

(48:27):
about written out because this is the later Pauline
presentation. Now, Paul mentions him in the
early letters because he says, yeah, I went up to Jerusalem.
I saw Cephas, think that's Peter.
I think it's Peter. Some people dispute that.
And oh, I also saw James, the Lord's brother.

(48:48):
And then in the book of Acts, when he goes up to Jerusalem,
oh, I went and checked with James.
I checked in with James. But you know where you can prove
to anyone that James is in charge of the group?
I think you know this. Acts 15, the biggest dispute the
church ever had or the synagoguereally the group Nazarene the
biggest. They almost split where one

(49:10):
group was saying if a gentile non Jew joins the Nazarenes,
they've got to get circumcised and basically convert to Judaism
and keep the whole Torah. Got to become a Jew.
Just think of it as becoming a Jew because it would apply to
women too. And they don't get circumcised.
So in order to be saved by the blood of Jesus, it's very

(49:31):
Pauline. You got to convert to Judah.
You got to become a Jew and keepthe entire Torah, OK, the way
Judaism teaches. And this would be the sect of
Judaism, Nazarenes. So they would have some
adjustments maybe as to what we call the Halaka.
You know, how do you keep the Torah?
Might have been more like Hillelthan Gamalia, I think.

(49:54):
Probably open but you still haveto convert And another group
Peter included said no. And Paul Paul was there and they
they argue for a while and Paul gives his his opinion and Peter
gives his opinion and then you get this astounding statement
out of the blue. Don't even explain who he is.

(50:16):
Remember X doesn't even say it'shis brother.
It's amazing says and James stood up and said I need a gavel
here. My decision is, who are you?
What do you mean? Your decision is, you see, we'd
say, who put you in charge? You know how we talk like it?

(50:36):
Who put you in charge of the church?
My brother. It's in the New Testament.
They didn't take that out. But when you go to chapter 1 and
you got to 1211 apostles and they choose a replacement,
remember. Yeah.
Judas Iscariot. And what does it say his mother

(50:56):
and brothers were there? Well, of course they were there.
They're actually in charge of the group.
Again, I show that in the book. Mary is the matriarch of the
movement. James, her second son, is in
charge. And before that, Jesus, her
first born, is in charge. And guess what?
When James dies, Simon takes over.

(51:17):
And I think he's also a brother.He's very old.
It I have AI have another book. I have a lot of books, right.
So this is called notice the title the Jesus Dynasty.
It's a caliphate. Caliphate doesn't have to be
Muslim, right? It means that it goes from this
one to this one to this one. It's a family thing.

(51:40):
And that's what the Ebenites believed.
And back to the Clementines, to have somebody come out of the
blue later that wasn't even partof that in any way and begin to
speak authoritatively and have views different from that core
group that had been with Jesus and James.

(52:00):
And James is very prominent in the Clementines.
And one of the things the Clementines say is don't believe
anything you hear unless you've checked with James.
That's in the Clementines. You got to check with James.
First, he's in charge. And secondly, he grew up with
Jesus. Now, many people say, yeah, but

(52:22):
he didn't even believe in him atfirst.
That's very possible. I'm not sure that there's not a
lot of evidence for that, but maybe he didn't.
But you know what? What about later as time went
on? Obviously wouldn't have been put
in charge if he didn't believe. And we have stories of him, you
know, honoring his brother and coming to see Jesus as the

(52:46):
anointed one that others believed as well.
But by Acts 15, which is probably by 4950 CE, that's the
way usually we could date it. James is in charge.
And Paul makes that very clear in Galatians.
He said, I went up to Jerusalem and I Peter was there and James
is there and he called him the them the so-called pillars of

(53:10):
the church. Notice some people say, well,
it's not sarcastic like you're saying, and I think it is.
He said, look, I've got my gospel.
If they don't like it means nothing to me.
So what he said what they are means nothing.
What do you mean what they are? How could what, how could the

(53:30):
people Jesus appointed as the leaders mean nothing to you?
No, he he doesn't mean they meannothing.
He means if they don't agree with me, too bad because I'm
talking to Jesus and I got I gotmy message from Jesus and he
said I did not get it from men or through men.
What does that mean from James or through James or Peter or any

(53:55):
of them? He names the he says the
so-called pillars of the church.So that tension is there.
And I have a chapter in this book that's pretty controversial
called Battle of the Apostles. So, so you can see what my books
are doing. I'm trying to actually, I'm

(54:16):
working on a trajectory. I'm not going to write a book on
John the Baptizer because he gets pulled into the Jesus
movement and we don't have enough on him.
And also James McGrath has just written 2 wonderful books on
John the Baptist that I just completely endorse and agree
with James McGrath. You should have them on.
He's wonderful. I'm not going to rewrite, you

(54:38):
know, something that doesn't like reinvent the wheel, as we
say. But I've written the book on
Jesus. I've written the book on Paul,
and I'm not going to write a book on James.
You know why? Because there's already great
books that have been written on James.
The best one, I think is John Painter.
It's called just James. I love that title because he's

(55:00):
called James the just. So the title is just James,
meaning he's just James. And he's also the just one
called James. Anyway, he goes through every
tradition. If you say I never heard of
James, get Painter's book. It's available in paperback.
So I'm not just trying to push my own books.

(55:20):
And now I I've done Mary and I don't need to do Mary Magdalene
because amazing books have been done on Mary Magdalene.
So look what we have. We've got John the Baptist,
Jesus the Mother, Mary Magdalene.
I don't want to leave the women out, James, you see.
And finally, Paul, and we've gotthe whole movement.

(55:43):
And yeah, so I'm kind of finished.
Yeah. I have other things I'm doing
that's continue to refine things, but probably when the
Mary book comes out, I have one more book in mind.
It's called Jesus Betrayed, and I'm going to put all those into
one book. So you might.
Summarize all of that. Yeah, it's called Jesus

(56:04):
Betrayed, and the subtitle something like How the followers
of Jesus Rejected Loss Forsook, the publisher will help me
decide his original message. So.
But all the books are basically saying that, but I want to make
it. And it's going to be short,

(56:25):
probably 150 pages, just puttingit all together.
And then, you know, oh, we'll see what I do after that.
Yeah, I also work in archaeologyand all kinds of other things.
The some very fun things. I mean, you touch a lot of
important things. You know, we've touched on the

(56:45):
one thread that does run throughSecond Temple period till now is
apocalypticism. You, you mentioned that some of
the views with Evie Nights and the early Pauline text.
You mentioned the branch, one ofthe groups that you've studied
was the Branch Davidians from the Waco situation with David

(57:08):
Koresh, with the rise of Christian nationalism,
influences of the neo Apostolic Reformation, things we've talked
about and their prophecies aboutpolitical figures.
Having written about Waco, do you see parallels between
Koresh's worldview and today's faith driven politics?

(57:30):
Are we witnessing a revival of this?
And like, how can your research into the Waco Instant help us
deal with those who've drunk theKool-aid as it is?
Of Christian nationalism, Yeah. Christian Nationalism.
Here's the Waco book. Since we're talking about all my
books, my Waco. These are all available and it's

(57:52):
a cults in the battle for religious freedom in America.
It's about more than Waco, but Iwrote the first half and Art
Droge, Michael Ether at the second, and that book is more
the idea of what happened at Waco, what went wrong, who was
David Koresh, what did he reallysay?
And if you saw the Paramount Pictures, six part TV series

(58:16):
with Taylor Quiche and so forth in it just called Waco, you can
get it on Amazon. I highly recommend it.
It's 8590% accurate and a lot ofit was influenced by my work,
David Thibodeau. Even one of the FBI agents
cooperated with that. So it's sort of a separate

(58:38):
subject because David Koresh, notice David and Koresh is the
Hebrew word for Cyrus, which who's called the Messiah and
they call themselves the Branch Davidians.
He didn't start the group. The group started way back in
the 1920s and 30s by an Adventist, the 7th Day Adventist

(59:01):
guy who broke away because he believed that when you read the
Bible and it says Israel, that means Israel and the land means
the land. And you know how Adventist
spiritualize everything kind of like the JWS do a little bit.
Russell didn't do it as much. We talked about that last time,
but so Jerusalem is above, like Paul, Jerusalem above, not

(59:23):
Jerusalem below. But course, believe no when it
says that there's a battle in Jerusalem, Zechariah 14 or
something like that, or Zechariah 12, that's going to
happen and we've got to go over there and we've got to fight
against the enemies of God and so forth.
So he was more an apocalyptic guy.

(59:45):
He would be more like some of these early apocalyptic texts in
the New Testament or the Dead Sea Scroll Group.
And I was involved in help working with the FBI and my
colleague, Doctor Philip Arnold,who is more involved than I was.
But we work together in communicating to the FBI and

(01:00:05):
with David Koresh and trying to bring about a peaceful
resolution, which unfortunately we failed in.
But we mainly fail because the people who made the decisions
didn't listen. At a certain level.
There were FBI agents and government agents who did know.
But the attorney general, Janet Reno, was never really told what

(01:00:27):
the plan was. So if you read the book, it's
sad to read because it should not have happened.
Absolutely unnecessary. So that's a little different
than the Christian right. The Christian right is almost
the opposite because they would say, and there are many forms of
it. Idaho has that huge movement and

(01:00:49):
they're all kinds of goes back to Rushdoony and all kinds of
Reconstructionist people they were called.
It's got quite a history. I know you've researched it.
You've even sent me some very well written articles, you know,
going into the whole history. So it's essentially America is a
Christian nation, and there's nodifference between politics,

(01:01:12):
faith, religion, society should all be run according to God's
way. And if enough Christians get in
control, we can begin to manifest the Kingdom of God
through the church, even as a country, so that church and

(01:01:33):
state aren't that different. Now, what worries all of us
about this? What kind of a Christianity are
they going to see spread throughout the country?
And they would say throughout the world, I don't want to make
a bad analogy, but it's sort of like Islamic fundamentalism.

(01:01:58):
They believe the whole world should be Islam and ruled by
Islamic law. Well, these kinds of Christians,
rather than separate from the world and see the world as a
wicked place. No, conquer the world, take over
the world. Our military, our economy,
everything should be run by Jesus Christ basically through

(01:02:22):
his servants, which would end upbeing a bunch of pastors over
churches and we need a Christianpresident and so forth.
And we do have something called the Constitution and we have the
1st Amendment, and all of the amendments touch on this to some
degree in terms of rights and freedom and what we generally

(01:02:47):
just call the separation of church and state.
But it's this idea that the government should not pass laws
that promote or prohibit the free exercise of religious faith
according to the conscience of individuals.
And we've loved that. And we are a great Republic.

(01:03:10):
You know, the great European democracies are still basically
church state. I mean, England has a king, once
a queen, now a king, right? And he's technically head of the
state, which is very strange. And he's head of the Church of
England, I think. I think that's true.

(01:03:31):
And you say, well, Germany's notlike that.
Well, there's a state church, you know, the theology
seminaries and so forth in Germany, they're state
supported. Well, we've been against that.
Now there's a movement now toward it.
Let's support all the schools. Good Christian schools should
get taxpayer money because Christianity is good.
Want to promote it? You know what's wrong with it?
10 commandments everywhere. And the objection, of course, by

(01:03:55):
free thinkers such as our founding fathers, is that, wait
a minute, I've got the JeffersonBible right here.
Whoa, boy, Thomas Jefferson, andhe goes through the Gospels.
It's called the Bible. It's really just the Gospels.
And he says the life and morals of Jesus extracted textually

(01:04:19):
from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French and English.
What do you mean extracted? I mean, why don't you just read
the New Testament? Well, that's what the Christian
Wright would say. You don't extract things.
That's what you scholars are doing.
You go through and you say, oh, well, Jesus didn't say this.
And so Jefferson, who helped write the declaration in the

(01:04:44):
Constitution, along with Franklin, along with all the
others, they were basically theywanted to allow freedom.
They were. Whether they're a Christian is
very questionable. I mean, if, if this, this is
certainly not fundamentalism, right?
I mean, he he has a lot of things he said, well, Jesus

(01:05:04):
never said that It's interestingto get you could this is
published, I think by the Smithsonian.
Yeah, you should get it. Read what Jefferson said because
a lot of it you're going to say,wow, he was way ahead of his
time because we're and he was really a student and he has it
in Greek as well. He knew Greek fluently.

(01:05:26):
So the idea would be to allow people to have their own views.
So let's start with Judaism, a great minority religion.
It's not the major religion. Or shouldn't Jews who do not
accept Jesus as Messiah be allowed to freely exercise their
faith in their synagogues and tosay freely, I don't believe he's

(01:05:48):
the Messiah. And here are the 10 reasons, and
I'd like to discuss with you andargue if you want to debate or
whatever, why I don't agree. And you can tell me why you do
believe and I'll respond. And so should we not allow that
kind of discussion in our culture?
So Jesus is the son of God. It's blasphemy to question.

(01:06:12):
This is scary because then we'reback to what former times when
the church controlled everythingand people were tortured and
killed if they didn't agree withthings like the Trinity and Jews
were killed by the millions overmany ages.

(01:06:33):
Course Hitler alone is the big one in modern times, but I'm
talking all through the ages. You couldn't count the hundreds
and hundreds of thousands of Jews that were killed with
pilgrims and riots and synagogues burnt and so forth.
And if you go back to the Roman war, it's even worse.
But this was more Christian persecution the Christian and

(01:06:56):
there are many books that have documented this.
Constant Constantine's sword is a really good one on that one.
A really good one, yeah. And that's and, and if you read
some of the council's like Nicaea, but don't just read the
Creed. Everybody knows the Creed.
They say it in church. But get a copy of the entire
council and start reading about you cannot talk to a Jew or be

(01:07:21):
involved with the Jew or if you follow anything that the Jews
teach, then that's forbidden andso forth.
So, so is that what we want? Is that what we want?
Now, I know Islam is not popularright now in in America for
certain reasons that we all knowfrom the Middle East and from
radical Islamic terrorists, frankly.

(01:07:43):
And I, I certainly don't favor them but and turn and I don't
want them to have any kind of political power.
But in terms of belief, you know, if you're going to be a
democracy, you have a kind of a crisis.
It's like free speech. Free speech means people can say

(01:08:03):
what they're convicted of and believe and be allowed to say it
with freedom and not be arrestedfor it.
Right. And we know there are limits to
free speech. We've discussed that everywhere
and everybody would agree There's the famous yelling fire
in a theater and on and on, of course, in hate speech.
But we're just talking about here, religion.

(01:08:25):
If I stand, I've given my ideas today in my studies.
Now, what I've said by any evangelical orthodox view of
Christianity is all heresy. So I'm a heresy.
Sorry. So I'm a heretic.
I'm a walking heresy, so should I be arrested or killed or

(01:08:47):
tortured or forbidden to go on YouTube?
Should we have a YouTube that only preaches the one view of
Christianity? Now, if, if you took a poll and
could make those issues clear, the vast majority of Americans
would say keep the religious freedom, please, even though the

(01:09:08):
polls show that many, many are people of faith, as they call
it. But you got to have, you know,
they said, well, I essentially believe in Jesus, but I don't
think he was the son of God. Whoa, wait a minute.
And you're not going to pass thetest.
You see, we can't have catechetical test of faith like

(01:09:30):
seminaries have to see if you can graduate or if teachers can
teach there. We can't have that.
So it worries me considerably. That worries me, any move to
restrict what we call religious freedom.
I know it's overused, but what abeautiful term, freedom of

(01:09:51):
conscience, freedom of religion,what we learned since John Huss,
100 years before Luther. And he was burned at the stake
for saying this by the Roman Catholic Church.
John Huss, he started the Taborites.
My name is Tabor, happens to be Czech Republic, right?

(01:10:15):
And the reason he picked Tabor, it's a mountain in the Bible.
And he thought Christ was comingback to Tabor.
So it's nothing to do with that.Tabor means drum or belly or
breast in Hebrew. So Mount Tabor, if you've seen
the picture, it looks kind of like a breast.
So Taborites. Now, what did he say?

(01:10:36):
He said what Luther later said, Pick up the New Testament,
translate it into the language of the people, and let every
human, every man, as they said back then, every individual can
read this book and interpret it and follow it according to their
conscience or not read it at allor consider it of no value.

(01:11:00):
Free thought, free thinking. If we lose that experiment, and
thankfully the majority of Americans believe that now.
But when wickedness and evil andviolence fill the country and
you see horrible things going onand people seem to have no
values, I mean, there is a tendency to want to kind of say,

(01:11:24):
wait a minute, we need to crack down, but start reading about
colonial America. I don't think you want that.
Did you know, I've studied my ancestors who landed in Virginia
in the 1600s, and one of them ismy favorite.
His name was William Tabor. He was the son of the guy who
came, and he got fined because he didn't want to go to church.

(01:11:48):
So maybe it runs in my blood. But the idea, like, you could be
whipped or fined if you didn't show up in church.
Do we want that? I don't think so, yeah.
We don't want Puritan America. We don't want to make.
America. Gilead no, we can't have that.
Yeah, no, yeah, I. Traced my ancestors.
We had some on my father's side that came over on they founded

(01:12:10):
the Plymouth Colony. William Brewster, one of the
early governors, is a ancestor of mine.
Interesting. We, we share, you know,
interest. It's interesting histories and
exploration in these things. You know, for me, this topic, I
was involved with the churches involved with the neo Apostolic
reformation, the restoration of apostles and prophets, you know,

(01:12:34):
stuff inspired by C Peter Wagnerand the Christian dominionism.
And I, I was aware of stuff thatwas when I was leaving
Christianity, when I decided to convert to Judaism.
I was there was so many disturbing things in there that
you know, the, the prophecies. This was as far back as 2010,
2012 that Jesus was going to come between 2025 and 2030.

(01:12:59):
And the president that was elected during that time will be
the last president. And then in the neo Apostolic
reformation prophets like Lou Engel prophesied that the
current resident of the presidency was going to be the
president. But here's the problem I have is
that they, these so-called prophets go and they do
political work and activism within their congregations and

(01:13:20):
community to elect people. So they make a prophecy and then
they work for over a decade to make things like that happen.
It feels a lot less like prophecy and more like a
cultural influence in the name of prophecy.
I was uncomfortable with the direction a lot of that things
and I was moving out of it. I was disbelieving this.

(01:13:40):
I I know a lot of stuff about the lives of the the so-called
prophets like I was involved with, you know, people who are
heavily involved in that movement.
And I know a lot about personal details, social failings,
relationship issue, like they weren't living this holy pure
life. It happens in every group that.

(01:14:03):
I know of throughout history, I mean, I'm a historian of
religions. I focus on the ancient world,
but obviously if I got involved in Waco, I was doing the
apocalypticism and so on. And let me give you my axiom.
And, and don't think this is like cynical.
It's not, it is, it's just something you can remember.

(01:14:27):
There's one enterprise that so far has a 100% failure rate, and
that's interpreting the prophecies of the Bible
apocalyptically. By that I mean setting dates,
coming up with all these detailsabout this country will do this
and this and it'll happen. By this day, they've all failed.

(01:14:51):
Now, that doesn't mean they always will fail, but it should
at least be some caution lights.So on my YouTube channel, I have
a whole series, I think it's 24 or maybe even 30 episodes in
which I talk about prophecy belief.

(01:15:11):
I call it just prophecy belief. I start all the way through
Isaiah 24 is probably one of theearliest.
The Lord will come and all the nations you know will begin to
fall and the day of the Lord andgo through all of them, all the
way through, all the way throughDaniel, all the way through the
New Testament down to the Book of Revelation at the end.

(01:15:32):
So watch those and don't take them as cynical, but learning
from history and coming to understand that the hopes and
dreams of these prophets and seers and predictors both in the
Hebrew Bible, but more in later Christian material.

(01:15:53):
It really gets ramped up in the book.
If you if you took the book of Daniel out, most of the
prophecies are very generic likeIsaiah 2.
In the last days, the nations will finally find peace and get
rid of their weapons of war and peaceful fill the earth.
That doesn't say this date, thisdate, this calculation, this

(01:16:16):
ruler, this battle movement. You see what I'm saying?
But Daniel's different. Daniel 11, Daniel 8, Daniel 9,
Daniel 7. You can start counting beasts
and horns on the beast and predicting all these things.
That's what I mean by a 100% failure rate.

(01:16:36):
And now there are Christian preachers out there.
YouTube opens up the world, doesn't it?
And they're using 2nd estrus of all things, which is just the
craziest book built on the Book of Revelation and the book of
Daniel. But it even says at one point.
Now what I'm going to tell you is not what was revealed to
Daniel because he can see blatantly that it's something

(01:16:58):
different. It's, it's always funny when I
read that passage. So it's also called forth
estrus, but it's in the Apocrypha.
So. So, yeah, I think we we should
be careful and you know, end of the world in the age are we at
the end times? Just I study it actually, it's

(01:17:21):
what I've mainly specialized in.And I'm not it's not so much
that I'm cynical, it's that I'vebecome wise by really.
It's more that I've maybe gaineda bit of wisdom by considering
all the things of the past and what people have said.

(01:17:42):
Did you know people were doing this in the 2nd century?
They were looking at these same texts and counting emperors and
figuring out which horn was this?
Well, that's totally wrong. None of that ever happened.
So that 100% failure rate shouldbe some caution, Yes.

(01:18:02):
And I, you know, I'm. Much older than you are you?
Can look up my age. I won't broadcast it.
I don't really care. But I'm just saying I've had
many, many decades of sincerely watching this stuff.
And guess what? Time after time, and I remember
in my 20s and 30s, I would delveinto this and think, Oh, yeah,

(01:18:23):
this really fits. And this could be this.
None of it worked out. So yeah, being a Jehovah's
Witness and. And seeing their false
prophecies is just always made me very cautious of people who
prophecy falsely in the name of God.
I guess time wise, I want to kind of wind it down to like a

(01:18:46):
final question here. And this is kind of what the
juxt of all this is really coming to.
This is setting up the reason for this, I feel like.
So your book Restoring AbrahamicFaith, I feel like is a
culmination of the lifetime of scholarship and I wanted to set
up for everybody kind of the reason, the underpinnings maybe
it seems to bridge your academicrigor with a, with a lived

(01:19:10):
ethical monotheism. Do you personally align with the
EB Night views? Is that what you're trying to
model? And given the reasons to not
believe textual criticisms, the contradictions, mythical
influences, redactions, what keeps your belief in a divine
plan, plan or moral framework alive?

(01:19:31):
First question. And then second, many of my
listeners here are looking for aspiritual home outside of
Pauline theology. Like myself.
We follow Jesus out of Christianity into some form of
Judaism or post Christian post Pauline experience.
But some that I've noticed people want something that's

(01:19:51):
still friendly to Jesus as a historical Jewish figure.
Not that that's not in an oppositional view of that.
Maybe he was a Jewish guy had nice things to say.
What would you say to someone seeking a post Christian Jesus
positive community? And is there space for Hebrew
faith that honors Jesus without the spiritual overlays, You

(01:20:11):
know, death and resurrection, salvation, you know, all the
Pauline overlays? Well, OK, here's the book again
and you can get it on Amazon. It's hardcover, Kindle, and
paperback. This is the paperback.

(01:20:32):
I would call it a faith manifesto.
That is, as I say in the prefaceor introduction, I sort of took
off my academic scholarly hat. Not saying it's not academic, it
is Full bibliography, hundreds and hundreds of notes, but sort
of took off that hat because I kept getting asked, well, what

(01:20:53):
do you believe? What's what's The upshot of all
this that you're presenting and study?
Where do you find yourself? And where I find myself is
affirming that the Bible is the story of one man's family,
Abraham, and it's traced in the Bible at least through Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob. Ishmael has a place and the

(01:21:16):
people of Israel and on down through what people often call
the Jewish people. But for me it's the record of
the Torah, the prophets and the writings.
If that's a concise package of sorts.
Now, it's very diverse and it has differences and
similarities, and you do have toread it historically and

(01:21:38):
critically or you're not going to get anywhere as far as I'm
concerned. But I find enough in that
proposal to stand out. First of all, I believe in God.
But what does that mean? A word, God.
And I covered that in the 1st chapter rather thoroughly.
What do I mean? What do I mean by God?

(01:22:02):
And then the faith, that's it begins to get expressed through
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and through the prophets
particularly, and into the writings, some of the Psalms.
And there are lots of resources in the Hebrew Bible.
It's a big book. I find that it's unique because

(01:22:23):
there's a sense in which it's not even a religion by normal
standards, which really strikes me as unique.
Religions are basically about another world and about
afterlife. And yes, God blesses you and
guides you and helps you in thisworld.
But mainly, you know what for? What's it all about?

(01:22:46):
And did you know if I pick up Hebrew Bible here, I got to do
the drama. Here's an actual Hebrew Bible.
This doesn't give any answers tothose big questions.
It really doesn't. What's life after death?
Well, there's a place called Sheo, and you are dust, and to

(01:23:07):
dust you shall return. You say, well, do you ever come
back from that? Well, have chapters I talk about
that. It's not real clear as an
affirmation. It's certainly not like in the
New Testament, like at the end there'll be the resurrection and
this is what it means and so forth.

(01:23:28):
We think the book of Daniel is fairly late and it does have one
text on resurrection, and there's one in Isaiah 26, which
is also a late text. Other than that, it's not talked
about. Why?
Because it said this worldly book.
There's a famous poem by Robert Frost that I like called

(01:23:49):
Birches. It's about boys climbing Birch
trees and going up to heaven, and then the Birch tree swings
down and they ride the birches, right?
I've never done it, but apparently they do it in New
England. And you know what he says at the
end? The Earth's the right place for
love. I don't know where it's likely

(01:24:09):
to go. Better think about it.
And So what do you have in the Hebrew Bible?
This is the good Earth. It's you didn't fall into this
world. It's not a mistake.
Humans didn't fall. They made choices to leave
childhood innocence, right? If you begin to read these

(01:24:32):
stories of Garden of Eden and leaving the garden and so forth,
but there's never any answer really given.
Job, for example, says, you know, I wish that my case
someday could be judged by a Redeemer.

(01:24:53):
It's literally a goela, somebodywho could be a lawyer in my
defense, because I do not think I deserve what happened.
And all of you, friends of mine are saying I did, I must have
done something wrong. And I'm standing my ground.
And he said, you know, if a treeis cut down, it can even grow
sprouts. Or if you cut down plants, they
can grow back at the center of water.

(01:25:15):
A seed can come up. Man lies low and awakes no more.
No, the heavens be no more. He will not awake.
Ecclesiastes, the same thing. So what kind of a religion is it
that has these pessimistic, realistic statements about death
and another world? It's ancient Near Eastern

(01:25:37):
thought. It stays with the ancient Near
East. And you think, well, that's
pretty hopeless and dismal. Only if you think that this
world is not a good place. Now it is a world full of
horrors. That's called Outside the Gates
of Eden. To use another poet, Bob Dylan,

(01:25:58):
what happens outside the gates of Eden?
Humans are free. Humans are made in the image of
God. So what do they do?
Cain kills Abel, right? And on and on it goes.
Violence fills the earth. So the Bible is a big book.
I'm not a fundamentalist. I don't read it always
literally, but in terms of a kind of an unfolding saga,

(01:26:22):
that's what I try to represent. And it's organized really
simply. It's God.
What it What do you mean in the Hebrew thought of God the way?
What do you mean the way? What what is the way is the way
going and slaughtering men, women and children and animals

(01:26:42):
and genocide. Is that the way?
What what is the way and then the plan like what would that
possibly mean? And finally, I put a chapter in
mainly because of Christians, the Messiah.
And then final chapter, just like, what are you going to do

(01:27:03):
about it? But you know, it's a lonely
road. I'll quote Robert Frost again.
You know what he put on his tombstone?
This is my faith. I've had a lover's quarrel with
the world right there on my tombstone.
I said go to a lover's quarrel with the world.
A lover's quarrel loving life, loving the world, loving the

(01:27:27):
beauty of everything that we have.
But a quarrel with all kinds of things, from why bad horrible
things happen to good people andwhat are the costs of human
freedom? That we are autonomous,
self-conscious beings reflectingthe image of the forces of all

(01:27:49):
forces of the universe. Are we a fluke?
Are we rooted in the depths of the consciousness of the whole
universe and then within our power?
Think about this. This is the scariest thing I'm
going to say today. Within your power, you can do

(01:28:09):
anything you want. Wow, talk about a crazy
experiment. But what would be the
alternative? Robotic control?
But you can do anything you choose to do anything within
your power. But I think within all of us
there is resonating that good, that yearning for the good and

(01:28:34):
even some of the most wicked behavior that we could think
about. Those individuals don't like to
see it done to them, right? Golden rule.
And most of them hypocritically would stand up for what's right.
Do you think the dictators and despots of the world, they they
want to appear good, right? Yeah, You know, think of Putin.

(01:29:02):
Does he say I'm a wicked evil man and I'm murder and kill
people and I'm awful? No, he says, Oh no, I'm
wonderful. I do this and I do that and hear
that, you know, so this is the thing.
So I find the Bible. I love the Bible.
It's I'm sure it's autobiographical.
You know, maybe if I were born in another time and place with

(01:29:23):
another culture, of course I might end up differently.
But I love the Bible. I study history, religion.
I think it stands unique and I'mkind of hooked on it.
But it is a lonely Rd. If you don't belong in
Christianity, you might find a home in Judaism.
That's certainly closer to Abrahamic faith, particularly

(01:29:44):
more, should we say, progressiveforms of Judaism that would
admit critical studies and so forth.
I love the website thetorah.com.You got to put the D in.
thetorah.com tends to be really nice articles on the kind of of
thing I'm talking about. And you said you converted to

(01:30:07):
Judaism. I go to synagogue sometimes, but
generally it's a lonely Rd. So what people do?
They just have to find their ownway.
But I don't I don't direct people to anything.
But, you know, Abrahamic faith was a household faith.
So that's kind of nice. You know, the story of one
man's. And I guess my favorite passage

(01:30:30):
in the book is in Genesis. I think it's 1918, maybe 18 or
19. I can't remember now.
I should memorize the numbers. It's either 18191918.
But it's Abraham will teach the way of Hashem or the eternal 1

(01:30:53):
and his household. He'll teach his seed, his family
and his household the way justice and righteousness.
So in Judaism, there's this phrase I love.
I don't think it's specifically in the Hebrew Bible, but I love
it. Tikkun, how long fixing the
world? Let's fix the world.
Like what's wrong if a lake is polluted?

(01:31:15):
Let's, let's don't fly off to heaven.
Let's figure out who polluted itand why and why is the good
earth getting ruined by us primarily and how are we
treating the animals and how are, how are we being managers
of the planet? He said, well, that's not
religion. That's isn't that ecology or
something? I mean, is that what you're for?

(01:31:36):
I'm for doing good in every way and doing justice and
righteousness. And I go through the five
virtues of the Hebrew Bible. That's what I'm for.
I think you almost have to be for them if you're a good
person. I mean, are you against justice?
Are you against truth? Are you against love and mercy

(01:31:58):
and grace? And these work together because
you don't want to have a bunch of sloppy grace without justice,
right. And you also, you need truth and
you need mercy and you need faith.
So I'm drawn to the Hebrew Bible.
Yeah, I share that if I had a label.
I would say. I wouldn't go with EB and I'd or

(01:32:20):
anything. I would go with Hebrew.
So what is Hebrew? One who crosses over from the
ancient culture in Abraham's time of Babylon, which then
becomes a metaphor throughout the Bible, means confusion, the
human way of greed and selfishness and all the negative

(01:32:40):
things of human history to the positive vision of how could
this world be what it was meant to be and what it could be.
And there I go to the prayer of Jesus.
Let your Kingdom come, your rule, let your will be done on
earth as it is in heaven. That's it.

(01:33:03):
So I don't know how you encapsulate it better than that.
So, yeah, I, I, he said, well, you're kind of a critical,
skeptical scholar. Well, yeah, on some things, but
I also believe the things that Isay in the book.
So good way to end, Yeah. And I agree a lot of ways you.

(01:33:26):
Know for me growing up jobs withthis not having traditions and
stuff, you know, I definitely resonated with the, you know,
the, the culture of Judaism. You know, I find a connection to
the people, to the land, to the,the festivals, the traditions.
And it's definitely something I do with my family and my
children. Yeah, I do as well giving them

(01:33:48):
something meaningful. My kids don't necessarily
follow. Everything I do, but they
certainly are aware of the Sabbath and different kinds of
things that are in the Hebrew Bible, particularly the 10
commandments and so forth. So yeah, Doctor Tabor, thank you
for joining us once again. To help us wrestle with faith,

(01:34:09):
history, and truth, your work encourages honesty, inquiry, and
spiritual integrity. To our listeners.
Please be sure to check out Doctor Tabor's books, including
Restoring Abrahamic Faith, Jesus, Dynasty, Paul and Jesus,
and you can follow his ongoing research at jamestabor.com.

(01:34:29):
That's all for this episode of The Pulling.
Threads if you enjoyed this. Conversation, be sure, be sure
to subscribe, share, like and join in the conversation online.
Keep questioning, keep digging and as always, pull the thread
and see where it leads. Thanks so lot, Jeremy.

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