Deconstructing Christianity: I Read the Bible Until It Talked Back (From Apologist To Erhman-Enns) ၏ စာသားမှတ်တမ်းအပြည့်အစုံ

around you, they're singing like they're high on something, and what they're high on is the presence of God. 00:01:45.120 --> 00:01:51.760 You're a 200-pound tattooed teenager who's been pissed off the entire fucking weekend, and you look out of the lights and you just say three words. 00:01:52.239 --> 00:01:53.200 God help it. 00:01:53.680 --> 00:01:54.000 That's it. 00:01:54.239 --> 00:02:00.480 But you break down like full body sobbing so hard that the people next to you, they're scared and there's something wrong with you. 00:02:00.719 --> 00:02:02.159 Now you jump a few years later. 00:02:02.400 --> 00:02:10.240 I'm in the United States, I can read the New Testament in Greek without needing a dictionary, I've got Hebrew, I'm getting into Coptic and Syriac, and I wake up in the middle of the night crying. 00:02:10.400 --> 00:02:12.639 Except at this time the question is different. 00:02:12.879 --> 00:02:14.639 Why the fuck do we trust Paul? 00:02:14.879 --> 00:02:19.439 Like, why does this one guy that what he gets to write gets to be the word of God? 00:02:19.759 --> 00:02:22.319 And I I knew every apologetic answer to that question. 00:02:22.400 --> 00:02:24.000 I don't need you to type an answer down. 00:02:24.080 --> 00:02:26.159 I I could recite them while taking a shit. 00:02:26.400 --> 00:02:28.000 They just didn't work for me anymore. 00:02:28.319 --> 00:02:29.919 Both of those nights are me. 00:02:30.240 --> 00:02:38.080 The first one made me a Christian, and the second one is what happens when you take that same book so seriously that you learn its languages and it starts talking back. 00:02:38.319 --> 00:02:43.199 I read my way of out of certainty, and I've never stopped loving this thing. 00:02:43.360 --> 00:02:49.039 If if if anything, I am more obsessed with Jesus and religion now than when I was on that hill. 00:02:49.199 --> 00:02:59.599 So this is the whole story, start to finish, and it's pretty long on purpose because I get a lot of questions about my history in the world of religion, and today we're gonna get that full record. 00:02:59.759 --> 00:03:02.960 Every stage of my life is gonna line up with uh big questions. 00:03:03.039 --> 00:03:09.919 So we're doing the philosophy of uh side of things here properly as well with the names, the books, and the years and all of this good stuff. 00:03:10.080 --> 00:03:14.080 And uh, you know, I'm I'm not here to convert you or to deconvert you. 00:03:14.159 --> 00:03:18.639 I don't care about your faith, I'm just here to talk about mine and my history. 00:03:18.879 --> 00:03:30.479 So, as you know, I grew up in the south of Brazil in Santa Catarina in a German-settled part of town, and uh in in Portuguese and German, they were at uh everything that I had at home because my mom's side is German, right? 00:03:30.639 --> 00:03:34.159 So uh in Sunday school, I was really the annoying kid, man. 00:03:34.240 --> 00:03:48.000 Like uh at 10 years old, I remember the teacher left the room and I I just came back, and uh when she came back, I was standing in front of the on top of the table, just going like, Hey, do you guys really think that a dude lived inside of a fish for three days? 00:03:48.159 --> 00:03:49.520 Because that doesn't happen. 00:03:49.680 --> 00:03:57.680 Um, and I was already being a little a little pedant at about the age of 10 because the book of Jonah never says um uh whale, right? 00:03:58.000 --> 00:04:02.159 The Hebrew word is dog gadol, uh literally it's a big fish. 00:04:02.319 --> 00:04:12.159 So that's Jonah 117 in your English Bible, but it's actually Jonah 2, chapter 2, verse 1 in the Hebrew, because uh no no even the chapter breaks, they don't line up between the two. 00:04:12.479 --> 00:04:18.240 When the when the Jews in Alexandria they put the text into Greek in the translation that we call the Septuagint, they wrote ketos, right? 00:04:18.319 --> 00:04:20.079 Which is basically a sea monster. 00:04:20.319 --> 00:04:24.959 Matthew 1240 is gonna pick up on the same word when Jesus compares himself to Jonah. 00:04:25.040 --> 00:04:30.879 Uh ketos goes into Latin as ketus, uh, which is uh where you get the Setekin. 00:04:30.959 --> 00:04:36.959 Uh so the the whale is literally a translation choice that was stacked on top of another translation choice. 00:04:37.120 --> 00:04:40.879 And kids in my Sunday school, they didn't love that shit, but I already did. 00:04:41.120 --> 00:04:43.680 And if you actually read Jonah, it's just four chapters. 00:04:43.839 --> 00:04:47.040 You read it in 15 minutes, and the fish is the least interesting thing about it. 00:04:47.279 --> 00:04:53.839 A prophet is running from God and he's getting dragged to Nineveh, the capital of the empire that wrecked Israel back in the day. 00:04:54.000 --> 00:05:01.120 He preaches one sentence and the whole city repents, and the king makes the animals fast and wear a sackcloth, and that's uh uh Jonah 3, 7, and 8. 00:05:01.279 --> 00:05:03.680 Uh cows in fucking sackcloth, dude. 00:05:03.759 --> 00:05:04.079 Uh-huh. 00:05:04.319 --> 00:05:08.639 Then uh Jonah, Jonah sulks because God is way too nice to his enemies. 00:05:08.800 --> 00:05:13.360 Like the prophet is pissed off that his own preaching worked. 00:05:13.519 --> 00:05:18.160 Uh, a lot of scholars they read the book as satire precisely because of some of these elements, right? 00:05:18.240 --> 00:05:23.120 And and uh if you read it that way, you're you're never gonna read it as like straight history again or anything like that. 00:05:23.199 --> 00:05:26.240 So I knew the stories, I just didn't buy them, right? 00:05:26.319 --> 00:05:28.800 Uh, and faith was something that adults had, right? 00:05:28.879 --> 00:05:32.720 But the weird part is that I actually loved the Bible before I believed a single word of it. 00:05:32.800 --> 00:05:36.879 Uh, me and my friends were used to go to these Bible church Q ⁇ A's uh just just for fun. 00:05:36.959 --> 00:05:48.879 And my my game

that I would play with them was uh the second that somebody would ask a question, I would call out which verses the pastor was about to use before he even opened his mouth, and uh I nailed it almost every single time because I was just too big of a nerd on this. 00:05:49.040 --> 00:05:52.639 I and I was telling everyone, like, look, guys, you need Jesus, right? 00:05:52.720 --> 00:05:56.480 I was looking at my friends and I was telling the solution to your problem, it really does seem like it's Jesus. 00:05:56.639 --> 00:05:59.839 Um, it just doesn't work for me, but I really think it's gonna work for you. 00:06:00.000 --> 00:06:08.480 I was writing songs about this stuff all the time about how much God loves them, and I was I was basically evangelizing as a non-Christian, which is kind of fucking hilarious. 00:06:10.160 --> 00:06:22.000 Now you need to understand the world that I was in because Brazilian Pentecostal is its own type of animal, and it's actually it's not even like Pentecostalism, I converted Pentecostalism, but you're gonna find this even in traditional churches that are not Pentecostal. 00:06:22.079 --> 00:06:25.040 So if you're Pentecostal in Brazil, you're really Pentecostal, right? 00:06:25.120 --> 00:06:29.519 You got tongues, you got healing, people falling down, prophecy, interpretation, all of this, right? 00:06:29.680 --> 00:06:46.240 Um, two Swedish guys, uh Gunnar Vingrin and Daniel Berg, they show up in Belang, uh, which is way north of the mouth of the Amazon in 1911, and um what they starred becomes the Assemblea de Deus, which is the assemblies of God in Brazil, which counted something like 12 million members in the 2010 census. 00:06:46.399 --> 00:06:52.800 And uh the thing these churches sell as the original church acts to is is brand new in church terms, so to speak. 00:06:52.959 --> 00:07:09.759 The modern movement, it actually kicks off uh at uh uh Charles Parham's Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901, and then it blows up in something that I really think you should watch at least a documentary or two on YouTube about because it's fascinating, which is the Azusa Street Revival that happened in Los Angeles in 1906 under William Sermon. 00:07:10.000 --> 00:07:16.560 He was a he was a black preacher from the holiness movement, which was that strict living wing that grew out of Methodism. 00:07:16.800 --> 00:07:22.800 Now, um, just a quick uh nerd thing on tongues here, since that uh that's the the air that I was breathing at the time. 00:07:22.879 --> 00:07:26.639 The the technical word is glossolalia from glosa, right? 00:07:26.800 --> 00:07:28.639 Tongue and laling to speak. 00:07:28.800 --> 00:07:31.519 And uh the Bible uses it for two different things. 00:07:31.680 --> 00:07:35.759 Uh in Acts 2, it's really just foreign languages that people from all over are able to understand. 00:07:35.920 --> 00:07:37.279 It's normal human languages. 00:07:37.439 --> 00:07:42.879 And in 1 Corinthians uh 14, it sounds like nobody understands this stuff unless someone interprets it. 00:07:42.959 --> 00:07:54.000 And Paul is kind of like calming the Corinthians down, he's saying, hey, I'd rather speak five real languages uh that people understand than to speak 10,000 words and then in in a word that in a language that no one understands, right? 00:07:54.079 --> 00:07:55.600 So it's a it's a hyperbole. 00:07:55.680 --> 00:07:58.240 He's not really saying that this thing actually exists. 00:07:58.399 --> 00:08:05.360 And I also think there's something really important for us to think about here uh when it comes to like how we present these topics in terms of complexity. 00:08:05.519 --> 00:08:09.199 Like, are you trying to make something that people can understand or not really, right? 00:08:09.360 --> 00:08:12.720 Then in uh in 1972, there was a linguist, William Samarin. 00:08:12.800 --> 00:08:17.120 He recorded modern tongues for his book, uh uh Tongues of Man and of Angels. 00:08:17.279 --> 00:08:25.360 Um, and um what he found is that the it sounds like it's a language, but it doesn't have the grammar of a language, which tells you what it is not, right? 00:08:25.519 --> 00:08:28.720 But it doesn't tell you what it's doing inside of the person that was praying. 00:08:28.800 --> 00:08:30.639 But anyway, that was the world that I was in. 00:08:30.720 --> 00:08:33.600 And and me, on paper, I had everything, dog. 00:08:34.080 --> 00:08:38.159 I was rapping, I was touring, I was battle app and winning everything. 00:08:38.320 --> 00:08:40.080 I almost signed a deal with Sony. 00:08:40.159 --> 00:08:54.799 Um, I had my own little, you know, bodybuilding thing going on as well, and I was making my own beats and selling them and making a living off of them, as well as what I had going on in the world of steroids, which we won't get into because, you know, uh it's it's uh it's uh water under the bridge. 00:08:54.960 --> 00:08:56.320 But I was fucking miserable. 00:08:56.480 --> 00:08:57.440 I was fucking miserable. 00:08:57.600 --> 00:08:59.279 My life was falling apart entirely. 00:08:59.440 --> 00:09:03.440 My parents, they didn't want to be me uh to have me at the house anymore. 00:09:03.600 --> 00:09:10.960 Um my girlfriend was uh about to break up with me, and everybody around me was really worried about my my mental state and my physical health as well. 00:09:11.200 --> 00:09:20.159 So um a friend shows up from work, uh, shows up at work, uh, he he he goes to this other church, uh uh and uh he he's like, hey, what what are you up to this weekend, bro? 00:09:20.320 --> 00:09:21.279 And I'm like, nothing, bro. 00:09:21.440 --> 00:09:23.039 My my my weekend just fucking died. 00:09:23.200 --> 00:09:28.240 So uh that's how I ended up in a Pentecostal retreat because uh I just didn't want to do nothing like like me. 00:09:28.320 --> 00:09:29.120 That's me always, right? 00:09:29.200 --> 00:09:33.840 If you know me, if you're a friend with me, you know that I'm always

fucking down for some bullshit. 00:09:33.919 --> 00:09:37.679 I'm always down to do something, even if it is like going to a Pentecostal retreat. 00:09:37.759 --> 00:09:44.559 Literally, one time I took LSD and went to a Pentecostal church to sit on the couch and just watch people interact, and it was beautiful, right? 00:09:44.720 --> 00:09:45.919 I I I love experiences. 00:09:46.000 --> 00:09:51.840 I'm an experimentalist, I want to die having as many experiences as possible under my belt. 00:09:52.000 --> 00:10:00.720 So, um, on the retreat and the conversion here, uh, there's a there's a worship leader who's in front of me, uh Gabriel Barbosa, uh Rafael Barbosa. 00:10:01.039 --> 00:10:03.440 He it it it doesn't really translate well into English. 00:10:03.519 --> 00:10:13.200 The song it still makes me cry up to this day, but it's about like God's love being like a lion that's just gonna like keep chasing you down and it won't fucking quit. 00:10:13.360 --> 00:10:16.320 Now, this guy he has so much joy in his eyes. 00:10:16.399 --> 00:10:18.080 And back in the day I didn't believe in love. 00:10:18.159 --> 00:10:20.879 I thought love was just a word that people use, but it wasn't a thing. 00:10:21.039 --> 00:10:38.879 I thought like God could give this to people, but like it wasn't really a thing that people had, and I thought that like, you know, true joy, like if you're if you're always happy, if you're happy, like you're either a fucking pejorative term about people that enjoy having sex with the same gender, or you are just fake as shit and you're manipulating people, right? 00:10:39.039 --> 00:10:40.639 That that was my mindset back in the day. 00:10:40.720 --> 00:10:44.320 That's how depressed I was, and how deep into this hole of misery I was. 00:10:44.480 --> 00:10:57.519 Now, he had so much joy in his eyes, it was starting to piss me off, and I'm I'm physically sweating, I'm kind of shaking, I'm breathing heavily, my my heart is pounding, and in my head I'm going, like, because I I feel like God wants to break me down. 00:10:57.679 --> 00:11:02.639 I'm feeling the presence of God for the first time, and it's it's something so fucking strong. 00:11:02.720 --> 00:11:08.480 I remember Paul Washer, Paul Washer saying, like, hey, you say that you've had an experience with God, but your life looks the same. 00:11:08.559 --> 00:11:09.600 You're a fucking liar. 00:11:09.759 --> 00:11:16.879 You're a fucking liar because it's it's like you're saying that you've been knocking on your neighbor's door and saying, like, hey, I've just been hit by an 18-wheeler. 00:11:16.960 --> 00:11:17.440 Can you help me? 00:11:17.519 --> 00:11:18.480 Uh can you give me some ice? 00:11:18.639 --> 00:11:22.320 And she's gonna be like, You have not, because an 18-wheeler would fucking destroy you. 00:11:22.480 --> 00:11:23.039 Exactly. 00:11:23.200 --> 00:11:25.440 That's what being hit with the presence of God was like. 00:11:25.600 --> 00:11:30.080 And I was like responding to this, uh, you know, just like feeling all of these things. 00:11:30.240 --> 00:11:33.279 And my answer to that was, oh fuck no. 00:11:33.440 --> 00:11:35.360 Like, you're you're not gonna break me down. 00:11:35.440 --> 00:11:36.879 Like, are you fucking kidding me? 00:11:37.120 --> 00:11:37.440 Me? 00:11:38.799 --> 00:11:40.480 Definitely not gonna happen today. 00:11:40.720 --> 00:11:46.240 So I uh like where where were where were you at all the times that I fucking needed you? 00:11:46.399 --> 00:11:50.639 Where were you all for the years that I was begging for your presence to show up and you never did? 00:11:50.879 --> 00:11:54.960 But he just keeps singing and something breaks, and I just I just give in. 00:11:55.120 --> 00:12:01.279 I sit down on the chair, I'm just trying to breathe, and and people are are like kind of like asking if I'm okay. 00:12:01.360 --> 00:12:02.559 And you you can see it in their faces. 00:12:02.639 --> 00:12:10.399 And later, when we were talking, they literally thought that I was about to go like full demon-possessed on them and just start spinning around and breaking shit, which is a thing that does happen. 00:12:10.480 --> 00:12:12.159 I I've seen it happen multiple times. 00:12:12.320 --> 00:12:17.679 I've seen people speak with with words and and and and tones of voice that cannot be explained by what a human does. 00:12:17.840 --> 00:12:20.639 And I've prayed over these people when I've seen these things go away. 00:12:20.799 --> 00:12:22.559 Uh, I it's I can't explain. 00:12:22.799 --> 00:12:28.080 Now, later that night there was a guest pastor that came over, uh, and I remembered this dude was a fucking dork. 00:12:28.240 --> 00:12:40.639 He had just we were all serious about this shit, and he was just coming out of a church retreat with with some teenagers and stuff, and he goes into full entertainment mode, kind of like all of these bullshit American churches that it makes me want to vomit, right? 00:12:40.720 --> 00:12:42.480 He's just treating us like little kids. 00:12:42.559 --> 00:12:46.159 Uh, and I hated it because I actually wanted to know this stuff, right? 00:12:46.240 --> 00:12:47.840 I wanted to know what the fuck was happening. 00:12:48.000 --> 00:12:49.600 So that's still me, by the way, right? 00:12:49.679 --> 00:12:51.919 Don't fucking entertain me, teach me, right? 00:12:52.000 --> 00:12:54.159 This is this whole channel, and I'm sure you can understand. 00:12:54.240 --> 00:12:59.679 Uh, and then a group of us go up to a hill to pray, and that's the the opening that uh that I had for you, right? 00:12:59.840 --> 00:13:01.679 Just three words, God help me. 00:13:01.759 --> 00:13:04.000 And I'm crying so hard that I was scaring people. 00:13:04.159 --> 00:13:05.600 I felt like I was vomiting. 00:13:05.679 --> 00:13:07.120 I literally felt like I was vomiting. 00:13:07.279 --> 00:13:12.320 And for months, as I was praying, I literally felt like I was just vomiting,

vomiting, vomiting. 00:13:12.399 --> 00:13:19.440 It was a very similar experience to what happens with some people in psilocybin, where you can physically see the trauma and all of this bad stuff leaving your body. 00:13:19.600 --> 00:13:23.600 And then the next day, my parents look at me and they they saw that I was a different kid. 00:13:23.759 --> 00:13:28.559 They they said, There's something in your eyes, like something happened in the way that you're talking. 00:13:28.720 --> 00:13:30.000 Nathan, you curse so much. 00:13:30.159 --> 00:13:33.120 My parents took me to a doctor because they thought I had Tourette's. 00:13:33.200 --> 00:13:34.480 Like you guys know how much I curse. 00:13:34.559 --> 00:13:38.720 They thought I had tourette because of how much I was cursing, and the cursing stopped. 00:13:38.879 --> 00:13:40.240 It fucking stopped, guys. 00:13:40.320 --> 00:13:44.639 I didn't try to do anything, I didn't try to make my life better, I didn't try to sanctify myself. 00:13:44.799 --> 00:13:47.919 And I I genuinely had no fucking clue what had happened. 00:13:48.080 --> 00:13:53.039 It took me months to realize, like, oh shit, I'm a Christian now. 00:13:53.200 --> 00:13:56.720 But everyone around me already saw that before I did. 00:13:56.879 --> 00:14:05.600 And then I literally sat down and I read the entire Bible cover to cover in about a month and a half, and I just highlighted basically every single fucking page. 00:14:05.759 --> 00:14:06.879 Uh, they're all glued together. 00:14:06.960 --> 00:14:10.799 I have this Bible, I love it, it looks beautiful because everything was important to me at the time. 00:14:10.960 --> 00:14:14.639 And and and this kid, this is a kid who didn't read books, guys. 00:14:14.879 --> 00:14:23.440 The only thing that I was reading was on chemistry of uh of uh of uh uh uh uh uh PDs and like bodybuilding research, right? 00:14:23.600 --> 00:14:30.639 Now, just no notice something about that night because it matters for like everyone watching something like who works on their body. 00:14:30.799 --> 00:14:32.879 Just look at how much happened in my body. 00:14:33.039 --> 00:14:38.320 The the racing heart, the sweat, the heavy breathing, the rage, and then the collapse and the crying until I'm empty. 00:14:38.399 --> 00:14:43.840 The the conversion, it came through my nervous system before it ever came through a doctrine. 00:14:44.000 --> 00:14:46.240 I didn't learn a single new idea that night. 00:14:46.320 --> 00:14:58.960 As a matter of fact, I had so many questions about Bible and and and God and Jesus that this uh uh the the the leader Bruno Bruno ha ha uh shout out Bruno, he he he gives me this uh this uh pin. 00:14:59.200 --> 00:15:06.720 I don't know how to say this in this word in English, but it's uh it's um a fruit that falls from a tree that uh and he says, like, this is you, right? 00:15:06.879 --> 00:15:09.919 Whenever, whenever it is uh hot, it opens up. 00:15:10.080 --> 00:15:14.240 But whenever it's cold temperatures, it closes itself down, it becomes very spiky. 00:15:14.399 --> 00:15:20.000 You need to shut your fucking mouth, swallow your tongue, and just open yourself to the presence of God, live in the moment. 00:15:20.080 --> 00:15:23.440 And here I am struggling up to this day to live in the moment and not live in my own head. 00:15:23.519 --> 00:15:30.320 But I I I I there there was just some shit that happened to me physically, but the idea is they came months, months, months later, years later. 00:15:30.559 --> 00:15:36.799 So the the the the philosophy on this, because like a the scholar in me looks back at that night with two sets of eyes. 00:15:36.960 --> 00:15:38.399 And I want to be very fair to them. 00:15:38.559 --> 00:15:44.639 The the question is simple to ask, and people ask me all the time, but it's brutal to answer, which is why it seems like I'm dodging the question. 00:15:44.799 --> 00:15:51.679 But I want to give you guys some clarity on this day so that we can understand exactly like, oh shit, he actually did have an experience. 00:15:51.759 --> 00:15:54.080 He actually, oh, this thing actually is interesting, right? 00:15:54.159 --> 00:16:02.320 I I think there's a lot for us to learn in terms of our physiology and and the and the body and then on optimization here, which is why I'm sharing it in this channel and not in another one. 00:16:02.399 --> 00:16:03.360 I really thought about this. 00:16:03.519 --> 00:16:05.919 So let's start with uh this guy called William James. 00:16:06.000 --> 00:16:10.080 If you don't know William James, um, god damn it, you're a little bit out of the loop here. 00:16:10.159 --> 00:16:11.759 But he gave the the Gifford Lectures. 00:16:11.840 --> 00:16:25.519 The Gifford Lectures were the a big series of uh on religion that was done in Edinburgh in Scotland in 1901 and 1902, and they became uh his monograph, The Varieties of Religious Experience, which is still the book that the field has to deal with. 00:16:25.600 --> 00:16:29.440 It was so fucking influential that scholars are still talking about it up to this day. 00:16:29.519 --> 00:16:38.879 His his very first lecture goes after something that he calls medical materialism, which is the move where you explain the experience by the body stuff, and then you think, hey, I'm done. 00:16:39.039 --> 00:16:47.279 So his famous example is uh people writing off Paul's vision and the road to Damascus as quote, a discharging lesion of the occupole cortex. 00:16:47.440 --> 00:16:49.200 Basically, he was an epidelectic. 00:16:49.279 --> 00:16:50.399 So case close, right? 00:16:50.480 --> 00:16:52.159 And James is like, no, no, hold on. 00:16:52.320 --> 00:16:56.159 Like every state of mind has a body behind it, including the atheists. 00:16:56.320 --> 00:17:00.240 So where it comes from in the body, that can all tell you what it's worth. 00:17:00.399 --> 00:17:02.960 So his test is fruits, not roots. 00:17:03.039 --> 00:17:05.279

It's a it's a twist on Jesus and Matthew 7. 00:17:05.359 --> 00:17:06.000 It's really interesting. 00:17:06.160 --> 00:17:07.759 By the fruits, you will know them. 00:17:07.920 --> 00:17:09.759 And in James, he gives us three checks. 00:17:09.920 --> 00:17:11.680 Does it feel luminous right away? 00:17:11.839 --> 00:17:13.759 Does it fit with everything else you know? 00:17:13.839 --> 00:17:15.599 And does it help you live a better life? 00:17:15.759 --> 00:17:21.680 Now, here's why this that that lecture, it should be required reading for anybody in the optimization world. 00:17:21.839 --> 00:17:25.519 Our whole industry does medical materialism all day long. 00:17:25.680 --> 00:17:30.880 Oh, your client is flat and unmotivated, check his testosterone, check his ferritin, check his fucking thyroid, right? 00:17:30.960 --> 00:17:35.599 And a lot of the time that is exactly right, and I'll show up in a minute how right that was for me. 00:17:35.759 --> 00:17:38.480 But James is pointing at the other side of the trap, right? 00:17:38.640 --> 00:17:45.839 Finding the lab value, it tells you the root, but it doesn't tell you what the experience meant or what that is doing to the person's life. 00:17:46.000 --> 00:17:48.000 Your biomarkers, they are just the roots. 00:17:48.160 --> 00:17:51.519 Who you become is the fruit, and you need both columns in your life. 00:17:51.599 --> 00:17:55.599 And James, he wasn't some guy who was scared of chemistry either, by the way, which is pretty interesting. 00:17:55.680 --> 00:17:58.000 And the biohackers who absolutely love this shit. 00:17:58.160 --> 00:18:06.720 But in the varieties book, he tells you that he experimented himself with nitrous oxide, the laughing gas that wrecks your myelin, it can make you disable for life. 00:18:06.880 --> 00:18:08.960 But it's oh so much, so much fun to do. 00:18:09.039 --> 00:18:13.920 Uh, illegal in pretty much every country, by the way, it's a recreational drug, just please don't die of asphyxia. 00:18:14.000 --> 00:18:27.359 And uh, he says that it convinced him that uh with like normal waking consciousness is just one type, with there's totally different forms of consciousness that are sitting next to it, that are parted from it by the filmiest of screens. 00:18:27.680 --> 00:18:37.759 A Harvard professor in 1902 is doing self-experimentation on recreational drugs and writing about religion and what the medical materialism is doing to people. 00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:40.880 Holy shit, and people think that I'm all over the place, right? 00:18:40.960 --> 00:18:43.920 That's the most biohacker shit in the history of philosophy. 00:18:44.079 --> 00:18:48.400 Now, he also splits people into two temperaments, uses a phrase that he brought from Francis Newman. 00:18:48.480 --> 00:18:51.519 Uh, the the once-born, they are called the healthy-minded, right? 00:18:51.599 --> 00:18:54.400 They're the folks who feel at home in the world just from day one. 00:18:54.559 --> 00:18:57.200 The twice-born are what they call as the sick soul, right? 00:18:57.359 --> 00:19:02.799 People who feel wrongness in the things in their bones, and they need to be broken down and reshaped and remade. 00:19:02.960 --> 00:19:10.480 In his lectures on conversion, they describe a self that's divided and unhappy, getting unified, sometimes over the course of years, sometimes in one night. 00:19:10.640 --> 00:19:13.920 He he's leaning on survey data, so very much scholarship, right? 00:19:14.000 --> 00:19:21.440 From his student, uh Edward Starbuck, who was published in night in 1899, uh, that was showing that conversion uh they cluster in adolescence. 00:19:21.839 --> 00:19:33.839 So, James, he separates the volitional type, where you build the change brick by brick, from the self-surrender type, where you fight until you can't and the change feels like it was done to you, which is similar to me, right? 00:19:33.920 --> 00:19:40.000 So a teenager screaming not today at God until he collapses on a hill, that is a James case study, right? 00:19:40.079 --> 00:19:43.279 A twice-born, sick soul in self-surrender. 00:19:43.359 --> 00:19:47.359 So by his test, the fruit was real because my whole life turned around. 00:19:47.519 --> 00:19:49.839 Now, here's where the the field went after James. 00:19:50.000 --> 00:19:53.519 Years later in college, I actually wrote a paper on this for my Christian philosophy class. 00:19:53.599 --> 00:19:56.640 And the the big positions, they kind of line up at a lot like a ladder. 00:19:56.720 --> 00:19:59.519 So you have William Alston in Perceiving God in 1991. 00:19:59.599 --> 00:20:03.440 He says, the mystical perception, it works like sense perception. 00:20:03.599 --> 00:20:07.279 You you trust your eyes until you've got reason not to trust your eyes. 00:20:07.440 --> 00:20:10.880 So, like, give religious experience the same starting credit. 00:20:10.960 --> 00:20:11.920 Just be open-minded, right? 00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:18.000 And he calls these doxastic practices from doxa, uh, for in uh Greek, which is the Greek for the word belief. 00:20:18.160 --> 00:20:22.160 Um, then we have William Proudfoot in Religious Experience 1985. 00:20:22.319 --> 00:20:26.160 He says that experience is partially built out of how you interpret it. 00:20:26.240 --> 00:20:29.759 And Proudfoot, it's just fucking, he fucking hits really, really close to home. 00:20:29.920 --> 00:20:37.680 He leans on a 1962 study by uh Stanley Shatter and Jerome Singer, where uh people got a shot of adrenaline without knowing what it was. 00:20:37.759 --> 00:20:44.799 And depending on who was in the room with them, they labeled the exact same heart racing as anger or as euphoria. 00:20:44.960 --> 00:20:46.400 Now, think about me, right? 00:20:46.480 --> 00:20:49.920 You have a heart pounding, sweat, furious in a room full of people. 00:20:50.000 --> 00:20:54.480 The context is a room full of people who know exactly what to call that experience.

00:20:54.640 --> 00:20:57.680 And what they call that experience is God chasing you down. 00:20:57.839 --> 00:21:02.960 So Proudfoot would say that the room handed me the label to interpret my experience. 00:21:03.119 --> 00:21:05.519 And then on the atheist side, you have Michael Martin, right? 00:21:05.599 --> 00:21:14.960 They saying that the experiences they're way too diverse to point out one God because an Hindu is gonna meet Krishna, the Catholic is gonna meet Mary, and then a Pentecostal is gonna meet the Spirit. 00:21:15.119 --> 00:21:27.759 And on the believer side, we have Mare Westfall who reads the religious experience as the self getting pulled at the center of its own universe, and who admits, in a line that I love, that sincerity is no guarantee against deception, sadly. 00:21:28.000 --> 00:21:34.960 Now, my paper itself was on Saint Teresa of Avalad, the 16th century Spanish mystic, who says that she saw Christ. 00:21:35.119 --> 00:21:37.440 Uh, my pushback was on expectation here. 00:21:37.519 --> 00:21:39.200 That's the thing that I have an issue with. 00:21:39.359 --> 00:21:51.839 So she lived in a world where the visuals uh the visions were happening, she was looking for visions, and expectation can produce the things that it expects, which is why in peer review research we avoid expectation via certain practices, right? 00:21:52.000 --> 00:21:55.519 Um, but then I wrote this about myself and I'm quoting my own paper here. 00:21:55.759 --> 00:21:59.680 I have very strong personal experiences of transcendence in which I believe. 00:22:00.400 --> 00:22:02.960 It was God, but which had no effects in my life. 00:22:03.119 --> 00:22:08.240 So I'd also sense people near me and been right and I and I'd been wrong as well. 00:22:08.480 --> 00:22:10.720 So that's real data from inside of one body. 00:22:10.880 --> 00:22:15.920 Some of my big experiences, they remade my life, and some of my big experiences, they did fuck all. 00:22:16.079 --> 00:22:17.680 Similar thing with psychedelics, right? 00:22:17.759 --> 00:22:19.680 And I ended up that paper kind of spicy. 00:22:19.759 --> 00:22:27.920 I was saying that the Christian philosophers, they're so obsessed with turning experience into proof that the systems end up oppressing religious experience itself. 00:22:28.160 --> 00:22:33.200 Now, there's the anthropologist Tanya Luman uh coming out of uh uh a Stanford University. 00:22:33.359 --> 00:22:40.480 Her book is called When God Talks Back in 2012, comes out of years of the vineyard churches in Chicago and California. 00:22:40.640 --> 00:22:44.160 She shows that hearing God is partially a learned skill. 00:22:44.319 --> 00:22:47.920 Like people practice prayer like you would practice a craft, right? 00:22:48.000 --> 00:22:51.119 And they learn to treat certain thoughts as God's voice. 00:22:51.200 --> 00:22:52.240 It's literally a training. 00:22:52.319 --> 00:23:00.720 And the the people who score high on a trait psychologist, they they call absorption that like getting totally lost in the moment, like in a movie or in a daydream. 00:23:00.880 --> 00:23:04.319 Uh, these people they tend to have the most vivid experiences. 00:23:04.480 --> 00:23:06.880 So because the room is teaching you, right? 00:23:07.039 --> 00:23:10.000 And that room in Brazil absolutely knew how to teach me. 00:23:10.160 --> 00:23:13.519 So here's here's where the scholars split, and here's where I split. 00:23:13.680 --> 00:23:21.759 So Proudfoot and Lerman, they are they tell you how an experience is built, but neither of them can tell you whether there's anything on the other end, right? 00:23:21.839 --> 00:23:23.839 And and they're both pretty careful to say so. 00:23:23.920 --> 00:23:29.759 It doesn't tell you that just because you your experience is real, that the thing that you believe caused the experience is real. 00:23:29.920 --> 00:23:34.000 Those are those are two completely different facts, and people jump from one to the other all the time. 00:23:34.319 --> 00:23:38.480 Austin, he says, Hey, give this experience at least the benefit of the doubt. 00:23:38.720 --> 00:23:43.039 But Martin says, hey, the diversity of these experiences is what kills the reality of it. 00:23:43.200 --> 00:23:47.200 And James just says, hey, stop staring at the root and look at the fruit, look at what it produces. 00:23:47.359 --> 00:23:51.599 If you say that you had an experience with God and it doesn't produce the fruit, uh, you you didn't have one. 00:23:51.680 --> 00:23:56.079 And that's the problem that I have with people in church nowadays, uh, and especially in our fitness world. 00:23:56.160 --> 00:24:00.400 And then you have Dale Allison, which is a New Testament scholar that I've read so much from. 00:24:00.559 --> 00:24:07.039 Uh, he has a line that uh a Buddhist sees a light and he calls an Amida Buddha, and a Christian sees a light and he calls it Jesus. 00:24:07.200 --> 00:24:11.920 The experience is real, but the labeling of the experience it comes from your culture. 00:24:12.079 --> 00:24:16.240 And people love telling ex-believers that it was never real for them. 00:24:16.480 --> 00:24:18.960 Don't tell me whether my experience was legit. 00:24:19.119 --> 00:24:19.680 It was real. 00:24:19.839 --> 00:24:20.960 I felt it in my body. 00:24:21.039 --> 00:24:22.559 The experience is data. 00:24:22.720 --> 00:24:25.200 What it's data about is the open question. 00:24:25.359 --> 00:24:32.400 And anybody who tells you it's definitely God or definitely just chemicals in your brain, they're claiming way more than they know. 00:24:32.559 --> 00:24:34.880 What it actually was, I don't know, guys. 00:24:35.039 --> 00:24:36.400 I'm I'm cool with not knowing. 00:24:36.559 --> 00:24:40.559 Now there's a piece of archaeology that I want to close this section here with, because it's my favorite, right? 00:24:40.720 --> 00:24:46.480 Acts uh it tells Paul's conversion three times in chapters 9, 22, and 26, and

the details they move around. 00:24:46.640 --> 00:24:54.799 So in Acts 9:7, the the guys with him, they hear the voice, but in 22.9 they do not, which is a pretty fucking big detail to move around, right? 00:24:54.960 --> 00:24:59.680 And Paul himself in Galatians 1:15 and 16, he doesn't call this a conversion, right? 00:24:59.759 --> 00:25:01.279 Because he never stopped being a Jew. 00:25:01.519 --> 00:25:04.160 He uses a prophetic language about being called from the womb. 00:25:04.240 --> 00:25:14.160 He's mixing, you know, Isaiah 49 and Jeremiah 1 at to to make his point here, and which is the the point that Kristen Stendhal made in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles in 1976. 00:25:14.319 --> 00:25:19.680 So even the most famous conversion that we have in history, the people telling it, they couldn't keep the details still. 00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:21.359 Mine is the same, right? 00:25:21.519 --> 00:25:25.440 Every time that I tell, I'm sure that I'm moving some shit around. 00:25:25.920 --> 00:25:29.759 Now, when I say that I was all in into this, I meant all in. 00:25:29.920 --> 00:25:32.480 Guys, I I went back to every single person. 00:25:32.559 --> 00:25:37.279 I made a list and I went back to every single person from my old life and I and I evangelized them. 00:25:37.359 --> 00:25:42.640 Every friend, everyone that I used to party with, and I would tell them, hey, there's three ways that this shit's gonna end for you, right? 00:25:42.720 --> 00:25:46.480 You're gonna die of overdose, you're gonna be arrested, you're gonna end up in rehab, right? 00:25:46.559 --> 00:25:51.279 And I I found the uh uh basically like the the the third one that doesn't end in a grave. 00:25:51.440 --> 00:25:53.200 It's uh it's it's gonna be Jesus, right? 00:25:53.279 --> 00:25:54.799 And I was very fearless about it. 00:25:54.880 --> 00:25:56.319 I was honestly kind of insane about it. 00:25:56.400 --> 00:26:08.720 I had a gun pointed at my face at one time in the middle of the street because I was preaching to an old uh dealer who was a friend of mine, well, not so friendly, but uh from 2013 all the way to 2015, I was actually an itinerary preacher around Brazil. 00:26:08.799 --> 00:26:15.519 I was translating for other people, and I was also working uh as an itinerary preacher, going church to church, and I led summer camps as well. 00:26:15.680 --> 00:26:18.079 I was working like all over the place on all of this stuff. 00:26:18.240 --> 00:26:28.880 I was uh bringing my I was creating my own uh program to go to the poverty areas in uh my city in Brazil, bringing them food, bringing them sustenance because the government wouldn't help, the churches wouldn't help, so I said, Fuck it. 00:26:28.960 --> 00:26:31.200 I'm gonna gather my friends and we're gonna help these people. 00:26:31.359 --> 00:26:33.200 Uh and I I wanted to be a missionary, right? 00:26:33.279 --> 00:26:48.000 I uh not a not a nice church trip that all these motherfuckers in the US do when they're teenagers that they're just going around to tell people to uh recite the sinner's prayer so that they can tell their church how many people they saved while they're enjoying an international experience in Mexico or some bullshit. 00:26:48.160 --> 00:26:53.200 Uh, I mean, literally, I wanted to go to the hardest places on earth, the places where preaching is going to get you killed. 00:26:53.359 --> 00:26:59.279 So in 2014, I went to a world's mission school, Camino de Santidad de Escuela Mundial Missiones from uh Colombia. 00:26:59.359 --> 00:27:06.880 And uh from 2014 into 2015, I did a Baptist theology program back at home at the uh Instituto Teologico Batista Catalines. 00:27:07.279 --> 00:27:09.359 Uh the missionary training was really, really heavy. 00:27:09.440 --> 00:27:16.160 Like we would go multiple days without eating, without sleeping, just training to survive into places with nothing, and I was ready to die for Christ, and I mean that. 00:27:16.319 --> 00:27:21.039 As a matter of fact, we were so inconvested in this that I had memorized entire books of the Bible. 00:27:21.200 --> 00:27:22.880 Guys, do you understand what that means? 00:27:22.960 --> 00:27:25.920 So when someone tells me that my experience wasn't real, go fuck yourself. 00:27:26.079 --> 00:27:27.920 I memorized entire books of the Bible. 00:27:28.079 --> 00:27:35.440 I wrote down all of the historical facts of the Bible, and we we had them in flashcards, and every single day we had to put them in order. 00:27:35.519 --> 00:27:39.680 And whoever ended up at the later group, if you ended up first, you get to eat. 00:27:39.839 --> 00:27:42.079 If you didn't end up first, you are not eating today. 00:27:42.160 --> 00:27:44.000 And I had that shit locked the fuck down. 00:27:44.079 --> 00:27:46.240 I was so dedicated to learning absolutely everything. 00:27:46.400 --> 00:27:50.720 I could tell the history of the Bible and the stories in the Bible in any way, shape, or form that you would want. 00:27:50.880 --> 00:27:56.880 Now, fasting here, because uh uh this is very interesting for my audience here because it's a there's two different reasons for fasting. 00:27:56.960 --> 00:28:03.519 So in the Bible, fasting is never about uh a health practice, it's about grief, it's about fears, about repentance, right? 00:28:03.599 --> 00:28:08.240 David, he fasts while his baby is dying in 2 Samuel 12, but the baby dies anyways. 00:28:08.400 --> 00:28:13.440 Um, and and I Esther, she fasts for three days before she walks in, a king who can kill her. 00:28:13.680 --> 00:28:18.400 The the only fast law that actually commands it is Yom Kippur, right? 00:28:18.480 --> 00:28:22.400 In Leviticus 16, it doesn't even say fast, it just says you need to afflict yourself. 00:28:22.480 --> 00:28:27.759 Uh, in Acts 13, the Church of Antioch, they fast and they pray before sending Paul and Barnabas out. 00:28:27.839 --> 00:28:29.920 And that's the model that the missionary school runs on.

00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:32.640 You empty yourself out before you get sent out. 00:28:32.799 --> 00:28:38.400 And even the famous verse, Mark 9:29, the the kind that uh only comes out by prayer and fasting, right? 00:28:38.480 --> 00:28:40.799 The type of demon that only comes out by prayer and fasting. 00:28:41.039 --> 00:28:53.680 So the two oldest Bibles that we got, which are Codex Siniaticus and Codex Vaticanus, both of them came out in around 300s, uh, they don't have like and fasting in the original hand, because that was added by a scribe later. 00:28:53.839 --> 00:28:56.480 Um, Jesus himself is super weirdly chill about it, right? 00:28:56.559 --> 00:28:59.039 People ask his disciples, like, why don't they fast? 00:28:59.200 --> 00:29:02.480 And he says, Hey, wedding gas, they don't fast while the groom is around. 00:29:02.640 --> 00:29:08.799 So when he does teach it on Matthew 6, he says, Hey, wash your face, uh, don't look miserable, and don't make a big deal out of it, right? 00:29:08.880 --> 00:29:10.400 Basically, don't post it on Instagram. 00:29:10.480 --> 00:29:14.880 And then B, um, that by around the year 100, we have the Dida Ke, right? 00:29:14.960 --> 00:29:17.039 Which is a little uh early church manual. 00:29:17.200 --> 00:29:24.000 It's uh they're telling you to uh Christians to fast on on Wednesday and Friday because uh the hypocrites are fasting on Mondays and Thursdays, right? 00:29:24.079 --> 00:29:25.440 So they think that that's what makes a difference. 00:29:25.519 --> 00:29:38.079 Kind of like evangelical churches having their their uh their their uh service in South America at night on Sundays because the Catholics, the the impure ones, the non-saved ones, the deceived ones, they are having their church service in the morning. 00:29:38.240 --> 00:29:45.920 So um then the physiology here I think is interesting because your body it reads a fast the same way that the Bible does, it reads it as a hard time, right? 00:29:46.000 --> 00:29:56.720 So Moro and colleagues in 2016, they split 34 resistance trained guys into two groups for eight weeks, same calories, same macros, and and one group just ate inside uh uh an eight-hour window. 00:29:56.799 --> 00:30:04.480 So, in that group, your T3, your testosterone, and IGF one, um, they they all went down, but muscle and uh strength actually held up. 00:30:04.559 --> 00:30:11.039 Uh, Bazolum and colleagues in 2019, they found one 24-hour uh fast, uh, dropped your free T3 pretty fast. 00:30:11.119 --> 00:30:19.279 So, um, but but if but a single fast is really a small hit on your hormones, it's days in a row that are stacked on top of hard training in a body that's already depleted. 00:30:19.359 --> 00:30:20.160 That's a different conversation. 00:30:20.240 --> 00:30:23.200 So, like in the missionary training, one day I had to fast for 10 days. 00:30:23.279 --> 00:30:27.119 And guys, you have to remember at that time I was literally like 130 pounds. 00:30:27.279 --> 00:30:30.319 It was miserable, it was very hard, but I did it for the glory of God, right? 00:30:30.400 --> 00:30:31.440 Or so or some bullshit. 00:30:31.599 --> 00:30:34.559 Uh now I I didn't know any of that in missionary school. 00:30:34.720 --> 00:30:37.599 I just knew that going without food, it was something holy. 00:30:37.839 --> 00:30:47.359 Now, the hinge of my of my whole life and the reason I do what I do now, but before the retreat, I was bodybuilding very hard as a teenager with a coach that was completely irresponsible. 00:30:47.440 --> 00:30:52.960 He had me on three grams of gear, like for a fucking kid, with no protection, nothing to manage side effects. 00:30:53.039 --> 00:30:55.680 So my blood pressure was literally through the roof and I couldn't breathe right. 00:30:55.759 --> 00:30:57.680 And the doctor told me, like, you are going to die. 00:30:57.839 --> 00:31:01.039 So once I'm saved, all of this is going out, right? 00:31:01.200 --> 00:31:09.359 Like I literally burned something about like 20 grand worth of steroids because, like I said, I was a little bit more involved in this world of steroids than uh I am nowadays. 00:31:09.440 --> 00:31:11.519 I'm definitely not involved with anything whatsoever. 00:31:11.599 --> 00:31:17.839 Uh, but um just I I just put it in on a pile inside of this uh massive container, I lit it up and I still have the picture. 00:31:17.920 --> 00:31:21.519 Um, and if I find a picture, I'm gonna put somewhere here on the screen so you guys can see it. 00:31:21.599 --> 00:31:23.599 Because I thought that that's what God wanted for me. 00:31:23.680 --> 00:31:26.960 And funny story, uh, I I thought I thought God wanted a clean break. 00:31:27.039 --> 00:31:28.640 And like I dropped a ton of weight after that. 00:31:28.720 --> 00:31:29.759 I lost all of my muscle. 00:31:29.839 --> 00:31:31.359 Like somebody let the air out of me. 00:31:31.440 --> 00:31:36.640 But I um when we were we were uh we were at the house and we were like, hey, I think I'm gonna throw away all these steroids. 00:31:36.720 --> 00:31:37.920 No one told me to do that, okay? 00:31:38.000 --> 00:31:41.599 Don't ever let me blame anyone about this because if I do, it's me changing my memory, okay? 00:31:41.680 --> 00:31:43.119 I'm I'm I'm honestly here. 00:31:43.279 --> 00:31:44.880 Uh I no one told me to do that. 00:31:45.039 --> 00:31:46.559 I just felt that that was needed. 00:31:46.720 --> 00:31:49.119 Um, and uh I grabbed everything from my closet. 00:31:49.279 --> 00:31:58.319 I I we went out, and as we were driving, we go into a street that is literally the wrong way, and a police car comes over, turns on his lights, and stops our car. 00:31:58.400 --> 00:32:02.400 And we have 20 grand worth of steroids in the fucking car, fam. 00:32:02.799 --> 00:32:04.960 He says, Hey, you guys, you guys can't come on the street. 00:32:05.039 --> 00:32:06.079 Are are you are you guys okay? 00:32:06.160 --> 00:32:06.880 Like, what is going

on? 00:32:07.039 --> 00:32:08.640 And we would just give some bullshit answer. 00:32:08.720 --> 00:32:16.079 I don't remember the interaction, but we just back out, go away, and I'm like, holy shit, holy fucking shit, my life almost just changed. 00:32:16.160 --> 00:32:21.279 But at the same time, if it had changed and I had gone to prison, I would just be like, guys, it's for the glory of God, I'm gonna preach. 00:32:21.440 --> 00:32:23.680 But I but I regret what I did deeply. 00:32:23.839 --> 00:32:26.240 Um, not because of the money, like fuck money, guys. 00:32:26.319 --> 00:32:27.519 I I literally don't care about that. 00:32:27.599 --> 00:32:29.200 Uh anybody that knows me knows this. 00:32:29.359 --> 00:32:31.279 Uh, here's the spoiler for you. 00:32:31.440 --> 00:32:36.400 Um, a lot of what I thought I needed God for, I needed my hormone fixed for. 00:32:36.640 --> 00:32:40.319 So I I kind of made a hormone problem into a God problem, but we'll get there. 00:32:40.480 --> 00:32:43.119 Now, a quick physiology here, so this makes sense to you. 00:32:43.279 --> 00:32:44.480 Um, your your brain, right? 00:32:44.559 --> 00:32:51.440 When you're when you're your hypothalamus and your pituitary, they are the ones that are responsible to send the signal down to your testes to tell them to make testosterone. 00:32:51.519 --> 00:32:56.480 So when you flood the body with outside hormone, the brain goes like, cool, hey, we're full, so shut that signal off. 00:32:56.640 --> 00:33:03.920 So if you stop cold with no plan to come off and there's like no outside supply anymore, while your own factory is still switched off. 00:33:04.079 --> 00:33:07.359 So you're gonna crash, you're gonna feel flat, you're gonna feel anxious, you're gonna have no drive. 00:33:07.519 --> 00:33:09.279 Like somebody drained the color out of your world. 00:33:09.440 --> 00:33:10.880 And that is well documented as well. 00:33:10.960 --> 00:33:17.359 We have Kan Kanayama and Harrison Pope, uh, a group out of uh McLean Hospital, uh Harvard Psychiatric Hospital, right? 00:33:17.440 --> 00:33:20.400 Uh, they have written about this stuff for years, right? 00:33:20.480 --> 00:33:32.240 They uh there that uh includes a uh 2015 paper in the Journal of Addiction called Prolonged Hypogonadism after quitting steroids as an underrecognized problem in medical uh in uh in the medical space, right? 00:33:32.319 --> 00:33:35.279 And hypogenatism just means your testes aren't doing their job. 00:33:35.359 --> 00:33:42.480 So here I am, I'm a teenager praying through partially an endocrine crash, and I'm calling the crash my spiritual life. 00:33:42.720 --> 00:33:51.039 So the question here is like, what do you do when when part of a uh when part of a spiritual crisis it turns out to be biological? 00:33:51.200 --> 00:33:58.160 Well, I think there are two lazy answers for this uh that we can uh uh uh uh uh uh explore, so to speak. 00:33:58.400 --> 00:34:04.240 So the believer's lazy answer is

that hey, it was all spiritual and your hormones don't matter. 00:34:04.400 --> 00:34:09.760 But the the skeptics' lazy answer is that hey, it was all hormones, so the God part was obviously fake. 00:34:09.920 --> 00:34:13.039 The second one is just James's medical materialism again, right? 00:34:13.119 --> 00:34:14.480 But it's pointed at me instead. 00:34:14.639 --> 00:34:18.960 Um, explaining where something comes from, it doesn't settle what it meant, right? 00:34:19.119 --> 00:34:24.480 My darkness was partially chemistry, the night on the hill was very, very much real as well. 00:34:24.559 --> 00:34:26.000 I'm not picking between the two. 00:34:26.159 --> 00:34:30.320 Now, the Hebrew Bible is closer to that than uh most Sunday school actually is. 00:34:30.559 --> 00:34:34.320 In Genesis 2.7, God he forms the human from dust, right? 00:34:34.400 --> 00:34:38.880 He breathes into his nostrils and he becomes a Nefesh Haya, a living being, right? 00:34:39.039 --> 00:34:42.400 He doesn't get a soul, he becomes a soul, and that's the same phrase. 00:34:42.480 --> 00:34:50.320 Uh, by the way, if you don't believe that animals have souls and that you should care for animals, all of them, uh, it's the same word that is used in Genesis 1:20 and 24. 00:34:50.559 --> 00:34:52.719 Nefesh is earthy as hell, right? 00:34:52.800 --> 00:34:54.400 It it's it animals have souls. 00:34:54.559 --> 00:34:58.239 It can also mean neck, it can mean throat, it can mean appetite, like Psalm 69.1. 00:34:58.559 --> 00:34:59.280 Save me, right? 00:34:59.360 --> 00:35:02.480 The waters have come up to my nefesh, up to my neck. 00:35:02.639 --> 00:35:08.400 Uh, the Hebrew doesn't really do like the the idea of like a ghost floating inside of a machine inside of your body, right? 00:35:08.480 --> 00:35:20.559 You're you are a breathing, hungry, whole ass animal, and the clean split between a a holy soul and a dirty body, that is owed more to Platoh than it is owed to Moses in the Jewish community, right? 00:35:20.639 --> 00:35:24.400 We'll we'll come back to that body stuff later because it's a huge part of where I end up. 00:35:24.480 --> 00:35:27.920 So when I say steroids, they change the body, but they don't change the soul. 00:35:28.079 --> 00:35:30.079 I'm using soul in the Hebrew sense, right? 00:35:30.159 --> 00:35:35.679 The whole self, your character, your why, like who you are when nobody's watching, and that shit does not come into vial. 00:35:36.000 --> 00:35:40.880 A guy getting his hormones fixed and a guy getting saved, those can be the same guy in the same year. 00:35:41.039 --> 00:35:44.480 So for a while, I treated my body like the enemy of my faith. 00:35:44.639 --> 00:35:49.920 And now my whole job is getting people's physiology right so they can actually live fulfilling lives, right? 00:35:50.000 --> 00:35:54.079 The two halves of my life, they literally meet right in the middle, and then this is how we're doing what we're doing. 00:35:54.159 --> 00:36:00.559 But that all like all in kid didn't just like want to feel it, he wanted to win the arguments as well. 00:36:00.639 --> 00:36:06.800 He wanted to make people understand that there is no rational basis for not believing in the same thing that I believe in. 00:36:06.880 --> 00:36:11.280 So I started looking for weapons, and that's where the apologetic years are going to start. 00:36:13.199 --> 00:36:16.320 So that was the the the body side going all in, right? 00:36:16.400 --> 00:36:18.639 But the other side of that was my brain, my head. 00:36:18.800 --> 00:36:22.400 And my head was just as fucking hard as my body was. 00:36:22.559 --> 00:36:27.119 So back in uh that sounds weird, but back in uh school in Brazil, I started questioning my teachers. 00:36:27.199 --> 00:36:27.920 I would debate them. 00:36:28.000 --> 00:36:32.079 I found apologetics and I was like, dude, I want to learn this deeper than anybody alive. 00:36:32.239 --> 00:36:45.280 I uh I started memorizing whole yes YouTube videos to be able to under to understand the arguments and memorize the arguments and be able to talk about like evolution and all this type of shit because obviously I was like fundamentalist, uh evangelical Christian, right? 00:36:45.360 --> 00:36:48.159 Um uh very, very focused on proto-orthodoxy right there. 00:36:48.239 --> 00:36:54.559 Um so I apologetics, it comes from the Greek word apologia, which uh is just a defense speech in a courtroom. 00:36:54.639 --> 00:37:01.199 Uh the verse it says uh every apologist that has like uh every apologist loves to use uh is 1 Peter 3 15. 00:37:01.360 --> 00:37:06.079 Always, always, always be ready to give a defense for the hope that is in you, right? 00:37:06.159 --> 00:37:07.840 So that became my whole personality. 00:37:08.000 --> 00:37:12.719 Um and then in 2015 I moved to the States, which we'll get into in a second, and I just kept going. 00:37:12.960 --> 00:37:36.079 By 2016, I was teaching theology in Portuguese and YouTube and on Facebook, and in 2017, I flew back and I gave the intro to philosophy of religion lecture at the Baptist Institute in Jaraguadus, and in Raleigh, I actually ended up leading the young adults group at uh at a church and later teaching their philosophy and religion class and also a historical Jesus in the gospel class. 00:37:36.239 --> 00:37:38.559 I I debated anyone who would sit still. 00:37:38.719 --> 00:37:43.199 I went head to head with William Lane Craig in debates, literally because I met him in person. 00:37:43.280 --> 00:37:46.559 I actually worked for reasonable faith uh as a volunteer for a little bit. 00:37:46.639 --> 00:37:48.480 Uh, and he's the biggest name in apologetics. 00:37:48.559 --> 00:37:50.159 I read pretty much all of his books. 00:37:50.320 --> 00:38:00.639 And I remember an evangelical academic conference with where a guy presented a paper, and in the Q ⁇ A, I just like raised my hand and I like we were it was the evangelical um uh uh convention

or of something. 00:38:00.719 --> 00:38:02.800 I don't remember, Evangelical Theological Society. 00:38:02.880 --> 00:38:03.599 It was something like that. 00:38:03.679 --> 00:38:07.840 It was in uh in uh um fuck uh Louisville, Kentucky. 00:38:07.920 --> 00:38:12.079 Uh, and uh he was talking about NT Wright, and uh I was very, very big on N.T. 00:38:12.159 --> 00:38:12.400 Wright. 00:38:12.480 --> 00:38:19.599 I had set out the goal to read every single one of his books, so just do me a favor, read his curriculum vita, and uh go go check out how many books he's written. 00:38:19.920 --> 00:38:25.519 I read pretty much every single one until we get to the very last ones where he published after I decided to uh to finish the project. 00:38:25.679 --> 00:38:33.920 But I uh I I just raised my hand and I cited the exact page and the paragraph that sank his entire fucking argument. 00:38:34.079 --> 00:38:38.320 And all of these heads, they turn around like who the fuck is this kid, yo? 00:38:38.639 --> 00:38:43.519 Because I was 120 pounds soaking wet, I look like a fucking broccoli with a big head, right? 00:38:43.599 --> 00:38:47.119 And nobody gave me credit for shit until I would open my mouth. 00:38:47.280 --> 00:38:49.360 And I'll tell you what that world is, right? 00:38:49.440 --> 00:38:52.960 At its worst, because you guys can know this game from the supplement side. 00:38:53.119 --> 00:38:55.840 Apologetics, it can turn into a fucking debate sport. 00:38:55.920 --> 00:39:02.000 You you lead with the strongest stat, you've got a memorized comeback for every objection, and the goal is winning the exchange. 00:39:02.079 --> 00:39:03.679 The goal is not finding out what is true. 00:39:03.760 --> 00:39:05.280 That is up for the audience, right? 00:39:05.360 --> 00:39:06.880 So that is supplement marketing, bro. 00:39:06.960 --> 00:39:08.000 That's the same fucking move. 00:39:08.159 --> 00:39:10.880 The best apologists, they know that and they fight it, right? 00:39:10.960 --> 00:39:15.360 And the worst ones, they're basically selling God like a pre-workout, and I learned both versions. 00:39:15.519 --> 00:39:19.679 So let me actually walk you through the arguments because this shit was my bread and butter. 00:39:19.840 --> 00:39:24.480 I learned them straight out of the the apologetics class with uh with with my professors. 00:39:24.559 --> 00:39:29.599 Um, I read uh Doug Gruthius uh and uh Craig's uh Reasonable Faith as uh textbooks. 00:39:29.679 --> 00:39:32.239 I read the whole fucking thing, and I I've still got the handout. 00:39:32.320 --> 00:39:34.239 I was looking at it uh uh earlier today. 00:39:34.400 --> 00:39:45.119 Um the the first one is uh the the cosmological argument, which you guys might be familiar with, why, which is the an argument from a first cause, and the version that everybody talks about and fights over is the kalam cosmological argument. 00:39:45.280 --> 00:39:46.639 So it's basically three lines, right? 00:39:46.719

--> 00:39:49.760 Premise one, whatever begins to exist has a cause. 00:39:49.920 --> 00:39:52.320 Premise two, the universe begin to exist. 00:39:52.480 --> 00:39:54.639 Conclusion, the universe has a cause, right? 00:39:54.719 --> 00:40:03.599 Then Craig, what he does is he adds a second stage where he argues that cause, a cause has to be timeless, spaceless, unbelievably powerful, and personal. 00:40:03.760 --> 00:40:11.760 Because the only thing that gets the you from uh a timeless state to a universe is a choice, and and and non-personal beings do not have choice, right? 00:40:11.840 --> 00:40:15.599 So, um, a fun fact the name of Kalam isn't even Christian, right? 00:40:15.679 --> 00:40:16.400 The argument is not Christian. 00:40:16.559 --> 00:40:27.519 Kalam is an Arabic, it's derived by Im al-Kalam, right, which is literally the science of speech, um, which is um uh what medieval Muslim theologians they called argu theology. 00:40:27.679 --> 00:40:33.840 So the core argument, it goes back to a Christian guy in Alexandria, which is John Philon Philoponis, right around the 500s. 00:40:33.920 --> 00:40:37.280 I don't remember exactly when, but it's the Muslim theologians who built it out. 00:40:37.360 --> 00:40:42.239 It was Al-Ghazali, right, who died in uh uh uh 1111. 00:40:42.400 --> 00:40:44.239 Uh it's the big classical name here for us. 00:40:44.320 --> 00:40:51.440 So Craig, he revived this in 1972 uh book, The Kalam Cosmological Argument, and his whole career is basically built off of it. 00:40:51.599 --> 00:40:54.880 Now, how do you defend premise number two that the universe began to exist? 00:40:55.039 --> 00:40:56.639 So Craig uses two arguments, right? 00:40:56.719 --> 00:41:02.079 The philosophy's way is Hilbert's Hotel, which is a thought experiment from the mathematician David Hilbert. 00:41:02.239 --> 00:41:05.679 So you've got a hotel with infinitely many rooms, right? 00:41:05.760 --> 00:41:07.679 And every single one of those rooms is full. 00:41:07.840 --> 00:41:13.920 A new guest is gonna show up, and you just move everybody down one room, and then boom, there's space now, right? 00:41:14.079 --> 00:41:16.000 So Craig says that is absurd. 00:41:16.159 --> 00:41:22.159 So an actual, infinite, actual, not possible, very distinct things in mathematical philosophy, okay? 00:41:22.320 --> 00:41:26.320 So an actually infinite number of past events is absurd as well. 00:41:26.559 --> 00:41:29.039 So the the the past it had a start. 00:41:29.199 --> 00:41:41.519 The physics way was the big bang, plus the the the Bordie Gun and Villikan uh theorem from uh 2003, which says that a universe that has been expanding on average cannot be extended forever into the past. 00:41:41.679 --> 00:41:44.320 But the pushbacks are very, very real, right? 00:41:44.400 --> 00:41:51.920 First, our sense that everything has a cause, it comes from stuff inside the universe, and stretching it to the universe itself is literally a massive jump. 00:41:52.079 --> 00:42:02.800 Sean Carroll, who's a physicist, he said this to Craig's face in a debate in 2014 at a great heard for him in New Orleans, because uh that that cause isn't even a basic concept in fundamental physics. 00:42:02.960 --> 00:42:09.920 Now, second, um, the Big Bang is where our models stopped working, not where it's it's not a certified moment of nothing. 00:42:10.000 --> 00:42:14.719 And right, and Vilenkin himself, he doesn't say his theorem for uh uh uh proves God. 00:42:14.880 --> 00:42:19.360 Now the third one, uh, this one comes from William from Graham Oppie, right? 00:42:19.440 --> 00:42:24.400 The atheist philosopher who was uh right there on my old handout when I was uh writing all of my notes about this. 00:42:24.559 --> 00:42:27.039 He argues uh he is a fucking genius. 00:42:27.119 --> 00:42:30.800 If you ever read Graham Oppie, you're gonna realize, like, oh my god, I don't know shit about anything. 00:42:31.039 --> 00:42:39.760 So they they uh he says that, like, hey, like uh infinite infinity puzzles, they are exactly what you would expect if actual infinites are real. 00:42:39.840 --> 00:42:41.599 So they cannot prove a damn thing, right? 00:42:41.679 --> 00:42:43.519 And then the kids' question, like, who made God? 00:42:43.599 --> 00:42:43.760 Right? 00:42:43.920 --> 00:42:45.280 Craig's answer, it's pretty fair. 00:42:45.360 --> 00:42:50.079 He says the premise says whatever begins to exist, and God, by definition, doesn't begin. 00:42:50.239 --> 00:42:53.840 So whether that's a definition or a cheat move, uh, that's the whole fight there. 00:42:54.000 --> 00:42:56.159 The second family of argument is the design argument. 00:42:56.320 --> 00:42:59.519 The old version is gonna be coming from William Paley in 1802. 00:42:59.679 --> 00:43:05.679 So you'll find uh a watch on the ground, kind of like you're hiking, and you just know that there's a watch, you know that somebody made it, right? 00:43:05.840 --> 00:43:08.320 So, so so look at an eye, for instance. 00:43:08.559 --> 00:43:17.840 Darwin, he answered that in um in in 1859, uh that because natural selection it builds the look of design without needing a designer as the explanation. 00:43:18.000 --> 00:43:22.480 So the the modern version moved to physics, and now what this is called fine-tuning. 00:43:22.639 --> 00:43:25.119 The the constraint constants of nature, right? 00:43:25.199 --> 00:43:28.639 Like the strength of gravity, the forces, the cosmological constant. 00:43:28.800 --> 00:43:34.239 They send in this stupidly narrow window that allows starts and chemistry in us, right? 00:43:34.320 --> 00:43:41.360 And in some estimates, they put the cosmological constant at one part in ten to the hundred and twentieth, right? 00:43:41.519 --> 00:43:45.039 So, uh, guys, Martin Reed was a British astronomer royal. 00:43:45.199 --> 00:43:48.960 He wrote a whole book on it uh in 1999 called Just Six Numbers. 00:43:49.119 --> 00:44:01.840 Uh, the best

story here is gonna be Fred Hoyle, who's an atheist, who in 1953 he predicted a specific energy level in the carbon atom because without it, there is no carbon and there is no And then they went after and they found it. 00:44:01.920 --> 00:44:06.719 And later he said, it looks like a super intellect has monkeyed with physics here. 00:44:06.880 --> 00:44:24.719 The pushback that is the the multiverse plus something that's called the anthropic principle, which is a term that Brandon Carter coyed in 1973, which basically says, like, hey, if there are tons of universes, could you click like a like a fucking course you would find yourself in one that allows you, right? 00:44:24.880 --> 00:44:26.480 Where the hell else would you be? 00:44:27.039 --> 00:44:28.880 You can only be in the one that you would be. 00:44:29.039 --> 00:44:36.639 And then David Hume in his dialogues of concerning natural religion, he published in 1779, he asks, like, why are we expecting one single designer? 00:44:36.800 --> 00:44:38.880 And why are we expecting the designer to be a good one? 00:44:39.039 --> 00:44:45.440 Why not some like infant deity, like first, like rough draft and a first attempt, and then he just walked away from because he got bored. 00:44:45.519 --> 00:44:46.239 So that is in there. 00:44:46.480 --> 00:44:47.920 I'm literally not making this shit up. 00:44:48.079 --> 00:44:51.039 The third argument that I was very familiar with was the moral argument, right? 00:44:51.199 --> 00:44:56.559 And Craig's version was hey, if God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist. 00:44:56.719 --> 00:45:00.239 So objective moral values do exist, therefore God exists. 00:45:00.480 --> 00:45:05.840 Um this one hits you in the gut because everybody knows that torturing kids for fun is wrong. 00:45:06.000 --> 00:45:07.360 It is not just unpopular, right? 00:45:07.519 --> 00:45:11.840 The oldest pushback, it comes from Plato's Eudhro, actually, it's a Uphro dilemma. 00:45:12.000 --> 00:45:15.920 Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it's good? 00:45:16.079 --> 00:45:18.480 If it's the first, morality is arbitrary. 00:45:18.559 --> 00:45:22.559 And if it is the second, goodness is above God, and you don't need God for it, right? 00:45:22.719 --> 00:45:25.840 So theists, they answer that goodness is God's own nature. 00:45:26.000 --> 00:45:36.079 But the atheist philosopher like Eric Willenberg, in his 2014 book on ethics without God, he says moral facts can just be basic facts with nothing underneath it. 00:45:36.239 --> 00:45:44.480 And I wrote my own question in the margin of AJ Swoboda's book, After Doubt, which is like, what keeps you from believing in an abominable God? 00:45:44.719 --> 00:45:48.159 The argument it just assumes whatever's at the bottom is good. 00:45:48.239 --> 00:45:52.320 And you've got God ordering whole ass cities to be wiped out in Deuteronomy 20. 00:45:52.400 --> 00:45:57.760 So you can't really just assume that being you proved uh is the nice one, right? 00:45:57.840 --> 00:46:00.320 Um, the the the the being that you proved is the nice one. 00:46:00.400 --> 00:46:02.000 Now, what what is that actually like? 00:46:02.079 --> 00:46:04.400 What what does each one actually get you, right? 00:46:04.559 --> 00:46:05.760 It's not as much as people think. 00:46:05.920 --> 00:46:08.880 The the kalam, if it works, it gives you a cause. 00:46:09.039 --> 00:46:09.519 That's it. 00:46:09.679 --> 00:46:13.119 Fine-tuning is gonna give you something like an engineer who sets the dials. 00:46:13.280 --> 00:46:16.000 The moral argument is gonna give you some ground for goodness. 00:46:16.239 --> 00:46:21.760 None of them on their own gives you Yahweh or Jesus or the guy who answered your prayer on Saturday night. 00:46:21.840 --> 00:46:24.800 It it gets you to the door, but it doesn't get you in the house. 00:46:24.960 --> 00:46:29.599 And the philosopher who hammered that exact gap was Paul Moser at Loyola University of Chicago. 00:46:29.760 --> 00:46:33.519 His books are The Elusive God from 2008 and the evidence of God. 00:46:33.679 --> 00:46:37.840 And his whole point is that God is not a hypothesis that you can prove with a syllogism. 00:46:38.079 --> 00:46:39.440 God is a person who calls you. 00:46:39.599 --> 00:46:46.079 So if there is a perfectly loving God, Moser says, he would actually show up in a way that confronts your will, your volition. 00:46:46.320 --> 00:46:48.719 And that is why this is called volitional theism. 00:46:48.880 --> 00:46:55.119 And the real evidence is what he calls personifying evidence, is God's character showing up in a life that's actually being changed. 00:46:55.280 --> 00:47:00.079 So to him, the classical proofs they are cognitively presumptuous, they're arrogant, even, right? 00:47:00.159 --> 00:47:02.320 And they hand you a lesser version of God. 00:47:02.480 --> 00:47:07.519 He's even on record suggesting that Craig should drop the natural theology book altogether. 00:47:07.599 --> 00:47:09.920 Uh, and he leans on Isaiah 45, 15. 00:47:10.079 --> 00:47:13.039 Truly, you are a God who hides himself. 00:47:15.119 --> 00:47:17.920 Now in 2017, I was studying at Southeastern. 00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:19.599 I wrote two papers against him. 00:47:19.679 --> 00:47:22.239 Um, the the first was for my epistemology class. 00:47:22.320 --> 00:47:25.760 It was Paul Moser's volitional theism, a defense of natural theology. 00:47:25.840 --> 00:47:27.599 I turned that in on April 28th. 00:47:27.679 --> 00:47:29.920 Um, the second one was Contra Moser, right? 00:47:30.000 --> 00:47:31.840 For uh Christian apologetics in May 4th. 00:47:31.920 --> 00:47:36.880 And but before I finished, I actually messaged uh Paul Moser on Facebook uh because we knew each other. 00:47:36.960 --> 00:47:48.719 And uh the guy he wrote to me back and he sent me the unpublished chapter that he had written on uh with uh Clint uh Clinton Neptune, which

uh literally the title is Is Traditional Natural Theology Cognitive Presumptious? 00:47:48.960 --> 00:47:49.760 So here I am, right? 00:47:49.840 --> 00:47:56.079 This skinny Brazilian undergrad arguing with the Cambridge University press author using the chapter that he sent me. 00:47:56.239 --> 00:47:58.480 That shit still makes me laugh nowadays. 00:47:58.639 --> 00:48:00.639 My best shot was exegesis. 00:48:00.719 --> 00:48:06.320 So the hiding verse that he leans on, Isaiah 45, 15, uh four verses later, God actually answers. 00:48:06.480 --> 00:48:08.159 He says, I did not speak in secret. 00:48:08.239 --> 00:48:12.159 So the hiding line is the accusation that the passage itself corrects. 00:48:12.320 --> 00:48:18.239 I also called him on a straw man because uh he kept saying lots of philosophers think that you need these arguments before anybody can believe. 00:48:18.480 --> 00:48:20.639 And I was like, cool, name these philosophers. 00:48:20.800 --> 00:48:24.239 And then he pointed at people like Lee Strobo, Jane Warner Wallace, right? 00:48:24.320 --> 00:48:28.159 These fucking guys that literally are irrelevant in the in the academic world, right? 00:48:28.239 --> 00:48:36.800 Because they're just regurgitating popular level bullshit that has been uh uh uh misinterpreted so that it's easy for people to understand and also wrong, but it sounds very, very cool. 00:48:36.960 --> 00:48:39.679 Uh the the Jane Warner Wallace was the Cold Case detective. 00:48:39.760 --> 00:48:42.880 He said that arguments were literally how they came to faith. 00:48:43.039 --> 00:48:49.119 My line was basically like, hey, a dynamic God, he can use whatever the fuck he wants, arguments included, right? 00:48:49.280 --> 00:48:54.559 And look, that is the most evangelical version of my brain on paper, and I'm very proud of that work. 00:48:54.639 --> 00:48:58.559 But a year later, in an actual published article, I was already poking holes in it. 00:48:58.719 --> 00:49:04.800 I was saying these proofs they hand you a cosmic engineer, which is pretty much Moser's lesser god, in my own words. 00:49:04.960 --> 00:49:07.440 And even though I still landed on keep doing it, right? 00:49:07.519 --> 00:49:09.679 So I've been on both sides of this fight. 00:49:09.840 --> 00:49:13.440 The Kalam I think is a great conversation starter, but it's a shitty finish line. 00:49:13.519 --> 00:49:18.480 And what moved me from one side to the other side was not a debate, it was languages. 00:49:19.679 --> 00:49:23.679 So that move, I I came to the US in 2015 with literally two bags, right? 00:49:23.840 --> 00:49:25.519 One full of books and one full of clothes. 00:49:25.599 --> 00:49:27.760 Uh, it wasn't even full of clothes, it had some clothes. 00:49:27.840 --> 00:49:31.199 I I worked a very shitty job so that I could pay for school. 00:49:31.360 --> 00:49:40.079 Um, I went to the the College of Southeastern, which is an undergrad side of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and that place uh so is is Southern Baptist, right? 00:49:40.159 --> 00:49:41.599 Which means it's conservative as hell. 00:49:41.760 --> 00:49:44.159 I have a conservative mentor in my corner, Dr. 00:49:44.320 --> 00:49:44.800 Dew. 00:49:44.880 --> 00:49:47.760 Uh, there's also the the world of my wife, right, Aubrey. 00:49:47.920 --> 00:49:58.719 I got I got married in there at the at the actual uh uh uh chapel at the school, and the president of the the the convention there was my mentor and my marriage counselor at the time, the president of the university. 00:49:58.800 --> 00:49:59.119 Sorry. 00:49:59.199 --> 00:50:04.639 Uh the Kenneth Keithly, he took me into the L uh Ross Bush Center's uh mentorship for my first year. 00:50:04.800 --> 00:50:07.840 He saw me, uh he saw my promise and he took me under his wings. 00:50:07.920 --> 00:50:09.760 Um and uh I worked in the library. 00:50:09.840 --> 00:50:12.320 So I was literally the Brazilian kid who never left the building. 00:50:12.400 --> 00:50:13.760 I did not do anything for fun. 00:50:13.920 --> 00:50:15.840 The only thing I did for fun was arguing and reading. 00:50:15.920 --> 00:50:24.079 I would literally wake up at 4 a.m., study my ass off until like 8 a.m., go to classes, study my ass off in between classes, study my ass off at night and go to bed. 00:50:24.239 --> 00:50:27.599 And the program was hard as shit, even though it wasn't evangelical school. 00:50:27.760 --> 00:50:31.039 Like, we had to read Plato's Republic in one fucking week. 00:50:31.199 --> 00:50:35.440 We read Aristotle's book, uh, the the The Politics, like in the next following week. 00:50:35.599 --> 00:50:39.760 We had literally one major book per class, and I was taking at least five classes at a time. 00:50:39.920 --> 00:50:42.960 And I fell in love with philosophy because of the way that it was taught. 00:50:43.119 --> 00:50:49.840 Philosophy is just learning how to think, which is now you understand, like, oh, this is why Nathan talks about peptides and all this stuff in this way, right? 00:50:50.000 --> 00:50:51.360 What do you actually know? 00:50:51.599 --> 00:50:52.719 How do you know that? 00:50:52.880 --> 00:50:54.800 And does the argument that you have actually hold? 00:50:54.880 --> 00:50:58.000 My whole thing on sexuality on Instagram was based off of this, right? 00:50:58.079 --> 00:51:05.440 And the line that I keep coming back to, the only thing in uh in that place that was not conservative was the Bible itself. 00:51:05.599 --> 00:51:08.320 Because I didn't want to read about the Bible, guys. 00:51:08.400 --> 00:51:09.599 I wanted the thing itself. 00:51:09.760 --> 00:51:11.920 Fuck all these other secondary books. 00:51:12.079 --> 00:51:27.199 So Greek first, Koine, right, which is the everyday Greek of the first century, and then I started learning biblical uh Hebrew and then Latin and then Coptic, which is the late stage of Egyptian that's written mostly

with Greek letters, and then Syriac, which is a dialect of Aramaic, the family of Jesus actually speaking. 00:51:27.360 --> 00:51:37.519 Um, and then I actually learned German, I learned Italian, I learned to read French and all of these other uh modern languages to be able to actually like understand modern Hebrew and modern Greek as well, to be able to be inside of all of these debates here. 00:51:37.599 --> 00:51:45.920 And by the end of my master's, I put nine fucking languages in my head, and meaning like I could read all of nine languages and I could speak about six of them. 00:51:46.079 --> 00:51:48.239 They they started paying me to tutor Greek. 00:51:48.400 --> 00:52:01.440 So from 2018 to 2020, I started uh tutoring undergrads, master students, and even doctoral students before I finished my own bachelor's, which I ended in uh finishing up a sumacum laude in philosophy with a minor in biblical studies. 00:52:01.519 --> 00:52:02.559 So picture that shit, right? 00:52:02.639 --> 00:52:06.800 The broccoli kid walking a PhD student through Greek participles, right? 00:52:06.880 --> 00:52:09.840 And on the side, I was actually translating things like a maniac. 00:52:10.000 --> 00:52:16.559 I put the entire Logos Bible software database from English to Portuguese in 2016-2017. 00:52:16.639 --> 00:52:17.679 I never got paid anything for it. 00:52:17.760 --> 00:52:18.719 I did it out of love. 00:52:18.880 --> 00:52:34.960 I also co-translated the Biblical Languages Center's Greek and Hebrew courses with Nicholas Elias, uh, and I worked on Glossa House projects like their Triglot Pentateuch reader, which never got published, but it would have been the first uh uh uh triglot Pentateuch reader in existence, right? 00:52:35.119 --> 00:52:36.400 Um then whole ass books. 00:52:36.480 --> 00:52:51.199 I co-translated Herban Bateman's Four Views on the Warning Passages in Hebrews, and I also translated Keneke's Salvation and Sovereignty, a Molinist Approach, which came out in Portuguese in 2020 as Salvação e Soberania, which was the first Molinist book in existence. 00:52:51.280 --> 00:52:55.039 Um, and there was a preface that I wrote bringing this context to our people. 00:52:55.199 --> 00:52:58.239 So when you translate a whole book, you can't really skim, right? 00:52:58.400 --> 00:53:02.000 Every single sentence it has to pass through your own head and it has to come on the other side. 00:53:02.159 --> 00:53:12.000 And then I was getting into a contract to translate the three volumes of James Dunn into Portuguese, and then I just decided, hey, um, for 10,000 bucks for all of these, it's gonna take me about four years to do this. 00:53:12.159 --> 00:53:13.039 I can't do it, guys. 00:53:13.119 --> 00:53:13.599 I'm sorry. 00:53:13.679 --> 00:53:19.840 Um, and Molinism, Molinism is a really, really slick piece of machinery, and most people are not familiar with it, so let me cover you real quick. 00:53:20.000 --> 00:53:21.199 So here's the problem, right? 00:53:21.360 --> 00:53:25.440 If God knows and controls anything, so how the fuck are you free? 00:53:25.599 --> 00:53:34.159 So Luis de Molina, he was a Spanish Jesuit in his Concordia in 1588, he says, God, he's got three kinds of knowledge, and this is based on modal logic. 00:53:34.239 --> 00:53:37.280 And if you don't understand modal logic, this sounds like, yeah, whatever, dude. 00:53:37.360 --> 00:53:40.719 But if you understand modal logic, you're like, holy shit, this is a massive idea. 00:53:40.880 --> 00:53:49.760 So what God knows what could happen, God knows what will happen, and God also knows the in-between, which is middle knowledge, cientia media, right? 00:53:49.840 --> 00:53:56.079 Which is the the what every free person would freely do in every possible situation. 00:53:56.239 --> 00:54:08.960 So God, He picks a world and actual and actually chooses to actualize a possible world to make uh knowing exactly what you would freely choose, and you get the sovereignty and freedom at once, right? 00:54:09.039 --> 00:54:16.719 So uh Craig is a big famous defender of this, and Keith Lee even took Calvinism's uh famous uh five-point acronym, which is the tulip, and he turned it into Roses. 00:54:17.039 --> 00:54:29.440 The the famous pushback, it came out of the called the Grounding Objection from Robert Adams in 1977 and William Hasker, which asked, like, what makes it true right now what you would do in a situation that never happens, right? 00:54:29.519 --> 00:54:32.719 If nothing about you fixes it, what is God even knowing? 00:54:32.880 --> 00:54:34.960 And I was really deep in that world, like all the way in. 00:54:35.119 --> 00:54:45.039 I joined the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, plus the Patristics and Papyrology Societies, and I were writing book reviews for reading religion and the Journal of Language, Culture, and Religion. 00:54:45.199 --> 00:54:47.440 I ended up getting uh early copies from guys like N.T. 00:54:47.519 --> 00:54:48.400 Wright and Peter Enns. 00:54:48.559 --> 00:54:53.199 I was on the Harper One launch team for Enns Uh, How the Bible Actually Works in 2019. 00:54:53.280 --> 00:54:57.360 And Bart Ehrman actually got to be quite friendly with, and I love that version of my brain. 00:54:57.519 --> 00:55:13.039 Um, then the the the the part that rewired me in 2019, I started working on the Greek Paul project for the Institute for New Testamentalikes for Schworen, the Institute in Must in Münster in Germany, whose uh work it feeds the Nessa Alan Greek text that most Bibles are gonna be translated from. 00:55:13.119 --> 00:55:15.760 It actually uh influences the Editia Critical Mayor, right? 00:55:15.840 --> 00:55:16.719 That's coming out still. 00:55:16.800 --> 00:55:26.960 Um uh under Charles Quarrels at Southeastern, I indexed and I started transcribing medieval lictionaries, which are the books that churches read from uh during liturgy, letter by letter, right?

00:55:27.039 --> 00:55:29.760 Really understanding these uh these tra these uh scribes. 00:55:29.840 --> 00:55:36.000 And when you're doing all of that stuff, you literally see with your own eyes where the scribes are changing things in the Bible. 00:55:36.239 --> 00:55:42.480 So my names, even in the museum of the Bible, which is it cracks me up for a kid who was arguing about Jonah's fish, right? 00:55:42.639 --> 00:55:46.639 So textual criticism is the study of how the copies of the Bible change. 00:55:46.800 --> 00:55:52.079 Nobody has a single original idea about what was in the original book of the of the New Testament. 00:55:52.239 --> 00:55:53.199 We have no fucking clue. 00:55:53.440 --> 00:55:58.639 There are about 5,800 Greek manuscripts, but most of them they're from the 9th century or later. 00:55:58.800 --> 00:56:08.480 You've got the paperi, right, which are the the big uh uh uh you also have like the big yuncials that are written in capital letters, and then you have the minuscules in a running hand, and then you have the lectionaries. 00:56:08.639 --> 00:56:16.559 The oldest scrap that we have currently is P52, is a is a very small piece, like a credit card size piece of John 18, about the the published by uh C.H. 00:56:16.719 --> 00:56:20.320 Roberts in 1935, and usually it's data around 125. 00:56:20.480 --> 00:56:27.599 Brent Nongbury, uh, he showed in the Harvard Theological Review in 2005 that the handwriting it actually fits a much wider range. 00:56:27.760 --> 00:56:34.239 So apologists they love pushing the dates earlier, but specialists in the subject, the people who actually know what they're talking about, they don't. 00:56:34.320 --> 00:56:36.320 It's really similar to our conversation about peptides. 00:56:36.480 --> 00:56:42.400 Uh, and then the two big fourth-century Bibles, Codex Sinaticus, which uh Constantine Ventitionorf, he got out of St. 00:56:42.559 --> 00:56:51.840 Catherine's Monastery at Sinai, very cool discovery in 1859, and Codex Vaticanus, which literally it has said in the Vatican Library since at least 1400. 00:56:52.000 --> 00:56:54.880 And um, with those two, you start seeing the shit move, right? 00:56:54.960 --> 00:57:01.440 The the woman caught in adultery, John 758 to 811, that is not in our early copies. 00:57:01.599 --> 00:57:08.239 We have two papyri from 200 called P66 and P75, or we have it in Synaticus and Vaticanus. 00:57:08.320 --> 00:57:10.639 And um, even even in the the gym verse, right? 00:57:10.719 --> 00:57:18.159 1 Corinthians 6 20, glorify God in your body, it picks up and in your spirit, which are gods in the King James Bible. 00:57:18.320 --> 00:57:19.840 That is not in the early copies. 00:57:19.920 --> 00:57:23.280 Somebody spiritualized the Bible verse, the gym verse, right? 00:57:23.440 --> 00:57:28.960 And the King James itself, it comes from what uh a text that's called the Textus Receptus, which is the received text. 00:57:29.039 --> 00:57:39.199 It goes back to Erasmus in 1516, which created the worst pronunciation of Greek ever known, but it's the one that is used in every college because uh people don't really understand Greek, they can't speak, they can't live the language like we learn. 00:57:39.280 --> 00:57:49.519 Um, and for the last verses of Revelation, Erasmus actually didn't even have the Greek, so he translated the Latin into Greek himself, a very interesting uh uh practice that I learned to do myself as well. 00:57:49.679 --> 00:57:56.559 Then the name received text copies from a printer's blurb in 1633 saying it's the text now received by all. 00:57:56.719 --> 00:57:59.119 The whole name is basically a printer bragging. 00:57:59.440 --> 00:58:13.679 In September of 2018, I gave a uh a talk at an apologetics conference called Investigate Faith um in North Carolina, and I was picking apart the standard line, which goes, Hey, we've got almost 5,800 manuscripts, way more than Homer, way more than the Iliad, right? 00:58:13.760 --> 00:58:15.760 And it the text is 99% accurate. 00:58:15.920 --> 00:58:24.719 So Dan Wallace, he makes the strongest version of that, and it's a it's a fair point, but the count, it barely matters when the copies from the first few centuries are just a tiny sliver. 00:58:24.960 --> 00:58:27.280 More copies of a later copy, they don't help you. 00:58:27.360 --> 00:58:29.039 It's quality, not quantity, right? 00:58:29.119 --> 00:58:34.639 It's the same thing that I teach in my course about how to read um uh research, and it you can find the link in the description. 00:58:34.719 --> 00:58:37.599 But if you want to learn how to read papers, this is the course that you need to take. 00:58:37.679 --> 00:58:42.719 Uh, and my line was like, hey, the classics having worse evidence doesn't make our evidence great. 00:58:42.800 --> 00:58:45.519 It's kind of like, oh, you're the strongest kid in kindergarten? 00:58:45.679 --> 00:58:46.880 Who gives a shit, bro? 00:58:46.960 --> 00:58:49.599 And and this is the thing that trained how I read studies today. 00:58:49.760 --> 00:58:52.639 You'll hear me like, hey, there are 50 studies in this compound, right? 00:58:52.800 --> 00:58:53.119 Cool. 00:58:53.280 --> 00:58:54.480 How many are in humans? 00:58:54.639 --> 00:58:56.079 Like, how many come from the same lab? 00:58:56.159 --> 00:58:57.599 How many just cite the first one? 00:58:57.760 --> 00:58:59.119 That's a manuscript count. 00:58:59.280 --> 00:59:04.800 Of 50 late copies of one rat study are still one fucking rat study. 00:59:04.880 --> 00:59:07.840 A textual critic he cannot ask what most copies say. 00:59:08.239 --> 00:59:12.880 He needs to ask which reading best explain how the other readings came about. 00:59:13.039 --> 00:59:15.760 And that's a question that I ask of a pile of papers. 00:59:15.920 --> 00:59:18.079 And they don't promise you the original, they they cannot. 00:59:18.159 --> 00:59:23.840 They only promise what is called the earliest attainable text, which

is the best that you can reconstruct from what you survived. 00:59:24.000 --> 00:59:32.079 And my work at the institute um in the in Münster actually is uh helped us establish what the earliest attainable text is, and I feel very, very proud of that. 00:59:32.159 --> 00:59:34.000 I'm never gonna stop bragging about it. 00:59:34.320 --> 00:59:37.280 So that is the exactly like what the evidence is in my world. 00:59:37.360 --> 00:59:44.880 It's the best available evidence, and it moves when better evidence moves, which is why we get the we we are now getting into the 29th version of the Nessalan. 00:59:45.039 --> 00:59:54.079 Um and then my paper, the one that I presented at the Southeastern Commerce uh Commission for the Study of Religion at the University of Georgia on uh February 29, 2020. 00:59:54.239 --> 00:59:57.360 Um uh I just a punchline here first because it's kind of wild, right? 00:59:57.440 --> 01:00:02.079 Uh I argue that Hebrews 2 9 first said that Jesus died apart from God. 01:00:02.239 --> 01:00:04.320 Jesus did not die by the grace of God. 01:00:04.480 --> 01:00:11.119 So your Bible says that he tasted death for everyone by the grace of God, kariti theu, right, in Greek. 01:00:11.280 --> 01:00:14.800 But but there is another older reading which is choris teu, right? 01:00:14.960 --> 01:00:15.920 Apart from God. 01:00:16.079 --> 01:00:19.199 The the capital letters, those two, they look nothing alike. 01:00:19.280 --> 01:00:24.159 That's an argument that this has been changed, like Hariti against Choris, um, different letters, different lengths, right? 01:00:24.239 --> 01:00:26.239 So that's no like tired eye slip. 01:00:26.400 --> 01:00:28.239 Somebody fucking chose to make a point there. 01:00:28.400 --> 01:00:39.119 So Origen, who was the great Bible scholar in the early 200s, he says that most copies, they actually um they uh they he knew that that that these most copies were reading apart from God. 01:00:39.280 --> 01:00:49.199 And uh a 10th century copy called uh 1739, made by a really, really careful scribe from an older copy with notes from the early church fathers, also has it. 01:00:49.440 --> 01:00:51.840 Now, grace it wins by headcount. 01:00:51.920 --> 01:00:52.800 So I'll give you that, right? 01:00:52.880 --> 01:00:57.280 Piece 46, which is our oldest copy of the Hebrews from around 200s, has it. 01:00:57.360 --> 01:00:59.760 So does Sinaticus, so does Vaticanus. 01:00:59.840 --> 01:01:05.280 And my professor made a great point that when Origin says most copies, he means the ones like around him. 01:01:05.440 --> 01:01:08.960 But apart from God, it fits the grammar of Hebrew. 01:01:09.039 --> 01:01:10.880 I really knew the grammar of Hebrew, which is like J.K. 01:01:11.039 --> 01:01:11.920 Eliot showed it. 01:01:12.079 --> 01:01:19.519 It fits a Jesus who prays out loud and and in tears in chapter five, and if it's Mark's, like, my God, why have you forsaken me? 01:01:19.599 --> 01:01:23.519 And if it's the Hebrew Bible, where death literally means being cut off from God, right? 01:01:23.599 --> 01:01:28.480 Like when when when when in the in the Psalm of David, he's like, Who can worship you in the depths of Seol, right? 01:01:28.559 --> 01:01:30.079 You are separated from God forever. 01:01:30.239 --> 01:01:49.840 So I argue with um Bart Roman's the uh book called The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture from 1993, that the early scribes on the side, um, the day that that eventually became mainstream Christianity, the the fighting groups who said that the divine Christ left Jesus before the cross, they saw that line as dangerous and then they changed the text deliberately. 01:01:50.000 --> 01:01:55.840 And the in the earlier text that we can get to, literally, Jesus dies separated from God. 01:01:56.079 --> 01:01:59.920 And this is where the philosophy hits because the question becomes like, what is even a text? 01:02:00.079 --> 01:02:01.199 And I was really interested in this. 01:02:01.360 --> 01:02:09.920 So in a literary theory class in 2018, I led us the session on Derrida, who was the French philosopher who basically says that meaning never sits still in a text. 01:02:10.159 --> 01:02:14.239 I I've got highlights all over through uh John Caputo's The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. 01:02:14.559 --> 01:02:16.719 So this question had been chewing on me for a while. 01:02:16.960 --> 01:02:19.599 Scholars, they don't even claim to have the original anymore. 01:02:19.760 --> 01:02:20.559 That's off the table. 01:02:20.719 --> 01:02:28.719 Eldon Epp, he wrote the a famous article by the Harvard Theological Review in 1999 on how many different things original texts can mean, right? 01:02:28.880 --> 01:02:39.039 The newest method, which is basically building a family tree of every copy, um, is uh it literally got renamed the the goal, the initial text, right? 01:02:39.119 --> 01:02:43.599 The form the the copying started from, but not necessarily what the author wrote. 01:02:43.679 --> 01:02:45.519 We do not know what the authors wrote, okay? 01:02:45.599 --> 01:02:46.559 And no one does. 01:02:46.719 --> 01:03:01.199 And and my takeaway from Wasserman and Gurry's uh 2017 book on on this type of stuff was that the the more that we know about how these variants relate, the less we know about the initial text because the editions now they mark more places as uncertain, not fewer. 01:03:01.360 --> 01:03:03.440 So more data gives you more humility. 01:03:03.599 --> 01:03:05.199 Same with your blood work, by the way, right? 01:03:05.280 --> 01:03:07.360 It tells you something real, but you still gotta interpret it. 01:03:07.440 --> 01:03:09.440 And this is something that I also see in our space. 01:03:09.519 --> 01:03:11.039 Um, and I see it this year as well. 01:03:11.280 --> 01:03:23.280 The less you know about the world of religion, the more you think you know about it, the less you know about Christianity, the less you know about all of these things that

I'm talking about, the more confident you feel about it, which is not the Dunning Kruger effect, by the way. 01:03:23.360 --> 01:03:24.719 The Dunning Kruger is a different thing. 01:03:24.800 --> 01:03:31.360 People, people, Dunning Kruger, the Dunning Kruger effect, and I taught this in a lecture in the how to read research course inside of the Aft Lab Engine. 01:03:31.440 --> 01:03:34.639 I would wish that everybody would see it so they would stop spilling bullshit online. 01:03:34.880 --> 01:03:40.559 So, where where does the word of God, like what where is the word of God if the words are moving around, right? 01:03:40.639 --> 01:03:41.920 Like, where is it located? 01:03:42.000 --> 01:03:42.960 Because it's always changing. 01:03:43.039 --> 01:03:44.719 Um, you've got you've got a few options, right? 01:03:44.800 --> 01:03:55.840 The the Chicago statement on biblical inerrancy from 1988, which is the big evangelical statement that the Bible has zero heirs, says that it applies to the original autographs, the ones that nobody's got, right? 01:03:55.920 --> 01:03:57.599 Which is like, how fucking useful is that? 01:03:57.760 --> 01:04:04.239 Uh DC Parker, the in the text of the living, uh, the living text of the gospels in 1997, he said that the text was always alive. 01:04:04.320 --> 01:04:07.599 And the variants they show the church working out what it believed. 01:04:07.760 --> 01:04:13.519 So back in 2018, I said the Bible should be used to start conversations, not to end them. 01:04:13.679 --> 01:04:15.199 So is the text reliable? 01:04:15.360 --> 01:04:19.920 Okay, it's reliable enough to know what these early communities believed and and thought about. 01:04:20.159 --> 01:04:20.719 Absolutely. 01:04:20.960 --> 01:04:24.079 Reliable, like a perfect fax that came from heaven? 01:04:24.320 --> 01:04:24.960 Fuck no. 01:04:25.119 --> 01:04:26.320 Like it can't be that, right? 01:04:26.400 --> 01:04:37.360 And once you watch the word moves under your own fucking pencil, the next question comes very fast, which is what you do when the four gospels themselves don't tell the same story. 01:04:37.519 --> 01:04:39.039 So so here's what people always want. 01:04:39.119 --> 01:04:40.079 They want the big moment, right? 01:04:40.159 --> 01:04:42.159 They want the law, the night that I lost my faith. 01:04:42.320 --> 01:04:46.239 They want to know the pastor that screwed me over, the sin that I didn't want to give up, right? 01:04:46.320 --> 01:04:49.519 And I'm I'm gonna disappoint you here because it wasn't sin that took me away. 01:04:49.679 --> 01:04:51.119 It wasn't the pastor who hurt me. 01:04:51.280 --> 01:04:53.119 Nobody failed to wave me at the hallway. 01:04:53.199 --> 01:04:55.440 I don't hold a single grudge against those people. 01:04:55.519 --> 01:04:56.639 They were very good to me. 01:04:56.800 --> 01:05:09.840 I just read the thing in Greek, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, line by line, four years, multiple times on repeat, and somewhere in there, it turned into a book that was written by people trying to make sense of something that happened to them. 01:05:10.000 --> 01:05:12.800 The the same way that every other religious scriptures are, right? 01:05:13.119 --> 01:05:16.400 It wasn't out like one night the way that my conversion was. 01:05:16.480 --> 01:05:20.320 It was a it was adrift, it was uh kind of sloppy, and it hurt like shit. 01:05:20.480 --> 01:05:23.840 So let me show you the first crack because uh you can you can do this shit at home as well. 01:05:24.000 --> 01:05:27.360 So uh do me a favor and read the Gospel of Mark alone. 01:05:27.440 --> 01:05:30.719 Don't read the other gospels and just write down everything that happens in order, okay? 01:05:30.880 --> 01:05:31.599 I done I I've done this. 01:05:31.760 --> 01:05:34.559 Bart Ehrman and Chapel Hill makes his students do this as well. 01:05:34.719 --> 01:05:40.960 Um, then do it with Matthew, and then you do it with Luke, and then you do it with John, and you lay down the four lists side by side. 01:05:41.199 --> 01:05:50.079 Bart Ehrman, he's gonna call that reading horizontally in uh Jesus Interrupted from 2009, instead of reading each one top to bottom and then blending them in your head. 01:05:50.239 --> 01:05:52.880 And the second you do it, dude, it jumps out to you, right? 01:05:52.960 --> 01:05:58.239 In in Mark 15, 34, Jesus dies screaming, Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabakhtani. 01:05:58.639 --> 01:05:59.840 My God, my God, why have you forgotten? 01:06:00.079 --> 01:06:00.480 Forsaken me. 01:06:00.559 --> 01:06:03.039 And that's the only thing he says on the cross in Mark. 01:06:03.199 --> 01:06:06.320 He's abandoned, he's scared, his guys are fucking gone. 01:06:06.480 --> 01:06:09.039 And then you go to Luke 23, 46, and he's calm. 01:06:09.119 --> 01:06:12.320 He says, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. 01:06:12.480 --> 01:06:15.679 And a few verses earlier, he's actually forgiving the guys who killed him. 01:06:15.840 --> 01:06:18.719 And then in John 19, 30, he says, it is finished. 01:06:18.880 --> 01:06:21.360 Kind of like a guy closing out a job that he planned. 01:06:21.599 --> 01:06:25.440 Same death, dude, but three different paintings, completely different. 01:06:25.519 --> 01:06:27.519 Now it's everywhere when you start looking. 01:06:27.679 --> 01:06:34.639 Does he flip the tables in the in the temple like at the start of his ministry, like in John 2, or does he do it in the last week, like Mark 11? 01:06:35.280 --> 01:06:38.000 Do both criminals mock him, like Mark 15, 32? 01:06:38.320 --> 01:06:42.719 Does one of them repent and get the paradise promise, like Luke 23, 39 to 43? 01:06:42.880 --> 01:06:44.719 And then John, he moves the date of this. 01:06:44.880 --> 01:06:48.239 In Mark 14, 12, the Last Supper is the Passover meal, right? 01:06:48.320 --> 01:06:49.280 They're eating the lamb. 01:06:49.440 --> 01:06:55.679 In John 18, 28, the priests won't go into Pilate's building because

they don't want to get unclean before they eat the Passover. 01:06:55.840 --> 01:06:57.119 So it hasn't happened yet. 01:06:57.280 --> 01:07:05.440 And in John 19, 14, Jesus gets sentenced around noon on the day of preparation, which is the exact time that the lambs are getting slaughtered at the temple. 01:07:05.599 --> 01:07:10.800 Then John makes sure that nobody breaks his legs and quotes the Passover rule from Exodus 12:46. 01:07:11.039 --> 01:07:12.880 Not one of his bones shall be broken. 01:07:13.039 --> 01:07:19.760 So John he opens his gospel with behold the Lamb of God, and he closes it by killing Jesus at the lamb time, right? 01:07:19.840 --> 01:07:27.519 I wrote a paper on this when I was in Jerusalem, uh studying, not in Jerusalem, I was studying online, but uh, and the people they they tried to save it with calendar theories, right? 01:07:27.599 --> 01:07:29.840 The two groups are using two different calendars. 01:07:30.000 --> 01:07:32.079 It just doesn't fucking work, that doesn't fucking exist. 01:07:32.239 --> 01:07:33.280 Please don't use this argument. 01:07:33.440 --> 01:07:36.800 John is making a theological point, he's not filing a timestamp. 01:07:36.960 --> 01:07:40.079 So then Paul, Paul is the one that got me crying at two in the fucking morning, right? 01:07:40.159 --> 01:07:42.880 I remember waking up lying there, like, why the fuck do we trust Paul? 01:07:43.039 --> 01:07:45.199 Like this guy never met Jesus when he was alive. 01:07:45.280 --> 01:07:49.119 He says that in Galatians 1.12, that he did not get his gospel from any human being. 01:07:49.199 --> 01:07:50.480 He just got it by revelation, right? 01:07:50.639 --> 01:07:55.119 In Galatians 2.11, he fights with Peter to his fucking face, the guy who actually walks with Jesus. 01:07:55.280 --> 01:07:59.599 In 1 Corinthians 7.12, he literally goes like this is part me talking, not the Lord. 01:07:59.760 --> 01:08:09.840 And there are basically 13 letters with Paul's name on it, but the scholars all agree on seven: Romans, first and second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, First Thessalonians, and Philemon. 01:08:10.079 --> 01:08:24.159 The rest, they're either fought over or most critical scholars, literally outside of evangelicalism, everyone thinks that these are books that wrote were written down, and then their names to a poem were added uh later, right? 01:08:24.239 --> 01:08:28.319 And Erman, he wrote a whole academic book on that in 2013, which is one of my favorite books. 01:08:28.399 --> 01:08:30.159 It's called Forgery and Counterforgery. 01:08:30.239 --> 01:08:38.159 When I left to Israel, this book is so like painful for people who are fundamentalist evangelical Christians that when I left for Israel, I left my books at the house of some of my friends. 01:08:38.239 --> 01:08:39.840 Uh, they threw away this book for me. 01:08:41.039 --> 01:08:42.720 I had all of my notes, I lost them all. 01:08:42.880 --> 01:08:44.079 So picture this, right? 01:08:44.239 --> 01:08:52.800 Somebody finds fucking seven emails on a guy's done on a dead guy's laptop, plus a handful more that somebody else wrote pretending to be him. 01:08:52.960 --> 01:08:56.560 And then they build their whole life around what this guy really thought. 01:08:56.800 --> 01:08:58.000 That's what I was doing, man. 01:08:58.079 --> 01:08:59.439 That's what I built my whole life on. 01:08:59.600 --> 01:09:03.039 And the the thing that made this worse is the stuff that I said at the top, right? 01:09:03.119 --> 01:09:05.359 I knew every single apologetic answer, right? 01:09:05.439 --> 01:09:11.439 I actually wanted to cover the ontological argument, but I don't want this uh this uh this here to be uh just uh way, way, way too long. 01:09:11.600 --> 01:09:13.920 Uh, but I've been I've been debating this stuff for years. 01:09:14.000 --> 01:09:15.359 I was really, really good at it, right? 01:09:15.439 --> 01:09:18.399 The the answers, they just stopped being satisfying. 01:09:18.479 --> 01:09:23.199 And that's kind of like a lonely fucking feeling because the answers, they were the thing that I was good at. 01:09:23.359 --> 01:09:27.680 It's kind of like being the guy who knows the whole manual and then watching the machine break anyway. 01:09:27.760 --> 01:09:28.880 And then the canon, right? 01:09:28.960 --> 01:09:32.239 Like who decided what even is in the book, right? 01:09:32.319 --> 01:09:35.520 Uh around 140, we have Marcion who was a teacher. 01:09:35.680 --> 01:09:38.079 He wanted to throw out the Jewish scriptures entirely. 01:09:38.239 --> 01:09:44.079 He makes the first list that we know of, and the church partially builds uh its own list reacting to him. 01:09:44.159 --> 01:09:47.840 And then the Old Testament was built in response to the canon of the New Testament. 01:09:47.920 --> 01:09:51.199 So, no, the the Hebrew Bible did not come first, right? 01:09:51.279 --> 01:10:04.079 The the first list that matches our 27 books is exactly uh Athanasius, which is the festal letter 39 in 67, and Martin Luther in uh 1522, he still called James an epistle of straw. 01:10:04.239 --> 01:10:06.000 That shit wasn't handed out, man. 01:10:06.079 --> 01:10:07.439 It was it was hashed out. 01:10:07.600 --> 01:10:10.000 So there's um one more moment that I remember clearly. 01:10:10.079 --> 01:10:19.119 I'm I'm reading Mark 5, where Jesus he sends the demons into the pigs, and like 2,000 of them, they're running into a cliff in the sea, and a whole village economy has gone in one afternoon. 01:10:19.199 --> 01:10:20.800 And I just talked to God out loud. 01:10:20.960 --> 01:10:22.479 I said, dude, you know me. 01:10:22.560 --> 01:10:23.920 So I'm gonna be blunt as shit. 01:10:24.079 --> 01:10:24.880 I don't buy this. 01:10:24.960 --> 01:10:26.319 I actually don't buy most of it. 01:10:26.479 --> 01:10:28.880 There's nothing inside of me screaming that this is true. 01:10:29.119 --> 01:10:33.600 Back then, I believed faith was a

gift, like something that was given to you, something you can't manufacture. 01:10:33.680 --> 01:10:35.760 And I looked inside and I didn't have it. 01:10:35.920 --> 01:10:41.119 So so I said, Hey, if you want me to believe this, something's gotta change because I can't do that part myself and I'm open. 01:10:41.359 --> 01:10:42.079 You know that I'm open. 01:10:42.159 --> 01:10:43.760 I mean that, and I still mean it. 01:10:43.920 --> 01:10:47.840 I've I just I've never had an answer back that I could point to. 01:10:48.000 --> 01:10:50.880 But I'm but I was the person saying, like, God, this is a very one-sided relationship. 01:10:50.960 --> 01:10:53.920 I'm the only one talking, but if you want to talk, I'm open, and that's where I am today. 01:10:54.079 --> 01:11:01.840 Now, I'm I'm not the first guy that detects walked out the door, and the two guys that I think most about uh walking out the same door, they took opposite roads. 01:11:02.000 --> 01:11:04.399 And I gotten to know both of them, which still blows my mind. 01:11:04.560 --> 01:11:15.199 So we have uh uh Bart Ehrman goes to the Moody Institute in Wheaton, and then the Princeton's Theological Seminary, where he does his PhD under Bruce Metzger, who was basically the king of New Testament manuscripts. 01:11:15.359 --> 01:11:19.279 In the intro to misquoting Jesus in 2005, he tells this story, right? 01:11:19.439 --> 01:11:28.079 He writes a paper twisting himself into a pretzel over Mark 226, where Jesus says David ate the holy bread when Abiathar was the high priest. 01:11:28.239 --> 01:11:33.279 And then you go back in 1 Samuel 21, and the high priest was actually Ahimelech, right? 01:11:33.439 --> 01:11:36.399 Um his professor, he writes this one line on the paper. 01:11:36.560 --> 01:11:38.560 Hey, maybe Mark just made a mistake. 01:11:38.720 --> 01:11:41.520 That one line cracks everything open for him, right? 01:11:41.600 --> 01:11:48.239 But but the part that people get wrong about, Erman, the manuscripts, they killed his belief that the Bible was perfect, but that did not kill his faith. 01:11:48.399 --> 01:11:54.960 He continued being a liberal scholar and a bit uh and working at church and preaching and being a believer for multiple years, I believe over a decade. 01:11:55.119 --> 01:11:57.359 What actually ended his faith was the idea of suffering. 01:11:57.520 --> 01:12:02.399 He just couldn't square how a good God uh existed when there is so much pain in the world. 01:12:02.479 --> 01:12:05.439 And that is his book called God's Problem from 2008. 01:12:05.600 --> 01:12:13.359 And then there's Peter Enns, uh, the Old Testament scholar at a Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, the person that has the only God ordained podcasts, uh, right? 01:12:13.600 --> 01:12:16.079 He's the he's the person that I put I stole that from. 01:12:16.239 --> 01:12:18.079 Uh it's a super reformed place. 01:12:18.239 --> 01:12:22.319 In 2005, he writes uh inspiration and incarnation, and the argument is very simple. 01:12:22.560 --> 01:12:26.560 The Bible looks like an ancient Near Eastern book because that is exactly what it is. 01:12:26.720 --> 01:12:28.399 So that ends up costing his job. 01:12:28.560 --> 01:12:32.800 The joy the board ends up suspending him in 2008, and he's gone that same year. 01:12:33.039 --> 01:12:39.119 Reading the text carefully has a body count in seminaries, bro, and that scared the shit out of me back then. 01:12:39.199 --> 01:12:41.119 But then ends, he stays a Christian. 01:12:41.359 --> 01:12:44.000 Same evidence as Ehrman, but an opposite ending. 01:12:44.079 --> 01:12:46.000 So I am somewhere in between these two. 01:12:46.159 --> 01:12:48.319 Ermin on the text, ends on the attitude. 01:12:48.479 --> 01:12:51.359 I lost the certainty, but I still keep the wonder. 01:12:53.039 --> 01:12:57.359 So, what actually happened to me, philosophically speaking, in there, right? 01:12:57.439 --> 01:13:01.760 Because I I don't think it was just like, oh, smart guy reads a book and then loses his faith. 01:13:01.840 --> 01:13:05.199 Oh, like, oh yeah, if you actually study the Bible, you're gonna lose his faith. 01:13:05.279 --> 01:13:06.399 I really don't believe that, guys. 01:13:06.479 --> 01:13:08.880 I I I am not here to like bash people's faith. 01:13:09.039 --> 01:13:11.359 The guy who explained this best is Charles Taylor. 01:13:11.439 --> 01:13:22.720 Uh, he's a Canadian philosopher from McGill University, and his book, A Secular Age, 2007, Harvard University Press, almost 900 pages, built out of the Gifford lectures that he gave in Edinburgh in 1999. 01:13:22.800 --> 01:13:26.239 It's my favorite book of all time, and it's almost impossible to read. 01:13:26.319 --> 01:13:29.520 There are literally books written to help you just read this book. 01:13:29.680 --> 01:13:30.239 James K.A. 01:13:30.399 --> 01:13:36.079 Smith, How Not to Be Secular from 2014 is the one that I would hand you if you want to get familiar with this idea. 01:13:36.239 --> 01:13:38.159 Um, I'm not just name-dropping him, right? 01:13:38.239 --> 01:13:40.319 I actually published uh a paper on him. 01:13:40.479 --> 01:13:45.520 So just let me walk you through what he actually says because uh it's simpler than the page count makes it look. 01:13:45.680 --> 01:13:48.560 So Taylor, he opens this book with one big question. 01:13:48.720 --> 01:13:56.560 Which were like, why was it basically impossible not to believe in God in in in Western society and say like the year 1500? 01:13:56.640 --> 01:14:02.560 And by the year 2000, lots of us find like not believing very easily, even kind of like unavoidable. 01:14:02.720 --> 01:14:05.600 So he says the word secular, it can mean three different things. 01:14:05.760 --> 01:14:11.279 One, it can mean God gets pulled out of the public spaces, kind of like government and school and the economy are running without him. 01:14:11.600 --> 01:14:14.079 Two, fewer people believe

and go to church. 01:14:14.159 --> 01:14:18.960 And three, the one that he actually cares about are the conditions of belief, those things change. 01:14:19.039 --> 01:14:25.760 Um, so he's exploring this idea that belief it stops being the default that you breathe, and it becomes just one option among many. 01:14:25.840 --> 01:14:28.239 And for a lot of people, it is not the easiest one. 01:14:28.399 --> 01:14:30.720 That third sense is what the whole book is about. 01:14:30.960 --> 01:14:32.000 So, how did we get here? 01:14:32.079 --> 01:14:33.119 Is an interesting question, right? 01:14:33.199 --> 01:14:39.279 And in 1500, you live in what Taylor calls an enchanted world, and you've got what he calls the poor self. 01:14:39.439 --> 01:14:43.039 You got spirits, demons, curses, blessings, relics. 01:14:43.119 --> 01:14:44.800 They they can get inside of you. 01:14:44.880 --> 01:14:49.279 So your inner life is open to the forces outside of you. 01:14:49.439 --> 01:15:00.960 And then over centuries, the world it gets disenchanted, and you ended up with the buffered self, which is sealed off, where meaning it comes from inside your own head, and the forest is just the trees. 01:15:01.199 --> 01:15:08.000 And in all of us now, we live inside of what he calls the imminent frame, which is the natural order that makes sense on its own terms. 01:15:08.239 --> 01:15:10.720 No God is needed to run the weather, right? 01:15:10.800 --> 01:15:19.760 The the key move is he says that a frame can be open or closed, you can live in it and stay open to something beyond it, or you can treat it as sealed. 01:15:19.840 --> 01:15:23.279 And he makes this distinction between what is called a take and a spin. 01:15:23.439 --> 01:15:25.760 A take is a here's how I see this thing. 01:15:25.920 --> 01:15:27.600 I know other people see it differently. 01:15:27.760 --> 01:15:35.119 A spin is acting like your view is just obvious, and anybody who disagrees with it is naive, which is a lot of like evangelicals. 01:15:35.199 --> 01:15:40.640 So Taylor, he thinks the closer reading of the imminent frame, it usually travels as a spin. 01:15:40.800 --> 01:15:46.560 And then you got you get like what he calls the Nova effect, which is this explosion of options, belief, unbelief. 01:15:46.640 --> 01:15:49.439 You can be spiritual but non-religious, and every flavor in between. 01:15:49.600 --> 01:15:55.680 And when every option sits next to like fucking next hundreds of them, every one of them gets fragilized. 01:15:55.840 --> 01:15:56.720 That's his own word. 01:15:56.880 --> 01:16:06.479 You your your belief becomes fragile, not because somebody refuses it or refuted it, but because your neighbor's a decent person who believes something totally different, and you can feel that. 01:16:06.560 --> 01:16:10.000 And so you end up what with what is called caught cross-pressure. 01:16:10.159 --> 01:16:15.039 You get pulled towards the transcendent and you get pulled towards the purely

imminent at the same time. 01:16:15.119 --> 01:16:19.840 And even believers, they are a little bit unsure, and even the skeptics they get tugged back, right? 01:16:20.000 --> 01:16:22.079 And that's exactly where I fucking live. 01:16:22.239 --> 01:16:24.720 I didn't trade one certainty for another. 01:16:24.880 --> 01:16:27.279 I ended up feeling the pull from both sides. 01:16:27.439 --> 01:16:33.680 Now, my paper was called Epicuranism and Providential Deism, anti-wright and Charles Taylor on natural theology. 01:16:33.760 --> 01:16:36.239 It was published in Occursis uh in 2018. 01:16:36.319 --> 01:16:46.880 Uh, natural theology, if you've never heard the term, is a project of looking at the world, the order, the fine-tuning, the fact there's anything at all, and reasoning your way up to God without opening a Bible. 01:16:47.039 --> 01:16:49.439 All the stuff that I was debating in my apologetics for years. 01:16:49.600 --> 01:16:53.600 So I put two guys in a room who both think that project has a problem. 01:16:53.760 --> 01:16:58.399 So, first thing, the ancient world's like big question was not, is there a God? 01:16:58.560 --> 01:17:00.560 It was which ones, right? 01:17:00.720 --> 01:17:03.119 So polytheism was the opponent, not atheism. 01:17:03.279 --> 01:17:08.000 Larry Hurtado, he makes the case of this in the book called Destroyer of Gods in 2016. 01:17:08.159 --> 01:17:15.600 So when an apologist he pulls out Psalm 14 or 1 Peter 15, they're answering a modern question that these texts were not asking. 01:17:15.680 --> 01:17:22.319 And in Jock Derrida's own words, they are committing violence to the text, which I find extremely disrespectful to a religious text. 01:17:23.840 --> 01:17:25.279 And then comes my beloved N.T. 01:17:25.439 --> 01:17:25.680 Wright. 01:17:25.840 --> 01:17:28.079 Oh, how I wish I had taught I had learned Christianity from N. 01:17:28.159 --> 01:17:28.239 T. 01:17:28.319 --> 01:17:29.680 Wright, I would probably still be a Christian. 01:17:29.760 --> 01:17:40.000 So in his Gifford lectures in 2018 at the University of Aberdeen, discerning Darwin, uh, Wright, uh, he says that uh modern natural theology has given way too much to Epicureanism. 01:17:40.159 --> 01:17:46.479 So Epicurus, through the gods, like if they exist, they live way off somewhere and they don't mess with us, right? 01:17:46.640 --> 01:17:52.880 So Wright, he he uh he calls that a kind of proto-deism, and it splits the world into two floors. 01:17:53.119 --> 01:17:55.680 Nature is downstairs, God is upstairs. 01:17:55.840 --> 01:18:04.800 David Hume's uh problems of of miracles in 1748, he only works inside of that split because a miracle has to be God breaking in from upstairs. 01:18:04.960 --> 01:18:17.199 So when you try to prove Jesus is divine by pointing at these weird miracle events, you've bought the exact divide that John was trying to close, where Jesus himself is the place where heaven and earth meet. 01:18:17.359 --> 01:18:27.439

And and and at the end of all of the arguments, you get what Wright calls the omni-god of philosophers, the all-powerful, the all-knowing, and you don't get a suffering messiah anywhere on site. 01:18:27.520 --> 01:18:34.399 And Taylor, he's he this is where it gets good as hell because Taylor he has this category called providential deism. 01:18:34.640 --> 01:18:42.479 So God, he keeps the job of the creator and the sustainer, he keeps the machine running, but he loses the job of being the redeemer. 01:18:42.640 --> 01:18:50.960 In that world, God's like goals they happen to line up perfectly with what the modern West already wants, with order, with flourishing, with freedom. 01:18:51.119 --> 01:18:58.720 So Taylor puts it in a line that I cited that providence is stays general, particular providences and miracles are out of the picture. 01:18:58.880 --> 01:19:01.279 Now the disenchantment piece is wild, right? 01:19:01.439 --> 01:19:07.039 Once the church rejected what used to be called white magic, all magic got labeled evil. 01:19:07.119 --> 01:19:12.399 And over time, healing it stops being read as God doing something, and it just becomes medicine. 01:19:12.479 --> 01:19:19.520 So if you put these things together, natural theology it builds this fortress on exactly the ground the secularity handed to it. 01:19:19.680 --> 01:19:22.640 So the world is orderly, so you get the design argument. 01:19:22.800 --> 01:19:25.359 People recognize good and evil, so you get the moral argument. 01:19:25.439 --> 01:19:30.079 And I point out that the design and order arguments they got really popular only after the French Revolution. 01:19:30.159 --> 01:19:35.199 I wrote on this, and the big cosmological argument it moved to the front when physics was winning. 01:19:35.279 --> 01:19:44.479 So, so the god you prove at the end is like really smart and he's really big, a god who keeps the machine running uh and kind of just forgets that the guy died on the cross. 01:19:44.640 --> 01:19:49.199 And dude, like that's a fucking god to end up with if the whole religion started on the cross, right? 01:19:49.279 --> 01:19:50.079 Like, what the fuck? 01:19:50.239 --> 01:19:51.199 And then the turn, right? 01:19:51.359 --> 01:19:55.199 My 2018 conclusion said natural theology must continue. 01:19:55.359 --> 01:20:03.840 It's just like, like, that is just apologists making points of contacts with their own age, like Paul talking philosophy with the philosophers in Acts 17. 01:20:03.920 --> 01:20:04.800 And that was me then. 01:20:04.880 --> 01:20:05.840 I was still defending it. 01:20:05.920 --> 01:20:18.560 I was writing papers uh uh of uh uh like writing papers is exactly what the the part that uh of what took me out though, because the arguments they only work inside of a frame that the modern world is built into. 01:20:18.720 --> 01:20:23.520 And after like changing that frame and rejecting this frame entirely, I could not go back, right? 01:20:23.600 --> 01:20:27.279 And this is where Taylor walks right into my current industry. 01:20:27.439 --> 01:20:34.960 He says, People they're still chasing what he calls fullness, the sense that life could be richer and more real than it is right now, that they just shop for it. 01:20:35.119 --> 01:20:38.319 You know, 500 years ago, you had an ailment, you went to the priests. 01:20:38.479 --> 01:20:40.640 Now the people find salvation, right? 01:20:40.720 --> 01:20:46.000 Which is the the literally a solution to their ailments through yoga, through enhancement, through a gut protocol. 01:20:46.159 --> 01:20:47.840 Like I'm not dunking on wellness here. 01:20:47.920 --> 01:20:51.600 The the salvation job, it didn't disappear, it just changed buildings. 01:20:51.680 --> 01:20:54.479 And I'll come back to that later because it's basically my entire career. 01:20:54.640 --> 01:21:00.960 The the other guy in my head um through that was going through all of this was Dale Martin, a New Testament scholar who taught at Yale. 01:21:01.119 --> 01:21:04.399 Fuck, I wish I had been born earlier so that I could have studied with him. 01:21:04.560 --> 01:21:10.159 He's the one that I are that I agree with the most, and he's got two lines that I basically build my entire brain around. 01:21:10.319 --> 01:21:14.319 One is that theology is our talk about our talk about God. 01:21:14.479 --> 01:21:17.439 Like nobody's got a direct line to talk about God. 01:21:17.600 --> 01:21:21.359 If there is a being that has to exist, humans are not gonna reach it. 01:21:21.439 --> 01:21:24.640 So all theology is done horizontally, it's never vertical. 01:21:24.800 --> 01:21:27.840 It's people talking about how other people talk about God. 01:21:28.000 --> 01:21:37.680 And the other line, which I quoted in my paper on Raimoris and Strauss, the the two Germans who basically kicked off the hunt for the historical Jesus, is hey, texts they don't mean. 01:21:38.000 --> 01:21:39.680 People mean with texts. 01:21:39.840 --> 01:21:42.960 So that is what the side-by-side gospel reading showed to me, right? 01:21:43.119 --> 01:21:46.479 So that is why I say I don't care much about theology, guys. 01:21:46.640 --> 01:21:48.079 I care about religious studies. 01:21:48.239 --> 01:21:50.800 Jesus died for our sins, that is a theological claim. 01:21:50.880 --> 01:21:52.319 I got no way of testing that. 01:21:52.560 --> 01:21:55.680 Jesus was executed by Rome as a sedition threat. 01:21:55.840 --> 01:21:58.399 That is a historical claim that I can actually work with. 01:22:02.960 --> 01:22:06.960 So, with all of this going on in my head, I actually don't quit religion. 01:22:07.119 --> 01:22:07.920 I go deeper. 01:22:08.079 --> 01:22:17.920 So I did my master's in ancient philology at uh Paulus, the Jerusalem Institute for Languages and Humanities, uh, and I was the receiver of their Plato Scholarship for Academic Excellence. 01:22:18.079 --> 01:22:22.000 I was studying under rabbis and I was reading

this stuff in the place where it actually came from. 01:22:22.159 --> 01:22:26.319 I learned Koine Greek and classical Greek, and I learned uh a modern Greek as well. 01:22:26.479 --> 01:22:47.600 I learned Biblical Hebrew as a living language through the Biblical Languages Center and the Con Conversational Koine Institute, and I studied Coptic, Syriac, Modern Hebrew, and I did an academic internship at the the the uh uh WF Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, uh, which actually like it was like when we were about to start the project, it got canceled out because of COVID, right? 01:22:47.680 --> 01:22:59.359 So my my zone here is uh the the period from the Maccabees, so the the revolt in 167 BC that uh the Hanukkah comes from, all the way to the fall of the temple in 70 AD. 01:22:59.439 --> 01:23:00.880 That's literally all that I know about, right? 01:23:00.960 --> 01:23:06.000 So that's the world that Jesus lived in, and it's still what I pick up late at nights to read for fun. 01:23:06.159 --> 01:23:10.479 A lot of it was during COVID, so it's like Greek lactin and Coptic all fucking day long. 01:23:10.560 --> 01:23:15.039 And I I want to say this clearly I wouldn't have been there without the people who supported me. 01:23:15.199 --> 01:23:22.079 Like 10 to 20 people, some gave one, some people funded specific translation resources that I made for pastors and Bible scholars. 01:23:22.319 --> 01:23:29.600 There's no fucking way that I would have made it without them, and I'm extremely grateful for them, even though a lot of them absolutely despise my guts because I don't end up agreeing with them. 01:23:29.680 --> 01:23:32.880 But, anyways, um, Jesus, Jesus did something that I didn't expect. 01:23:33.039 --> 01:23:37.920 So people tell you, like, hey, new uh new Christians should start with the Gospel of John because it speaks our language. 01:23:38.000 --> 01:23:39.119 It sounds very similar, right? 01:23:39.279 --> 01:23:40.960 Dude, are you fucking serious? 01:23:41.439 --> 01:23:43.840 John speaks the Jewish language from beginning to end. 01:23:44.079 --> 01:23:49.279 You only think this is simple because you don't understand the world around this book, right? 01:23:49.359 --> 01:24:07.359 The papers that I wrote there were on uh John's Passover timing on Deuteronomy 32 and the Sons of God, on the section of the Talmud, the big rabbinic law collection on fasting, on the archaeology of Galilee, where the dirt of is basically full of ritual baths and stone vessels, because under Jewish purity law, stone could not become impure. 01:24:07.520 --> 01:24:10.560 So being there, it didn't make the gospels less Jewish to me. 01:24:10.640 --> 01:24:12.560 It made them more Jewish because that's what they are. 01:24:12.720 --> 01:24:16.239 And meanwhile, guys, I was hustling like crazy to survive. 01:24:16.399 --> 01:24:24.880 I'm teaching for uh the Hebrew university, which uh I was the only person who could teach biblical

um and classical Hebrew as a spoken language. 01:24:24.960 --> 01:24:26.079 I never use translation. 01:24:26.159 --> 01:24:32.960 I I can teach anyone any language that they want without relying on translation, without them having to study just via the natural method. 01:24:33.119 --> 01:24:39.279 Um, and um on the side, I also have my own business going with Itaki to teach English, Portuguese, and Spanish. 01:24:39.439 --> 01:24:41.840 Um, and I'm also teaching modern and ancient Hebrew. 01:24:41.920 --> 01:24:48.960 So I'm teaching five languages while I'm doing grad school, plus I have a side job at the university at the university itself. 01:24:49.119 --> 01:24:52.960 I was basically working for them as an editorial uh uh um uh person. 01:24:53.279 --> 01:25:04.399 Um but as you gotta understand that I got uh accepted at Duke University for a full ride because I wanted to study uh the sexuality and the power of language in the ancient world, specifically around Jesus. 01:25:04.479 --> 01:25:11.439 Uh I wanted to study with Jennifer Nust um and um uh and with uh uh another Jesus scholar, Mark Goodacre, that was there. 01:25:11.520 --> 01:25:26.560 Um and when the um even even with the max package that they had, like stipend and all, because I I got the the biggest scholarship that you could possibly get, uh, even though I failed the GRE, but my promise in the religious world was so big that they were like, you don't need to know anything, please just come study with us. 01:25:26.720 --> 01:25:29.840 Um I was really happy I still have the the email somewhere saved. 01:25:29.920 --> 01:25:37.359 So when I ran the numbers on everything that I would need to do, I would still walk out of this program with about like 100k of debt from Duke alone, right? 01:25:37.439 --> 01:25:38.399 Even if I was working. 01:25:38.560 --> 01:25:40.079 But money was not the only thing, right? 01:25:40.159 --> 01:25:47.439 In the humanities, what you're doing is you're competing with people who are like doing fucking summer programs at Harvard when they were 14. 01:25:47.600 --> 01:25:53.279 And I was studying at a fucking at a fucking public school in the in a in a minuscule city in Brazil. 01:25:53.439 --> 01:25:58.079 So I figured my only shot was to outwork these motherfuckers, and I published like a fucking maniac. 01:25:58.239 --> 01:26:00.800 And now you understand why I work the way that I do, right? 01:26:00.960 --> 01:26:13.039 I presented at the Southeast Um Regional Conference at Georgia and at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Meeting of the American Academy of Religion at Princeton Theological Seminary, and that AAR paper was on Matthew as a takedown of Rome. 01:26:13.119 --> 01:26:19.199 It was 48 pages of single space citations pulled out of actual books in the library before AI. 01:26:19.279 --> 01:26:23.439 So when I hear people saying, like, oh Nathan, he just has like so many resources, no one can read that much. 01:26:23.520 --> 01:26:26.079 I'm like, you don't know what I'm fucking made of. 01:26:26.239 --> 01:26:36.479 So I presented um uh at uh international conferences as well, and I got published in peer-reviewed journals in the curses uh in philosophy and mandragora at the University Metodista de Sao Paulo. 01:26:36.560 --> 01:26:44.479 Uh, but but you start noticing that most of what you're going to produce is just another line on a CV, and then you repurpose it five different ways to make five more. 01:26:44.640 --> 01:26:47.359 That's just the cracks in the ivory tower, if you want to read that book. 01:26:47.520 --> 01:26:50.079 That is literally what it's talking about, the problem that we have in academia. 01:26:50.239 --> 01:26:57.760 At the Münster Manuscript Project, the dissertation everybody was excited about was literally about a dot on the corner of medieval pages. 01:26:57.840 --> 01:27:02.079 And the conclusion was that scribes were just dabbing the pan to like test it. 01:27:02.399 --> 01:27:04.079 Earth-shading stuff, bro, right? 01:27:04.159 --> 01:27:05.840 So here's the moment that did it, right? 01:27:05.920 --> 01:27:11.840 Uh, I would make a spreadsheet and I was comparing every grad school option against what the jobs actually pay. 01:27:12.000 --> 01:27:19.920 And I'm scrolling job listings, and there's this one job at Oxford to be the head of uh the ethics of the chair of the ethics and philosophy department. 01:27:20.079 --> 01:27:26.079 It's a job listing, and I'm looking at like no fucking offer, and it pays 50,000 pounds a year. 01:27:26.159 --> 01:27:27.920 And I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? 01:27:28.000 --> 01:27:42.800 It's a I after the I've I've been studying for like eight years, and I've got at least 10 fucking more years of research because now you need the PhD, then a postdoc, then the experience, the publications, flying yourself to conferences, all out of pocket. 01:27:42.960 --> 01:27:50.000 And um, you add all of those up on top of the Duke expenses, and I'm looking at like 200k in debt in 10 years of my life. 01:27:50.159 --> 01:27:58.079 Literally, I would have finished and I would be looking for jobs nowadays, nowadays, guys, um, for for assistantships, not even full time jobs. 01:27:58.159 --> 01:27:59.760 I would still have to have another job on the side. 01:28:00.159 --> 01:28:05.600 And just to make 50 grand a year, I I started working as a server and I was making 75. 01:28:05.920 --> 01:28:07.520 Like, what the fuck are you talking about? 01:28:07.680 --> 01:28:21.039 Now, so, but I got burnt out um so badly uh in studying this, which uh you you know I went so hard, and now uh thinking out loud, you guys are like, No, that I'm dealing with burnout right now, and you're probably like, Yeah, bro, you go very hard on fucking everything, bro. 01:28:21.119 --> 01:28:23.520 Uh yeah, you that's a good way to like run yourself drive. 01:28:23.600 --> 01:28:26.880 So um um, but I was so upset that I didn't even want to go to my

graduation. 01:28:26.960 --> 01:28:32.800 I I fought with my wife, and I uh I deeply regret that because I was a dick to her, and she was the most loving. 01:28:32.880 --> 01:28:35.760 She is the most loving and most supportive person that I have in my life. 01:28:36.000 --> 01:28:37.600 Uh, she was there for everything for me. 01:28:37.760 --> 01:28:41.359 When I couldn't work, she was working her fucking ass off in miserable jobs. 01:28:41.520 --> 01:28:42.560 She was doing everything she could. 01:28:42.640 --> 01:28:47.279 She was selling her own stuff to be able to pay for my own studies, and I was a dick to her and for dad. 01:28:47.439 --> 01:28:48.319 Baby, I'm sorry. 01:28:48.479 --> 01:28:50.560 I I really do uh apologize for that. 01:28:50.640 --> 01:28:55.199 And I uh have asked for forgiveness before, but I still beat myself up for it. 01:28:55.439 --> 01:28:59.920 But in any case, uh the whole program, the the graduation, it was it was online because of COVID. 01:29:00.079 --> 01:29:02.720 And I we actually could have gone to Israel, but we had a cat. 01:29:02.880 --> 01:29:06.560 Uh, we still have the cat, and the cat uh was the problem with the visas. 01:29:06.640 --> 01:29:11.279 We couldn't get the cat figured out, so we ended up losing the window, and I ended up never making it to Israel. 01:29:11.520 --> 01:29:15.119 So I'm uh my wife is asking me, like, why am I so upset? 01:29:15.199 --> 01:29:16.479 And I'm just done, guys. 01:29:16.720 --> 01:29:18.800 I don't care about any of this shit anymore. 01:29:18.880 --> 01:29:20.640 I'm so fucking fried. 01:29:20.800 --> 01:29:26.239 So I finished and I literally grab my guns and I go straight to the range and I got into competitive shooting. 01:29:26.319 --> 01:29:29.279 And for a really long time, I never looked into that stuff again. 01:29:29.439 --> 01:29:40.560 Uh, Daniel Katarine uh has a book called Leaving Academia, and he's got the stat that only about 1.2% of people who start a humanities PhD, they end up with a tenure track at a leading school. 01:29:40.720 --> 01:29:46.239 But the line that hit harder was about being scared you don't know who you are if you stop being an academic. 01:29:46.399 --> 01:29:47.840 So that part really got to me, right? 01:29:47.920 --> 01:29:51.680 I already lost my faith identity, and now I was losing my scholar identity. 01:29:51.840 --> 01:29:53.920 And then the coaching kind of snuck up on me, right? 01:29:54.000 --> 01:29:59.039 After the masters, I was burnt out as hell when I was finally looking at my own blood work and my own hormones were trash. 01:29:59.119 --> 01:30:00.000 So I started fixing them. 01:30:00.079 --> 01:30:03.359 And I'll never actually stop studying the body, even in the religion years. 01:30:03.520 --> 01:30:05.439 I just stepped out of the world, so to speak. 01:30:05.600 --> 01:30:16.960 So people had been asking me to take, like, uh what to take, and like when when uh like all all ever since I was a skinny kid at the gym in Brazil, and by the shooting days, uh the guys were asking me about cognitive enhancement now. 01:30:17.119 --> 01:30:23.760 So I was the first person to bring this into our space, and then I uh one day it clicked that, like, hey, I'd basically been coaching people for free for like 15 years. 01:30:23.920 --> 01:30:26.720 So I messaged a bunch of people and I started doing it for real. 01:30:26.880 --> 01:30:28.000 So, do I miss this? 01:30:28.159 --> 01:30:29.840 Guys, this is something that I miss deeply. 01:30:29.920 --> 01:30:43.039 I went to the Museum of the Bible and I was looking, I walked into this space that is like basically supposed to be ancient Palestine, it's supposed to be like a mock-up of Israel, and I'm I'm looking into it, I'm crying my eyeballs out because I miss this so fucking much. 01:30:43.119 --> 01:30:50.880 And it's uh I'm making this video, I don't care if people are gonna watch it or not, it's for me because uh it just it just hurts me so much to not have this in my life anymore. 01:30:51.039 --> 01:30:54.239 But sadly, um it's not where I can focus my energy at this point. 01:30:54.399 --> 01:30:59.600 I I still get stupidly excited about like seeing a new variant reading, but academia? 01:30:59.840 --> 01:31:01.279 Fuck academia, guys. 01:31:01.520 --> 01:31:10.000 The the weird thing that Southeastern Baptist School taught me philosophy as learning how to think, and that is exactly what I do now with my clients and compounds. 01:31:10.079 --> 01:31:16.800 So the scholar didn't actually die, he just changed jobs, and the certainty thing followed me into the gym, which I did not see coming. 01:31:17.039 --> 01:31:20.079 A good framework, it can become a religion really, really fast. 01:31:20.239 --> 01:31:22.880 So people started running this thing like a checklist, right? 01:31:23.039 --> 01:31:26.159 Do this, now do that, and then they shut their brains off entirely. 01:31:26.319 --> 01:31:28.560 And that is usually when shit goes sideways, right? 01:31:28.640 --> 01:31:31.119 It's the same move that I watch happen to the Bible. 01:31:31.279 --> 01:31:35.199 Somebody's gonna write something flexible, and then two generations later, it becomes law. 01:31:35.359 --> 01:31:37.600 So I tell clients, I teach you protocols, right? 01:31:37.680 --> 01:31:39.439 I don't give you protocols. 01:31:39.600 --> 01:31:45.119 Every compound has to earn its spot the way that a sentence has to earn its spot in an academic paper. 01:31:45.279 --> 01:31:47.680 If it doesn't support the thesis, it's fucking out. 01:31:47.840 --> 01:31:54.239 Losing certainty in the text made me allergic to certainty in a protocol, and that has made me a better coach. 01:31:54.479 --> 01:31:58.159 And in my religious life, I was never the monastic type. 01:31:58.319 --> 01:32:01.520 I always gravitated towards the missionary thing, like just talking. 01:32:01.680 --> 01:32:03.359 Bodybuilding is monastic as fuck, right? 01:32:03.439

--> 01:32:07.359 You got silence, you got ritual, repetition, pain, and I'm still the missionary. 01:32:07.439 --> 01:32:08.399 I'm still talking. 01:32:08.640 --> 01:32:16.319 So the kid who wanted to go preach in the hardest places on earth ended up sitting with people about their bodies and their fear and their labs every single week. 01:32:16.479 --> 01:32:19.840 Which brings me to the question that everybody wants answer after all of this. 01:32:20.079 --> 01:32:26.319 If it's not Jesus that I was ready to die for in that hill, then who is he to me now? 01:32:27.840 --> 01:32:29.840 So I'm officially out of academia. 01:32:29.920 --> 01:32:31.279 I am uh officially coaching, right? 01:32:31.439 --> 01:32:35.520 And the question that I get more than any other is like, okay, bro, like you read your way out of this. 01:32:35.600 --> 01:32:37.439 Uh, so who is Jesus to you now? 01:32:37.600 --> 01:32:39.600 Now, I I always start in the same place. 01:32:39.840 --> 01:32:41.039 Jesus is a real guy. 01:32:41.199 --> 01:32:45.840 There's literally not a single fucking scholar that believes that Jesus did not exist. 01:32:45.920 --> 01:32:47.520 Okay, this is this is a fact. 01:32:47.760 --> 01:32:55.359 Basically, every serious scholar says that he existed, and that includes Bart Ehrman, who is that agnostic that still wrote a book in 2012, did Jesus exist? 01:32:55.840 --> 01:33:04.079 Just to say yes, obviously, as a response to this other fucking scholar that just makes shit up all the fucking time and doesn't use papers or actual critical thinking. 01:33:04.239 --> 01:33:08.640 But the the the list that historians will sign off on is very short. 01:33:08.800 --> 01:33:11.119 It's uh it's uh what we have is for Jesus. 01:33:11.279 --> 01:33:14.000 Jesus is essentially a Jew from Galilee. 01:33:14.159 --> 01:33:24.880 He was baptized by John, he gathered followers, he was known as being a healer and an exorcist, and he made a scene at the temple of the pa uh doing Passover, and Rome crucified him. 01:33:25.119 --> 01:33:30.000 Everything past this point are where the fights start, and they get nasty as shit. 01:33:30.239 --> 01:33:32.960 So the first fight was what kind of prophet was Jesus? 01:33:33.119 --> 01:33:44.239 So Albert Schweitzer, he wrote the quest for the his order of the historical Jesus in 1906, and he showed that basically every scholar for well over a hundred years had found that Jesus who looked like himself, right? 01:33:44.399 --> 01:33:50.159 Then they uh he said that the real guy is way stranger, he is not like us, he is an apocalyptic prophet. 01:33:50.319 --> 01:33:56.000 That just means he thought God was about to flip the whole world over, like very soon, and in his own lifetime. 01:33:56.159 --> 01:33:59.439 We started changing the meaning of that later because that never fucking happened. 01:33:59.520 --> 01:34:04.560 So the later books they start saying, Oh, this like no one knows the time, it's gonna happen later, and all this type of shit, right? 01:34:04.720 --> 01:34:12.079 Uh, Mark 9:1, he says that some standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom coming with power. 01:34:12.239 --> 01:34:16.800 Mark 13:30 says, This generation will not pass away until all these things happen. 01:34:16.960 --> 01:34:24.079 And that's the view that I landed closest to, even though I think this is prophetic language that's saying this is what happened at the crucifixion at the resurrection. 01:34:24.319 --> 01:34:32.560 The coming of the Son of Man is uh is a is a is an argument that's coming from a citation of the book of Daniel, and the coming of the Son of Man is a perspective that's coming from the heavens. 01:34:32.720 --> 01:34:36.479 So it's about the sun coming to the heavens, it's not about the sun coming to the earth. 01:34:36.640 --> 01:34:39.920 The s the coming of the son of man literally is the ascension, right? 01:34:40.000 --> 01:34:41.680 So that has already happened, right? 01:34:41.840 --> 01:34:43.520 That is the the theological reading. 01:34:43.680 --> 01:34:46.319 Um now the the that but that is not Schwartz's view. 01:34:46.479 --> 01:34:48.239 Uh so that's the view that I land closest with. 01:34:48.319 --> 01:34:48.720 Uh, with E. 01:34:48.880 --> 01:34:48.960 P. 01:34:49.039 --> 01:34:50.800 Sanders, Dale Allison, and Bart Ehrman. 01:34:50.960 --> 01:34:52.239 The logic's pretty simple, right? 01:34:52.399 --> 01:34:54.720 Those predictions, they just did not come true. 01:34:54.880 --> 01:34:55.920 The world kept going. 01:34:56.000 --> 01:35:01.680 And the early church was very embarrassed by that because nobody invents a prediction that's already failed. 01:35:01.760 --> 01:35:04.399 So the awkward stuff is probably the old stuff. 01:35:04.560 --> 01:35:06.079 Like, why the fuck would you make that up? 01:35:06.159 --> 01:35:09.039 And so John Meyer, he calls this the criteria of embarrassment. 01:35:09.119 --> 01:35:10.159 But here's the caveat. 01:35:10.239 --> 01:35:13.920 Um, uh, Chris Keith and Anthony Ladone, they edited a volume in 2012. 01:35:14.079 --> 01:35:17.760 They were arguing that those criteria are way shakier than people thought. 01:35:17.920 --> 01:35:21.199 So I treat the criteria as a nudge, but not as a lie detector. 01:35:21.359 --> 01:35:27.680 And uh Anthony Wright, who I read like crazy in my evangelical days and I argue with in my own papers, he says no. 01:35:27.840 --> 01:35:40.079 In in Jesus and the Victory of God in 1996, Wright uh Wright's Jesus, he sees himself as Israel's Messiah, the one whom through through through whom God is finally going to bring back Zion, right? 01:35:40.159 --> 01:35:49.359 So all of the sun-going dark language is just a metaphor for a political earthquake, which for Wright is Rome wrecking Jerusalem in the year of 70 AD. 01:35:49.520 --> 01:35:52.399 Um, then we have the Jesus Seminarch, uh, they came from the other side. 01:35:52.479 --> 01:35:59.680 We have

Robert Funk, John Dominic Crosson, which is uh an atheist that believes in God, a guy who believes that Jesus was and resurrected, who believes in Jesus. 01:35:59.760 --> 01:36:10.159 We have Marcus Borg, we have a room full of scholars that are voting on every saying with colored beads, like red for what Jesus definitely said, and then uh black for like no way he definitely didn't say that. 01:36:10.399 --> 01:36:21.279 Only one in five got red or pink, meaning he said or he probably said it in the five gospels in 1993, and their Jesus is basically a sage with parables, and there's no end world at all. 01:36:21.520 --> 01:36:28.479 George Tyrell, he had a line in 1909 about looking down uh a deep well for Jesus and just seeing your own face at the bottom. 01:36:28.640 --> 01:36:32.800 So I hold my own view of Jesus very loosely too because I'm not immune to this shit. 01:36:32.960 --> 01:36:34.640 So why did Rome kill Jesus? 01:36:34.720 --> 01:36:38.239 I wrote a paper on exactly that Roman execution and Jewish burials. 01:36:38.479 --> 01:36:42.239 Crucifixion was done for slaves, for rebels, and for nobodies. 01:36:42.399 --> 01:36:44.640 And the point was it's a billboard, right? 01:36:44.880 --> 01:36:49.520 So Martin Hangles, uh, his little book on crucifixion in 1977 is brutal on this. 01:36:49.680 --> 01:37:01.920 We've well we've even got one guy's uh heel bone, uh Yehohanan, uh, that was found in um 1968 at uh Givatha Mitvah Mivhtar uh in Jerusalem uh with the with the nail still in it, right? 01:37:02.000 --> 01:37:05.359 It was bent at the tip, probably from hitting the uh a knot in the wood. 01:37:05.520 --> 01:37:07.279 So uh they they couldn't pull this out. 01:37:07.439 --> 01:37:09.920 But um here's the puzzle that fucks with me, right? 01:37:10.079 --> 01:37:18.239 If Rome thought that Jesus was leading an army, then the guys that that that would have been hanging with him, they they they would have been arrested as well. 01:37:18.319 --> 01:37:22.239 They they would be like the the ones hanging out would have been hung as well, but they were not. 01:37:22.399 --> 01:37:27.920 So Paula Frederickson, she wrote a book around that idea, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews in 1999. 01:37:28.000 --> 01:37:31.600 Uh Pilate, uh he knew that he wasn't an armed threat. 01:37:31.760 --> 01:37:35.760 It was the Passover crowds hailing him that made him dangerous. 01:37:35.920 --> 01:37:44.000 So he Jesus died just simply because he was a troublemaker, which is serious enough for a cross, but it's small enough that nobody rounded up his followers to die as well. 01:37:44.159 --> 01:37:45.600 But the politics never left me. 01:37:46.000 --> 01:37:48.880 Son of God was Augustus' first title, right? 01:37:48.960 --> 01:37:53.439 Uh uh the he he was he called himself son of the divine Julius. 01:37:53.600 --> 01:38:01.520 And the coin in in render unto Caesar was most likely a Tiberius denarius, which says the son of the divine Augustus, right

in it. 01:38:01.680 --> 01:38:10.479 There's an inscription from Prien and uh in what's now Turkey from 9 BC that calls Augustus' birthday the beginning of the good news, Ewangelia, right? 01:38:10.560 --> 01:38:12.720 The the the same Greek word for gospel. 01:38:12.880 --> 01:38:24.000 So when um when when Luke's angels they announce good news, uh a savior and peace on earth while Augustus is on the throne, Luke is literally stealing the emperor's ad copy, bro. 01:38:24.239 --> 01:38:26.000 So Matthew is my guido, right? 01:38:26.079 --> 01:38:33.439 That AAR paper, the American Academy of Religion, was called Imperial Critiques in the Gospel of Matthew. 01:38:33.600 --> 01:38:37.359 And I leaned very hard on Warren Carter's Matthew and Empire from 2001. 01:38:37.600 --> 01:38:40.319 So Matthew he builds this Jesus as the new Moses. 01:38:40.640 --> 01:38:48.800 It's a it's a baby king that is escaping a tyrant who's killing boys, and Herod, he gets called a king right before the magi called Jesus King. 01:38:49.039 --> 01:38:50.880 So, like, who's the real king here? 01:38:51.039 --> 01:38:53.039 So emperors they claim they could heal. 01:38:53.279 --> 01:38:58.000 Tacitus he even says Vespasian, he healed a man with but with uh uh with spit. 01:38:58.159 --> 01:39:06.000 So a Roman centurion going uh to a Galilean peasant for his sixth servant instead of to Caesar, like that story is a shot at Rome, right? 01:39:06.159 --> 01:39:14.720 So, what my younger papers missed is that Matthew, he also goes very hard at the religious leaders and has like, um, his blood be upon us and our children. 01:39:14.960 --> 01:39:20.560 Dagah used against Jews for centuries, and you gotta read that as a fight within Judaism. 01:39:20.640 --> 01:39:25.119 That is not a fight of the Gentiles writing on it, but it is something new because that does not happen in the Gospel of Mark. 01:39:25.199 --> 01:39:27.039 That was an addition that was added later on. 01:39:27.119 --> 01:39:30.479 Because and you read the Gospel of John, the fault is 100% of the Jews. 01:39:30.640 --> 01:39:40.560 So basically, it moves the fault, moves from being Pilate and the Roman Empire with a little bit of influence from the Jewish uh community, all just the religious leaders, not the Jewish people. 01:39:40.640 --> 01:39:41.680 Please don't confuse the two. 01:39:41.760 --> 01:39:47.279 Um, and it moves all the way to being a hundred percent the Jews themselves, not even the religious leaders, just the fucking Jews. 01:39:47.359 --> 01:39:53.520 Kind of like how people nowadays lost all nuance because in the Tanyahu and the IDF, they now say all the Jews as well. 01:39:53.760 --> 01:39:56.159 Because Jesus was not a Christian, right? 01:39:56.399 --> 01:39:58.640 He was doing uh uh he was he was a Jew. 01:39:58.800 --> 01:40:06.079 He was doing Jewish stuff in a Jewish world, in a synagogue, in a temple, Passover, tassels on his clothing, he was arguing the Torah from the inside. 01:40:06.239 --> 01:40:12.000 Uh Geza Vermes, he wrote that uh he wrote that uh Jesus, the Jew in 1973, on exactly that, right? 01:40:12.159 --> 01:40:18.399 Next to uh Galilean holy men like Hanina Bendoza, who heals a rabbi's son from a distance in the Talmud. 01:40:18.720 --> 01:40:22.079 Nobody called these guys gods, not a single fucking person, right? 01:40:22.159 --> 01:40:25.520 Apollonius of Tiana was not God, even though he was resurrected as well. 01:40:25.680 --> 01:40:31.520 So the miracles were not proof of divinity, they were just uh a picture of the kingdom that he thought was coming. 01:40:31.680 --> 01:40:33.359 And I used to argue the opposite, right? 01:40:33.439 --> 01:40:45.359 In 2018, when I was an evangelical, I gave a talk called Rethinking the Deity of Jesus, and I come close with uh um like come known, like uh uh I close with basically like come known God-made flesh, right? 01:40:45.439 --> 01:40:47.279 I wouldn't say that ending nowadays, right? 01:40:47.439 --> 01:40:55.840 Erman's uh How Jesus Became God in 2014, he says that the early followers of Jesus, they thought God exalted Jesus at the resurrection, right? 01:40:56.000 --> 01:41:01.439 Romans 1, Acts 2, and the pre-existent God-made flesh of John, that comes later, right? 01:41:01.600 --> 01:41:06.880 Larry Hurtaro and Richard Bachum, they they push back and they say like they worshiped him super fucking early. 01:41:07.039 --> 01:41:10.399 And then we have Daniel Kirks, a man attested by God in 2016. 01:41:10.560 --> 01:41:12.159 He made the point that killed it for me. 01:41:12.319 --> 01:41:18.399 If Jesus does everything because he is divine, then there's not much reason for the rest of us regular humans to try to act like him. 01:41:18.560 --> 01:41:20.079 And that wrecks me. 01:41:20.239 --> 01:41:23.119 Like that is like who ate with, who he ate with, right? 01:41:23.199 --> 01:41:24.159 Who he hung out with. 01:41:24.319 --> 01:41:28.079 It's kids, is the sick, is the poor, is the people that everybody wanted gone. 01:41:28.239 --> 01:41:31.119 He doesn't give he fucking hates the religious leaders and the religious people. 01:41:31.359 --> 01:41:34.000 His enemies call him a glutton and a drunk. 01:41:34.159 --> 01:41:41.039 You don't get that, that, that, you don't get called that unless you are really fucking drunk and you are really a fucking glutton, right? 01:41:41.119 --> 01:41:44.479 A friend he is called a friend of tax collectors and of sinners. 01:41:44.640 --> 01:41:46.159 So Jesus literally has two disciples. 01:41:46.239 --> 01:41:55.520 He has Matthew, which is a tax collector for the Roman Empire, and he has Peter, who's uh who's uh who is basically a zealot who is trying to overthrow the Roman Empire. 01:41:55.760 --> 01:41:56.800 Jesus holds both. 01:41:56.960 --> 01:42:05.199 And I find it so interesting that a lot of people are gonna listen to what I have to say and they're gonna just part ways with me because they cannot do the

same thing Jesus did because they do not follow Jesus. 01:42:05.439 --> 01:42:10.479 Jesus holds both the communists, so to speak, and the capitalists, the the anarchists, so to speak, together. 01:42:10.640 --> 01:42:13.199 Both of them are followers of Christ, and no one doubts that. 01:42:13.359 --> 01:42:17.359 And scholars think that's real because no follower would have made this up. 01:42:17.520 --> 01:42:24.319 So as a coach, I kind of love the idea that that the son of God's reputation is that he eats too much with the wrong people. 01:42:24.560 --> 01:42:26.560 So that's where theosis comes in, right? 01:42:26.640 --> 01:42:28.640 The idea that humans can become like God. 01:42:28.720 --> 01:42:31.600 And it's the idea that I love from most of the old church, dude. 01:42:31.760 --> 01:42:35.600 2 Peter 1:4, it talks about partakers of the divine nature. 01:42:35.680 --> 01:42:42.239 Uh Irenaeus around 180 says, God became what we are to bring us to be what he is. 01:42:42.399 --> 01:42:46.399 And Athanasius, he says, God became human so that we might become God. 01:42:46.560 --> 01:42:51.039 So the way that I read it now, you don't get closer to the divine by escaping being human. 01:42:51.199 --> 01:42:58.399 You get there by being more human, by loving the kids, loving the elderly, loving the weak, and caring for the immigrants and the poor, right? 01:42:58.560 --> 01:43:01.359 Matthew 25, I was a stranger and you took me in. 01:43:01.439 --> 01:43:02.960 That's his line, that's not mine, right? 01:43:03.119 --> 01:43:09.680 I don't call myself a Christian, and I would still say Jesus is the most interesting fucking character that has ever lived. 01:43:10.640 --> 01:43:12.640 So who the fuck is God? 01:43:12.800 --> 01:43:16.319 Remember Dale Martin, that theology is talk about or talk about God. 01:43:16.399 --> 01:43:20.079 So whatever I say next is me talking about how people talk about God. 01:43:20.239 --> 01:43:24.800 I I kind of believe in everything and I believe in nothing, which sounds like bullshit, but just hear me out for a second. 01:43:24.880 --> 01:43:28.000 Uh, this is as old as uh as old of a move. 01:43:28.079 --> 01:43:32.239 It's called apophatic theology, uh, from the Greek apophysis, which is unsaying. 01:43:32.319 --> 01:43:35.920 Uh Pseudo-Dionysius was a Syrian monk writing in around 500. 01:43:36.000 --> 01:43:39.520 He says anything you affirm about God, you also have to deny. 01:43:39.680 --> 01:43:44.720 And Maimonides, he does a Jewish version of this in the Guide for the Perplex around uh 1190. 01:43:44.800 --> 01:43:48.560 Uh, like God is good, but not good in the way your grandma is good. 01:43:48.720 --> 01:43:52.399 And then we have Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology, Volume 1, in 1951. 01:43:52.479 --> 01:43:56.960 He says, God is not a being at all, he's not even the biggest being, God is the ground of being. 01:43:57.039 --> 01:44:03.760 Hell, you even say God does not exist, meaning God isn't one more item in the inventory of things that exist. 01:44:03.840 --> 01:44:11.920 And in The Courage to Be in 1952, he talks about the God above God who shows up when the god of theism has disappeared. 01:44:12.000 --> 01:44:14.880 And I've got that highlighted, but it's because it's kind of like where I live now. 01:44:15.039 --> 01:44:17.039 And then there's the blind guys and the elephants, right? 01:44:17.119 --> 01:44:23.920 One is gonna grab the leg and is gonna say it's a post, the other one is gonna grab the tail, is gonna say it's a broom, and the other one is gonna grab the ear, is gonna say it's a basket. 01:44:24.079 --> 01:44:32.720 The oldest version of this comes from Yudana, which is part of the earliest Buddhist scriptures, and the the Buddha, it tells it to mock teachers of that are fighting over their one piece. 01:44:32.880 --> 01:44:34.960 So that's basically John Hicks' whole thing, right? 01:44:35.039 --> 01:44:36.640 And uh his story is kind of mine. 01:44:36.720 --> 01:44:49.199 He had an evangelical conversion as a law student, he went all in, and then when he was living in Birmingham, next to Muslims, next to Sikhs, next to Hindus, who were obviously good people, the only like only we are a right thing, it stopped working for him. 01:44:49.359 --> 01:44:56.479 So, in uh interpret in an interpretation of religion in 1989, there's an ultimate reality that he calls the real, the capital R. 01:44:56.640 --> 01:45:00.239 And every religion is human, is a cultural response to it. 01:45:00.399 --> 01:45:06.159 The the test is whether it moves you from being all about yourself towards going at like living for something bigger. 01:45:06.319 --> 01:45:09.039 And he says the universe is religiously ambiguous, right? 01:45:09.119 --> 01:45:13.520 You can look at the same week and you can see God, or you can see a layoff, and both are rational. 01:45:13.680 --> 01:45:20.159 Now, the catch is uh Leslie's new beginning, she nailed this in the gospel uh in a pluralist society in 1989. 01:45:20.319 --> 01:45:24.960 So the guy telling the elephant story is uh acting kind of like he can see the whole elephant. 01:45:25.199 --> 01:45:26.960 Pluralism also got a claim, right? 01:45:27.039 --> 01:45:29.039 So it doesn't get a free pass from either. 01:45:29.199 --> 01:45:32.399 Ever like even my not knowing is a position. 01:45:32.479 --> 01:45:36.479 And the God of the Bible is way weirder than the shit that you learn in Sunday school. 01:45:36.640 --> 01:45:38.960 Genesis 1 doesn't start from nothing, by the way, right? 01:45:39.119 --> 01:45:40.239 The water is already there. 01:45:40.399 --> 01:45:41.840 Tohu vavohu, right? 01:45:41.920 --> 01:45:42.640 Formless and empty. 01:45:44.479 --> 01:45:52.560 It's uh is basically a linguistic cousin of Tiamat, which is the sea monster Marduk that splits the world in the Babylonian and Numa Elish. 01:45:52.880 --> 01:45:55.680 So creation out of nothing, that is a later idea. 01:45:55.840 -->

01:45:58.479 We get a hint of that in 2 Maccabees 728. 01:45:58.560 --> 01:46:02.319 So the God of Genesis 1, he's literally just bringing order out of chaos. 01:46:02.479 --> 01:46:04.880 That's like what you do every day with your body, right? 01:46:05.039 --> 01:46:09.439 You don't make it from scratch, you just organize the mess, and the mess comes back every single morning. 01:46:09.600 --> 01:46:12.640 And then we have the divine council, which is my favorite part, Psalm 82. 01:46:12.800 --> 01:46:20.239 God stands in the council of El and tells the gods, I say you are gods, sons of the most high, but you'll die like humans. 01:46:20.479 --> 01:46:35.920 In 1928, a farmer's plow hit a tomb near uh Ras Shamra in Syria, and uh that's uh how we found the Ugarit, which uh are those tabas that have El sitting in the assembly of gods, while his wife, Athirat, has 20 sons, uh, sorry, seven sons. 01:46:36.079 --> 01:46:50.479 Then uh Deuteronomy 32, which I wrote an exam on in Jerusalem, uh, word by word through the Hebrew, um, one of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls uh copies of Deuteronomy says the most high divided the nations by the number of the sons of God. 01:46:50.560 --> 01:46:58.239 Uh and the standard Hebrew later uh later reads sons of Israel, so 70 sons of El, 70 nations in Genesis 10, right? 01:46:58.319 --> 01:46:59.039 That's how you get it. 01:46:59.119 --> 01:47:03.279 So the older reading of that verse, it looks a lot like a council of gods. 01:47:03.439 --> 01:47:07.680 And the later standard text, they read like somebody started to cleaning this stuff. 01:47:07.840 --> 01:47:09.600 And then there's evil because it's a big one, right? 01:47:09.680 --> 01:47:11.920 The oldest version of this is get pins by epicurus. 01:47:12.159 --> 01:47:15.760 So if God is willing to stop evil but not able, he's not all powerful. 01:47:15.920 --> 01:47:18.079 If he's able but not willing, he's not all good. 01:47:18.239 --> 01:47:20.319 If he's both, where the fuck is evil coming from? 01:47:20.560 --> 01:47:24.159 Jill Mackey said that makes God and evil logically incompatible. 01:47:24.239 --> 01:47:33.520 Uh Alvin Plantinga, he answered, uh, which is where I get my idea of warrant and uh and where I've been pushing back on people who have warranted beliefs uh when it comes to all of the stuff in our optimization place. 01:47:33.760 --> 01:47:35.920 There's a little red book that you definitely read. 01:47:36.000 --> 01:47:38.159 Uh he answered with a free will defense, right? 01:47:38.239 --> 01:47:43.039 That a a world with freely, like really free creatures, it might have to include evil. 01:47:43.199 --> 01:47:45.840 And a lot of atheist philosophers, they actually grant him that. 01:47:45.920 --> 01:47:53.760 Um and then William Rowitt, he he brings the evidential version of this in 1979, and that one has like a pretty big like uh bite to it, right? 01:47:53.920 --> 01:47:58.800 A fawn burns in a forest fire, he suffers for days, nobody ever

sees it. 01:47:58.960 --> 01:48:01.520 Like, whose free will is that protecting? 01:48:01.680 --> 01:48:04.239 Now, the Christian answers, some of those are smart as shit. 01:48:04.319 --> 01:48:14.079 Christian uh Augustine, he spent about nine years in Manichae, uh, which is a uh a religion that made evil its own dark substance, and then he got it flipped out in uh confessions book seven. 01:48:14.239 --> 01:48:17.439 Evil is not a thing, it's brivatio boni, right? 01:48:17.520 --> 01:48:18.960 It's good with a hole in it. 01:48:19.119 --> 01:48:27.439 I I love that if the devil exists and God is the only source of existence, something in the devil is not bad at all, because at least he exists. 01:48:27.600 --> 01:48:30.720 But the Bible fights him, Isaiah 45, 7, right? 01:48:30.800 --> 01:48:32.560 I make peace and I create evil. 01:48:32.640 --> 01:48:42.159 And then we have Hick, Evil and the Love and the God of Love, in 1966, that was borrowing from Irenaeus and uh the 1819 Keats letter, the veil of soul making. 01:48:42.319 --> 01:48:50.479 The world is not a how it's not just a fucking hotel for pets, it's a gym for our souls because you can't build courage where there is no danger. 01:48:50.560 --> 01:48:53.199 And Erman comes back brutally with this in the God's problem. 01:48:53.520 --> 01:48:57.439 He says, Eh, what about the baby who dies before it ever gets to make a fucking soul? 01:48:57.680 --> 01:49:02.079 Right, he's going to say that God answers evil with the cross, not with a theory. 01:49:02.159 --> 01:49:04.079 There is no syllogism for you to learn, right? 01:49:04.239 --> 01:49:06.000 I don't think anybody has solved this problem. 01:49:06.159 --> 01:49:13.359 My own margin note at AJ Soboda's After Doubt says, like, so as long as you like God, you can dislike everything else. 01:49:13.600 --> 01:49:19.920 So God gets the credit for the job offer, but he gets zero blame for the layoff, and that double standard I cannot get past. 01:49:20.079 --> 01:49:22.000 Now, a couple more things before I let God go. 01:49:22.159 --> 01:49:29.119 Um, in 2021, uh, a paper on Phylum in the Gospel of John, I put a footnote saying, like, hey, I personally prefer day for God. 01:49:29.199 --> 01:49:32.319 Since Genesis, he makes God male and female. 01:49:32.399 --> 01:49:33.600 That is the image of God, right? 01:49:33.680 --> 01:49:36.560 And Isaiah, he has comfort you like a mother. 01:49:36.720 --> 01:49:39.039 Um, you you you call God he, that's totally fine. 01:49:39.119 --> 01:49:40.479 I'm not policing anyone's prayer. 01:49:40.560 --> 01:49:42.479 And I've got experiences that I can't explain, right? 01:49:42.560 --> 01:49:49.840 The heel at the retreat, and um, the the one time being around somebody who was supposedly possessed by a demon, where what I saw, I've got no scientific explanation for. 01:49:50.000 --> 01:49:55.439 My wife asked me what I thought it was, and I told her, I I don't think that's something an MRI is gonna

catch. 01:49:55.520 --> 01:49:59.760 But uh but a scientist saying science proves God doesn't exist, it's kind of like saying food. 01:50:00.399 --> 01:50:02.000 Proves that exercise is useless. 01:50:02.079 --> 01:50:03.439 You're using the wrong field, buddy. 01:50:03.520 --> 01:50:05.199 You don't have the tools to measure this claim. 01:50:05.279 --> 01:50:09.840 And a pastor saying that my experience proved his doctrine is the same mistake coming from the other side. 01:50:10.000 --> 01:50:11.039 Same as the hill, right? 01:50:11.119 --> 01:50:14.159 Something happened, but what happened is still a mystery to me. 01:50:14.319 --> 01:50:15.600 So who's God to me? 01:50:15.760 --> 01:50:19.600 God to me is a big question mark that I'm still trying to see the edges of. 01:50:20.479 --> 01:50:24.239 And this right here is where my two lives they smash into each other. 01:50:24.399 --> 01:50:27.520 So go back to Taylor's providential deism for a second, right? 01:50:27.600 --> 01:50:31.279 The God whose job is order, it's flourishing, it's freedom, right? 01:50:31.439 --> 01:50:36.640 Once God's whole job is your flourishing, you can drop God and keep the flourishing. 01:50:36.800 --> 01:50:37.920 That is optimization, right? 01:50:38.000 --> 01:50:39.439 That's my whole fucking industry right there. 01:50:39.520 --> 01:50:40.560 He's got another word for that. 01:50:40.640 --> 01:50:41.840 It's called excarnation. 01:50:42.000 --> 01:50:46.640 So Christianity became a set of correct ideas in your head and lost the body. 01:50:46.800 --> 01:50:56.319 So the fasting, the feasts, the kneelings, the pilgrimage, the architecture, the good-looking churches, the candles, the paintings, the art, it all gets stripped out. 01:50:56.479 --> 01:50:58.319 And I filled that gap even as a believer. 01:50:58.399 --> 01:51:06.800 In 2019, I wrote an article for the Intersect Project called Soul, Body, Mind, Three Ways to Honor God this semester, because I already thought that the body belonged in the faith. 01:51:06.960 --> 01:51:11.279 So people went looking for the body somewhere else and they found it in the gym and in a gut protocol. 01:51:11.359 --> 01:51:14.560 And since the 1960s, he says we're in the age of authenticity now. 01:51:14.640 --> 01:51:16.079 We're spiritual, but we're not religious. 01:51:16.159 --> 01:51:17.279 And look at us, right? 01:51:17.359 --> 01:51:19.439 We have gut protocols, those are conversion stories. 01:51:19.520 --> 01:51:22.319 You have a before and after, I was lost and now I'm found, right? 01:51:22.399 --> 01:51:23.840 Peptides, they are sacraments. 01:51:24.079 --> 01:51:26.560 Labs are confessions, coaches are priests. 01:51:26.720 --> 01:51:28.399 I'm basically a fucking priest, man. 01:51:28.479 --> 01:51:31.039 Except my confession booth is a blood panel. 01:51:31.199 --> 01:51:34.000 So does any of it like do something to your biology? 01:51:34.239 --> 01:51:36.000 I think the data is real and is observational. 01:51:36.079 --> 01:51:37.279 So I don't observe this shit. 01:51:37.359 --> 01:51:43.279 The big one comes from a Harvard group in 2016, who followed about 174,000 nurses for about 16 years. 01:51:43.439 --> 01:51:50.079 And the women going to services more than once a week, they had a third lower death from any cause than the women who never went to services. 01:51:50.239 --> 01:52:03.039 Uh, the same group later found weekly attendance went with uh 68% lower risk of what they call cell deaths of despair, like suicide, overdose, drinking yourself to death uh in women healthcare workers, and 33% lower in men. 01:52:03.199 --> 01:52:05.920 So just zoom out to the relationships in general. 01:52:06.000 --> 01:52:11.439 And Julian Hold Lundstead, uh, she pulled 148 studies, around 300,000 people. 01:52:11.520 --> 01:52:16.479 Uh and it saw a strong relationship come about 50% better odds of staying alive. 01:52:16.640 --> 01:52:17.680 But it flips as well, right? 01:52:17.840 --> 01:52:26.640 Pargament found that uh the the more strongly sick older patients wondered whether God had abandoned them, the higher their risk of dying over the next two years. 01:52:26.800 --> 01:52:30.000 About 28% higher for every step up that question. 01:52:30.079 --> 01:52:41.199 And even awe shows up in your blood, by the way, because Stellar and Keltner, they found that it was the strongest prediction of a lower IL6, which is one of your main inflammatory signals out of all of the positive emotions that they measured. 01:52:41.359 --> 01:52:45.199 So, church people they drink less, they smoke less, they have more people checking on them. 01:52:45.279 --> 01:52:50.720 So I would bet that a big chunk of that effect is just a room full of people who would notice if you disappeared. 01:52:50.880 --> 01:52:54.479 So I went to Brazil once, uh, no drinking, no supplements, garbage sleep, right? 01:52:54.720 --> 01:52:58.079 I was I was actually drinking, I was doing drugs, my blood work came back beautifully. 01:52:58.159 --> 01:53:02.159 And I'm convinced uh a big part of that was being surrounded by people I love. 01:53:02.319 --> 01:53:06.720 You can't out pharmacology loneliness, it doesn't give a shit about what's on your stack. 01:53:06.800 --> 01:53:09.760 And longevity is where our space goes full religion, by the way. 01:53:09.920 --> 01:53:14.640 Ernest Becker, he won the Pulitzer for the denial of death in 1973. 01:53:14.720 --> 01:53:19.600 And his argument is that a huge chunk of human culture is just an immortality project. 01:53:19.760 --> 01:53:25.760 You get empires, families, you know, religions, bodies, so we don't have to feel how temporary we are. 01:53:25.920 --> 01:53:35.680 A protocol that promises to beat aging is partially a deal with that fear, like strict rituals, measured purity, a promised future where death is going to lose, right? 01:53:35.760 --> 01:53:38.079 That's eschatology with a blood panel. 01:53:38.159 --> 01:53:39.600 And the Bible

is very weird here. 01:53:39.760 --> 01:53:45.199 Genesis 3, uh, God, He blocks the tree of life with a flaming sword so the humans will not live forever. 01:53:45.359 --> 01:53:52.880 Psalm 90 says, Teach us to number our days so you will get to the heart of wisdom, which is the opposite of numbering your days to add more, right? 01:53:52.960 --> 01:53:56.640 And the Bible's big hope is resurrection, which assumes you fucking die. 01:53:56.800 --> 01:54:03.520 So living longer is half of my job, but if the whole point of your life is not dying, your blood work is your fucking God. 01:54:03.680 --> 01:54:05.199 So how do I hold the body? 01:54:05.279 --> 01:54:06.960 I hold a body like a cathedral. 01:54:07.039 --> 01:54:08.720 It is beautiful, it took forever. 01:54:08.800 --> 01:54:12.000 And the people who built it, they knew that it would crumble one day. 01:54:12.159 --> 01:54:17.119 You you build it not because you know that your body's gonna last forever, you build it exactly because it will not. 01:54:17.359 --> 01:54:20.720 A physique is a conversation with decay. 01:54:20.880 --> 01:54:23.840 You're not beating decay and you can't beat time with hormones. 01:54:24.000 --> 01:54:26.640 When you come off, you just have your own hormones again. 01:54:26.800 --> 01:54:31.520 And the body that gets glorified in Paul is Jesus' body, glorified by what? 01:54:31.680 --> 01:54:32.479 By being broken. 01:54:32.560 --> 01:54:34.800 We have Philippians 2, the concept of kinosis. 01:54:34.880 --> 01:54:39.520 He emptied himself and he took the form of a slave, like an early hymn older than the letters. 01:54:39.600 --> 01:54:43.760 And Ernest Lmeyer, he uh argued that in 1928 already. 01:54:43.840 --> 01:54:46.800 Uh, so glory after emptying, never instead of it. 01:54:46.880 --> 01:54:49.279 And weirdly, that is contest prep, right? 01:54:49.359 --> 01:54:51.279 That's the last weeks before a bodybuilding show. 01:54:51.359 --> 01:54:54.079 You're stripping every calorie and you're standing there with nothing. 01:54:54.239 --> 01:54:59.279 And then enhancement, which to me is an existential process with the physiology living inside of it. 01:54:59.439 --> 01:55:04.640 So you get bigger and and uh uh and and people they kind of let you go first at the grocery store, right? 01:55:04.800 --> 01:55:08.479 Uh and your identity and like how everybody treats you, it changes with it. 01:55:08.560 --> 01:55:12.800 So I've asked out loud, like, how do I serve my partner when my estrogen is crushed? 01:55:12.880 --> 01:55:17.520 Because when guys on gear, they knock the estrogen too low, the mood of libido, they go with it, right? 01:55:17.680 --> 01:55:20.159 And then there's a little bit of playing God in it, right? 01:55:20.319 --> 01:55:23.119 Michael Sanders, the case against perfection in 2007. 01:55:23.279 --> 01:55:27.600 He says the problem is not cheating, it's the problem is losing the sense that your body is a gift. 01:55:27.680 --> 01:55:30.960 And he calls that opposite uh higher hyperagency, right? 01:55:31.039 --> 01:55:34.640 Which basically uh the urge to control everything about yourself. 01:55:34.880 --> 01:55:36.000 I don't fully buy it. 01:55:36.079 --> 01:55:41.359 I think you can enhance and still feel the gift of life, but I think this is the best argument against what I do. 01:55:41.520 --> 01:55:44.399 And I think that more people in our space should have to face this argument. 01:55:44.560 --> 01:55:48.239 And that's the tension that I feel the most, guys, because optimization is about control. 01:55:48.479 --> 01:55:52.479 Faith, the way the believers talk about, the way that the Bible talks about, is about surrender. 01:55:52.720 --> 01:55:58.479 Proverbs three, lean not in your understanding, or the Yiddish line, man plans and God laughs. 01:55:58.640 --> 01:56:00.640 A lot of my clients' anxiety, they live in that gap. 01:56:00.720 --> 01:56:04.640 They track their sleep, their glucose, their HRV, and the tracking becomes the anxiety. 01:56:04.800 --> 01:56:06.640 Real surrender is not a lyric, right? 01:56:06.720 --> 01:56:12.319 I've I've I I've basically had God break me into a million pieces, and it's the most painful thing that I have ever done. 01:56:12.479 --> 01:56:19.439 And then Ecclesiastes, the where the where the teacher gets gold and vineyards and every pleasure that he calls hevel, which is vapor, it's a breath. 01:56:19.520 --> 01:56:23.279 I wrote a paper on how it fights Deuteronomy's obey and get blessed uh approach. 01:56:23.439 --> 01:56:29.279 And his answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no, which is the most accurate thing ever said about a protocol. 01:56:31.039 --> 01:56:33.039 So, guys, where do I land? 01:56:33.199 --> 01:56:34.640 Because people ask me this question all the time. 01:56:34.800 --> 01:56:39.199 Look, I'm I'm not a Christian, and I think it's freeing because I can talk all of this in a very free way. 01:56:39.359 --> 01:56:43.680 I can talk as a critical scholar who loves religion and is obsessed with historical Jesus. 01:56:43.840 --> 01:56:46.079 And these guys, they aren't just names on a shelf for me. 01:56:46.239 --> 01:56:47.359 Erman left, right? 01:56:47.439 --> 01:56:52.079 He calls himself an agnostic and he's clearly at peace with it, and he spent his whole life teaching these texts. 01:56:52.319 --> 01:56:55.600 Ends he stayed and he changed how he holds the text, right? 01:56:55.760 --> 01:56:57.279 He stayed in the middle of the tradition. 01:56:57.520 --> 01:56:58.720 Hick, he went wider. 01:56:58.880 --> 01:57:04.399 Like I said, Ehrman is on the text, ends is on the attitude, and on God, I went wide like Hick, right? 01:57:04.479 --> 01:57:06.720 So I'm somewhere between Erman and Hick. 01:57:06.800 --> 01:57:11.680 And the the kid on that hill would be horrified as shit about this stuff, and that's totally fine. 01:57:11.840 --> 01:57:15.359 Uh ends, he wrote a book called The Sin of Certainty in 2016.

01:57:15.439 --> 01:57:19.039 And his point is that the Bible itself runs on trust, not certainty. 01:57:19.199 --> 01:57:21.680 Job, he yells at God and he gets the win. 01:57:21.840 --> 01:57:25.680 And the Psalms, they're full of guys who are going, Where are you, God? 01:57:25.760 --> 01:57:30.960 And Ecclesiastes says, you literally, like, hey, I can't figure God out, and I still got in. 01:57:31.039 --> 01:57:36.640 So reading Ermine's Forged, I I wrote that the evangelical push for hard realism is just unattainable. 01:57:36.720 --> 01:57:38.800 And it's also harmful for people that are curious. 01:57:38.960 --> 01:57:40.800 Critical realism might be the way. 01:57:40.960 --> 01:57:43.359 So that is the real world out there, so to speak, right? 01:57:43.439 --> 01:57:51.520 And you just uh uh you the the the you just have to kind of like see it through your own lens so that whatever you know, it should always stay a little provisional. 01:57:51.680 --> 01:57:53.760 Frank Schaefer, he got the simplest version of this. 01:57:53.840 --> 01:57:56.640 He says, I believe and I don't believe at the same time. 01:57:56.800 --> 01:58:02.399 Kind of like uh the dad in Mark 9 with the sixth son, I believe, so help my unbelief both at the same time. 01:58:02.560 --> 01:58:07.199 And the mo that's most people that I know, as a matter of fact, they are inside of the church and they're also out. 01:58:07.359 --> 01:58:09.600 Um, here's the the textual thing that gets me every time. 01:58:09.760 --> 01:58:12.319 Mark's gospel in our old two biggest Bibles, right? 01:58:12.399 --> 01:58:16.159 The Syniatics and Vitacanus from the 300s, it ends in Mark 16, 8. 01:58:16.319 --> 01:58:21.119 The woman literally run from the empty tomb and they say nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. 01:58:21.279 --> 01:58:24.159 In Greek, it ends with the word for God, right? 01:58:24.239 --> 01:58:28.640 In Vaticanus, he leaves a blank column after it, like the scribe knew that something was up. 01:58:28.800 --> 01:58:29.680 There's no appearance. 01:58:29.760 --> 01:58:33.279 The story just ends open on fear, and the reader has to finish. 01:58:33.439 --> 01:58:34.960 There is no resurrection in Mark. 01:58:35.039 --> 01:58:35.760 So that's me, bro. 01:58:35.840 --> 01:58:37.439 That's my whole fucking story in one verse. 01:58:37.600 --> 01:58:40.800 And whatever the fuck you believe, the people who walked away are not the enemy for me. 01:58:40.880 --> 01:58:43.680 Like I said, mine wasn't sin, it wasn't a grudge. 01:58:43.760 --> 01:58:44.880 I just read the freaking book. 01:58:45.039 --> 01:58:48.239 Erman's got a line, he says, Faith is not a matter of smarts. 01:58:48.399 --> 01:58:51.760 Believing doesn't make you dumb, and leaving doesn't make you the smart one. 01:58:51.920 --> 01:59:04.319 And if you've uh like if you if if what you've got is working for you, it's making your marriage better, and it's making your life better and to make the lives of other people better, including the fucking immigrants, the poor and the destitutes, your piece of shit, then go for it, right? 01:59:04.399 --> 01:59:06.079 I'm not here to pull anybody out of it. 01:59:06.239 --> 01:59:10.640 So, what what would I tell the kid on the hill that was crying, saying, like, God help me? 01:59:10.800 --> 01:59:14.000 I would tell him, hey, your experience is real and it's okay that it changed, right? 01:59:14.079 --> 01:59:18.640 What what he felt that night, I'm not gonna explain away, and it's got him reading Greek and Hebrew, which got me here. 01:59:18.800 --> 01:59:22.079 Rob Bell, he has a line for looking back without trashing your old self. 01:59:22.239 --> 01:59:25.760 It's less right versus wrong and more like earlier versus later. 01:59:25.920 --> 01:59:28.079 The kid on that hill wasn't wrong, he was just earlier. 01:59:28.239 --> 01:59:33.600 And uh to the guy crying over Paul at two in the morning, I would say, hey, losing certainty does not mean you lost everything. 01:59:33.760 --> 01:59:45.039 Genesis 32, guys, uh Jacob, he wrestles with uh uh with this like all night with this man or or with God, the text actually doesn't say, and he's renamed Israel, the one who struggled with God and he limps away. 01:59:45.199 --> 01:59:48.000 Uh uh a whole people named after a fight. 01:59:48.159 --> 01:59:49.359 I don't think that's a bug, dude. 01:59:49.439 --> 01:59:52.159 So if you're new here, uh that's uh that's who's coaching you, right? 01:59:52.239 --> 02:00:06.079 Is a guy who went deep into the Bible and walked out uh and never stopped loving it, which is the the same way that I read a panel or I read a study, it's all the way down to the original language and the primary sources, and holding what I find with an open hand and always ready to change my mind. 02:00:06.239 --> 02:00:10.239 And if somebody sent you this to uh figure out where I come from now and now you know, right? 02:00:10.319 --> 02:00:13.199 And the verse that I would leave you with is Ecclesiastes 9. 02:00:13.520 --> 02:00:26.560 Go eat your bread with joy, drink your wine with a merry heart, enjoy life with the people you love, all the days of your vapor of a life, because whatever that's that's it's true about God, uh that part really holds. 02:00:26.640 --> 02:00:31.439 So drop a comment and tell me where you guys are at, uh or or out of like uh somewhere in between. 02:00:31.520 --> 02:00:33.520 Uh, you know, uh what you think about all this. 02:00:33.600 --> 02:00:34.640 I'm curious to hear your thoughts. 02:00:34.720 --> 02:00:36.960 And uh also subscribe because I got more coming on this. 02:00:37.199 --> 02:00:44.399 I'm not sure if I'm gonna make more videos on uh on religion, but uh, I just wanted to leave this out so that everyone can have an idea of uh who I am. 02:00:44.479 --> 02:00:45.680 And uh this is my story. 02:00:45.840 --> 02:00:46.399 I love you guys. 02:00:46.560 --> 02:00:47.680 Talk to you soon.