Ep. 238 - Dr. Bart Ehrman "Love Thy Stranger" pt. 1

[00:00:00] And, I mean, just to take immigration as an example, I'm not proposing a particular immigration policy at all. Like I'm not taking, you know, but I am saying that if somebody says that they're a Bible believer and they believe in getting rid of all of immigrants because they don't belong here, the Bible is quite clear on this. That in Israel, loving your neighbors yourself, as I said earlier, means fellow Israelites.

[00:00:23] But in the Bible, it explicitly states that anybody emigrates into Israel. Any immigrant is to be treated as an Israelite, the same as the citizens. And so that's the biblical view. So I'm not saying that we should have governmental policies based on biblical views. What I'm saying is that if you say that you're a believer in the Bible and you're trying to follow its teachings, you should follow its teachings instead of making up your own teachings and then saying the Bible supports it.

[00:00:54] So take a break. Welcome to The Deconstructionists. I'm your host, John Williamson. And today on The Deconstructionists, I am joined by one of the most well-known and widely respected New Testament scholars in the world and someone who is a first time guest and somebody I've wanted to have on for a while, Dr. Bart Ehrman. And if you spent any time exploring questions around the Bible, early Christianity or the historical Jesus, there's a good chance you've come across his work.

[00:01:22] He is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of numerous bestselling books that have helped bring critical scholarship into the public conversation in a really accessible way. In this two-part conversation, we're diving into his latest book that should be out right about now called Love Thy Stranger, How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West.

[00:01:46] In part one, we focus on the central premise of the book, what Jesus actually taught about loving others, especially outsiders, and how those teachings stood in contrast to the moral frameworks of the ancient world. And we also explore how those ideas took root, how they spread, and why they were so radically different in their original context. This is a fascinating conversation that I was thrilled to have that challenges a lot of assumptions, not just about Christianity, but about the moral foundations of the Western world itself.

[00:02:16] So we'll get into that in just a second, just as some housekeeping things as usual. If you would like to support, there's three really great ways to do that. We are still an independent podcast that I record out of my little recording studio in my house. So if you want to support, and if you can, there are a couple ways to do that. We have a brand new Patreon with all sorts of new content on there, ad-free, commercial-free episodes that are uncut, the full hour-plus long interviews.

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[00:03:35] Got lots more content coming your way in the coming weeks, but without further ado, let's get to part one of my conversation with Dr. Bart Ehrman. All right, welcome to the podcast. I'm very excited to have Dr. Bart Ehrman on. It's been a long time I've been a fan of your work, but first time on the podcast. So thank you so much for coming on today.

[00:04:05] Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Absolutely. So you've got an interesting and I think very timely book, especially in terms of what's going on today. We find in society and in especially politics, which seems to be very heavily married to religion these days, especially on the right. And so your new book, Love Thy Stranger, one of the things that you point out is you talk about this idea, this phrase, I guess, that's been floating around lately,

[00:04:32] especially in certain Christian circles, this phrase toxic empathy. This idea that somehow caring too much or caring for maybe the wrong people can actually be a problem. That empathy, if misdirected, can weaken a society or that compassion has limits. So what is it that, you know, what would be your response to that and what ultimately drove you to write this book? The book, the subtitle of the book is How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West.

[00:04:59] And the argument in the book is that, well, that's what the argument is. The basic argument of the book is that before Jesus, there certainly was the sense that you ought to help other people. You know, it's in our DNA. We wouldn't survive as a species if we didn't help each other. It was in Greek and Roman moral philosophy at the time of Jesus. It's within Jewish teachings. So everybody agreed you need to help others.

[00:05:24] But what I argue in my book is that the distinctive thing about Jesus' teaching is that he stressed that when, within his tradition, when it says love your neighbor as yourself, for Jesus, your neighbor didn't mean just the guy who lives next door, the woman up the street. And it didn't just mean a person who was socially or biologically related to you or in the same community or, you know, it was actually anybody in need. That's who your neighbor is.

[00:05:51] And Jesus taught that you need to help those who were in need, regardless of their connection to you. I think fears of toxic empathy somewhat run counter to that view. I would say. Yeah. So talk a little bit about that, because I think that's something that I know that on this podcast specifically, because, you know, we're very interested in the original languages of the Bible, the original Hebrew and Greek, and really taking the text seriously.

[00:06:17] That is a piece of pushback we get quite frequently, is that, you know, those who take a more progressive view, for lack of a better term, aren't taking the Bible seriously. But when we point back to the original words, how do we, you know, how do we derive that understanding out of the original languages? Well, you know, in this case, it's not—look, I'm, you know, I'm a Greek scholar. This is my primary research language. And in graduate school, of course, I had to learn Hebrew and Latin and Coptic. I mean, I learned a bunch of ancient languages.

[00:06:46] And so I am a big fan on ancient languages and have taught them for many, especially Greek, for, you know, 40 years. So I'm big on that. But I'm just saying, you can just read the English Bible and see that it is quite—it is unambiguous what the teachings of the English Bible are. The big problem with Jesus is knowing what actually he said. So this is a problem scholars have, because there are clearly sayings of Jesus that are put on his lips by later followers.

[00:07:16] And the task of scholarship, one of the tasks, is to differentiate between the things his followers made him say and the things he actually did say. But once you get back to the things he actually said, it is clear as day that what he thinks, that the important thing for people in his generation to do is to get right with God because the day of judgment was coming very soon. If they're not with God, they're going to be destroyed, whereas people who are right with God are going to enter into God's kingdom. And he says what that entails.

[00:07:45] It entails helping people in need. It's not believing in him. It's not having the right theology. It's not even being Jewish. It's helping people in need. You find this repeatedly throughout the Gospels. And so I'm not championing that in the sense that I'm a Christian and, you know, I'm a Christian apologist saying that Jesus got it right. I'm a historian who's not a Christian. I am saying that's what Jesus said.

[00:08:10] So if anybody wants to say that people who say that are not following the Bible closely because, like, they don't read Greek or something? What? No, it's just insane. No, of course, that's what the Bible says. Yeah. And, like, I like to tell people who kind of push back on that. I said, you know, and he didn't follow with a list of conditions after he said, love your neighbor, you know? No, the only question is, who is your neighbor? So, because there is that episode. It's in the Gospel, only in the Gospel of Luke.

[00:08:39] But because, you know, the Hebrew Bible says, Leviticus 19, 18 says, you should love your neighbor as yourself. When you read it in Leviticus, there, of course, people don't even read these passages. They just quote them. But if you actually read the very same verse, it indicates who the neighbor is for Leviticus, which is those among your people. And so Leviticus is indicating that you need to love fellow Israelites. And by love, it doesn't mean, like, to have a feeling or an emotion. It means how you treat somebody.

[00:09:05] And you have to treat fellow Israelites, even if they're strangers, even if you don't know them, the way you would treat yourself. Which means, you know, if you're hungry, you feed yourself. And if you don't have shelter, you find shelter. And, you know, you provide for yourself for what you need. And so if there's another Israelite who doesn't have that, you need to provide for them. So that's Leviticus. But Jesus tells this thing in Luke. And a teacher of the law says, what's the top law? Love your neighbor as yourself.

[00:09:34] And the guy wants to justify himself. And so that's what the text actually says. So he says, well, who's my neighbor? Yeah, hoping it's the guy next door. And then Jesus tells a parable of the Good Samaritan, where it turns out that the hated enemy is your neighbor. And you need to take care of even your hated enemy who's the other. And different from you and your religion, your nationality, your ethnicity, that's the person you take care of if they're in need. Yeah, and it's funny because obviously that's not the first time that sort of message is conveyed within Scripture.

[00:10:04] You know, we can go back to the story of Jonah and the whale. And Jonah going to the Assyrians, their most hated enemy who were, historically speaking, were just awful to his people. You know, just brutal. And so, like, this is not the first time this sort of message comes up, right, in the text. Well, Jonah does it reluctantly. Right. He jumps on a ship to go the other direction. God makes him do it. But that's the point. God makes him do it.

[00:10:32] Because God is interested in the Assyrians as well as the Israelites. And it's an offensive message to many people. But, you know, we live in a world now where the other, the one who's not of our religion or of our race or ethnicity or nationality or whatever, the other is a threat and we want to destroy them or at least get rid of them. And, okay, okay, if that's your policy, okay, that's your policy. But don't tell me it's in the Bible.

[00:10:58] Don't quote the Bible for that one because you're actually precisely against the Bible on that one. Yeah. So what Jesus is really saying there, you know, he's introducing something that's generally kind of new in that way. He's not just preaching kindness or generosity, but a kind of moral obligation, as you say, to love people you don't even know. So how is that different from what we see in, like, Greek and Roman moral philosophy of the time? So, you know, most people are not particularly interested in Greek and Roman moral philosophy. And I get that. We are here.

[00:11:28] But I am. And I'll tell you, it's really interesting stuff, you know, because my students, so I teach in the South, North Carolina, and my students from the South, they basically generally think that morality came into the world with Christianity and that the ancient pagans were pagan. You know, they were like unruly, immoral, you know, louts. And so it's not true. Greek and people within the Roman Empire where Jesus was, which had been highly influenced by the Greek culture,

[00:11:57] there was a lot of discussion about morality and what it means to be an ethical person and all of that. And we actually have serious moral, ethical discourses going back to Plato and Aristotle and on. So hundreds of years before Jesus. And they were very concerned about morality. And they're very concerned about helping other people. But the other people you were to help were those who were biologically or socially connected to you.

[00:12:23] And when you read ancient moral philosophers, there's a lot to, they say a lot of things. Aristotle devotes two entire books of his Nicomachean ethics to friendship and what it means to be a friend. And what he says is just compelling. And it's stuff people really ought to read today. But the idea is that you help those close to you. And this is in our DNA. This much is in our DNA.

[00:12:45] If we, if the human race didn't have this tendency to help others, to cooperate, if that wasn't in us, we wouldn't have survived as a species. Because if it's every person for themselves, you're easily picked off by predators. Even Darwin recognized this. Survival of the fittest does not mean that everybody's out for themselves. It's the group that has to be fit. And so, that's in us.

[00:13:10] But what's, but the Greek and Roman moral philosophers picked up on that and made it into kind of a philosophically sophisticated system. But what they didn't have was that you're supposed to help other people outside your group. So, that's what Jesus, that's what Jesus introduces is that it's not just in-group stuff. Not just your family, friends, and community. It's anybody who has needs. So, in your research, you know, how was this seen at the time?

[00:13:39] You know, the first audience hearing this message, would that have been seen, I would assume, as radical or even sort of unrealistic at the time? Well, it was unrealistic. And most people realized it was unrealistic. And Jesus expresses it to an extreme. So, this is kind of, it's kind of a complicated thing. We don't need to get into the weeds. My book doesn't get deeply into the weeds. But I do explain that within Judaism, there were lots of different Jewish teachers and very, very fine moral teachers within Judaism.

[00:14:07] And they each had their various takes on things. So, it's not that like there was Jewish thinking and then there was Jesus. It's there are lots of Jewish things. And he was part of that. But within his understanding of Judaism, his view is that, of many others, that the world was a corrupt place, an evil place, and that God, God was ultimately sovereign. The creator of the world was ultimately in control of the world. But the forces of evil were wreaking havoc here.

[00:14:35] God is soon going to intervene and destroy these powers of evil and set up a good kingdom on earth. Jesus thought that was going to happen. He called it the kingdom of God. He talked about the coming kingdom of God. People need to be ready for it so they can enter into this new paradise that was soon to come. What Jesus thought is going to happen soon. He thought it would be within his generation. He thought some of his disciples would not die before they saw it happen. Because he was so sure this day of judgment was coming soon, it radicalized his ethics.

[00:15:01] Because you have to behave the way God wants you to get into this kingdom. And since it's coming soon, there's no time for half measures. You have to go all out. And so Jesus says things that he means. If you're rich, you need to sell everything you have and give to the poor. Then you can get into the kingdom. Whoa! What? And he praises his disciples because they've left everything. They've left their families, their spouses, their children, their homes, their jobs to follow Jesus. And Jesus praises them for it.

[00:15:31] And when people today, ardent Christians today, read that, they think, well, that's really noble. They gave up everything. They really devoted those disciples. But what they're not thinking about is the people they've left behind. Because as the sole leaders of their households, these men would have been the breadwinners. And if the breadwinner leaves, how do you get food? Well, you know, you either do very nasty things to survive or you don't survive. So it's radical. You asked if it's radical. Yeah, it's very, very radical.

[00:15:58] But it's because of Jesus' apocalyptic views that the judgment was coming soon. Man, that's fascinating. I had not heard that connection made before. And it makes a lot of sense, you know, these people who believed in their time and age that the end was coming, that they would act, you know, accordingly. And I think that's one of the things that I'm sure you see in, you know, being a teacher as well.

[00:16:22] A lot of people think they read these texts, these ancient texts today, and they apply that same logic to today when it was meant for a specific people at a specific time. Well, you know, one of the kind of unfortunate ways that people have applied that teaching to their own situation today is that people, there are, you know, many evangelical Christians who still think Jesus is coming back soon. And this has seriously affected their concern for climate change, for example, and the environment.

[00:16:51] Because if Jesus is coming back in, you know, in a year or two, what's it matter if we, like, devastate the world we live in? It's not going to matter. It's going to end soon anyway. And so, and so there's been a lot of polling on this, you know, among, you know, outside polls, polling evangelicals about their concern about climate change and whether we should do anything about it. And a lot of just kind of regular old folk who are evangelical say, well, there's no reason to do anything about it. The world's not going to be around much longer. Yeah.

[00:17:19] And that kind of overlaps a little bit with what I've heard referred to as escape theology, where we don't really need to worry about the here and now because it's all going to go away. And ultimately, the end goal is to get into heaven, you know, over there, you know. And so who cares about what happens to the earth and, you know, the people in it? Yeah. Well, you know, it's been a kind of a public issue since the Reagan administration when the Secretary of the Interior was James Watt.

[00:17:45] And he was an evangelical Christian who believed Jesus was coming back soon. And in a congressional hearing, a Democratic senator asked him if he thought that we needed to preserve our resources for future generations. And he said he wasn't sure how many future generations there would be until Jesus came back. Whoa! Normally, that's not the kind of thing you hear in a congressional hearing, at least back then.

[00:18:09] And it got really people upset, like the Secretary of the Interior is supposed to be protecting our resources, our natural resources. And he's saying he's not sure you need to. Oh, yeah, that set off a fire. Yeah. And that's quite a change from the Republicans of old, like the Eisenhower era Republicans were all about conservation and national parks and things of that nature. So I'm sure that probably confused some people. It confused people. And he kind of tried to walk it back.

[00:18:36] But it was clear he really did think Jesus is coming soon. And so it affects things. It affects things. Yeah, absolutely. So at some point, you know, you talk about how, you know, eventually loving even strangers becomes something like a moral common sense in the West. How does this happen? And how do we go from a radical idea to something that shapes entire societies? So the yeah, so there's kind of two aspects to that.

[00:19:01] The followers of Jesus after he died, very few of them took him literally and sold everything. Some people did, but most people didn't. And his teachings got softened over time. As people started realizing the end's not coming on Thursday, they started realizing we're going to be here for the long haul. And we need to develop our ethical systems in light of that. And so they had to soften his teachings, which they did. But the core of his teachings remained. The core was that if somebody's in need, we need to help them.

[00:19:31] The reality is that today, this is what almost everybody in the West feels internally. It's not that everybody acts on it. But people have this sense and many people do act on it. So right now, I don't know if you can see, I'm in my mountain house. My mountain house is outside of Asheville, North Carolina. And I was here in this house when Hurricane Helene hit. And it was very nasty. I didn't suffer any damage. But I was stuck here for a long time.

[00:19:57] And it was really interesting to see the relief efforts. People around the country were sending in money. People in local communities were bringing water in by mule, you know, just because, you know, people didn't have anything. And all this money that was coming in, these people who were helping out, just dozens, hundreds of volunteers, they didn't know the people they were helping. And they probably will never know these people that they were helping. And if they did know them, they probably wouldn't like them. But they helped anyway.

[00:20:27] Well, what is it? That is written into us now. That's just what we feel. And so when we hear about a disaster someplace overseas or at home, we feel like we need to send a check, you know. So you send a check to Doctors Without Borders or to some care or to some place like that. You know, people volunteer in a soup kitchen or people volunteer for it. Where does that come from? It does not come from the Greek and Roman worlds that Christianity emerged out of. It comes from the teachings of Jesus. And so I try to establish this historically.

[00:20:55] In other words, as I said, I'm not doing this as a person of faith. But you can show historically that this line of thinking, this line of moral thinking was dominant within Christianity, even when they softened Jesus' teachings. You've got to help those in need. And so when Christianity took over the Roman Empire, starting in the 4th century in a big way, by the end of the 5th century, basically, they're getting there. Once the Roman Empire, the entire Western world at the time, becomes Christian, people hear this message repeatedly.

[00:21:25] Help those in need. Help those in need. And it changes where people give their money to, and it changes how they understand what it means to be a good person. And that view sticks around century after century after century after century. So that today, even those of us who are atheists have this built into our moral system. And it's because of the fact that Christianity took over the world, and that Christianity took out as the core moral teaching that you need to help people in need,

[00:21:53] which was not the teaching anywhere else in the Western world before. That's really interesting. I just did an interview a couple months back with Dr. John Dominic Cross, and he just released a new book on religion that aligned with empire. And so you're talking about when it became the state religion. So he kind of goes the opposite direction where he talks about all the negative side of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I mentioned that stuff in my book, too.

[00:22:21] I mean, look, there's a real dark side. And I don't think Dom would disagree with me on this particular thesis, and I won't disagree with him on the horrible things that resulted. The thing is, in our bifurcated age, where everybody is just taking one side or the other, it has become impossible for the two sides to talk to each other, not just in politics, but in religion involving social agendas. Because you've got an opinion, the other person is evil and demonic,

[00:22:49] and so the other is always castigated rather than listened to. And so in this book, unlike my other books often challenge traditional Christian beliefs in one way or another, but in this book, I thought, you know, there really is some good that came out of Christianity. And even though Christianity was responsible for pogroms against Jews that led to slaughteries in entire villages, leading to the Holocaust, and crusades against Muslims, leading to Islamophobia and hatred of Muslims now,

[00:23:18] and inquisitions where you torture people to death because they don't share just exactly your belief, you know, you get all of these things. You get justifications for slavery, justifications for war still today on Christian grounds. And, you know, so it has a very dark essence to it, but it also has good sides to it. And so there's—and I think we're remiss if we don't look at both. So in my book, I mean, I try to show that historically Christians in the West are the ones who invented public hospitals.

[00:23:47] They invented orphanages. They invented old people's homes. They invented poor houses. They invented private charities dealing with hunger and homelessness. They invented governmental assistance to the needy. These are—in the West, these are Christian inventions. And again, I'm just saying historically. But as a person who's interested also in ethics and morality, I think, well, that's good. I'm glad. I'm glad we have those things. Well, and it goes back to what you just said, where nothing is all good or all bad. You know, too often we leave out the nuance.

[00:24:17] And we try to, as you said, divide things into black and white, good and evil. And when we do that, we sort of simplify it to a degree it was never meant to be simplified to. You know, we call it dualism or dualistic thinking. And where does that get us? Kind of where we are today. You know, we see it in politics. We see it in religion.

[00:24:35] And again, it kind of goes back to one of my favorite authors, Jonathan Haidt, you know, who wrote a book about tribalism and the dangers of tribalism, where it becomes a situation where, sure, you've formed a common bond with like-minded people. But as a result, you've created an outsider or an outside group. And so it's this in or out kind of, you know. Yeah. Well, I think that's the normal human tendency. And it's precisely because of evolutionary biology.

[00:25:03] We've biologically developed that kind of genetic structure where we try to protect the group. And that means warding off the enemy, even if they are fellow humans. But tribalism recurs regularly. And it often leads to very bad things, as we're seeing right now, just every day in the news. Yeah, absolutely. One thing that stood out to me is this idea wasn't just accepted. It was debated. It was misunderstood and even resisted by early Christians. Talk about that a little bit. Sorry, I wasn't taking it.

[00:25:33] No, no, no, it's fine. It's what, you know, when, all right. So I'll give you a good example of what happens is Christians, yeah, they agree, of course, you know, that Jesus' teachings are, you know, that's how we're supposed to live our lives. But they realize it's impracticable, really. But for one thing, when Jesus was teaching, he was teaching in a very remote rural area in an outback area region of the Roman Empire. He didn't have these many, many thousands of followers as he's portrayed, you know, in the Bible or in Hollywood movies.

[00:26:03] He had some followers, but they were lower class peasants, basically day laborers from this region in Galilee. Within 100 years, 150 years, you've got Christian churches spread throughout the Mediterranean. You know, you've got them not just in Judea and in Galilee, but up in Syria and Cilicia and Asia Minor, which is modern Turkey. We're in Greece now, over in Italy, maybe as far as way to Spain, North Africa. In urban areas, you've got all these things.

[00:26:32] And they're not living in the context that this rural preacher in Galilee was living in. With a small group of followers, they're becoming an institution. And so naturally, they confront different ethical dilemmas, different moral decisions, different issues. And so the teachings have to be adapted to the new situation. But they also have to be adapted because his teachings are all really premised on the idea this kingdom of God is coming very soon.

[00:27:00] And if it's not coming soon, how do you live? And so one really interesting example of how the teachings get shifted is an example I use in my book is a church father named Clement of Alexandria. So he lives in Alexandria, Egypt. He's writing around the year 200. And we have a number of his writings. He was an ethical thief. He talked about ethics and morality and such. So he wrote a book called—he wrote a book. It's a treatise called What Rich Man Will Be Saved?

[00:27:29] And it's based on this passage in the Gospels where this man comes up to Jesus, filthy rich, and says, What must I do to have eternal life? And Jesus tells him that he has to sell everything and give to the poor. And the man walks away completely upset because there's no way he can do that. You know, he just can't bring himself to do it. And that's when the disciples ask Jesus, What? A rich guy can't get in? Why not? It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into the kingdom of heaven. Whoa. Huh. Okay.

[00:27:58] Well, I think Jesus meant it. In fact, I think you can show. Jesus really did mean it. You have to give away everything. You know, in the year 200 in Alexandria, Egypt, Clement has this sermon. He's got a big church and he's got like rich people in this church. And so he writes this treatise. And in the treatise, he says, This passage says you should sell everything and give to the poor. Jesus did not mean it. He does not want you to sell everything. If you sell everything, you'll be poor. Then somebody's going to have to support you. And if you sell everything, who's going to give money to the church?

[00:28:28] So like he goes on and he says that it means just the opposite of what it says. But, you know, in that situation, it makes sense that he would say that. But so he definitely agreed that if you've got any additional wealth, any excess wealth, you should give it to those in need. He would agree with that. But he had to soften the teachings. And so that's what happens then. And so throughout history today, I mean, I know thousands of Christians over my lifetime. And I maybe have met two or three that have actually taken Jesus' teachings literally.

[00:28:58] Yeah, there was an interesting book that came out some years back. I think it was called A Year of Living Biblically, I believe. And where it's just darn near impossible to... Well, this... Yeah. So this guy, Feiler was his name? He wanted to implement the Jewish law literally for a year. Yeah. My God. Yeah. It was a very funny book. But he... And he was seriously doing... He meant it to be a funny book. But he said, well, what would it take actually to keep the Jewish law? Wow.

[00:29:27] I mean, yeah. Yeah. Good luck. And he makes a good point. It's next to impossible to try to do. So in that sense, you know, we are constantly over time negotiating with the text and kind of wrestling with it and kind of deciding like what applies and what doesn't in the modern age. Because as you said, again, many of the authors thought that the time was... The world was going to end thousands of years ago. And so we're still here somehow. So talk a little bit about...

[00:29:56] And you kind of mentioned this briefly. The parallels between kind of the resistance back then in the early Christians and what we're seeing today. Because there's, gosh, a lot of examples. I know, you know, if you just jump online, especially recently, you know, there are the actions of the administration, current administration. And then, you know, they're tweeting out about how great God is. And you're like, these two things don't jive. You know?

[00:30:25] So it has long been easy to weaponize the teachings of Jesus, where he'll say something and people will use it to advance their own social or political agenda. And a lot of people do it. And it's because, you know, Jesus has authority or they quote the Bible because the Bible has authority. It's a very strange phenomenon. One reason it's strange is because people quote, you know, they'll cherry pick some verse or other that aligns with their views.

[00:30:52] But some other verse that's like right next to it, they'll say doesn't apply anymore. And so, I mean, kind of the famous example is the book of Leviticus that says that it's an abomination for a male to lie with a male. And then in the next chapter, it says that it's absolutely wrong. You cannot wear a sweater made of two fabrics. Right. And so you say, yeah, that doesn't apply anymore. Or you can't plant two different crops in the same field.

[00:31:20] And, you know, and so they're both, they're all that's forbidden. But you launch on the one that you happen to agree with and ignore the other two and say they don't apply anymore. And you have no criteria for doing it. It's just that you, you know, you just, you know, it's what you think. And so you quote the one and ignore the others. Or when people absolutely have never even read the Bible, who quote it. You know, when Marjorie Taylor Greene had this thing, I don't know if you remember this a

[00:31:46] year or so ago, where she, there was a piece of anti-Semitism, legislation against anti-Semitism that I think had to do with school admissions. And this thing would not allow schools to discriminate against people for admission into their schools for students because they were Jewish. So it's pretty simple stuff. You shouldn't do that. But she said, Marjorie Taylor Greene said she could not support the legislation. The reason she could not support the legislation was because if she did, it would mean that

[00:32:14] she could not publicly affirm what the Bible says, which is that Herod, that the Jews handed Jesus over to Herod to be crucified. Or was it Herod handed Jesus over? Yeah. Yeah. Herod handed Jesus over to the Jews to be crucified. That's what she said. So Herod was the king of the Jews. So the king of the Jews handed Jesus over to the Jews to be crucified. And I'm wondering, what Bible has she been reading lately? So there are four accounts of Jesus being put on trial and being condemned to crucifixion.

[00:32:44] They're Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And there's only one of them that mentions Herod. That's Luke. And when Luke mentions Herod, it says that Jesus appeared before Herod and Herod found no guilt in him. And he turned him back over to Pontius Pilate. Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor. In all four Gospels, it's Pontius Pilate who hands Jesus over to his Roman soldiers to crucify. She has her mind that Jews actually crucified Jesus based on the commandment of the Jewish leader.

[00:33:13] She's either making it up or she's just ignorant. And I don't think she was making it up in the sense that she was trying to be mean toward Jews. I think that she really is just ignorant. But then why is she quoting the Bible for something that's the opposite of what it says? That seems to happen a lot. One of the things I've been digging into a lot recently just because, you know, watching what's happening at least in the United States has got me interested to understand the history of it.

[00:33:42] You know, I'm a big history nerd myself and that's what I went to school for. And so my, you know, reaction to that sort of thing is just to research it, dig into it and find the root cause of it. And so one of the things I've been researching a lot is sort of evangelicalism and sort of how it intertwined with politics. And then ultimately sort of how evangelicalism itself sort of mutated, I'll say, once it hit the shores of the United States.

[00:34:11] Part of that seems to be sort of this, I'll say, less of a, less, they put it a lesser importance, I would say, is education and understanding, you know, the actual original intent. You know, how the original audiences would have understood the text and sure they'll read it, but it seems like academics sort of are sort of poo-pooed in that environment.

[00:34:38] And so it does feel like there is a lot of misquoting happening, sort of selective reading, a lot of just misunderstanding or picking verses out without reading the context around it. And that does seem to be a pattern within specifically evangelicalism in the Western world. Yeah, I mean, you can trace the history of evangelicalism as you've been researching. And it's one of the interesting phenomena is that the fundamentalism really started out in the 19th century.

[00:35:07] And there were complicated routes to fundamentalism, but the two main things that drove it were opposition first to science. People before the fundamentalists basically, you know, they thought the things described in the Bible or what happened in the Bible. But then you start getting, you know, you get Darwin with the origins of the species. And you start getting geologists who realize that this earth is not 4,000 years old, you know, and the scientists start saying things that seem to be contrary to the book of Genesis, for example.

[00:35:36] So what do people who basically believe in the Bible do? They become fundamentalists, which means that they double down on the Bible and they start saying it literally means this. And so they're opposing science, but they're also opposing developments in Europe in biblical scholarship.

[00:35:55] Because this is the period when scholars start taking the Bible seriously as a book and start reading it in light, you know, in light of the kind of critical scholarship you would apply to any other book. And suddenly they start finding contradictions and they find implausibilities and they realize there are sources behind these things that are older than the documents that we have. And they find there's unhistorical stuff in here and they start saying this and the fundamentalists again are being attacked.

[00:36:22] And so they double down and become fundamentalists. So, but for me, one of the interesting things that's happened over the last 20 or 30 years is that this evangelical belief that the Bible's our root, it's inerrant and we need to know, and we base our doctrines directly on the Bible. Evangelicalism over the last 20 or 30 years has really shifted away from a doctrinal perspective of where you dig into the Bible and you get the truth that way. And it's become more of a social agenda movement.

[00:36:50] It's all about identity, you know, to be an evangelical means, you know, that you oppose abortion and that you in support of guns. And, you know, like you have these agendas that are not really talked about in the Bible. Even abortion, by the way, is not talked about in the Bible. And so, but to be an evangelical means those things and it's no longer. So you assume the Bible's true, but you don't even like read it because it's not as important to you as it used to be. Yeah, it's amazing to me.

[00:37:18] You brought up a great point. Sort of hitching the wagon to politics sort of began, I mean, even before the Reagan era, but really started to become more prominent then and sort of creating what we call one issue voters, you know, where abortion, whoever the candidate is who supports or who's anti-abortion, essentially, we vote for that candidate.

[00:37:49] And so, you know, you know, you can research the history of this. We have the Internet. And yet. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, I know. Yeah. No, no. Well, that certainly has changed.

[00:38:17] That certainly, too, has changed a lot of things. And there are, you know, there are a lot of political agendas that directly relate, you know, to the evangelical tradition. So, you know, I don't know if like the shift in evangelicalism. I don't know if you know this book, Jesus and John Wayne. Do you know this book? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. It's fantastic. And it kind of explains these connections.

[00:38:40] And for me, as a biblical scholar, as a scholar of the New Testament, what really I think I find bothersome in these kinds of shifts is that the social agendas that are being promoted often are directly contrary to the teachings of Jesus. And that's I find that troubling because they're using Jesus to support views that they have. And, you know, it'd be better if he actually did support those views.

[00:39:05] And, I mean, just to take immigration as an example, I'm not proposing particular immigration policy at all. Like I'm not taking, you know, but I am saying that if somebody says that they're a Bible believer and they believe in getting rid of all of immigrants because they don't belong here, the Bible is quite clear on this. That in Israel, loving your neighbors yourself, as I said earlier, means fellow Israelites. But in the Bible, it explicitly states that anybody immigrates into Israel.

[00:39:34] Any immigrant is to be treated as an Israelite, the same as the citizens. And so that's the biblical view. So I'm not saying that we should have governmental policies based on biblical views. What I'm saying is that if you say that you're a believer in the Bible and you're trying to follow its teachings, you should follow its teachings instead of making up your own teachings and then saying the Bible supports it. Does God have a face? Does he have a body?

[00:40:05] If he does, does he know that I'm alive? Does she care that I doubt? Does she care that I fear? Something tells you.

[00:41:03] If God has a face, his face must look like yours.

[00:41:19] If God looks like it's not.

[00:41:58] Has a face, her face must look like yours.

[00:42:45] Like a Tina, an Ahmed or Mildred. Or Russ and his husband, Gus and their children. Face like a Kim, a Ted or Tyrone. An extra chromosome.