Audio only:
Joe responds to a few questions Daniel Greene had after reading the Bible for the first time!
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and I want to introduce you to Daniel Green, an agnostic YouTuber who decided to read through the entire Bible for the first time.
Daniel:
Hello, everyone. I feel like I’ve kind of gotten away with something somehow. What do I mean by that? I managed to put out a Bible video and for the large part it’s been received pretty well. I don’t know how I did that.
Joe:
I’ve actually got a pretty good idea how Daniel did it. Well, first, his approach is to be a respectful and curious outsider. He’s not an ex- Christian with an ax to grind. He’s someone approaching the Bible who’s interested in the Bible, but also sort of exposed to it in a secondhand way as somebody who grew up in the Bible belt but in a non-believing household.
Daniel:
And I’m ashamed that it took me until 31. I’m getting old to actually read it for the first time. My only excuse is I grew up in a house void of religion. We were a collective of agnostics and atheists.
Joe:
He’s also approaching as an author and a book lover, a book reviewer who realizes or is maybe starting to realize just how much the Bible has shaped Western civilization.
Daniel:
There is a distinct difference between understanding the Bible in terms of Western storytelling is the biggest 2001 Space Odyssey monolith of them all and experiencing it. It feels like the literature in my life has been orbiting this force that I finally sent a probe to for the first time and get it.
Joe:
I like that image of our culture revolving around the sort of gravitational pull of the Bible. I think it’s a good way to think about the impact of the Bible culturally, but of course from a Christian perspective, the Bible matters for much more than that. In any case, I think Daniel does a really good job of both reading the Bible in hopes of better understanding the world and his Christian neighbors. He actually begins one of his videos by saying-
Daniel:
If I had to point at one book as being the most impactful in terms of shaping the world around me unequivocally, it would be the Bible. It’s not only basically set the tone for Western culture for centuries if not millennia. It has also changed how most people I meet in my life view the world in one way or another.
Joe:
By approaching Christianity, by approaching the Bible with that spirit of respectful curiosity, this means that even when he reads something he disagrees with or finds confusing or challenging, most people seem ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s coming in peace. Now, if you’re a non-Christian, maybe I can explain with an analogy. So I don’t know if you’ve seen these viral videos of people from around the world visiting America for the World Cup and they’re sharing what they find strange or confusing or surprising. I think a lot of Americans really like those videos. They help draw us parts of our culture that maybe we’ve taken for granted or don’t even notice like free refills or large stadiums. Daniel’s kind of doing something similar. He’s taking a book many of us hopefully are familiar with and pointing out things in it that should surprise us about Jesus and about the gospel that maybe we’re so used to that we’ve started to take for granted.
But of course, this also means that he’s going to come away from reading the Bible with a number of questions, things that weren’t what he thought they were going to be. So these are really good questions and as a Christian, I thought it’d be a good idea to take a stab at answering at least some of them.
Daniel:
If someone says as a Christian, that’s as blanket to me as like saying as an agnostic. Let’s get a little deeper into that, right? Okay, are you Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, and what is your relationship been like from there?
Joe:
Okay, fair point. I’m a Catholic Christian and that distinction is actually going to matter today because some of the things that he’s talking about, they get to the heart of disputes between Catholics and Orthodox on the one hand and Protestants on the other. So what kind of questions is Daniel asking? On the surface, they might seem to be just kind of all over the place.
Daniel:
I am weirded out by holy relics. Where is that in the New Testament? If I was religious, how would I interpret these things? And I think I would really struggle with the fact that this is a retranslated text. This is not directly the words of Jesus. We didn’t have Jesus write the Bible. It’s coming from a myriad vast catalog of sources that were then cut down and decided on by humans what’s canon and what’s not. Is it just the devil is completely ignorant of what Jesus’ true connection to his Father is? And so he’s doing a meaningless task here or is there something I’m missing and Jesus technically could be tempted? That’s something I’m very unsure on and I hope to get greater clarification. And this even takes me to the saint conversation where we have the Catholic church and I think maybe some other churches, I’m not sure to this day putting up saints and having that higher individual.
This gets into the monotheism versus Polytheism debate. I know some people have online.
Joe:
As I said, at first glance, looks like they’re all over the place. We’ve got relics, how we got the Bible, whether Jesus could be tempted and whether in honoring the saints, we are inadvertently turning them into demi gods. But I want to suggest that there’s actually a kind of through line here, a thread that ties all of those questions together once we grasp one central idea. Daniel’s difficulty does not seem to be with the character of Jesus. It doesn’t seem to be with the idea of God or divinity. He seems comfortable with Jesus. He even seems drawn to him at least as literary character and perhaps as a historic figure. I think his trouble is with humanity, making sense of Jesus’ humanity, but also how we’re going to trust anything divine that has been entrusted to or transmitted through human channels. Daniel basically says this outright, “I don’t think I’m making any great stretch here.”
Daniel:
And if I was a Christian, that would drive me insane because I wouldn’t trust us. Our words, our interpretations of God cannot be perfect. Nothing we make can be perfect. The human element to the Bible would become a really big source of fracturing within my own faith if I was religious.
Joe:
So if you start with a certain set of beliefs about our inherent human limitations, sinfulness and corruption, then I think all of the objections he has make perfect sense. In fact, I hear common objections like this from fellow Christians. They’ll ask, for example, how can the Pope ever be infallible given how sinful and untrustworthy we humans are? What I like here is that as an outsider, Daniel recognizes that’s not just an objection to Catholicism. That’s an objection to the core Christian story. How can Jesus be fully human unless he’s prone to sin? How can we trust the Bible if humans write the words down and humans preserve the books and compile the biblical texts and how does it make sense to honor great Christian saints or even honoring the relics of their bodies? And to be clear, these are not the only objections and questions Daniel has.
He raises well-traugh areas like Christian hypocrisy, the relationship of faith in politics, plenty of other issues, but this came up enough times. It became enough of a common theme to his objections that I thought it might be worth tackling head on because the truth of the matter is this is one of the best parts and one of the hardest parts of the Christian message. For all of our weaknesses, for all of our imperfections, for all even of our wickedness, God still loves us and he delights in us and he doesn’t just want good things for us. He wants to do good things through us and with us. Let me show you what I mean. I want to start with John nine with a sort of a strange encounter Jesus has with a man born blind. He heals the man of his blindness, but he does it in a really striking way.
He spits on the ground, he makes clay out of the spittle and he anoints the man’s eyes with the clay before sending him to wash in the pool called scent. Now, elsewhere in the Bible, Jesus has healed people with just a touch or a word. So why here? Why does he offer the gift of his body’s moisture? I’ve been listening to the book Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls by Dr. John Bergsma, and he offers what I consider the best explanation I’ve heard of John nine. He draws upon Dr. Daniel Frayer Grigg’s work in spittle clay and creation in John nine and some dead sea scrolls. And the basic takeaway is this. Scripture speaks of God as the potter and us is the clay. It describes how man is formed from the dust of the earth. But if you’re going to think about that analogy more deeply to shape anything with dust or clay, moisture is needed.
And so we see in the Dead Sea scrolls references to God forming man from clay and saliva. This is how people thought of what it meant to form man out of clay or out of dust. And so it’s perhaps not surprising that early Christians like Saint Iraneus, when they see Jesus acting in John nine by healing the man with clay and spit, they recognize this as evoking the original creation of man back in Genesis. Jesus is sort of forming man and new. He is restoring and elevating creation. So I want you to think about the full implications of what that means. Back in Genesis, when God creates all of creation, each time he creates, he looks at his creation and he regards it as good. But after he forms man, God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was very good. That’s the first message Genesis relates to us.
God creates everything creation is good, but man is very good. But of course this original goodness is quickly corrupted through sin, but now God made man in Jesus Christ is at work in healing our blindness and restoring our original dignity. In fact, raising us even beyond what we’d ever had in the first place back in Eden. So that’s the message. Jesus became man to redeem man and not just the individual sinner. Jesus comes to redeem humanity, to redeem human nature, to redeem what it means to be human. Understanding that this is Jesus’s message is going to be key to making sense not just of John nine, but of the whole New Testament story. As St. Paul says, great itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. He describes all of creations groaning in the pains of childbirth as if a kind of new life is to come forth in the cosmos.
And then he says, “Not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption of sons, the redemption of our bodies.” So creation generally and mankind specifically is being redeemed and glorified and we’re in that kind of transition state, this sort of childbirth to a new kind of life. And this is why Jesus becomes man in the first place. In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, he’s showing us how great is man’s dignity less we should soully it with sin. Or in San Augustine’s words, he’s showing us how high a place human nature holds amongst creatures or in Pope St. Leo’s words, Lerno Christian thy worth and being made a partner of the divine nature refuse to return by evil deeds to your former worthlessness. Something is happening to us. We are having our dignity both exposed and elevated.
St. Thomas Aquinas says that one of the reasons Jesus dies on the cross was because it redounded demands greater dignity, that his man was overcome and deceived by the devil so also it should be a man that should overthrow the devil. And to show this, he quotes St. Paul who says, thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. God doesn’t just win the victory on our behalf. Jesus wins the victory as one of us and he calls us to share in his cross and to share in his victory. He wins the victory for us but also with us as one of us. If you get this idea, then you can see not only why Jesus became man in the first place, not only why he died on the cross, but also so much of what happens in between. We repeatedly find Jesus doing things like healing human bodies and human souls and performing miracles with things taken from the earth, multiplying loaves and fish, turning water into wine, changing bread and wine into his body and blood.
So the Christian life is not just a matter of imitating Christ. It’s a matter of Christ operating through us, living in us. As C.S. Lewis explains in mere Christianity, he operates through us not in a way that destroys our humanity, but in a way that elevates it. And Lewis suggests that this is why life in Christ is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and holy communion. It’s not merely the spreading of an idea. It’s more like evolution, biological or super biological fact. In Lewis’s words, there’s no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not. He invented eating.
He likes matter. He invented it. So it’s not just that Christ brings about spiritual miracles through material things. It’s also that he brings about miracles through other people. For instance, the very first miracle we see Jesus perform in the gospel of John is when he’s changing water into wine at the wedding feast of Cana. But if you read the miracle closely, you’ll notice that while Jesus is the one who performs the miracle, he performs it through the servants of the feast. We never see Jesus personally touch the water. Rather, those who obey his word do what he tells them to do and Jesus works the miracle through them. A few chapters later, we see the same thing with baptism. We’re told Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John, that’s John the Baptist, although Jesus himself did not baptize but only his disciples. So Jesus is the one at work in baptizing, but not directly, but rather through those who obey his word.
Now, this also explains another of the questions that Daniel had.
Daniel:
We get introduced to his 12 apostles and he tells them to go off and heal the sick. Maybe I was under a false impression, but I thought the only person capable of doing magic for lack of a better word in the New Testament was Jesus.
Joe:
The critical line is verse one of Matthew 10 and he, Jesus, called to him his 12 disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and to heal every disease and every infirmity. Obviously, mere human beings cannot cast out demons or heal diseases by our own power, but the apostles are able to do these supernatural actions, the things Daniel calls magic and we would call miracles because Jesus who is divine gives them divine authority. He works through them. This is the same reason that we believe that priests can forgive sins. Jesus breathes on the apostles. Again, think of God breathing life-giving spirit into Adam and he says to them, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they’re forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained. Get this and you’re going to start to understand why we make a big deal of the saints.
And I want to be very clear about something because sometimes it’s going to be a stumbling block for people because they’ll say, “Well, what about the fact that God is a jealous God?” And that’s true. God is a jealous God in the sense that he calls us not to worship false gods. But it’s also true that Jesus comes to be glorified in his saints and to be marveled at in all who have believed. You might think about it like this. We don’t live on a planet with two sons where they’re competing to give light to the earth. Virtually all of the light we get, we receive from the sun, but some of the sunlight we receive comes to us via the moon. The moon reflects the sun’s light. The moon is not a second sun, is not a rival to the sun. All of its radiance, all of his glory is simply a reflection of the source of radiance and glory, the sun.
Well, similarly, when we talk about the glory of the saints, we’re not talking about them being dimmigods or rival gods to God like second suns in the sky. They’re moons that reflect the light of the sun. And sometimes we see something about the sun’s light in the moon that we don’t see just from staring directly at the sun, not because it’s not in the sun, but because we missed it. This is what it means to say Jesus has made glorious in his saints. Not that he’s lacking in glory, but that we’re able to marvel at his infinite goodness in fresh ways when we look at the things he’s done for those who’ve believed. So with that in mind, let’s turn back to Daniel’s question about relics.
Daniel:
Holy relics, where is that in the New Testament and why have they gotten so bizarre?
Joe:
Now, I know Daniel is asking particularly about the New Testament, but I want to actually start with the Old Testament where a dead man is thrown on top of the bones of the prophet Alicia and as soon as a man touched the bones of Alicia, he revived and stood on his feet. But now I want to go to the New Testament where we find sick people are being carried out to the roadside so that as St. Peter passes by, at least his shadow might fall on some of them. And what happens? They were all healed. That’s Acts five and Acts 19 were told that God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul so that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them. So that’s going to be the key to making sense of relics.
God works through his saints. He even works through the bodies of his saints even after they’ve died and he works through the shadows of the bodies of his saints and he works through things that are touched to the bodies of his saints. Take that lesson to heart and relics make sense. And might still seem weird and unusual. That’s normal, that’s to be expected, but the basic theology of relics is perfectly biblical. We find it on display right there in the old and the New Testament. So speaking of the Bible, I want to return to Daniel’s question about the sort of trouble of the human history of the Bible.
Daniel:
If I was religious, how would I interpret these things? And I think I would really struggle with the fact that this is a retranslated text. This is not directly the words of Jesus. We didn’t have Jesus write the Bible. It’s coming from a myriad vast catalog of sources that were then cut down and decided on by humans what’s canon and what’s not. And if I was a Christian, that would drive me insane because I wouldn’t trust us. Our words, our interpretations of God cannot be perfect. Nothing we make can be perfect. Yes, we are made in God’s image who is perfect. If you’re a Christian, God’s perfect, but anything we do to try and communicate God’s message will have flaws. And over time, those flaws would only become exacerbated.
Joe:
So there’s a specific question here and then maybe a bigger question. The specific question is about how the Bible comes to us in English. And people quickly pointed out to Daniel that his idea that it was kind of an elaborate game of telephone from one language to another, to another, to another, to another, that’s actually something of a myth. And so Daniel acknowledged that and actually set the record straight.
Daniel:
It’s a misconception that things have been translated and retranslated and retranslated, retranslated, so like how much has been lost. And in fact, I wanted to almost like bulk at this because it’s so against everything I’ve been told my whole life, but it makes so much sense once multiple Christians tell you this, and I was told this by current believers, former believers, and those that are struggling with their faith, they’re actually pretty sure that the translations we have are pretty direct because no, you don’t translate from Latin to German to French to English and instead you just take that oldest manuscript and you translate it. And what actually has happened over time as we’ve discovered older and older texts is that the translations have gotten more confident.
Joe:
The only thing I’d add to that is that scholars are not just looking at one manuscript. For example, in translating just the gospel of Matthew, the scholars behind the latest edition of the Nestle Ilan translation relied principally upon a collection of 24 different Papyrus manuscripts and 42 uncles, which are manuscripts written on Parsman or Velem. They’re a little bit later than Papyrus, but still quite old. In other words, even if somebody had intentionally or accidentally mangled the biblical text, it would not be hard to discover that by comparing them to all of the other available biblical texts. So it’s less like a game of telephone where one person whispers to one person and more like somebody shouts a message to a crowded room and then people take turns shouting that message. It’s much less likely just on a human level anything is going to be substantially lost there.
And the story’s similar if you ask Daniel’s other question, which is, well, how do we know we got the right books in the Bible? How do we know which books belong in and which ones belong out? And I want to be clear, it was not as if a group of men got together in a backroom at Nicia, as people sometimes believe, and decided to add or remove books from the Bible. It’s rather that the various local churches, many of whom were direct recipients of letters from the apostles gathered together the books that they regarded as divinely inspired scripture and then they would sort of compare notes. And eventually as these local churches are comparing notes, there is a relatively clear consensus that emerges on which books belong and in which ones don’t. There are a few borderline cases. I’m going to leave that kind of conversation to the side, but that’s the basic story.
Now all of that so far is just looking at history from the human level of how we transmit information. Multiple independent witnesses are going to be more reliable than a single witness typically, but there’s a deeper answer as well that God can and does work through weak humans, that God’s strength is actually stronger than our weakness, that God’s goodness is better than our wickedness. I understand what Daniel means when he says that nothing we make can be perfect and that’s true but only of our unaided humanity. God can work through us to create the results we want. Our job then is to cooperate, to allow Christ to live and to work through us so we can get to the point where we can say with St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. ” If God wants to communicate something like his word, he’s not going to be thwarted by human frailties, limitations, or even machinations.
As Paul also said, “For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ is Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.” But then he hastens to add, we have this treasure in earth and vessels to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. He means the apostles, but we can say even more broadly as Christians and as those who spread the message of the gospel, we’re weak jars of clay. It’s true, but we have within us is this treasure of inestimable worth. Now having said all of that, I hope I’ve at least given a general kind of trajectory to make sense of how Christians might answer the questions that Daniel’s raising, but I should acknowledge that there are even many Christians who struggle with that same idea. For example, many Protestants struggle with the idea of the saints and relics for pretty similar reasons and I actually made a video a while back on relics responding not to non-believers, but to Protestants who claim things like even if the entire cross of Jesus was discovered intact, there’d be no spiritual value to it.
So if you want a fuller explanation both of relics and the biblical and theological support for why we think they’re good, I encourage you to check out this video right here. And Daniel, if you get a chance to watch this, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below, as well as any of you watching. For Shamus Popri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.