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Celebrate 100 episodes as Jimmy Akin answers the questions you sent. He shares his preliminary research on the Tilma of Guadalupe and whether the earliest testimony points to a human painter. He explains why St. John Paul II said nuclear deterrence can be morally acceptable, discusses Catholic ghost hunting and EVPs, and explains Schrödinger’s cat. He also unpacks the Fall and evolution, the Book of Tobit’s fish guts and dog, limbo, the mysterious word in the Our Father, and how Genesis quietly dismantles pagan gods. Careful, sourced, and unexpectedly fun.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
Howdy, folks!
This is the 100th episode of the Jimmy Akin Podcast, and to celebrate, we’re going to be answering questions from the patrons who keep the show going.
I do need your help to keep making the podcast, and you can help me do that—get early access to new episodes, and ask questions just like the ones I’m answering in this episode—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
Let’s get into it!
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The Tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe
Our first question comes from Father James, who says:
FATHER JAMES: I think I recall you mentioning skepticism about the tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I’ve been curious ever since why you may have doubts about its authenticity or the experiments that were supposedly carried out to verify its authenticity. Can you share more about your perspective?
Well, sure!
I should say I don’t have a fully formed perspective on this at this point.
I’ve done a certain amount of research on the Tilma, but I haven’t yet done the deep dive I’d like to.
I may do that deep dive in the future and then base a Mysterious World episode on it, where I’d report my findings.
But I can give you my preliminary impressions now, based on the research I’ve done so far.
The first thing I should mention is something that’s agreed on by everybody about the Tilma: it’s a painting.
It’s an image made of paint that has been applied to cloth fibers.
And most paintings we encounter have been made by somebody.
The claim in this case is that even though it’s a painting made with paint, the paint arrived miraculously on the cloth fibers without a human painting it.
But that’s not the way most paintings arise.
So a natural question is: well, if it’s a painting, then who painted it?
We do have some very early testimony that provides an answer to the question of who painted the image on the Tilma.
The earliest testimony we have to the miracle story, though, is from the mid-1600s.
But basically a century earlier, in 1556, Fray Francisco de Bustamante reported that the image had recently been painted by an Indian painter named Marcos.
This is very likely a reference to Marcos Cipac de Aquino, who lived from around 1517 to 1572.
He was a very famous and accomplished artist in Mexico, and he’s regarded by art historians as the person most likely to have painted the image on the Tilma.
That would explain Bustamante’s reference to the Indian painter Marcos having painted the image on the Tilma.
The earliest testimony we have to the miracle claim regarding the image’s origin is basically a century after that—and the Tilma had already been around for decades before Bustamante commented on it.
So the Tilma would have existed for more than a hundred years without any claims on record that it was of miraculous origin.
Now, that doesn’t mean there were no such claims in that period—it just means we don’t have a record of any of them—and we do have a record, much earlier and closer to the origin of the Tilma, that says the image was painted by a human being.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t other miracles connected with the Tilma—like it being miraculously preserved from a dynamite explosion, or people being healed when they touched it.
And it certainly doesn’t mean the Tilma isn’t an important symbol of the Catholic faith. It most definitely is.
But the earliest testimony we have indicates that the painting has a normal origin, rather than a miraculous, paranormal one.
And that’s what I can tell you, based on where my research stands right now. But like I said, I hope to do that deep dive in the future and then do a Mysterious World episode on it.
The Morality of Possessing Nuclear Weapons
Nick W. writes:
NICK: Here is my question: Is a nation merely possessing nuclear weapons immoral in and of itself? It seems to me like if the United States did not have any nuclear weapons then it would run the risk of millions of U.S. citizens dying in a war, but just the fact that we have them greatly reduces the risk of a nuclear war actually occurring. Wondering what Jimmy’s take on that is. Thanks!
The philosophy you’re articulating is related to one that was common during the Cold War, known as Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD—and the irony was noted that you could call this MAD philosophy a mad philosophy.
Some people thought it wasn’t accurate—they thought that just having the nuclear weapons made a nuclear war more likely rather than less.
Other people said no, despite the ironic name, it’s actually less likely that we’d have a nuclear war, due to the deterrence effect.
So different people had different opinions on that.
In terms of the question—is it intrinsically immoral to have nuclear weapons as a deterrent—that’s something one of the popes of the Cold War, St. John Paul II, actually commented on.
In an address to the United Nations that he gave on August 7, 1982, John Paul II said:
- JOHN PAUL II, Address to the United Nations (Aug. 7, 1982), 8
In current conditions “deterrence” based on balance, certainly not as an end in itself but as a step on the way toward a progressive disarmament, may still be judged morally acceptable. Nonetheless in order to ensure peace, it is indispensable not to be satisfied with this minimum which is always susceptible to the real danger of explosion.
So according to John Paul II, you could have nuclear weapons as a deterrent, to provide balance against other people who had nuclear weapons for either deterrence or as an offensive capability, and that could be morally acceptable.
So in John Paul II’s view, it’s not intrinsically evil to have nuclear weapons—there are circumstances that would justify having them.
The question then would be: well, what about now? Is now such a situation? Or have we arrived at a position where they should all be eliminated—where we should complete the progressive disarmament that John Paul II thought should be the goal?
I also would say that there are other potential circumstances John Paul II didn’t cover that could conceivably justify having nuclear weapons—not for their weapons function, because nuclear explosive devices are dual-use technologies. They have more than one use.
Of course, their primary use—and the only use they’ve actually been put to so far—is as weapons of mass destruction to destroy people, like the United States did with Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
But there are other potential uses that, for example, science fiction authors have explored.
Like if you have a country that doesn’t have any warm-water harbors, you could potentially drill your own harbors using nuclear weapons. And that would be a perfectly peaceful use of them.
Of course, you’d need to let everybody else in the world know, “hey, we’re just drilling some harbors here,” so you don’t start a nuclear war—but as a matter of principle, it’s possible to envision uses of nuclear explosive devices as something other than weapons used to destroy large swaths of people.
So there are other uses, and I would say that—in congruence with John Paul II’s position, and based on additional reasoning he didn’t go into—the mere possession of nuclear weapons is not intrinsically evil.
However, like many things, it may become extrinsically evil depending on the circumstances, which include things like just how sane our leaders are, and just how sane the leaders of our opponents are, and things like that.
Sometimes it may well be better to say, “hey, we’d be better off without these than having them.”
However, I don’t see us, given the current world situation, arriving at that position anytime in the near future, because we’ve got them and we’re kind of stuck with them now.
And even though we’ve succeeded in reducing the number of nuclear weapons that exist in the world, I don’t think we’re close to getting rid of them entirely.
Arguments for Christianity
Krzysztof K. says:
KRZYSZTOF: I’ve always been impressed by how systematically you compared different Christian traditions before concluding that the Catholic understanding of the Bible is the correct one. Have you investigated atheist claims in a similar way, and if so, what convinced you to stay within Christianity?
Well, I’ll do my best to answer.
I should mention that there’s not an official Catholic commentary on the Bible, so there’s usually not just one Catholic position on any given biblical passage.
But I did conclude, when I was in the process of becoming Catholic, that—taken on balance—the Catholic faith is true, and its reading of a range of Bible passages is more consistent with what they originally meant, and what can be reasonably inferred from them, than rival non-Catholic interpretations of the same passages.
I have also thought about other religions, including atheism. I consider atheism a religion.
The way I define religion, it’s a view that deals with God and/or the afterlife. Any belief that concerns God and/or the afterlife is a religion.
And atheism—which I take here to mean Western atheistic materialism—has a view on both: it says God doesn’t exist, and the afterlife doesn’t exist. Well, those are beliefs about God and the afterlife. So atheism is a religion, the way I define the term.
Having said that, I think there are multiple problems with the secular materialist worldview, and thus multiple problems with atheism.
Some of those problems deal with arguments for God’s existence.
Now, I should mention I’m not a fan of one of the common arguments you hear in contemporary Christian apologetics for God’s existence: the Kalam argument.
You can phrase it different ways, but basically it says the universe had a beginning, everything that has a beginning has a cause, God is the cause of the universe, and therefore there is a God.
I’m not a fan of that argument. I think you can justify a version of it based on science, but the results of science are always provisional, so it’s not a conclusive argument—it’s a provisional one.
There are others who have tried to mount a philosophical defense of the idea that the universe must have a finite past, and therefore a beginning. I think all those arguments fail. I think they’re all bad.
So, not a fan of the Kalam cosmological argument—but I am a fan of other arguments for the existence of God.
One that may surprise some folks: I’m a fan of the ontological argument.
The ontological argument holds that you can demonstrate the existence of God just from properly understanding the concept of God.
A version of this argument was made famous by St. Anselm of Canterbury, back in the 1100s, and there have been other versions of it, such as one by the twentieth-century mathematician Kurt Gödel, who is one of the most famous mathematicians ever and a really sharp thinker.
So I have an intuition that, even if some versions of the ontological argument—like Anselm’s—need refinement, a version of the ontological argument can succeed.
More than the ontological argument, though, I’m a fan of the contingency argument.
The contingency argument is based on the fact that everything we see around us in the world is contingent, meaning it could be different than it is.
Like right now I’m sitting down, but that’s a contingent fact—I could stand up, or I could lie down. So my posture is something about me that’s contingent, and thus Jimmy Akin is a contingent being.
Now, you can say, well, why is he sitting down at the moment? And you could give various historical explanations that trace the fact that I’m currently sitting down backwards in time.
But that’s not what the contingency argument looks at. The contingency argument asks: why is he seated now? Forget history—he’s seated now. Why, appealing only to factors that exist right now?
So you could say, well, his muscles are in a certain position—some are contracted, some are relaxed, and that puts his body in a seated position. But then you can ask further questions, like why are his muscles the way they are?
And you could say, well, because he’s got a central nervous system firing certain impulses that cause the muscles to tense or relax. And you can then ask another question: why is his nervous system transmitting these particular signals?
You can ultimately push the physical explanations back to the atomic level and the subatomic level—there’s this group of particles, and they’re related in certain ways, and so on—and you can then ask, okay, why is that?
And you either end up with a situation where you can just keep going, and you get an infinite regress of current, simultaneous causes—or you hit a first explanation. And that first explanation is going to be God.
I don’t think an infinite regress of causes explains anything. Also, it violates Occam’s razor to propose one.
So I think the contingency argument—that there must be an original cause that currently exists and grounds the chain of causes for the current state of affairs—works. Remember, we’re not talking about history; we’re talking about why things are the way they are now. I think the contingency argument is a really good argument for the existence of God.
I’m also open to, and do cite, other pieces of evidence besides philosophical arguments for God’s existence.
For example, I believe we can show there are miracles—interruptions in the regularities of nature. We call those regularities laws, but what they amount to is observational regularities: we notice that certain things tend to recur in certain ways.
So we see these regular patterns in nature, but there can be interruptions in the patterns of nature. It’s like if you see water flowing in a stream—you could take a branch of a tree and stick it down in that flow, and the water would flow around it, and that would change the otherwise regular flow of the water.
In the same way, we see regularities in nature, but there seem to be interruptions in those regularities, which we call miracles.
A key example of a miracle that I think we have really good evidence for is the resurrection of Jesus. If you want to see a sketch of why I think we have really good evidence for that, check out my book, Evidence for Christ.
I also think there are other evidences that favor Christianity. For example, the Old Testament prophets—particularly Isaiah and Habakkuk—predict the coming of a day when knowledge of the Lord will cover the earth like the waters cover the sea.
And if you think back to when Isaiah and Habakkuk lived, in the seventh and eighth centuries B.C., the number of people who worshiped Yahweh was a teeny little minority. But today, by comparison, a third of the world’s population is Christian, and half of the world’s population worships the God of Abraham, and the rest of the global population has heard of him.
So today that prophecy has been fulfilled. How did it get fulfilled? Through Jesus of Nazareth, through Jesus Christ. And I think that’s a notable fact in evidence for Christianity.
There are also other miracles, more recent ones—like I did an episode on Mysterious World about the Miracle of Calanda, where a detached leg that had been buried was reattached and reanimated, and we have really good documentary evidence for it.
There are also other findings, for example from parapsychology, like the study of near-death experiences, that point to a real afterlife that corresponds, in broad terms, to the Christian understanding of the afterlife. I think that favors Christianity.
There’s also the fact that religion is just a human universal. So if the alternatives are atheism versus religion, I’d say the natural thing for humans to do is to be religious—we’ve evolved to be religious. That’s what’s natural. It falls out of human nature.
And then it would be a question of, well, which religion, as opposed to atheism? And again, I think I have good evidence for Christianity compared to other religions.
I also am a fan of Pascal’s Wager, which is the idea that—even though it’s not an evidential argument for religion—it’s what’s called a pragmatic argument for religion.
That is, if your choices are be an atheist or be a Christian—which were the two choices the French philosopher Blaise Pascal was dealing with—it’s in your interest, it’s practical, to assume Christianity is true. I think that’s right, and I have a lot more to say about Pascal’s Wager.
I also have variants of Pascal’s Wager that deal with other religious claims, like what’s the nature of the afterlife—do we reincarnate, or do we get one shot?
Well, prudentially—this is a form of what you could call Akin’s Wager—you should assume you only get one shot. You shouldn’t count on reincarnating and getting another shot unless you’ve got really good evidence for that. So in the absence of evidence one way or the other, the thing to do is assume you’ve got to make this life count.
I also have another variant, based on moral considerations, because a lot of people who feel torn between atheism and religion in general have a moral concern: “I shouldn’t believe something unless I have adequate evidence for it—it would be somehow immoral of me to believe it otherwise.”
Well, I think we do have adequate evidence. But let’s suppose you genuinely couldn’t decide—let’s suppose you personally don’t have evidence to tip the scales between atheism and religion.
I would say it’s still in your interest to be religious, because religion, broadly speaking, says morality is real and you need to be a moral person. That’s certainly something Christianity says, and the same thing is true of other religions.
But atheism, classically, has no mechanism for judging anything to be ultimately right or wrong. Atheists may have feelings that something’s right or wrong, but they don’t have evidence for that, because moral goodness and moral evil are not empirical properties. You can’t measure them in a lab. There’s no “evil-ometer” you could measure the evilness of an action with.
And given that you don’t have any evidence of an empirical nature for moral quality being morally real, if you’re confined to a secular materialist worldview that wants you to judge everything based on empirical investigation, then you shouldn’t conclude that you have any moral obligations.
So if you can’t decide between religion and atheism, and religion says these non-empirical qualities we call good and evil exist and you need to be a good person—versus atheism, where we don’t have any evidence that these properties exist, and therefore can’t objectively say you’re being good or evil, because we can’t measure non-empirical properties—then I’d say prudence or practicality is going to point you toward religion.
Because if it turns out religion is true and you assume atheism is true, then you’d be doing something wrong. But if it turns out atheism is true and religion is wrong, then by being religious, you’re not doing anything wrong—you’re just going along with your nature, because religion is the natural human condition. It’s built into human nature.
So you could call this Akin’s Moral Wager. The gist of it is: if you assume religion is true and you’re wrong, you’re not doing anything wrong by being religious. But if you assume religion is false and you’re wrong, then you can very well indeed be doing something wrong. So, in terms of moral prudence, I’d say it’s more prudent to be religious than non-religious.
So those are some of my thoughts on that question.
Speaking to Spirits in Paranormal Investigations
Our next question comes from Ryan F., who says:
RYAN: To what extent are Catholics permitted to investigate paranormal phenomena? Years ago (as a Lutheran pastor prior to coming into full communion with the Catholic Church) I was asked to be a theological advisor for a ghost-hunting group that investigated in the style of TAPS from Ghost Hunters. I was invited on a few investigations. To what extent are Catholics permitted to do this? Is attempting to communicate with spirits in an effort to capture EVPs crossing a line, or since the goal is not to communicate per se (i.e., seeking information from the dead) but simply to detect the presence of a disembodied voice, does that make it OK? What things should Catholics who might participate in “investigations” like this be concerned about? How much of “debunking” claims of phenomena is acceptable, and when do these groups tend to cross a line that might make them vulnerable to evil influences or, at the very least, would be venially or mortally sinful?
Okay, so I’ve got to tell you, I haven’t watched a lot of ghost-hunting shows. I’ve seen a few episodes of some of them, but I haven’t made a habit of it, because in my view, they’re a waste of time. They’re not doing real investigations—they’re doing a reality-TV cartoon version of paranormal investigation.
So I’m not familiar with the details of how TAPS works, but having said that, there is no prohibition on Catholics doing paranormal investigations, including ghost investigations.
There’s simply nothing in canon law or Church doctrine that says Catholics aren’t allowed to do this. If anyone tells you otherwise, they’re either ignorant, or they’re selling a viewpoint that’s just their own personal view, misrepresented as the Church’s official position.
There have, in fact, been Catholic parapsychologists who did investigations. An example would be the Jesuit Father Herbert Thurston, who lived in the early twentieth century and wrote many books on ghostly and other paranormal phenomena.
When it comes to the question Ryan asks about attempting to communicate with spirits, this is an issue that gets a little complex.
One thing I find helpful in this area is to draw a distinction between two types of communications, which I refer to as initiatory communications and responsive communications.
Now, it’s clear that Scripture actually expects Christians to have communication with spirits.
1 John 4:1
Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God.
Well, if you’re going to test the spirits—since we don’t have a “spirit-ometer,” or an “evil-ometer,” to measure their qualities with—if you’re going to test them, you’ve got to talk to them. You have to communicate with them.
And the question then is: well, did you initiate the communication, or did the spirit initiate the communication and you just responded?
If we’re supposed to test the spirits, then you can certainly engage in responsive communications. If a spirit is manifesting somewhere, well, you need to test it and find out the story with this spirit—is it of God or not?
So it’s clear that we can engage in responsive communications, where the spirit took the initiative and we’re just responding. If an angel shows up, or the spirit of a saint appears to you, you’re just responding to them. You can test them, ask them questions, observe what they say and do, and form conclusions.
So responsive communications are fine. The question would be, can you initiate communications? Where there’s no spirit activity going on—a spirit hasn’t manifested itself—can you take the initiative to call one up?
And that’s where the issue gets dicier, and Christians have different opinions on it.
I did a talk at a Christian parapsychology conference a year or two ago where I looked at this question in some detail. You can check it out—it’s episode 388 of Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. Go to Mysterious.fm/388 and watch that episode for my full presentation on the subject.
But if there’s a problem, it’s going to be in initiatory communications, not in responsive communications. You can even respond to a demon—that’s what exorcists do. A demon starts manifesting in a person’s life, they may possess the person, and the exorcist responds and drives them out. So responsive communications are okay.
And since Ryan asked about electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, I can shed a little light on that. I should first mention what EVP is: it’s where people use an electronic device in an attempt to capture voices from spirits. And Pope Pius XII actually supported research into EVP.
There were a couple of Italian priests who worked with choral music, and they had tape recorders—this was in the mid-twentieth century—to record their choir practices and so forth. And in listening back to the tapes, they found mysterious voices on some of them.
One of the voices seemed to be the father of one of the two priests—he even called the priest by his boyhood nickname, which was Zucchini. That’s an interesting childhood nickname, but anyway, his nickname was Zucchini, and it seemed to be his father on the tape, calling his now-grown-up son by this boyhood nickname.
The two priests weren’t sure whether they should look into this—whether they’d be breaking some kind of moral or ecclesiastical rule by doing so—and they actually talked to Pope Pius XII, and he said no, it’s not a problem, you’re not doing anything wrong.
The voice on the tape, if that’s what it is, is an objective fact. Notice this would also be responsive communication, because they didn’t seek out the voice on the tape—it was already there.
But he said it’s an objective fact, it can be investigated, and it may help people in the future take the idea of life after death more seriously—it may give them more confidence that there is an afterlife. So Pius XII was in favor of doing this research, at least when the voices manifested on their own.
Now, I should mention—if you bring a device to try to capture EVP to where a ghost is already reported to be manifesting—let’s say there’s a haunted house, and you bring a device to that haunted house to try to interact with the spirits already manifesting there—even though you brought the device, you’re still engaging in responsive communications.
And the key is, you’ve got to test the spirits—don’t just trust them. You’ve also got to look for alternative natural explanations.
And this is actually my concern with a lot of EVP. I think a lot of it isn’t actually spirit voices—a lot of it is pareidolia, which is the tendency of humans to see patterns in meaningless noise. I suspect a lot of what passes for EVP in the cartoon ghost-hunting community is actually pareidolia—people hearing patterns that aren’t really there.
But as long as you’re using critical thinking—you’re not credulously believing this is a voice from a spirit, and if it is a spirit voice, you’re not credulously believing everything it says without testing it—then it’s permissible to do that.
Ryan also asked about debunking, and “debunking” is a term I avoid, because it comes from the word “bunkum,” a nineteenth-century term that means nonsense. To debunk something is thus to remove the nonsense from it.
Now, if nonsense is present, you obviously want to remove it. But if you think of yourself as “I’m a debunker,” that represents a closed-minded attitude that I’d say is not genuinely open-minded. It’s also adversarial in nature—“I’m gonna debunk this thing”—rather than investigative: “let’s look at the evidence and see where it leads.”
Also, if you’re talking to someone and you tell them, “I’m gonna debunk your case,” or “I’m here to debunk your case,” it’s going to insult them, if they know what the word “debunk” means—because you’re implying they’ve got nonsense, and maybe fraud, that it’s your job to get rid of.
So I don’t think in terms of debunking—I think the proper attitude is genuinely open-minded investigation. Let’s look at the evidence: does it point to a natural explanation, or a paranormal one? Concluding “I think this has a normal explanation” isn’t debunking—that’s just following the evidence. It’s explaining.
So I don’t think in terms of debunking; I think in terms of explaining, whether the explanation ends up being normal or paranormal.
In terms of crossing a line, people often ask this question, but it really comes down to applying normal moral principles.
Where would you cross the line? Well, it depends on who you are—if you’re a commissioned exorcist, you can engage with demons in a way that wouldn’t be prudent for other people to do. But if you’re just a normal person, in terms of responsive communications, I’d say you need to be educated about all this, so you know what to look for—how to surface the evidence, weigh the evidence, and follow the evidence. So I’d say you need training, and the Rhine Education Center, where I teach, is a good place to get that.
But in terms of crossing a line, I’d say especially initiatory communications without testing the spirits—or, for that matter, any situation where you just believe the spirits without properly testing them—those are going to be crossing a line that shouldn’t be crossed. We always need to test the spirits and not just credulously believe what they say.
So that’s where I would propose a couple of lines.
Alleged Contradiction of Pius XII
Justin S. asks our next question. He says:
JUSTIN: Hi Jimmy. I hope you are well. Thank you for all you do with this podcast and Mysterious World. Both are podcasts I look forward to every week. I was curious how the Church can defend an apparent contradiction between what Pius XII says in his encyclical Mediator Dei, paragraphs 61 and 62, regarding the liturgy when he says “The same reasoning holds in the case of some persons who are bent on the restoration of all the ancient rites and ceremonies indiscriminately. The liturgy of the early ages is most certainly worthy of all veneration. But ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity” and “But it is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive table-form; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments . . .”? It seems that only 25 years later the Church did exactly this. Are we then in the Ordinary Form partaking of practices a pope rejected as antiquarianism? This contradiction has always bothered me. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks!
Okay, so let’s start with a few basics. The first is that Mediator Dei was a document Pope Pius XII issued in 1947.
And what he’s articulating, I’d describe as a cautionary principle. He’s not saying the liturgy shouldn’t incorporate various elements that used to be present in the ancient Church—he’s just saying we shouldn’t introduce them willy-nilly, with no restraint, as if ancient were automatically better, because it isn’t.
The Holy Spirit does guide the Church over the course of time, and there can be a liturgical development that parallels doctrinal development. So we shouldn’t assume ancient is good and more recent equals bad.
Now, that’s a cautionary principle, a guiding principle—but it’s not an infallible prohibition on ever introducing an ancient practice. So whether you introduce an ancient practice or not is going to be a judgment call, and since it’s the universal Church that has authority over the liturgy, it’s ultimately up to the universal Church—to the magisterium of the bishops teaching in union with the pope.
So we can’t read what Pius XII wrote as a binding, forever prohibition on ever restoring older usages in the liturgy.
That’s also borne out if we actually look at the text of Mediator Dei. Now, I’m not sure what translation Justin was quoting from, but I went to the Vatican website and got the version posted there. In section 62 of the encyclical, Pius writes:
PIUS XII, Mediator Dei 62
Assuredly it is a wise and most laudable thing to return in spirit and affection to the sources of the sacred liturgy. For research in this field of study, by tracing it back to its origins, contributes valuable assistance towards a more thorough and careful investigation of the significance of feast-days, and of the meaning of the texts and sacred ceremonies employed on their occasion. But it is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device.
So that’s a positive assessment of wanting to return to at least the spirit of what’s in the ancient sources of the liturgy—he’s not condemning research into, or revival of, ancient usages.
What he’s doing—the “money” part of the quote—is the last sentence: that it’s neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device, meaning take every opportunity you can to reintroduce something ancient. That kind of willy-nilly approach, he says, would be unwise, and I’d agree.
When it comes to the specific examples Justin quotes from Pius XII—the altar being turned back into a table, and not using black as a liturgical vestment—well, neither of those has actually been done.
In the very earliest Church, Christians didn’t have churches with altars. They met in houses and sat around a table—an ordinary table people ate meals off of—and did the Eucharist on that.
Well, you go into a church today, and unless they’re breaking liturgical law, people aren’t just using the altar as a table you’d have a meal off of. It’s a sacred, specially blessed liturgical implement reserved for the use of the Eucharist. It is not just a table, like the early Christians had to make do with.
Also, black is not prohibited as a color for liturgical vestments. You may or may not see it—even back when it was used, it wasn’t used at ordinary Masses, but it was used, for example, on All Souls Day and at funeral Masses. And that’s still permitted.
For example, in the United States, funeral Masses can use violet, white, or black vestments, and which one gets used is a choice made by the individual pastor or priest. But black has not been prohibited.
So I’d say the principle Pius XII articulates is a good one—that we need to exercise caution and prudence about which ancient practices get revived, and we shouldn’t just rubber-stamp anything that’s ancient. But the Church has broadly followed that policy. After Vatican II, it did reintroduce some ancient practices, but not all of them.
The question would then become: has this principle been implemented in the optimal way, or have there been mistakes—maybe it wasn’t the right idea to reintroduce this or that? Well, that’s a debatable opinion, but the Church is not systematically violating what Pius XII said, which was only a cautionary and prudential principle to begin with. I’d say it’s actually sought to implement the principle Pius XII articulates. You can debate whether it implemented it perfectly, but it sought to implement it.
Development of Doctrine
Ricardo E. says:
RICARDO: Hi Jimmy, I have a question about development of doctrine. You recently had a couple of podcasts about purgatory, reacting to and dialoguing with Austin Suggs. You made the point that the Church’s understanding of purgatory has been shifting from a satisfaction to a sanctification model. This got me thinking, and it seems to me that development of doctrine as a whole tends to follow the same principles as divine condescension in Scripture, where God gradually reveals more of his love and at the end all is love. For example, in the Old Testament, we start with 613 laws, then it seems to move to the Decalogue, then Jesus brings it down to two laws of love of God and love of neighbor, and I think that we can say that in revelation that is brought down to a single law of love. Would it be fair to say that development of doctrine tends to lead to an increased focus on love as the source and end of our faith? I wonder if it can even be considered a litmus test for true development.
Well, I certainly agree that love is obviously God’s highest priority. That’s why the two great commandments are love of God and love of neighbor, and it’s no surprise that it’s his highest priority, since, as 1 John says, God is love. So yeah, this is the core of the Christian faith, and it’s something that had not initially been fully revealed.
There was always an awareness that Yahweh is a loving God, but the revelation that this is God’s highest priority—and in a sense, this is what God is—was not initially revealed. And certainly, anything that’s inconsistent with love is going to be inconsistent with true doctrinal development.
So I’d say, yeah, it’s fair to say there’s a criterion here. Not to say it’s the only criterion of doctrinal development, but I think it is a criterion. Like all criteria, though, it has to be very carefully applied, because what can seem loving at first glance is not always the loving option in reality.
Like, think about it this way: I’ve got a child, and this child really wants unlimited candy and dessert, and the child will be really upset if I don’t give them unlimited candy and dessert. They’ll scream and holler and be in all kinds of emotional anguish.
Well, we don’t want to cause people emotional anguish, so obviously the loving thing to do is let the child have unlimited dessert and candy—except we know that’s not what’s best for the child. That’s not really the loving option here. It’s only superficially loving, rather than actually loving. The loving thing is to put limits on the sweets the child is allowed to have.
Well, okay, that same principle can apply in doctrine—like saying, “oh, well, these people have sexual temptations of such-and-such a nature, and it’s hard to resist them, so we should let them go ahead and give in to their temptations so they won’t be distressed or shamed.”
Well, that can sound like the loving option, but just like a child has a disordered desire if they want unlimited dessert and candy, adults who have sexual temptations—the very fact that these are temptations means they’re disordered desires. It doesn’t matter what the subject of them is; they’re disordered desires.
And just like saying no to unlimited dessert and candy, saying no to sexual temptations is also the loving thing to do, ultimately speaking.
So I’d say this is one criterion that one can appeal to in doctrinal development, but it has to be applied carefully.
Does Evolution Contradict Genesis?
Paul G. says:
PAUL G.: I don’t see how the Fall of man can be reconciled with evolutionary theory given that there seems to have been no paradise to fall out from. This worries me a bit, so if you could shed light on it, I’d be grateful.
Okay, sure. It’s something that’s been thought about. John Paul II, in a speech he gave about evolution back in the 1990s, touched on it a little bit. But basically there are two options.
The first option is that there really was a paradise that man fell from—it’s just that, at this point in history, that paradise is undetectable. It didn’t leave traces in the archaeological or literary record that we can pick up on today, because back then they didn’t have writing, so there’s no record of it in literature outside the Bible, and archaeology only preserves certain kinds of things.
There’s a lot in history that has been lost, and we have no archaeological record of it—and it just so happens we don’t have archaeological traces of a paradise. So God could have created a paradisiacal environment, and then, when we lost it, ultimately all the traces of it decayed, so we don’t have extra-biblical evidence for it today.
So that’s option one. And that seemed to be something John Paul II was favorable toward, even though he didn’t articulate it exactly that way.
There’s another interpretation, though—option two—that says the paradise we read about in Scripture is an image of what could have been if humanity had made different choices.
This view, again without being articulated in exactly this way, was proposed by the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, who was appointed a cardinal because of his theological contributions—not because he was the head of a major diocese, but because he was such an important theologian. John Paul II appointed him a cardinal; he died right before the ceremony, but he still got the appointment.
Von Balthasar proposed that the Fall of man is a sort of meta-historical event: God made paradise and immortality available, in the sense that if humanity had not fallen, we would live in a paradise and be immortal. But God could foresee that we would misuse our free will and fall, and based on that, the history of the universe—both after that event and before it—snapped into place around it.
So there’s no concrete moment in our universe’s history, in our timeline, where there was a paradise, but the offer of paradise was real—it’s just that God foresaw we weren’t going to take him up on the offer, and history got written around that choice.
So the paradise we’re shown in Scripture—and the Church acknowledges that early Genesis uses a lot of symbolic language—is a symbol of what we would have had if our first parents had made different choices. That’s von Balthasar’s view.
So those are the two basic options. The Church doesn’t have a teaching on which one is correct, so you can pick either one, and there may be other options too—but those are the two that occur to me.
Schrödinger’s Cat
Christine says something a little more lighthearted:
CHRISTINE: My husband and I come back to the same good-natured argument from time to time. My husband takes the stance that Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead and I take the stance that he’s a crazy person. Can you settle this for us?
Well, okay, so Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment proposed by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, and its point is to illustrate—I’m trying to think how to say this without technical jargon—the counterintuitive nature of a macroscopic quantum state.
Now, subatomic particles, it’s commonly held, don’t exist in a single state until you measure them. Prior to measurement, they exist in kind of a range of possibilities all at once, called a superposition. Then, when you take the measurement, all that superposition collapses down into a single position.
So if you ask, where is the electron? Well, it could be here, it could be here, it could be here, until you measure it—it’s kind of in all of those positions at once. And then when you take the measurement, wham, the so-called wave function collapses down to: the electron is right here.
Okay, that’s often held to be how things work on the quantum, subatomic level.
But Schrödinger said, well, let’s see if we can translate that up to the macroscopic scale, something you could see with your naked eye. Let’s put a cat in a box.
Now, this isn’t a real experiment—nobody ever actually did this, not so far as I know. But imagine putting a cat in a box with a small radioactive source that has a 50% chance of decaying in an hour and a 50% chance of not decaying in an hour. If it decays, it releases a subatomic particle; if it doesn’t decay, it doesn’t release the particle.
We then have a detector that detects whether it releases the particle or not. If it releases the particle, it releases a poison gas, and the cat dies. If it doesn’t, the cat survives.
So at the end of that hour, if you don’t look in the box and take a measurement—by looking—is the cat alive or dead? According to some interpretations of quantum mechanics, the cat is in an indeterminate state. It’s in a superposition of being both alive and dead, and until you open the box and look, the wave doesn’t collapse into the cat being either alive or dead.
Now, that’s wildly counterintuitive, and it’s meant to illustrate how bizarre it would be if quantum effects applied on the macroscopic scale.
So that’s what Schrödinger’s cat is. The deal about it is there are different interpretations of quantum mechanics. On some interpretations, your husband is correct—the cat is both alive and dead, in a superposition of being alive and dead.
However, on other interpretations of quantum mechanics, this whole superposition idea is misguided. For example, there are hidden-variable interpretations, on which particles are always in one state—they’re never in a superposition, they’re always in one state, we just don’t know what that state is until we take a measurement.
And if those interpretations of quantum mechanics are correct, then the cat is always either alive or dead before you look in the box—and on that interpretation, your husband would be crazy.
So I would say, since we don’t know which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, your husband is in a superposition of being correct and being crazy. Hope that helps.
Google Translate & Speaking in Tongues
Rebecca L. says:
REBECCA: Could Google Translate or any translator work on someone speaking in tongues if you didn’t have to set the language in advance?
The answer is pretty straightforwardly yes. Essentially what we’re talking about is using AI to identify a language that’s being spoken. Well, we can do that now.
I could give a string of text—it doesn’t even have to be spoken—to an AI and say something like, let’s say “la manzana es roja.” I could type that into an AI and ask, what language is this? And the AI can come back and say, oh, that’s Spanish—it means “the apple is red.”
So we can do that now. And you could do the same thing with human language experts, too. In fact, there have been paranormal investigators who’ve looked into cases of what tends to be called, in parapsychology, xenoglossy—speaking a foreign language you don’t know.
There have been investigators who’ve taken a case of xenoglossy around to language experts, to linguists, and asked, can you tell me what language this is, and if so, can you tell me what this person is saying? And they’ve been able to do that.
Well, the same thing can be done by artificial intelligence. It can listen to, or read, what the statement is in the unknown language, and start eliminating possibilities until it’s identified which language it is—and then it can tell you that, and translate it for you too, if it’s properly coded.
Now, this assumes the person is actually speaking a known language. If the person is speaking, say, a dead language we have no literary records of—like let’s say they’re speaking Indus Valley.
The Indus Valley is in India, and one of the earliest forms of writing was left by the Indus Valley Civilization—it’s called the Indus Valley script. We can see the Indus Valley script, but because we don’t have any translation of it into another language, linguists haven’t been able to crack it. We don’t know what it means. We can see it, but we can’t read it. And so the knowledge of what was spoken there is gone, and we may never be able to recover it.
So if someone has xenoglossy and they’re speaking in tongues, and they’re speaking Indus Valley—well, if you ask a linguist or an AI to identify what language they’re speaking, it may not be able to tell. It might be able to say, oh, this sounds like it’s related to later Indian languages—maybe it could do that, but we don’t even know that it could. It wouldn’t be able to say, oh, that’s Indus Valley, because no one knows how to speak Indus Valley at this point.
But in principle, yeah, you could use AI to identify foreign languages, whether they’re being spoken in tongues or through any other means.
Deep Dive on Dating the Gospels
David H. says:
DAVID: Hi Jimmy. I really enjoyed your series on the dating of the Gospels. They made logical sense to me. I have a friend who teaches Catholic Bible study class, and he looked up one of your videos on the dating and thought the arguments were weak. I did not have time to discuss which video and why he thought so. I know videos can be in less depth than written documents, so do you recommend a well-supported book discussing the earlier dating? Is there a debate video or other source that compares the later dating arguments to earlier dating and can show weaknesses in later dating arguments? Finally, do you know if the earlier dating is gaining momentum among scholars? Is it overwhelming support for later dating, or is earlier dating getting closer to 50/50? Thanks for your great videos on the faith!
Okay, so there are some books I can recommend. One that’s kind of pivotal in the history of this question was written by an Anglican—was he a bishop? I’m forgetting all of a sudden—he was at least a priest, named Father John A. T. Robinson. He was also a liberal, not a conservative. He wrote a book, I want to say in the ’60s or ’70s, called Redating the New Testament.
Also, there’s a more recent book by Jonathan Bernier called Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament, and there are some other books too. I don’t agree with everything either author says, but they go through the arguments in a significant amount of detail.
If you want what I have to say in a fairly concise written form, I’d recommend my book The Bible Is a Catholic Book, but it’s a popular presentation rather than a scholarly-level one. I have more detailed writings on a more scholarly level, but they’re not published at this point—though I hope to publish them, as well as more on biblical chronology, in the future.
You asked about live debates—I don’t know of any live debates on this. Where the discussion of this question really lives is in scholarly resources.
So if you read a commentary on a book of the Bible—let’s say the Gospel of Luke—it’ll typically have, in its introduction, a discussion of when Luke was written. And if it’s a good, thorough commentary, it’ll lay out arguments for more than one position, and then the author will conclude with the position he thinks is right. You also sometimes see these arguments in books known as “introductions,” like Raymond Brown’s Introduction to the New Testament.
What I find is that the vast majority of biblical scholars never look into this question—they just repeat what they were taught in seminary and never challenge it. So even scholars who are experts in, say, Luke, have often never seriously looked into exactly when Luke was written and how we can show it. They just inherited an idea from the biblical-scholar playground, so to speak, and ran with it, without ever seriously sitting down and cross-examining the question.
So most scholars, even if they’re experts on biblical books, are not experts on when that book should be dated—that’s a really small handful. And I don’t have any way to track trends on this.
When I’m discussing the subject, I always tell you what the majority position is, what the range of positions is, and what I’ve concluded and why—but there are no surveys on this. The number of people who even look at this question in a focused way is very small, and there are no surveys of that population. So I can’t really tell you.
What I can say is that these things go back and forth. If you step back and look at the scale of decades and centuries, you can see some trends—like in the nineteenth century there was a big push for late dates, and then over the latter nineteenth century and the twentieth century, they got pushed back somewhat.
Then there was kind of a pushback on that, and you got some people advocating slightly later dates again—but at the same time, you have people like Robinson and Bernier, and me as well, along with many others, saying, no, no, it’s earlier. So there’s an ebb and flow to it, but the early-dating proponents are out there.
Popularity, though, is not the ultimate test. The ultimate test is what the data says—what are the best arguments and the best lines of evidence? So I don’t worry about popularity. I don’t care about popularity. I care about the data.
Why Is the Book of Tobit Scripture?
bent-nail says:
BENT-NAIL: Bible Questions: Why was the book of Tobit kept in Scripture? What is God telling us with this book? Why are fish guts used to cast out the demon and heal Tobit’s eyes? And what on earth is the significance of the dog? I’d be very grateful if you’d take any one of these. Thank you so much!
Well, I’ll try to take them all, but it’ll have to be brief.
So, on the first question—why was Tobit kept in Scripture? The book of Tobit is an extended parable, and it teaches—I should say it this way—it teaches God’s providential care for those who seek him and follow him. That’s an important, valuable message, even couched in the form of a long parable.
So on the human level, Tobit was considered valuable by ancient Jews and Christians, and it ended up finding a place in the Christian canon. But that human level is superintended by the divine level, and on the divine level, why did it end up in Scripture? Well, because it was God’s choice—he wanted us to have this as part of his biblical revelation, so he made sure we ended up recognizing it.
In terms of why fish guts are used in the book to cast out a demon and heal Tobit’s eyes—well, because this is a parable, this may just be a literary device. The author of Tobit may not expect the audience to really try to cast out demons or heal cataracts using parts of a fish, the way Tobit does. It may just be something in the story to move it along.
It also may be something that reflects popular belief at the time. I know there were ancient Jewish exorcists who used physical substances in the process of driving out demons. Josephus, for example, records an exorcist who had a ring with a little piece of root in it, and he would make the possessed person—the energumen—smell the root, and the smell was so nasty it would help drive out the demon.
So maybe there were some exorcists using fish guts for that purpose, and maybe there were ancient physicians trying to use it to cure cataracts. Not that it would really work, but it may have been a popular belief at the time, and that belief just happens to be reflected in the book.
But since the book isn’t trying to teach us science, or trying to teach us here’s-how-you-get-rid-of-a-demon, we shouldn’t look to the book for those kinds of lessons. It would just be the kind of thing a person might try to do back then.
Also—well, maybe they do work. Maybe these fish parts are things God could use, either as natural ways of helping with various eye problems, or as supernatural tools for helping drive out a demon. So there’s a range of possibilities for how to regard the fish guts in the book.
When it comes to the dog, well, that’s an interesting question, because the dog plays no role in the plot. If the dog played a role in the plot, you could try to infer, okay, here’s the point being made by the dog. But that’s not what happens.
It just notes that when Tobias and Raphael set out on their journey, the dog goes with them, and when they come back, the dog’s coming with them and runs ahead. There’s no real significance—no impact on the plot of the story.
So it looks to me like the dog is just in there as color. It’s the kind of thing that happened to people when they set out on journeys—they had dogs. Dogs are pack animals; they like to stay with their core pack members, so if you set off on a journey, your dog may want to come with you, and when you come back, the dog will want to come with you—and when the dog sees home, he’s going to get so excited he’ll run ahead.
So it’s just a realistic bit of color, based on how dogs behave and on experiences that people in the ancient world had with dogs when they set off on, and came back from, trips.
Investigating the Shroud of Turin
Caroline E. says:
CAROLINE: Hi Jimmy, I am reading a book by Dr. Gilbert Lavoie, The Shroud of Jesus: And the Sign John Ingeniously Concealed. I have heard you say you have reservations about the Shroud.
And yeah, I’d say that’s a fair way to put it. It’s not that I completely disbelieve in the Shroud, or have rejected it—but I do have reservations. I don’t just assume it’s a genuinely miraculous object.
CAROLINE: This book deals with information I had not seen before regarding the blood marks on the face and that the image is that of an upright man. Is this something that you would revisit? Your opinion on the information presented in this book would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for all the wonderful podcasts.
Well, thank you, Caroline. I don’t need to revisit this subject, because I haven’t formed any firm conclusions. I have reservations I’ve expressed, but as I’ve always said every time this comes up, I haven’t done a deep dive yet, and until I do, I don’t have settled conclusions.
But should I ever get time—because the data on this is mountainous, and I just don’t have time to do a deep dive right now around all my other duties—but should I ever get time to do one, I’ll firm up my opinions, and I’ll certainly take into account what I run across, from this book and certainly from other sources. I may do a Mysterious World episode on it.
I don’t have this particular book, and at the moment I don’t have time to read it, but I’ll attempt to do a thorough review at some point in the future, if I get the time, and then report on Mysterious World what my findings are.
Can We Pray for Souls in Limbo?
Christine says:
CHRISTINE: Can we do anything for souls in limbo like we can for souls in purgatory, or is limbo eternal?
Well, it depends on which limbo you mean. There are two limbos that have been classically discussed in Christian history—I won’t give their Latin titles, but translated into English, they’re the limbo of the fathers and the limbo of the infants.
The limbo of the fathers was a temporary holding place before Jesus opened heaven, so that’s now empty—all the fathers who were there are now in heaven.
The limbo of the infants, though, is classically understood as eternal. It was envisioned as a place where children and other innocents dying without baptism would go to spend eternity.
The argument was that without baptism, you lack the sanctifying grace needed for full union with God. But without personal sin—which infants don’t have, and various other innocents, like maybe people with mental handicaps, may not have—you’re not going to suffer in the afterlife.
So various theologians proposed that people without baptism wouldn’t go to the full glory of heaven, but they also wouldn’t suffer—so they wouldn’t go to hell, at least not hell as we use the term. They’d be in this other state where they might even have great natural happiness, just not the supernatural happiness of union with God. So those are some of the speculations about limbo.
But this isn’t actually Church teaching. For a time it found a place in what’s called the ordinary teaching of the Church, but subsequent magisterial developments have walked that back. Today, limbo is a permitted theological opinion.
But the Church also permits other opinions—like that God has ways of saving these children, and giving them the grace they need for union with him, other than baptism. Maybe he counts the parents’ desire for the child’s baptism as a kind of proxy baptism of desire. Or the Church desires to baptize all infants and ensure their salvation—maybe he counts the Church’s desire as a proxy baptism of desire. Or Jesus wants to save everyone who doesn’t positively reject him, so maybe he counts Jesus’ desire for the salvation of these children as a kind of proxy baptism of desire.
So there are other, alternative views that don’t involve limbo that the Church is perfectly fine with today. The Catechism even says that the liturgy for children dying without baptism entrusts them to God’s mercy, and we may hope there are ways for God to provide his salvation to them.
So I’d say we shouldn’t assume that limbo is actual. But if it is actual, and if it’s as classically understood, it would be eternal.
Now, that doesn’t mean, though, that you couldn’t do anything to help a child in limbo. Just because someone doesn’t have full supernatural glory doesn’t mean you can’t pray for them—just like you can pray for someone in purgatory, you could pray that they be purified of disordered desires, that they increase in happiness. It just won’t be the supernatural happiness of the beatific vision of God.
And even if there’s no limbo, you can still pray, or intend, to do your part—to say, hey, I want these children saved. And if you count human desire as a proxy baptism of desire, well, sign me up: I want to count as praying for their salvation. I intend, to the extent I can, for them to be saved. So please add my name to the petition for the salvation of these children.
So that’s something you could do for them.
Holy Days of Obligation Around the World
Justin S. says:
JUSTIN: Hi Jimmy. Why does the Church allow Conferences of Bishops to transfer the Solemnities of Epiphany (January 6), Ascension (Thursday after the Sixth Week of Easter), and Corpus Christi (Thursday after Trinity Sunday) to Sundays? It’s strange that in certain countries these are Holy Days of Obligation on their proper days while in others those days are transferred to Sundays. It is even more weird in the U.S. itself regarding the Ascension, as some dioceses retain the proper day while others transfer it to Sunday. Do you have any thoughts on this practice? I understand why the Church allows it for practical reasons, but I also think the days’ traditional dates have historical purposes that have meaning. In any case, I have read that the only places in the world that observe all ten Holy Days of Obligation named in canon law on their proper days are Vatican City and the Swiss Diocese of Lugano, which is directly under the Holy See.
Okay. So, first thing: my understanding is that it’s a little broader than that. It’s not just Vatican City and the Diocese of Lugano—it’s also Indonesia and Romania, at least that’s what I’ve read.
You put your finger on the head of the nail—so don’t let it get smashed by a hammer—when you mentioned practical reasons. That’s why the Vatican allows any deviation from the universal liturgical calendar when it comes to holy days of obligation.
Now, it doesn’t want every diocese making its own calendar, so it’s chunked things and allowed this decision to be made, in general, by bishops’ conferences. The idea is: a bishops’ conference covers a large territory, and they know the conditions in their country better than we know them here in Rome. So we’ll let them decide what the circumstances in their territory allow, and what would best foster the spirituality of the people.
They do have to run their plan past the Vatican—it can’t be implemented without the Vatican’s consent, but they need to let the Vatican know and get its approval. And because humanity exists in so many different conditions, there’s a lot of variation in how the ten holy days mentioned in the Code of Canon Law get used, or not used, or adapted, in different countries.
The U.S. actually has more holy days of obligation than many countries. In fact, it’s a little startling how few some countries have. Our neighbor to the north, Canada—guess how many they’ve got? Two: Christmas, and Mary, Mother of God, on New Year’s. That’s it. Two holy days of obligation.
Hong Kong—and here there’s more of an excuse, because Hong Kong is not a historically Christian country, unlike some countries to the north of America I could mention—only has one holy day of obligation: Christmas Day itself.
Here in the United States, we have a national standard, but then Ascension Thursday, as I like to call it—because historically it was on a Thursday, and that’s what Luke’s chronology would tell you, that it was probably on a Thursday—is something different bishops here in the United States had different opinions about. Should it be transferred to a Sunday altogether, or should we keep it as a holy day of obligation on a Thursday?
The solution they came up with was: we’ll allow variation on this question, but not on a diocese-by-diocese basis. Otherwise, you could be living in one diocese in a state, and people living five miles away could have a totally different practice. So they didn’t want it varying diocese from diocese—they allowed it to vary by ecclesiastical province.
An ecclesiastical province is a collection of dioceses that are all in the same general area, and there aren’t that many ecclesiastical provinces in the United States—so it’s a few big chunks, rather than, say, two hundred little ones.
So they’ve allowed variation, and as you mentioned, they allow transfer of the celebration of some of these days to Sunday. The reason is that’s kind of a compromise. It doesn’t have the problem of requiring people to take off work, when it may be hard to get time off, or where it’s otherwise hard to get to Mass on a weekday—and some people who otherwise would come may not, and thus may not be exposed to the mystery that day celebrates at all.
So it’s a compromise that lets us avoid that problem, but keep the celebration of the particular mystery—like the Ascension—so that we, as a group, end up celebrating the mystery in a way more people can participate in, because it’s on a Sunday, and in our culture, people tend to have that day off. So more people can show up to Mass to celebrate it.
So it’s kind of a hybrid position that allows for both. In any event, those are some thoughts on all that.
What “Daily” Really Means in the Our Father
Paul B. says:
PAUL B.: Hi Jimmy, thank you for all you do. My question is about the word “daily” in the Our Father. The Greek word is epiousios, which seems to mean “above substantial.” I have read that Jerome used that in Matthew but “daily” in Luke. Why was he hedging his bets? “This day . . . daily bread” is a tautology, and epiousios seems to mean exactly the opposite of “daily.” And surely there is a reference here to the Eucharist and manna. It seems a missed opportunity not to be able to use a word with that resonance. Why did “daily” catch on in common usage? Do non-English versions all use a word for daily? Thanks!
Okay, so I haven’t looked at Jerome’s translation of Matthew and Luke to verify the difference you mention—I’ve got them, I’d just have to look it up. But the Greek word, you’re right, is epiousios.
And the reason for the variation—actually, let me back up. First thing I’d say is “above substantial” is not a correct translation, because it wouldn’t make sense in the context of the petition.
Think through the Our Father: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread.” Okay—“give us this day our above-substantial bread”? That doesn’t mean anything.
People want to connect it to transubstantiation, because it’s got the word “substantial” in there. But transubstantiation is a term that arose in the Middle Ages, and there’s no way that term, or a variant of it that wasn’t even invented yet, would be in use all the way back in the first century.
That’s not to say there can’t be a reference to the Eucharist in this petition—it’s just that “give us this day our above-substantial bread” is not a sensible translation. It doesn’t make any sense.
Now, the source of the confusion is the word epiousios itself. The problem is, we don’t know for sure what this term means—it’s a subject of debate. And the reason it’s a subject of debate is that it almost never appears outside the Bible and early Christian writings. It doesn’t appear in secular Greek. It doesn’t appear in any Greek before Matthew and Luke.
It looks like Matthew or Luke coined this term when translating Jesus’ Aramaic prayer into Greek. If Luke wrote first, which I suspect, Luke coined the term; if Matthew wrote first, which some other folks suspect, then Matthew coined it.
And we have native Greek speakers among the Church Fathers, like Origen of Alexandria, saying exactly this—that nobody uses this term. It’s not used by educated Greek speakers, it’s not used by uneducated Greek speakers, it’s just not a term in standard Greek. And Origen himself proposes: hey, the evangelists must have made it up—they must have coined this term.
And because of that, it’s really hard to say what it means, because we don’t have the parallel cases we’d need to figure it out.
So scholars have tried to think about what would make sense in Aramaic, that Jesus could have taught, that would correspond to this term, and they’ve proposed different translations for epiousios based on different etymologies.
One is “necessary”—so it would be “give us today our necessary bread.” That’s actually the one more connected to the idea of substance—we need this bread to maintain our substance. So, “give us today our necessary bread.”
Another, based on a different etymology, may mean “for tomorrow” or “for the coming day.” So the petition would mean “give us today our bread for tomorrow”—we’re not asking for a lot here, we’re not asking for bread five years from now, just let us have today what we’re going to need tomorrow.
Or, based on another etymology, it may just mean “for today”—and that would be a really humble request: please give us today the bread we’re going to need for today. We’re not even asking for tomorrow, just what we need today.
And on all of these, really—and this is true of any petition in a prayer—it reflects an attitude of dependence on God. He’s the source of what we need, whether it’s necessary bread, or bread for tomorrow, or even just the bread we need today. These all reflect an attitude of dependence on God. It’s just a question of how urgent that dependence is.
And, like I said, there may also be references here to other things, like the final day, or the Eucharist. But that’s the story on epiousios, and what we can say about what it means. It is fundamentally unclear, though.
How Genesis Corrects False Pagan Beliefs
Our last question comes from Nathan. He says:
NATHAN: Hi Jimmy! You have been an inspiration to me as a careful thinker and a humble follower of Jesus. Thank you for all you do! Here’s my question: I’ve heard that Genesis was intentionally written to correct ancient pagan beliefs. For example, it makes clear that the sun and moon are created things instead of deities. Can you break down in detail which parts of Genesis correct false beliefs in the ancient world? God bless you!
Well, thank you, Nathan, and God bless you too. I often comment on exactly this, and you’re right that Genesis does make it clear that the sun and moon are not deities, but created entities.
Genesis refers to them as “lights”—you could also translate the term “lamps,” since it’s one term in Hebrew. It says God made two great lights, one to rule the day and one to rule the night, and he also made the stars. Genesis never names the sun and the moon—it just says they’re two lights.
The reason becomes obvious once you think about the ancient background: in Hebrew, the word for “sun” was the name of the sun god, and the word for “moon” was the name of the moon god.
So, for example, Shamash would be the sun—and if the author of Genesis had used the names, it would read like “then God made Shamash,” and people would think, oh, okay, so the high God made the sun god. That’s not what the author of Genesis wants to communicate. So he just said God made these two big lights. The message is: they’re just lights—don’t worship them.
Okay, so that’s Genesis 1—and that’s just one example. We also have the author correcting pagan ideas in Genesis 2 and 3, and we have a good chunk of this same strategy in Genesis 6 through 9, in the Flood narrative.
This theme pops up later in Genesis and later in the Bible too, but where it’s really prominent is in Genesis 1 through 11—the primordial history, as it’s called.
Now, can I go through all of that in detail? Unfortunately, not in a show of this nature—I’d have to do a full episode of either the Jimmy Akin Podcast or Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World on it. People can let me know if they’d like a more expansive version than what I’ve just surveyed.
But I can recommend some books. This is something well known in scholarship, and a lot of different scholars have commented on it, but one current living scholar has set up a bit of a cottage industry for himself looking at different biblical texts through this lens: John Walton.
He’s written a whole bunch of books—they often begin with, or contain, the phrase “lost world,” meaning the lost ancient Near Eastern world. He’s trying to restore an ancient Near Eastern perspective to whatever aspect of the Bible he’s discussing.
For example, one of his books on this question is called The Lost World of Genesis One. He’s got a whole bunch of other “Lost World” books too—like one about the flood narrative. Another of his books is Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology, and there’s also Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, and a more recent book, New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis.
He’s got quite a number of books that try to supply this lost ancient Near Eastern context to the biblical text, comparing and contrasting the way biblical authors handled an issue with the way pagan authors did back then.
So if people want me to do a fuller treatment of this subject, let me know—I won’t be able to do a whole book’s worth, but I can do a fuller treatment. And if you really want to dig deep, check out John Walton’s work. It’s popularly accessible, and it’s worth reading.
Conclusion
Well, that’s it for this episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed interacting with these questions as much as I have.
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Thank you, I’ll see you next time, and God bless you always!