The Bible Geek Show

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The Bible Geek Podcast 16-028 Nov 17, 2016

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What does the number 40 signify in biblical symbology? Might Mark originally end at 15:39 with the centurion's exclamation, "Truly this man was the Son of God!"? Why do scholars neglect the work of Alfred Loisy? To what extent do you agree with the theory of Lena Einhorn? What is the difference between the â??birthrightâ?? and the â??blessingâ?? which Jacob cheated Esau out of? Does the term 'sons (or children) of Belial', mentioned a number of times in the OT (Hebrew, from 'beli' (without) and 'yaal' (value)) mean merely 'worthless men' or instead of 'sons of Belial,â?? a devil? Has the Westcott and Hort edition of the New Testament become outdated? What if Christians of the 2nd century and encoded their belief that YHWH didn't send Iesou to redeem our sins, but his own crimes?

The Bible Geek Podcast 16-027 Nov 07, 2016

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What do you think of the arguments in the Eastern Orthodox Bible for the originality of Markâ??s long ending? How synoptic are the synoptic gospels really? Why are the monotheistic religions so obsessed with the Apocalypse? Were the Greeks and Romans the same way? The Christadelphians deny that the biblical terms â??devilâ?? and â??satanâ?? generally refer to a supernatural evil entity as most readers think. Are they right? Whatâ??s your opinion of Kenneth Wuest's New Testament translation? How can Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15:8, refer to himself as â??one untimely bornâ?? if he was a contemporary of Jesus? I was wondering if Matthew and Luke's genealogies had any real link to anything. Can you recommend a good introduction to the Bible for an interested novice?

The Bible Geek Podcast 16-026 Oct 20, 2016

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What are your thoughts on the Parable of the Talents, and could you offer me a more erudite, exegesis, than my Sunday school teacher gave? Are the stories of Saul and Ahijah parallel, and if so is it an intentional parallel to establish continuity in the pre-Omride rulers of the north? Or is it, as I suspect, the merging of two different legends who had similar stories told about them in a less nationalistic tribal past in the north. Care to comment on when and where you think the monotheistic idea came from? I think Jerusalem represented by Aaron and Moses were priesthoods of different gods. Moses represents a priesthood of the snake god Nahushtan/Leviathan and perhaps even a remnant of a cult of Set that remained in Canaan after the Bronze Age collapse and the withdrawal of Egypt during the 13th century BCE or so. Aaron then is the Yahwistic priest who represents the more rural Jerusalemite/Jebusite/Melchizedek priesthood that overtakes the snake cult with their bull god sometime around the end of the northern kingdom. Is that a fair interpretation of the evidence do you think? Why do mainstream critics reject the notion that the whole Jesus story is rewritten from the Old Testament? Has anyone proposed that the religious leaders had the soldiers steal the body of Jesus and destroy it to keep people from worshipping it (e.g. Lenin) or hiding it and then saying it was risen? John 21:15-17 uses two different Greek words for â??love.â?? Does Aramaic have analogous pair of terms? And if not, what does this imply about the origin of the story?

The Bible Geek Podcast 16-025 Oct 19, 2016

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If Jesus himself knew about the betrayal, and knew that it was needed for his eventual execution, why isnâ??t Judas eventually seen as a saint or at least a non-disgraced Apostle by Christians? What is your take on the visionary experiences at the heart of the Old Testament, and could they be a description of the visionary experience as induced by psychedelics? Might the various 'episodes' in the life of Jesus have started not only as midrash of the Old Testament but as incantatory texts for healing and exorcism? Might Mark in its earliest form have been a Simonian document? If Paul were Simon Magus, with â??Paulâ?? himself being a later proto-Catholic creation, wouldn't it be better to stop using the term Pauline Christianity and instead speak of Simonian Christianity? If one were to pick one of the early Christian, proto-Christian, and ancient Christian-offshoot cults to use as the basis for a Cthulhu Mythos cult, which cult would you pick and why? What are some of the more credible theories behind the importance of the number seven in the ancient world?

The Bible Geek Podcast 16-024 Oct 18, 2016

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What would be the most probable rendition of the phrase â??end of the worldâ?? in the canonical gospels? How does the â??closure of the ageâ?? relate to Gnosticism? According to Diogenes Laertius, 360 jurors voted for death to Socrates, 140 for a fine. However, before this, when voting on if he was even guilty, when the ballots were counted, 280 jurors had voted to find Socrates guilty, 220 jurors for acquittal. This means that there were jurors who said to themselves, "yeah, he's innocent, but let's kill him anyway." Ditto Joseph of Arimathea re Jesus? What markers point towards a late date for John? Given Paulâ??s letters, why would Mark have had what seems to be an undeveloped theology? Is there astrological symbolism in the NT? Did Paul never refer to the Son of Man because his Jesus was not a human man and Mark and Matthew used the phrase because they wanted people to think their creation was human? Is there any evidence that Thomas evangelized India? Why would a predominantly Hindu people convert based on the teachings of a man who preaches of Jesus? Does Islam ever acknowledge that God's name is / was once Jehovah? How do they deal with that?

The Bible Geek Podcast 16-023 Oct 17, 2016

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Michael Heiser suggests the gospel story of the raising of Jairusâ?? daughter (Luke 8) is intentionally drawn from the story of the death of Jephthahâ??s daughter (Judges 11), but with a happy ending. What about it? Why didn't the early copyists and redactors fix Matthewâ??s erroneous attribution of Zechariah 11 to Jeremiah? Might Revelation be envisioning the events of the Bar Kochba Revolt? â??Church of Christâ?? (HQed in the Philippines) insist that most of the translations of Isaiah 43 are corrupted when they read, â??I will bring your offspring from the east.â?? It should, they say, read â??from the far eastâ?? (cf., the Moffatt translation) because Isaiah is talking about the Philippines. Bogus, right? Why would a scribe (Eusebius?) choose Josephus to insert a forged passage about Jesus? Why not some other historian and writer like Philo of Alexandria? Why would anyone venerate an empty tomb? Lourdes gets something like 5 million visitors every year on so-called apparitions witnessed by schoolkids! Revelation 3:10 speaks of an hour trial about to come upon the whole world.â?? Sometimes this phrase seems to denote the Roman Empire in ancient usage. Could this Revelation passage be a rhetorical polemic against the Romans? Did Jesus have brothers? It would seem so since there is an allusion to James the brother of Jesus in Galatians, thus an actual firsthand testimony. Stephen H Smith shows how Mark evidences the structure of a dramatic tragedy. Is it reasonable to suggest that perhaps Matthew (or Luke) came first and then another author came along and attempted to rewrite those gospels into a script for a tragedy/closet drama; stripping out the long sections that we call Q material, because they interrupt the narrative flow?

The Bible Geek Podcast 16-022 Oct 16, 2016

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What is the impact on Christianity if the Pauline doctrines were merely the product of a temporal-lobe epilepsy sufferer? What do you think of the suggestion in The Mythology of Eden by Arthur and Elena George that the forbidden knowledge was really the awareness of the chaos of the primordial waters that existed prior to creation, the order of the world that Yahweh created, and the responsibility that humans would have to participate in keeping the chaos (i.e. evil) from entering back into the orderly world (i.e. good). Looking at Luke's nativities of John and Jesus, I wonder if there's a connection between the quasi-simultaneous miraculous births of John and Jesus (Elizabeth barren, Mary a virgin) and the conception of Castor and Pollux? Is Peter denying Jesus three times another instance of making Jesus a new/better Elijah/Elisha/Moses? Isnâ??t Richard Dawkins right in claiming that "theology isn't even a subject"? How might one reconcile Lena Einhornâ??s theory with mythicism? Though Acts has Paul surviving a viper bite on Malta, prior to the fourth century there is no evidence of Christianity there, nor did any species of poisonous snakes ever inhabit the Islands! Wouldn't everyone in Heaven be terribly depressed and horrified at all times because of what they knew was happening to their loved ones who didn't check the right theological box? What do you think of Michael Heiserâ??s explanation of Exodus 4:24-26? Cain was avenged seven-fold; Tubal-cain was avenged seventyseven-fold, and Jesus forgave seven times seventy. Is there anything in the new testament that isn't "my scripture's bigger than your scripture"? Were Elijah and Elisha really two separate characters, or is it possible we're seeing a doubling as in twice-told tales of Genesis?

The Bible Geek Podcast 16-021 Oct 14, 2016

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Have The Christ Myth by Arthur Drews (1910) and Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions by TW Doane (1882) been superceded? Where have all the Deists gone? Do the numerous Moses-Jesus parallels imply that Moses was already viewed as a Messiah? Irenaeus in his Against Heresies (III,11.1) says, "John, the disciple of the Lord, preaches this faith, and seeks, by the proclamation of the Gospel, to remove that error which by Cerinthus had been disseminated among men..." What he is saying here is that John was written after to refute Cerinthus which is one smoking gun for the late date of John. There are scholars before and now that contend that it is the case and that John was the judaized and historicized version of Cerinthus' gospel. Are there any scholarly attempts to reconstruct the Cerinthus gospel just like scholars before and now have reconstructed Marcion's gospel of the lord which is being called as the "ur-lukas"? Can we consider the Cerinthus gospel as an "ur-john"? If 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 is not an interpolation, does it really back up the gospelsâ?? Easter stories? The listed appearances sound more like visions, while the rest of the chapter seems to understand the resurrection of Jesus as spiritual rather than physical. Is Mark 16:9-20 more Marcionite or Gnostic? Are the â??hate your familyâ?? passages in the gospels a reflection of the period when the Early Church Fathers are battling the heresies of Gnosticism? Reading the apocryphal "Life of John the Baptist" text recently, I noticed a present-tense reference to Theophilus, who identified as being in office. Is this the same Theophilus mention in Luke, eh? Is it reasonable to suggest that the Passion narratives are not meant to implicate and condemn Jews but rather to say that all humanity must be depraved if even the best of them, Jews, could be so blind to the truth? Iâ??m curious to hear what you might have to say about Lena Einhornâ??s new book, â??A Shift In Time: How Historical Documents Reveal the Surprising Truth about Jesusâ??? Are there links between the NT passages and Isaiah 65, which mentions eating unclean pigs and living in tombs? Is there a correlation between one not being able to look at the face of God and not being able to stare directly at the sun? Is the Deuteronomic prohibition of cross-dressing the product of the ancient Israelite taxonomies discussed by Mary Douglas?

The Bible Geek Podcast 16-020 Oct 10, 2016

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I can't recall exactly where I got this inchoate understanding of the history of the Jesus thing; I believe it was from you or Carrier. Basically, this ill-formed understanding is that people believed that Jesus had done his thing during different times in history, with references in his stories that pinned him down to different historical periods, and those dates kept getting moved up. Is that the case? Was the Jesus mythology a wholly mutable east(sic), dancing forward through history until it got pinned down by scripture to the times of Herod and Pilate? Obviously, if that were the case, those are the sorts of documents that medieval Christians wouldn't bring forward to us, making it difficult to verify, but if it's the case, how do modern Christian cognoscenti deal with it? Do you have a suggestion on reading material that addresses the claim that Jesus fulfilled hundreds of messianic prophecies? You mentioned that Dan is excluded from the tribes in their enumeration in Revelation because Jewish scribes calculated that the antichrist would come from the tribe of Dan. Could you elaborate on this? Could you please outline the "Pantera is Jesus' father" theory and describe its strengths and weaknesses? What resources do you recommend for me as I prepare to do my own NT translation? Given all the hoopla about the Eucharist being a version of Passover, why if Jesusâ?? body represented by bread and not lamb chops? What sayeth the Geek? Was God bound by some rule that only a blood sacrifice could entitle him to forgive sins? Doesnâ??t this entail the Socratic Euthyphro dilemma? Were there factions that disagreed about faith vs works as they wrote it into the Bible, or is this just a minor contradiction that was made into a big deal by later factions? Did the superstition about 666 increase dramatically after The Omen movie? What is the meaning of â??the prince of the power of the air" from Eph 2:2?

The Bible Geek Podcast 16-019 Oct 09, 2016

Show notes

If God is â??pure actâ?? and does not move from potentiality to actuality, how can God ever act, speak, love, etc.? Why is there so little genuine intellectual curiosity among most religious people? You once said the BahÃ¡'Ã Faith was the only other religion that you "seriously considered converting to." What appealed to you? Hereâ??s a recent dream: God changes his own â??Wordâ?? from YHVH to YHSVH, and this changes his underlying character and essence. This idea unifies the God of the Old Testament with Jesus, yet preserves Marcion's realization that these are two different people. Has anyone else has this idea? Re the story of Jesus and the coin in the fish's mouth (in Matthew 17), wouldnâ??t there have been many much simpler ways for Jesus to have had his and Peter's taxes paid? Why the miracle? Youâ??ve described the character Joseph of Arimathea evolving from a merely pious person into a disciple of Christ. But already in Mark he is already called â??of Arimathea,â?? meaning, according to Richard Carrier, "best disciple town." Compatible theories or not? If I am in no way a believer, can I still aspire to be a theologian? What would it mean to be a theologian in that case?

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