NEW SERIES: Professor Dale Martin talks about the Gospels (2021-06-11) ​

0:00:01 good evening everyone and welcome
0:00:04 to a very special new series on blogging
0:00:06 theology
0:00:07 um and i'm very happy very privileged to
0:00:10 to
0:00:11 introduce again uh professor dale martin
0:00:14 from yale university uh who is an
0:00:16 expert a world class expert on the
0:00:19 gospels
0:00:20 and the new testament in general
0:00:21 actually and um
0:00:23 what's gonna happen uh on this occasion
0:00:25 is we're going to go through
0:00:27 uh the gospels one by one uh we're going
0:00:31 to have a brief introduction to the
0:00:33 four gospels in the bible and another
0:00:35 gospel which is outside of it
0:00:38 uh called the gospel of thomas and then
0:00:40 we're gonna i'm gonna
0:00:41 perhaps steer the conversation through
0:00:43 to the kind of questions that
0:00:44 interest me and interest many people i
0:00:46 think about these uh
0:00:48 four works about their authorship and
0:00:50 their date and
0:00:51 you know do they give us the gospel
0:00:52 truth about jesus are they historical
0:00:54 are they fiction and so on and so on who
0:00:57 is who is jesus
0:00:58 who did jesus say that he is there's so
0:01:00 many questions that we can
0:01:01 um explore in this fascinating subject
0:01:04 so you are most welcomed uh dr dale
0:01:06 martin
0:01:07 and um i'll i'll just start then by
0:01:10 asking if you wouldn't mind if you could
0:01:11 just give us a brief survey a brief
0:01:13 introduction to
0:01:15 the four gospels in the bible and the
0:01:17 gospel of thomas as well
0:01:19 and why that's important in our dating
0:01:22 and understanding of the
0:01:23 the bible's gospels okay
0:01:26 the as most people know the four gospels
0:01:29 that are in the
0:01:30 christian canon are
0:01:34 matthew mark luke and john
0:01:37 now we most modern scholars don't
0:01:40 believe they were written
0:01:41 in that order in other words matthew was
0:01:44 not the earliest one
0:01:45 um and mark wasn't the second one and
0:01:48 luke wasn't the third and john wasn't
0:01:50 the fourth although i think john
0:01:51 probably was the latest one of the four
0:01:53 to be written
0:01:55 and i can explain why but we think that
0:02:00 though and the how the gospels got into
0:02:02 that order
0:02:03 is another complicated question about
0:02:05 the development of the canon
0:02:06 why did the people who put together the
0:02:08 canon uh
0:02:09 put them in the order that they were and
0:02:12 we have to say that not all
0:02:13 canonical collections of the gospels are
0:02:16 in that same order we have manuscripts
0:02:19 from the ancient world that have john
0:02:21 first or have
0:02:22 you know some of them but for kind of
0:02:25 western christianity
0:02:26 including roman catholicism eastern
0:02:28 orthodoxy
0:02:30 and the protestant churches uh the order
0:02:32 in the canon is matthew mark luke and
0:02:34 john
0:02:35 why did they get there most of us think
0:02:38 that matthew just happened to be the
0:02:39 most
0:02:40 popular gospel among a lot of early
0:02:44 churches
0:02:45 there's a lot of teaching in it it's
0:02:47 it's very well organized it's
0:02:49 it's easy to kind of read in sections um
0:02:53 and of course people believed in the
0:02:55 ancient world that it was actually
0:02:56 written by matthew who was
0:02:58 a disciple of jesus we don't believe
0:03:00 that anymore
0:03:02 we don't know who wrote it but i would
0:03:04 argue that it's not written by a direct
0:03:06 disciple of jesus
0:03:07 um because there are just too many
0:03:09 things in it that
0:03:10 um suggest that this author was copying
0:03:14 mark
0:03:14 and using other sources and was not
0:03:16 depending upon
0:03:18 his own memory or his own you know notes
0:03:20 from the field or anything like that
0:03:23 uh so the very compilation aspect of the
0:03:25 gospel of mark
0:03:26 of matthew uh suggests that it was not
0:03:29 written by
0:03:30 uh the disciple of jesus name matthew
0:03:34 who appears in the gospels
0:03:36 but it was written anonymously by
0:03:37 someone later but for different reasons
0:03:39 it seems to become
0:03:41 the most popular gospel to be read in
0:03:44 church
0:03:45 in lots of parts of the ancient
0:03:47 mediterranean and we think that's
0:03:49 probably why i
0:03:50 became first in the canon and then the
0:03:53 others matthew mark and luke are all
0:03:55 grouped together because they're
0:03:57 what we call the synoptic gospels that
0:03:59 is they they tell the same story from
0:04:01 much of the same point of view
0:04:03 they have the same kind of chronology
0:04:04 they have jesus doing this and that they
0:04:06 share a lot of materials
0:04:08 and so uh they
0:04:12 we those three gospels got grouped
0:04:14 together and the gospel of john is so
0:04:16 different from the others it's just
0:04:18 jesus doesn't sound the same
0:04:20 the order of events in in the gospel of
0:04:22 john are not the same
0:04:24 as they are in the other three gospels
0:04:26 in the other three gospels there are a
0:04:27 lot more
0:04:28 healings for example and exorcisms
0:04:31 and there are no exorcisms in the gospel
0:04:33 of john at all
0:04:35 and there are very few healings there
0:04:37 are signs where
0:04:38 jesus turns water into wine and you know
0:04:41 walk from the water and things like that
0:04:43 but there's much less of an emphasis on
0:04:45 healings in the gospel of john
0:04:47 compared to the other three gospels and
0:04:49 no exorcisms at all
0:04:51 which makes it really stand out and the
0:04:53 teachings of the gospel of john
0:04:55 are very different from the teachings
0:04:57 than the other three gospels
0:04:58 they in in john jesus
0:05:01 sounds like a greek philosopher about
0:05:04 half the time
0:05:06 right whereas in the other gospels he
0:05:08 sounds like an apocalyptic
0:05:10 jewish prophet speaking of which there's
0:05:13 a lot less
0:05:15 what we call eschatology or
0:05:17 apocalypticism
0:05:18 in john that is any talk about the end
0:05:21 of the world as we know it
0:05:23 uh satan coming with his angels and
0:05:25 fighting against
0:05:26 uh the son of man with his angels and
0:05:28 the setting up of the kingdom of god on
0:05:30 earth and
0:05:31 all that sort of thing which is all the
0:05:33 way through matthew mark and luke
0:05:35 very little of it in the gospel of john
0:05:37 jesus sounds much more like a
0:05:38 philosopher talking about light and dark
0:05:40 and truth and
0:05:42 you know falseness and that sort of
0:05:45 thing
0:05:45 uh so for a variety of reasons uh
0:05:49 john seems to be set apart from the
0:05:51 other three gospels and we think that's
0:05:53 probably why it comes last
0:05:55 in the canon also a lot of people just
0:05:57 felt it looks like a more mature gospel
0:06:00 it looks like a later gospel for example
0:06:02 it has more of an emphasis
0:06:04 on the deity of jesus and
0:06:07 jesus as the son of god and jesus is
0:06:09 equal to god the father and
0:06:11 and these kinds of things that seem like
0:06:13 they developed more in the
0:06:15 second century the late and first
0:06:16 century in the second century
0:06:18 which would make them several decades
0:06:20 after the writing of mark
0:06:22 now we think mark is the earliest both
0:06:24 because matthew and luke
0:06:26 use mark as a source so mark has got to
0:06:29 pre-date matthew and luke
0:06:31 but how do we know how do we know that
0:06:33 matthew and luke use mark
0:06:35 what gives you such confidence you can
0:06:37 say that well it is disputable because
0:06:39 of course
0:06:40 uh you could say that either matthew
0:06:44 is copying mark but then cutting out
0:06:47 some of the action but expanding the
0:06:48 teachings
0:06:50 because matthew will take you know
0:06:52 something from mark and expand it a lot
0:06:55 now is that is it more likely that
0:06:57 matthew is expanding on mark
0:07:00 or do we imagine mark sitting down with
0:07:02 matthew and cutting reams of it out
0:07:06 you know why would an ancient author cut
0:07:08 out material
0:07:09 if he had it to pass on and it's the
0:07:12 same way with luke
0:07:14 there are parts where i think luke has
0:07:17 mark in front of him and he's following
0:07:20 mark's
0:07:20 chronology somewhat but then he'll take
0:07:23 a story that he finds in mark in
0:07:26 you know a much later chapter and he
0:07:28 takes that story and he
0:07:30 transfers it to earlier in his gospel
0:07:34 and the reason is i think is because he
0:07:36 wants to use that story to make some of
0:07:38 his
0:07:39 favorite themes and so he he uses the
0:07:42 story
0:07:43 um and then he packs into it a bunch
0:07:47 more material
0:07:48 and again it's just a matter of when you
0:07:49 put matthew and mark
0:07:52 next to each other or mark and luke next
0:07:54 to each other
0:07:56 who looks like he copied the other
0:08:00 and it's a guess of course but it's a
0:08:03 guess that scholars
0:08:05 analyzing sentence after sentence after
0:08:07 sentence
0:08:08 for example mark uses language that's a
0:08:10 bit more rough and tumble
0:08:12 a bit more earthy and matthew and luke
0:08:15 almost
0:08:16 always will clean up mark's greek
0:08:19 right to where it sounds more
0:08:20 respectable well what's more likely
0:08:24 that matthew and luke used a
0:08:26 colloquialism
0:08:28 or even a sketchy kind of sounding term
0:08:31 uh a disrespectful term or that matthew
0:08:34 and luke
0:08:35 cleaned up mark so it's it's hundreds of
0:08:38 decisions like that that
0:08:40 you make when you take
0:08:43 the parallel gospels and this is what's
0:08:45 fortunate in modern publications
0:08:46 we can have the greek of matthew in one
0:08:49 column the greek of mark in another
0:08:51 column and the greek of luke in another
0:08:53 column
0:08:53 all of the same passages and you can
0:08:55 just highlight with a with a pen
0:08:58 uh where they have the exact same words
0:09:00 and where they have
0:09:01 different words and then you have to
0:09:03 decide which is most likely changed
0:09:05 to what and so as you're saying at the
0:09:08 level of the greek
0:09:08 the actual greek text sometimes is
0:09:10 identical uh in various gospels and
0:09:13 sometimes it changes subtly or not so
0:09:15 subtly
0:09:16 and and this is the conundrum what's
0:09:17 going on here who is copying and editing
0:09:19 who perhaps
0:09:21 yeah that's exactly right and and uh
0:09:25 you know this is not just something that
0:09:27 scholars of ancient documents
0:09:29 do we have i mean i taught for
0:09:32 30 over 30 years in universities and i i
0:09:35 got to the point where i had to
0:09:37 i learned pretty well when i saw
0:09:39 plagiarism
0:09:42 and i was pretty sure that the student
0:09:46 that the wikipedia article hadn't copied
0:09:48 from this student's paper
0:09:51 okay but the other way around sounded
0:09:53 right and
0:09:54 and you can even see okay well the
0:09:56 student kind of changed the word here or
0:09:57 changed to work here
0:09:58 thinking that he or she was going to
0:10:00 fool me then clever
0:10:02 yeah and then oh well no i didn't copy
0:10:04 this i wrote this out myself
0:10:05 you know but you get to the point where
0:10:08 you can tell
0:10:09 uh more likely who's copying whom
0:10:12 doesn't always work but it's fascinating
0:10:15 does this detective work really isn't it
0:10:17 you're kind of
0:10:18 you're trying to reconstruct with a
0:10:20 detective's mentality you know what
0:10:21 what really happened there what's the
0:10:23 best hypothesis one can come up with
0:10:25 um that's right but one of the other
0:10:28 things i i've heard and i've checked
0:10:29 this out myself it seems that in mark's
0:10:31 gospel the earliest
0:10:33 um there's quite a negative portrayal of
0:10:35 the disciples
0:10:36 uh often they're portrayed as
0:10:38 unbelieving or hard of heart
0:10:40 um for example the famous story of jesus
0:10:43 walking on the water
0:10:45 and the sort of ends with the disciples
0:10:47 just not getting what's going on in
0:10:48 their hearts were hard
0:10:50 and then if you look at say the story in
0:10:51 matthew's version
0:10:53 yeah there's a bit of disbelief but at
0:10:55 the end they proclaim him as
0:10:57 the son of god and they worship him it
0:10:59 says uh in
0:11:01 matthew and that seems to be a
0:11:03 consistent change is it not
0:11:05 from one to the other which suggests
0:11:07 that matthew is later because
0:11:09 i guess why would a late why would a
0:11:11 gospel writer deliberately
0:11:13 from say a more positive portrayal make
0:11:15 them look more more stupid but you can
0:11:17 understand how
0:11:17 perhaps a later gospel might perhaps
0:11:20 improve their
0:11:20 status as wanting to be more like role
0:11:23 models or more respectable people than
0:11:24 the unbelievers they were earlier on
0:11:27 is that something that uh is the case do
0:11:30 you think
0:11:31 yes um although i don't think it would
0:11:34 be necessarily the case that people
0:11:36 writing later
0:11:37 would always want to make the apostles
0:11:39 look better
0:11:40 right because it's how it's how mark
0:11:43 presents the apostles
0:11:44 the disciples that is one of the clues
0:11:47 to why he wrote his gospel
0:11:49 and you take the places where he's not
0:11:51 like matthew
0:11:52 or luke or john and you're right it's
0:11:56 in these places where over and over
0:11:58 again the disciples misunderstand
0:12:00 and even to the point of you know
0:12:01 halfway through when they're in the boat
0:12:04 and and jesus is saying beware the
0:12:07 leaven of the pharisees
0:12:09 and the disciples i'll start talking
0:12:10 about oh darn we forgot to bring some
0:12:12 bread
0:12:13 you know we don't have any we have one
0:12:15 loaf of bread and that's not enough for
0:12:17 us to get across the
0:12:18 sea of galilee with and what are we
0:12:20 going to do what are we going to do
0:12:21 and jesus overhears them and says
0:12:25 don't you understand yet didn't i just
0:12:28 do two
0:12:28 feedings when we had the you know
0:12:32 12 you know we had the 5 000 people that
0:12:34 i fed
0:12:35 how many baskets of food left over did
0:12:37 you take up and they kind of hang their
0:12:39 heads and they said well 12.
0:12:42 and then he says and then after that you
0:12:43 know we had the 7 000 people that i
0:12:45 fed and how many baskets of food did you
0:12:48 take up after that
0:12:49 and they kind of hang their heads and
0:12:50 they say seven
0:12:53 and so you get again jesus saying you
0:12:55 don't
0:12:56 you just don't get it do you you keep
0:12:58 misunderstanding
0:13:00 but i think if you really see what it is
0:13:02 exactly
0:13:03 this is the way i've taught mark and
0:13:05 it's the way i've published it in my
0:13:06 book actually the chat remark
0:13:09 why are the disciples portrayed this way
0:13:11 right and i think it's because they're
0:13:14 meant to be representatives of the
0:13:16 disciples that mark is writing to
0:13:20 and it's not that they don't understand
0:13:22 that jesus
0:13:23 is great or a healer because they keep
0:13:26 bringing people for him to heal they
0:13:28 know that
0:13:30 what they don't understand this really
0:13:32 comes to a head in the very very central
0:13:34 chapter
0:13:35 of the gospel of mark which is chapter 8
0:13:37 there are 16 chapters in mark
0:13:38 chapter 8 is the turning point for the
0:13:41 whole gospel
0:13:42 and it's when jesus is saying the son of
0:13:44 man is going to go to jerusalem they're
0:13:45 going to
0:13:46 be beaten he's going to be you know
0:13:48 they're going to kill him
0:13:49 and he's going to rather and peter takes
0:13:51 him aside and says
0:13:53 no no no no you can't talk that way
0:13:54 that's not going to happen
0:13:56 well why is peter saying that because
0:13:58 peter has come to believe that he that
0:13:59 jesus
0:14:00 is the messiah and he just confessed it
0:14:04 jesus had just said who do people say
0:14:06 that i am and they said well some people
0:14:08 say you're john the baptist some people
0:14:09 say you're elijah something
0:14:11 like that and jesus says who do you say
0:14:13 that i
0:14:14 am and that's when peter says you're the
0:14:17 messiah you're the christ
0:14:19 and jesus praises him
0:14:22 for the confession but then when jesus
0:14:26 immediately starts talking about the
0:14:28 suffering he's going to have to endure
0:14:30 precisely because he is the messiah
0:14:33 peter doesn't understand that because
0:14:34 messiahs don't suffer
0:14:36 this is breaking the form and so that's
0:14:39 why peter takes him aside and says no
0:14:41 you don't understand jesus i just told
0:14:43 you you're the messiah
0:14:45 you get on a big white horse in the
0:14:47 heavens and you come sweeping down with
0:14:49 angelic armies and you overthrow the
0:14:51 romans and the bad people and you set up
0:14:52 the kingdom of god on earth
0:14:54 that's what messiahs do messiahs don't
0:14:58 get killed
0:14:58 they don't suffer they don't die that's
0:15:02 against form and that's when jesus
0:15:05 rebukes him
0:15:06 and says the famous line get thee behind
0:15:08 me satan
0:15:10 because god and the holy spirit have not
0:15:12 revealed this to you
0:15:14 this has come from the bad place but
0:15:16 this is i i find this totally confusing
0:15:19 uh indeed that's what the passage says
0:15:21 but then at the end of luke uh you had
0:15:23 this wonderful story of the
0:15:24 disciples on the road to emmaus and they
0:15:26 bump into this stranger
0:15:29 who they don't know it's jesus and in
0:15:31 the end they do but
0:15:32 the stranger when he reveals himself
0:15:33 with the breaking of the bread so
0:15:35 rebukes him says
0:15:36 didn't you understand that all these
0:15:37 things the the suffering the death and
0:15:39 so on
0:15:40 had to happen as it was foretold in the
0:15:42 scriptures
0:15:43 yeah so it's in the scriptures
0:15:47 and yet you're saying it's breaking form
0:15:49 and peter as a good jew didn't know
0:15:51 anything about it so
0:15:53 if you if you take this their scriptures
0:15:56 which is the jewish scriptures
0:15:57 yes our old testament with a few other
0:16:00 books
0:16:02 you find me a passage or say 10 passages
0:16:07 where the messiah is talked about
0:16:10 and it says he'll be he'll suffer and be
0:16:12 beaten and
0:16:13 and killed there is no place now you can
0:16:17 find the passages of
0:16:19 the suffering servant in isaiah
0:16:22 but that's that he's never called the
0:16:23 messiah so there's
0:16:26 the suffering servant passages in the
0:16:28 bible
0:16:30 and then there's the messianic passages
0:16:32 in the bible they're never put together
0:16:34 in the old testament well this is why
0:16:36 i'm confusing because this is not my
0:16:37 idea this it says in the end of luke
0:16:39 and this is jesus speaking thus it is
0:16:41 written that the messiah is to suffer
0:16:44 and to rise from the dead on the third
0:16:46 day and that's from the nrsv
0:16:47 so it's an idea that is built in to the
0:16:50 gospels themselves it's not
0:16:52 it's true they luke believed that he was
0:16:55 reading the old testament correctly
0:16:58 but how can he given that you've just
0:17:00 said that he couldn't be
0:17:02 because it's not there well from a
0:17:04 modern perspective this is why we have
0:17:05 historical criticism
0:17:07 a historical critic says sift through
0:17:10 the 2000 years of christian tradition
0:17:12 and christian reading
0:17:14 christians immediately after jesus was
0:17:16 killed
0:17:17 i think you know maybe before
0:17:20 anybody saw him in the resurrection
0:17:22 appearances because those kind of
0:17:24 happened over
0:17:25 you know most of the gospels act like it
0:17:28 all was a three-day thing
0:17:29 you know he was buried three days later
0:17:31 he got up well if you read them
0:17:32 carefully
0:17:34 that's it's not probably what happened
0:17:36 there were appearances of the risen
0:17:38 jesus that happened according to the
0:17:39 to acts and the gospel look over a
0:17:42 40-day period of time
0:17:44 exactly and so that's much more and in
0:17:47 fact paul
0:17:49 who probably saw had a vision of the
0:17:52 resurrected
0:17:53 uh jesus maybe in the year 35 or 36
0:17:57 so maybe just a few years after the
0:17:59 death of jesus or maybe even the year 34
0:18:02 i would say it was the year 34 probably
0:18:04 or
0:18:05 thereabouts well if jesus was
0:18:08 executed in the year 30 as i think is
0:18:10 the most likely
0:18:12 historical jesus scenario then paul's
0:18:14 claiming to see
0:18:16 the risen jesus in a bodily form
0:18:19 a physical form
0:18:23 four years after jesus's death
0:18:27 but uh it's a naive question here but
0:18:29 surely the ascension
0:18:30 happened four years prior to that so has
0:18:33 jesus
0:18:33 come from heaven back down to earth
0:18:35 again for a second is that his like
0:18:37 an early proto-second coming no it's not
0:18:39 no i mean how can he see a bodily jesus
0:18:41 if he's already gone to heaven
0:18:43 according to there again you're reading
0:18:45 like a modern
0:18:46 christian you're mashing together all
0:18:48 these different
0:18:49 pieces of the new testament and say they
0:18:51 all tell the same story with the same
0:18:53 facts
0:18:53 paul didn't know anything about an
0:18:55 ascension right
0:18:59 i believe all the stories about the
0:19:01 ascension
0:19:03 um are much later inventions right
0:19:06 um and what i think what's happening is
0:19:09 that
0:19:10 christians who sincerely have had
0:19:13 visionary experiences of jesus yes
0:19:16 in the stories of
0:19:19 you know luke especially they pack those
0:19:23 experiences
0:19:24 into one story about the ascension of
0:19:27 jesus
0:19:28 and then for the rest of acts jesus
0:19:31 doesn't appear to anybody
0:19:32 except as a vision from heaven yeah
0:19:35 jesus
0:19:36 never appears on earth again he speaks
0:19:38 off stage
0:19:40 yeah from off stage that's not how
0:19:43 that must not be how paul defined it
0:19:45 because
0:19:46 in galatians it's very important for
0:19:48 paul to say
0:19:49 what i saw is exactly what peter and
0:19:52 james and john saw
0:19:54 i'm not i'm not a junior apostle no
0:19:57 see other people can say it wrong say
0:19:58 well paul yeah maybe you saw
0:20:00 a vision of jesus but peter and james
0:20:03 and john
0:20:04 actually held his body in their hands
0:20:07 after he was resurrected
0:20:09 and paul will have none of it because
0:20:10 he's not going to take a junior level
0:20:13 apostleship from the other from the 12.
0:20:16 he's just not going to allow it so he
0:20:18 insists in galatians
0:20:20 and it makes no sense of his argument at
0:20:21 all if he's this is not his point
0:20:23 that what he saw was exactly what peter
0:20:26 and james and john saw
0:20:27 which means some form of bodily
0:20:30 jesus now we use the word physical to
0:20:33 our peril because
0:20:35 what we mean in the modern world about
0:20:36 physical is very different from what
0:20:39 in the ancient world they meant by
0:20:41 fooses or fusicos or
0:20:43 the greek words that we usually
0:20:44 translate physically so i'd say let's
0:20:47 get rid of the
0:20:48 material immaterial dichotomies and the
0:20:50 physical spiritual dichotomies
0:20:52 those don't work for paul no and they
0:20:55 don't work for most of ancient
0:20:56 christianity
0:20:57 they had much more complicated views of
0:20:59 what the body was
0:21:01 and what nature was but whatever paul
0:21:04 believes peter saw
0:21:07 paul believes he saw and that's four
0:21:11 years after
0:21:12 masomenos we're guessing but something
0:21:14 like four years after
0:21:16 the so-called ascension of jesus was
0:21:19 supposed to have occurred
0:21:22 okay well coming can we come back to
0:21:24 mark then and
0:21:25 what i've heard this phrase used uh
0:21:27 mark's so-called
0:21:29 messianic secret this idea of there's a
0:21:32 secret
0:21:32 in the gospel of mark which we don't
0:21:34 find say in john
0:21:35 or the other gospel what's that about
0:21:37 what's this secret do you think that
0:21:39 refers to what i just said about
0:21:41 what is it that mark believes the
0:21:42 disciples misunderstood
0:21:45 he thinks they get it right that jesus
0:21:46 is the messiah
0:21:48 what they don't get right is it's
0:21:50 necessary for the messiah to suffer
0:21:52 before he can be glorified
0:21:53 right and that's why jesus keeps saying
0:21:56 to the disciples also
0:21:57 you're going to have to suffer you're
0:21:59 going to preach my name they're going to
0:22:01 throw you in jail they're going to beat
0:22:02 you they're going to stone you
0:22:04 they may even kill you but if you hold
0:22:07 on
0:22:08 you will achieve the glory
0:22:11 that jesus himself achieves so
0:22:14 the whole idea in mark in my view and
0:22:16 this explains the messianic secret
0:22:18 the messianic secret is not that jesus
0:22:20 is the messiah
0:22:22 i think that he keeps telling people
0:22:24 don't spread this word around because
0:22:26 the whole gospel of mark is jesus
0:22:28 attempt to teach
0:22:29 the people who follow him uh
0:22:32 and he's not teaching he's not
0:22:33 broadcasting this all the time see a lot
0:22:35 of
0:22:36 mark is about jesus taking the disciples
0:22:38 off in secret
0:22:40 and he teaches in parables to the crowd
0:22:42 but according to mark why does jesus
0:22:44 teach in parables and this is something
0:22:45 for modern people really
0:22:47 hard hard to wrap their brain around
0:22:49 according to us jesus spoke in parables
0:22:52 so people could understand better but in
0:22:55 mark jesus says i teach them parables so
0:22:57 the people on the outside will not
0:22:59 understand
0:23:01 they'll hear and not understand they'll
0:23:03 see and not perceive
0:23:05 so jesus is intentionally trying to
0:23:08 throw outsiders
0:23:10 a curveball but he tells the truth
0:23:14 to the insiders and the truth he keeps
0:23:16 teaching them over and over again in the
0:23:18 gospel of mark is
0:23:20 glory must be preceded by suffering
0:23:23 that's what so many of the early
0:23:24 disciples of jesus did not understand
0:23:26 and i think a lot of them truly did not
0:23:28 understand it
0:23:29 the crucifix they didn't expect jesus to
0:23:30 be crucified
0:23:32 all this stuff about jesus prophesying
0:23:34 his crucifixion all the way through the
0:23:35 gospels well that's also probably not
0:23:37 historical
0:23:39 um and why would that be is it because
0:23:41 of what some would talk about
0:23:42 anti-supernaturalist
0:23:44 liberal prejudice or is it for kind of
0:23:46 more
0:23:48 obvious historical reasons that if you
0:23:50 had predicted it
0:23:51 in such detail why were the disciples so
0:23:54 surprised when it
0:23:55 when it happened there seems to be no
0:23:56 awareness or so ah this is now the final
0:23:58 stage let us
0:24:00 see this drama unfold they're all kind
0:24:01 of scattering and running away and
0:24:04 you know there's kind of not it's an
0:24:05 inconsistency there which needs to be
0:24:07 ironed out
0:24:07 and that's one thing that's one thing
0:24:10 you could argue
0:24:12 uh but i think there are lots of other
0:24:14 uh possible explanations and they are
0:24:16 it's probably
0:24:16 an amalgamation of several of them as i
0:24:19 pointed out
0:24:20 there was no expectation that the
0:24:21 messiah would suffer
0:24:26 i rather doubt that the historical jesus
0:24:29 thought that either
0:24:30 because when he goes to jerusalem he
0:24:32 seems like he's headed in for a parade
0:24:35 and and he it seems to me that jesus
0:24:39 at least he's portrayed is it is
0:24:42 sincerely surprised
0:24:43 at what happens to him in jerusalem
0:24:47 or at least if we reconstruct this
0:24:49 historically
0:24:51 um so maybe even jesus thought that he
0:24:54 if he was
0:24:54 i think i don't know that we can tell
0:24:56 whether the historical jesus
0:24:58 thought he was the messiah or not i
0:25:00 think if he
0:25:01 didn't think he was the messiah he
0:25:03 definitely thought he was a prophet who
0:25:05 was making way for the messiah
0:25:07 there are just so many things in the
0:25:09 gospels where jesus talks about
0:25:11 this i do this but the son of man will
0:25:13 do this
0:25:14 yes and it sounds like he's talking
0:25:15 about two different people it's about
0:25:17 someone else almost rather yes
0:25:20 is it possible it's a roundabout way of
0:25:21 talking about himself or is that not
0:25:23 plausible
0:25:24 it is and that it is a possible and
0:25:27 that's been the
0:25:28 you know christian answer for two
0:25:30 thousand years is uh
0:25:32 when paul says when jesus says me
0:25:36 uh he means the same person as when he
0:25:38 the next sentence says the son of man
0:25:41 the son of man is just a circumlocution
0:25:43 for i yes
0:25:44 and so people have said that uh i think
0:25:47 it's stretching it
0:25:48 and i think it doesn't get rid of all
0:25:49 the different clues
0:25:52 um but so i think that
0:25:56 mark is so is his peculiar self
0:26:00 because his main goal is to change
0:26:05 uh his own friends the disciples in his
0:26:07 churches
0:26:08 to change their notion about what glory
0:26:11 is
0:26:11 and therefore what the messiah is just
0:26:14 like jesus
0:26:15 was the glorified messiah who first had
0:26:17 to die
0:26:19 and suffer so we can attain glory
0:26:22 if we'll hold out through the hardships
0:26:25 but we are going to have hardships
0:26:27 right now right now people are at our
0:26:30 doors
0:26:32 but what is this glory that they're
0:26:33 they've been encouraged to have hope in
0:26:36 what what is this great treasure or this
0:26:38 great uh
0:26:39 goal that they want that they've been
0:26:41 encouraged to aspire to
0:26:42 for if they've if they've died it's
0:26:45 resurrection
0:26:46 but resurrected into a glorified body
0:26:49 not just the decaying body in the tomb
0:26:53 paul is the best one to talk about this
0:26:54 in first corinthians 15 but
0:26:56 mark seems to be somewhat familiar with
0:26:59 paul's at least paul's theology
0:27:01 of all the gospels mark's theology is
0:27:04 closer to the theology of the apostle
0:27:06 paul than any of the other four gospels
0:27:09 and one of the things for example as an
0:27:11 example is
0:27:12 paul very much believed in a doctrine of
0:27:14 atonement
0:27:15 that is that the death of jesus wasn't
0:27:18 an accident
0:27:19 yeah it was a it was a sacrifice
0:27:22 for our sins jesus atoned for our sins
0:27:26 by his
0:27:27 lamb-like sacrifice now you read that
0:27:30 that's all the way through mark
0:27:31 it's in matthew because matthew takes it
0:27:33 out of mark it's in paul very much
0:27:36 it's not in luke or acts no luke acts
0:27:39 does not want to have an atonement
0:27:41 theory the death of jesus was necessary
0:27:45 for the gospel of duke but it's because
0:27:47 jesus was a righteous prophet
0:27:52 yes and all righteous prophets suffer
0:27:55 for their righteousness and jesus was
0:27:58 just
0:27:58 the best example of the suffering of a
0:28:00 righteous prophet but his death doesn't
0:28:02 cover our sins
0:28:05 no so the the odd thing is you you get
0:28:09 this extraordinary
0:28:10 scene of jesus dying on the cross
0:28:11 calling out seemingly in despair my god
0:28:14 my god why have you forsaken me
0:28:16 uh now i'm aware that's the first line
0:28:18 of a psalm but
0:28:20 nevertheless if he wasn't just reciting
0:28:22 poetry on the cross it actually
0:28:24 meant it this is a curious cry of
0:28:27 despair
0:28:27 it seems um and then after that
0:28:31 in mark you don't have any resurrection
0:28:33 appearances
0:28:35 i i know there are resurrection of
0:28:37 stories uh
0:28:38 several of them that you might read in
0:28:40 modern bibles but i understand that none
0:28:42 of them
0:28:43 are part the organic part of the
0:28:45 original gospel that they were added
0:28:46 much later on so
0:28:47 these mysterious things again this is
0:28:49 suffering jesus talking about how he
0:28:51 must suffer must die
0:28:53 and then when he actually goes through
0:28:55 that terrible ordeal in that trial
0:28:58 he seems to die in despair and then
0:29:00 after that there's no resurrection
0:29:02 either
0:29:02 for mark i mean i'm not saying that it's
0:29:05 not mentioned but it's if the
0:29:06 appearances don't figure
0:29:07 as actual events in mark so for me
0:29:10 that's
0:29:10 more more mysterious events that
0:29:13 aren't expected yeah of course you're
0:29:16 mixing up several different problems
0:29:18 the the quotation of the elements of
0:29:21 bhaktani
0:29:22 is you know one problem uh that requires
0:29:25 some kind of
0:29:26 interpretation how you fix that up with
0:29:31 the fact that mark believes there was a
0:29:34 resurrection
0:29:36 yes and yet the fact that he doesn't
0:29:39 seem to want to depict any of it
0:29:41 visually yes um
0:29:45 and i don't personally buy the idea that
0:29:49 several last pages of mark were lost
0:29:51 burned up or
0:29:53 lost and so mark actually originally did
0:29:55 have resurrection appearances and they
0:29:56 were just lost
0:29:57 do you think it ends where mark intends
0:29:59 it to end in this kind of i
0:30:01 do i do and again i think that's because
0:30:05 there are hidden messages all the way
0:30:07 through this stuff
0:30:09 so i would say the quotation of the my
0:30:12 god my god why have you forsaken me
0:30:15 is it's a hint to the mindful reader
0:30:20 that on the surface jesus is being
0:30:23 forsaken by god the father
0:30:25 but we know how these psalms end
0:30:29 right most of these suffering david
0:30:32 kingly figures
0:30:33 that the psalms are attributed to
0:30:37 even if david didn't write them all it's
0:30:40 their you know woe is me they all they
0:30:43 tons of them begin
0:30:44 with woe is me why have you forsaken me
0:30:46 god why have you
0:30:48 led me to be king of this country and
0:30:50 now you're just slaughtering me
0:30:52 yeah and and then somehow the suffering
0:30:55 comes
0:30:56 is made sense of the king
0:30:59 is going to be redeemed the king is
0:31:01 going to be saved
0:31:03 so if you're if you're a knowledgeable
0:31:06 you know disciple of jesus
0:31:08 you you don't hear just the one word
0:31:10 from the song
0:31:12 you might even go look it up you go
0:31:16 that sounds familiar but where is it
0:31:19 from
0:31:21 or you might know your songs you very
0:31:23 likely know your psalms well enough that
0:31:24 you at least know what the first line of
0:31:26 each of them is
0:31:28 and so you can go look it up that way
0:31:31 and it gives you a way again to
0:31:33 deal with the reality of the suffering
0:31:36 by
0:31:36 still being able to confess that the
0:31:38 suffering is not the last word
0:31:40 glory is the last word so
0:31:44 i also think that kind of throws some
0:31:47 light on
0:31:48 mark 16 8 that is the last verse in
0:31:52 what we consider the original mark that
0:31:54 we possess
0:31:56 and if you notice it's not
0:31:59 jesus doesn't appear bodily
0:32:02 but he's certainly resurrected and what
0:32:05 does
0:32:07 what are the women told by the young man
0:32:10 and i think we're supposed to understand
0:32:11 him to be an angel although they don't
0:32:13 actually call him that
0:32:15 he says don't look here for him he's not
0:32:18 here
0:32:19 well that makes perfectly sense he's
0:32:21 been raised from the dead why should he
0:32:22 hang around in a graveyard
0:32:24 he's not a ghost after all ghosts hang
0:32:27 around in graveyards
0:32:28 resurrected messiahs don't and it says
0:32:31 go
0:32:32 to galilee just like he told you go
0:32:35 to galilee there you will see him
0:32:40 now i'm not the first person to suggest
0:32:43 this
0:32:44 gunter borncom i think was one of the
0:32:46 german scholars who suggested way back
0:32:48 in the 50s
0:32:49 which was to say the end of the gospel
0:32:52 of mark is telling the community
0:32:55 either that there are already in galilee
0:32:58 or that they should go to galilee and
0:32:59 wait for jesus's appearance
0:33:01 there and he said there is no
0:33:04 resurrection appearance of
0:33:06 jesus in mark because he had not
0:33:09 appeared to any of them yet
0:33:11 even when mark was written
0:33:14 around the year 70. what the gospel
0:33:17 writer is saying
0:33:18 he's going to appear to us our community
0:33:21 in galilee and then he's going to
0:33:25 establish the kingdom of god so you he's
0:33:28 saying it to him
0:33:28 to his his readers
0:33:31 as if they're living back in the year
0:33:33 30.
0:33:35 but he's meaning for them to follow this
0:33:37 as if they're living in the year
0:33:39 68 or 69 which is when i think it was
0:33:42 written
0:33:43 or they're about and so
0:33:46 it's it's market is sounds like a simple
0:33:50 gospel when you read it
0:33:52 first time through because it's all this
0:33:53 action there's not a lot of
0:33:56 mysterious teaching but on the on the
0:33:59 level of the narrative
0:34:01 and some of the sayings mark is full of
0:34:03 puzzles
0:34:05 they're very interesting puzzles once
0:34:08 you kind of get into them and say okay
0:34:10 why did it end this way and i'm just
0:34:13 guessing but i'm saying
0:34:14 mark it believes that the where his
0:34:17 community needs to be is in galilee
0:34:19 waiting for jesus
0:34:21 and enduring the sufferings that they're
0:34:23 bound to receive
0:34:24 from say the romans or the synagogues in
0:34:27 galilee
0:34:29 um but it seems to me it's not just the
0:34:31 end that's
0:34:32 missing compared to the other gospels
0:34:34 where there clearly is they are
0:34:36 actual uh resurrection appearances is
0:34:38 beginning to because
0:34:39 uh in matthew and in luke we have these
0:34:42 uh
0:34:42 extended nativity stories you know
0:34:46 the birth of jesus and what happened to
0:34:47 them the stories are quite different but
0:34:49 nevertheless they're there
0:34:50 but in mark what we begin um you know
0:34:53 with
0:34:53 john the baptist preaching and then
0:34:55 jesus comes straight in
0:34:56 uh as an adult presumably a.d 30 or 80
0:35:00 28 or whenever
0:35:01 so what why does mark seem to leave out
0:35:04 the really important beginning and the
0:35:05 really important end
0:35:06 it seems a truncated gospel but when we
0:35:09 have the others that clearly do have
0:35:11 those
0:35:11 and of course john then takes it back
0:35:13 much much further to
0:35:14 eternity you know before the creation of
0:35:16 the universe he really goes for the
0:35:18 whole hog but
0:35:19 um it just seems to be odd that mark
0:35:21 then doesn't have why would mark have a
0:35:23 a beginning uh why did he jump why would
0:35:25 he jump straight in
0:35:27 uh with jesus as a an adult like that
0:35:30 because if this has to do with how the
0:35:32 different writers perceived what they
0:35:34 were writing
0:35:36 luke is the best example of someone who
0:35:40 seemed to have a very clear genre
0:35:42 expectations in his head
0:35:44 right he's going to take mark he's going
0:35:46 to take a lot of his story from mark
0:35:49 he's also going to take the sayings that
0:35:52 are in
0:35:53 the lost document we call q that is
0:35:56 sayings of jesus that aren't in mark but
0:35:59 you see
0:35:59 word for word in matthew and luke well
0:36:01 where did matthew and luke get them
0:36:03 we don't think luke used matthew
0:36:04 matthews luke they're just
0:36:06 that introduces cans of worms that are
0:36:08 too many to take care of
0:36:10 but it does make sense if matthew and
0:36:12 luke both had access
0:36:14 to a document that was mainly sayings of
0:36:17 jesus
0:36:18 that had been collected before them and
0:36:20 they both had access to this document
0:36:22 and they used it
0:36:23 sometimes freely sometimes pretty
0:36:25 slavishly
0:36:26 but um they both used it so luke
0:36:30 has at least mark in front of him and
0:36:32 this cue document
0:36:33 the sayings and he may have it sounds
0:36:35 like from his first few verses of his
0:36:37 gospel
0:36:38 that he had other documents he certainly
0:36:40 claims to have
0:36:41 relied on oral tradition and things
0:36:43 people said stories people told
0:36:45 but he may have had other written
0:36:46 traditions too i think he probably did
0:36:50 um just because the way some of the
0:36:51 styles change when you read through luke
0:36:54 and and luke sets out
0:36:58 he looks at mark and he goes that's kind
0:37:01 of a nice little short story
0:37:04 but it's not a real book
0:37:07 it's certainly not a bios
0:37:11 of jesus now we use the word bios
0:37:13 because
0:37:14 the modern word biography is a little
0:37:17 misleading
0:37:18 because in modern biographies what you
0:37:20 expect to get is not only the child the
0:37:22 person's childhood and upbringing
0:37:24 and education but you also expect to get
0:37:27 some psychological explanation
0:37:29 right well you don't get that in luke
0:37:31 and you don't get it in most ancient
0:37:33 lives ancient lives though had some
0:37:35 things that you
0:37:36 were supposed to give and you could even
0:37:38 learn these in rhetorical school
0:37:40 as a teenage boy you start off
0:37:44 with maybe addressing your reader or
0:37:46 your patronage as if it's your reader so
0:37:48 you dedicate the book to
0:37:50 them dear theophilus
0:37:53 you give a little spread about how you
0:37:56 came about to write this well i've heard
0:37:58 several stories about this and i've
0:37:59 decided to collect
0:38:00 some real information and do some
0:38:03 research and i've done my research and
0:38:05 i'm going to lay it out
0:38:07 then you give the heritage of the person
0:38:09 who the person's parents were
0:38:11 and possibly their ancestry now you
0:38:14 don't get that
0:38:15 immediately in luke that comes a little
0:38:17 bit later because luke
0:38:19 dives first into the stories around
0:38:22 jesus's
0:38:23 well the stories around john the baptist
0:38:24 birth
0:38:26 so he he makes john the baptist cousins
0:38:29 with jesus
0:38:31 it's probably not historical and it's
0:38:33 not in any place else
0:38:34 but notice how it ties everything
0:38:37 together this is
0:38:38 these are kind of an extended family of
0:38:40 prophets
0:38:41 that's how he wants to portray john the
0:38:43 baptist in his relationship with jesus
0:38:45 he admits that john the baptist came
0:38:46 first and that jesus was a follower of
0:38:49 john the baptist and was baptized by
0:38:50 john the baptist
0:38:52 and jesus doesn't really come on the
0:38:53 scene until john the baptist is arrested
0:38:56 by herod which is the way
0:38:57 a detail luke gets from mark also mark
0:39:00 says
0:39:01 jesus didn't start his ministry until
0:39:03 john was in prison
0:39:05 so luke kind of follows that but he gets
0:39:07 he gives all this up at the birth
0:39:08 as part of the birth if you read a
0:39:10 biography of plato for example
0:39:13 you get miracles you get stars that
0:39:15 appear in the sky you get shooting stars
0:39:17 you have
0:39:17 announcements from god you even get
0:39:19 maybe like asclepius
0:39:21 uh asclepius is
0:39:24 you know apollo is born because the god
0:39:27 asclepius
0:39:28 uh appears to his mother as a snake and
0:39:31 getting her
0:39:31 gets in her bed and has sex with her and
0:39:34 so apollo's then
0:39:35 no it's the apollo who turns into the
0:39:37 snake and asclepius who's the
0:39:39 child who's born anyway you have to have
0:39:41 miracles
0:39:42 you have to have wonders for god because
0:39:45 great men
0:39:46 you can see they're great at their birth
0:39:49 that's the way the gods like things
0:39:51 and then you show their education uh you
0:39:54 say okay he studied for a while in
0:39:56 alexandria then he he studied with the
0:39:59 great
0:39:59 you know socrates for a while in athens
0:40:02 um and then you know you kind of give
0:40:05 well that's what you got with jesus he
0:40:07 you know he's a young man in the temple
0:40:10 he's arguing with the scholars in the
0:40:12 temple they show that he's very educated
0:40:14 he's learned his books he's learned his
0:40:16 torah
0:40:16 he's probably even learned a little bit
0:40:18 of the mishna you know and these kinds
0:40:20 of things he can argue with the best
0:40:21 well it shows he's
0:40:22 and then two times luke even has this
0:40:25 phrase
0:40:26 he grew and whacked strong in body and
0:40:29 spirit
0:40:29 i can't quote it it's in stature and
0:40:33 you know he wisdom and stature in the
0:40:36 favor of god and man i think is the way
0:40:37 one of them puts it
0:40:40 that's day rigger that's just
0:40:43 that's required stuff in an ancient
0:40:46 biography
0:40:48 so luke does all of this stuff at the
0:40:50 beginning
0:40:52 because that's what a boss of a famous
0:40:55 person is supposed to look like
0:40:57 so luke is behaving an act like an
0:41:00 ancient historian according to the
0:41:01 canons of ancient historiography
0:41:03 he's converted being very conventional
0:41:05 he's following this this set pattern of
0:41:07 of the person's bios the biography but
0:41:09 matthew doesn't
0:41:10 do that and that even makes sense you
0:41:12 know luke's luke's ending
0:41:14 luke would not could not live with
0:41:16 having mark's ending
0:41:18 nothing happens so he has all these
0:41:21 stories
0:41:22 about the appearances of jesus and all
0:41:24 that kind of stuff and
0:41:25 jesus explaining the nature of his
0:41:27 gospel and why this happened why this
0:41:29 happened and all he's all wrapped up
0:41:31 really nice at the end of luke but then
0:41:35 act starts and it's clearly
0:41:40 a follow-up of luke but if you look at
0:41:42 the way acts
0:41:43 starts and how it goes through it's not
0:41:47 written like a bios
0:41:48 a bios a biography it's written like a
0:41:51 history
0:41:51 historia and uh
0:41:55 he again there's references to him
0:41:57 gathering data
0:41:59 there's references to him following
0:42:02 orderly the things
0:42:03 well he doesn't mind chronologically
0:42:05 ordering because we can look at acts and
0:42:07 say
0:42:08 uh he he moved this incident
0:42:11 from a source that he probably had and
0:42:13 puts it in a different place
0:42:15 because it serves his purpose by having
0:42:17 this story about jesus
0:42:18 or the apostle of paul or peter it
0:42:21 serves his purpose to have it in a
0:42:22 different place in acts
0:42:24 so he's rearranged the chronological
0:42:26 sequences
0:42:27 but that's what historians do all the
0:42:29 time in the ancient world
0:42:30 the other thing is that it's pretty
0:42:32 obvious that paul
0:42:35 luke didn't have you know verbatim
0:42:38 copies of speeches
0:42:40 that these guys gave for one thing they
0:42:42 all sound too much alike
0:42:44 right peter sounds like paul paul sounds
0:42:47 like peter
0:42:48 you know peter gives the same kind of
0:42:49 speech three times paul gives the same
0:42:51 kind of speech
0:42:52 uh three times about his conversion
0:42:54 except they're slightly different
0:42:55 you know well um
0:42:59 the rule in ancient historiography was
0:43:01 that the author of the historiography
0:43:03 wrote the speeches
0:43:06 and wrote the species speeches and
0:43:08 they'll say oh these are true speeches
0:43:10 what they mean is they're true to form
0:43:13 so they're true to the kind of thing
0:43:14 that person
0:43:15 would and should have said on that
0:43:17 occasion but that's not the same as
0:43:19 saying
0:43:19 this is what they actually said because
0:43:21 we have a video recording of it or a
0:43:23 stenographer took down notes you're
0:43:25 saying it's exactly
0:43:26 and this is what this is what you
0:43:28 learned how to do in school when you
0:43:29 were
0:43:30 when you were even 12 years old or much
0:43:32 less 16 years old
0:43:34 you get up in school one day and uh
0:43:37 your teacher your rhetorical teacher
0:43:39 because that's what most education for
0:43:41 boys that age were was teaching and
0:43:42 rhetoric
0:43:43 yes and you say okay
0:43:47 you are um
0:43:49 Music
0:43:53 you are achilles
0:43:57 and you're not going to give up on helen
0:44:02 you need to show how the greeks can't
0:44:05 give up on helen
0:44:08 uh so give you first
0:44:11 give this you you're going to give give
0:44:14 a hortatory speech
0:44:16 which is going to come later that's
0:44:17 going to be telling all your
0:44:19 cohorts why we got to go to war
0:44:24 but you're going to start off with what
0:44:25 we call an encomium
0:44:27 which is a kind of speech that praises
0:44:29 something or someone
0:44:32 so you're going to first give your
0:44:33 encomium of the beauty of helen
0:44:36 describe her as the dew and the
0:44:38 mountains and doves
0:44:40 and you know and then segway from that
0:44:43 encomium
0:44:44 into a horritory call to war
0:44:49 well you spend the next hour writing it
0:44:51 in your school
0:44:52 memorizing it and then with the scroll
0:44:55 with the speech on it
0:44:57 in your left hand because you keep your
0:44:59 right hand free to gesture
0:45:02 the proper way you're told to gesture
0:45:04 there's proper ways to gesture an
0:45:05 improper way to gesture
0:45:06 i'm sure they're wrong and you've
0:45:08 learned all these things
0:45:09 and then you give up and you give your
0:45:11 speech that you've written and memorized
0:45:13 to the rest of your classmates
0:45:16 luke learned all this stuff when he was
0:45:18 a kid because he obviously had a
0:45:19 rhetorical education i think paul had a
0:45:21 rhetorical education too
0:45:23 which is why he can change his
0:45:24 rhetorical style so
0:45:27 quickly and and well
0:45:31 but so the acts looks like ancient
0:45:34 history
0:45:35 and luke looks like ancient biography
0:45:40 and so that author just didn't want his
0:45:44 book to look like that shabby old mark
0:45:48 but you say shabby old mark now let
0:45:50 let's be let's be fair here surely many
0:45:52 people believe
0:45:53 that poor old shabby old mark behind
0:45:56 mark
0:45:57 stands peter the prince of the apostles
0:46:00 uh who is obviously an eyewitness
0:46:03 participant in the very events described
0:46:04 in in
0:46:05 mark 8 and mark 9 and so on what do
0:46:08 modern scholars think about this uh
0:46:10 tradition that behind it lies the
0:46:12 apostle himself and this is
0:46:14 what whatever kind of literary merit it
0:46:16 may have at least it has that
0:46:18 golden connection with the prince of the
0:46:20 apostles
0:46:21 i think most of us uh just believe
0:46:24 there's no reason to believe it
0:46:26 it was a tradition that arose only in
0:46:28 the second century
0:46:29 um so it doesn't go back to the
0:46:32 beginnings of the gospel at all
0:46:35 the the gospel itself makes no such
0:46:36 claims for itself
0:46:38 in fact as you pointed out peter comes
0:46:40 across looking pretty bad
0:46:42 in a lot of this gospel he's not
0:46:44 heroized as he is in matthew
0:46:48 um i think it'd be more likely that the
0:46:50 gospel of matthew
0:46:52 showed peter's reminiscences but we
0:46:55 don't think any of these gospels
0:46:56 or the show much influence of actual
0:46:59 reminiscence of the apostles
0:47:01 for one thing they just get too much
0:47:02 wrong they contradict each other
0:47:04 all over the place so
0:47:08 whenever you can take the gospels and
0:47:10 really line them up next to one another
0:47:12 on things that you can kind of test them
0:47:14 on they don't
0:47:16 live up to history
0:47:20 there are memoirs about that some people
0:47:22 had about a great man
0:47:24 but there's just no reason to believe
0:47:26 that
0:47:27 mark was written by a guy named mark
0:47:31 john mark who was himself
0:47:34 a follower of paul for a while then a
0:47:36 follower of peter for a while
0:47:38 and who ended up in rome with peter at
0:47:40 the end of peter's life
0:47:42 and took down a notation what peter said
0:47:46 the document just doesn't look like that
0:47:49 right
0:47:50 but you know it was important in the
0:47:52 second century for that kind of pedigree
0:47:54 to be built
0:47:55 for one thing mark was
0:47:58 some people nowadays especially since
0:48:00 some
0:48:02 the sense of an ending i can't remember
0:48:04 the literary critic's name who wrote
0:48:05 that
0:48:06 but uh he wrote on the gospel of mark in
0:48:08 the 20th century
0:48:10 and he praised it as being just really
0:48:13 well written
0:48:14 well nobody in the ancient world thought
0:48:18 that
0:48:20 and it's because it didn't live up to
0:48:21 ancient notions of literary criticism
0:48:24 well this guy's writing in the middle of
0:48:26 the 20th century and
0:48:28 we like things that do unexpected things
0:48:30 with the text
0:48:31 right we like sentences that are short
0:48:34 and clippy
0:48:35 we like using one syllabus words or
0:48:39 two syllabus words rather than 15
0:48:41 syllabus words
0:48:42 that's this you know we've all read our
0:48:46 um
0:48:48 hemingway and
0:48:51 but it's not it should not be a surprise
0:48:54 to people
0:48:55 when they learned that nobody in the
0:48:57 ancient world read hemingway
0:49:01 so uh mark
0:49:04 for example there's no way mark could
0:49:06 really ever become first in the canon
0:49:09 it was either matthew or john almost
0:49:11 always
0:49:14 and it's because the literary value of
0:49:16 mark was just not appreciated in the
0:49:18 ancient world now we can
0:49:19 read it and i agree i love to read mark
0:49:21 and the greek it's
0:49:23 it's easy to read it's immediate um
0:49:27 you don't have all these sentences that
0:49:29 are phrases upon
0:49:31 other phrases upon other phrases uh the
0:49:34 stories are direct
0:49:35 the healings are direct the
0:49:38 you know the devil casting the exorcisms
0:49:41 are direct
0:49:42 and it's nice to read and there's
0:49:44 surprising things in it too
0:49:45 and we in the modern world we like
0:49:47 literature that surprises us every once
0:49:49 while
0:49:51 we ought to point out of course that
0:49:52 when we're reading jesus teaching
0:49:54 in mark obviously someone like me would
0:49:57 be
0:49:58 more likely to be reading in english
0:49:59 you'll read it in greek but
0:50:01 jesus himself most likely did he not
0:50:04 have not preached in greek either he
0:50:05 would have been preaching in perhaps
0:50:07 aramaic
0:50:09 several layers before the modern avid
0:50:11 reader gets to
0:50:12 uh the words of jesus you have well not
0:50:16 only linguistically you also have the
0:50:17 gospel itself which is an additional
0:50:19 layer
0:50:19 but linguistically you have two
0:50:21 languages to go through and they're not
0:50:22 just
0:50:23 it's not like i don't know like italian
0:50:24 and spanish they're not kindred
0:50:26 languages they're very very different
0:50:28 languages aren't they
0:50:29 greek and the semitic uh
0:50:32 aramaic which is a bit like hebrew or
0:50:35 arabic
0:50:35 um so it's like arabic and english
0:50:37 almost is that
0:50:39 that difference yeah well aramaic is
0:50:42 actually closer to hebrew than it is
0:50:44 arabic but it certainly has
0:50:45 commonalities with both of them
0:50:47 yeah and you're right that's not uh
0:50:50 that has pretty much nothing to do
0:50:54 linguistically with greek
0:50:58 so um that's another reason
0:51:01 to be you know very skeptical about
0:51:05 how much reliance to place on the
0:51:07 historical reliability
0:51:09 of any of these gospels
0:51:13 you know even the fact that they don't
0:51:17 they they know jesus spoke aramaic so
0:51:20 every once in a while they'll have a
0:51:21 little
0:51:21 aramaic phrase there you know
0:51:23 talithakumi
0:51:25 when jesus talks to the young girl to
0:51:27 raise up
0:51:28 little girl get up uh
0:51:31 well why does mark and then some of the
0:51:33 other gospels i think matthew follows
0:51:35 this
0:51:36 why do they quote the talithakumi
0:51:39 um of jesus uh why when they quoted the
0:51:43 elohim they quoted it in which is really
0:51:47 more of an
0:51:48 aramaic form than a hebrew form
0:51:54 i don't think they did it
0:51:58 simply out of a desire for various
0:52:00 similitude right
0:52:03 i think they did it because it was in
0:52:05 their sources
0:52:07 it was a telling thing in their source
0:52:09 it was a it was a sharp
0:52:11 phrase that they could remember and
0:52:14 storytellers had been
0:52:15 remembering them for years yeah
0:52:18 um so i i don't think it
0:52:21 it does though add a feeling of very
0:52:23 similitude
0:52:24 uh other than that apparently
0:52:28 similitude uh how significant is it
0:52:31 though that jesus spoke in aramaic
0:52:33 the gospels are in greek i mean does it
0:52:35 make that much of a difference
0:52:36 or is a real cultural shift or
0:52:39 transposition occurring because of this
0:52:41 movement from a semitic language to a
0:52:44 what we would call a western language
0:52:46 like greek or latin
0:52:48 how significant is it for our
0:52:49 understanding of jesus
0:52:51 i think it's very significant though it
0:52:53 has to happen over a period of time it
0:52:55 doesn't happen suddenly um i think you
0:53:00 can tell this because the kind of greek
0:53:03 you get at least in certain parts of the
0:53:06 new testament is a greek that's
0:53:09 clearly been kind of polluted by the
0:53:11 aramaic
0:53:13 so the gospel the revelation of john for
0:53:15 example
0:53:16 yeah is almost unreadable
0:53:19 in greek if you have classical greek in
0:53:21 mind
0:53:22 um now there have been several
0:53:25 explanations some people just say well
0:53:26 the guy who wrote the revelation of john
0:53:28 was probably a jew from palestine and he
0:53:31 probably just didn't know greek very
0:53:32 well
0:53:34 other people think that it's more
0:53:35 intentional they they felt like the
0:53:37 writer of the revelation of john
0:53:39 wanted his document to look strange
0:53:42 and to look otherworldly as if it wasn't
0:53:44 strange enough already but anyway
0:53:46 exactly
0:53:46 right and so some people will say the
0:53:48 language of revelation
0:53:50 is part of the meaning of the text
0:53:54 i'm not so sure about that it just seems
0:53:56 like this guy
0:53:59 wasn't that good with greek
0:54:02 um even paul's greek
0:54:06 looks perfectly fine i don't think paul
0:54:09 actually spoke hebrew
0:54:11 but i do believe that he grew up with a
0:54:13 greek that was heavily influenced by the
0:54:15 septuagint
0:54:18 and by greek translations of traditional
0:54:20 hebrew and aramaic
0:54:22 texts so his
0:54:25 his greek just looks more
0:54:28 everyday you know it doesn't look like
0:54:31 the
0:54:31 it doesn't even look as expansionist and
0:54:34 grecoy's
0:54:35 as colossians and ephesians
0:54:38 one of the reasons that i'd say
0:54:39 colonists and ephesians were written by
0:54:40 paul
0:54:41 is because the greek's just too
0:54:42 different from paul's seven
0:54:44 undisputed letters the first sentence of
0:54:46 colossians is
0:54:47 you know a hundred words long the second
0:54:50 the the writer of the ephesians
0:54:52 copies that sentence and then blows it
0:54:54 up to 200 words
0:54:56 um you know it's like independent
0:55:00 independent clause dependent clause
0:55:01 dependent clause dependent clause
0:55:03 dependent clause
0:55:05 you know characteristic of paul's style
0:55:08 he didn't he didn't write like that
0:55:09 no i'm not saying he couldn't he that's
0:55:12 called a periodic style
0:55:14 whether it occurs in greek or latin or
0:55:15 english because it was taught in english
0:55:17 schools in the 19th century
0:55:19 um so in 19 18th century documents in
0:55:23 english even
0:55:24 done here in america you'll see somebody
0:55:26 who's kind of showing off
0:55:28 by writing these long involved periodic
0:55:30 sentences
0:55:31 that's where they're taught you know but
0:55:34 uh so i'm not saying that paul
0:55:35 couldn't write that way and a few and
0:55:37 there's there are a few places where he
0:55:38 seems like he's just on the edge of
0:55:40 going off into a long periodic sentence
0:55:43 but it just doesn't sound like
0:55:45 colossians or ephesians
0:55:49 one of the questions that i have but i
0:55:50 really don't quite understand given what
0:55:51 we said about
0:55:52 mark okay that it's uh it's greek is not
0:55:55 as polished as luke and matthew
0:55:57 that it lacks the beginning it lacks a
0:55:59 nativity it lacks the resurrection
0:56:01 appearances
0:56:02 themselves why on earth did didn't the
0:56:04 church just ditch mark and just stay
0:56:06 with matthew and luke and john why
0:56:09 retain this
0:56:11 you know it's clearly uh you know
0:56:13 they've upgraded their software they've
0:56:14 got a better functioning system
0:56:16 now why retain the old software uh
0:56:18 within this new canon
0:56:19 it seems to be a kind of a an unexpected
0:56:23 move why do that why keep the old text
0:56:26 might let us go with a better version
0:56:28 the improved upgraded version
0:56:30 it's a it's a very good question and uh
0:56:34 it actually normally doesn't happen that
0:56:36 way in the ancient world for example i
0:56:38 mentioned the q
0:56:38 document we don't have any copies of
0:56:41 this document
0:56:42 i'm convinced it was a real written
0:56:44 document some scholars want to say well
0:56:46 we don't have any evidence it was a
0:56:47 written document so it could have been
0:56:50 you know oral traditions and that sort
0:56:52 of thing well i just think that the way
0:56:54 that matthew and luke
0:56:56 both sound verbatim the same
0:57:00 means they're not working from oral
0:57:01 tradition they both have a document in
0:57:03 front of themselves
0:57:05 and we can even tell by piecing together
0:57:07 all these parts where matthew and luke
0:57:09 sound almost verbatim alike and piece
0:57:12 them together and we can get an idea
0:57:14 about well what does this doc
0:57:15 we only have it's only in fragments but
0:57:17 what could we say about the nature of
0:57:19 that document
0:57:21 if just judging by what survives in
0:57:23 matthew and luke
0:57:24 and i think we can say some intelligent
0:57:26 things we can tell you know that it's a
0:57:28 book mainly of sayings it doesn't seem
0:57:30 to have
0:57:31 you know a lot of narrative it doesn't
0:57:33 seem to happen except maybe the
0:57:35 narrative of jesus being tempted by
0:57:36 satan
0:57:37 that could be part of it but it
0:57:39 certainly doesn't have you know a
0:57:41 nativity scene and it doesn't have
0:57:43 even a crucifixions it doesn't have no
0:57:45 passion
0:57:46 there's no passion there's no passion so
0:57:49 uh and i think that you could tell that
0:57:51 it has it's it's written i think for a
0:57:54 community of scholars uh early christian
0:57:56 disciples who see themselves in a
0:57:58 scholastic tradition
0:57:59 of bookishness look at bookishness and
0:58:02 copying and
0:58:04 editing i think you can tell that but um
0:58:08 obviously the church people in the
0:58:10 church didn't
0:58:12 decide to keep it or nobody just got
0:58:14 around to keeping it
0:58:16 um i think the only way you can answer
0:58:20 that
0:58:21 is to say q from a very early time
0:58:26 uh was not you was not read out loud in
0:58:29 churches as part of the liturgy
0:58:32 but mark was right
0:58:35 and in fact in some parts of the east
0:58:38 um mark seems to have been more popular
0:58:43 in the syriac church than he was in the
0:58:46 western church
0:58:52 and my own views of the development of
0:58:55 the canon
0:58:56 is that it's a mistake to look at some
0:58:58 kind of to search for some kind of
0:59:00 essence in the book itself and say this
0:59:03 is why it was kept this is why it
0:59:05 survives
0:59:07 there's just too many accidents involved
0:59:09 i think the best explanation is
0:59:12 that the books that were being used by
0:59:16 actual churches in their liturgies if
0:59:18 they were being read
0:59:20 as part of the liturgy on a
0:59:23 sunday or even you know in the middle of
0:59:26 the week
0:59:27 and you had enough churches that liked
0:59:29 them
0:59:30 then they kept getting stuck into the
0:59:32 canon
0:59:34 that's also why i think you have like i
0:59:36 said matthew first
0:59:37 it was just about the most popular of
0:59:39 the early gospels
0:59:41 so it got first place in the canon
0:59:44 in most lists not all lists
0:59:47 interesting okay um perhaps we can come
0:59:51 to conclusion
0:59:52 shortly um i've got my favorite hobby
0:59:54 horse if i could just ask you about that
0:59:56 is a passage in matthew
0:59:58 mark's gospel chapter 10 verse 17
1:00:01 and 18 the story where a man comes to
1:00:03 jesus good teacher what must i do to
1:00:05 inherit eternal life why do you call me
1:00:07 good there's no one good but
1:00:08 but god alone obey the commandments uh
1:00:11 without going into matthew because
1:00:12 matthew
1:00:13 has the same story and matthew does his
1:00:15 um
1:00:16 he he does something with those words of
1:00:18 jesus
1:00:19 what is that that what do you think that
1:00:21 passage actually means
1:00:22 i mean what in terms of who jesus was
1:00:25 christology what's it telling us about
1:00:27 who jesus was assuming
1:00:28 for the second that it's an authentic
1:00:30 word of jesus what what what can we
1:00:32 deduce from that about
1:00:33 the christology of jesus i think it's
1:00:36 that the
1:00:37 writer of the gospel of mark
1:00:42 at least we can say
1:00:45 whoever passed on that particular story
1:00:48 in other words
1:00:50 i'm putting aside speculation about
1:00:53 who was the final editor of bark right
1:00:57 if the final editor had come across that
1:00:59 story
1:01:01 and read it the way you're reading it
1:01:04 and that final editor had a full
1:01:06 trinitarian christology that is believed
1:01:08 that jesus was not only the son of god
1:01:11 or a son of god but was equal to god the
1:01:14 father
1:01:15 i can't imagine them leaving the story
1:01:17 like that
1:01:19 so it makes me think that this person's
1:01:22 christology is a lot lower
1:01:24 than the gospel of john or even luke or
1:01:28 even matthew
1:01:29 in other words i think that you can read
1:01:31 all of the gospel of mark
1:01:33 and there are only two places maybe two
1:01:35 places because there's
1:01:37 textual questions about the first where
1:01:40 jesus is called the son of god
1:01:42 he's always called the son of man the
1:01:45 first one being the very first verse of
1:01:47 the entire gospel of course which is
1:01:49 well that's the place where it's
1:01:50 questionable it says
1:01:52 jesus son of god in the first verse of
1:01:55 mark
1:01:56 yeah but it's it's not in all
1:01:57 manuscripts
1:01:59 and so some people have said they think
1:02:01 that was added
1:02:03 because it makes a good title if you
1:02:05 believe jesus is the son of god
1:02:09 and then you have the last confed the
1:02:11 so-called confession of the
1:02:13 roman centurion when jesus is on the
1:02:15 cross and even that
1:02:17 can be read as surely this man was a son
1:02:20 of god
1:02:21 yes in the roman or greek sense that
1:02:24 lots of heroes are sons of gods
1:02:26 yes and then there's also the dispute
1:02:29 that jesus seems to gotten into
1:02:32 uh you know in some of the guys where
1:02:34 you know they say you know you can't
1:02:36 call yourself son of god and jesus says
1:02:38 look at all the passages where human
1:02:40 beings are called sons of god it's all
1:02:42 over
1:02:42 the psalms david is called the son of
1:02:45 god
1:02:47 in another passage in scripture says you
1:02:48 are all sons of god
1:02:50 yeah so even jesus can get into a
1:02:53 dispute about it's according to what you
1:02:55 mean by son of god
1:02:56 indeed so um
1:03:00 but i think that i depend upon that
1:03:02 passage quite a bit
1:03:04 to say that i that's one of the reasons
1:03:06 i think mark is
1:03:09 more let's call it primitive in a
1:03:11 christian sense
1:03:14 he believes that jesus is somehow divine
1:03:19 but you could call angels divine in this
1:03:22 period
1:03:22 you could call the king of jerusalem
1:03:25 divine
1:03:26 because the language at that time was it
1:03:28 not the much more elastic
1:03:30 much more of a spectrum of the divine
1:03:33 language
1:03:33 you know you could call a human being or
1:03:35 the emperor divine all the way up to
1:03:38 uh well the lord high god himself
1:03:40 obviously is divine but
1:03:41 so today we have a more binary kind of
1:03:43 well you're god or you're not
1:03:45 exactly you could use language much more
1:03:48 as elastically or promiscuously of human
1:03:50 beings like
1:03:51 psalm 45 where the king is called god
1:03:53 and um
1:03:54 so when you say mark has jesus divine in
1:03:57 some sense
1:03:58 christians shouldn't just automatically
1:03:59 trip to the idea
1:04:01 oh he's yahweh or he's the he's a
1:04:03 trinitarian
1:04:04 uh there's a trinitarian christology
1:04:06 there you you mean something much more
1:04:07 historically
1:04:08 contextualized and subtle than that i
1:04:11 guess
1:04:11 much more nuanced and i i think that
1:04:14 even that kind of gets cleaned up a bit
1:04:15 in the later gospels
1:04:18 they're much more interested in making
1:04:21 jesus's divinity
1:04:22 higher and more special than the rest of
1:04:25 us
1:04:26 but i just don't see it in the gospel of
1:04:27 mark i see jesus as
1:04:30 a great prophet as a son of man
1:04:34 which is an eschatological figure who's
1:04:36 preparing for the kingdom of god to come
1:04:39 who maybe even be a suffering prophet
1:04:42 whose prophet whose suffering is part of
1:04:44 his prophecy
1:04:47 um but
1:04:50 i would even hesitate to call jesus the
1:04:53 son of god
1:04:54 in the gospel of mark i think it
1:04:57 misrepresents what's there in the text
1:05:00 so he is divine in some sense uh what
1:05:02 would be a comparable
1:05:04 divine status that one would find in the
1:05:06 ancient greek or roman world that one
1:05:07 could point to if one can
1:05:09 is there any an analogous example that
1:05:11 one could point to
1:05:12 all kinds of angels michael right uh
1:05:16 um or there's even the concept you get
1:05:19 mostly
1:05:20 greek texts and roman texts of the
1:05:23 divine man
1:05:25 um theo anos you know on the earth
1:05:29 they are sitting and any philosopher
1:05:32 could be depicted as a human being but
1:05:36 also as a divine figure
1:05:38 plato was plato was almost universally
1:05:41 considered divine
1:05:42 by ancient philosophers uh but even then
1:05:45 they're
1:05:46 wonder workers you know there's the
1:05:47 whole the whole story about apollonius
1:05:50 of tiana
1:05:51 who was a greek uh wonder worker
1:05:54 and i'm sure considered himself a
1:05:57 philosopher
1:05:58 i think he probably was not a very good
1:06:00 philosopher but uh
1:06:01 five by ancient philosophy standards but
1:06:04 um
1:06:05 but then you know he probably lived it
1:06:08 was a historical person who lived
1:06:10 and traveled in greece and asia minor uh
1:06:12 and then eventually to rome
1:06:14 where he supposedly was martyred by you
1:06:16 know nero or one of the
1:06:18 bad emperors um but then who rose from
1:06:22 the dead and flew off into heaven and
1:06:24 was divinized in heaven well he probably
1:06:27 lived around the time of jesus
1:06:29 now the big two-volume biography of him
1:06:32 was not written
1:06:34 until philostratus wrote it the great
1:06:37 roman
1:06:37 uh poet and uh rhetorician
1:06:41 and he wrote uh you know a biography of
1:06:44 uploads of tiana
1:06:45 and this is one of the places where i
1:06:46 told you you know what do we look for
1:06:47 when you look at an ancient biography
1:06:49 well you need to tell about the person's
1:06:50 birth with miracles you need to tell a
1:06:52 person's
1:06:53 heritage you need parents education
1:06:56 how they grew up and then at the end you
1:06:59 need to pack a few miracles in to show
1:07:01 how they died
1:07:02 a miraculous and death and became
1:07:05 divinized
1:07:07 this third century document that we have
1:07:09 a senator annapolis of piano
1:07:11 some people even think it was written to
1:07:13 counter the gospels
1:07:15 they think that it was written by
1:07:18 someone who wanted to
1:07:21 compare the gospels and jesus
1:07:24 unfavorably with apollonius of tiana
1:07:28 because there were statues of him around
1:07:30 that you could worship
1:07:31 it's not like he he actually did attain
1:07:34 some kind of divine status
1:07:37 you know at least somewhat to the same
1:07:39 extent
1:07:40 that um
1:07:45 who's hadrian's lover boy
1:07:48 uh adonis um
1:07:56 it's not adonis is it no um but um
1:08:00 i think um maybe uh if we can conclude
1:08:03 here but maybe next time we can
1:08:05 um uh explore the gospel of matthew
1:08:09 which i think for me is the most
1:08:11 interesting of all the gospels for a
1:08:12 whole bunch of reasons
1:08:14 uh historical theological exegetical
1:08:17 redactional
1:08:18 there's a lot going on there that's very
1:08:19 very interesting and replexing as well
1:08:21 um so you comfortable about doing that
1:08:23 next time yeah it sounds good
1:08:26 fantastic well that's the logical
1:08:29 progression because uh the gospel of
1:08:32 matthew is the closest of any of the
1:08:35 other gospels to mark he he sticks with
1:08:37 he sticks with mark better than the
1:08:39 other two guys dude
1:08:41 and if uh readers viewers want to read
1:08:44 more about this i
1:08:45 certainly recommend um del martin's uh
1:08:47 text
1:08:48 on the is based on the this is a kind of
1:08:50 transcript of a
1:08:52 a course of lectures he gave at yale on
1:08:54 this very subject on the gospels and
1:08:56 paul's letters and
1:08:57 uh the historical jesus and all sorts of
1:08:59 things the canon
1:09:00 all these subjects and a lot more so i
1:09:02 do recommend people get this
1:09:04 um it's it's very readable um
1:09:07 which is not always the case with text
1:09:09 on the new testament but the this one is
1:09:11 uh the title is simple new testament
1:09:14 history and literature
1:09:15 of course so i didn't mention that new
1:09:16 testament history and literature open
1:09:18 yale courses uh there is a
1:09:20 a youtube series uh uh um on which this
1:09:24 is
1:09:24 related i think or based um so
1:09:28 um thank you very much professor dale
1:09:30 martin for your time
1:09:31 and um and your patience for these
1:09:33 questions and i really look forward to
1:09:36 exploring uh the gospel of matthew with
1:09:38 you next time
1:09:39 okay thank you thank you bye