God's Swear Jar

I’m curious. I would love to know for whom this was considered authoritative. Like, what groups out there were like, we’re gonna. We gotta follow the Didache, you know, and in our household, we follow the Didache. You’re keeping an apostle in your room for more than two days.

How long has he been here? A day. Okay, you’re fine. Have some goat.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

It’s a glorious day. It’s.

It has been very lovely. I don’t know what it’s like downtown, but where I am, it has been pleasant and I couldn’t be happier.

Yeah, it’s go for a walk season right now, and that’s always lovely. And it is also a wonderful time to discuss, to. To talk about, to have some fun with some Bible stuff. Some Bible stuff today. I’m excited. The first thing we’re going to talk about is something that I had never heard of. I don’t know what it is. I did some research. I mean, I kind of know what it is now, but I’m glad that.

Around a little bit.

That’s going to be fun. And I, when I read it, I mispronounce it in my mind. So you say the name of it.

Didache.

Okay. So we’re doing that. And then at the end of the show, you guys are going to want to stick around because it’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re going to talk about profanity.

We’re going to have some fun with some naughty words. So that’s. That’s going to be good. I’m going to really enjoy that. But let’s do our first segment. What is that? And for this. What is that? The. The. The Didache. The. I. I wanted to say Didache. Didache.

Anyway, the Didache. Yeah.

You can, you can look up the spelling in the show notes if you want to, but talk to me about this thing because it’s actually like the more I read about it, the. The more exciting it kind of was.

Yeah, it is. It’s a fascinating text. It’s not a very long text. It’s 16 chapters, I think, with like 7 to 10 ish verses per chapter.

That. You know what, that you can’t call that a chapter. They’re cheating. That’s.

That is. It’s a paragraph, really.

Those are sections. Those are.

Yeah. And so it is, it dates to around the end of the first century or beginning of the second century CE. Scholars have, have kind of wiggled back and forth on where exactly to date this, but usually you’re going to find people say somewhere between 70 and 110 CE. This is something that was probably in circulation before some of our New Testament texts were even written.

Right.

And the, the Didache. The Didache, the Di. If you’re nasty, it is, it’s basically a kind of an instruction book. Didache means like teaching or doctrine or something like that. So it’s basically instructions to Christians on how to be a good Christian. And it includes things like the baptismal prayer and the Eucharist prayer, and there’s even kind of a secondary Eucharist prayer that some people think may be earlier than the first and may have been borrowed from a Jewish blessing on food. So a lot of cool stuff in there, but we didn’t have a manuscript of it for a long time. We have references to it. Eusebius of Caesarea, for instance, in his Ecclesiastical History talks about this. Other patristic authors make references, reference to this text, but we didn’t have a manuscript of it until like the 1870s or something like that.

Yeah, that’s crazy.

Yeah. And so we’ve only known about this for the last couple hundred years and it probably, like, I, I don’t know the story of, of whether or not it entered into the debate about canonicity when that was going on. Oh yeah, we, we certainly have Eusebius talking about the canon, and this is in the 4th century CE and describing it as something that is not canonical but is like known to the churches and used in the churches. Just, it’s just not considered inspired and authoritative because it, it doesn’t seem to claim apostolic authorship or anything like that. It just seems to be an anonymous dude’s instructions and.

But if it was referenced by all of those various writers, clearly it had some sort of importance in, in the ancient times, in terms of. People were looking to it, as you say, like, it was, it was kind of instructions for how to do Christianity.

Yeah, and I think it was, it would have been influential in certain areas and other areas would have been like, we’re not so big on, on how they’re doing this part.

Interesting.

Yeah, but, and, and the references aren’t like, and this is because of the words of the Didache, you know, it’s, it’s not that kind of reference. To the Didache. It’s like, and then there’s that text over there, the Didache, as they call it, those, you know, those rubes over there, they don’t use that word, but we’ll, they use, we’ll get to profanity later in the show. But yeah, yeah, but there was, in Constantinople, which is now Istanbul.

I’ve heard a whole song about that.

Yeah, it’s nobody’s business but the Turks. And there was a, there was a guy named Metropolitan Philotheos Bryennios who found a copy of the Didache which was transcribed around 1056 CE.

So the, the 11th century. So it’s like 950 to 980 years after it was originally written. But that is the only manuscript of the entire thing in existence.

That’s crazy. And that must have been like, you know, you think about the, the, the various archaeological finds that people do. You think about the, the Dead Sea Scrolls or whatever. And, and those are like wildly exciting. But they’re texts that we already had. Like we had versions of these texts and it just sort of, you know, you can compare and contrast. You can do a bunch of, a bunch of interesting stuff with them. But like this, they must have been pooping themselves when they realized what they had.

Well, I’m sure many of them were. This is, they, they publish translations pretty well, not incredibly quickly. But the text itself was published in 1883, the Greek, so that was 10 years after its initial discovery. And then translation into English was published in 1884, a German translation same year, French translation the year after that. So it was in circulation by the end of the 19th century and, and certainly caused a big splash, but not, not considered Scripture.

Right.

And a lot of it is, is not very surprising. Like most of it bears a striking resemblance to the Gospel of Matthew . And there is also a lot that folks think might be drawn from a shared source from which the author of the Epistle of Barnabas also drew. So it has a bit of a family tree textually and so it’s not like there was anything phenomenally groundbreaking. There is one thing though, that is interesting that is mentioned quite early on in the Didache, which is a condemnation of abortion. Oh, it’s the earliest known Christian condemnation of abortion that exists.

Interesting.

So I mean, one of the things that’s almost surprising about that is that they had abortion. Like I, I, I don’t know that that’s surprising, but it does seem like that must mean that it was in widespread, it was a widespread practice.

Well, yeah, and, and it was. And it was linked with the Greco-Roman world along with exposure, infanticide, where when somebody didn’t want an infant, they would just leave it out somewhere. So you have. I think it’s in chapter three. My. What does it say? I probably can’t sing that.

It’s. But there’s a lot of my child flee from all evil and everything. Like it, like it starts off with this thing called the Two Ways discourse. There’s a. There’s. There are two paths, one of life and one of death. And the difference between the two paths is great. This then is the path of life. And then you have the two great commandments and then the Golden Rule and whatever you do not want to happen to you, do not do to another. And then you get into a lot of other interests and again, a lot of it resonating quite a bit with, with Matthew with the Sermon on the Mount and stuff like that.

It’s funny because you hear so many people like, like one of the, one of the things that I see on like videos similar to yours where, you know, talking about myths about the Bible, one of the, one of the big myths is that the Golden Rule is somewhere in the Bible, which it isn’t. But here it is. It’s in the Didache.

Yeah. And. And you have there. There’s something close to the Golden Rule and in the New Testament. But. But yeah, not those exact words. And then we get into chapter two. And now the second commandment of the teaching. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. And then we have some things that are not really in the.

Which is, what do we have in the Greek—paidophthoreseis is the word. Then we have, do not commit adultery, natch. Do not—do not engage in—I already said that. Do not engage in sexual immorality. Do not steal. Do not practice magic. Do not use enchanted potions. Do not abort a fetus or kill a child that is born. So when people get tangled up in the whole abortion debate, frequently folks will appeal to the Didache and say it’s right there. It’s right there. It explicitly says. And whether this is—and there’s an argument it’s right there.

In the not-scripture? What, what’s so hard about this?

Oh, well. And, and the folks who, who point that out tend to ignore some of the stuff later on in the Didache. Let me—yeah. For instance, I think it is in chapter—yeah. Do not shun a person in need, but share all things with your brother and do not say that anything is your own.

For if you are partners in what is immortal, how much more in what is mortal.

So yeah, now we’ve got our—

That’s downright un-American is what that is.

Yes, the Didache would—McCarthy was not a fan of the Didache famously and would interrogate it regarding whether it is now or have ever been a member of the Communist Party. So yeah, there’s—there’s stuff in the Didache that the people who want to appeal to the beginning of chapter two are kind of like, “We read past that, we don’t pay much attention to that.” But there’s an argument to make also that the abort a fetus part, that abortion was understood to mean after the quickening. And if—and if it was prior to the quickening, they—they may have used a different word. I’m still tracking down the data on that. But that is something that I’ve heard people argue about that. Not sure about that. And then we get Ten Commandments stuff. Do not desire what belongs to your neighbor. Do not commit perjury. Do not give false testimony. Do not speak insults. Do not bear grudges. Do not be of two minds or speak from both sides of your mouth. For speaking from both sides of your mouth is a deadly trap. So lots of good stuff.

And the two ways discourse represents a kind of dualism that was popular in Greco-Roman period Judaism. We see this in, for instance, the Dead Sea Scrolls. You have the sons of light and the sons of darkness. So it’s this—this binary notion that the world exists in good and evil. And so you want to make sure you follow the path, right, of the good, choose the good way. And then you have the “my child do all this and don’t do all the other stuff.” And I think that’s like the first five or six chapters. The two ways. Yeah, chapters one through six are—are about the two ways.

And then we have, we also have some household code stuff. Chapter six is interesting because then—where’s the household? I think the household code stuff. I don’t know how many takes I’ve burned making TikTok videos where I just fumble a single phrase that, yes, doesn’t…

Want to roll off the tongue trippingly.

But in chapter seven you have instructions on how to baptize. You have the words you’re supposed to say, instructions on how to pray. You have the words you’re supposed to say. I love this on chapter 8. Do not keep your fast with the hypocrites. For they fast on Monday and Thursday, but you should fast on Wednesday and Friday. Okay, I want to know what beef was going on between the Monday-Thursday and the Wednesday-Friday.

Yeah, that’s—that—that is an interesting—because it doesn’t seem like it should make a difference. It’s clearly just markers as to which…

group you’re a part of, I guess. I mean, they obviously thought there was some kind of moral underpinning to, you know, hump day being your fast day or—or what. I just—and—and I don’t know if the—if like “hypocrites” is code for Jewish folks.

Right.

It certainly could be. This is a period when there’s—they’re still not entirely disentangled from Judaism. We—I think a lot of scholars would say we haven’t quite achieved the parting of the ways yet if this is a first-century CE text. And so maybe within Judaism there’s a group that’s, you know, the United Front of Judea…

Right.

Or the People’s Front of Judea. And then the, the splitters over there are the, the Judean People’s Front. And, and they do Wednesday and Friday. And so some schismogenesis, as David Graeber might have called it, they’re just looking for arbitrary ways to distinguish the, the in-group from the out-group. And then then they focus on those arbitrary identity markers very heavily.

Yeah. You hit on one of the things that I actually was interested in as I was reading about this, which was the idea of sort of Jewish Christians versus non-Jewish or Gentile Christians. Or, you know, like I, and it feels like what, when I was reading about this, it seems like it’s, it’s sort of, sort of straddling a line between those or, or somehow there’s, there’s conversation between Jewish… like, like, like clearly a lot of the people who followed Jesus were still practicing, considered themselves practicing Jews.

Yeah. Now the, the very first, the opening sentence of the entire document is tois ethnesin. So the teaching or the doctrine of the Lord through the twelve apostles to the Gentiles.

And so the document seems to be addressing Gentile followers of Jesus. And, and you’ll remember when we had Matt Thiessen on, he talked a little bit about how Paul seems to suggest that Judaism is an ethnic designation. And so if you become a follower of Jesus, who is a Gentile, you don’t adopt all the trappings of the different ethnic group. You don’t start to put braids in your hair. You don’t do all the stuff that is, that is their identity marker. You are a distinct ethnic group, but you are a follower of Jesus. And so it seems like this is probably aimed at just the Gentile followers of Jesus.

Although again, we’re still in the midst of the milieu of this disentanglement of Judaism from the followers of Jesus, which is why I’ve taken to not referring to Christianity or Christians in this time period. I’ve… these days I refer to followers of Jesus or Christ followers or something like that.

When… just throw out a date. When do you think, oh, gosh, I…

Know I’ll wake up with a horse head in my bed. Because that’s, that’s not my debate. And, and that it is, it is an ongoing debate. I’m just kidding. It’s not that fierce. But, but I would say folks would say probably not until like second century at the, at the earliest. Okay, so maybe this is when, when people are starting to be like, you know what? I don’t think we want to be a part of this group anymore.

Use these words. Do it. You know what, do it Wednesday and Friday. We’re, we’re skipping all this Monday, Thursday stuff.

Yeah. And, and you know, there’s just so little that we know about this period. We don’t have a ton of Jewish texts from this period. The rabbinic texts are all being, like, edited and compiled starting around 200 CE. So between the 2nd and the 3rd century is when we get the earliest rabbinic literature. And then 3rd to 5th century, we get a big bunch of other literature. And so we, apart from whatever we might discover, letters or the Dead Sea Scrolls or things like that, we don’t really have anything saying, “So here’s how we did.” And apart from Josephus, right, who’s writing in the mid-90s, we don’t have a ton about what they were, about their practices, their, you know, the, the daily life of a Jewish household and local practices and things like that. We’ve reconstructed an awful lot. And, and what we get between 200 and 600 CE, some, some of that we say, well, this was probably going on 150 years earlier, in the middle of the first century CE, but we can’t really say for sure.

So unless we can correlate it with some archaeological data or something like that. So. Yeah, but, but yeah, that, that’s a debate that is, is going on on a higher level than I operate when it comes to one of the things.

That was interesting about this, when I was thinking about it, was that it did sound like I, I, I’ve come to think that it’s probably not this, but when I first started reading about it, it felt like this was kind of the, the Christian Talmud, you know what I mean? It was like, it was like exploring what, what things are. But now it sounds, now it sounds like it’s not unlike the Talmud. It’s not. There’s no conversation about which direction we could go. It’s just telling you what it’s supposed to be.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s laying down the law.

Yeah. And speaking down to the, the audience as well. Okay, child, this is how you’re going to do things. And yeah, there’s no House Hillel. And, and you know, House Shammai says this.

Right.

But, and, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, as we’ve seen. There’s, there’s an advocacy for communalism that and, and even a rationalization for it. Yeah. So. And oh, here’s another one for they love. We’re criticizing people here. Who are we criticizing? And the path of death is like this. So chapter five is like. So that was the path of life. Here’s the path of death. And then it describes all the things the people on the path of death do. For they love what is vain and pursue rewards, showing no mercy to the poor, no toiling for the oppressed, nor knowing the one who made them. Murderers of children and corruptors of what God has fashioned, who turn their backs on the needy, oppress the afflicted and support the wealthy. They are lawless judges of the impoverished, altogether sinful. Be delivered, children, from all such people. So, so these are vice lists. This is what we have.

And thank goodness we don’t have any Christians who support the wealthy now. Yeah, that would be spooky.

Yeah. I mean, once you can no longer count how many homes you own. Um, yeah, you’re, you’re running afoul of, of the Didache. Yeah. And then we have this interesting. We have the Eucharist and with respect to the Thanksgiving meal and the Greek is eucharisto. And if anybody who finds themselves in Greece for any reason, it is a good thing to know.

That’s the one word that I managed to learn of modern Greek when I was there was eucharisto.

The, the other ones you’ve got to know are nai and ochi. Nai means yes. Ochi means no.

Nai means… yeah. Oh my gosh, that’s, I’m never that. Because, because nai means no here. So. Nice.

Yeah. And with respect to the Thanksgiving meal, you shall give thanks as follows. First, with respect to the cup, we give you thanks, our Father, for the holy vine of David, your child, which you made known to us through Jesus, your child. To you be the glory forever. And with respect to the fragment of bread, we give you thanks, our Father, for the life and knowledge that you made known to us through Jesus, your child. To you be the glory forever. As this fragment of bread was scattered upon the mountains and was gathered to become one, so may your church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom, for the glory and the power are yours through Jesus Christ forever. And then it says, but let no one eat or drink from your Thanksgiving meal unless they have been baptized in the name of the Lord. For also the Lord has said about this, do not give what is holy to the dogs. So.

So yeah, that’s a very different Eucharist prayer than than we get from the other, from the Gospels.

Yeah. Which, yeah, basically is: this is my body, this is my blood, take, eat. And then you have the, the very next chapter says, and when you have had enough to eat, you should give thanks as follows. We give you thanks, holy Father, for your holy name which you have made reside in our hearts, and for the knowledge, faith, and immortality that you made known to us through Jesus, your child. To you be the glory forever. And then it goes on. And, and this is the part that’s maybe related to the, the Jewish blessing on, on the food, because it, it organizationally, it bears some resemblance to the Birkat Hamazon, which is the, the blessing of the food, which is something that is supposed to be pronounced with the, the last bit of food before everybody finishes. Interesting. And that, and that might have been… some people think this might have been an earlier version of the Eucharist, that that was the, the Eucharist prayer. And then later on, they were like, we’re gonna do our own. Just to get. And, and they were like, well, I really like this other one. And so they kept it for the, after the meal or… because maybe the Eucharist was something that was done at the very end. There’s interesting, not a lot of clarity about that kind of stuff, but. And then that, that prayer ends: if anyone is holy, let him come. If anyone is not, let him repent. Maranatha.

We don’t know what that means.

Mar is Aramaic for Lord, and natha would be come.

Oh, okay. I… one of the things that was interesting to me about that prayer that you just said was the… because, because you have talked specifically, because it was your, your doctoral dissertation, the whole… the idea that his name is what resides in our hearts. That’s a real… that’s really interesting.

Yeah, Yeah.

I, you know, you. You’ve talked about the, The. The divine name being the, the thing of power, the thing of. Of sort of indicating divinity or whatever. It’s just an interesting phrasing.

Yeah. Well. And in the Gospel of John , you have Jesus praying that. That the name be. That everybody be protected by the name which you have given to me. And the name is going to be distributed. You have in the book of Revelation , and a name will be written on their forehead that is secret and all this kind of stuff. So, so the. The name of God is this communicable vehicle for divine agency and love and glory and all that kind of stuff that. Yeah, you see, even. Even there.

There you go.

Yeah. And then we get into the organization of the church and we get a lot of stuff about apostles and prophets. Let every apostle who comes to you be welcomed as the Lord, but he should not remain more than a day. If he must, he may stay one more, but if he stays three days, he is a false prophet.

Oh, wow.

When an apostle leaves, he should take nothing except bread until he arrives at his night’s lodging. If he asks for money, he’s a false prophet. So.

Wow, we’re really. We’re really cutting these. These apostles off at the legs, aren’t we?

Yeah, yeah.

You can imagine some of these pop apostles running around like, look, this just is. This per diem is just not cutting it. We’ve got to talk with the. We got to talk with. You know, go upstairs to the 26th floor and. And we got to talk about what’s going on here.

And. Yeah, every true prophet who wants to settle down with you. I don’t know in what sense that settle down. I think it just means stay with you. Deserves his food. So too, a true teacher, like the worker, deserves his food. Therefore, you shall take every first portion of the produce from the wine vat and the threshing floor and the first portion of both cattle and sheep, and give it to the prophets, for they are your high priests. If you do not have a prophet, then give it to the poor. If you make bread, take the first portion and give it according to the commandment so too, if you open a jar of wine or oil, take the first portion of it and give it to the prophets. So you gotta pour one out for the homies.

Right.

Meaning either the prophets who are visiting you or the poor. And take the first portion of your.

This is definitely describing, like, these prophets are just itinerant preachers who are just sort of going from house to house.

Like, basically, hey, can I stay at your place? I’ll give you a little bit of prophecy, you give me your best food, and. And I’ll move on to the next.

We’ll prophesy for food. Yeah, but only for one day, right?

Two max.

Yeah, two max. I can. We can do one plus, but that’s all we get. And then. Yeah, take the first portion of your money, clothing, and everything you own, as it seems good to you, and give it according to the commandment. So it’s pretty strict rules.

And I’m. I’m curious. I would love to know for whom this was considered authoritative. Like, what groups out there were, like, we’re gonna. We got to follow the Didache. And, you know, in. You know, in. In our household, we follow the Didache. You’re keeping an apostle in your room for more than two days.

How long has he been here? A day. Okay, you’re fine. Have some goat.

The first portion. Yeah. And. And then we get into the Lord’s day. When you gather together, break bread after you have confessed your unlawful deeds, that your sacrifice may be pure. Let no one quarreling with his neighbor join you until they are reconciled that your sacrifice may not be defiled. For this is the sacrifice mentioned by the Lord in every place and time. Bring me a pure sacrifice, for I’m a great king, says the Lord, and my name is considered marvelous among the Gentiles, which is evidently riffing on Malachi, chapter one.

And then it talks about bishops and deacons, gentlemen who are not fond of money, who are true and approved for these also conduct the ministry of prophets and teachers among you. And. And then we get into chapter 16, which is the last one.

So, to be continued.

I guess I could. I have not looked at the actual manuscript itself to see if, if maybe that’s the end of the, the end of the page, or maybe they wrote…

Ah, right.

Why would he take the time to write out…

Perhaps he was dating. Yeah. So. Fascinating. Fascinating.

I want to know what the, what the, what the Koine Greek version of dot, dot, dot is. I want to see that. Is that how it’s pronounced? Is it K-O-I-N-E? What is it?

How do you say that? Koine is, yeah, but in, if you’re in Greece, it’s kini. Okay, but, but kini is not the, the, the Greek that they speak. Okay. Or that’s, that’s old Greek.

Right?

Katharevousa is also older Greek. Dimotiki or Demotikos. I’ve heard both. That’s what most people refer to contemporary Greek as.

Okay, yes, but, yes, but I’m… what I read was that this… so help me understand this. So this text was written in the, the Koine. Is that what… yeah, you just told me it was written in that. And so is that, is that contemporary with, with the ancient times or is that contemporary with… you said that the, this manuscript is…

From… oh, the manuscript is from the 11th century. But yeah, it is, it is preserved. It preserves much older Greek.

Which is one of the reasons that scholars agree that this, this is our best shot at reconstructing what it may have looked like in, in the first century CE. I would have to… I would love to do some text-critical stuff on this, you know, whenever I just have a handful of extra days with nothing else to do. But I would be interested to see what relationship the, this manuscript has to the quotations we have from… if we have quotations from those patristic authors or if we just have Johannine-type kind of oblique references.

All right, there you go. Very interesting little, little bit of non-canonical scripture.

Yeah, well, and, and in a couple of notes that I’m seeing. Clement evidently quotes it as scripture.

And that would probably… I don’t know if that’s Clement of Rome or Clement of Alexandria.

It’s Clement of West Philadelphia, born and…

raised, but it’s also a part of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s canon.

Oh, okay.

And those, those manuscripts date to later. But it sounds like we don’t have a complete manuscript, at least not in Greek. I would have to see what we do have in Ethiopic. But I’m… and, and we have discovered fragments. We have just got like Oxyrhynchus papyri. We’ve discovered some fragments of this there. So, so we have some things that go back many centuries prior to this manuscript. But the manuscript is the only full complete manuscript we have or at least evidently is the fullest we have. So.

Interesting. All right. Well that was awesome. That was very interesting. And now let’s, let’s talk dirty with… Watch Your Language.

All right. I… not that kind of talking dirty. No.

Well, but why not?

Well, well, I was gonna say we can do that. We can do that.

There’s a little bit of that. There’s, there’s, you know, I’ve, I’ve seen Song of Solomon. You can’t trick me. There’s plenty of talking dirty.

So what are we talking about here? We’re talking about profanity.

Yeah. I, I get asked frequently, is there any swearing or profanity in the Bible?

And okay, so like the ancient, the ancient Hebrew, the ancient Greek.

Does it include some swears? Because, you know, when I was looking at this a little bit, obviously there are lots of… there are… the internet is replete with articles about why profanity is bad and biblical reasons why we, why we need to avoid profanity.

And shame on you. But it is a fascinating question. Like, you know, translators probably don’t necessarily take things and make them, you know, weak. Do we even know how powerful words were back then, like, like a scale? Because we have a scale of how, how bad we think a certain particular swear word is now.

Yeah. As, as far as we know, the FCC back then was primarily focused on other things. But yeah, we, we have, there are words that are considered. You know, a lot of kids growing up, you can’t say certain words.

Right.

And, and it’s, you know, it’s different from family to family. “Shut up” is profanity in some houses.

Oh, yeah.

And, you know, so if there’s not a one to one correspondence, they, they didn’t seem to have the words that were like, okay, now you’ve crossed a line by using that word. But they were, they were sensitive to vulgarities. So I would, I would say it’s probably more accurate to talk about vulgarities than profanity as it’s conceptualized today. And they had, you know, they had a few different categories of, of profanities or, or vulgarities back then. But I, I think there is, there might be one example of something that would qualify as profanity as we understand it today. And we’ll get to that one. But I wanted to start with Ezekiel as, as the, the great poet once said, “even Ezekiel thinks that my mind is gone.” But Ezekiel was, was pretty fond of using some, some vulgar expressions, particularly in talking and using this metaphor of Israel as the unfaithful wife.

And there. Oh, I gotta remember what the passage is. I’m pretty sure it’s Ezekiel. It’s in my book. Give me just one, just one second. I have a stack three feet high of the finished copies of my book now. But yeah, it’s very exciting. But there’s a part where God is talking to, talking about some other countries and is like, yeah, you go down to Egypt and play the whore and you’re gonna have, and they’re gonna fondle your virgin nipples and all this kind of stuff. And I wish I could remember the… but it’s supposed to be kind of… oh, it’s supposed to have the, the hearer or the reader clutching their, their pearls. It’s supposed to be a little shocking.

And then I’m gonna have to find that one in a second. But the one that I have pulled up, Ezekiel 16:26 , you prostituted yourself with the Egyptians, and the NRSVUE says “your lustful neighbors.” And the Hebrew doesn’t say that. Okay. The, the Hebrew says “your neighbors large of flesh.” Which, and, and basar, which is the word for flesh, is probably a bit of a euphemism here.

Right.

In other words, this means your, you know, your well-endowed neighbors or, or maybe your aroused neighbors, something like that. Your large-membered neighbors. God seems to be sensitive about the what? The what the other nations of the…

Right.

Neighbors. God seems to be sensitive about the what? The what the other nations of the…

The earth are packing? The turgid nature of the Egyptians.

Yeah. Because they’re, they’re a much larger. They were a much larger empire during most of the time the Bible was being written. And so you know, God had to, to show respect for, for that.

I’ve heard that about the ancient Egyptians.

Yeah, well, you and, and something that my doctoral supervisor and very good friend Francesca Stavrakopoulou wrote about in her book God: An Anatomy is that the, the same might be said of God. Isaiah… the word in Isaiah 6 , so this is, this is Isaiah’s calling, his prophetic call. He’s, he has a vision, he’s in the temple and it says God’s train filled the temple. But the word for train there is… I believe the word is shul, but it is used fundamentally it means hang-downers and it is used… it can be used to refer to either the butt or the genitals.

And so there’s a way to approach this text as saying, “and God’s hanging dong is filling the temple.” And the, the seraphim who are sitting there, they’re covering… they have six wings and they’re covering their eyes and they’re covering themselves. And it says they’re covering their feet. And feet can be a euphemism for genitals. And so it might be embarrassing the seraphim, where they’re like, “oh, geez.” So, yeah, you have that. So, so God, the God of Israel might also be talked about in, in the same ways.

Yeah. And. And this is not the only case where euphemistically large genitals are referred to. I know. In Song of Solomon. I think it’s Song of Solomon 5 . There is a thing about that is. I read this. You can correct me on this. I think it’s 5:4. Yeah, I’ve got it here. It’s 5:14. That is. That is translated as his body is polished ivory or something along those lines. But this says that. That it is comparing the. The body to an elephant tusk.

He’s tusky.

He’s got. He’s got a tusk. He’s swinging tusk.

And. And the description of behemoth in Job, by the way, a lot of people think it’s talking about as a tail like a tree branch or something like that. That’s probably a euphemism as well. A lot of scholars suggest that. That, that is talking about something else being like a. The trunk of a tree.

Ezekiel 23:20 is a famous one. A lot of. A lot of folks. A lot of skeptical folks, a lot of people wanting to mock or deride the Bible point to this one. Again, we’re talking about our metaphor of she increased her prostitutions, remembering the days of her youth when she prostituted herself in the land of Egypt. Oh, that’s the verse I was thinking of. Okay, I’ll get to that. Anyway. And lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys.

Right.

And whose emission was like that of stallions. So, yes, the issue of horses. Yeah. And then the next verse is, thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth when the Egyptians fondled your bosom and caressed your young breasts.

Boom. Yeah, I mean, I think that is. That we’re getting vulgar.

So. Yeah, there’s some vulgarities there. And. And the idea is generate this mental imagery and have the people go, no, no, I can’t take it anymore. It’s too. It’s too provocative. In their Victorian sensitivities.

Right.

And then. But there’s also sexual violence that goes on because God is not just wagging his finger at the. The naughty metaphorical wife. God also threatens to. Threatens a lot of things. Threatens to sexually shame the unfaithful wife publicly. Oh, wow. We also have a passage in Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 28 , where it actually uses what was probably a quite vulgar word. You shall become engaged to a woman, but another man shall. And then the NRSVUE says another man shall lie with her. But the Hebrew does not say lie with her. Later manuscripts change the verb to say lie with her. But the verb is actually shagal, which a lot of scholars understand to be a vulgar term for rape.

Oh, wow.

So it’s not just that she’s going to commit adultery, it’s that you’re going to marry a woman and then somebody else is going to. And then imagine some kind of vulgar term for sexually assaulting that new wife. But it was probably intended to be shocking. It was probably intended as something like what we would understand as profanity. Another example where the audience is supposed to go, I can’t believe you said that.

I mean, one of the things that we should talk about is I. Is just the concept of profanity, vulgarity and how, you know, I. I’ve actually done a lot, quite a bit of reading about this and. And it does. It serves, contrary to some of the articles that I read about this, it serves a really good, powerful sort of psychological function. Yeah. It’s. It’s actually really great to have words that have extra power to them.

Because sometimes you need a little extra oomph. You need a little extra zing for whatever it is that you’re doing. Yeah. And it actually has positive psychological effects. They. You know, there are studies that have been done where people can withstand more pain if they’re swearing during it. Like, that’s literally a thing that they had them do. Yeah. And, you know, people. People who swear are actually more trustworthy, apparently, than people who don’t. There’s a. There’s a sense. There’s a sense in. In which it’s like this person is. Is being upfront about, you know, about themselves and is. And is not hiding something.

And. And I think it’s. I think it’s interesting that the more. The more you reserve the profanity, the more rhetorically impactful it is, true. And so a lot of people, you know, you have a lot of people who are champions of profanity. Who would be like, why did people even think there are such things? They’re just words. We shouldn’t even think that they’re anything different. But if. If they just become regular words that nobody thinks twice about, then they lose their.

It ruins them.

The rhetorical punctuation mark, which, which, which, yeah, can have and can be means of effective speech. And and in the Bible, they’re doing it.

And one of the—one of the ones that I really like that always I laughed at the first time I read this. This was in the—in the time period between getting baptized as a Mormon and leaving on my mission. I read the entire Bible word cover to cover.

Right.

And I got to this part in First Kings, and there are a few examples of it, but it’s 1 Kings 14 , I think, is the first example where somebody is threatening and it says, therefore. And this is the NRSVue, therefore I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam. I will cut off from Jeroboam every male, both bond and free in Israel. However, it does not say male. It doesn’t say zakar in the text. It says mashtin baqir, which means urinator against the wall, which—which in the King James Version, which was what I was reading this first time, it says, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall. So I—I think it’s hilarious that the King James Version preserves this. Like, it’s supposed to be kind of a euphemism, but kind of not, because piss was—was kind of in that gray area when I was growing up and a young adult.

Yeah. In fact, I—I can still recall my science teacher yelling at a student because the student, like, was—had an assignment to write some kind of poem about some biological process or something. And he ended it by saying, you should do that or you’ll be pissed. And the science teacher just went off on him about using the word pissed. And I was like, relax, man.

Yeah, this.

Just use the word.

That’s one of the lesser ones. Don’t worry about it. Calm down.

But that’s—but that’s obviously supposed to. And this is one of the things that profanity does, particularly vulgarities. It’s—it conjures up mental imagery of things that are generally considered not fit for, you know, proper Israelite society. And so pisseth against the wall makes you think of a man urinating. And not necessarily very, like, explicitly, but there is a little bit of evocation of that imagery and—and so it kind of, it’s, it would be the equivalent of, of him saying, I will cut off from Jeroboam every swinging dick.

Right.

And, and both bond and free in Israel. Like, it’s, it’s just a little bit of rhetorical punctuation there to kind of keep them on their toes and be like, what did he say?

I love, I love how we’re currently making the—the—the translators of the NRSVue seem a little, like a little prudish. Yeah, come on, guys, just—just—just preserve what—what we got there.

Yeah, just glossing right over, just running roughshod over these, these vulgarities.

So when, when, when we do get to the—the scriptures that—that sort of—that the. Some of the articles that I read say are decrying vulgar language. I’m—I’m looking right now at Ephesians 5 , which says entirely out of place is obscene, silly and vulgar talk. That sort of thing.

What verse is that?

There we go.

Verse 4.

Yeah, I see it.

And you know, there’s, there’s similar verses in. Well, they cited a verse in Matthew 5 in the Beatitudes in verse 22 that says, But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment. And if you insult a brother or sister, you will, you’ll be liable to the council. And if you say, you fool, you will be liable to the hellfire. Yeah, but there are some other things that are like, oh, this is Colossians 3:8 , that says, but now you must get rid of all such things. Anger, wrath, malice, slander and abusive language from your mouth. Yeah, I just think, you know, and one of the articles that I read claimed that saying a swear word was abusive was. That’s abuse. That is. What a horrible thing. I just think, I think one of the things that’s interesting is that.

What’s the line from the Simpsons. Ow, my freaking ears.

I think, you know, again, we’re speaking, we’re, we’re talking about a non-univocal, a multivocal book.

And so I think it’s interesting that you’ve got, you know. Yeah. You’ve got some references that say, don’t, you know, watch your language. Mind your mind your P’s and Q’s and other times when the authors of the book itself aren’t minding their P’s and Q’s.

Well, here’s an interesting thing to note about that. Who is supposed to be the author of Ephesians and Colossians?

Paul. Supposed to be Paul. But a lot of scholars don’t think Ephesians and Colossians were written by Paul.

Right.

And—and this is one of the reasons, because Paul uses—probably our one example of something that gets close to profanity, where he calls something skubalon.

And so if we go to Philippians three, eight, he says—he’s talking about how important—whatever gains I had, those I have come to regard as loss because of Christ, saying, like, yeah, good things happen to me, but they mean nothing in light of the gospel. Verse 8: “More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for his sake. I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ.” So the NRSVUE again, our prudish little…

Those delicate souls.

Yes. Rubbish is rendering the Greek word skubalon. Now, it’s—it’s in the neuter plural accusative here. So it’s skubala. But that is not your, like, standard term for trash or garbage. It does seem to refer to excrement.

And it does seem to be a little more vulgar than your average bear. And so that’s why there are some translators who have rendered it “crap.” Interesting where—where Paul’s like, I’ve suffered the loss of all things, but it’s all crap in order that I may gain Christ. Or if you really want to twist the noses of the blue noses, the men who stroke their beards and cluck their tongues and ask, “What is to be done with this, Homer Simpson?” you could say, I’ve suffered the loss of all things, but I consider it all shit in order that I may gain Christ. And so it’s again, rhetorical punctuation saying it’s not just that, oh, that outranks that, it’s that this has become feces. This is crap in my hands compared to Jesus. And so it’s using a little bit of that.

And it’s so much—it’s so much more potent than saying it’s rubbish. “This has become rubbish.” It’s positively nasty. It does—it just sounds so much like it does. I—and it—and it humanizes it too. Like, I would really appreciate a translation that actually went and had Paul saying, “This is just shit,” because that—is because that feels—because it—like I say, yeah, it humanizes Paul. It makes him—it makes him a person who’s like, really trying to emphasize a point.

Yeah. And I think the audience would be more like, “Whoa. He really means that. He feels strongly about that.”

And the NET renders “dung,” which is—which is what the KJV has. Okay. So, yeah: “do and so I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung that I may win Christ.” So I would…

It’s poopy. It’s doody.

Now we’re getting—now we’re getting all Ted Lasso.

It’s poopy.

Oh, gosh. That Manchester dialect, when he says poopy. I love that. So great.

Jamie Tartt, you magnificent bastard. And I would love to see translations do that more often. But, you know, most Bible translations are trying to reach believing crowds. At least that’s how they’re gonna move the most Bibles. Right? And—and the—you know, you’ve got the tyranny of the audience, the tyranny of the consumer of your publication. And so they’re gonna be like, “It’s just rubbish.”

It seems like it’s probably more than that, though, too. It’s—there’s also this sense of, we want to preserve the original meaning, the original punch of the thing, but we’re also counterbalancing that with our job, which is to somehow, like, honor this as a sacred holy text.

Yeah. Which obviously cannot talk about bathroom stuff.

Right, right. Even though it does. And so, like—so—but the modern conceptualization of a holy text doesn’t jive quite as strong—quite as well with the idea of poopy. So—so yeah, I just…

I can see why it’s a challenge. They’re walking a line when they’re, When. When they’re choosing the. What words, they’re going to render these things out.

But, and, and you know, that. And that doesn’t even get into, like, socially stigmatized words. Like, there have. There have been who knows how many debates among translation committees about whether to take the Greek word doulos in the New Testament as servant or slave. Like, every time I make a video about. About slavery in the Bible, I always get those folks who are like, you should learn Hebrew because it means servant. It doesn’t mean slave. You don’t know what you’re talking about because people are sensitive. And, and this is just one more example of that. There. I think there are. There are about a dozen passages, maybe a few more in the Bible that I where I think the author was intentionally turning the screws rhetorically and using vulgarities in order to get a rise out of the audience and evoke the kind of mental imagery that’s going to function as a rhetorical punctuation mark so that they’re not just, you know, so that the, it keeps them on their toes, keeps them paying attention.

So, yeah, yeah, there you go.

I think use more profanity when you’re reading the Bible, man.

Get out there. Get, you know, say, say some swears, have some fun in your life. You only get one shot at this thing. You might as well, might as well enjoy yourself while you’re doing it. Yeah, but don’t, don’t offend your grandma. All right, well, that’s it for the show today. If you’d like to become a part of keeping this show going and going strong, you can become a patron over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma where you can get early access to an ad-free version of every show and access to the after party. There’s, it’s good stuff all over there. You’ll get early announcements about upcoming events, that sort of thing. Our patrons are beloved by us, so be one of those if you can. They’re the best of the people. And if you’d like to contact us, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

God's Swear Jar

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology