Problematic Prophecy

The trains that are derailing. That reminds me of Revelation, where you have the… the horses and they have the tails like scorpions and all this, and… Can we just not? Can we please stop doing that?

Just relax, everybody. Yeah. You’re gonna be okay.

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?

Things are good. We’re… we are both now officially back from our travels.

Yes.

And for now, or at least for the… for the immediate future, we’re… we’re stateside and living life. We got a… a fun show coming up. I’m pretty excited about it. We… we got the… the old… well, okay, let me just say a miracle has happened. And that miracle is, we mentioned a thing on a previous episode, and then we remembered to talk about it on this episode.

You mean we followed through on something?

On anything. It’s a miracle. We literally were able to do it with the help of our listeners who… they literally heard me say, hey, I hope somebody will help me remember to do this. And they came out of the woodwork and helped me remember to do this. So we’re talking about preterism, which I think is awesome. And I also did not know what that was. So I’m very glad that we get a chance to… to talk… talk through it. That’s… that’s… that’s going to be our first “What Is That?” segment. And then in the latter half of the show, we’re going… we’re… we’re going eschatological, but not… or rather, we’re talking about an eschatology, the Book of Revelation , or as Marjorie Taylor Greene says, the Book of Revelations. And we’re going to talk about that. And whether or not we… we’re going to talk about who thought… who thinks and doesn’t think it should be in the canon.

Yeah, it was. A lot of people don’t know. Its canonicity, its authenticity, its inspiration was challenged by an awful lot of early Christians. So, yeah, we’ll talk about that.

I personally would vote it off the island, but we’ll get to that. We’ll figure it out.

That’s… I get in a lot of interviews, I get asked what book I would omit from the Bible, and I make a point of answering Revelation before they even get the question fully out. And I… I think we probably saw that on our book signing tour. I think that happened a couple of times. So.

Yeah, yeah, I think I, I. Anyway, yes. And the island we will vote it off of, apparently, is Patmos, but we’ll get to that in the latter half of the show. But for now, let’s dive in with “What Is That?” and the “What Is That?” that we are discussing is, as I said, preterism. Okay. So let’s just start with “What is that?”

What does the word mean? It’s an unusual word, but if you’re familiar with linguistics, you might have heard the term preterite. A preterite is a… is a past tense thing. And preterism comes from the Latin praeter, which… which means past. And so the… the idea is that this is talking about things that happened in the past and that’s… and that’s not very detailed. That’s not giving you an awful lot of information.

But we’re building to something here.

We’re making it… we got to go brick by brick.

Yeah, exactly.

The basic idea of preterism is that the prophecies about the end times in the New Testament and even in the Hebrew Bible have already been fulfilled either in part or in full. So generally you divide preterism into partial preterism or full preterism.

Wow.

And you got… yeah. Well, you’re usually one or the other or neither, if… if you don’t accept preterism at all. I get accused of… of being a preterist frequently. And we’ll… we’ll talk about why that doesn’t really work.

Okay. Well, I was going to say I would… I would almost accuse you of being a preterist based on a few things that you’ve said. But let’s… let’s not… let’s not get the cart before the horse here. Let’s… yeah, let’s dive in and figure out what… what we’re talking about because we—

We have, you know, when… when we hear people on social media today talk about the fulfillment of end times prophecies, there… there are a handful of… of places they’ll turn to, and two popular ones are Daniel and Revelation. Daniel talks about, you know, the… the abomination of desolation and… and all this kind of stuff. And… and you got the seventy weeks and… and every time somebody’s about to make some kind of peace treaty associated with Israel, suddenly it’s about this… this peace that is going to last for a week, AKA seven years.

And this is the, the Olivet Discourse.

The Olivet Discourse, right. And we’ve talked in the past about how the Olivet Discourse makes it sound like the second coming is going to happen immediately after the events that are being described. And the events that are being described sound an awful lot like what happened around the year 70 CE when Rome had been laying siege to Judea for a while and, and destroyed Jerusalem, destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, ran off the Jewish rebels. So it sounds like that already happened.

Yeah.

And so according to preterism, if you’re a partial preterist, you would say, okay, so that part of the Olivet Discourse has already been fulfilled. The rest of it, where the Son of Man comes in clouds of, of great glory and all that kind of stuff hasn’t been fulfilled yet. We’re still waiting on that. God is slow-playing their hand regarding the fulfillment of the next part. If you’re a full preterist, then you say, no, it was all—the, the second coming, the resurrection—it was all fulfilled by 70 CE. And we’re just in some kind of post, I won’t say coital, but some kind of post-apocalyptic waiting period, I guess. There are a bunch of different ways that it’s rationalized, but it all stems from the fact that the, the, the Book of Revelation , the Gospels, even Daniel, a lot of the way, the most likely ways to interpret that is the events that happened in 70 CE.

And so a lot of this requires that Revelation be written prior to 70 CE, if these are all prophecies about what’s going to happen.

Right. I mean, this is, this is assuming that this is not someone writing after the fact that, as though they’re writing before the fact to give to, to, to give credence to their, to their revelatory power or whatever.

Right. And, and the folks who argue that, funny enough, will argue that the beast is supposed to be Nero.

Right?

They will say 666 is gematria, it’s a reference to Nero, and it already all happened and it’s already all been fulfilled by 70 CE—it was done and dusted. And scholars—the overwhelming—I don’t know about the overwhelming, but the majority of scholars date Revelation to well after that. But yeah, like, like you said, it, it raises an important interpretive question. What’s more likely? That somebody was writing shortly after 70 CE and they were writing as if they were coming prior to that time period and were trying to include all these things that they knew were going to happen and leading up to what they hoped would happen in their own immediate future.

It does make prophesying a lot easier if the stuff’s already happened.

Yeah. And, you know, we have the same issue with Daniel because we have, as you get from the 6th century BCE, which is when Daniel was supposed to have been written, as you get closer to the 160s BCE, the history gets one, more accurate, two, more detailed up until you have Antiochus IV Epiphanes laying siege and, you know, threatening to do all this stuff, abomination that makes desolation, or however you want to translate that. And then right then is when God is supposed to show up and God is supposed to rout the, the invading army. God is supposed to save their people. And so it gets, it’s more and more accurate right up to the point where God intervenes, and then everything after that is totally inaccurate. And, you know, the most likely interpretation of, of that trajectory is, okay, this was all written right at the point where God intervenes by somebody who was living that experience and probably writing this in the hope that it would, that they would manifest somehow these events or they would give people hope that, that these things were going to happen.

And the same is, is almost certainly true of the Olivet Discourse as recorded in Mark, which was probably—you know, scholars are like, it might have been like a couple—the destruction of the temple, or it might have been a couple months after the destruction of the temple. Like, they’re, they’re very granular about this is either immediately before or very shortly after.

Right.

And so from, from a critical point of view that makes the most sense of these texts and, and what’s going on that, that this is, this is somebody writing in view of these events who is kind of hoping that what happens next will be the intervention of God. But the further away you get from that composition of the text, the less and less that really fits the treatment of these things as inspired. And so, right. You have to negotiate. You have to figure out a way. Okay, so it didn’t happen. Right. After all the events that they said were going to happen. We’re still waiting to happen. It’s been 2,000 years.

It’s been a minute.

Yeah. So we’re going to create this notion of preterism that. Well, it wasn’t, it wasn’t created very recently. It’s actually quite old. This goes back to the first few centuries. Sure. CE. You have early Christians who are like this kind of seems like it just happened. So you have the seeds of preterism already being planted pretty early on. But it’s not until, you know, the late medieval period or Reformation period that you begin to get formal articulations of this doctrine of preterism. And I think one of the interesting things about the early articulation of, of preterism is that it was a lot of. It was criticized for its chiliasm. Have you heard that word before?

I don’t know that I have. Does it have to do with Helios?

No, it’s C H I L I A S M. And this is based on the Greek word for thousand.

Oh, okay.

So it’s millennialism, basically.

Oh, okay.

And because a lot of what preterism was about was this notion that there would be a thousand years of, of peace when Jesus reigned. And so you have some folks who, who suggested that this was going on following 70 CE or that this was about to happen. And a lot of early Christians did not like chiliasm because it was one, it was associated with some people who were dismissed as as heretics, but it, it kind of, it undermined the, the, the hope in the imminent return of Jesus. So you had a lot of conflicts with, with the idea of preterism. And it was something that, I think I, if I recall correctly, an awful lot of Protestants didn’t like it. This was something that was more common among Catholic and other theologians and writers and things like that. But, but it’s somewhat.

Began to be accepted by Protestants. And these days there are an awful lot of Protestants who are partial preterists. Full preterism is still a minority view and particularly among Protestants, but you see more and more evangelicals who are partial preterists. And, and this is where the accusation that I’m a preterist comes in. Because when I talk about the Olivet Discourse, when I talk about Revelation, I’m like, no, this, this is all talking about things that were just then happening with the siege of Jerusalem on the part of Rome and people like, ah, you’re a preterist. It’s like, no, no, I don’t think that any of this is real prophecy.

Okay. There’s the distinction.

Yes. So, like, preterism is, and, and this is where I, I, I see this a lot. There are a lot of folks who cannot fathom the existence of a critical study of the Bible. Like everybody, not everybody. An awful lot of people think that I am studying the Bible for religious reasons.

Yeah.

And, and, you know, it’s not just the people who say, I’m a theologian. It’s not, I, I don’t know how many times people will say, I love your channel, but I’m an atheist. So you don’t have to qualify this. So it’s not like you don’t, you’re not allowed to be here if you’re, if you’re an atheist. It’s, I don’t expect anything related to theological belief to consume my content. But a lot of people think that if you study the Bible, it’s for religious reasons. And, and I don’t know if that’s what leads people to think, oh, you’re, you’re arguing that, you know, the, the Olivet Discourse was all about the 70 CE. You must be a preterist. No, I don’t think anything else is on the way. I don’t think that, and I don’t think these were prophecies that were actually fulfilled. Right. The data don’t support that at all. The data indicate that these were things that writers, looking back on these events, put into the narratives that they were crafting as if they came from an earlier time period, which is what happens in Daniel, which is what happens in, well, Revelation is, is, is kind of contemporary with its composition.

But, but yeah, I’m not a preterist, or at least I wouldn’t identify as a preterist. If someone wants to define it as anybody who thinks the Olivet Discourse events of the Siege of Jerusalem, fine, but, but if it has anything to do with the notion that anything is actually prophecy that is, was or has yet to be fulfilled, then then, no, I, I’m not a preterist.

So not to put too fine a point on it, but just so that I understand, okay, I guess what you’re saying is that preterism is a theological contention that these were real prophecies. And, and the difference is just that they believe that these prophecies were already fulfilled.

Yes. The, the idea is that the, these things are actual inspired prophecies and that the, that ancient Israel’s continuation is, is manifested in, in the Christian church. And you know, the pivot took place in 70 CE when, when everything went down with, with Roman Jerusalem. And, and so, yeah, it interprets things as, as prophetic, but as aimed at a specific set of events that took place in the past. So I, I would distinguish it pretty sharply from a critical academic approach which.

Right.

Understands it all as, as a product of human industry and, and propaganda and things like that and renegotiation with the Scriptures of, of earlier Judaism and things.

Yeah, so the, so, so yeah, preterists are not people who believe that these, the like as you do that, that it’s possible that these were written before the, the events that they’re pretending to, to prophesy about. They’re saying that these were written whenever they purported to be written. They were about future events. Those future events then came to pass.

Yeah. And okay, particularly folks who want to put Revelation prior to 70 CE, because if, if it’s written in 90, but about the events of 70 CE, well, well, that kind of undermines the notion that it is prophetic. That undermines the notion that this is actual prophecy. Which is why you, you won’t, you won’t see many preterists say that Revelation comes from the 90s CE, but is about, you know, is about Nero and the events of 70 CE, but in a prophetic sense, in a true inspired sense. So in, in that sense, I, I reject that, that categorization. But yeah, once like 18th century is when preterism becomes more, more widespread. You get some books that are written that advocate for a preterist view. And the other views, by the way, are futurism, which is that all of this is still off in the future. This is, this still has yet to come to pass.

You got historicism, which if I remember correctly, is, is the view that, well, the, is the historicization of all of this, which is probably closer to what I’m doing where I’m saying, no, this is not prophecy. When we look at the history, it just, you know, these texts are describing things that, that were happening then or had just happened. And you know, they’re hoping for, for things to happen in the future. But there’s, there are categories for the different approaches to this. And then, yeah, millennialism fits into all that. And then you got, when we’ve talked about millennialism, we’ve got amillennialism, we’ve got pre-trib, we’ve got post-trib, we got all the different types of millennialism as well.

Right.

It all fits into the, that whole framework of how we understand this to be true. And this is one of the main reasons I object to the label preterist is because in my view, it presupposes the truth of everything that’s going on here. The inspiration, the inerrancy, the prophetic origins of all of this. And so I would have described my approach as more critical.

Yeah, I guess. So what are the. You touched on it briefly. But one of the things that I’m curious about is sort of the theological consequence of preterism, meaning if theologically we assume that essentially John’s Apocalypse happened and, you know, the predictions of Daniel and Jesus at Olivet have all come to pass, what does that mean for now? Because, I mean, I understood when I was a believer, I understood that these were all. I guess I was raised to be a futurist about these ideas. So I understand what it means if you are a futurist. I understand that it means that there’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s coming down the pike at some point and we all need to prep for it and we all need to be ready for it when it happens. Oh, this is all the stuff that’s gonna happen. But like, I guess I, I’ve never put myself in the shoes of, of someone who doesn’t come from that perspective.

This is all the stuff that’s gonna happen. But like, I guess I, I’ve never put myself in the shoes of, of someone who doesn’t come from that perspective. So I don’t know. So I don’t know what it means. What, like what? You know, I see all of these, these right wing preachers talking about it’s coming any day. Oh, this means, you know, look at this, look at what’s happening in Israel. This proves that it’s gonna, that it’s right around the corner. Corner, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah.

I guess, I guess that perpetual anticipation, that perpetual, like we’ve got to be on guard, which goes back all the way to when these books were written. I mean, I remember, I’ve read about, I’ve read historical accounts about, you know, the great London fire in 1666. And like, everybody’s just like, here it is, it’s happening. We got it. And so this is not a new phenomenon. No, but without that, it does seem like it’s a very different approach to theology and to, to how one lives one’s life.

Yeah. And I think most folks these days, most Christians these days have spent all their time swimming in the waters of an expectation of a second coming, if not the rapture, at least resurrection, all this kind of stuff. And that’s rather undermined at least by full preterism. I think partial preterism basically says that happened. We’re still looking forward to Jesus’s second coming. We’re still looking forward to the rapture. We’re still looking forward to a resurrection from the dead. But with full preterism, you’ve got to kind of reshuffle the deck and you’ve got to figure out a way to, to understand how the last, you know, 1900 years have carried on following all of those things as if Jesus has already come and the resurrection of the dead has already taken place. Which is why a lot of folks would argue that full preterism requires that the resurrection be something more symbolic, something more metaphorical, that it not be the literal resurrection from the dead.

And, you know, there are groups that understand it that way that, okay, that this is not about, you know, everybody coming back from the dead, but it is something else, whether related to the spirit or something like that. There’s. It’s a very different way of, of understanding Christian history and Christian eschatology. And yeah, you can find, you know, in the book of Matthew , it says when Jesus died, you know, a bunch of people came back from the dead and appeared to their loved ones and things like that. And so people say, ah, there’s the, there’s the resurrection. It. It happened right there. And so now we, we’ve had a resurrection. We need no more resurrection.

And yeah, I guess it ruins phrases like the end of days or any of that sort of thing, but it does kind of, kind of frees you from this, from the anxiety that, that a coming apocalypse somewhere looming on the horizon has given. I mean, there are. I, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who had or, or still have intense apocalyptic anxiety.

Oh, yeah, big time.

And then there’s just. I guess you’re just left with sort of a different anxiety, which is just like, what do we do now? I don’t know. I guess we just live our lives well or something.

Yeah. Oh, I was listening to a video. I was in my kitchen and I was on TikTok listening to a video, and my wife walked by and the person was like, all those people who say that these are actual. We’re not in the end times. They had to deal with the same thing back when 1 Peter was written and my wife was like, and it didn’t happen then. It’s been 2,000 years. They were right back then when they criticized the notion that they were in the end times. And yeah, there are a lot of folks who would still consider themselves Bible believers and Christians looking forward to something, but not what the majority of Christians these days are looking forward to. I don’t think they anticipate, you know, that, that Iran and Turkey and Russia are going to form a coalition and then attack Israel from the north and from the south, and then that’s going to bring on Armageddon and that. And, you know, the, the people who see this as some kind of paint by number where you’re trying to divine, you know, what’s happening in the future, like it makes for a puzzle to be solved.

And I get that that is meaningful. I get that that has value to folks, but it’s so ridiculous, the notion that this is, this is a Ouija board and we’re trying to divine the future and we’re keeping a lookout for, for all the signs because they, you know, there’s, every generation over the last 2000 years has had the ability to point to stuff and say it’s the sign of the times and the. But not every generation, I think, understood the Bible to be pointing them in that direction.

And, and it is, it is kind of bizarre to think about Christians in other time periods and other places being like, no, none of that’s going to happen. We’re all right. We’re cool. Yeah. Because. So that’s, that’s, I think I probably have some holy envy for the generations of Christians who did not have to deal with, with these ridiculous people out there going the trains that are derailing. That reminds me of Revelation where you have the, the horses and they have the tails like scorpions and all this. And can we just not, can we please, please stop doing that?

Just relax, everybody. You’re going to be okay. Well, since we were just talking about, you know, Christians in history and the book of Revelation , why don’t we jump into our next segment? Taking issue, the issue that we are going to take is with the idea that Revelation itself is a. Is. Is, is good? No, no, that’s not the issue. Is, Is. Is actually, like, meant to be in the canon.

Yes.

Of, of Christian books of the New Testament.

Yes. We’re gonna, we’re gonna talk about the Christians who challenged that. Okay. A lot of people don’t know this, but the, it’s not like the earliest Christians were like, ah, we’re Christians now, and here is our collection of books that everybody agrees on. Like, no. It took. Not only did it take a long time for these books to be written, and most critical scholars would say there are multiple books of the New Testament, perhaps even at least one of the Gospels that weren’t even written until probably the beginning of the second century CE. So it’s probably over a century after Jesus’s death that the final books are being, are being wound up, being completed. So it’s taken a long time to do that. And then you have these, you know, you couldn’t just get on Amazon and order a book and be like, I have to wait until 5 in the morning to get this book. These, these things had to be copied by hand, which meant they didn’t just immediately go and get out there. They, you know, they had a biography.

These things had to be passed along and somebody would have multiple copies made by hand, and then they would pass the original copy on. And, and so different congregations had different sets of books, and the canon came together slowly. And it was not that people sat around a desk and went, I vote for this one in the canon and this one out. What happened is mainly people went around and found out what books were being read in the services, what books were being considered authoritative and inspired and which were not. And so a lot of the early discussions of canon would say, well, these are the books that the majority of churches treat as authoritative, as inspired, as doctrinally binding. These are the books that they read, but they don’t really consider doctrinally binding. These are the spurious books. These are the ones that we know were not written by the people they claim to have been written by and all that. So you had different levels of, of proximity to this notion of canon. And ultimately it was, it was basically a boundary firmed up around the books that the majority of people were using.

And then they came up with rationalizations for why it’s those books that are in and everything else is out. Now.

I. Objection. I don’t think any.

Overruled.

No. Okay. No, you’re correct. It does seem that is a very human way of doing these things.

Yeah.

You. You figure out what you like and then you prove why it’s good, why it’s, why it’s real or why everyone else should care about it or whatever.

Hundred percent that is is how it. It works. And, and you know, this is how it works. Even, even today when, you know, a politician gets up there and says something, the person intuitively decides whether they like it or not and then goes about rationalizing why, right, their feelings are correct. And, you know, it’s. It’s the same for the development of the canon.

Right.

And you know, you had things like apostolic authorship or some kind of connection to an apostolic source. You had the, the authority of the text within early Christian churches and all these things. And so all the criteria are basically like, well, that’s because that’s what everybody thinks. Right.

Look at how many people are reading it. All those guys can’t be wrong.

Yeah. And the Book of Revelation for quite some time was not really that popular. It was something that was dismissed as a rather grotesque misrepresentation of. Of Christian sensitivities and ideologies. There’s a. There’s a guy named Dionysius of Alexandria. He was a bishop and a scholar, and he died the middle of the third century, around 260s CE. And he argued that. And his argument was, was really the consensus view for a long time within early Christianity that whatever the nature of the Book of Revelation , it was not written by the author of the Gospel of John . It was written by somebody else. And, and this kind of complicates the relationship of the Book of Revelation to any kind of apostolic authority.

Right.

But Dionysius writes, he’s kind of describing opinions about the Book of Revelation middle of the third century. Some before us have set aside and rejected the book altogether, criticizing it chapter by chapter and pronouncing it without sense or argument and maintaining the title is fraudulent. And this was a big deal. Is this actually a revelation or not? For they say that it is not the work of John, nor is it a revelation, because it is covered thickly and densely by a veil of obscurity. You know, the God is not the author of confusion kind of approach. If, if all of this is.

And it is a confusing book.

Yeah.

It is a very mystifying bit of writing.

Yeah. Apokalypsis Revelation. It means an uncovering, a revealing. And it’s like if all this stuff is being smuggled in, in all this complex and frequently grotesque imagery, there’s nothing revealing about this. So it’s not, it can’t be that.

It should be called the obfuscation of.

Yeah, the obfuscation of John. And, and he goes on and they even affirm that none of the apostles and none of the saints nor anyone in the church is its author. And so obvious. And Dionysius is not endorsing that position. He’s not rejecting the Book of Revelation . He says he thinks it is authoritative but doesn’t think that it was written by the author of the Gospel of John . And when you compare the Greek of John and Revelation, it’s night and day. Like the author of, of the Gospel of John knew what he was doing. It’s Koine Greek, you know, he’s, he’s not a classical Greek lyricist. It’s Koine Greek. But it is far more sophisticated and educated than the Greek of the Book of Revelation , which tends to be rather choppy and, and rather rough in style. And there are things that, that a lot of Greek grammarians would call just non standard or even grammatically incorrect Greek in there.

So that, that was the main concern. Readers would be like this is not this the same style kind of Greek as we have in the Gospel of John ? Right. You had folks who said it’s, you know, it’s Eusebius of Caesarea and his text Ecclesiastical History. And if you want like Ecclesiastical History, I don’t know if you’ve ever read any part of that. But Eusebius, he was, he was a friend of, of Constantine’s. He put together this ecclesiastical history and that’s one of the primary sources for, for a lot of the history of the early Church. But it’s a, it’s a great thing to read if you haven’t read it. He called it a disputed book, saying that there was a lot of uncertainty about any kind of apostolic origin. And he referenced Dionysius’s discussion about the concerns with it. And I think Eusebius probably also said it probably wasn’t written by the author of the Gospel of John .

Sorry, my memory fails me on this. Does the Book of Revelation claim to be written by the Gospel by John the Apostle? No, it’s just John. It says I am John. Yeah, but it doesn’t say John the Apostle.

Yeah, call me John.

Right.

And then moves on. And the first person to actually say this could be the same author as the author of Gospel of John is Justin Martyr around 150 CE, and, and he was a defender of the authenticity of the Book of Revelation , but prior to that, nobody had identified that John as the same John as the Gospel of John .

To say, no, this is a bad book. This is heretical. This should not be included in the canon. And he was—and mainly because of its chiliasm, its millennialism, he was fiercely opposed to this. So. And then Marcion of Sinope was the heretic. Not that Christians today really hate Marcion, but he was also one who rejected the authenticity and the inspired nature of the Book of Revelation and excluded it from his canon, along with a ton of other stuff.

What were some, if you can remember, what were some of the objections? I mean, were they—were they textual objections or were theological objections? Like, what are we talking about here?

Well, you—there were a few different objections.

We.

We talked a little bit about the authorship thing that this just does not read like the author of the Gospel of John . We talked about the fact that there is nothing that seems to be revealing about this. It is all shrouded in a lot of mysterious apocalyptic imagery. There are folks who thought it sounded too Jewish. It was Jewish apocalyptic imagery that was not becoming of, you know, good Christian literature. There were—there were folks who said that wasn’t—that was not really what we’re doing anymore. There were folks who said that the ideologies in the book were very exclusionary, exclusivistic, but also very materialistic. “We’re gonna get everything that the bad guys have. We’re gonna—” Yeah, and we talked about this. We’ve talked about this a couple times in the past where the author of the Sermon on the Mount would have wildly disagreed with the Book of Revelation ’s vision of a future where we’re just swimming in wine and everybody has all the riches in the world, and we’re all glutting ourselves on all of the, you know, just the bounty of the cool loot that we get.

Yes. And so for a lot of people, this vision of the future just clashed with the asceticism of early Christianity. And you know, a Jesus who was like, “deny everything, you know, make yourself a eunuch. We’re gonna live in basically abject poverty.” And then along comes John the Revelator, like, “wine for everybody.”

And I can see how each of those approaches would have—would have their supporters. Yeah, those approaches both have their supporters now.

Yeah, you can imagine some early Christians, you know, sitting in the Coliseum going, “but I kind of like what they have over here.” And they’re like, “no, that—you guys—”

“Tried having a bunch of money and wine, because I like it.”

I’m sure that you pretend to enjoy celibacy, but everybody knows you’re just so—I think that was a big part of it as well. And, and yeah, just, just the fact that it doesn’t seem to follow in the trend of Christian writings from the time period. It’s just—and even people today who read it, Revelation is an outlier linguistically, literarily.

It does. I mean, you can see it. You don’t have to be well versed in almost any of the studies, the academic studies, to read that and see it as very different.

Yeah.

From what comes before.

Yeah. And then I—there are a few things that contributed to the Book of Revelation ’s inclusion in the canon. One, you know, because it was debated, it had widespread circulation. And so you did have fans of the Book of Revelation . Papias, who we’ve talked about before, who is one of our witnesses to a couple of the Gospels—he identifies a Gospel by Mark and by Matthew, which may or may not be related to what we have now as the Gospel of Mark and Matthew. Obviously Justin Martyr, who was the first one to say they’re the same John, he was a fan of it. These were very influential folks. And so the objectors were not as influential in a lot of ways, but it was still a debated text. And I would say probably was on its way out of the canon until Athanasius of Alexandria, to whom I shake my fist.

Athanasius.

He was. And what. Like this guy just led what must have been the most bizarre and stressful life. Like he was exiled, I think, seven or eight times in his life. Like they were like, we just can’t get rid of you. And, and mainly because he was, he was like the fiercest anti-Arian that was around. I mean, I’m sure you had other Christians who were like, Athanasius needs to.

Pull it back, talk about anti-Arian, because I don’t think people are going to know what that.

Okay, so Athanasius was around in 325 CE when we had the Council of Nicaea, which was there to try to resolve the Arian controversy, which is where this Presbyter Arius was saying that Jesus was a subordinate being, which was not that controversial in the early church. But he also was saying there was a time when Jesus was not, when he did not exist, he was a creation of God the Father. And that is what set I think the most people off. But at Nicaea they came up with the Nicene Creed. They came up with the idea that Jesus was consubstantial with the Father and with the Holy Ghost and with. We have the beginnings of formal articulated Trinitarianism. And. But that didn’t seal the deal. Like that didn’t fix the problem. There would be another century of back and forth between Arianism and anti-Arianism. And you even had an Arian emperor. One of the Roman emperors was an Arian.

And Constantine was even somewhat sympathetic to the plight of the Arians. But Athanasius was one of the torch bearers for the anti-Arian bent. And one of the things that he did was appeal to the Book of Revelation as a way not to distinguish Christians from non-Christians and not as a way to circle the wagons around the followers of Jesus, but as a way to root out inadequately faithful Christians who are in the church. So he took the Book of Revelation and he pointed it back at the other Christians and said, you’re not good enough. You’re an enemy. You’re a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And, and this would have been aimed at not only Arians, but anybody who challenged the power structures that served his interest and that he was trying to advance. And I think we’ve talked about this before. For instance, you had the monasteries at the time, they were not under the wing of the institutional church.

They were the rebels out in the desert living like hippies going peace and love and Gnostic literature, man. And Athanasius wanted to put a stop to that and wanted to, to bring the monasteries under the control of the institutional church. And had his ways of going about doing that. But, but one of the things that he did was include the Book of Revelation in his canon and his list, his canon list from, I think it was 367, this was his 39th Festal Letter. And if you don’t know what that means, this was kind of the letter celebrating, I think, Easter. Okay, that. That went out in the year 367. And in that letter, he lays out the canon, which becomes more or less the first, like, formal articulation of the canon as it exists now. Prior to that.

Yeah, prior to that, there were debates, and you had some people going, yeah, these are. These are in. These are out. But it hadn’t firmed up until Athanasius’ letter. And he was the first one who said, revelation is in. That’s the last book he includes. And then he goes on in the next paragraph. These are the fountains of salvation, that he who thirsts may be satisfied with the living words they contain. In these alone, the teaching of godliness is proclaimed. Let no one add to these. Let nothing be taken away from them. Now, readers of the Bible will recognize this. May no one add to this or take away from this. You see this in Deuteronomy. You see this in the Book of Revelation .

Revelation, yeah.

Yeah. And so. And so Athanasius is. Is basically quoting his favored text as a means of doing what Revelation was trying to do, kind of authorize and tie off and authoritatively seal up his message. And his message is Book of Revelation is canon. And a lot of people will. You don’t really have an authoritative canon list that matches closely what we have today. Prior to this letter, some people will point to the Muratorian fragment. Have we done a show on the Muratorian fragment? Does that sound familiar? Okay, we got to do. We got it.

I might have to check, but I don’t remember anything about that.

Yeah, the. We’ll have to do a show on that, because most people today will say the Muratorian fragment is from, like, the second century. Like, it’s a very early canon list. However, the canon that it lists is more like late 4th century, and it refers to some groups that weren’t around when it was supposed to have been written in the second century.

Yeah, I, I was noticing when I was sort of poking around on this that the Council of—you’re gonna have to tell me—Laodicea.

Laodicea omitted.

Revelation. That was 363. That was pretty late in the game.

Yes.

And they, they were like, nah.

Yeah, this was, this was something that, that was established pretty late and, and primarily because of rhetorical utility to Athanasius for, for his attempt to try to engage in boundary maintenance—who’s a good Christian, who’s a bad Christian—and, and also for the churches. So I think you have toward the end, the Council of Hippo, 393 CE, the Council of Carthage, 397 CE. Those are reaffirmations basically of more or less the canon that Athanasius asserted. And I wanna, I wanna say there are one or two places where Athanasius might diverge. Yeah, so he says Isaiah 1 book, Jeremiah with Baruch. So that would be what is now considered an apocryphal book. Lamentations and the Epistle, which is probably a reference to the Epistle of Jeremiah, another apocryphal book, if I recall correctly. And when he talks about like Daniel, whether or not he’s referencing the additions to Daniel which are now included in the Apocrypha, I’m not positive about that.

But so there, there are additions you’re saying,

Like Bel and the Dragon.

Yeah, yeah, okay. Stuff like that. So I would have to go and see what the scholars have said about that. I don’t recall. But so there are some squishy edges to Athanasius’s canon as compared to today. But what some people think—it was more or less in place—like even you even have people who think it was more or less in place at the end of the first century, beginning of the second century CE. You have apologists who will argue that. And the reality is that that’s just not the case. It was something that was a lot more amorphous for a lot longer than a lot of people want to acknowledge. And Revelation was one of the Johnny-come-latelies in the 4th century that… and again, in my opinion, it probably would not be there if not for Athanasius of Alexandria, to whom I once again—

Shake your fist.

Shake my fist? Yes, you.

There’s a lot of fish shaking on this, on this particular episode.

Did you say fish you could shake?

A fish if you want to. I meant to say fist. If fish is what came out, then.

I don’t know. I probably just didn’t hear.

Should we just shake our fishes also at Athanasius? Let’s just shake whatever we got. Got them.

Yeah. Shake what your mama gave you like a Polaroid picture. As the great poet grew tired of saying, from what I understand. So, yeah, Revelation probably would not be included in the canon if you went with the consensus view of the 1st century of followers of Jesus and probably even more, probably into the third and maybe even the fourth century of Christians. So not a great text. And particularly when overwhelmingly it is leveraged today in order to try to scare people into thinking that there is some apocalyptic end times. That that is—that is in the post. And that—that authorizes the nation of—of Israel to do whatever it needs to do to correct to less powerful groups that reside by and in it. So I think it causes more harm than good.

And—and that’s without even referencing the untold trauma that has been experienced by people raised under, you know—and to quote another great poet—under his watchful eye. Is that what the—is that what the shoot—is that what the Handmaid’s Tale thing is, under his eyes?

I don’t know. The Handmaid’s Tale.

Oh, I’m… I’m pretty sure it’s “Under His Eye.” Yeah, that was the phrase. “Under His Eye,” I think, is what it is. Yeah.

Okay.

But I think a lot of people have had very traumatic childhoods because of this notion that this is something that is right around the corner and we’re all going to be experiencing some nightmarish apocalyptic hellscape that we’re supposed to be excited about.

Yeah, I’m real thrilled about it.

And because… because… and I, like, I didn’t grow up in that kind of environment, but I can’t imagine having parents who would be like, “Here’s all the awful stuff that’s going to happen, and you need to be excited about it.”

Right.

If you’re not excited about it, that means you don’t have enough faith and you’re going to be one of the ones who’s going to be, you know, have their skin worn like a helmet or something. Yeah. Like, I can’t imagine what it must be like trying to rationalize that.

Trying to wrap your head around… yeah, okay. Well, I guess… I guess it’s a bunch of bad things, but I’ll be okay because as long as I don’t sin. Oh, no.

Yeah.

It’s a very scary, scary thing.

Yeah. And, and people are like, “You can’t sin.” You’re going to… everybody… nobody has a choice but to…

But you shouldn’t sin.

Yeah. And, oh, gosh, it’s… it’s a Catch-22 or a Catch-666, as it were. So I like it.

All right, friends, well, that’s it for today. If you would like to be a part of making this show happen and also, in the process, avoid the ads that you have to listen to and…

Thought you were going to say avoid the apocalypse.

But avoid the apocalypse. We will guarantee that you will not have an apocalypse. And if you do, you can… you can come to us for a refund. But yes, if you want to avoid the apocalypse, go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and pick which level you would like to join. You can even join… you can join at higher levels. You can pick a level, go up as high as you want, go as high as you can and give us your money. And we… we greatly appreciate all of our patrons. If you’d like to write to us, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.