Blessed Baruch!

Maybe Paul read this. Maybe Paul was into this thing.

Maybe Paul was. I think Paul was probably into a lot of the, you know, the more underground stuff. You’ve probably never heard of it.

I liked Baruch back when it was— I liked his early stuff.

When it was Hebrew. Yeah. 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?

Good. You’re coming in kind of mellow. You got an NPR vibe. I’m coming in hot. I always come in hot. I’m a brash goofball. But, but yeah. I was just going to say this week is going to probably be a slightly truncated show. Dan is being very kind and going and recording on a day that we normally don’t record. He’s taking time away from his family that normally they get some Dan time because I have to go and take care of some family business and an emergency trip coming up.

So yes, you must, you must abandon our good nation.

I’m fleeing the country. Fleeing, I say.

But it is all for a good cause.

Yeah, so hopefully be forgiving, oh ye of our listeners, of listen-dom.

Yes.

And we’ll come back hot next week with something extra spicy just for you.

And it won’t just be the chili.

It won’t just be. Yeah, that’s right.

You’re going to be having it in Cincy.

You’re going off to Cincinnati, I’m going to Canada. It’s going to be crazy.

Yeah.

Uh, all right, so, uh, we’re only going to be doing one segment this week, and it’s gonna be, uh, Is It Canon?

Will It Canon?

Um, will it blend?

And you can too.

Yeah, then this week’s Is It Canon is, uh, interesting. It’s so— it’s Baruch. Now, we’ve mentioned the book of Baruch. We have, uh, before in conjunction with the letter of Jeremiah, which is sometimes tacked on to the end of Baruch as just the final chapter of Baruch.

Yeah, it is chapter 6, just, uh, right on the end there, although most scholars agree this is definitely not written by the same crew. And it is included in other parts.

And as I read it, when I got to chapter 5 of Baruch, I was like, wait, this is literally exactly the same thing as the letter of Jeremiah. It is, it’s not identical, but it just does the same thing. And it’s so weird. It’s weird to tack on Yeah, if I read— if I were to read that as one book, I would be like, why are we doing this again? It’s like someone was trying to remember what they just wrote and wrote and rewrote it again.

That’s a— that’s a funny thing. If anybody out there ever ends up like taking a course in like Ugaritic or something like that, which you’re gonna—.

Who among us hasn’t?

Yes, I mean, that’s— that’s the perennial question. Um, every, uh, the— when the— the leaves start changing and everybody wonders, is now the year that I take a course in Ugaritic.

But are you, are you in first year Ugaritic with me? Who do you have for Ugaritic?

But, uh, you, you read these mythological texts and there’s an awful lot of repetition, the same, the same thing over and over again. I don’t know how many letters I translated where I would skip over the first line because I knew it was going to say So-and-so to so-and-so, at the feet of my Lord I fall 7 times, even 8 times I fall at the feet of my Lord. And just this, the groveling at one’s feet. It’s grovel. It’s grovel. But yeah, so there’s grovel.

I mean, you know, it depends on what the feet are standing on.

Yeah, it depends where you are at the moment that you collapse at their feet. But yeah, there’s a lot of repetition, and there’s just so much of this kind of rhetoric in the text of Greco-Roman period Judaism.

Yeah.

It’s just over and over again, “Look, we gotta stop with the idols. We gotta stop with the worshiping the other deities. We’ve been over this and over this. " It’s kind of like being on Twitter right now, where it’s like, “No, we’ve been through this. We’ve been through this. " But yeah, today we’re talking about the 5 chapters of Baruch. And Baruch is the son of Neriah, so Baruch ben Neriah, and he is well known from the Book of Jeremiah .

And this made him obviously very unpopular among the who’s who of late— Well, no, not the hoi polloi, it would be the elite. The hoi polloi would be the masses.

Okay.

But, and yeah, there was some unpopularity there, but it was mainly like the king. Yeah. There’s a famous chapter 36, Jeremiah chapter 36, where Jeremiah is— God’s like, “Okay, Jeremiah, write all the words of this prophecy down and send it to the king. " And Jeremiah’s like, “Uh, Baruch, get over here.

Come here.

Write down everything I say in a scroll. " And Baruch goes, “Okay. " and writes it all down, and then goes and reads it to the people. And you know, it’s all the Jeremiads, basically. A Jeremiad is kind of a finger wagging, a ranting at everybody for their sins. And somebody who’s in the crowd goes and tells some of the officials, and they invite Baruch in to read the scroll to them, and he reads the scroll to them. They take it to the king, they read it to the king. And the king evidently is sitting there by the fire and has the person reading. Every section that they read, they use a penknife to cut off that section of the scroll and then just plunk, drop it in a fire. And so the king is basically really not happy with Baruch. And Baruch goes back to Jeremiah and is like, “They burnt the scroll.

They didn’t like it. " Yeah.

“Where is the different one? " And then Jeremiah goes to God and God’s like, “Well, I guess we’ll just do it again,” and has Jeremiah dictate the words of the prophecy all over again, and Baruch writes another scroll. “And gave it to the secretary Baruch son of Neriah, who wrote it at Jeremiah’s dictation, all the words of the scroll that King Jehoiakim,” by the way, “of Judah had burned in the fire. " and many similar words were added to them. So, the king is not on their side. And this is kind of how the story of Baruch, the apocryphal text, begins. But before we get to that, is there anything that you wanted to add about Baruch, or are you like, let’s move it?

No, what I want to do is situate us. So, you’ve connected this to Jeremiah. But so like, within the stories of the Bible, if we were to take them as true, then this is like during the exile.

Yes. So Jeremiah 36 , that’s happening right before the exile. The exile comes in waves. And the main one’s like 587, 586 BCE. That’s when the Jerusalem Temple is actually destroyed by the Babylonians. Babylonians. And that’s the final wave of forced migrations. And so the letter of Baruch actually begins by situating itself 5 years after that.

Right. And so when we have past talked about books that are— that theoretically take place during the exile, it has been— you have made it clear that these books were not written in that time, but were actually written much later in the Hellenistic sort of periods or whatever?

Overwhelmingly, yes. Now, okay, now the Book of Jeremiah , portions of that are thought to be authentic, to come from the exilic period. Baruch, no. Okay. Baruch is definitely coming from well after that. There’s an awful lot in Baruch that is quoting, alluding to, paraphrasing other parts of scripture, including non-canonical texts and things that are written well after the 6th century BCE. And so most scholars would say Baruch was probably written 1st century BCE, 1st century CE.

Oh, okay.

So the century before the life of Jesus or the century of the life of Jesus, somewhere in there. And scholars suggest that it’s divided into 4 kind of general pieces, and the first 2 pieces make up the first half. They go to Baruch 3:8, and this, scholars suggest, may have a Hebrew, an underlying Hebrew source text. So it might have been composed in Hebrew and then translated into Greek. All the manuscripts that we have of Baruch are in Greek. We don’t have any existing Hebrew manuscripts. And then for the second half, which basically switches over to poetry. Um, from 3:9 to 5:9, uh, you have a wisdom poem, and then you have, um, a poem about return from exile, right? And these are a little— there are fewer Semiticisms. So one of the ways that scholars can tell if something has been translated is if the Greek is using constructions and sayings and idioms and things like that that are not very Greek, but are very, very Hebrew.

So for instance, the master’s thesis I wrote at the University of Oxford, which was about textual criticism of the Septuagint and anti-anthropomorphism, you know, that old chestnut. I was making the argument that there’s this passage in the Hebrew Bible, in Hebrew, Exodus 24:10 , where Moses and the 70 elders go up Mount Horeb or Mount Sinai, and it says they saw the God of Israel, and under his feet it was like a brickwork of sapphire and shininess and all this kind of stuff. And they, and they broke bread, basically. In the Greek, it says, and they saw the place where the God of Israel stood. However, the Greek says it in a very weird way. It says they saw the place there where the God of Israel stood. And that’s not how you would normally say that in Greek. However, it is a perfectly normal way to say it in Hebrew.

Okay.

And so it’s this resumptive adverb thing. And so the argument that I made was that this suggests that the Greek the disappearance of God, the translating it so that they’re not actually looking at God. My argument was that this was not the work of the translator saying, “Well, I don’t like that. I’m going to change it,” because what they changed it to is not natural Greek. My argument was that they were translating something they found in their Hebrew source text, and it was written that way in Hebrew, in a very natural Hebrew way, and then they very woodenly translated it into unnatural Greek. So that was the argument I made. There’s a very prominent Septuagint scholar who heartily disagrees with me and has published stuff on that.

I think you’re a ding-dong about that.

Well, maybe not a ding-dong, but at least wrong about that. Yeah. And since that was something I wrote as a recent graduate of my undergraduate degree, I’ve just kind of backed away slowly. So I’m— I I have not taken up that cross recently, but that’s an example of one way that scholars can say this was probably written in Hebrew, is if the Greek is a little weird but works well if you back-translate it into Hebrew. But you don’t really get that for the second half of Baruch, which maybe is an indication that the book came together in stages, maybe is an indication that you know, maybe the author translated the first half from a Hebrew source text and then was like, “I’m going to roll. I’m going to keep pumping out stuff. I’m going to keep going, man.”

Why stop here?

Yeah. So we’ve got the 4 different segments divided into 2. You can divide it in half. The first half is a little more narrative and talks about a prayer. You’ve got to admit the guilt. You’ve got all these petitions that you offer. And then the second half is just poetry. But it’s set in around 582-ish BCE, somewhere in there. And one of the ways we know this is not actually written in 582 BCE is it starts with Baruch sending the words of this book to Jeconiah, or Jeconiah son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah. And talks about passing the hat around, basically, to get a bunch of silver, send it to the priest in Jerusalem, and they basically want them to do these temple offerings.

And it says Baruch took the vessels of the house of the Lord that had been carried away from the temple to return them to the land of Judah. But the temple was destroyed, right? It would not be rebuilt until like 519 BCE, so several more decades, right? And so this is probably being written by somebody who knows about the existence of the Second Temple and for whatever reason misunderstood the availability of the temple.

Didn’t get the timeline exactly right.

Yeah.

So got a lot of begats correctly, like, that guy is Baruch son of Neriah, son of Mahseiah, son of Zedekiah, son of Hasadiah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, the timeline got a little wiggly there.

And yeah, and this is kind of par for the course for Greco-Roman period Judaism. Like, the Book of Daniel does this as well. We’ve talked about that in the past, that Daniel was like, “Yeah, and then there was this other guy, and you know, he did this.” And it’s like, “No, there was—” like, “Darius the Mede conquered Babylon, and then Cyrus the Great came in after Darius.” And it’s like, no, Cyrus conquered Babylon, and then there was a Darius who was a Persian who came after Cyrus. And so even the most popular text from that time period that made it into the canon, unlike Baruch, but Daniel made it into the canon, got a lot of the details wrong. So so yeah, that is suggestive of somebody who’s not writing in this time period. And so we have Baruch basically instructing the people, saying basically, look, the exile is because y’all were naughty.

Yeah.

And so everybody, all of us. Yes. The entire people. We were all bad, and we need to now pray and admit that we were bad and say we’re just so very sorry. Yes. And then one of the weird things—what do you make of verse 11 in chapter 1 that says, “And pray for the life of King Nebuchadnezzar”? This is the Babylonian king. “And for the life of his son Belshazzar, so that their days on earth may be like the days of heaven.”

Oof. Yeah, this is related to something that happens in the book of Jeremiah , where in Jeremiah you have a bunch of people who are saying, you know, let’s get God to send us back home right away. Like, don’t even unpack your bags, and God’s gonna send us right back. And in Jeremiah 29 , Jeremiah writes a letter to the exiles in Babylon and basically says, “Get comfortable. Y’all gonna be there a while.” And then in, I think it’s verse 7, is it 7? Yes, verse 7. “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” And this is something that has been appealed to by Christian nationalists. We talked about Charlie Kirk appealing to this passage to endorse Christian nationalism, the idea that your—basically that your religion should be involved in statecraft and in ensuring the success of the government, even though really what’s going on here is Jeremiah is just telling them, get cozy because—

Buckle up.

‘Cause you’re not going anywhere anytime soon. And so I imagine that Baruch here is kind of reflecting on that, where in order to try to draw lines of connection between what he’s talking about and the scripture that already exists, that everybody knows about, he’s just kind of going to touch those bases, hit those beats, so that they can be like, “Oh yeah, this is the guy.”

This felt different from that, though.

It just felt weird to pray for the conquering king, you know what I mean? Pray for the guy that’s oppressing us, not just for us while we’re here, or for, you know, for it to be a comfortable stay or whatever. But yeah, it just seemed a little weird. Well, for them to feel like they’re in heaven.

And the next verse says, the Lord will give us strength and light to our eyes. We shall live under the protection of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and under the protection of his son Belshazzar, and we shall serve them many days and find favor in their sight. And then, you know, a few years after that, what’s 587, 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great comes in and conquers Babylon. And then suddenly everybody’s like, oh, pray for that guy over there now. Yeah, he’s even better. Great. And Isaiah 45:1 , I don’t know why I’m confusing 45 and 47. Yeah, it’s 45:1. Begins with, “Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and strip kings of their robes.” So Cyrus is referred to as the Lord’s Christ, the Lord’s anointed, the Lord’s Messiah in Isaiah 45 .

So you have some of that similar “this is our guy” language, not just for Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, but also for the guy who conquered Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, at least their kingdom.

So weird to do that when you’re writing so far after the fact.

Yeah, and I think it really is just an attempt to try to draw points of contact.

Right, to make it sound like the other texts that have come before.

Yeah, and to make it seem like, oh, this is Baruch, this is, you know, Baruch wrote—Jeremiah wrote that letter and said the same thing. So now our guy is saying the same thing. And there’s, according to—I don’t remember if it’s in the text of Jeremiah. If any Jeremiah scholars are listening to this, they’re going to be yelling at me. But Jeremiah was supposed to have fled to Egypt with Baruch.

Oh, they weren’t even supposed to be in exile. But yeah.

You don’t even go here.

Okay, so stop trying to make Baruch happen. So yeah, we have—I think that’s the origin of that rhetoric. And yeah, you’ve got the confession of sins, you’ve got prayers for deliverance that are supposed to be offered, where you say, “Oh now, O Lord God of Israel, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and with signs and wonders and with great power and outstretched arm and made yourself a name that continues to this day, we have been ungodly. We have done wrong, O Lord our God, against all your ordinances. Let your anger turn away from us.”

And there’s, I gotta say, a lot of that stuff. Yeah, this is—it is, it is repetitive. It is just, oh, we are not worthy. We are such pieces of crap. Please, please don’t be mean to us. We beg of you. We know that we’re awful. And it just keeps going and going and going.

Yeah, yeah, it is, um, the lady doth protest too much. That’s not what that phrase means. But yeah, there is an awful lot of that. That makes it sound like the author is trying to kind of, I don’t know, the more heartfelt the performance of this, maybe the more effective it will be. I guess you just go, maybe, you know, God’s like, “And 45 minutes. Okay, I’ll go ahead and answer your prayer or bless you according to your wish.” I just think of Evan Almighty. No, not Evan Almighty. Bruce Almighty. Bruce Almighty when he’s getting all the emails from all the prayers and it’s overwhelming him.

It makes me think of the very spot-on joke that Monty Python made at one point where they did, “And now do, you know, recite the prayer. Oh Lord, oh, you are so big, so absolutely huge. Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell you.” I mean, what it’s—that’s barely satire of what this actually is.

Well, all it’s doing is taking the sentiment and then articulating it in a way that is not hiding behind sophisticated, highbrow, archaic language. Right, right. If you translate it into what it would be saying now.

Down to earth. Yeah.

Yeah. So anyway, it is so obsequious. Yeah. So, “Lord God Almighty, God of Israel, yada yada yada.” Have you ever yada yada’d repentance? So, and then we move on, chapter 3, it just goes on like this. And then after verse 8, we get to the poems about wisdom.

About wisdom. And then I think, as I read it, and a couple of times I had to sort of shake myself out of the the stupor that this kind of biblical poetry puts me in. Yeah. But as I read it—okay, what was that? It seems like, like it’s about quote-unquote wisdom, but basically what it’s about is you can’t get wisdom in the big cities. You gotta just follow the rules of the law and the end. That’s all the wisdom there is. You don’t get any more wisdom than that.

And it’s—yeah, the—so wisdom is personified, it’s this divine gift, but it’s really identified with Torah, with the law. And so basically it’s like, you want wisdom? There’s your wisdom right there.

We already wrote it down. What do you want more? Do you want—stop looking for other wisdom. There’s no more wisdom. We wrote down all the wisdom.

For, for Latter-day Saints, uh, wisdom—we already have wisdom. We have no more need of wisdom. So it’s—and this is riffing on Proverbs 8 . That’s where wisdom is personified and was like, “I was engendered before the hills, and I was, you know, birthed before God drew the circle of the earth.” And then we also have Sirach chapter 24, I believe, is also related to this. So again, we’re trying to create points of contact with scripture that’s already in circulation in order to increase the gravitas, the authority of our text. And Israel has forsaken wisdom, but then we have the promise of redemption from a figure who comes from on high. I think this is 3:29. Who has gone up into heaven and taken her and brought her down from the clouds?

Who has gone over the sea and found her and will buy her for pure gold? No one knows the way to her or is concerned about the path to her, but the one who knows all things knows her. He found her by his understanding. The one who prepared the earth for all time filled it with four-footed creatures. Anything more or less than that is of the devil, evidently. Um, He called them and they said, “here we are.” They shone with gladness for him who made them. This is our God, no other can be compared to him. And yeah, he found the whole way to knowledge and gave her to his servant Jacob and Israel, whom he loved. Afterwards she appeared on earth and lived with humankind. She is the book of the commandments of God, the law that endures forever. Yeah. So we’ve got a lot of wisdom going on, and then we get a bunch of encouragement for Israel. We’ve just been like, “You’ve got to just—I suck. You’re the greatest.

I’m the worst. You’re awesome. I’m awful. You’re beautiful. I’m ugly." And then we get the wisdom poetry, and then we get these poems of consolation. It’s basically saying, it’ll be okay.

It’s cool, man. You’re gonna be all right. There’s gonna be some joy. There’s gonna be some—there was sorrow, and now there’s gonna be joy.

Yeah. Yeah. And there’s still some lamenting. I was left desolate because of the sins of my children, because they turned away from the law of God, had no regard for his statutes. They did not walk in the ways of his commandments. Yeah. Is this how you treat me? After all I’ve done for you?

It’s the Jewish mother for sure.

But, uh, we—how can I help you in verse 18? For he who brought these calamities will deliver you from the hand of your enemies. Which sounds an awful lot like a lot of the prophetic texts. That’s like, God beat—just beat you down. But God will be nice to you again. God’s gonna pick you back up and. And everything will be okay. Not. Not in your lifetime. No, no, no, no. No, no, no.

But yeah, your kids are gonna get a. A nice condo back in. In Judah when we’re all done with this.

Take courage, my children. Cry to God, and he will deliver you from the power and hand of the enemy. For I’ve put my hope in the everlasting to save you. So it’s kind of. There’s a. I remember learning something called the—what was it called? I think it’s called the criticism sandwich. When, when, when you’re training, when you’re like coaching, right, people, the compliment sandwich, compliment sandwich. Yeah. Where you say something nice, give them some constructive criticism, and then say something nice. You’re actually more correct.

They do call it a compliment sandwich, but it’s a criticism sandwich.

The thing—yeah, the meat is the criticism. Yeah, is the—.

Is what you name the sandwich after. So, so you’re You’re right, it is a criticism sandwich, not a compliment sandwich. But yeah, you’re—that’s, that’s what we have here.

Yeah, a nice, uh, uh, MLT where the mutton is nice and lean. Yeah, exactly right. Um, I, I sent you out with sorrow and weeping, good, but God will give you back to me with joy and gladness forever. And, and it just goes on like that. Yeah, so you’ve got a lot more of that. And then, uh, Jerusalem is addressed in the vocative, “O Jerusalem, take courage, for the one who named you will comfort you.” So yeah, and this is the second half. Chapter 5 is only 9 verses. “Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God. Put on the robe of righteousness that comes from God.” This is sounding very Pauline. “Put on your head the diadem of the glory of the everlasting, for God will show your splendor everywhere under heaven. For God will give you evermore the name Righteous Peace, Godly Glory. Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height, look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west to east.” And it continues on like that.

That’s interesting that you say it’s Pauline, because you said there’s a possibility that this could have been influenced by Paul.

If it’s at the very late window, chronological window of composition, who knows? I think it is considered a Jewish composition and not a Christian one. But yeah, the whole put on the robe of righteousness, put on your head the diadem of the glory of the everlasting sounds an awful lot like Paul saying put on the helmet of righteousness and pick up the shield of faith.

Maybe Paul read this. Maybe Paul was into this thing. Maybe Paul was.

I think Paul was probably into a lot of the more underground stuff. You’ve probably never heard of it.

I liked Baruch back when it was—I liked his early stuff.

When it was Hebrew, yeah.

Tell me this, because when I was looking at, when I was doing some research, essentially, this is a Jewish text, but Jews don’t take ownership of this. Jews now don’t. Don’t include this in their scripture.

So this is something that was included in the Septuagint. Now, Septuagint is a designation that is more closely connected with Christian transmission of the scriptures, but it comes from an ancient Jewish tale, the Pseudo-Aristeas. And so it is part of the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which was in circulation among Greco-Roman period Jewish folks. Probably until, you know, 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, as you’re having this division of Judaism and Christianity where Judaism kind of rejects the Greek foundation of what’s going on in Christianity. Judaism, the rise of rabbinic Judaism, is kind of based on a rhetorical, not entirely historical, but at least the rhetorical rejection of the influence of the Greek world and a return to the more ancient, pristine, original Hebrew worldview.

Interesting. Yeah, and so even things like a lot of the manuscripts of Josephus and Philo and things like that were not really preserved within Jewish communities nearly as much as within Christian communities. And so this is one of the things that would have been translated into Latin as part of the Vulgate. But then by the time we get to the Protestant Reformation, and Martin Luther is like, “Ew, I don’t like this stuff. " And so that gets put into the Apocrypha, and then Protestants in the 19th century decide, “We don’t want to hang around you anymore, Apocrypha. Go home. " And so yeah, Baruch is a Jewish text that primarily is preserved in Christian manuscripts, like the the Septuagint manuscripts of the 4th and 5th centuries CE. Okay. So yeah, it is that, and that’s a peculiarity of the development of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

And in fact, when we look at, um, and I think we talked about this in, in one of the discussions that we had about ideas about, uh, fetal personhood and abortion where Christianity sticks with the Greek philosophical perspective, whereas rabbinic Judaism returns to the perspective of the Hebrew Bible, abandons the Greek philosophical perspective and goes back to the Hebrew Bible. And so the parting of the ways, whenever this occurs, in a lot of ways is a question of who’s going to return to Hebrew Bible stuff and who’s going to carry on the Greek philosophical tradition as overlaid upon the scriptures. Okay.

All right, well, let’s close this out. You know, we’re looking at— yeah, I guess, the, you know, as you say, Baruch 5 is short, but again, it is literally the same as Baruch 6, which is the Letter of Jeremiah. It’s all just, don’t worry about the bad guys’ gods. Don’t worry about them. That’s not, you know, you’re not going to—.

They’re nothing. Yeah. They can’t bake a cake. They can’t do any of this stuff. Yeah. It’s interesting, you got 4 different texts in, uh, like the Vulgate that are related to Jeremiah. You’ve got Jeremiah, you’ve got Lamentations, you’ve got Baruch, and you got the Letter of Jeremiah. And they’re all basically doing the same thing, uh, in terms of trying to convince people not to adopt the worship practices of the people around them because that’s what caused the exile in the first place. And it looks like in ancient Septuagint manuscripts, you have the order goes Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations, Letter of Jeremiah. Whereas in the Latin tradition, the Vetus Latina, the Old Latin, it went Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations, Letter of Jeremiah. So that’s the same. Although it looks like Baruch is appended to Jeremiah without a break.

So Baruch is basically the end of Jeremiah. And then Jerome’s Vulgate has Jeremiah and Lamentations, but then omits Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah. So yeah, different people did different stuff with it and put it in different orders. But yeah, it’s an interesting tradition. And if you want to understand how Christians would have engaged, at least for the first 4 centuries-ish of followers of Jesus, how they would have engaged these texts. You got to read Baruch. You got to see the lens through which they’re looking at Jeremiah. Yeah. Yeah. And they weren’t incredibly critical about where this came from and why it feels so Greek to them, because everything they were dealing with was some kind of Greek.

Yeah, I’ve never thought of the Christian-Jewish divide as being linguistic as well as sort of theological. But it does seem like that’s as good a place to draw the line as any, almost.

I think it was certainly a big factor, because I think the use of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, became an identity marker for Christians. And in fact, you have folks like Origen of Alexandria who creates what’s called the Hexapla, which is like a 6-column manuscript of the Bible where he’s got the Hebrew, and then he’s got a transliteration of the Hebrew into Greek, and then he’s got the Septuagint, and he’s got different recensions of the Septuagint, and he’s got little annotations that he makes where the Hebrew differs from the Septuagint. And a lot of people were saying that the differences were because Jewish folks realized the Septuagint was— their scriptures were too Christian. And so they revised the Hebrew away from Christianity to make their scriptures sound less Christian.

And so, so early Christians were like, those Jewish people, they’re, they’re changing their text, they’re changing the Bible to to make it sound less Christian. So it’s the complete opposite, obviously. The Septuagint was translated in a period of heightened messianism and Greek thought, and so it’s really the sociocultural influences that gave rise to Christianity and that Christianity kind of ran with that are responsible for the differences, introducing the differences. And so I laugh when people today, you know, buy a new translation of the New Testament and they’re like, “They took out the verses!” And, you know, the unnamed “they” is doing all this stuff. And it’s like, no, they’re giving you a more faithful, more accurate Bible. Verses were added by other people after the fact.

And so they’re not taking stuff away from the word of God. They are restoring a more accurate version of the quote unquote word of God.

So I feel like whoever the they is, whoever made the— you know, when you do a new version of the Bible and you make the choice to make it more accurate to what we believe the original text would have been, and you take— you’re playing with fire. But what I’m saying is, Just yell about it. Just make— just scream, “Here’s what I’m doing, everybody. Here’s why I’m doing it. I just want you to know.” Don’t just— don’t just release the version. Don’t just like put it out into the world and hope that people read the footnotes.

And I’m sure that there’s a degree to which they try to do that, but it’s never going to be enough because there are always people like— As many times as I’ve made that video and have said, look, Matthew 17:21 wasn’t in the earliest manuscripts, that’s why it’s not there. There are going to be— until the sun expands and consumes the earth, there are going to be people who make videos going, I just discovered this. And yeah, and well, there’s good—.

There’s good clicks in outrage.

Oh yeah. Oh, And yeah, so conspiracy theory. So, well, yeah, and we’re, uh, unfortunately the internet and, and, uh, brain rot meme culture and all that stuff is just making it harder and harder for people to find, uh, good info, good data, and to think critically about it. Because, uh, yeah, it’s just, it’s a mess. Well, I’m upset about this.

On, on, on that note, hey everybody, share our stuff because We’re out here trying to do some data. We’re out here trying to do some, some critical thinking. So yeah, so share far and wide if you can. All right. I think that that’s a good place to close it out. Friends, thank you so much for listening. If you would like to become a part of making this show what it is, we can’t do it without our patrons. So if you happen to have some, some extra coin kicking around that you’d be willing to share, Go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and get yourself early access to an ad-free version of every episode, as well as potentially, if you at certain levels, you’ll get the afterparty with bonus content every darn week and, and, and potentially other bonuses that we come up with. As we come up with them.

But yeah, that would be how to help us out. Otherwise, go and leave us a 5-star review wherever you’re listening to this. That’s also helpful. Sharing, liking, subscribing, all those things on the YouTubes or whatever is always a great thing. So we really appreciate that.

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I, I remember that.

That’s Coming to America. Oh, right.

That’s when the donations— donation. You know what the best nation in the world is? Donation. All right, uh, thanks all for joining us, and we will talk to you again Next week. Bye, everybody.