Bring Me the Head of John the Baptist!

Okay, so shepherd in that case doesn’t make any sense.

Yeah, I imagine they were like—I can picture a mad shepherd. He’s, uh, he got caught beating his wheat, and so he’s like, all right, well, I’m gonna beat my sheep instead. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan, and I’m Dan Beecher, and this is Data Over Dogma, 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 great. Things are great. It’s, it’s here in Salt Lake City. It’s midwinter right now and couldn’t be warmer. Just absurdly like there’s no snow on, on in the ski slopes that hasn’t been manufactured by humans.

It’s 60 degrees where I am right now.

Yeah, it is absurd.

It is only winter as the calendar flies.

So there’s that. I don’t know. I’m frankly unclear how I should feel about that because I don’t love snow and cold, but also it portends things.

Yes, we live in a state where it is critical to certain things. So yeah, we need it as much as we may not want it.

Yeah, well, and yeah, it’s—yeah, there’s a lot of—and the idea of us not having winter anymore, you know, there’s global warming is a thing. Anyway, we might have to switch to Summer Olympics instead of Winter Olympics coming up. And who knows? Who knows what’s happening? But we are going to do a show. And we’re—this week, we’re going to start with a fun little Chapter and Verse, or Chapters and Verses, because we’re going to talk about the death of John the Baptist, which is a huge deal and really fascinating. I was actually, as I was like sort of combing through this, there’s a whole bunch of stuff I didn’t really know about it or realize about it. And I think it’s really cool, really interesting. And then we are going to talk about your pastor or pastoring in general.

And what pastoredom might mean.

Pastorage.

And whatever the, what the—yeah, like what the Bible has to say about what a pastor is supposed to do and who’s allowed to be a pastor, just offices of the church and all that sort of stuff. So we’re gonna get to all of that later. But for now, let’s, let’s dive in with Chapter and Verse. Okay, and so for our Chapter and Verse, it’s chapters and verses. And we’ve got, we got most—it’s the Synoptic Gospels, really.

Really? Yeah, we actually—the Gospel of John just doesn’t want to talk about John the Baptist’s death at all. But it is the Synoptics, it’s Matthew, Mark, and Luke. However, Luke also is pretty reticent about this.

Luke is sparse.

Yes, just mentions it in passing. So it’s really just Matthew and Mark that go into any detail about this. And then there’s Josephus, right? So we also have a separate account of John the Baptist being put to death. So—

And that’s a fascinating—I look forward to getting to the Josephus part of this conversation because, uh, it attests very strongly to this being an actual event that occurred.

As opposed—like, so much of what we read isn’t attested in extra-biblical manuscripts or whatever. And this one is very much so, very much attested.

Now, the motivations for it disagree, and scholars are pretty sure they know which one is more likely to be accurate. We’ll talk about that. But yeah, the fact that there was a John the Baptist and he was put to death by a Herod is multiply attested and is widely accepted by scholars. So an interesting—

Yeah, so that’s pretty cool. So let’s get into the story. Yeah. As it appears in Mark and Matthew mainly.

And I think an interesting place to start on this is the fact that unlike most of the stories that we find across the Gospels, this is the only one where it literally goes longest to shortest. Yeah, Mark’s description is the longest. Matthew’s is next. Luke is just like, meh. And then John the Baptist doesn’t even mention his death at all. So that’s the opposite of what normally happens, where we generally have people building on the stories. So it seems like the role of John the Baptist becomes less and less significant, or at least the death of John the Baptist becomes a less and less significant part of the communicating of the gospel of Jesus.

Yeah. And to me, there’s a—there’s like, I have a bit of a theory about why that might be. I’m curious to hear what sort of the scholarship says. But when we talked to—who did we talk to about John?

James McGrath.

That’s right. When we talked to James, it was—it, it became like one of the things that he sort of went into in depth about was that John was probably—John the Baptist was the bigger deal in the timeframe, in the time period. He was a huge deal prophet of that era. And so somehow, these books need to find a way to supplant his fame and his importance with Jesus’s fame and Jesus’s importance. And I think that I think that maybe that might account for the shortening of and diminishing of the role of John the Baptist in the later gospels. What do you think?

That the idea is that they less and less want to give John a bunch of credit, and they’re moving further. That’s interesting, because when we do look at John, John does kind of make the biggest deal out of John the Baptist being subordinated to Jesus. And because like the account of John, he was baptizing, and then John 3:24 , John of course had not yet been thrown into prison. And then down in verse 30, you have John the Baptist explicitly saying, he must increase, but I must decrease. And that’s kind of, that kind of portends his marginalization in this story. And yeah, that it seems to me like that could account for why as time goes on, the gospel authors are less and less concerned with the role of John the Baptist because he was competition initially to some degree.

So yeah, interesting theory. I’m sure people have talked about that. But yeah, maybe I’ll have to reach back out to James and be like, what do you think? Because he’ll know better than me. But why don’t we start in Mark, which was the earliest one written? Yeah. And we got a whole—well, we got 16 verses here on John the Baptist.

It’s a big, long thing. It starts in John or Mark 6 , and starts with—in what, verse 14? Is that where we’re starting?

And we don’t have to read the whole thing. But the broad strokes are that Herod uh, basically—

Now this is Herod Antipas.

So yeah, I think we need to clarify. It’s easy to get the Herods confused because there are multiple of them.

Yeah, wait till we get to his wife. That’s confusing too.

Who was married to multiple of them, at least according to the Gospel.

Yeah, like, and then the daughter who is named in Mark, which is probably incorrectly named if I’m not mistaken, but anyway.

Yeah, um, so we have Herod the Great who dies in 4 BCE, and then he’s got a bunch of Herods as children who take over his kingdom. And Herod—

He’s got a bunch of Herods? Like he did the George Foreman thing and named multiple kids Herod?

It—that seems to be the case, because if his—he’s got, um, he had 5 different wives, and he had Herod Philip I, Herod Archelaus, Herod Antipas, and another Philip II. Oh my God. And then, um, and then he had a grand—he had 2 grandsons and a great-grandson: Herod of Chalkis, uh, or Chalkis, and Herod Agrippa I, and then Herod Agrippa II. So yeah, it’s, it’s a, it’s a panoply of, uh, of Herodian hubris.

And if, dear viewer/listener, you have had trouble keeping track of all of this, I think that that is forgivable. I’m just going to say it.

So Herod Antipas rules from 4 BCE when his father dies to 39 CE. Oh wow. But he rules a tetrarchy. So Herod Archelaus took over Judea and the rest of the kingdom was split up. And Herod Antipas got a tetrarchy, so he was in charge of Galilee and Perea and somewhere else. And then one of his, his brother Philip II was in charge. He was known as Philip the Tetrarch. He ruled in like the eastern, just east of the Galilee, like the east northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee and east and north. Like that was Philip II or Philip the Tetrarch’s area. And then there was a Herod Philip I who was different altogether. We’re just going to ignore him. But, uh, so yeah, it’s Herod Antipas who’s the one who’s, um, who’s causing issues here, right? And, uh, yeah, there, there’s a—who’s this John the Baptist? Oh, he’s—is it Elijah?

Is it a prophet, like one of the prophets of old? Uh, and then in Mark 6:16 , he says, but when Herod heard of it, he said, John whom I beheaded has been raised. So Jesus is the is the resurrected John the Baptist. And then the rest of the story explains what happened with the beheading.

story explains what happened with the beheading. What happened when he— when he went— when he beheaded John. So the story is that Herod arrested John and put him in prison. Because John had, had basically, very least, he had complained about Herod’s marriage to his brother’s wife.

Yes. So this is— and this is Herod Philip I, evidently married Herodias, who would later marry Herod Antipas. But right now he’s married to Herod Philip I. And John says that’s a no-no. And Herod Antipas gets mad and throws him in prison.

Right. So, yeah. Wait, had Philip not died? Did Herod just yoink her? Like, it seems— I had assumed that Philip, Herod’s brother, had died and Herodias was just sort of chilling, and then Herod just snapped her up.

He may have. Well, And here’s where I get annoyed. Herod Philip I and Herod Philip II frequently, they’re very easy to confuse. Yeah, yeah, they would be, wouldn’t they? I think he continued living on, but yeah, he may have just yoinked her. I would have to look into that because I frankly, I get sick of the Herodian dynasty’s incest.

So, okay, so anyway, for the purposes of this, Herod married Herodias. John said, that is bad, you’re bad for doing that.

And so he had him arrested. And it turns out that Herodias, the wife, really held a grudge against this guy.

Now, uh, Herod— and in Mark it says in verse 20, for Herod feared John knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. So in this one, Herod is protecting John. He’s just got him locked up. Yeah. And then there’s a whole thing where— so Herod and Herod— and let me tell you something, it took me a minute to parse out what the hell was happening, because in verse 22, at very least in the NRSV, It says, when his daughter Herodias came in and danced, and I was like, his daughter Herodias? What the heck? Herodias is his wife, who is his brother’s wife, but now it’s his wife. And who is Herodias? Who’s— so I then I thought, because I also know this story from other parts of like culture, uh-huh, the, the name of the daughter in like opera is Salome.

So who the heck is daughter Herodias?

Well, and we do have some, uh, there are some manuscript variants where it does not say Herodias, uh, came in and danced. It says the daughter of Herodias, which would be Salome, which would be how the story comes down to a lot of folks.

Which I am utterly mystified why NRSVUE didn’t choose to put daughter of Herodias.

But I, I, I think there’s probably a, a stronger text-critical case for Herodias, uh, even, even if, yeah, that, that, um, kind of messes up the— yeah, all right, the, uh, the timeline.

All right, so anyway, whoever she is, this daughter, whatever her name happens to be, came in and danced, and she pleased Herod and his guests And the king said to the girl— and by the way, this is a bad thing to say. It doesn’t matter. Like, it feels like you’re going to be cool when you say something like this to someone who pleases you. Never say this. He says to her, ask me for whatever you wish and I will give it. And he swore to her, whatever you ask me, I will give you even half of my kingdom.

And she ran to her mom They had a quick confab. They were like, what should we do? What should we do? What should we do? And mom’s like, oh, I know what I want. I want you to ask for the head of John the Baptist, literally on a platter.

Yes. And there’s another person who says, ask me whatever you want and I’ll give it to you, up to and including half of my kingdom. Oh, that is Esther. And King Ahasuerus tells her that after she pleases him. So we’ve got a lot of kind of stock literary motifs going on. In fact, in fact, the, the idea that John the Baptist would condemn the king and then the king’s wife would come after John the Baptist, that’s also reflected in the Hebrew Bible. Oh, this is— yes, this is just like the story that we see in the Hebrew Bible of Elijah condemning Ahab for taking over Naboth’s vineyard, and then who comes after Elijah but Jezebel, Ahab’s wife.

Right.

And so the old, you know, the wife of the king is coming after the people who are criticizing the king. That old canard is bubbling to the surface in this story, as well as the Esther, you know, “I’ll give you up to half my kingdom,” which really, like, the intertextuality here makes it clear this is more of a literary creation than it is a reflection of strict history. The author is very clearly taking liberties.

So, but yeah, we have—so this would be Salome. She goes to her mom, “What should I ask for?” And John the Baptist’s noggin. And the king, who has to do it because he told her and he swore, gives her the head of John the Baptist.

Yeah, he sends for a soldier. A soldier, they come in with a head.

Yeah, pretty gruesome. But, and another interesting thing, when we look throughout the Bible, there are only a few times when birthdays are celebrated. And it’s always by the villain. You never have—you never have a hero, a protagonist, celebrating a birthday in the Bible, which is one of the reasons—the reason, really—that, for instance, Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate birthdays.

I was going to say, point Jehovah’s Witnesses. All right, I did. I didn’t realize that that was the reasoning.

If you interpret the fact that the Bible only presents villains as celebrating their birthday as an indication that you shouldn’t be celebrating birthdays, then yeah, point Jehovah’s Witnesses. But another interesting point. So yeah, head on a platter, gave it to the girl, who knows what she did with it. Dear diary, maybe—

Well, it says the girl gave it to her mom.

The girl gave it to her mom, yeah. But, and then the mom, who knows, smacked it around a little bit, I don’t know.

Played soccer, I don’t, yeah.

Had it flattened, put it in the pages of something with some old dried leaves. I don’t know, maybe hung it upside down to dry it out like you do with the flowers that you get. Yeah. But yeah, that is Mark’s account, which is the lengthiest account of the death of John the Baptist. But I think it’s interesting to note that Herod thinks that Jesus might be John the Baptist come back. Yeah. To you know, get him in a Jason and Freddy kind of sense.

Yet another way in which they’re like trying to supplant John the Baptist with Jesus. They’re just like, yeah, yeah, it’s a very interesting sort of move that they’re pulling there.

Let’s get ourselves to Matthew 14 .

Yeah, Matthew 14 , we got verses 1 through 12. So slightly shorter. And it is a little more succinct. At that time, Herod the ruler heard reports about Jesus, and he said to his servants, “this is John the Baptist. He’s been raised from the dead, and for this reason these powers are at work in him.” For Herod had arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because John had been telling him, “it is not lawful for you to have her.” And then Herod wanted to put him to death, but he feared the crowd because they regarded him as a prophet. So it’s not “This guy’s a nuisance, but it’s so much fun the way he does the little magic tricks. And, you know, I love to watch him dance” kind of thing. It’s now he wanted to kill him, but he feared the implications of that. He feared what the crowd would do if he killed.

Yeah. Put a pin in that for Josephus.

Yeah, put a pin in that indeed. And then we have the same thing. The daughter. And here it says when Herod’s birthday came, the daughter of Herodias danced before the company and she pleased Herod. Prompted by her mother, he promised an oath to grant her whatever she might ask. He’s not going to be as explicit about it as the author of the Gospel of Mark was. “Give me the head of John the Baptist here on a platter.” He was grieved. Not because he was sad to kill John, but because, oh no, this might make the crowds angry. Yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he commanded it to be given. He was beheaded, head was brought on a platter, gave it to the girl who brought it to her mother. And here we have the added detail. I’m pretty sure this is an added detail. No, it’s not an added detail. It’s in Mark. His disciples came and took the body and buried him, and they went and told Jesus. Now you’ll recall the very next verse is the feeding of the 5,000 story, right?

They tell. In Mark, they don’t go and tell Jesus. They actually come back from their mission and talk about all the cool things that they were able to do. So there’s a little bit of narrative incongruity there. We got some plot holes in Mark. Matthew fixes it up a little bit because they go and tell Jesus, and Jesus is like, “Leave me be. I have to be alone. Let me grieve. My boy, look what they did to my boy.” My boy! And then in Luke, it’s just in passing. Herod hears about everything that’s going on, and he was—this is Luke 9:7 , 8, and 9—he was perplexed because it was said by some that John had been raised from the dead.

So in Luke, Herod is not superstitious about this. Luke has Herod just being like, “Well, can’t be that dude because he’s a little too tall for that dude. I shortened him by several inches.” One too many heads. Yes.

Be John.

So who is this guy? And that’s it. Yeah. Luke does not feel it is necessary to narrate the reasons for John’s beheading, or excuse me, Herod’s beheading of John, and just moves on. So yeah, it does seem like they’re like, we don’t want to belabor this guy. We don’t want to give him too much attention. We’re just going to kind of squeak him out of the narrative there. And then, yeah, when you get to John, it just says John, of course, had not yet been thrown into prison, a little parenthetical remark at John 3:24 . And then John says, “I’m not the Messiah. I’ve been sent ahead of him. He who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom who stands and hears him rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. For this reason, my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease.” Exit, stage left.

And, and that’s it. And so we’re not focusing on, on that tragic story of John the Baptist in the Gospel of John .

Yeah, it’s such an interest. It’s funny because the two gospels that do decide to tell this grand story, and it is one of the better stories in the New Testament, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s got intrigue.

Yeah. The details are richer in this story than, than what we mostly find.

Yeah. And yeah, you get to think about dancing. There’s a lot to picture there. And then there’s this head that shows up on a plate. So it feels, it feels rich. And no wonder, you know, pop culture, just culture in general, has glommed on to this for centuries. And, you know, you go to the Louvre, or you go to any art museum, and you’re going to see a representation of John the Baptist’s head on a platter. And you’re going to, you know, and there are whole things about Salome. Now, we should quite quickly just get to why we call her Salome now, which is Josephus, right? Like, isn’t he the only place that we get that name?

Well, we have— I think she’s Salome III, because there are earlier Salomes. But I think it comes from, um, uh, Shlomit is the Hebrew, which is a feminine version. Shlomo would be Solomon. Shlomit would be a feminine version, uh, based on probably, uh, the word for peace. Uh, but yeah, I think, uh, the daughter of Herod II, Princess Herodias, however you want to refer to her, I think she was not the first Salome ever. Okay, but she’s, she’s within the, um, the Herodian line, so she’s royalty. In fact, I should probably— some— yeah, I should probably look in a little more and see, uh, if there are earlier Salomes. But, um, there were three in the Herodian dynasty. There were three women named Salome. Salome the First was Herod the Great’s sister and the mother of Berenice.

So governor by her husband, Costobarus, governor of Idumea. We’ve heard of Costobarus before. We’ve heard of— we’ve talked about it on the show.

Have we?

I remember now.

I don’t know who that is.

Yes. Oh, gosh. It was in— it was in the Mary movie that we watched. Oh, for God Awful Movies. Costobarus was one of the people that Herod was manipulating, remember?

Right, right.

And I think Salome was his wife.

No, Berenice was his wife. Okay. Salome was his sister. We are well off track. Yeah, we have derailed.

We are deep in the weeds here. Let’s just get to Josephus real quick.

Yeah, Josephus mentions John the Baptist once, and this is in the Antiquities of the Jews, and if you don’t know much about Josephus, Josephus actually fought in the Jewish war against Rome, was a general up in the Galilee, was captured, and then basically became kind of court historian for a couple of Roman emperors writing in the 90s CE. And Antiquities of the Jews is basically him saying, “Here’s what happened to us.”

On this part of Antiquities. I’ve ordered the hard copy. I couldn’t get it in time for this, but, uh, here’s what we have from an older translation. Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod’s army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John that was called the Baptist. For Herod slew him, who was a good man and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue both as to righteousness towards one another and piety towards God, And so to come to baptism, for that the washing with water would be acceptable to him, if they made use of it not in order to the putting away or the remission of some sins only, but for the purification of the body. So that kind of addresses the overlap of the earlier notion of the mikveh as purifying the body, and then the newer notion of baptism as forgiveness of sins, which we talked about with James. Supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness. Now, when many others came in crowds about him, for they were very greatly moved or pleased by hearing his words, Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion, for they seemed ready to do anything he should advise, thought it best by putting him to death to prevent any mischief he might cause and not bring himself into difficulties by sparing a man who might make him repent of it when it would be too late.

Accordingly, he was sent a prisoner out of Herod’s suspicious temper to Machaerus, the castle I before mentioned, and there, and was there put to death. Now the Jews had an opinion that the destruction of his army was sent as a punishment upon Herod and a mark of God’s displeasure to him.

Machaerus is this hilltop fortress that is on the east side of the Dead Sea. Right about the middle of the Dead Sea, north and south. So yeah, there it’s just no banquet, no Herodias, no Salome, none of that.

And also, like, Herod is not reluctant. Herod is not worried. Herod, or rather what he’s worried about now, he’s, you know, back in Matthew, he was worried about the crowd, but he was worried about the crowd being mad if he killed him.

Now he’s worried about John’s— so Josephus says he was worried about John’s influence over the crowd and worried that he could inspire the crowd to come and rebel against him. So he just thinks it’s handy and useful to just have him killed and just end that little bit of nuisance.

And it is interesting that the observation is identical. “Oh, these people really love this guy.” The conclusion is entirely different. Luke wants you to think that he was like, “Well, I can’t kill him.” And then Josephus is like, “Well, I better kill him.” So we have very different motivations going on here. But Matthew, not Luke, Matthew is the one who says he feared the crowd. And what they might do. And that’s something that— and Pilate is the same. Pontius Pilate is the same. They have, “He fears the crowd,” which is why he ends up acquiescing to crucify the guy in whom he found no guilt, even though what we know from Josephus is that Pilate would have relished the opportunity to piss off the crowd. So, yeah, the gospel authors, the personalities, the ideas that they’re putting into the heads of the characters, the villains, don’t really fit with what we know historically about these very real historical figures.

So, well, there you have it. Yeah, that’s the death of John the Baptist, or the several deaths of John the Baptist. And you get to decide which one you like the best. Let’s—.

And the, the many different, uh, weirdos of the Herodian dynasty.

Yeah, yeah, good luck keeping that all straight. Uh, don’t name your kids the same things.

All right, well, let’s move on to What Is That? And this week’s What Is That?, uh, we’re gonna talk about the word pastor, uh, to some extent. Yeah. And what that is. And then, uh, sort of the org chart, uh, as it is laid out, or as near as we can tell, in what is and isn’t actually in the Bible.

And I don’t think it has.

And that’s really what’s inspiring this. We see a lot of arguments about who is and is not allowed to be a pastor and what the Bible says about the requirements for being a pastor. And the problem is the word pastor only occurs one time in the entire New Testament.

And what is the word? I know it’s not pastor because that’s our word. What’s the Greek that they’re using?

Uh, so the, uh, the Greek word is—you have the plural in Ephesians 4:11 , and, uh, poimen, uh, is the singular word, uh, but poimenas is the masculine accusative plural that we see in Ephesians. And this comes from a word that has reference to sheep. So the idea is to—is to pastor. In fact, when you have in John 21 —and we’ll talk a little bit more about what’s going on here—but when Jesus tells Peter that, you know, the threefold, uh, “If you love me, feed my sheep,” the verb there doesn’t say feed, it actually says pasture, or pastor my sheep. So it’s related, and we’ll get to that. But you have a lot of people who are arguing that you have to be a man to be a pastor. You have to be a husband of only one wife. You have all these qualifications for pastor.

And the big problem is that that isn’t in Ephesians 4 , and that’s somewhere else where they’re actually talking about an overseer, a word in Greek that is frequently translated bishop. That’s what they’re talking about in those other passages. And in Ephesians 4:11 , we just said he himself granted that some are apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ. That’s the only reference to pastors anywhere in the New Testament.

Okay, but—

And, and now you know who you’re dealing with in terms of singing prowess. Nobody. Absolutely nobody. There is an argument. People say, oh no, that’s about pastors too. An overseer is a pastor, they will say. And then you’ve got to say, well, come on, how is that precisely that an overseer can be identified as a pastor? And I saw someone post on Twitter this big long thread about how an elder, an overseer, and a pastor are all the exact same specific office within the institutional Christian church. And so everything that is said about overseers, everything that is said about elders, is also said about pastors. And the, the passage that is adduced to prove this is Acts chapter 20 verse 28.

Okay, and here’s what that says, and I’m reading from, uh, the NRSV-UE, as is our wont.

Keep watch over yourselves and over all the flock, all of which—or excuse me, of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to shepherd the church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own son. And so the idea is overseers therefore are pastors, because Acts 20 says an overseer is shepherding, is pastoring, and therefore, well, they, they must be the same thing. Okay, because so, so basically, if the role is to pastor, then whoever has that role, they’re a pastor. And here in Acts 20:28 , it’s the overseer who is described as pastoring or shepherding the church of God. Now, here’s my problem with this. Well, I have a couple problems with this. One is this is presupposing univocality, because the author of Acts is not the author of the Pastoral Epistles, is not the author of Ephesians, is not the author of any other text apart from the Gospel of Luke .

So what they have to say does not necessarily have to agree with everyone else. So we’re creating an institutional structure, an org chart, if you will, where it’s not necessarily true that one existed.

It seems to me that each of these books that you’re mentioning is being written in a different time and a different place. And this was a sort of diasporic thing that was happening. And it seems unlikely that a unified, sort of almost like Mormon, super delineated structure was even a glint in anyone’s eye at that point.

Well, and this is why you only see references to a lot of these offices in the text that might have been written either at the end of the 1st century CE or the beginning of the 2nd century CE, because Ephesians was not written by Paul, right? Ephesians was probably written again end of the 1st century, beginning of the 2nd century, when the church had had several decades to get bureaucratic. So that’s why when you have the, you know, if you desire the office of an overseer, that’s great, here are all the qualifications.

Bethlehem, that’s who— for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people. So Jesus pastors, Jesus shepherds. Does that mean that a pastor is also Jesus? Does that mean Jesus is a pastor? Does that mean that’s the office he held? Of course not. Um, uh, you have Luke 17:7 , we’ve got a bit of a parable. Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or shepherding sheep in the field— now this one is a little sillier— but is your enslaved person also a pastor? Because they are pastoring, that doesn’t have to do with church responsibilities. But we already mentioned John 21 when Jesus says, “Do you love me?” And Peter goes, “I love you, man.” And he says, “If you love me, pastor my sheep.” Peter was not a pastor. Peter was an apostle. So his job was to pastor. Does that mean an apostle is a pastor?

Is that the specific office? Of a pastor.

Maybe one of the things we should talk about is, because all of this arose out of Judaism, out of that, that sort of Greco-Roman period Judaism, were the offices that are discussed in Ephesians— apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds/pastors, teachers— were those offices official offices within Judaism at that time, or was this a new concept?

I wouldn’t call them official, but you had concepts of prophets and teachers and things like that. Rabbi would be kind of a more official in later periods within the Jewish structure hierarchy. It’s kind of an admixture of Greco-Roman period Jewish ideas and the developing hierarchy, because you are borrowing a bit from the Greco-Roman world as well with some of these titles to some degree.

So I don’t think it’s just a straight ripping it off from an earlier tradition, but pastoring, for instance, is something that we find in the Hebrew Bible, Micah 5:2 , “We’ll shepherd the people.” But the Good Shepherd, is an idea that goes all the way back to Hammurabi, right? And is in a few different places in the Hebrew Bible. And so a lot of these have deep, deep roots, but they weren’t formal, official, you know, org-charted offices.

Yeah, it seems like even in Ephesians, it feels like these are sort of descriptive terms rather than prescriptive terms. It’s just like, there are these people, and that, you know, some of them seem to be— I don’t know what an apostle is really. I don’t know what that is.

It’s one who is sent, and that seems to derive from the Gospels. But yeah, it might be the same as somebody being like, oh, we’ve, in our community, we’ve got seekers, and I can’t think of any of the other terms.

Teachers.

Yeah, yeah.

And people who and missionaries and—

Yeah, and we’ve got mothers in the sense of people who are mothering just by their very nature. So yeah, it could just be we’re just characterizing the different folks rather than saying, “This is their job title.” Right. It could be doing that. But I think the later you put Ephesians, I think the more likely it is that it might be something understood closer to a specific office.

Does it seem like they’re hierarchical in some way, or does it seem like they are just— these are just different things that different people do. Because now it feels, you know, when you, when you talk about words like bishop, pastor, prophet, those all seem like there is a strict hierarchy. It may be different in different organizations and different church organizations. But yeah, it does. You know, we think of those as being this guy’s above this guy, this guy’s above that guy sort of thing.

Right. And so, and then you have in Revelation, you have the mother, she brought forth a man-child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron. Well, rule there is pastor, is shepherd.

Oh, okay. That’s a very different use of notation.

Yeah. And then also, we’re—go ahead.

So, so wait, would you agree with, with that being— with, with rod, with ruled being a good translation? Or should, should it not be changed? Shouldn’t— should, should we not understand that as— because to me, ruling over someone and pastoring them are very different concepts.

Well, this is— this seems to be a quotation from, from Psalms 2:9 . Let me go see what the what the Hebrew is there. You will— yeah, so it looks like there we have a word that— so teroem is a second masculine singular verb with a third masculine plural pronominal suffix or object suffix. But it’s based on raah, which is Resh, Ayin, Ayin, which means to smash or shatter. But it looks an awful lot like the verbal root Resh. I think it’s Resh, Ayin, He is the verbal root for to shepherd.

So, so I think what you probably have here is, if I’m correct about the about the Resh, Ayin, He, which I may not be— I have to look at the Hebrew lexicon. Yeah, shepherd, to shepherd. Resh, Ayin, He. Yeah, so they appear to be almost identical. Only by the vocalization would you be able to tell that one is a— what’s called a— one has a— doubles up the second character versus drops the last character of the verbal root.

And so I think the Septuagint— yeah, the Septuagint renders pastor or shepherd. And so it looks like the Greek translators misunderstood the Hebrew verb there and said somebody’s gonna shepherd you with a rod of iron. It’s gonna hurt.

So that means that the translators of Revelation have then gone back and tried to retroject in the the earlier Hebrew meaning from the Psalm?

No, because the Psalm says— because Psalms 2 says, and I’ll read the NRSV-UE, “You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” Okay. And so when we get to Revelation 19:15 , that’s what it says, or it says something related to that. For “From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will shepherd them with a scepter of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty.” So the—

Okay, so shepherd in that case doesn’t make any sense.

Yeah, I imagine they were like, all right, we can— I can picture a mad shepherd who’s, you know, he got caught beating his wheat, and so he’s like, all right, well, I’m gonna beat my sheep instead.

And that’s crazy. That’s— I thought I was asking a much simpler question than I turned out to be asking.

Yeah, well, let that be a lesson to you, right?

Don’t ask questions.

But that’s about Jesus pastoring. So, right, if the fact that a specific person or a specific office is described as pastoring or shepherding means that that is an identical office to pastor. Well, we’ve got everything from the Messiah to Jesus to an apostle to the mother of Jesus all the way down to an enslaved person who are described in the New Testament as shepherding. And so I don’t think that argument holds water. I think that argument is presupposing an awful lot. In fact, it already has to presuppose univocality, which I think if you don’t accept the presupposition of univocality, then you know, the argument falls to pieces already.

Interesting.

In other words, an overseer is not a pastor according to the New Testament, right?

And, and, you know, it— when people do try to define down terms like this, it’s— I mean, you talk all the time about the consolidation of power the, you know, annoyingly so. That’s what we’re talking about, right? Is that, is that, is that they want to define it down to the point where they can say, where they can gatekeep who gets to say one thing and who doesn’t, and who gets to fulfill a role and who doesn’t.

And it’s, it’s used explicitly to say women are not allowed to be pastors. And also, we talked about the, the one pastor who is polygamous. That’s the other thing. The overseer is supposed to be the husband of one wife. So it also means, oh, the overseer’s got to do it, but the pastor does too. So no, the pastor can’t be a polygamist. So yeah, it is about gatekeeping. It’s about structuring power. It’s about having control over who gets to participate in what way.

Yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah, I guess part of the thing for me is just It feels like because all of this was written before church structures really started to set in anyway. I think so. Long before it got, you know, 3rd century or whatever it was when, when things really started to solidify. So it just seems like to take what they’re saying here in the New Testament as a rule book for how the various offices are meant to be viewed. It seems bizarre to me.

Yeah, I think it is, because it’s an attempt to look back on a bunch of writings that had nothing to do with trying to curate a bureaucratic superstructure and then said, well, we have to use them to curate that bureaucratic superstructure anyway, so we’re just going to interpret them however we want to interpret them. Yeah, I think it’s rather silly. Like, you know, this is something I always think about when I think about how they use the New Testament when they ran across issues that are not covered in the New Testament. I think about the first meeting of Congress after the Constitution. One of the very first things that they had to decide was, okay, it says in the Constitution that the president gets to appoint executive officers with the advice and consent of the Senate. Who gets to remove them? Yeah, it’s just not in there, and, and there’s no way to— you cannot— there, the Lego blocks, the Lego bricks are missing. You cannot construct that answer from the available stuff. You just have to say, all right, we’re going to say X.

And, and you have to do that with the New Testament if you’re trying to put together a church. And unfortunately, it is— there’s a lot of mental gymnastics involved in trying to make it seem like the New Testament thought of everything and is sufficient to cover everything, and it’s really not.

Yeah. And it’s almost silly to impose that on the New Testament. It’s almost, it’s just like, you don’t have to do that. Yeah. You can just say, this is how we structured it. We let, you know, we learned what we could from the book, and then this is what we did. But boy, do people like to say this is the only way and we’re doing it right. And everybody else is doing it wrong. And it’s making Jesus sad, all the ways you guys do it. And we’re doing it in the way that makes him happy.

Agreed.

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Bring Me the Head of John the Baptist!

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology