Unforgivable!

Go ahead and have your occasional prophylactic passionless sex to keep down the urges.

Right.

As the great poet Ned Flanders once said about cornstarch. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

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?

Chilly with a chance of showers. No, things are fine.

All righty. It is chilly, though. That’s, that’s not a lie.

It’s pretty cold here in these, in this Salt Lake Valley of ours.

Yes.

I am looking forward to what we’re going to this week’s show. Yeah, we got some interesting stuff coming up.

Agreed.

The first one I was entirely unfamiliar with. I think a lot of our listeners will be entirely unfamiliar with it. It is a book that could have been in the Bible, just didn’t quite make the cut. So we’re going with some Apocrypha. We’re going with the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

That’s the one.

I think that’s gonna be a good time. And I promise, if you think that doesn’t sound interesting, it’s gonna get interesting. Yeah, uh, and yeah, buckle up for sure. And then, uh, in the second half of the show, we’re going to be doing a What’s That? And the that that we’re going to be asking about is the unforgivable sin. Uh, so that— yeah, Dave, definitely stick around for that because you may have committed it. What if you have? Who knows? Yeah, uh, you won’t know until the end of the show. So, uh, I vote we just dive in with Apocryphilia. All right, and this week’s Apocryphilia— I said it before, it’s the Acts of Paul and Thecla. I had never heard of it. You know, I’ve heard of some of the books that never quite made the cut. You know, you got your Gospel of Thomas, or your—.

You’re cut.

Just that. I’ve heard of a few. Mary, Gospel of Mary Magdalene or something like that. You’re cut. She’s out.

Yep.

But I had never heard of an Acts that got the axe.

Yep, also cut.

So talk to me about, before we dive into sort of what’s in it, talk to me about the history and the the, what we know of the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

So it’s a text that probably comes from somewhere in the 2nd century CE. There’s a dude named Tertullian, we’ve talked about him before on the show, around by the time of about 200 CE, he’s talking about this text as a well-meaning but spurious document. And it’s part of kind of the broader Acts of Paul. There would’ve been a lot of stories and texts circulating about the further exploits of Paul beyond what we have in the Pauline epistles, in the Acts of the Apostles. And some people think maybe this is early 2nd century, mid-2nd century, late 2nd century. We don’t really have a way of knowing. Some people think that some of these stories circulated independently about Thecla prior to being worked into the manuscript as we have it now.

Okay.

But this is—.

Oh, so one of the theories is that maybe Thecla was already sort of out in the world and someone just stapled it onto Paul to give it a little more oomph.

Something like that. Thecla was probably associated with Paul early on in the life cycle of these traditions, but there might have been just kind of stray stories about Thecla and Paul. But as we go through, Paul kind of is mostly on the sidelines of the narrative, but there are large chunks where Paul’s not in the narrative at all. And so these stories could very well have circulated prior to the involvement of Paul. So yeah, who’s to say which of those situations is most accurate? Maybe they’re accurate in different ways to different parts of the narrative.

And as we know, like, I don’t know, was the author of this trying to attribute it to Paul? Or I guess not, because it doesn’t. But all of— I don’t know how attribution ends up working, because half the time when a work is attributed to that person, it means that that person is talking about themselves in the third person. And it’s so weird, and it doesn’t make any sense.

Well, the Acts usually are not. They’re usually third-person narratives. The Acts of the Apostles is supposed to have been written by Luke, is the name that we’ve assigned to it, but it’s about Paul and Peter and the others. And so, you know, Paul’s not around for a lot of what’s going on here. So it doesn’t seem to be a first-person narrative.

I guess I’ve never asked—.

Spreading the gospel.

When it says the Acts, That just means like the doings, the things that they did.

Yes.

The actual acts of these people.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

So we’ve got—.

It’s not the battle axe of Paul.

Right. No, no, no. All right, well, let’s dive into the story then, I think, because it is good and I recommend finding it online and reading it. It’s short. It’s not hard to get through.

Yeah. What do we got there? They’re large verses. —More like paragraphs than verses. And it looks like there are 43 verses in the—.

Yeah, but do think of those as paragraphs, because the versification is not the same as what you’ll find in the Bible.

So we lay our scene in fair Iconium, which is the southwest corner of Turkey or Asia Minor. And so Paul is headed that way, And we’ve got, and Paul has got some fellow travelers, Demas and Hermogenes, who end up being kind of foils to Paul.

Yeah, they’re like the two evil Disney sidekicks who are like plotting against him while walking with him and pretending to fawn over him.

Yeah, yeah. And they get jealous of his attention. But they run into a dude named Onesiphorus who is— Good job on that name.

I kept having to read it really slowly. Onesiphorus. Onesiphorus.

One, two, ah, ah, ah. And Onesiphorus finds out what Paul looks like and he goes and I think this is so peculiar. Paul is described as a man small in size, bald-headed, bandy-legged, of noble mien, with eyebrows meeting, rather hook-nosed, full of grace. And sometimes he seemed like a man, and sometimes he had the face of an angel. And Paul is nice. He sees Onesiphorus and, “Hail, O servant of the blessed God,” and is being nice to him. There are a lot of these kind of doxological greetings that are going on all over the place. And Onesiphorus is talking to Paul, and the two lackeys are like, “How dare you not greet us? What, are we not full of grace?” And he’s kind of like, “I do not see God’s light in you, but if you’re good people, then come to my house.

We can—" Yeah, he does. They’re like, “Hey, what about us? You’re supposed to greet us.” And he’s like, “I don’t think you look great, but yeah, it’s cool.” Yeah.

And Paul shows up and just preaches evidently nonstop for days.

It does give that sense because Thecla then sees him out her window. I guess she’s across the street from Onesiphorus and is listening to him preach and does not leave her window for 3 days. Doesn’t eat, doesn’t do anything, just sort of out her window. Yeah. As Paul preaches.

I’m thinking of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, right? Where the girl in the class blinks and she’s got “love you” or something like that written on her eyelids. Yeah, yeah.

And he’s kind of like, “Uh.” Only it’s the opposite of that because what she’s falling in love with, at least in part, is that Paul is preaching absolute virginity. Yes. Sex is bad. Sex is— Marriage sucks. Ascetic life is the only life if you really love Jesus.

Yes. And this is seen as a good thing. And this is part of one of the main thrusts of this story is— and this is one of the reasons you mentioned that the ladies probably liked this story a lot, because it kind of gives them a social identity and a mission that is not tied to their subjugation to a paterfamilias in a household. Right. So it’s not you, because at the time, you know, the best you could hope for is to marry some dude and then basically be tied to his household. And that is where you draw your social identity from. But you’re basically just a servant in your own house. And this gives them an opportunity to be free from that patriarchal ball and chain. And so that is not only what Thecla seems excited about, but also the main threat that is posed to the antagonists of the story, because the husband gets outraged.

And even initially, Thecla’s mom is like, whoa, whoa, what’s going on here? Yeah. And so it represents a threat to the Greco-Roman social order, the patriarchal household system. If these women are deciding they’re going to just abandon that goal, that lifestyle, and go off and run around like hippies in the woods, that’s a big problem.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but this is actually like this anti-sex message is actually pretty close to the actual Pauline message. Yeah, yeah, certainly.

We see this in 1 Corinthians 7 , where Paul’s like, yeah, it’s better to be celibate. But if you can’t hang, if you can’t hack celibacy, you know, go ahead and get married. And, you know, it’s better to marry than to burn with passion. And that way you can have your occasional, as I like to call it— I have some friends who get annoyed with my characterization of Paul’s sexual ethic this way. I don’t think it’s inaccurate, though. Go ahead and have your occasional prophylactic passionless sex to keep down the urges, right? As the great poet Ned Flanders once said about cornstarch. So yeah, this is— and I think that’s one of the reasons that Paul is a central figure in the story is because it is carrying on. It’s kind of taking up the banner of Pauline asceticism and just carrying it, running with it.

Yeah, sprinting hard.

And let’s put a pin in that because I think also later on in the story, we’re going to get to more stuff where this holds to original Paul, where pseudo-Paul diverges.

Yeah, and in fact, there’s even a theory that this text may have been a catalyst for some of these pseudo-Pauline texts that have Paul saying, “Some people say it’s bad to marry,” and, you know, that’s maybe, if not this text, maybe related traditions are circulating, inspiring some people to say this Paul needs a makeover. Yeah. And thus the Pastoral Epistles, maybe. Interesting. Yeah, it is a theory.

I’m not saying— So we’ll get to more of that later on in the discussion. But yes, so as you mentioned, Thecla has a betrothed. She has a man.

Thamyris, or Thamyris—or I haven’t seen it in Greek, so I don’t know exactly where the accent is, but I think Thamyris probably sounds better.

Thanos, I think, is— Thanos, yeah. Anyway, he’s mad. Understandably, you don’t want, you know, you’re making wedding plans, you’re making plans for the future. Yeah. And then you find out that your lady is enamored of the idea of no sex forever, and that doesn’t sound awesome. So he basically brings her to court.

He takes her. Well, what I love is that he shows up and it’s like, “Hey babe, what’s going on here?” And she’s just off in la-la land. And like everybody is like breaking down in tears. They’re just inconsolable because she’s just like la-la-la. Um, and I, I, I think of, uh, when I think of Thamyris, I picture Prince Valium.

Um, but yeah, everybody that just yawned because Dan did that, uh, thing. Uh, all right, so, so he, Prince Valium, brings, uh, brings all of the head dudes in town.

Oh, I love this line. And he’s like, “What’s wrong, babe? What’s going on? Why do you sit thus? And what sort of feeling holds you distracted? Come back to your Thamyris and be ashamed.” Yeah, I didn’t read that. I was like, “What?” Yeah, he’s like, “Well, you got me there.” And then even her mom. And oh yeah, we should mention because I was like, I wonder where that name comes from, and completely ignored that you said, I think it’s a shorter version of her mom’s name.

Yeah, so Thecla’s mother’s name is Theokleia. Theokleia. And I was like, I think those might be the same name. Thecla’s just a nickname or a truncated version.

Yeah, so it combines theos with kleos, which would be God and then glory or honor or something like that. So the, um, we did it all for the glory of God, um, like a knight in shining armor from a long time ago. Yeah, okay, uh, enough of that.

We don’t have time to fall into the Peter Cetera trap.

So, um, and then we get, uh, Demas and Hermogenes show up again, and now I guess they’ve just had it with their “Can’t Get No Respect,” because they go talk to Thamyris and they say, “Bring him before, or bring Paul before the governor Castelius, because he persuades the multitude to embrace the new teaching of the Christians.” Because Paul is the culprit. What’s going on with my baby? Oh, this dude Paul is preaching and she’s enamored. And they’re like, you should totally—you should get him, take him to court. Yeah. Um, so he does this. He, uh, rises up early in the morning filled with jealousy and anger, uh, and went over with rulers and officers and a great crowd with batons. Sure, you, you can’t have a riot without batons.

You gotta, you gotta, you gotta raise up some baton people. Yeah. Um, I like to imagine like at a parade, girls spinning batons. I’d— yeah.

You gotta get the retractable one though, so you can go— oh yeah, yeah. Um, and, and accuses Paul of deceiving the city of the Iconians and especially my betrothed bride so that she will not have me. Um, and, and here I’m thinking of the antagonist in Titanic. I was hoping you would come to me last night. Um, and, uh, she’s not interested because there’s this kid who draws naked ladies. Um, And the whole crowd cried, “Away with the sorcerer, for he has misled all our wives!” So here’s the threat: Paul has taken our ladies away from us with his seductive, ascetic, celibate lifestyle.

It is a different form of seduction, surely, than we’re used to. But yeah, he’s the weirdest Pied Piper of them all.

Yeah, and we’ve got the governor is kind of of two minds about this because Demas and Hermogenes are like, “Just say he’s a Christian. That’s illegal. That’s enough. He’ll die.” And his governor is like, “Slow your roll, gentlemen,” and goes to question Paul. And Paul obviously just goes off on his preaching rant.

Right. And then that short, bald, one-eyed, unibrowed little dude is compelling. He’s a very compelling speaker.

But he does get thrown into jail. Yeah. And then Thecla comes in. But not having been convicted yet.

He was thrown into jail because the guy, the head dude, the governor did not have time yet to fully question him. Yeah, so he’s just— this is like—.

This is like ICE saying, you’re going to be pre-imprisoned. Yes, yes, for the crime of not listening to me. Uh, and Thecla, by night, she takes her bracelets, she gives them to the gatekeeper, a little, um, little quid pro quo, gets inside the prison. Sure. And, uh, gives the jailer a silver mirror. And, uh, she’s just got like a backpack full of junk, full of bribes.

Yeah, you gotta— you gotta have everything you got to bribe your way in.

My bribe-out bag that I have by the door. And she finds Paul just to go sit at his feet and just hear those golden words tumbling from his tongue. And her faith also increased, and she kissed his bonds, which has reference to his bonds of imprisonment. And then obviously her family and Thamyris can’t find her, so they’re, uh, they’re going through the, the streets. One of the gatekeeper’s fellow slaves informed them that she had gone out by night. They examined the gatekeeper, who said to them, she’s gone to the foreigner in the prison. And they went and found her, so to say, chained to him by affection. By affection.

There is so much innuendo in this, uh, moment. She’s kissing his bonds.

She’s chained to him by ‘affection.’ But really what we’re all about is none of that. We don’t— Right. Yeah, we don’t. Yeah, no hanky-panky here. And they run out and they incite the people, because if you can’t convince your lady friend to stop groveling at the feet of some dude, the best thing to do is to start a riot. Yeah. So Paul’s got to be brought before the tribunal. But Thecla was riveted to the place where Paul had sat whilst in prison, which seems odd. And I’m wondering if this is kind of a pilgrimage reference, because, you know, you have those spots in different parts of holy lands and places where it’s like, this was the spot where Jesus cooked the fish and told Peter, feed my sheep. And, you know, you build a church around it. And so maybe like the spot where Paul sat maybe is supposed to be the place that people go to visit.

And so this story is kind of building a narrative around the pilgrimage to that site. Maybe that’s what’s going on here. I don’t know. But she seems oddly enamored by the place where he sat. Yes. So now we got big trouble in little Iconium and scourges Paul, casts him out of the city. But decides to condemn Thecla to be burned.

Yeah, she’s naughty.

And she— and as a land—.

And it’s not his idea either. It is her mom’s idea. She’s the one that screams out, “Burn her if she’s not going to marry. She’s a bad girl.” Yeah.

She weighs the same as a duck.

Yeah, exactly. It’s that which— that’s a moment that I find kind of horrifying. But there you go. Her mom. Calls for her to get burnt.

Yeah. And here’s the— I love this line: Burn her who will not marry in the midst of the theater, that all the women who have been taught by this man may be afraid. So, so here we have that threatened patriarchy is, is lashing out in anger.

Well, interestingly, yeah, they get the logs, they get her up on top, they set it on fire, it is going, and then she—by the way, she makes the sign of the cross as she gets up on top—and then, uh, God just dumps a deluge down on them. Uh, sounds dangerous, like some people are like washed away. And then it puts out the fire.

It does say that a great fire was blazing, but it did not touch her. And then, or it says, for God, having compassion upon her, made an underground rumbling, and a cloud full of water and hail overshadowed the theater from above, and all its contents were poured out so that many were in danger of death, and the fire was put out and Thecla saved. So this is one of those, Paul’s gone, and now we’ve got this public spectacle. Yeah, that’s going to come up again and again. But the spectacle has everybody gathered around to witness and is just jazzed about witnessing this woman being burned. And God just unleashes a deluge on the fire to put it out. And Paul and Onesiphorus are in a tomb somewhere fasting. And after many days had been spent in fasting, the children said to Paul, “We are hungry.” Probably not the first time they said it, but this is the first time the narrative is mentioning it.

Because, yeah, you take your whole family and you just leave everything behind. I think that’s poor planning, if you ask me.

Yeah. And Paul takes his cloak and gives it to a child and says, “Sell this and buy some loaves and bring them.” And while the kids were out trying to find, trying to hawk this cloak, he saw Thecla.

How many breads will you give me for one cloak?

Yeah, it’s only been worn by one weirdo. They see Thecla and said, Thecla, where are you going? She said, I have been saved from the fire and I’m following Paul. And the child said, come, I shall take you to him, for he has been mourning for you and praying and fasting 6 days already. They come to the tomb, Paul is kneeling in prayer, and he’s actually praying that God will save her from the fire, that it will not touch her, which is kind of a hint that maybe it was Paul’s prayer that actually was the catalyst for the fire not touching Thecla. And we get this very doxological prayer, and Paul sees her, says, “O God who knows the heart, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, I praise you because you have speedily heard my prayer, and there was great love in the tomb as Paul and Onesiphorus and the others all rejoiced.

So, um, so they, they reunited, and it feels so good. And they had 5 loaves and vegetables and water, which is—yeah, nothing better for keeping down the urges. Yeah, yeah. And, and Thecla wants to, uh, shave her hair off and follow Paul.

‘Everywhere he goes.’ And this was the weird line I thought, ‘Times are evil and you are beautiful.’ And I just was thinking, ‘The night is young and you’re so beautiful.’ Yeah, it does have this very interesting moment where it feels like Thecla is like, ‘I want to be a man now.’ Like, it’s this very interesting moment where she’s like, ‘I’m going to shave off my hair. We’re going to call me a man.’ It’s a very trans interesting coded moment.

Yeah, kind of a pogonia.

And it was unclear to me. I think I guess what I read was that Paul says, no, don’t do that. You have to stay a woman.

Well, yeah, that it’s a weird thing. He says, I’m afraid lest another temptation come upon you worse than the first, and that you do not withstand it, but become mad after men.

Apparently if you cut your hair, you go boy crazy.

Yeah, so Thecla is like, I’ve spent 3 days just staring at you, and then I came and stared at the place where you sat, and now I’ve been saved. And Paul’s like, your libido has not been adequately defeated. So, but, and she says, give me the seal in Christ and no temptation shall touch me. And Paul says, ‘Be patient, you shall receive the water.’ So the seal in Christ, is she talking about baptism? Yes, yes, that is, uh, in, in the early, uh, Christian movement, uh, the seal was, was baptism. That was how you sealed, uh, yourself to Christ.

And she is going to be baptized later on, and there will be seals involved. So it gets weird, you guys. And like, we gotta get tigers and bears.

Yeah, we’re gonna run long if we’re not careful.

Oh, look at that. Okay, so let’s let’s, let’s plow in because she, she goes into another town. Uh, this is the town of Antioch. Yeah, I think Antioch, right? Uh, went to Antioch. Yeah. And Alexander is a, as an influential citizen there, he sees her. She doesn’t have her hair cut, so she’s still pretty, and he’s like into it and yeah, decides to, and basically like kind of starts to molest her there in the street or whatever, and she’s like, no, no, no. And finally he does— he doesn’t take the hint. Finally she tears his clothes and knocks the crown off of his head and humiliates him. Yeah. And he is furious. And so he, uh, he basically takes her to the boys club and says, hey, let’s kill this lady. And everybody’s on board with that, but not the women. The women are like, no, no, don’t do that. But all the men are like, yeah, let’s feed her to the critters.

Let’s get her in with all the wild animals.

Yeah, the wild beasts. And they bring out all these wild beasts and Thecla is stripped, received a girdle, was thrown into the arena.

I don’t know what that— I don’t know what I’m meant to imagine here. Is she— she’s only in a girdle? She’s—.

I don’t know. I guess they’re protecting her. Like the text makes a point of saying that her nudity, her nakedness was not seen later on.

Yeah. So she’s probably in something.

And then you have the— there’s some more, this interesting gender dynamic where a female lion runs up and sits at her feet and then fights off the other animals that are coming. There’s a bear that runs up, but the lioness kills the bear, tore the bear to pieces according to the text. Yeah. And then another lion comes up and the lioness engages with that other lion, but then the lioness dies.

Both— well, both lions die. They both die in that process. So she is protected from bears and lions. But there seem to be more beasts. We don’t name what they are. Yeah. But she holds out her hands. She like rebukes them in the name of the Lord or whatever.

She prays and then she turns around and suddenly there’s a large pit full of water. Yeah, she sees the pond.

Yes. And she’s like, “Oh, great. I’m going to baptize myself. " Yeah.

And she says, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I baptize myself on my last day. " And then when the women and the multitude saw it, they wept and said, “Do not throw yourself into the water. " Even the governor shed tears. Because the seals were to devour such beauty.

They had vicious seals. I’ve never heard of this. I mean, I’ve heard of the lions. I’ve heard of the bears, but I’ve never heard of like, throw them to the seals. Yes. The seals of death.

Let her death be drowned out by the honking of the seals. And there’s that. The last thing she shall hear is, urr, urr, urr. But the seals, having seen a flash of lightning, floated dead on the surface. Yeah. And there was around her a cloud of fire so that neither could the beast touch her nor could she be seen naked. So she baptizes herself, having authority of myself. I baptize myself. And then they’re like, we got some bulls. Let’s try the bulls out. And the governor is like, all right, give it a shot. And then they they bound her by the feet between the bulls and put red-hot irons under their genitals so that they, being rendered more furious, might kill her. All right. They rushed forward, but the burning flame around her consumed the ropes, and she was as if she had not been bound. Which I—.

My, my initial thought was just like, well, if she was still burning flames, how did they even get the ropes on her? But they did. They managed it. But but she was, she was a hunk of hunk of burning love. And she— those— and yeah, the ropes were gone. So she survived all of the animals.

And then the queen, who looked favorably upon Thecla when she showed up. Yeah.

Like literally adopted her. Yeah. As her own daughter sort of thing. Faints.

And they all say, well, the queen died. And the governor’s like, pause.

Yeah, we’ve lost a bunch of animals. The queen’s gone. Maybe, maybe we shouldn’t be killing this lady. Yeah.

And then Alexander, the, the, the dude that gets made fun of or becomes a laughingstock, is like, let’s, let’s stop doing this because we are going to destroy the city. And if Caesar hears about this, I’m going to be in so much trouble. So the governor calls Thecla over and says, who are you and what is there about you that not one of the wild beasts touched you? And she says, I’m a servant of the living God, and as to what there is about me, I have believed in the Son of God in whom he is well pleased.

There are a lot of edicts going on. “I release you to the pious Thecla,” or “I release to you,” releases this edict to the people. I release to you the pious Thecla, the servant of God. And the women shouted aloud and with one voice praised God, so that the whole city was shaken by their voices. So it’s mainly— it’s the women who are ecstatic about this. And then Tryphaena is the name of the queen. She’s not dead. She comes to and decides, now I believe in the resurrection. She says, come inside and all that is mine I shall assign to you. She doesn’t add up to half my kingdom. No, no, that’s only what the men do. The women are just like, we’ll talk about it. And so Thecla rests for 8 days instructing the queen on the word of God so that many of the maidservants believed and there was great joy in the house. Yeah, which means that Thecla was a pretty effective preacher.

Yes. She’s, at the very least in that house, she’s doing a good job. Yes. But she wants Paul, she wants to get back to Paul. Back she goes, she finds him in Myra. And, you know, he’s preaching the word. And she goes, hey, guess what? I got baptized. And he does not seem to question it. He’s just like, oh, okay. Because I think by now this is— there’s a— this woman is oozing power. There is like— she’s like, you’re not gonna question anything coming out of this woman. She’s just— she’s like, by the way, I’m baptized now. And like, I didn’t need you. I don’t need any man. Uh, I did it. And, and he’s like, awesome, that’s great. And she’s like, “And now?” And it feels like there’s this thing where she’s supposed to ask people, ask a man for permission to do whatever she wants to do.

And she’s like, “No, just so you know, I’m leaving.

I’m going back to Iconium." And interestingly, and one thing I want to point out is when she finds Paul and says, “Yeah, I’ve been baptized,” Paul then hears everything that she has to say, right? They go inside and Paul basically sits enraptured while she narrates all this stuff that went on. So yeah, there is, there is quite a role reversal here going on where, where the student has become the master in a sense. Yeah, yeah, she is no longer a Padawan learner.

She is a full Jedi at this point. And she says, I’m going to Iconium. And Paul says, go and teach the word of God.

Mm-hmm.

And that feels like a big deal. Yeah. Like, like, like basically she is now a full-on apostle.

She is a preacher. Yeah. She is a peer of Paul now. Paul can’t tell her what to do. She has her own money and she goes back home. Thamyris obviously is dead. So her former beau, doesn’t say why, but he’s dead and her mother is alive. And remember, her mother is kind of the one who started all this. But she calls her mother and said, “Theocleia, my mother, can you believe that the Lord lives in heaven? For if you desire wealth, the Lord will give it to you through me. Or if you desire your child, behold, I am standing beside you.” And then we’ve got the briefest of sentences. And having thus testified, she went to Seleucia and enlightened many by the word of God. Then she rested in a glorious sleep. So yeah, basically like then she went and did her thing and then she died.

Yeah, but yeah, so really fascinating. Very much a feminist triumph.

Not, not a longstanding one, but at least for the time. Yeah. In the second century, this was no doubt this was a very popular text. You know, I think we’ve mentioned it before on the show, when you get to the end of the 1st century, beginning of the 2nd century, Christianity is like mainly comprised of women and slaves. That’s how a Roman author characterizes Christianity, a religion or a movement of women and slaves. Right. And so in the 2nd century, no doubt this would have been a very popular text, but it didn’t take too long for the patriarchy then to say, that’s cute. Deleted. Your services are no longer needed here. We’re going in another direction. And, and yeah, yeah.

But it is very in line with sort of the Pauline— like, again, the pin that I want to pull out is that Paul, in, you know, when Paul greeted Junia and stuff, like, Paul was down for women leaders in the church. Yes. And it isn’t until the pseudo-Pauline epistles where we start to get, “A woman shall not preach in the church and must remain quiet,” and all of that sort of thing.

Yeah, which again, maybe that’s happening in response to some of these traditions as they exist in the text as it has been preserved down to us, or maybe other stories. But yeah, you do get a pushback against that, and also pushing back against the whole celibacy thing, because that’s not good for the men, because it’s not like they have the option of just doing it with each other anymore, because Paul has taken that from them as well. So yeah, they’re not going to take matters into their own hands. Oh, because that would be also bad. So yeah, but it’s such a fascinating story and fantastical events that, you know, are obviously legendary, all these miracles, the whole—all the crowd being like, “Kill the witch!” “Okay, she’s alive! Yay!” And everybody changes positions so readily. But yeah, a fascinating story, and you can find the text of the Acts of Paul and Thecla and scholarship on it all over the place.

If you haven’t read it before, highly recommend checking it out. Just get an idea of what kind of stories were in circulation in the 2nd century CE. This is before the Gospels. This is probably right around the time that the Gospels were getting named, right? Like, this is very early in the history of Christianity. But, but we got Paul and Thecla roaming around doing their thing, and it’s fun stuff.

Love it. All right, well, let’s move on to our next thing. What’s that? All right, so what is the unforgivable sin? Uh, it’s—there’s only one of them.

Being a Raiders fan.

Um, so that’s only slightly forgivable, but there is a thin, thin margin by which it is forgiven.

It goes not out but by much fasting and prayer. Um, yeah, no, we, uh, the unforgivable sin is something that we get in only in the Synoptic Gospels, interestingly. Yes, Synoptic Gospels, because which—.

Yes, those are because John is his own thing and just really is excited to not be—he’s not one of the crowd. That’s all I’m saying.

Yeah. Yeah. He goes his own way, follows the beat of a different drummer. And the earliest version of this is from the Gospel of Mark . I’m counting up verses. I think we have about the same number of verses in the little sense unit, the little story in Mark 3 . The story goes from verse 20 to verse 30, and then in Matthew 12 , the story goes from verse 22 to 32. In Luke, the story’s shorter. It’s Luke 12 , like verse 8 to 12, but it kind of just comes out of nowhere. Yeah. And interestingly, Luke really entirely changes the position of this announcement of the forgivable sin because it’s embedded in a specific rhetorical narrative context in Mark and Matthew that kind of hints at what’s going on here. And then Luke’s like, “Nah, I don’t like it there.

I’m gonna have it over here." Yeah, just completely adrift. Yeah, it’s not gonna have anything to do with the context.

It’s about sparrows now. Leave me alone. I can do what I want. Yeah, do what I want.

And I think the context is telling, because what we have in Mark 3 is we have Jesus’s family comes out to restrain him, for people were saying he has gone out of his mind. And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem says, he has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons. And Beelzebul would be—here, I don’t know if we’ve talked about this before on the podcast, but Beelzebul is the New Testament’s version of Beelzebub, right? And Beelzebul is actually the accurate spelling of what the actual name of the deity would have been. Beelzebub is an editorializing—

Oh, right, right, right. I think we have talked about this a little bit when we did—when we talked about like Satan and these sort of, are they Satan, are they not Satan entities? Yeah.

And so Beelzebub, Lord of Flies. Yeah, Beelzebul would mean Prince Lord, which was a title that was used of Baal. And he—so they say by the ruler of demons, he casts out demons. And he’s like, that doesn’t make any sense. How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.

Which is funny because it’s like, you know, if it were Satan and he did say, hey, you know, if you’re in tight with Satan and you’re like, hey, Satan, get these guys out of here and it’ll make me look good. Of course Satan would be in on that.

Yeah, you could exploit that a little bit. And, um, but in verse 27 he says, but no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man.

Um, in this case, the strong man is Satan, I guess. Yeah, that, that’s a weird metaphor, but, but yes, uh, apparently we’re breaking into Satan’s house and taking his stuff, but you gotta tie up Satan first.

Yeah, yeah. Um, Because ropes work for subduing Satan. I almost said the prince of thieves, and I was like, nope, that’s Kevin Costner. That’s different. Without an English accent. In verse 28, he says, truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin. And then verse 30 explains, for they had said, he has an unclean spirit. And so I think when we’re looking at Mark 3 , if the question is what is the unforgivable sin, it seems to be maybe calling God’s Spirit Satan.

Yeah, yeah. Or, or, or like attributing God’s good works to Satan.

Yeah. So, so it seems like what, what Jesus is saying is the biggest no-no is to attribute to what I’m doing the inspiration and the influence of, of Satan, because it’s, you know, that’s just not accurate. You know, we’ve already, we’ve already talked about the strongman. And the house divided against itself. And so I think that’s— and this is the earliest account of this that we have. And so it seems like the original setting, the original context for this notion of an unforgivable sin is the fact that what these folks are doing is basically blaspheming the work of the Holy Spirit through Jesus, saying what Jesus does is inspired and controlled by Satan. No, it’s actually the Holy Spirit. How dare you call the Holy Spirit Satan?

So, and I— the Holy Spirit, the whole concept of the Holy Spirit is still very mysterious to me. It’s still very confusing to me. And I see why we might want a triune God, because it seems like the Holy Spirit represents God but isn’t God, but is God, and, and all of that sort of thing.

Well, it is. It is mostly isn’t. At this point. We don’t get the is until later when we’re working on the Trinity and somebody was like, you forgot to incorporate the Holy Spirit. Oh shoot, we got to get the Holy Spirit in there too.

But in this one, it does seem like the Holy Spirit is somehow almost a synecdoche for God in general in some way, or for the divine or something. Yeah.

It is the extension of God’s agency. Yeah, because in this time period, the kind of anthropology of this time period is that people are made up of an assemblage of parts, and spirit is one of those parts, and that’s kind of the executive function. And just like your spirit can leave, you know, you’ve got your dream soul, and your spirit departs when you die and hangs around your tomb as long as you’re getting fed and having your name pronounced and all that kind of stuff. So your spirit is an agent that can depart from you, and so God’s spirit is kind of the means of God’s activity in the world while God’s own self is elsewhere. So yeah, the idea that the spirit is an extension of God’s agency is definitely active and had been for quite some time. It was just not identified as the very God of Israel itself in this time period. And that’s something that comes later.

Okay, let’s— so let’s move on to Matthew. Yeah, because Matthew has a similar but slightly different take on it, or maybe an expansion of the concept.

Yeah, we have, uh, they bring to him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute, and he cured him. So that he could speak and see. And the crowds were amazed, saying, can this be the Son of David? But the Pharisees say, it is only by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons, that this man casts out the demons. And he, having perceived their thoughts, said, every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand. We have the Satan cast out Satan thing. And then he says, if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your own exorcists cast them out. Therefore, they will be your judges. Right. And this reminds me of— did you watch any of— now I forget the name of the series, the one about Jesus that’s been popular? The Chosen. The Chosen. Have you watched any of The Chosen? Seen any of it? I tried to watch the first episode, and I think it’s that first episode where they bring the— first or second episode, they bring the priest in and they’re like, hey, this, this lady’s nuts.

He’s nuts. You gotta cast the demons out of him. And it doesn’t go as well as he would have liked. But, and then he does the strong man’s house and plunder his property. Whosoever or whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. Therefore, I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. Just so, yeah, we got a bit of it. We’re adding to it. He’s like, and what’s more, you can give me a hard time all you want. I can handle it.

But I can take it. But the Spirit is really sensitive. Yeah. And hates that. Yeah, it is interesting. And point of order, it does feel like this is—I think that verse is an excellent argument for Son of Man being distinct from Holy Spirit.

Oh yeah, yeah, 100%.

Like a totally different entity. Yes. However, yeah, I mean, we have roughly the same idea of blasphemy as speaking. In this case, it says speaking against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. I think we should acknowledge that none of these are tremendously clear in—no, in what we’re talking about. Whoever blasphemes—I mean, looking back at the story that this erupts from, it seems like just, yeah, don’t attribute the good works of the Holy Spirit to an evil being, is what we’re talking about. But yeah, Mark says, whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit. Matthew says, whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit. Yeah. It’s still very unclear.

Because it feels like, you know, just accusing God—Jesus—of, you know, using Beelzebub as his way of casting out the demons, that doesn’t feel like an irredeemable sin to me. No.

And I think that there’s a—and I think what’s going on here is we’ve got one of these—this is a costly signal. This is something that it’s like, here, we’re drawing a line here just arbitrarily. And an example from the Hebrew Bible of something that where the punishment doesn’t seem to fit the crime: you have the idea in the Hebrew Bible that, you know, a man who picks up sticks on the Sabbath gets executed. It’s like harsh but fair. Rough. That’s rough. Yeah. Yeah. And this is—and this kind of becomes the identity marker. It’s like, we in this family, we don’t pick up sticks on the Sabbath. And it’s like, don’t you think that is a little disproportionate? And it doesn’t matter. This is the identity marker. And so I think there’s a degree to which it’s kind of functioning like that. And where it’s coming from is something that scholars have been talking about for a while, and I don’t think we’re going to have an answer.

But I think that you point out that it is a bit ambiguous. It’s not clear, which I think supports the notion that it’s not like a specific word or sentence or statement. It’s not like, “I declare blasphemy against the Holy Spirit,” and then it’s like, “Okay, well, you’ve done it.

You’ve gone." Though I have met and heard people say that that’s what they believe it to be. And so there are people who believe that if you say the sentence, “I defy,” or “I deny the Holy Spirit,” or whatever, you can’t get into heaven. That’s locked in now. It’s the eternal sin. It’s unforgivable. You just did it. It’s over for you now.

Yeah, it’s been over for me for a while, but—

Which is a good way to get rid of pesky fundamentalists if they’re bothering you.

But I think the ambiguity serves interpreting this as more of kind of a general, we don’t speak ill of the Holy Spirit. You can speak ill of Jesus, you can speak ill of God, you can get forgiven for all that. But just not the Spirit. Yeah. Which is peculiar. Why is suddenly the Spirit so sensitive about this? And yeah, I don’t know that we have a good answer.

Yeah. For me, the vibe that I get, and this is just—this is not based on any kind of scholarship, obviously—but the vibe that I get is that in this case, the Spirit means God. And so you can—or at least the active agent of God. Yeah, like God. Yeah.

You can’t speak because it doesn’t say—because Jesus doesn’t say you can speak against the Son of Man, or you can speak against the Father, just not the Spirit. He just identifies the Son of Man as the one it was okay to blaspheme. Right, right.

And that’s echoed also in Luke 12 . Okay, let’s, let’s go to Luke. Let’s jump to there. Where it says, I think, I think verse 8, interesting sort of context. He says, and I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God. But whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God.

Could be understood to conflict with the notion that you can speak any manner of ill against the Son of Man and you’ll be forgiven. Here he’s like, no, you deny me, I’m still gonna deny you.

Well, yeah, I- but then verse 10, but then he does say- it’s confusing because it says, and everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.

It’s very final, categorical language. But then, and it doesn’t quite fit the context.

It feels like, yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s all- and, and by the way, we do not have, as we mentioned before, the context of the, uh, the Pharisees claiming that Jesus’s miracle belongs to Beelzebul. And so, right, that, that’s, that’s nowhere near here.

Yeah, so the likely catalyst for the statement has been displaced. Yeah, the- for the author of Luke anyway, he just wrenches it out of context but still kind of leads into it with this deny me kind of thing. And then goes on, when they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers, and the authorities, do not worry about how or what you will answer or what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say. So it’s almost like this is supposed to be comforting for the faithful, right, followers of Jesus, because he’s saying the Holy Spirit’s going to be there. Oh, by the way, the unforgivable sin is to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, just in case you didn’t already know.

Yeah, it’s a very strange thing. I went through and like went to many different sort of apologetic websites trying to get at what they believe this means. What is the unforgivable sin? Because even though it seems to be spelled out, it’s wildly unclear.

And they have some creative eisegesis that they engage in to try to make it about anything that annoys them.

They’re like, “Oh, that’s the unforgivable sin. " Well, but also they’re in a precarious position, which is that they want converts, they want people who aren’t believers to join up. But if me having said as an atheist, I don’t believe in that guy, or I don’t like the whole, you know, I don’t believe in the Holy Spirit, I don’t care about the Holy Spirit, or, you know, any number of things that I could have said, if I then want to join, they don’t want me to just be- they don’t- that put- they don’t want to be in the position of saying, okay, well, we like that you joined, but you’re sentenced to eternal hell no matter what.

Now, if you had murdered someone or raped someone, you can be forgiven for that. Yeah, yeah.

They’ll get you off the hook entirely on that one. Yeah.

But if you have said these words, I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do. Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty ridiculous. And anyone who- and when you see apologists out there, they frequently, if they have an answer, it’s usually something specific that has nothing to do with blaspheming the Holy Spirit. Yeah, it’s usually- there are 3 interpretive steps away where they’re like, it’s really about not doing what Trump tells you to do, or something like that. Like, that’s ultimately what the unforgivable sin is for some of these folks.

But well, some of them said things like- this is from GotQuestions. We’ve visited GotQuestions before, but they say the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, specific as it was, to the Pharisees’ situation cannot be duplicated today. You can’t even do it because their sin was that they were in the presence of Jesus, and they still denied it. So you couldn’t do it unless you’re in the presence of Jesus. You couldn’t even- there’s no chance. And but then they turn around, they have this weird turnaround a sentence later, and then they say the only unpardonable sin today is that of continued unbelief. There is no pardon for a person who dies in his rejection of Christ. Well, you literally just said that we can’t duplicate that today.

Yeah, but we’re going to arrogate to ourselves the authority to declare what it is. Right. And even though the text says you can deny Christ and be forgiven, what we’re going to do is we’re going to flip it. Yeah. And we’re going to say, no, it is denying Christ that is unforgivable. Even though-.

Even though it’s specifically not about Christ, it was about the Holy Spirit. But there you go.

Well, that’s the intellectual integrity and rigor that you get from Got Questions.

Yeah, I mean, I looked at some other ones. I looked at what the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association had to say. And they were weird about it. They just—

They— it never— like, “Stop bothering me.” Yeah, basically.

I mean, it’s just like, instead of— they said the sin of the religious leaders, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, was a refusal to accept the witness of the Holy Spirit to who Jesus was and what he had come to do. And then submit their lives to him, it’s basically the same thing. I mean, most of the sites that I visited craft their decision about what this means into saying, “Don’t worry, all the Christians are safe. If you care at all about Jesus, if you’re one of us, you’re safe.”

“You can’t possibly commit this sin.” “But those atheists are probably pretty bad, so no.” Yeah, and this is where, and I’ve talked about this before, where everybody who treats the Bible as authoritative is trying to make it meaningful and useful to them. Sure. It’s not clear precisely what’s going on here, and so they’re like, “Well, we got to figure out some way to make it meaningful and useful to us. What are our concerns? Okay, let’s leverage it as a way to authorize and validate our concerns, even though it probably isn’t going to have much at all to do with what was actually going on for Mark and Matthew and Luke. Yeah. Or at least the authors of those texts. Yeah.”

So there you go. I don’t think I’ve committed an unforgivable sin in my life. I hope not. But that depends on your interpretation of whatever the heck those scriptures mean.

I still contend it has something to do with the Raiders, but it’s probably that.

And I— you’re gonna need to do the Broncos fan translation of the New Testament. Well, I mean, they’re—

Where are they now? Las Vegas, city of sin. Boom.

Yeah, I mean, they might as well be The Sodomite Raiders. If we’re going to— if we’re going to go with Sin Cities. Yeah, it’s just unwelcoming. Don’t worry. Well, that’s it for this week. Thank you so much for joining us. If you would like to become a part of making this show go, head on over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma where you can get early and ad-free access to every episode. You can get access to the afterparty. Which is bonus content that we do just for our patrons every week, and it’s a lot of fun. And you can have that warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that you helped us keep going, which we really appreciate so much. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. We’ll talk to you again next week. Bye everybody. Data Over Dogma is a member of the Airwave Media Network. It is a production of Data Over Dogma Media LLC, copyright 2026, all rights reserved.