The Dans Go to Hell

So he just has a field and is standing there beholding the field in which he grows all his— You know what. And then he just starts swelling up like Violet in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and then bursts. And then, you know, you find traditions somewhat like this in the ancient world where somebody— Some divine punishment was that somebody swelled up and popped. So would not be totally unheard of, but very gross. And then the other option is that he— Yeah. Was just walking and was like, doo, doo, doo. And then splat. Fell on his head.

Sometimes when you hit your head just right, your entire bowels burst out of your body. It’s a— That’s a known thing.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we bring you greater access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. And before we get into any— Anything, Dan, I wanted to share a brief note about an episode from a couple of weeks ago where we talked about God regretting and repenting. Because a helpful listener pointed out that I had two different words confused when I was talking about the root nacham. I mentioned that it was related to the word for the womb, and that is actually a different noun. And I had those two confused in my head. Little slip of the brain there. It doesn’t affect my commentary. It doesn’t affect the argument against the claim that God does not regret or repent. But I do want to keep it 100 and make sure I’m acknowledging when— When I made mistakes and— And a helpful listener pointed that out.

So I like that. I think, you know, it is the official position of this podcast that admitting when you make a mistake makes you more credible, not less, everybody. So if that’s not your position, then, Dan, you’ve just lost all credibility.

Well, you know, there are a lot of people for whom I never had any credibility to begin with.

So there you go.

I think the balances are— Are not thrown too far off.

I’m lucky I’m in the position where I don’t have to be credible. You’re the only one—I’m in-credible and you’re credible.

Yeah, well, there’s— There’s that great line from— I think it was the first Mission Impossible movie with Tom Cruise: I’m gonna miss being disreputable. I wish I could be disreputable sometimes.

No, you’re not allowed to.

You—

You have to be the reputable one. I get to be as disreputable as I want to be. Well, so this— This week on the show, we got a fun show coming up.

We’re gonna try something different.

You’re— You’re gonna— You’re gonna take us straight to hell.

Yep.

To start us out with. For— For a— A— All right, let’s see it. And then we’re gonna go chapter and verse. And I— We’re gonna— You’re gonna explain to me why something in the Bible feels like it contradicts itself.

Yeah.

I’m sure that what you’re going to do is just completely harmonize everything and it’ll all work out great and everyone will feel at peace.

We’re gonna make these texts get together, sing Kumbaya, and it’s going to be a great time. All right.

But first..

All right, let’s see it. You mentioned a pastor or author from a handful of years ago. I think we’re at an age now where a few years ago means 15 years ago.

Yeah. So it felt like only a few years ago, but yeah. There was a guy named Carlton Pearson who made waves. He was the pastor of one of the largest Pentecostal congregations in the country.

Okay.

And he. He was out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and he came out as being no longer believing in hell. He said it just. It just didn’t line up with either his theology or his reading of the Bible. And. And that just. blew minds across the country. And since then, I have seen plenty of debate about what is hell. Does the Bible talk about hell? What is. I mean, was it just made up? What’s going on? So, Dan, help us. Was. I mean, there was a movie with. with Chiwetel Ejiofor. I have no idea if that’s how to pronounce it. Chiwetel. I know you’re a listener.

Write in.

Help me understand how to. How to say your name, but send.

A recording, preferably, rather than just write it.

Yeah, or just call me. Well, I’ll give you my number. You can call me. Anyway, help us out here.

What?

You know, if this was a. As big a bombshell as. As it was, we should know what we’re talking about here. What? It seems like it would be obvious, but it doesn’t feel that way.

Yeah. And it. It. There are a lot of arguments on social media. I see it a lot on Instagram, on TikTok, on other places where people insist that the concept of hell as a place of eternal conscious torment is something that’s not anywhere in the Bible but was developed post-biblically, perhaps even as late as some of the early English literature, or even pre-English literature, Italian literature, Dante and others. Maybe that’s where the concept of hell as burning forever in a lake of fire comes from. But there’s actually a lot to say about concepts of the afterlife in ancient Israel and early Judaism and in early Christianity. And it’s a little more complex than this black and white. Oh, it wasn’t in the Bible. And then after the Bible, it just popped up. There’s actually a long history of innovation on concepts of the afterlife that go from nothing remotely approximating our concept of hell to how we understand the concept of hell today generally.

So I want to start all the way in ancient Israel. However, there is a popular idea that there was no concept of the afterlife in ancient Israel. That you died. That was annihilation. That was everything. You just ceased to exist consciously, physically, metaphorically, grammatically, ecumenically, just in every possible sense.

Oh, man. Your grammar dies with you.

That’s.

That is rough. That is rough.

But that doesn’t really fit with the archaeological data. One of the interesting things about ancient Israel and the. The material remains is we have a lot of material remains that come from tombs and from graves. And partly because everybody just shoved a bunch of stuff underground, sealed it up, and that happens to preserve things quite nicely in the drier climates, like in Egypt, like in parts of Israel. And so we’ve got a lot of grave goods. And this is actually responsible for a bias towards grave goods. Like when we reconstruct what we have about the ancient world, it seems they were really focused on the grave and the tomb. And really, it’s because that’s where we find most of the stuff that we happen to find. So there.

Fairness to the people who have. Who take that approach, pretty much everybody from the ancient times did die.

Yeah.

So. So they. So it makes sense to be to. To recognize that, you know, they. There were a lot of graves.

Yeah, there. There were a lot of graves. We. We don’t find nearly all of them, but the majority, I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what percentage, but there is definitely a disproportionate amount of our material remains from the ancient world that are grave goods. And two books I just want to highlight if you want to go learn more about the grave and the afterlife in ancient Israel. One was one that recently came out by a scholar named Kerry Sonia, and it’s called Caring for the Dead in Ancient Israel. That’s a wonderful book. And then another one by a friend of mine, Chris Hayes, called A Covenant with Death. And this is the subtitle is Death in the Iron Age II and its rhetorical uses in Proto-Isaiah. But there’s wonderful information in there about the fact that the things that were provided to the dead seem to indicate that ancient Israelites believed the dead kept on living in one sense or another. And that whatever this agency that kept on existing, whether you want to call it a spirit or a soul or a ghost or whatever, whatever this agency that kept on existing was, it in some sense was kind of tethered to the corporeal body, to the remains of the dead and to the location of them.

And so we would see people providing food, providing light, providing protection for the deceased in the afterlife. And we also see them communing with the deceased in different ways, visiting them at prescribed intervals to have feasts or to petition them for aid or to seek information from them. So necromancy was phenomenally common in ancient Israel.

Necromancy, help me out with, with that word because it sounds magical or whatever, but in this case we’re just, it’s.

Basically seeking information from the dead, communing with them to engage in some kind of exchange of information.

Yeah. And you know, it’s interesting to say that, I mean you, you started this part of, of your segment by saying that, that people are saying that the ancient Hebrews had no, no concept of an afterlife. But now I’m realizing that I remember there being stories, you know, the, the witch of Endor jumps to mind where someone is called back from the dead or someone is communicated with after they’ve died.

So that’s the, the necromancer of Endor. She, her profession has been outlawed by Saul. But then Saul is, is in a bind and he needs to get information from Adonai and the prophets aren’t doing it for him. So in disguise he visits the necromancer of Endor and wants to call up Samuel. And it works. And the necromancer says, I see Elohim, I see deity rising up from the underworld. And Saul asks, you know, what is its form? And, and basically Samuel’s coming there to say, you should have let me sleep. And, and then says Saul is going to die in, in battle. And that’s what ends up happening. But yeah, we see some interesting things there. One, Samuel is still extant, still exists in the sense that they are some kind of, I, I don’t want to say incorporeal or immaterial, but some kind of non-fleshly sense..

And he’s referred to as an elohim, as a deity, which kind of attests to the overlap in the concept of ancestors and deities.

Interesting.

But you have care and feeding for the dead because they kept on existing in some sense. And there’s a way, this is kind of like the movie Coco, where they were thought to exist as long as they were remembered. And so some of the ways that people would try to ensure that they were remembered for longer periods is they would pay to have their name pronounced over their mortuary chapel or something like that. Or they would. The families were expected to go make offerings, to commune with them, to pronounce their name, because the pronunciation of their name, in a sense, was a materialization of their name, in a sense, extended their postmortem existence. And the nature of this postmortem existence is not incredibly clear from what we can tell from the biblical text. It was just kind of a dreary, murky, ambiguous, just existence of some kind that was. We get the sense that it was fraught with all kinds of dangers associated with malevolent or benevolent forces that might exist in this.

In this world of the deceased, but also, somehow the deceased also had access to strategic information and so could be petitioned for aid. People would go. And in this type of worship we refer to as ancestor worship, they could go petition their ancestors for aid or say, hey, can you get so-and-so to stop stealing my stuff? Or to give back my stuff? Or, you know, you had imprecatory petitions and things like that too. So they were.

You just used a word I do not know.

Imprecatory, which has to do with cursing. So imprecatory means I’m putting some kind of curse on you.

I’m saying, go spook my neighbor. He’s a. He’s a jerk.

Or make somebody fall in love with me or make somebody not be in love with me. Like, there were all kinds of different ways that the deceased could. Could help out. But this. This realm of the dead was the same for everybody. There was no distinction between the good and the evil. It was the same place for everyone. And in the Hebrew, the word most commonly associated with this realm was Sheol, which just. It could mean the grave literally, or it could mean the grave figuratively, the realm of the dead. And so everybody was destined for Sheol in one sense or another. And in many English translations of the Bible, Sheol is translated hell or grave or pit or something like that. So this is.

But in and of itself, that word doesn’t have a negative or a positive connotation.

It’s negative in the sense that it’s mysterious, it’s murky and it sucks to be dead. Yeah, it’s going to suck to be there, but there’s not a distinction of do good and you’ll get on, you know, you’ll be in the, the better part of Sheol. It was just everybody’s going to Sheol. And so you did good or bad or how you acted in life really only affected your lot in life because once you were dead, everybody’s lot was the same.

Interesting.

So when we get into the Hellenistic period, when we have a lot more interactions with first the Zoroastrian societies and then the Greco-Roman societies, we start to see some bleeding into Judaism. These concepts of Hades on the, the Greco-Roman side of things and a kind of dualism on the Zoroastrian side of things. And you start to see people distinguishing a, a different kind of abode in the afterlife for those who, who do bad and for those who do good. And, and I get the sense there’s still an argument to make.re’s still an argument to make. It’s still debated, but I would argue that the concept of punishment in the afterlife probably derived from early Jewish experiences with larger empires that were oppressing them. And the observation that there did not seem to be punishment for the wicked in this life because the people who seem to be the most successful and the most powerful and the most wealthy frequently were also the most wicked and the most evil and they didn’t ever really seem to get their comeuppance.

And so I think there’s an argument to make that the concept of divine punishment in the afterlife is rooted in some sense in fantasizing about the incredibly wicked and evil and powerful people of the world getting their just deserts, if not in this life, then in the life to come.

Well, it makes sense. How, how can one believe in a just deity, in a just God? And yet justice doesn’t come to the worst people that they can think of, the people who have most hurt their people. There’s got, you know, it, it all. It just makes a lot of sense to imagine a justice that comes after this life.

Yeah, and, and we see these debates about, in wisdom literature, in Job and Ecclesiastes and elsewhere this idea. Do bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people? There doesn’t seem to be any justice. Well, once you can tack on what Latter-day Saints are used to calling the eternal perspective or the fact that there is an afterlife and so everything can be resolved in the afterlife. That is a convenient. That’s a convenient way to outsource that problem. We’ll take care of that in the afterlife. So I’m going to posit, and I am working on research on this and we’ll publish something hopefully at some point in the future. And I know some other people are working on similar projects as well, that, that is one of the main foundations of the concept of divine punishment. But we begin to see the concept of divine punishment popping up in the Hebrew Bible in some of the most recent layers of the Hebrew Bible and some of the most recent passages.

So one is in Daniel 12 , which was written in the middle of the second century BCE. Again, this is under heavy persecution from the Seleucid Empire, these Greco-Roman folks that are oppressing them. And the other is the very last verse of the book of Isaiah , Isaiah 66:24 , where we have this statement I’m reading from the NRSV here. And they shall go out and look at the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh. So this idea is that these people are going to see the place where these bodies are amassed and the worm shall not die, the fire shall not be quenched. Now, this doesn’t have to be interpreted to mean they will experience this pain and this torment for eternity. This can just mean the worms and the fire that the people are seeing doesn’t go away.

It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be feeling that. But here we see this concept of divine punishment that gets picked up in later authors and particularly this idea of the worm that does not die and the fire shall not be quenched is going to pop up in the New Testament, but there are.

And the idea is that. Sorry, I’m. This concept of an undying worm is baffling me a little bit. Yeah, the idea is not anything to do with the worm other than you. These bodies do not stop being eaten. Yeah, somehow. Somehow they, I, I mean, one would think that after a while of being worm digested, you are, you’re just goo. But apparently worms like goo.

Well, it’s.

And burnt goo with that. Because the fires are still going.

Yeah.:00.690] Dan McClellan: And so this is, this is pretty horrific imagery. It’s hyperbolic imagery where you’re just imagining these, these bodies just rotting and being consumed for eternity by worms and being burned for eternity without necessarily saying they’re gonna feel all that for eternity. But we have some other literature that is not part of what we understand as the canonical Bible that is reflecting on this as well. The book of First Enoch, for instance, seems to be one of the innovators of the concepts that are going to be picked up later on. And particularly as it relates to the word Gehenna, which is in the New Testament, in the Greek transliteration, frequently translated hell in English translations. Now Gehenna is in the Hebrew Bible. If you go look it up in your Bible, it’s referred to as the Valley of the Son of Hinnom. So Ge Ben Hinnom is the word in Hebrew, but it becomes Gehenna or Gehinnom in the Greco-Roman period.

And this is an actual valley that kind of swoops down and runs to the south and then to the southeast around Mount Zion. It meets up with the Central Valley and the Kidron Valley coming down around both sides of the City of David. And this valley is where Tophet was located. And Topheth is a name that’s used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to the place where the pre-exilic kings of Israel made their children to pass through the fire. In other words, engaged in child sacrifice. So this place is associated with unspeakable evil in the eyes of the folks who are curating these traditions in the exilic and in the post-exilic period. Now I want to stop and make a quick qualification here. There is a, an idea that this place around the time of Jesus was a landfill where there were perpetually burning fires or where the bodies of criminals were tossed.

And so there’s this idea that this is just this perpetually burning place of filth and dead bodies and stench and all this. And there are no archaeological or textual data that actually support that.

Interesting. I have heard those theories. Yeah, that’s something that has popped up in my just looking around.

And that’s something that we don’t see anybody making those claims until many centuries after the time of Jesus. And I was just in that valley a couple weeks ago. It’s a lovely park down there.

So no, no garbage.

No, no garbage at all. Grass, green grass. There’s, there’s a little like rope bridge that goes across part of the valley that you can go run across if, if you’re brave enough. And they have a little concert venue on one end of it. It’s a lovely area. So I tell people, or you know, I told the, the tour group I was with, you can tell people now you’ve been to hell and there’s a lovely park.

There you go. Absolutely. So very few child sacrifices.

Yeah, that’s. That’s all in the past.

That’s gone way down.

Yeah.

Since. Since the. The exilic period.

But when we get into the Hellenistic period, because this valley is associated with unspeakable evil and with child sacrifice and with burning, it becomes kind of a symbolic location for wickedness and punishment. So we have in the Book of Enoch a reference to this valley right by Jerusalem where certain entities. We’ve got some angels who are being buried under mountains, and we’ve got some other who. Who are being reserved in this deep, dark valley where they’re going to be punished. And we first have a reference to or suggestion that this is a place for eternal postmortem punishment. So First Enoch is. McClellan: Is kind of the. The seedbed for this idea. And this is.

And talk to me about Enoch. I don’t know.

So First Enoch. Well, yeah, it’s. A lot of people don’t. And. And even the people who spend all of their time on. On TikTok making videos about First Enoch frequently don’t understand what it is. But it’s. It’s. In a sense, it’s a retelling of some of the main stories from Genesis that. And particularly focused on Genesis 6 , the kind of setting the stage for the flood, where it talks about the Bnai Elohim, the sons of God, seeing the. The daughters of humanity, seeing that they are beautiful, going down, marrying them, having children with them. And then it says in the text of Genesis, the Nephilim were in the land in those days and after as well. And then it goes straight into. And so the Lord saw that everything was corrupt and wanted to destroy the earth. And so it’s probably an older disconnected tradition that was inserted in this spot to kind of buttress the idea that God was perfectly validated in wanting to destroy everything that breathed on the earth.

But what First Enoch does is pick up that story and kind of expand on it, fill in a lot of the gaps, and use that as kind of a conceptual template for this story about angels rebelling against God, coming down and inappropriately engaging in sexual intercourse with human women and siring these giants. And then the giants have children who are the Nephilim, and they die. And then the ghosts or the spirits that. That rise up from their deceased bodies become demons. And the angels teach humanity everything, all the wickedness from warfare to makeup.

Interesting.

And so it’s. It’s really.

We’re gonna have to do a whole. A whole episode?

Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. First Enoch needs to have a whole discussion. But. And this is one of the most influential nonbiblical texts in this period. This sets the stage for so much that goes on regarding angels, regarding the source of evil. And in part this was a way to account for where evil came from. We had the problem of evil, of theodicy. How do we get evil from a creation that was all good? And it’s. Well, these angels rebelled and they came down and they basically physically reproduced evil and then spread knowledge of evil.

And when was this book written?

So this is the Greco Roman period, the Hellenistic period. It’s probably the earliest phases of it are probably somewhere around 300 BCE or after. And it kind of cumulatively picks up a bunch of stories. So there are several. I think there are five distinct books within the Book of Enoch and they are generally dated to different periods by scholars starting around 300 BCE down to probably close to the turn of the era. Well, actually some of the later layers of some of these books probably come in the Common Era rather than before the Common Era. But the issue with identifying this as the origins of hell is that eternal conscious torment is not the only concept that is reflected in there. We also have two other concepts of divine punishment in the afterlife. One of them is annihilationism, the idea that the wicked, when they die, they just stop existing.

And the other is temporary torment followed by annihilationism, the idea that the wicked are punished for a time and then there comes a point when they stop existing entirely.rely. So I think the best scholarship on the development of these concepts would identify three different general categories of post mortem divine punishment: annihilationism, temporary torment followed by annihilationism, and then eternal conscious torment. And we have this reflected in First Enoch. We have this reflected in places like the Book of Judith from the Apocrypha, which is quoting or at least alluding to Isaiah 66 and the fire and the worms. And we have it in a handful of other texts. We have even Josephus discussing things like this. We have some rabbinic literature that is discussing things like this, the Apocalypse of Abraham, Second Baruch, a number of texts that are considered Apocrypha or Pseudepigrapha or other early Jewish writings are kind of…

We see one or more of these three different categories bubbling to the surface. And so what we can say is that the concept of hell or divine punishment in the afterlife is not yet systematized. It is kind of ambiguous, it is inconsistent. People are making use of different ways of thinking about it to the degree it serves their rhetorical goals, but it has not sifted out into one kind of universal idea. That is something that would not come until after the Bible. So in the New Testament, we see all three of these categories as well. We have, yeah, we have this idea of the… …worm and the fire reflected in places like Mark and Matthew. And we have Jesus talking about divine punishment as eternal conscious torment. But we also have Jesus talking about it as if it is just annihilationism or as if it is temporary torment followed by annihilationism.

We have all of that in the Gospels. So it is not a systematized concept yet in the Gospels. Some of the other literature in the New Testament similarly reflects one or more of these concepts. Paul does not talk about it at all. We do not have any of them in Paul. And probably the place where we get the most imagery that is going to be picked up later in the systematization of hell, in the programmatization—program—I don’t even know what that word should be. But in the…

I think you nailed it.

When they finally decide hell is going to be this, they pull a lot of the imagery from the Book of Revelation where we have this idea of a lake of fire and we have this dragon and we have Satan and there is throwing down of stuff. But even death and hell in the Book of Revelation come to an end. And so we are fans on this channel of rejecting univocality. So even the concept of hell is not presented univocally in any single Gospel, much less in all the Gospels, much less across the entire New Testament. It is entirely inconsistent. And it is not until early Christianity becomes institutionalized and gains political support and resources once it takes over the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, that we get the means of systematizing everything and then enforcing a single concept of hell, which does reduce down to this concept of eternal conscious torment.

But for the authors of the New Testament, there is no one concept of hell. Some of them do not refer to any of these concepts of hell. Some of them refer to multiple different ones. And these are influenced by Greco Roman ideas of Hades. They are influenced by what is going on in the Book of Enoch. They are influenced perhaps by Zoroastrianism, although we do not have a lot of great data to show us exactly how it was influenced. And so hell comes together from a number of different streams of traditions that begin inconsistently and do not really arrive at what we understand today about hell until well after the Bible has been completed. And then we also have obviously that other literature, Dante and others that are giving us additional imagery that contribute to the accumulated kind of conceptual package that we generally evoke today when we talk about hell.[00:33:02.050] Dan Beecher: Right.

So sort of circling back to Pastor Pearson that I, that I mentioned at the beginning of this segment.

Yes.

Would you say that there is a valid argument to be made that there is no hell? Do you think that is because there are so many different concepts presented biblically? Is that a tenable position? Or do you think that somehow we have to, if we’re following the Bible, there is some hell-like concept that is more likely than not? To be, to be more likely than not?

I think if you’re talking about the Bible as a single text and if you are going to impose a univocal lens upon it and say we have to reduce it down to one concept, then that concept is going to be negotiated. And I think all of those possibilities are there. You have everything from absolutely no reference whatsoever to post-mortem divine punishment, all the way to eternal conscious torment across the different authors of the Bible. So I would suggest that any one of those positions is arguable. If you’re trying to accommodate a univocal take, if you’re trying to say we have the text and we must arrive at a single conclusion with the text, then that is a negotiated conclusion and any one of those is tenable. If we’re saying, what did the authors of these texts believe about divine punishment? You have to say there are authors that say absolutely nothing about it, that it’s not relevant, certainly not salient.

They may not have believed in it at all. Then there are other authors who treat it one way, other authors who treat it another, and we have authors that treat it a variety of different ways. So I think it’s murky and it’s a little more complex than just saying yes it’s there or no it’s not there. It depends on what you’re doing with the text. It depends on how you understand the text and its function. And it depends on, yeah, I suppose it depends upon the group that you’re doing it for. What are your goals for this? All right.

Well, thankfully our next segment isn’t going to be anywhere near as confusing. Don’t worry, we’ll find a way to make the Bible all say one thing, just stick with us.

Yeah. This is. This is the problem of putting data over dogma; it frequently does not sift out into one easy answer. It. The answer is usually yes with a “but” or no with an “and” or something that is just entirely confusing. So.

Or just pick one.

Yeah. It’s up to you. If I can show up and muddy up the waters and then scamper away, I’ve done my job.

Good, good. Well, let’s. Let’s do some more muddying with some chapter and verse.

Sounds good. Let’s do it.

All right, so for this week’s chapter and verse, we’re gonna talk about the villain, the final villain of the Jesus story, Judas Iscariot, the man, the myth, the legend, the guy, the betrayer of Jesus. Because there’s a confusing discrepancy between the story of Judas in Matthew and the story of Judas in Acts.

Yes.

So I thought we would dive in and just sort of talk about this discrepancy. And so where should we start? Should we start with Acts or should we start with Matthew?

Why don’t we start with Acts, actually?

Okay, well, that’s the fun one. We will definitely start with the fun one. Where? In Acts. And this is.an Beecher: This is chapter one, verse, what, 15? No, sorry, I had it pulled up.

It starts in 18. We have this parenthetical aside about what happened to Judas.

Okay. So, yeah. Chapter one, verse 18. Judas, having received his pieces of silver for his betrayal of Jesus, has apparently purchased himself a field. In verse 18, it says, now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness. And this is so great. Falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out. This became known to all the residents of Jerusalem, so that the field was called in their language, Hakeldama. I, I, I’m gonna assume I pronounce that perfectly. That is Field of Blood.

Yes.

So, yeah, we.

That.

That’s a gruesome end to, To a person’s life. Just, Just tripping, apparently, and just explosion.

Yeah. Well, we have a couple of things. First, this sounds to some degree like kind of an etiology for why there’s this field called the Field of Blood. And so it may be that the author is saying, oh, this would be a great opportunity to tie in and tie off the story of Judas. Because we got this place over here that’s called the Field of Blood. And it’s a. It’s a Greek transliteration. Hakeldamach is how. What it is in. In the Greek but yeah, it is. It is pretty brief. And yeah, he has a reward. He buys a field. Now, the Greek here, where it talks about him falling, says headlong in the KJV. This could mean head first, or it could mean towards his head or on his head. There’s an argument that some people have made that the Greek there could, instead of falling, could mean to. To burst.

And so that would kind of fit a little better. The verb to swell up. That would kind of fit a little better. This idea that he burst asunder. So he just has a field and is standing there beholding the field in which he grows all his. You know what. And then he just starts swelling up like Violet in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And then bursts. And then, you know, you find traditions somewhat like this in the ancient world where somebody. Some divine punishment was that somebody swelled up and. And popped. So would not be totally unheard of, but very gross. And then the other option is that he, yeah, was just walking and was like, do, do, do. And then splat. Fell on his head.

Sometimes when you hit your head just right, your entire bowels burst out of your body. It’s. It’s a. That’s a known thing. Yeah, it’s a little. It’s an alarming story. It’s an alarming tale. And what. I don’t. I don’t think it could happen. I don’t think you can just burst open. But there you go. There, there. There’s one story of Judas. The other comes to us from Matthew 27 .

And I want to make a point here before we move to the one in Matthew 27 . This is two verses long. The first verse tells what happened. And then the second verse just ties it into this etiology for. etiology for

For this place that was called the Field of Blood. Yeah, it definitely like, the one thing that seems clear from From comparing these two stories is that there is in fact a field of blood at the end of both of these stories. We know that there’s a place called the Field of Blood.

Yeah.

So here we go.

This is.

I’m going to start with.

With.

This is chapter 27, verse 3. When Judas his betrayer saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented. And brought back the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders. He said, I have sinned by betraying innocent blood. But they said, what is that to us? See it. See to it yourself. Throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed and he went and hanged himself. But the chief priests taking the pieces of silver said, it is not lawful to put them in the Into the treasury, since they are blood money. After conferring together, they used them to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners. For this reason, that field has been called the field of blood to this day.

And then the next two verses, I think are relevant, but we’ll get to them in a second. Let’s talk about this story a little bit. So the passage in Acts was two verses. This one is so far, six verses. Six of a total of eight. So the first thing to note is that this story is significantly expanded. And when you’re comparing two versions of a story, one principle that is not a hard and fast law, but is a tendency is something called lectio Oh, I forget the Latin lectio brevior, I think. I think is what it is. But the, the shorter reading is what that means. And the idea is the shorter reading is usually, not always, but usually the earlier one, because the tendency is for stories to accrete more details rather than for people to shave details off. And so just from looking at the length of these two stories, it’s seems like the one in Matthew is probably the one that’s a little later and is adding more details to it.

But the details are also interesting. Let’s take a look at the beginning. And there’s an earlier part where Judas goes to these people and negotiates the price for turning Jesus over. And they negotiate 30 pieces of silver. And so that’s delivered to Judas. And here it says he repented, brought back the 30 pieces, threw it into the temple. And they tell him, you know, this is your problem, man. Now that 30 pieces of silver is significant, but I want to put a pin in that and keep going. The chief priests take the silver and say, this is blood money. And here we have the tie in with the field of blood idea. But they buy a potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners. And this potter’s field is also interesting. So I want to go on to verses 9 and 10 where the author of Matthew says, then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah.

And this one is wrong. It’s not Jeremiah, it’s actually Zechariah.

Oh, Matthew, get it straight, will you?

And this is probably Zechariah 11:12-13 . But we also have a reference to verse nine. But. And they took the 30 pieces. So this is Zechariah. And they took the 30 pieces of silver, the price of the one on whom a price had been set, on whom some of the people of Israel had set a price, and they gave them for the potter’s field as the Lord commanded me.r’s field as the Lord commanded me. So this is, this doesn’t exactly match any text that we have from Zechariah, but it very closely matches Zechariah 11:12-13 , where it says, I then said to them, if it seems right to you, give me my wages, but if not, keep them. So they weighed out as my wages 30 shekels of silver. Then the Lord said to me, throw it into the treasury for this lordly price at which I was valued by them. So I took the 30 shekels of silver and threw them into the treasury in the house

of The Lord. And so the story in Matthew seems very, very close to this prophecy from Zechariah. And this fits Matthew’s M.O. One of the things Matthew is doing is trying to show that Jesus fulfills all these prophecies from the Hebrew Bible, and Matthew is willing to change the story to make it fit better these prophecies. So sometimes these are prophecies that are found in the other Gospels; sometimes they’re prophecies that are not, that Matthew is coming up with. And so if we look in Acts, we’ve got a very short story. None of the details that are found in the prophecy from Zechariah are found in the story of Judas’s death from Acts.

Yeah, it’s very interesting. You know, it’s funny because one of the things that I looked at when I was looking into this was, you know, if you just Google “how did Judas die?” You find a lot of apologetic websites, things like Answers in Genesis, saying, don’t worry, these aren’t conflicting stories because maybe Judas hanged himself like Matthew says, and then he rotted. And while he was hanging there, he expanded and expanded because he was, you know, the bacteria and blah, blah, blah. And then they burst open after the rope broke or the branch broke. And they, they, they go through this very elaborate harmonizing of these two different stories. None of them acknowledge that there’s another problem. And that is who bought the field.

Right.

Which is a directly conflicting idea. Like there, you can’t harmonize. He bought the field and was walking in his field and he fell headlong. Bought. He bought the field with his money that he got with that, the, the, the 30 pieces of silver, and then the Matthew version, which is he threw the pieces of silver back at them and then they went and bought the field.

Yeah, there. You can’t plausibly harmonize it, but there are a lot of folks who are willing to say, well, if you presuppose this scenario, and if you assume this scenario and if this were going on in the background and, oh, well, you could speak of someone buying something with the other person’s money as the other person buying it. Like, you can come up with all of these rationalizations for why it is not impossible.

Of course you can. Yeah.

Yeah. And this is. This is something that I’ve repeatedly mentioned on my own social media channels: if you want to harmonize two passages, as long as “not impossible” is the bar. One, that’s the lowest bar you could possibly set, but two, you can always get over that bar if “well, it’s not physically impossible” is the bar; you can harmonize anything. But this, I think, raises one of the biggest problems with apologetics. This is apologetics. One does not follow the data where the data lead, does not allow the data to operate on their own terms. Apologetics treats the data as an obstacle to be overcome because they have a predetermined endpoint, and they just need to get around and get rid of and get over and get by the data to be able to arrive at that endpoint. And it so commonly results in “not impossible” stacked on “not impossible” stacked on “not impossible” stacked on “not impossible.”

Is it probable? Of course not. Of course not. Is it plausible? Of course not. Is it impossible? And as long as they can gin up the tiniest little sliver of “it’s not physically impossible,” even though we’ve got a dozen NIs—we’ve got a stack of 12 “it’s not physically impossibles” sitting on top of each other—it’s still not impossible, therefore, dangling like a Jenga…

Tower that’s ready to tumble at any…

In any direction, they’ve got the tiniest little sliver of not impossible. And that’s all they need, because the goal is not to show that it’s probable or even that it’s plausible. The goal is just to show it’s not physically impossible. Therefore, there is the tiniest little glimmer of validity to the belief in the univocality, in the inerrancy of this text. And that’s all they need to grasp onto, because it’s ultimately not about coming up with what’s most likely. It’s about defending my belief in this—whatever, in the inerrancy of this text, in the univocality of this text—to themselves, not to anyone else, to themselves. So they can feel justified in having that belief, even if that justification is built upon the foundation of that tiniest little sliver of not impossible. And so any two stories from outside the Bible that were so incongruent as these two would immediately be dismissed as contradictory.

But because the guiding principle here is not what really happened or what do the texts actually say, the guiding principle here is, damn it, make it work. That’s going to be the end result, as long as I have that tiny little sliver of not impossible. But, yeah, what’s going on here is Matthew is telling this story in a way to make it sound like a fulfillment of this prophecy in Zechariah. And we’ve got all these details that are not found in the other account of Judas’s death that are there only to make Matthew’s story fulfill the prophecy in Zechariah. And this is not the only place where Matthew is telling stories in weird ways. The triumphal entry is another one that is also a prophecy from Zechariah about the king riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, even a colt, the foal of a donkey. And this is apposition. This is repeating the same thing again, using different or additional details to kind of flesh it out further.

Matthew tells the story in a way that has Jesus riding on two animals simultaneously into Jerusalem, which has been depicted… Yeah, it’s been depicted a variety of different ways. Some people have him sitting on the bigger one with the smaller one… Like a foot rest.

Like an ottoman.

Yeah.

Nice donkey ottoman that you can get.

Yeah. I’d love to see a depiction of like a trick-riding Jesus where he’s got a foot on each saddle and he’s… And he’s kind of…

That’s always been how I’ve pictured it. It’s always been a circus act to me.

But I…

That’s my preferred version.

But that… And there… There are arguments for why this is the way it is, but one that I think is… Is probably most likely, in my opinion, is that Matthew’s reading this in the Greek translation. And in the Greek translation, the poetry of the Hebrew, the apposition doesn’t come through as well. And so I think Matthew saw a donkey and a colt, the foal of a donkey, and thought two of them. Okay. And wrote the story that way. Because his priority is making sure Jesus is fulfilling the prophecies from the Hebrew Bible as the author of Matthew understands him. Even if that means Jesus has stacked a colt on top of a donkey and then is balanced on top of the colt, which is probably the most likely way you’re going to get Jesus into Jerusalem.to Jerusalem. Jerusalem on two animals. But we’ve got a similar situation with Judas where Matthew is telling the story in a completely different way, in a way that is incongruent, is not plausibly harmonized with Acts.

And so there are going to be folks who are going to say, yeah, it’s totally the same story. You know, I, I don’t have a problem harmonizing. Of course not. Nobody has a problem doing what is necessary for their worldview to be safe. So it’s, it’s, it’s two different stories. And yeah, we were talking earlier about a third version of this story.

Oh yeah, a story as big as.

A house comes from around 120 to 130 CE. There was this Christian leader named Papias of Hierapolis who wrote some accounts of Jesus’s life that are no longer extant, but they are quoted in pieces in Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History. And to begin, Eusebius thought that Papias was kind of a moron, did not think he was incredibly intelligent. Doesn’t seem to have respected Papias. I don’t know.

You’ve told me the story that Papias came up with for Judas and I think he sounds like a real smart guy.

But Papias tells the story of Judas being on his property and basically swelling up again like Violet Beauregard from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But he grows to a size bigger than a house and this is all like maggots and festering whatnot is just making him swell up. And for some reason there’s a mention of his genitals swelling up and becoming disgusting and he’s exuding maggots and who knows what and bursts forth his intestines and whatever covers this property. And as the story goes, the stench was unbearable for over a century on the field of blood where Judas died. Which is an odd thing for Papias to say since ostensibly according to a lot of people, and this is a discussion for another day, but Papias, a lot of people claim, is one of the earliest witnesses to the Gospel of Matthew as written by Matthew.

A lot of people think he’s the first one to attribute Matthean authorship to the Gospel of Matthew , but doesn’t seem to take it seriously if his story of Judas totally ignores Matthew’s story and instead is this kind of outlandish Charlie and the Chocolate Factory story of Judas swelling up and then bursting asunder in the field.

Well, there you go. I, I, I don’t know what to believe now. Now I’m just, I’m confused. I, all I know for sure now is that I don’t want to go to tumble headlong in a field because that sounds terrifying.

Well, as long as you don’t betray.

The Lord, it should be okay.

Yeah, yeah, that’s. That’s as long as you stay away from that cliff. I know it is tempting to go dance along the edge of that cliff, but stay away. I don’t know how.

How much silver you got. Well, I’ll consider it anyway.

Oh, and another thing to note, the. The 30 pieces of silver that according to a chapter in Exodus, that was the value of a slave, so.

Oh, wow.

A lot of people find that noteworthy that Christ was betrayed for the value of a slave. So now. Now we’re connecting Matthew to Zechariah to Exodus. So there’s some trigonometry involved, but I love it.

Eventually we’ll figure this thing out.

Yeah, eventually. One day we’ll get there.

Okay, well, I guess that’s how we’re gonna have to leave this one, because I. There’s no real concrete conclusion to come to, but thanks to all of you for tuning in. We sure do appreciate that. If you would like to become a part of helping to make this show go, you can go to our Patreon page, which is patreon..com/dataoverdogma. You can write into us contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the way to do that. And until next week, have a good one.

Bye, everybody.