Apostlepalooza!

I’ve seen this claim. I don’t know where it’s coming from. I don’t know if there’s. If this has ever been argued by any scholars, but I’ve seen some folks try to argue that Thomas is Jesus’s twin.

Okay, well, that would change the nativity stories a lot. Yeah, I mean, now we have to hire Danny DeVito to play Didymus, have.

Him say your back looks like a relief map of the Andes. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we try to increase the public’s access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation. About the same, which unfortunately seems always to be increasing. How are we doing today, Dan?

Doing okay. I am doing my best not to increase the misinformation, though. I’m not, you know, I’m a bear of very little brain. It’s not like I’m gonna. I’m gonna do it sometimes just by accident. It’s just bound to happen.

Well, yeah, yeah. And who of us is innocent of every now and then spreading a little misinformation?

Yes, indeed.

There is a lot of it online these days, though. And in today’s episode, I understand we’re going to be just full of questions. We got.

We got a whole lot of questions. It is an apostolic episode. We are going to be talking about apostles left and right, even epistles about apostles. So it’s. It’s a. It’s a good time. But to start us off, I. Look, here’s what happened. I was doing some research for one of our segments and I went down a rabbit hole and almost didn’t make it back out. So I messaged you and I was like, you need to help me out with this. I don’t know what’s going on. So let’s jump into our segment. McClellan 911.

I guess our audio of choice. Mine. Anyways.

Let’s do the segment.

Alrighty. What are we talking about, Dan? What is your emergency?

Okay, here’s the thing. I was looking up what the word apostle meant. And. And then I decided to think about. And then I was thinking about apostles and the original 12 came up. The 12 apostles. They’re very famous. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, but a lot of people have.

And the thing about them was I started to ask myself, wait, can I name the 12 apostles? It seems like something I should know, and, you know, I got. I got Peter, James, and John, or Matthew and Mark and Luke, and I don’t. I. I don’t know who was an apostle. I literally suddenly realized, like, who’s at that Last Supper? I don’t know. You know, I. I knew Judas was one. And then when I really racked my brains, I came up with, you know, Mr. Doubting Thomas. And then I got so confused, so I went and looked it up, thinking this is a thing that will just have an easy list of names.

Yeah. One would imagine the way people talk about the 12 apostles, it seems like it’s just a simple datum. Here they are.

Yeah, there’s 12 dudes. How hard could that possibly be? And then I go to Wikipedia and there’s a grid. There’s, like, graphics. And like, I. I was blown away. Now, I know that I’ve been confused before by things like name changes, which happen way too frequently in the Bible for my comfort, for my personal comfort. Dan McClellan: Yeah. You know, we’ve talked about. We. We talked about Abram becoming Abraham.

We talked. You know, there’s. There’s.

Jacob becomes Israel. Even God’s name changes. You have God introducing themselves to Moses, saying, look, they all knew me by this name. They didn’t know me by this other name. But I’m letting you know my actual name is this. And then you go look at those other texts, and it’s like, that name’s in there, too. So, yeah, even God’s name is not safe. They’re getting changed up.

Yeah. And the other thing that I want to talk. So, okay, so we’ve got some names that are changing. We’ve got some names that are confusing. And the other thing is that I’m pretty sure that none of the names that I know are the original, like, Aramaic names of these guys.

Yeah. And this is something I get asked all the time. Did people running around this area 2000 years ago really have names like John and Matt and Andrew? Yeah, exactly. And there’s some confusion going on regarding how we get the pronunciations of the names as we have them today. Okay, so lots of fun.

I’m wondering, let’s start with just a few confusing things from the group of apostles.

All right?

One of the first things is that I have never known. I have heard the name Simon. I have heard the name Peter. I have heard the name Simon Peter. And I don’t know. Are these three different guys? Are they the same guy? I don’t know who we’re talking about.

Yeah. So we’ve got the name Simon, which is a Greek transliteration of Shimon, which is an older Hebrew name. And so there’s nothing too.

Also also a frequent thing that Michael Jackson would shamone.

Yeah. Which is a great interpretive key to interpreting his lyrics, so.

Yes, exactly.

But we have Simon also referred to as Peter in the text. And this is a name that Jesus was supposed to have given to Simon. And in the Gospel of John , it’s Kephas, which would be a transliteration of the Aramaic word for rock, which is what Petros would be related to, rock of some kind. Some people try to read a lot more significance into the name than probably was there. Oh, it means a little itty bitty rock. Oh, it means a bedrock. Oh, it means a boulder. It, you know, I don’t think it’s quite so. So granular what’s going on there? But yeah, Simon Peter is an individual who seems to have two names. Now, there was a tradition, evidently, I have not plumbed the depths of the data regarding this notion that anciently they would have their traditional Aramaic Hebrew name and would also adopt a Greco Roman name.

Kind of like how when folks come here from parts of Asia, they’ll adopt, you know, they’ll be like, my name’s Sarah. It’s like.

Right.

And you know, they’ve got another name that most people would just have a rough time pronouncing. And so they will adopt an Anglicized name of some kind. So conventional wisdom says that was going on back then. So Simon is already a Greek transliteration of an Aramaic Hebrew name. And Cephas Peter would be the same. So it doesn’t seem like that’s fitting in with that tradition. fitting in with that tradition. And there’s actually an argument to make that these may have been two different people, that Simon and Kephas were separate people. I think Bart Ehrman published an article a long time ago talking about how many early Christians understood them to be two different people. And so it’s a little confusing when you look across the four different Gospels and then into the book of Acts because they’re referred to in different ways. So in Matthew it’s Simon, also known as Peter. In the other synoptic Gospels,

so Mark and Luke, it’s Simon, whom he named Peter. And then in John you’ve got Simon Kephas, which is translated Peter. In Acts he’s referred to as Peter. It’s almost like there’s kind of a chronological trajectory. Starts off as Simon, and then by the end of the first century he’s completely Peter. Which suggests that they’re wrestling with what to do here. And you just have different texts approaching it in different ways, which could indicate they were two different people and their identities were just merged. It could indicate that, you know, he used his own name inconsistently and they were just trying to figure out a way to make sense of it, but we don’t really know for sure.

I’m going to go back to something because I think I understood what you were saying. But. So Peter, that’s a transliteration of of an Aramaic.

Well, that’s the Greek word Petros. Right. And in John, Jesus gave him the name Kephas, and so Petros is just a translation— excuse me, Petros is a translation of Kephas.

And so translation from Greek to Greek?

No, Kephas would be Aramaic.

Oh, Kephas is the Aramaic.

Yeah. So in John we have the story that Jesus gave him the name Kephas. And then if you translate Kephas from Aramaic into Greek, you get Petros. And then in English that is transliterated as Peter.

So Simon is a transliteration, and Peter is a potential translation of Kephas.

If John is to be believed.

If. Okay, all right, fine. You know what, I’m done with… But he was also called Simon Peter, right?

Yeah. We have in John the double name.

Okay, then there’s also— I don’t want to confuse things too much, but one of the other apostles is also Simon. Am I right about that? That’s…

They really—

This was poor planning on the part of the Savior, I think. Because there’s doubles of a couple of names.

So here’s the…

Because there’s doubles of a couple of names.

Yeah. So Simon is not… This other Simon, who is one of the original twelve ostensibly, is not mentioned in the Gospel of John because John nowhere says, “here are the twelve apostles.” He just mentions them randomly, but he does not give a list of them like the other Gospels do. And when the other Gospels mention this other Simon, they tag on some kind of identifier. They call him the Zealot. They call him the Canaanite. Mark calls him the Cananaean or something like that.

And I think, yeah, Luke and Acts call him the Zealot to distinguish him from Simon Peter. And John just isn’t worried about it.

I like the Zealot. You know, it’s like a version of this is Jeremy A and Jeremy M when you’re in school or whatever.Beecher: But they’re, they’re just adding, I think The Zealot is a much. If you are an elementary school teacher and you have two Johns or whatever in your, in your class, name one of them the Zealot. It’s much better than. Yeah, just giving their last initial.

Well, that’s what we could do. We could be Mack and the Zealot or something like that.

There you go. I don’t think I’m the Zealot. Between the two of us, I think the atheist is probably not the zealot among us.

Beecher and the Zealot, I don’t know.

That you’re a zealot either. So I think zealotry is actually is. But you’re right. How did I not think of the fact that we are two Daniels. Okay, fine. Speaking of two names, we got two Jameses.

We got, yes, two Jameses.

So there’s James son of Zebedee, who is the brother of somebody. Right? No, wait, there’s. There’s various Zebedee, Zebedians. So there’s James and then there’s another James son of Alphaeus. And where does. So first of all, let’s talk about the name James. What’s the origin? What’s the original name in its, in its original language?

So James actually comes from the Hebrew name Yaakov, Jacob.

And. And so if you go look in the Greek, you’re actually going to see Iakobos is what the Greek says there. Now. Okay, we use James today because that’s, that has become conventionalized, that particular transliteration. And there’s, there’s actually we can trace the development of this name through different languages to get us from Jacob to James. And this was just a side note. This was always a complication in translating the Book of Mormon because you have the Book of Jacob and you also have. When you’re saying, well, there’s also the Epistle of James in the Bible. And so when you’re referring to these, you got to distinguish somehow. But in many languages, they don’t distinguish Jacob from James.

Right.

Anyway, that’s, that’s not important here. But yeah, Jacob, when you go into Latin, you get Iacobus, which is, which is very close to the Greek. But there are some dialects where you have kind of a nasalization of the B and it’s Iacomus, which is how it sounds. And then there are, as that name is used, there are some places where the B nasalizes and you get Iacomus, and then you go into. And then you get Iacomo, which is a name that we find in some languages. And then the, the Hard C sound that we have in the. In the. Or the. The M drops off entirely and the hard C sound will turn to. Into like a G or something like that. Iago derives from this name. And then. So San Diego, contrary to the conventional wisdom, has nothing to do with a whale.

Right. But is St. James or St. Jacob San Diego. So Diego is also a variation on this name. Santiago is a variation on this name. Tiago is a variation on this name. And when it gets into English, we have James as one of the variations on this. And so I forget exactly the path that we have to trace, what countries we have to go through to get from the Latin to the English. But these are just different ways that people pronounce these things based on the conventions that their languages held in their particular region in their particular time.e. And this is going to have relevance when we talk about how we get from Yeshu to Jesus, which we’ll talk about a little bit later.

But I’m just saying. I’m just going to say that of all of the names that you went through that are versions of this original Yaakov or whatever, what was the original in the Hebrew?

Yaakov.

Yaakov. I feel like James is the worst of all of, like, that is that you… You’ve gone way too far down the road. Let’s back it up a few steps.

But okay, yeah, we’ve also got Jaime and Jamie, and we got a bunch of different variations that… That are derived from that as well. So, yeah, it’s… It’s a bit of a mess. But… But I think it’s fascinating linguistic…

It is fascinating. And I think we can do the same… We can do the same kind of crazy name tree with James, James’s brother John. Which John. What? So do we know what the original Hebrew slash Aramaic name for that was? Which sounds like, like… So, like, I know the German Johannes is… Is… Would be a variant of… Of John that sounds more like Yohanan than John. Yeah, I can… But at least I can see a… A thread through all of those better than I can with James. But, yeah, there’s… There’s a thousand different John variants.

Yeah. Yeah. So when… When people are like, was there really a dude named John living in Syria-Palestine, 2,000 years ago? And no, they were Yohanan or if they were using Greek, Ioannes or something like that. And then that goes into a bunch of different languages. We have Ian is developed from this. We have Giannis develops from this John. Hundreds of different variations. And in fact, the… This was something I discovered when I was living in England and did a little research on my own last name, McClellan. There are over a hundred different names that derive from the name McClellan. Mine isn’t the… My spelling isn’t the original spelling by any stretch of the imagination. But we have neighbors, the Gillilands, who… Their last name is a derivation of McClellan as well. So there are so many names are related and derived from other names. It’s so fascinating when you look into it, but I think some people get confused and think because some of these things have relationships like that, that they can just arbitrarily imagine relationships that exist between other words, which is a problem that I am constantly trying to respond to on my social media channels when people are like, well, this…

Like, what did I just hear? Oh, demos from democratic. So I just saw a video 30 minutes ago where somebody was like, that looks like demon. So Democrats are demons. And it’s like, okay, so they both come from Greek, but they don’t look at all alike in Greek. And so, yeah, that’s… There… There are a lot of… A lot of amateur etymologists out there that should not quit their day job, but should quit being amateur etymologists.

Well, or at very least, we should all quit listening to them if they… If they’re not going to have, you know, the… The… If they’re going to approach this without credentials, at very least we can all reject whatever it is that they have to say. Yeah, yeah, I’m. I’m gonna dive into. I’m. I’m just now going to. As a refresher, as a little palate cleanser, I’m going to say that in the massive grid of, you know, who’s named what and where they are in the lineup and everything, Philip is delightfully easy.

Yeah. Non. Controversial. Yeah.

Everyone calls him Philip. No one calls him anything else. No one tacks anything onto his name or anything. Just Philip.

You know, he didn’t cause any problems. He showed up on time. He did what he was asked to do. And. And, yeah, it didn’t cause any issues.

Do we know what that name was in the. In the original.

In the original, it probably has to do with Philippos, which would be lover of horses or something like that, if I’m. If I’m remembering correctly. But I didn’t. I haven’t looked that one up in a long time.

I didn’t expect you to look up all of the. All of them, I will say. So let’s see. We’ve had all of those. Bartholomew looks almost as. As nice as. As clean as Philip. Until you get to the Gospel of John .

Yep. And then doesn’t mention him.

Well, in this thing it says, you know, on. On the. In. In my grid here, it says Nathanael is associated somehow with Bartholomew.

So it’s not. Nathanael is mentioned in the Gospel of John . And so the algebra here is. Okay, John mentions a bunch of other people who are mentioned in the synoptics. John doesn’t ever mention Bartholomew, but he does mention this guy Nathanael, who’s not mentioned in the synoptics. Nathanael must therefore be Bartholomew by the process of elimination, if we assume that they’re telling the same story with the same characters, Nathanael would have to be Bartholomew. There’s an argument to make for that. There’s an argument to make against that. I don’t know for sure. I don’t have strong feelings about that identification.

But Nathanael would be a good Hebrew name. God has given or gift of God. So Nathanael in Hebrew would be the same as Theodore in Greek. Gift of God. Okay, so that would be like the Peter-Cephas thing. Yeah, that would be a translation into Greek.

So in those two, the. The God part would be the El in Nathanael and the theos in the Theo in Theodore. Is that what we’re talking about? Am I. Am I sounding smart at all?

Okay. All right. After Bartholomew, slash Nathanael, we have Thomas. Thomas. Thomas. And then Thomas, also called Didymus.

Didymus, yes. Which means twin.

And there. There are some. I’ve seen this claim. I don’t know where it’s coming from. I don’t know if there’s. If this has ever been argued by any scholars, but I’ve seen some folks try to argue that Thomas is Jesus’s twin. And I think this may come from a Gnostic text.is may come from a Gnostic text.

Oh, interesting.

From later on. But I have not looked deeply enough into that to have any more information than to say somebody once suggested that they think Thomas was Jesus’s twin.

Okay, well, that would change the. The. The nativity stories a lot. Yeah, if that.

Now you.

I mean, now we have to hire Danny DeVito to play them.

Them. Say your. Your back looks like a relief map of the Andes. Well, no, I was thinking of Life of Brian when they realized that Jesus is actually next door and they come back and take the gifts away from Brian.

Right. From Brian. From Didymus, from Thomas.

So, yeah, Thomas. Thomas is just sitting there. Like, “Why is he getting all the attention?”

Yeah. So now I want to get to Matthew.

Who is referred to in the Gospel of Matthew as the publican.

The publican, yeah.

Is this the same Matthew? I mean, are these meant to be the same Matthew, the Gospel of Matthew and Matthew the publican?

So that identification seems to be made by Papias between 120 and 130 CE. He says, “Hey, tax collector Matthew, he wrote down sayings of Jesus in Hebrew.” And a lot of people think, “Oh, he’s talking about the Gospel of Matthew .” But it’s not for another 50 to 60 years before anybody identifies this gospel as the Gospel according to Matthew. So, and I would also argue that the text as Papias describes it is not our Gospel of Matthew . It was definitely not written in Hebrew and it’s not a sayings gospel. And so when it was, when we do finally have this identification of the Gospel of Matthew as written by Matthew, I would argue that this is based on Papias’s identification. They’re looking for an author and they’re like, “Papias says Matthew wrote one. This one mentions Matthew.” This is the only one that actually mentions the calling of Matthew by Jesus as the tax collector.

And so they’re like, natch, that one was written by Matthew. Because the other ones talk about the calling of Levi.

Not the calling of Matthew.

And so in our grid it says Matthew Levi.

On the Mark and Luke gospels.

So they’ve just made an association between… These are potentially, these are not the same person. Or are they? How are we…

Again, a lot of people would say they’re the same person. And other people would be like, maybe they’re not.

Okay. Okay. And, and again, not mentioned by John. Not mentioned. Which feels a little catty, John not mentioning the name of another author of another… Or at least of a gospel.

Yeah. And then why couldn’t he be more like Philip? John would have been happy to name him if he was more like Philip.

If he could have been more like Philip or be like Simon Peter. And then just get multiple names, get all the names. All right, then we got another James, this is the son of Alphaeus. And then Thaddeus, who is also Judas. What the heck, Thaddeus or Lebbaeus.

Well, we have, yeah, we have… And this is a textual thing. Some manuscripts say Thaddeus, some manuscripts say Judas. Judas. And those, the, the differences there are probably a product of the fact that some of the other gospels seem to put the name Judas in the place where they’re expecting Thaddeus. And so maybe some people made some corrections here or there. So yeah, it’s confusing, this Jude.

Judas. So if it’s not Thaddeus. So in Matthew and Mark, we’ve got Thaddeus. In Matthew, it says it’s Thaddeus or Lebbaeus, called Judas the Zealot. We’ve got another zealot with all this zealotry. Then in Matthew, Mark, Luke, we’ve got Judas. It’s listed as Judas, quote, son of James. And then Judas. And then in John, Judas. Not Iscariot.

Not that one, just the other one.

And then. Yeah, so that’s.

I can see the author being like. And then Judas. Oh, not the Judas I just talked about. This was another guy.

Just not that one.

Another Judas.

Yeah. And then we’ve got Simon that we already talked about, who’s the Canaanite or the Cananaean or the Zealot or just not mentioned by John because he’s kind of prone to that. And then, and then Judas Iscariot, son of, confusingly, Simon Iscariot, which we don’t need any more.

According to John.

I, I’m just gonna read. I wanna, I do want to get to the most important name in the New Testament in just a moment, but I did want to read this. I, I, There’s a sentence that I wanted to read from the Wikipedia article that made my head explode, and I just thought I’d share it.

You feel nicely?

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Is it this one? Since the father of both James son of Alphaeus and Matthew is named Alphaeus according to the tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the two were brothers as well. Oh, that’s not, that’s not even, that’s, that’s crazy right there. And then there’s another one that says, according to the tradition of the Catholic Church, based on the writings of the Apostolic Father, Papias, the apostles James, son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus were brothers and sons of Alphaeus, also named Clopas, and his wife Mary of Clopas, was the sister of the mother of Jesus. Mary had a sister named Mary. What’s happening is this. Do we have a George Foreman situation here? I, I, like, I had to read that sentence 22 times to figure out.

What was happening, make sure you understood it right. Yeah, well, there have been, you know, when these traditions kind of accrete around specific locations and specific leaders and, and specific manuscripts and texts and things like that, they develop their own little ways to deal with a lot of these incongruities, and they don’t compare notes with the other guys, they just, you know, we’re going to do it our way. And, and sometimes those ways sound more rational than, than others. And so, yeah, it’s an issue, but certainly not the biggest issue in all of biblical interpretation, but certainly one that I think a lot of people overlook, assuming that, yeah, there were 12 apostles and that’s that. But you can memorize a little song to help you remember the books of the New Testament in order or something like that, largely uncontroversially. But the song you got to memorize.

For this kind of go according to.

John and according to Matthew, but then if you don’t. And then he’s.

How many write this song? Yeah, it’s going to be 24 verses long. But I want I want this song to exist where it’s like Simon, who is Peter, who.

Is Cephas, also known as Cephas, who is not the Simon that’s mentioned by John in the other part of this book in the manuscript witness from the third century.

Yeah, I like it. Somebody’s got to write this song and. And I’ll bet they will. Anyway, let’s get quickly. You know, we could probably do a whole segment on the name of Jesus.

That’s not his name. Well, I just want you to.

That’s a good point. I feel like I can’t sing.

Okay, sorry.

You’ve had a lot of people on your TikTok come after you about that one name and. Yeah, and you’ve also exposed a lot of people who, like, claim that they know the original name and there’s meaning behind it and all of this stuff.

There’s a weird genre of, like, entrepreneurial bro, like, who just randomly starts sharing videos about Jesus’s name and where it comes from, and obviously not even remotely informed about these things, but for some reason, this adds value to their entrepreneurial endeavors on social media. I don’t understand this.

They have this. I mean, you call them a bro, they have this braggadocio about them where it’s like, if you really knew the real name of Jesus, you wouldn’t be coming at me with your nonsense. Yeah, I know the real name of Jesus, and therefore I’m somehow better. Yeah, yeah. So. So, okay.

Doesn’t believe any of it either, but wants to let you know that I know better than you.

So there wasn’t a guy walking around in Judea named Jesus.

Right. They didn’t say, hey, Jesus, back in the first century CE.

So what did they say?

That’s tricky. We have, we have to reconstruct what was going on anciently. But to begin, we go back to the Hebrew Bible and we got this. This name that is usually translated as Joshua. Yehoshua is, is how it is used in the Hebrew. And this is. And it means Adonai saves or Adonai delivers or something like that. And this is Joshua son of Nun, who takes over after Moses. And when we get into the post-exilic period, into the Greco-Roman period, so we’re talking about after 500 BCE, between 500 and the period of the New Testament, the name seems to change into this Aramaic variant that seems to be spelled, at least in the text, it’s spelled Yeshua.

And the Greek transliteration, as we have it, seems to be Jesus. Now, the transliteration into Jesus or Iesous is how some folks do it. There are different ways to reconstruct the pronunciation, but that transliteration predates the New Testament, predates the birth of Jesus. It comes from a couple centuries BCE.

Oh, interesting.

A transliteration of this Aramaic variant on the name Yehoshua, Joshua. And so we already see what we find in the Greek New Testament, in the Septuagint translation, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. And so this is just, just like we’ve been talking about. Petros. An English transliteration is Peter. Jesus is a transliteration of. However this Aramaic name was pronounced. Now, Jesus walking around in Galilee was not being referred to in a Greek transliteration, was being referred to in Aramaic. And scholars have pointed out that the pronunciation conventions in the Galilee were probably slightly different from what we get in other regions. And one of the things that they’ve noted is there’s a letter called an ayin which is in this name, and it’s kind of a glottal stop.here are indications from not many contemporary texts, but particularly from later rabbinic texts, that the Galileans were known for not really pronouncing their ayins very well or just dropping them off entirely.

And so if the ayin was pronounced anciently in Aramaic, the name Yeshua would have been Yeshua. And then we have this glottal stop. And if the Galileans didn’t pronounce that glottal stop or pronounced it poorly, it would have just been Yeshu or Yeshu. So with a short e or a long e at the beginning. But that a was probably something that was added later in the manuscripts. There’s a complex linguistic argument for why that is. But in short, I think the scholarship is moving in the direction of suggesting if you were talking to Jesus in Galilee in the early first century CE, he would have referred to himself as Yeshu or Yeshu. So that’s probably how his name was pronounced. When it goes into Greek, we have Iesous now, so we still don’t have that ah on the end. It’s not Yeshua or. Or anything like that, or Iesous in.

In the Greek transliteration. It’s just Jesus or Iesous or however you want to reconstruct that pronunciation. And then that goes into Latin as Iesus or something, or words to that effect. So the earliest English translations of the Bible actually transliterate straight from the Latin, which is pretty cut and dry. Iesus, Jesus or Iesus or Iesous. It was probably pronounced a bunch of different ways. So the first edition of the King James Version, which, by the way, wasn’t remotely the first English translation of the Bible, but for many years, the King James Version used Iesus. And it was not until decades later that we get the introduction of the J in the English alphabet. And some folks argue that the I was being pronounced close to what the J represented in the 17th century.

Other folks say, no, the J kind of altered the way the I was pronounced. But once we get the J, that stands in as the consonantal use of I, so it starts the word, and we’re going to use it more as a consonant than as a vowel. So we get Jesus. So it is a natural development within the language. It’s not like it’s a different name. There are some people who are like, oh, Jesus means Hail Zeus, which is absolutely laughable.

I’ve never heard that.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, I love that. So, like, that’s not his name that means Hail Zeus. It doesn’t mean anything remotely like Hail Zeus. It’s just a transliteration that has been following the phonetic development of the English language. And so Jesus is a perfectly legitimate transliteration of this, just like James is a perfectly legitimate transliteration of Yaakov or Jacob. And so there’s no reason to be upset about this. There are folks who think there is some kind of metaphysical power in how we pronounce the name, who are like, you have to say Joshua. Well, that’s wrong too. Oh, you have to say Yeshua. Well, that’s also kind of wrong too. So if there’s metaphysical power in that, there are very few people who are getting it right. And so I think people need to just chill about the name. Jesus is perfectly fine.

I think a lot of people are just trying to make themselves sound better informed than other people to try to prop themselves up. And it has a lot more to do with pride than being more informed about these things.

I am fascinated. You know, I don’t want to get too deep into this where, you know, this segment’s going long, but I do love that it does seem weird that we don’t call him Joshua.hat we don’t call him Joshua. It just seems like that as a, as a transliteration is so much closer. Is and, and has also just as much of a, of a, of a sort of traditional tradition.

Well, there are two reasons for that, I would point out. First, Joshua is directly from Yehoshua, which preserves the ho sound, which is absent from the Aramaic variant Yeshua. So the ho isn’t there in the way Jesus’s name was pronounced in the first century. So Joshua would also be inaccurate in that regard. But also, and this is a part that a lot of people get uncomfortable with, Jesus is only attested in Greek texts. And so we are going with what the texts use rather than saying, I’m going to artificially impose what the text should have been using or something like that.

Okay, that makes sense.

And so Joshua would be saying, we’re not going to do what the gospel authors said. We’re not going to do what the original text that referred to Jesus said. We’re going to go back, go back and say we’re taking from this, from this earlier tradition that is not connected to Jesus. So, and, you know, there, you can disagree with that. There, there are folks who will try to use an Aramaic transliteration in their renderings of the text. And I mean, you know, you’re not going to get struck by lightning, not by me at least. So there’s nothing wrong with that. But at the same time, yeah, there’s, there are perfectly good and valid reasons for doing it the way folks are doing it.

Okay, well, then I will agree to not call Jesus Joshua, but I won’t. But I am going to start calling James Jacob, because that just seems obvious to me.

Yeah, all right. Well, yeah, that would be fine.

Okay, good. You know, there is another fascinating apostle that we need to get to, so I say we move on to that.

Okay, let’s do it.

Okay. We’re introducing this new segment, Women in the Bible, because I, you know, it’s, it’s something we’ve already talked about a few times without calling it its own segment, but it is an important thing.

And we were taking as our reading for the day, Romans 16 . This is the final chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. And, and it’s. It’s nice. It’s just a. He’s just calling out to a whole bunch of friends, hey, say hi to our friends here and our friends there.

And shout out Ampliatus.

Yeah, yeah. Who’s a great guy. Everybody loves him. The family of Narcissus and whatever. But right in the middle, there is something that has befuddled and. And bedeviled many a reader of it, which is. Starts on. Which is verse seven where he says greet. And now I. I am taking. I. This is from the. The NRSV.

And that will become important in a minute because different translations definitely have a different take on this. On this particular verse.

Verse. Yeah. Strong feelings about this.

Yeah. So from. From the NRSV, greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Israelites who were imprisoned with me. They are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was. Now that’s. There’s a lot packed into that one thing, but I think the. The thing that we’re going to focus on is that name Junia and, and the idea that this person could have been prominent among the apostles.h.

Is it me or is that a lady apostle?

So, yes, this. The academic consensus right now, I would argue, and I think I’m supported by. By most scholars, is that this name is a feminine name. Now, there has been controversy for some time, but a lot of people might be surprised to hear that this controversy is actually quite new regarding how we. How we accentuate this name, because this name could be masculine or feminine with the spelling that we find in the Greek of Romans 16:7 . The difference would be what accent you put on what syllable of the word. And unfortunately, the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament, in fact, the manuscripts for centuries after the New Testament was written did not put in accents. Accents were added centuries later. And so we are basically going with traditional accentuation, or if we want to try to revise that accentuation, that’s just based on our own judgment calls.

And there is no early Christian author who identifies this name as a masculine name until the 1200s.

Oh, wow.

And we have several early Christian authors and authorities who make reference to Junia, either just acknowledging that it is a feminine name or actually praising Junia for being a woman apostle. In fact, there’s a prominent, I think, Bishop of Constantinople, if I’m not wrong. John Chrysostom, writing just before or around the year 400 CE, basically says, wow, can you imagine this person being how cool this person was? To be a woman apostle, just being an apostle is one thing, but to be a woman apostle, how great she must have been. And we have no disagreements with this identification of Junia as a woman until the 13th century. And so the record is not strong for those who are arguing that this is a masculine name.

Additionally, if we go look into other occurrences of this name, this name doesn’t really appear much in Greek. Primarily it appears in Latin. But there are over 200 occurrences of this name in Latin in the first century CE, and every single one of them is a feminine name. There’s one occurrence in all of known history of this name as a masculine name, and that comes from a century later.

Oh, wow.

And so the data do not support the identification of Junia as a man. The data overwhelmingly support identifying Junia as a woman. And so it would seem to suggest that Andronicus and Junia. Now frequently when Paul mentions a man and a woman together, they’re either relatives of each other. More often they are husband and wife. So some folks suggest that Andronicus and Junia are husband and wife. That may or may not be the case. I’m not arguing for that right now, but I would argue that Junia is definitely a feminine name.

I did read an article that. That linked them as husband and wife. Was absolutely certain of it. And not only was certain that. That they were husband and wife, but literally, like, kept pounding it home, which I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand why it was important to that author to make sure that we all understood that this was a couple who was a husband and wife.

But, yeah, I mean, there are certainly situations where. Where that would be. That would be more meaningful than others. But for the context of our discussion right now, I think it suffices to mention that it’s certainly possible. It’s certainly plausible that that’s the case. But it’s interesting what Paul says about them. Uses this word syngeneis in Greek, which means my kin together. And then genos is what the other word is in Greek.. So kinsmen, family. I think you read fellow Israelites. Is that the edition you read?

That’s what the NRSV has.

Is that the NRSV?

UE. NRSV, yeah, the NRSV.

UE. Yeah, UE. Okay, that’s interesting, because the previous NRSV reads my relatives. Okay, relatives or compatriots. But yeah, the idea is kin, and that’s probably figurative, but who knows? And then fellow prisoners. And then it goes on to say they were of note among the apostles or prominent among the apostles. And here’s where the folks who don’t like the idea of a woman apostle have another opportunity to try to make their case against that. There is another way to read the Greek here where instead of saying they are prominent among the apostles is to say they are well known to the apostles. Right. That is a possible reading of the Greek. And there are some people who have argued very strenuously for that reading.

And that’s. That’s what the English Standard Version has. They are well known to the.

Yeah, well, the ESV was written, or was. Is a translation that was executed by complementarians who were basically upset that the NIV and the RSV and the NRSV were not as misogynistic as they felt they should have been. So the ESV is like, in a lot of ways, it’s a perfectly adequate translation. In other ways, it is an awful.

Translation, particularly man woman hater translation.

Yes, in a lot of ways. So it’s one of the newer translations that have come out of the Bible and they. And it’s. And it’s quite popular. But a lot of people don’t realize that. That the purpose of the ESV was to push back against what they saw as too much progressivism with the NIV, of all things. So, yeah, and there’s a great sociologist who works for the Sociology of Religion named Samuel Perry, who has published a wonderful article discussing how the ESV intentionally tries to structure power directly over and against the interests of women. But anyway, getting back to that. So the ESV says they’re well known to the apostles. Possible reading of the Greek here. There are a handful of reasons I don’t think this makes sense. One is that this is Paul writing. Paul was not a huge fan of the other apostles and didn’t really care what the other apostles thought. So for Paul to say, hey, Andronicus and Junia, these are cool folks, even the other apostles thought they were really cool is out of character.

For Paul, the estimation of the other apostles is no big deal. He does not care what the other apostles think. And then the last clause of the verse is, they were in Christ before me. Which would fit with Paul’s rhetorical bent elsewhere of always wanting to remind everybody that he is the last one who gets to be called an apostle, that everyone else who is called an apostle was in Christ before him, and he’s the last apostle. So I think the way that this verse is set up and the way Paul’s rhetoric is in the genuine Pauline epistles pretty firmly point in the direction of interpreting that passage to say who are prominent among the apostles. In other words, these are prominent apostles, which would identify Junia as a woman apostle, which is, you know, despite Paul’s misogyny elsewhere, I think he was willing to call balls and strikes when it came to who was occupying what office, what position elsewhere in the church, because he refers to other women as leaders in the church and is not shy about that.

So since we’re using this word apostle.

How are we defining it? What, what is an apostle? What does that mean here?

So, you know, I don’t like defining stuff.

That’s a great point. That’s a great point.

But I was using the word, so we need to, I will just describe it. Yeah.

In some way what we’re talking about.

So it comes from a Greek word that means one who is sent. And the idea is messenger, emissary, delegate. Like it’s not just somebody sent some person, it’s this person is traveling on my behalf to execute some function for me, whether it’s deliver a message or whether it is actually do something or something like that. So it’s comes from the idea of one who is sent out. And by the time of the New Testament, though it, well around the, because of its use in the New Testament, it takes on status as kind of an office that this person may have been sent out, but they’re not an apostle, because that is a specific assignment, a specific designation that kind of is cordoned off. And only certain special people get to be called that kind of messenger. And so it becomes an office, a duty, an honorific title later on.

And, and by the time of Paul, then that’s what we’re, that’s where Paul is coming in and be like, I’m an apostle. And he gets upset with, well, not, he kind of sarcastically refers to other folks as super apostles. He’s like, oh, all these people, these super apostles going around doing all this stuff. But, but the idea is that this is, this is a, a special designation, a special calling, a special assignment that, that somebody has. But yeah, it fundamentally comes from the idea of, of emissary, delegate, maybe messenger.

To be an envoy, if you will.

Envoy? Yeah.

I, I, I saw at least one article looking through this, you know, and when I was sort of reading up on Junia and, you know, I wanted to see arguments for and against this person, this woman being considered an apostle. And one of the things that came up a few times when people wanted to argue that there’s no way she could have been an apostle was that the original 12 were. There were specifically 12. They were all men, therefore there should always be 12 and they should always be men.

Is there. I mean, so when you start to talk about this, this word, this appellation, becoming a, an office in Jesus’s time because Paul’s after Jesus or after his, his life. What. Is there any indication that in Jesus’s time this was an office that he was designating that there should be 12 of and that those should be men? Is there anything that you can think of that, that would, that would fill in that argument or bolster that argument as far as.

As any data that would support that argument? No, that’s an is ought fallacy. They’re saying, oh, this is the way it was, therefore this is the way it ought to be. The. There is the indication in the Book of Acts in the beginning where they say, well, Judas is gone. We need to fill in that office. So the idea that they were supposed to be 12 is found in the Book of Acts , which is not from Jesus’s day. This is decades after Jesus’s death. And so that does not necessarily indicate that Jesus was like, it’s got to be 12, but at least within the decades after Jesus’s life, yes, they understood that there should be 12. And 12 is a significant number. It has symbolic weight anciently. It is completion. It is fullness. And so that is supported by the. Or that supports this notion that they felt there needed to be 12.e 12. The notion that it had to be men. There is nothing that supports that apart from this is-ought fallacy.

Well, they were all men, therefore they were supposed to all be men, which is not mentioned in Acts in any way and is undermined by this passage in Romans 16:7 . So I don’t, I don’t think that’s a good argument.

So. And also, you know, I don’t, I don’t know how this, how this, you know, the significance of the number 12 works, but it also seems like the need to have 12 could also be the need to have at least 12. You know what I mean? And I don’t know, you tell me, because Andronicus and Junia are not, you know, they’re not listed in. Neither of those are one of the many names that are listed in our original 12.

Yeah, yeah. And. And certainly, you know, the, the text of Acts says, you know, that office has got to be filled, doesn’t necessarily say it’s got to always be 12. I would lean a little more in that direction just because of the significance of 12, there are. Sorry, is it a reference to the.

12 tribes of Israel sort of thing?

Well, to some degree, the 12 tribes of Israel, there was significance to the number 12. But you know, when you get into the book of Revelation as well, you’ve got 12 coming up, particularly in reference to, you know, the 144,000 or 12,000 from the 12 tribes of Israel.

Right.

And 12 is used a handful of places. And seven is another significant number. And so seven is perfection. Twelve is fullness, completeness, stuff like that. And also in the years between the death of Jesus and the writing of Romans, people are dying and other people are stepping in. I don’t know that I know enough about the circumstances to know whether or not we have enough data to say there were never more than 12. I don’t know what the consensus is in that regard. I’m sure there are people who know a lot better than me, but. Yeah, that’s a good question. I have feelings about it. I don’t know that I could definitively say one way or another.

Okay, well, then we’ll leave it at that. Junia, for my money, I love the idea of. Of a woman apostle that. That makes me happy. And since that is at least arguable, if not probable, I’m going with it. There was a woman apostle, and there’s.

A wonderful book by a scholar named J. Eldon Epp. Eldon J. Epp is the name, called Junia: The First Woman Apostle, published in 2005. And I think that book kind of set the tone for the scholarly consensus. So if you’d like more information on this, that’s a wonderful book to go check out.

Nice. I love it. Well, thanks so much, Dan. Listen, friends at home, if you would like to be a part of making this show go. And what we have kind of settled on is that if you. If you want to hear Dan and I talk more about the topics of each of these episodes and, and get into it in a much more casual way, you can. There is patron only content available. If you become a patron over on Patreon, go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and. And you can join up there at whatever, you know, amount you want. And we will be very thankful for your patronage. If you would like to write to us about anything, contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the place to do that. And other than that, we’ll see you next week.

Bye, everybody. See ya.

Apostlepalooza!

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Scripture Index

Terminology