A Trickster God and the Worst Wedding Ever

Just to be on the safe side, you guys, when you get to heaven, poke your head in and see what everybody’s wearing and just make sure that you’re, uh, that you get it right.

And, uh, ask if they’re circumcised.

Yeah, yeah, look under the robe. Yeah, yeah, what’s going on?

Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

I think things are great. How are things with you?

Uh, nice. I think the air has cleared out a little bit. It’s, uh, it’s— there was a storm that came through the valley yesterday. It missed us. My wife loves a good summer thunderstorm. We actually didn’t really catch much of it. It passed just south of us, or just east of us. But yeah, that cleared some stuff out. So doing all right.

Good.

How about you?

Well, I’m looking forward to today’s show is what I’m doing, because—.

Nice.

We’re at first, we’re going to be Taking Issue with the question of Can it be okay to lie or practice a deception if you believe that it is in service of the Lord?

Lying for the Lord.

And if you’re still on the fence as to what angle we’re coming at this from, we’re going to be talking about Joel Webbon, who is not our favorite person in the world. So we’re going to get to that in the first part of the show. Then in the second part of the show, It’s, uh, it’s a terrible parable. Yeah, uh, it’s a parable that I read and couldn’t make head or tail.

It’s a head-scratcher.

Yeah, I am sure. I was like, wait, I know I can figure out what the, what, what the takeaway is supposed to be here. And no, I could not. So Dan’s gonna help me out with that, hopefully. We’ll see. Uh, it’s the parable of the wedding banquet. So that’ll be fun. But first, let’s dive in with Taking Issue. Okay, so who, Dan, is Joel Webbon?

So, so Joel Webbon is like your quintessential Christian nationalist. You have some soft Christian nationalists. You have some people like, I don’t really know what that means.

But it sounds good. I like my nation and I like being a Christian. So it sounds pretty good to be a Christian nationalist.

It just means you’re a Christian and you love your country, right? No, this is hardcore Christian nationalism. This guy is the president and founder of something called Right Response Ministries and the senior pastor of Covenant Bible Church, which is in Austin, Texas. So you know it’s good. Right?

It’s in the liberal part of Texas, so it must be okay.

And he has a podcast. Obviously, I mean, he’s a white man.

Yeah, we all have them.

Yeah, you’re issued a podcast if you grew up in the suburbs. Hopefully everybody gets that reference as well. But he recently made some comments. Recently, this show might be airing like a month from now.

Yeah, in 10 years, we’ll see.

It was a bit ago for you, but he was reading a passage out of 2 Kings 23. And he took this passage as authorization to talk about the goals that somebody who is running for office in the great state of Texas should have, at least a Christian who is running for office in the great state of Texas should have, but goes on to warn against making those goals publicly known.

Mm.

And I thought I would start— I thought we could talk about the passage that he read and then get into where they take everything from there and talk about why this is, you know, the— his rhetorical goals are kind of in stark contrast to pretty much the whole thing called the New Testament. But as I frequently pointed out, when Christian nationalists try to validate and authorize their fascism, they have no choice but to go to the Hebrew Bible. And he starts off by reading something from 2 Kings 23. And this is Josiah’s reforms. And he reads verses 5 through 9. And this is how it reads in the NRSV-UE. He, and he’s talking about Josiah, deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places at the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem, those also who made offerings to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations, and all the hosts of the heavens.

He brought out the image of Asherah from the house of the Lord outside Jerusalem to the Wadi Kidron, burned it at the Wadi Kidron, beat it to dust, and threw the dust of it upon the graves of the common people.

So basically, chapter 22 is when somebody comes to Josiah and says, “Guess what? We found the law of the Lord in the temple.” And Josiah goes, “Ooh, is it bad?” And they read it and it’s very bad. Basically everything you’ve been doing is actually what we told you not to do. So now you’ve got to go make amends for all of this.

And so chapter 23 is, you know, killing all the people who are not supposed to be alive, destroying all the idolatrous stuff, and, you know, just taking a pretty cool place and ruining it.

Yeah, like everybody’s chill, everybody’s worshiping whoever they want to worship and whatever, and then just wrecking that.

And the idea of men in positions of authority just going out and manhandling the people they don’t like, you know, gives Joel and his co-host a semi. So he likes the cut of the jib of that passage.

Yeah, it’s a— it’s— it I can see why that could sound like a go-ahead for authoritarianism.

Yeah.

A big thumbs up for dictatorship.

Yeah. Now, obviously what’s going on here in 2 Kings 23 is propaganda. It’s not clear that any of this happened. We do think that there were reforms that were implemented by Josiah, but how comprehensive they were, it’s not clear. Whether or not it actually involved any of this kind of stuff, it’s not clear. The notion that it was so widespread and involved literally killing people and all that kind of stuff, most scholars would say, yeah, it was not that. But this leads Joel’s co-host, who is— his name’s Todd, Wesley Todd. He says, “If you were to ask me, I absolutely think that the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Texas National Guard, should go through downtown Austin, find churches flying pride flags, depose their ministers, that is, defrock them and remove them from the pulpit, take the property and auction it off to faithful churches.”

So this is obviously not how the United States of America has ever worked for several reasons.

There are a couple of documents that are pretty against that.

Yes, documents that are formative for our nation.

Pretty important, big deal documents here in these United States.

Yes. And Joel’s response is, “Amen. This is what I believe should happen.” Yes, that will not happen in Texas, at least in the next 10 years. Who knows what the Lord does? Practically speaking though, we’re very far away from that. And then goes into the deception part of all of this. You, if you are a politician running for office, don’t say that. We have to live in the real world. Let me pause for a second and make sure that’s abundantly clear. When Wesley says, if you are a Texas politician or aspiring, you’re campaigning or want to be, don’t say that. And what he means by that is on this particular topic, you’ve got to hide your power levels.

Yeah.

You say that the people aren’t ready for it. Your kids are going to love it, but the adults are not quite ready for that one. And so don’t say it. But we’re saying in principle, that is perfectly permissible. That’s why we started, right? It’s not just a random Bible verse just to start with the Bible and pretend that we’re biblical. No, we start with a Bible verse, a passage that actually pertains, it has relevancy to the topic of today’s podcast. And then goes on to say that this idea is, it’s not just biblical, it’s American.

Haha.

But he says that kind of purity spiraling will put you on the bench. It’ll sideline you. It’ll function as a liability. So don’t run on that and don’t talk about that as a politician yet, but that is the goal.

So yeah, one hears echoes of Project 2025.

Yes, yes, yes. Here’s our manifesto. It’s not actually what we want to do, but it is actually what we want to do. Right.

Yeah. Donald Trump’s saying, I don’t even know what that is. Of course I’m not going to worry about that. I’m not going to do that. And then literally going, point by point and down the list and doing it.

Yes, it is. It’s a laugh riot. But I want to take issue not only with the, hey, we’ve got to deceive the public so that you can be elected so that we can achieve the things we are keeping from the electorate. But I want to take issue with the claim that it is biblical. And American.

All right, we’re Taking Issue with a bunch of stuff. I like it.

Yes, yes. So it’s biblical. Again, like I said previously, Christian nationalists cannot find support for their arguments in the New Testament. They will weakly appeal to Romans 13, but Romans 13 is not going to authorize this.

What does Romans 13 say?

Romans 13 is the one where Paul says that political powers are put in place by God.

Right.

So you don’t want to fight against God.

That one only works for them when their guys are in power. Yes. When Obama was in power, if you said, “You’re a subject, he must have been put there by God,” they suddenly shrink away from that conversation.

Yes. Yeah, there’s— it is very, very selective when Romans 13 is authoritative.

Right.

It is always and only when someone is questioning our fascist agenda. And also, you know, a close look at Romans 13 makes clear that this is situationally emergent rhetoric that Paul is using. He’s writing to folks in Rome. And he expects Jesus to be coming back any minute now. And he’s basically saying, hey, pay your taxes, don’t rock the apple cart. And so does it by saying, yeah, so, you know, governments are instituted by God. So, you know, just chill. And obviously that does not mean that everybody has to respect and honor and cannot speak out against any government. I mean, our nation only exists because we rejected the government. But anyway, so that’s really the only passage that Christian nationalists can appeal to. Other than that, they’ve got to go to the Hebrew Bible to try to find advocacy for basically theocracy.

Right.

And when we look in the New Testament, the authors of the New Testament, the people who were putting the words into Jesus’s mouth, all pretty clearly did not have any political power and did not have any I don’t know, aspirations to political power, certainly didn’t have any prospects for political power. So political power was something that other people did and they were glad to let them have it. They basically just railed against empire. Right. So here’s one of the examples where we have inconsistency between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament regarding, you know, the limits of political power and its imposition of a government’s will on the people. The New Testament is agin it when it comes to the theocracies that are talked about and endorsed in the Hebrew Bible. So when Joel says—.

Go ahead. I was just going to say that we’ve talked about the fact that, you know, the New Testament is largely from the perspective of a sort of downtrodden minority. Yeah. You know, a marginalized little group of, you know, upstart rapscallions.

Yeah.

Whereas, you know, like 2 Kings, Josiah is a king.

You know, we’re talking royal propaganda.

Yeah, we’re coming at it from the perspective of an emperor, essentially, someone who is unquestionable and can order the deaths of people and act with absolute impunity.

Right.

Which seems like—First of all, when you—that’s what you’re clinging to? Well, when… when you’re clinging to stories about kings, it’s hard to feel less American than that. Like, the whole—as you pointed out, like, the whole point of America was to get away from monarchy, to get away from, you know, not a non-representative government. And now that’s exactly what he’s into. And theocracy. Yeah.

It was also, I mean, the framers of the Constitution quite explicitly put in there no religious tests for office. And this is what a lot of Christian nationalists also struggle with, is the misapprehension that the way some state constitutions were written has anything at all to do with the way the US Constitution was written. Because they’ll point out, oh, well, you know, several of the 13 colonies, their state constitutions had religious tests for office. It’s like, yeah, that did not create the United States of America.

The Puritans who came over here, ironically, they went ahead and implemented it themselves when they came over here to escape being told how to live their Christianity. But by the time of the founding of the US, we kind of learned our lesson. And even those states that did have tests for, religious tests for office in their constitutions, within 50 years, almost all of them were gone. Because they also learned their lesson. So the notion that it’s biblical is not clear-cut at all. It’s biblical if you’re ignoring a large chunk of what is supposed to be the more important part of the Bible for somebody who identifies as a Christian, and you kind of negotiate with it in a very specific, predetermined, selective way. Right. And in that sense, anything can be biblical.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned through the years in this show, it’s that you can pretty much support almost any position using the Bible if you really, really want to.

Yeah, so, so that doesn’t mean anything. An American? No, in absolutely no sense whatsoever. It is 100% precluded by everything that sits at the foundation of the American nation. Now, can you talk about behaviors that suggest certain people are a little more authoritarian, a little more oppressive with their Christian nationalism? Yeah. And usually we got over that stuff pretty quick, or usually those people were defeated in an election or by circumstances or something like that.

And history does not smile on those people.

No. No. It’s profoundly stupid. To say that this is something that is American. You do not go and beat down the doors of a church for flying a pride flag and then confiscate their property and give it to the churches you agree with. That’s the kind of thing you did when you had a swastika on your arm.

Yeah.

That is not the kind of thing that happens in America. We’ve fought multiple wars over that. Joel, your side is over. So it’s not American. Now, does America do lots of bad stuff? Are we currently going through our fascism era? Yeah. But it is also, there’s no case to make apart from whatever we feel like doing right now in this moment constitutes what is American. That’s a ridiculous argument. But Webbon’s not big on making arguments. Webbon’s big on asserting things on a podcast and then not responding to challenges because he doesn’t know the Bible very well at all. Right. And he doesn’t know much at all about American history. What he knows is the things to say that will make small men who think small thoughts feel big. Because he is a small man, he does think small thoughts. But he tries to come up with big words so that he can make himself feel big.

Well, let’s explore then the thing, the one thing that we sort of pitched at the beginning of the episode, which is this idea of, is it okay? Because in the end, what he is asking is that people running for office hide their true intentions, deceive the people that they’re going to be representing, and then enact this ulterior motive. So I wanted to talk about, you know, the most obvious thing biblically about that is that one list of rules that everybody’s so keen on, that has that “thou shalt not bear false witness” moment.

Yeah.

Moment.

Yeah.

I think, you know, that’s pretty obvious, but that it’s not the end of the story. If the— boy, a lot of people want you to make it the end of the story, but there’s plenty of moments in the Bible where people are deceptive, including God.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, the big guy.

Okay, sure.

Yeah, that it is treated as, as you know, you have an ideal in some societies, the idea of a trickster, somebody who is able to manipulate people to get what they want. There are times and places where that is considered an asset. And you have that in parts of the Hebrew Bible. And, you know, within the history of early Christianity, you have people who imagine that Christians were an underground sect that had to be incredibly secretive. But yeah, it’s peculiar how they kind of compartmentalize the approval of that, the endorsement of that, over and against the kind of black and white prohibitions on precisely that thing.

For instance, when Jacob wants to leave Laban, Laban has deceived Jacob by giving him the wrong wife.

Yes, I remember this. You recall that?

Yeah. And so then later on—

What a great trick. What a fantastic— Haha.

Yeah, you got me.

And Jacob was just like, “Oh, you, you got me.”

“Okay, I’ll work for another 7 years for the right wife.” Yeah, and then he uses this bit of sympathetic magic, the sticks that he’s peeled the bark off of and stuff like that, to try to make it so sheep give birth to certain kinds of patterns and things like that. And basically, tricks Laban, deceives Laban, so that when he does leave, he can take with him the best of the flocks and everything like that. And attributes that to God, that God is the one that made this possible and made it so I could do this. And there are other examples of using deception and trickery to get what somebody wants, and the authors of the Jacob cycle seem to represent God as not only being okay with it, but even orchestrating it in multiple examples, which would suggest that yeah, God is down with deception as well when God’s purposes are on the line.

Well, there’s also God’s story about when you’re going to die if you eat that fruit.

Yeah, yeah, Genesis 2:17, which didn’t end up coming to pass quite the way God intended. Which I think, you know, is related to the fact that in Genesis 6 and in 1 Samuel 15 and in other passages, God also regrets doing things, ‘cause God does not know the future in all parts of the Bible. So sometimes God gets it wrong and— excuse me— sometimes the getting it wrong means God was lying. And like a parent will sometimes do, like, “If I get to 3, this is gonna happen.” And then you get to 3 and you’re like, “Just do the thing.” Just do it.

Or yeah, or little Spot is now living on a farm upstairs.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The little white lies. But yeah, so God does that as well. So there’s a case to make that deception can be divine, which just goes to show that, you know, the Bible’s not perfectly consistent. And many of the values, even where it asserts values as absolutes, they’re negotiable. They’re up for debate. And you can find examples of God saying, you know, “Eh, well, you know, we can get around this if we have to. We can bend this rule.” And this is what fascinates me about apologists when it comes to God lying. When you’ve heard people talk about how God is the source of morality, therefore whatever God does is right.

I see it all the time.

Yeah.

Especially as a challenge to atheists.

Yeah.

It’s like, “Where do you think your morality comes from? Gotcha.”

And one of the arguments is that when God kills, it is okay because it’s God doing it. And as the source of all morality, if God does it, it’s okay. And that’s up to and including killing people or commanding their people to kill other people. When it comes to lying, for some reason, the people are— people are a lot more squeamish about that. It’s like, no, if God says to kill the child, you gotta kill the child. And it’s okay because it came from God. But and if God kills, well, God gave life, God can obviously take life. That’s God’s prerogative. But it’s like, okay, well, here it says God lied.

No, no, no, he wasn’t lying. It was, it was actually he bent it. And actually, uh, no, because they— he— when he said you would die that day, uh, days meant 40 years in that time.

A thousand years.

A thousand years. Yeah, whatever.

But you never see the, “If God does it, it’s right,” applied to lying. Why is lying the thing that’s just a bridge too far for people who lie programmatically when it comes to at least Christian nationalism? Yeah. Like, I’ve always wanted to find somebody who’s thoughtful and who will engage in good faith and be like, why is lying the immoral thing that you just— that’s just a bridge too far for your God, even though, you know, sexual assault, rape, murder, all those things, if God does it, it’s perfectly fine ‘cause God’s the source of all of that anyway.

Yeah. So here’s my question then. Is Joel Webbon then, if God, you know, can be a trickster God, and if trickster tactics can be permissible in service of God’s will or God’s ideas, then maybe now I’m wondering, is Joel Webbon at very least, if he’s not correct about what should happen and what is American and all this stuff, is he not at least a little bit maybe consistent, correct about being okay about trickster tactics?

If the rhetorical goals at which Webbon and Todd are aimed were actually biblical and American, then I think you could make a case that the Bible, you could negotiate that into the Bible, that being okay.

Yeah.

Now, obviously, it’s not biblical. It’s also not American. It’s also deeply immoral. Yeah. And will prove to be incredibly harmful to a lot of people, including Christian nationalists. And so in that sense, I would say the, yeah, lying for the Lord there, you’re not actually lying for the Lord. You’re lying for yourself.

You’re lying to structure the world. Isn’t that always how it is? Like, whenever you’re declaring, “I’m doing this for God,” or “I’m doing this for a thing,” somehow whatever it is that you’re doing lines up with your own desires and your own ethics.

And at some point it’s going to come back around to benefiting you directly. Yeah, that’s what’s really underlying all of this. Yeah, so I think you could make a case that it’s at least consistent if you are negotiating with the text and you decide that this is biblical and you overlook all of the stuff and you acknowledge that’s what you’re doing, then yeah, the text is not going to stop you. And if you want to try to make the case that God lies to bring about their purposes and this is therefore the purposes of God that we’re lying about, yeah, you could make that case. Every other part of the case is profoundly stupid and misguided and wrong though. And again, immoral and hateful and harmful. So—.

Oh, well, and not for nothing, also deceptive, deception, even if it is, even if we could conclude that it’s biblically permissible, that’s also immoral. Like it’s also immoral to deceive people when you’re running for office in order to enact an agenda that you are pretending you’re not going to enact. Like that’s also— morally impermissible.

And although it is ongoing all the time. Absolutely. Yeah, the Project 2025—.

I’m not claiming they’re not doing it. Right, right.

Yeah, the, the, you know, you, you put somebody on the Supreme Court and they’re like, are you going to overturn Roe v. Wade? And it’s like, I can’t, I have no idea. And then, well, no, they get in office, uh, yeah, let’s overturn Roe v. Wade.

That’s— yeah, they, they, they— what they say is no, that’s settled law, and I believe it’s settled law, and blah, blah, blah. And then the first chance they get, they’re like, “Woohoo!” Yeah, yeah.

So everybody lies, unfortunately. And having run for office twice at the state level, I can see why they do it. And I can sympathize to some degree with the, with the impulse to do it. I adamantly refused to do it. I refused to compromise my own principles just because I was told it’s the only way to be electable in a place where I’m down by 50 points. And one of the things I found dispiriting was, yeah, being honest is not electable.

Yeah.

They all expect you to lie. And they want you to lie, and you can’t really get far in most markets if you’re not willing to promise things you don’t intend to keep and lie about what you intend to do and lie to people so that you can get their vote, which I think is a good sign that we’re doing something wrong with the way we have organized these things.

And the thing that we’re doing wrong is called politics. All right, well, I, I think we could go on and on, uh, complaining, but I, I, I love that we came to a conclusion that I was not actually anticipating. Uh, so that’s, that’s a lot of fun. Um, let’s move on. I think, I think it is time to, uh, to move on to a terrible parable. Okay, so the wedding banquet, uh, or at least it’s a wedding banquet in Matthew. In Luke, it’s, uh, it’s just a dinner. Uh, it’s a great dinner in Luke. Um, I, I don’t know, should I walk us through kind of the basics?

Yeah, why don’t we read it, read through it first, and then we’ll go back and talk about what’s going on here.

Are we doing Matthew? Matthew’s the craziest. Luke feels so reasonable after having read the Matthew one.

Yes, it’s good cop, bad cop. Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, yeah, yeah. Let’s start with Matthew. Okay. Talk a little bit about it, and then we can talk about Luke and also the version that we find in one of the other gospels that is not in your Bible.

What? Yeah, you sprung that on me right before. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. All right, uh, I’ll dive in and read it. Uh, this is from, uh, Matthew 22. It says, once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying— I love that it says right off the bat that it’s a parable. It’s, it’s, it’s not always clear when something’s a parable. We’ve made it clear this— it’s explicit this time.

Yep.

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other slaves, saying, tell those who have been invited, look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet. But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, the wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet. Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad, so the wedding, uh, so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

But when the king came in to see these guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe. And he said to them, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.’ And that last scripture is very, very popular, and I have heard it a lot, and I never knew that it was attached to a crazy story that makes no sense.

Yeah, uh, let— why don’t we talk about some of the ways it doesn’t make sense before we talk about, uh, the other parables that make more sense, yeah, that are associated with them? Because we, we have the story in Luke covers most of the ground covered by Matthew, except for verses 11 through 14. And this is interesting because a lot of scholars, when they compare things that are found across multiple different gospels, a lot of times you’ll find, you’ll notice that the language is identical. Like a verse, two verses, the whole thing, maybe it’s identical or very, very, very close. Uh, when it comes to what’s in Luke, it’s parallel, but there are only 3 words that are actually identical: “into the streets.” Okay.

That’s the only—

Those are the only 3 words that are actually in the same order, in the same part, uh, between Matthew and Luke. Other than that, it’s 2 different tellings of more or less the same parable until we get to verses 11 through 14. Which leads a lot of scholars to say, okay, so whatever parable this was before it was written down in Matthew and written down in Luke obviously didn’t have verses 11 through 14. And it probably wasn’t from what, what some scholars reconstruct as Q, which would be a written source that was used by Matthew and Luke that was probably not known to Mark that is the reason that there’s so much in Matthew and Luke that is shared. It’s probably not in Q because it seems more like an oral tradition or something like that. But the— it’s really—

Now remind me the order that they came in. Matthew predates Luke?

Probably, yeah. So it probably went Mark, Matthew, Luke, and then John. Okay. That’s where I think most scholars stand right now.

Okay.

But verses 11 through 14 are where it gets weird, because, you know, if the story is, okay, invite all the people, they’re not coming, all right, burn their city to the ground, let’s just invite the strangers off the streets. Okay, now we got a wedding banquet full of strangers off the street. Fair enough.

I mean, I don’t know about this burning the thing to the ground.

We’ll get to that. Yeah. It’s at least, at least internally consistent.

And Luke doesn’t have that part either, the burning the cities to the ground. No, burning the cities to the ground. Luke’s a little different. But yeah, I mean, like, if I cut out all the parts that freak me out, it’s a nice story about like, you invite the nice fancy people, they don’t come, so you got a bunch of food, you give it—you invite all the poor people, which you probably should have invited them before, but that’s okay. But you invite them in and, and, and it’s a, it’s an, it’s a large table parable, and that’s a great parable.

Yeah.

If it stopped there, if the parable was just like, hey, be cool to all the poor people and be cool to all of the, you know, the people less fortunate than you, that I get. But then there’s this guy who forgot his tuxedo.

Yeah, it says when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he’s like, brohim, how did you get in here? And the guy was probably like, I was walking by and somebody told me to come in.

Chillin'.

Yeah, like, why would I, why would I have that on me? I don’t keep that thang on me.

Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

And then, and yeah, he gets, he goes to hell because of that. He gets thrown into outer darkness. And so there are a lot of textually sensitive scholars who are like, “Okay, 11 through 13 was something that Matthew added, because it doesn’t really fit.” And then verse 14 is also peculiar because in the story—

That’s the “many are called, few are chosen.” Right, right.

In the story, the majority of the people who are called don’t come.

Yeah.

And then of all the people who do come, only one is not chosen. So many are called, few are chosen is like, that doesn’t fit with the story you just told.

Yeah, but the story you just told is confusing.

Yeah, the story you just told is many are called, some don’t come, a small minority of the ones that do come are not chosen.

So yeah, well, it’s, it’s a few are called, then they don’t come, and then, then many are called and then everybody but one guy is chosen, and he’s not chosen because he wore the wrong—because of fashion reasons.

Yeah, yeah, because he—yeah. Um, but he’s—what is the author of Matthew doing here? Probably cobbling together something. And Matthew, the author, has some messages going on here, but I want to talk now about the message of the parable.

Okay.

Because like, it makes sense. It’s not necessarily a great parable because in this parable, obviously the king is God. And obviously the wedding banquet for his son is about Jesus. This is the kingdom of heaven. This is basically this eschatological end times. We all survived. It’s the final scene in any of your happy ending post-apocalyptic, uh, movie.

Right.

Sends out his slaves to call those who have been invited to the wedding banquet. So this is prophets, apostles, things like that. Who are the ones who have been invited? The Jewish people.

Okay.

Yes, the Jewish people would not come. I gotta, I gotta—it says, no, everything’s ready. We’re ready to go. And they’re like, I gotta go tend to my farm. I gotta go tend to my business. And then some of them, it says, “seizes his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them.” So that would be the prophets who were killed by other Jewish folks. And then the early followers of Jesus who were mistreated. Saul, for instance, who became Paul, you know, mistreated and had some of them killed. “The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed their murderers, and burned their city.” This is widely understood to be a reference to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. In other words, yes. So this is saying, okay, the Jewish people aren’t going to come to my feast for my son? Well, I’m going to send Rome to destroy Jerusalem.

So this is almost a taunting. It’s almost like a, “Told you so. You shouldn’t have been a jerk to us.”

That’s what happens. Yeah, “You see what happens? Look what you make me do.” Oh gosh.

Okay.

Wow. And then he said to his slaves, “The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy.” That would be the Jewish people. So problematic, to say the least. “Go therefore into the main streets and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.” So this is a reference to the mission of Christianity to the Gentiles. Right. You Jewish people don’t want to accept the invitation? We’re going to open it up to everybody. Right. And we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna find anybody we can. The poor, the weak, the orphan, the widow, uh, whatever. We’re gonna go find everybody.

The dirty, dirty Gentiles.

Yeah. The slaves went out into the streets, which would be the world, and gathered all whom they found. And then you have this, uh, both good and bad. So the wedding hall was filled with guests. Now it’s like, why, why would you include that? And there are a number of scholars who have suggested this is probably something that was added to kind of make sense of the fact that there’s somebody in there who doesn’t belong.

Okay.

Yeah, so it does seem a little like, “What?” Yeah, like we’re in heaven now and we brought bad people.

Yeah, why did you let them in? What’s going on?

And I love in verse 12, “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” And he’s speechless. I can see the guy with like pate, like, just wide-eyed, kind of looking at him before he’s grabbed by both arms and dragged screaming out of the venue.

Mouthful of chicken. He’s like, yeah, who told me about the dress code? I’m sorry.

But yeah, I think it’s likely the author, in trying to stitch the pre-existing parable to this idea of the one without the wedding robe, probably had to sprinkle a little foreshadowing into the parable that was received. The received—

So is the idea with the wedding robe, is the idea that, like, if I’m putting on my parable interpretation hat, the best I can come up with is that, like, everyone’s invited in, but you got to come correct, meaning you got— you still have to be righteous and you still have to sort of, uh, do all of, you know, do all of the correct things, or you’re still not getting in even though everyone’s invited.

I think this is one of the complexities of interpretation, because in whatever context this was initially published, it probably would have made sense to the audience if they were the target audience, what was intended by that. Whether it was you have to be baptized, or maybe it’s you have to be circumcised.

Okay.

Because Matthew is very much, uh, we’re doing all the stuff.

Uh-huh.

You know, anyone who keeps the least of these laws will be the most in the kingdom of heaven, but he who breaks the least of these will be the least. So maybe it is somebody who’s not following the Law of Moses. Yeah. And they’re not circumcised, or they’re not wearing the right garment, or they are, you know, not doing the good works, or whatever. It depends on how narrowly you can figure out what the target audience was and what precisely might have been in view for the author and for the target audience. I don’t think we can say for sure what that is, but it’s probably some kind of costly signal, some kind of display of your fidelity to the group that there was probably controversy about whether or not this was still required.

I’m just going to say, just to be on the safe side, you guys, when you get to heaven, poke your head in and see what everybody’s wearing and just make sure that you get it right. Just in case that it’s more literal.

Yeah, and ask if they’re circumcised.

Yeah, look under the robe of a couple. Yeah, yeah, just to see what’s going on.

So I think that’s one way to interpret what’s going on there. But what do you say we take a look at some of the other iterations?

Okay, so let’s go to Luke. Luke is very, very similar to Matthew. I don’t want to read the whole thing, but instead of a wedding banquet, which I think this is good because wedding was a bit of a weird metaphor because Jesus never got married that we know about, and it just seems like a weird thing. It’s a reason for a big banquet, and I think that’s probably what they were going for. But this is not a great—

Yeah, it’s not a king, it’s just someone.

It’s just a dude throwing a party, a dinner party.

And he says, yeah, send his slave, just one slave, which is suggestive of Luke having access to the earlier version of this before Matthew got his grubby hands on it and, you know, added all these details.

Yeah, Matthew was into embellishment for this one.

Yeah, so one slave goes out to say to those who have been invited, “Come, everything is ready now.” Yeah. And then they all began to make excuses. “Oh gosh, I bought a piece of land. I must go out and see.” “I bought 5 yoke of oxen. I’m going to try them out. Please accept my regrets.” “I’ve been married and therefore I cannot come. So the slave comes back and goes, uh, they all need Jesus.

And in this case, I liked that they all had what sound like fairly reasonable excuses, as opposed to just screw off, I don’t want to come.

Yeah, well, and here’s where we get one of the messages of this. All of these people have been pre-invited. They already know it’s coming.

Oh, that’s right.

Yes.

And yet they made other plans for the time.

Yeah, and here’s another kind of layer of significance to Christians. It’s kind of like the wise and the unwise virgins, because God doesn’t tell you when God’s coming. You know neither the hour nor the day, but be on the lookout, because one day at some point, God’s slave is going to show up and say, “Come, for everything is ready now.” And you got to be sure you haven’t gotten married. ‘Oh, and you know, that’s not an excuse. You haven’t bought 5 yoke of oxen. That’s not an adequate excuse.’ But then the person gets angry, tells the slave to go back out into the streets and bring in the poor, the disabled, the blind, the lame. And yeah, nobody is—.

First of all, nobody’s murdered.

So yeah, we’re not making reference to the 70 CE Jerusalem destruction.

Right.

Oh yeah.

So they just send them out and just say, bring in some other cool people, whoever you find.

And it’s explicitly the social outcasts.

Right.

Oh yeah, that’s right. Not just anybody off the street. Not just Fulano de Tal, Joe Schmo, not your Joe Six-Pack or whatever. It’s the poor, the disabled, the blind, the lame. And the slave said, sir, what you ordered has been done and there is still room. And then he says, “Go into the roads and lanes and compel people to come in so that my house may be filled.” So now, yeah, at some point—.

Make them come in.

Yeah, at some point salvation is going to be angels going, “We need more people, come on, get in here.” Yeah.

“I don’t want to.” “You have to, come on.” “For I—” “I just ate, I’m full.” That’s the rapture.

Angels showing up and being like, “Uh, take that guy.” “Yeah, you too.” “No, I didn’t know.” “We’re not even Christians.” “Doesn’t matter, we need somebody to ‘Fill the seats.’ ‘We’re Hindu, leave us alone.’ And then it ends, ‘For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner.’ Right. So it sounds almost more like revenge, like, ‘Look who I’m with now.’ There’s a little bit of bitterness in the last little line, yeah.

Yeah.

Now, I think Luke probably gives a more pristine representation of what’s going on here, probably a little closer to whatever tradition was in circulation prior to, again, the author of Matthew getting their grubby little hands on it and turning it into this revenge fantasy where, “Burn the city to the ground.” I was going to quote something from Three Amigos, but I thought better of it. There’s another version that is recorded that comes from the Gospel of Thomas, Okay.

This is the one I had no idea about.

I’m excited to hear about it. So Gospel of Thomas probably preserves from some stuff that might predate the canonical gospels, even though it’s also got a kind of Gnostic-leaning layer to it as well. But here is utterance, logion number 64, however you want to refer to it. Jesus said, “A man had guests, and when he had prepared the dinner, he sent his servants to invite the guests.” He went to the first. He said to him, my master invites you. He said, I have some money for some merchants. They will come to me in the evening. I will go and give them my orders. I pray to be excused from dinner. He went to another. He said to him, my master has invited you.

I go to collect the rent. I shall not be able to come. I pray to be excused." The servant came. He said to his master, “Those whom you invited to the dinner have excused themselves.” The master said to his servant, “Go out to the roads. Bring those whom you will find so that they may dine. Tradesmen and merchants shall not enter the place of my Father.” Whoa.

Okay. That’s an interesting exclusion. Yeah.

So we have something that’s more basic, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s earlier, but it could mean that. Although it does add people. It’s not just 3 excuses given. There are 4 people with excuses. And they all have to do with trades, the trades or money. Or responsibilities to family or things like that. And we get a quite explicit, “Tradesmen and merchants shall not enter the place of my Father.” But also, this indicates that the master is not the Father. The master here is Jesus. Right. Yeah, but this is understood by those who understand the Gospel of Thomas to be a little more Gnostic, to be kind of anti-capitalist to some degree, given—

Yeah, I mean, it sounds very, uh, eat-the-richy to me.

Yeah, yeah, which is funny because you got to imagine somebody who’s like, they’ve read Luke, they’ve read Matthew, then they read this and they’re like, what? The other ones are like, people don’t make excuses for, for not being aware. This one’s like, tradesmen and merchants suck. Yeah, like, that’s, it’s a little on the nose, but, uh, but yeah, that’s what we get in the Gospel of Thomas’s version of this parable. Again, nothing about anybody who shows up and starts shoving his face with— stuffing his face with shrimp. No shrimp involved, but stuffing his face with chicken and then being sent to hell because he was being incorrectly clothed. Yeah, so nothing about that. But yeah, we do have the Gospel of Thomas’s own little spin on who exactly this is about. Well, it’s not the Jewish folks, it’s capitalists. It’s capitalists.

Yeah. Which, if you ask antisemites now, they would claim that the Jewish folks are the capitalists.

Yeah, it’s a— that Venn diagram is a perfect circle. Yeah. So, interesting parable found in a few different versions within early Christianity. With some layers added to it to kind of, you know, point the finger at this group, that group, and the other group. But yeah, a lot of fun to see how it differs from one author to another, and how it’s kind of deployed to serve their own rhetorical interests and goals.

Yeah. And also how confusing it is. It is a murky, murky, brackish water yes, that we’re wading in, and I, I still don’t feel like I understand what’s really going on, but that’s okay. That’s— we don’t get to understand everything. It’s, uh, but it’s fun to explore it anyway. Well, there you go. That’s it. Uh, if you would like to become a part of making this show happen and exploring more terrible parables, you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogs and give us a little bit of your hard-earned money. Don’t be a merchant. Don’t be, don’t, don’t be one of those guys.

Don’t be a tradesperson. Don’t be a tradesperson.

Just, just be cool and give us a little bit of your coin. And in return, you can get access to an early and ad-free version of every episode. At the right level, you can get access to the after-party, which is bonus content every week. And and you can also get access to that warm fuzzy feeling that you, that you know you’re helping us out. And what, what could be better than that? Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. Thanks to Sam for being our right-hand man. And thanks to all of you for tuning in. We’ll see you again next time. Bye everybody. Data Over Dogma is a member of the Airwave Media Network. It is a production of Data Over Dogma Media LLC. Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.